The Vanishing Point Read online

  I don’t care, he heard himself say. It doesn’t matter. He’s still my son. And you’re my wife.

  But she wouldn’t look at him.

  You’re still my wife, he repeated. Magda, do you hear me?

  She couldn’t seem to move.

  Look at me, he demanded.

  She wouldn’t.

  He was angry now. He rose from the table and jerked her out of her chair and slapped her as hard as he could across her face. And she shrank back. But she didn’t cry. She was done crying. I’ve never loved you, she said.

  That can’t be true. His voice cracked, and his eyes glazed over. He stared at the floor, the yellow linoleum they’d always planned to replace, and then he hit her again. And she went down.

  He knelt beside her, stroking her hair, blood running from her nose, and she whimpered a little, and he opened his belt and fumbled into her, and her fists beat against his back, and his hands entwined her hair. When it was over, he held her for a long time, maybe hours. And they waited there like that on the floor in the dirty yellow light. They waited, for what, exactly, he didn’t know. But it was coming. Something terrifying and real that would change everything.

  Magda

  When she woke the next morning and faced herself in the mirror, she saw what he’d done to her.

  She’d allowed it, she decided.

  That last part, how he’d gripped her hair so hard he’d pulled out a chunk of it, how he’d held her down.

  Call the police, the little voice said.

  But she couldn’t. She couldn’t bear it, the cruiser in her driveway, the flashing lights. Neighbors peering out their windows. No.

  No, thank you.

  It wasn’t how she’d been raised.

  There were things that didn’t leave the house.

  He had left her there on the floor. Stood there, buckling his belt. Watching her without even a shred of remorse. She was like some kind of animal in the road, the blood smeared on her cheek. She didn’t move till his car pulled out.

  She hadn’t spoken to him since that night. She was still bruised, and her cheeks were puffy. There was the red mark on her neck where he’d held her.

  She hadn’t left the house in a week.

  Theo hadn’t called either. The security guard had left a message saying he was sorry he’d never caught up with their son, though he’d tried. Ferez had reported to the R.A. that Theo hadn’t returned to the room. A few days later, the dean of students called to ask what was going on with Theo and why he hadn’t been going to classes. She lied and said he’d come home with the flu; they were getting a doctor’s note. She promised to get back to him. But more days passed, and Theo still hadn’t called, and now it was almost the winter break.

  Maybe he would come home for Christmas, she told herself.

  She made herself get dressed and put on some makeup. Then she drove a good twenty minutes outside town to a Christmas tree farm and bought herself a tree. They tied it to the roof of her Range Rover, and when she got home, she had to bring it into the house by herself. It was heavy and cumbersome and it scratched the car a little, but she was determined. And like all the years before, she set it up in the front window where everybody could see it. Let there be no doubt, she thought bitterly, that in the Ladd house it would be a very merry fucking Christmas.

  All afternoon while the snow fell, she decorated the tree, something she and Theo usually did together. Some of the ornaments had been her mother’s and some were from her own childhood, and a few Theo had made over the years in school, a snowflake, a reindeer, a star—even now, after all these years, the glitter came off on her fingers.

  The next morning, she hired a private detective. He drove all around Albany, looking for Theo, and finally found him in a not-so-great neighborhood, huddled with the girl in the doorway of a Chinese takeout. He said her son was living on the streets with a group of kids, all of them addicts. He’d approached Theo and explained who he was and asked him to get in the car, but her son refused.

  She didn’t know what Theo was thinking. Or what sort of emotional catastrophe, if any, had prompted his addiction. She only knew that, as his mother, she was somehow culpable. She had to be. And it made her very sad. She didn’t know why he’d chosen this. She had tried very hard. She had given him everything she could. She was a good mother!

  But it wasn’t enough. Obviously she’d missed something.

  She sat in the kitchen. It was late afternoon. The windows were almost black. It had snowed all day and it was very cold. The sky was a deep, punitive blue. Under the full moon the snow-covered ground seemed to sparkle. But she couldn’t appreciate its beauty. She couldn’t appreciate anything, because her son was out there somewhere, cold and alone and fucked-up on drugs.

  She found she couldn’t eat. She went into the living room and fetched one of Julian’s bottles of whiskey and brought it back to the kitchen and poured herself a drink, her hand shaking just a little, and sat there at the table, drinking it. She drank one glass and then another.

  Clean up, she told herself. Look at this place. Don’t just sit there.

  Julian had left a message that he was putting the house on the market. Start packing, is what he said. Translation: if you don’t want to be my wife and sleep in my bed and do my laundry and take my suits to the cleaner, you don’t get to live in my house.

  What power did she really have? Her lawyer had assured her she’d be all right, she’d get the house if she wanted it, and Julian would continue to support her. But Magda wasn’t smart about this stuff. She didn’t want the house; she didn’t want anything from him. She just wanted to be free. She’d come to the marriage with nothing. She would leave with nothing.

  Where would she go? She didn’t know.

  Back to her mother’s place, which they’d been renting out. She thought of her mother now, gone already ten years; she didn’t miss her.

  She looked around at the mess. She’d let things go. She didn’t care about this house. It had never felt like home.

  She turned on CNN and winced at the president making more excuses. She turned the sound off and stood at the sink and stacked the dirty plates in the dishwasher and wiped down the counter and the table and swept the floor. There she was, her whole rumpled self, in the black glass of the French doors. She was broken, weary, unforgivably middle-aged—softer, rounder, less defined, and at the same time more defined than ever—and she was angry, very angry, with herself more than anyone else.

  She made herself go up to Theo’s room. Maybe this time she would find the one clue she’d overlooked, some stupid thing that accounted for this nightmare. She turned on the light and sat on his bed. It was a really nice room, nicer than most, and everywhere she looked were reminders of all the nice things they’d done for him, the shelves cluttered with souvenirs from all the places they’d taken him to, the circus, Broadway musicals, Disney World. His books. His dresser. Some of his clothes he’d outgrown. The old sneakers in his closet. The long-ignored tennis racket.

  He wasn’t this person anymore, she realized.

  She thought she’d been strategic, the extra activities outside school, the pottery classes, the saxophone, the church youth group where they did community service, walking around the neighborhoods picking up trash, the food bank, the SAT tutor that cost a fortune, the chess club, the math club—there hadn’t been any indication, not even the remotest possibility, that her son would come to this end. She stared up at the ceiling at the little green stars he’d stuck on it when he was eleven, and brought her hands together and closed her eyes very tightly and prayed.

  Where are you, God?

  She swatted her tears angrily and rose and turned off his light and descended the grand staircase and put on her coat and her old boots and shuffled out into the cold, grappling for her cigarettes. The coat was a dark green wool; it had been her mother’s, and by now it was pretty shabby, the satin lining a little torn, the pockets bulging with restaurant mints, how old was anyone�
�s guess. Her mother was a chain-smoker. Magda had quit years ago, but on impulse, at a weak moment, had bought a pack of Marlboros, and now she was right back at it. In truth, she liked having an excuse to go outside. To stand out in the cold. She lit one now in defiance of her life and the wreck she had made of it.

  Everyone on this street had too much money. The houses, the cars, the help, the fucking landscape guys with their mowers and snowplows. The practiced aloofness of the other women, wives with husbands like Julian who were never home. How they’d pull out of their garages in their beautiful cars, the snotty wave if they happened to see her, the icy greeting when they saw her in town.

  Magda was from another world, where small pleasures brought joy—her mother’s pierogis, the homemade wine their neighbors made, the crash of glasses coming together, the stories people told around the table, the noise of laughter, the simple gift of being alive. Her parents had moved to this country to live a free American life. But what did that even mean anymore?

  They were all under surveillance, the whole world. She was probably being watched this very moment, through some satellite. Even her phone and computers were apparently available to some unseen voyeur. There were cameras in town, perched in discreet corners. There were cameras on every streetlamp. There were cameras in doorbells. It seemed to her that a highly sophisticated conspiracy was at work. It wasn’t really about the consumer or convenience. That was the ultimate subversive trickery. They were selling you their most up-to-date newfangled gadgetry, and you bought it, you had to have it. But it wasn’t for you.

  They—whoever they were—were watching your every move.

  Her mother used to say, in her heavy accent, There is no such thing as a free country, even here.

  She had taught Magda to keep her feelings to herself. You don’t tell them nothing, she instructed her one morning before school, ironing the pleats of her uniform. You keep your feelings in here—she tapped her heart—where they belong. She’d braid Magda’s hair so tightly it hurt, and on the bus Magda always unraveled it, setting free her wild brown mane. She was an American girl! This was her country! She had her own ideas.

  At the base of her neighbor’s driveway, she dragged on her cigarette like it was the very thing keeping her alive. At this moment, she felt entirely contemptuous of the world. She didn’t belong here; she never had.

  She ground out the cigarette and, looking up at her neighbor’s house, glimpsed a woman she’d spoken maybe two words to in the entire time they’d lived here taking a sip of wine in her kitchen. As if sensing Magda’s intrusion, she went to her window, peered out a moment at the darkness, then pulled the shade, her concealment restored.

  Part Four

  Illumination

  I don’t think it’s the job of art to entertain or offer reassurance. There are hard truths without easy answers. Maybe discomfort, in some way, can actually lead to illumination.

  —Katy Grannan, Aperture

  Theo

  God was an indulgence, he decided. You couldn’t prove that God existed; you couldn’t prove He didn’t exist either. You could talk yourself blue in the face and it wouldn’t change the outcome. Alas, the burden of proof allowed you to assume that something in fact existed unless proven otherwise. There was evidence of absence, and yet there was also absence of evidence. You couldn’t see God, so why assume He was there? And yet so many people did, and why was that? The professor gave other examples of things like ghosts and fairies, ephemeral entities.

  His Philosophy of Religion class.

  Mostly it was boring.

  They walked together without talking. The sun on their backs. The sound of the wind in their ears. She had long black hair, small shoulders, tiny bones in her back. Her fingernails white as shells. When they kissed, her small mouth was like a sea creature, opening and opening.

  Her name was True.

  His first time. It was back in October, this Halloween party in one of the dorms. People were drinking tequila and doing coke and Ecstasy, and a bunch of people started talking about getting some heroin, and Carmine said there was a girl at the party who had some but she was bad news and don’t get any ideas, and when they got introduced, they looked at each other with a kind of psychic recognition, like they’d known each other in another life, and she smiled and said, I think I know you.

  She had some on her and was willing to turn them on, and it wouldn’t even cost that much, and it was great and safe, and they’d have a lot of fun. She was wearing a costume, Snow White, which was pretty funny, like pretty ironic, because she wasn’t, and he was sober enough at that point to think of it as a political statement, because suddenly everything that happened on campus was political, and you were either on one side or the other. That first time he saw her, he felt a jolt go through him, like a cosmic wind full of black stars, and he trusted her and he held out his arm and said, Let’s do this, and she wound it tight with a band, and he felt the prick of the needle, and about two seconds into it, he puked into a garbage can, and people were laughing, and he lay back and gave in to it, and that’s pretty much all that happened.

  Somehow, he woke up the next morning in his own bed and reflected on the night and remembered doing the heroin and was amazed he’d done it and survived, and he felt all right. He thought maybe he was a little hungover, and he staggered into the dining hall for breakfast, and all that morning he felt this nagging preoccupation with finding the girl, because he knew she had more.

  Carmine told him she was no good. You don’t want to find her, he said.

  Yes, I do.

  She’s dangerous, man. She’s, like, a dealer. She crashed our party. You have to trust me on this.

  But he drove Theo downtown to the bus station, and there she was, standing on the corner in the wind with her crystal-blue eyes. She sold them some dope, and they fixed in Carmine’s old black gypsy car with the beaded curtain in the back window and the fake-velvet seats holey with cigarette burns. It had a sunroof that was stuck open, so it was always cold, but you could see the sky, and if it rained, the drops shot right down on you. They were sitting all three of them in the front seat, and she was in the middle, and she took his hand and held it a minute, and he felt like it was about to catch fire, like it was a burning torch held high in the air. A proclamation, he thought.

  He didn’t want to be afraid anymore. He’d grown up afraid of this and that. Dangerous people, germs, bad luck, deception. But Carmine wasn’t afraid of anything. With Carmine, you saw life. You walked straight into it.

  They walked the triangle of tracks in the train yard and slept in the retired train cars. You’d hear the blasting freighters all night long with their clanging bells. Sometimes they went down to the river and hung out under the bridge. There was a whole community of people down there existing along the shore of the Hudson. It was only a couple miles from campus, but it was this whole other reality. Some of them had made huts out of cardboard and corrugated plastic. Some lit kerosene lanterns, and from a distance you could see the flames flickering, and you came into it like into some magic land. Even in the dark you saw the hard lines on their faces, the pain that had marked them. It made Theo mad, and he felt something deep inside him, the desire to help, to make the world better somehow—but he knew he couldn’t. How could he? What would he do? What could he do? They weren’t looking for help, not from him or anyone else. They were just getting along, and that was all right.

  They were nice to him. Even with nothing, you felt welcome. Unlike people in his other life, at school, or back home, these people had nothing more than the tiny world they’d pulled around them. They didn’t have tables or chairs or couches or dishes or TVs. They didn’t sleep in beds. They had their hands. They had their bodies, their feet. They had their brains. They had eyes, ears. And that was all.

  Carmine walked around like a wizard in this long hobo coat, and he had all these crazy tricks up his sleeve. He was the sort of person who made you believe he was helping you, when all along h
e was just making things worse. You got deeper into the darkness with Carmine, and sometimes it was so black you couldn’t see two steps ahead of you, you couldn’t see your own hands.

  He knew it was about love. He loved Carmine in a fucked-up sort of way. Just like he loved heroin. He knew this rim of life coiled him in deeper. It was his feet dipped in tar.

  They hung out a lot at the bookstore, the word USED in red neon in the window. He and Carmine sidled in like gangsters looking for trouble, but all you saw were books and more books and the little old man at the register, hunched over the crossword puzzle with one of those short little pencils, and they got lost in the back rooms of the place, and Carmine showed him all the first editions, with their thick green and red bindings, that nobody ever looked at and were covered with dust.

  He came across this old book of poems by Rilke—pronounced Rilka, Carmine corrected him—and they were elegies, which he knew had something to do with death, and he stuck the book in his back pocket like he already owned it and walked right out of the store, and nobody cared, nobody came running, and he felt like some angel had left the book for him, some angel had wanted him to find it, so he read it, and on one level it saved him from himself, it saved him from death, and on another it freed him in his own mind. At night in his dorm he read in bed by the light of his phone. He read the lines again and again and then again. He really liked this guy, Rilke. Life and death and sex and angels, and really, what else was there?