Spook Country

She tested the water, undressed, and got into the tub, settling herself on her back.

She was no longer certain why Jimmy had needed to borrow that much money in Paris, why she’d been willing to part with it, or how it was that she’d been able to lay her hands on cash.

She’d given it to him in francs. It had been that long ago.

The water was deep enough that it rose along the sides of her face as she settled the back of her head against the bottom of the tub. A child-sized island of face above water. Isla de Hollis.

Odile’s poppies. She remembered Alberto’s description of how he sculpted and ski

She raised her sunken head partially out of the water and began to work shampoo into her hair. “Jimmy,” she said, “you really piss me off. The world is already weirder and stupider than you could ever have guessed.” She lowered her shampooed hair back into the water. The bathroom kept on filling with the absence of her dead friend, and she’d started to cry before she could start to rinse.

25. SUNSET PARK

V ianca sat cross-legged on Tito’s floor with his Sony plasma screen across her knees. Wearing a disposable hairnet and white knit cotton gloves, she was going over the Sony with an Armor All wipe. When she’d wiped it completely down, it would go back into its factory packaging, which in turn would be wiped.

Tito, in his own hairnet and gloves, sat opposite her, wiping the keys of his Casio. A carton of cleaning supplies had been waiting for them in the hall, beside a new and expensive-looking vacuum cleaner Vianca said was German. Nothing came out of this vacuum but air, she said, so there would be no stray hairs or other traces left behind. Tito had helped his cousin Eusebio with exactly this procedure, though Eusebio had mainly had books, each of which had needed, according to protocol, to be flipped through for forgotten insertions, then wiped. The reasons for Eusebio’s departure had never been made clear to him. That too was protocol.

He looked up at the symmetrically spaced holes in the wall, where the Sony had been mounted. “Do you know where Eusebio is?”

Vianca raised her eyes from her wiping, eyes narrowing beneath the white paper band of the hairnet. “Doctores,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Doctores. In the Federal District. A neighborhood. Or maybe not.” She shrugged, and went back to wiping.

Tito hoped he wouldn’t have to go to Mexico, to Mexico City. He had not left the United States since being brought here, and he had no desire to. These days, returning here might be more difficult still. There were family members in Los Angeles. That would be his choice, not that he would have one. “We used to practice systema, Eusebio and I,” he said, turning the Casio over and continuing to wipe.

“He was my first boyfriend,” Vianca said, which seemed impossible until he remembered that she wasn’t really a teenager.

“You don’t know where he is?”

She shrugged. “Guessing, Doctores. But better not to be sure.”

“How do they decide, where you go?”

She put her wipe down, on top of the Armor All container, and picked up a foam packing segment. It fit perfectly over one end of the Sony. “It depends on who they think might be looking for you.” She picked up the segment for the other end.

Tito looked over at the blue vase. He’d forgotten about that. He’d have to find a place for it. He thought he knew where.

“Where did you go, after 9/11,” she asked, “before you moved here?”

He had been living below Canal, with his mother. “We went to Sunset Park. With Antulio. We rented a house, red brick, with very small rooms. Smaller than this. We ate Dominican food. We walked in the old cemetery. Antulio showed us Joey Gallo’s grave.” He put the Casio aside and stood, removing the hairnet. “I’m going up to the roof,” he said, “I have something to do there.”

Vianca nodded, sliding his foam-braced Sony into its carton.

He put on his coat, picked up the blue vase, and put it, still wearing the white cotton gloves, into his side pocket. He went out, closing the door behind him. He stopped in the hallway, unable to give a name to what he felt. Fear, but that was in its place. Something else. Edges, territories, a blind vastness? He went on, through the fire door and up the stairs. When he reached the sixth floor, he climbed a final flight to the roof.

Concrete covered with asphalt, gravel, secret traces of the World Trade Center. Alejandro had suggested that last, once, when he’d been up here. Tito remembered the pale dust, thick on the sill of his mother’s bedroom window, below Canal. He remembered fire escapes, far from the fallen towers, filled with office papers. He remembered the ugliness of the Gowanus Expressway. The tiny front yard of the house where they’d stayed with Antulio. The N train from Union Square. His mother’s wild eyes.

The clouds were like an engraving in some ancient book. A light that robbed the world of color.

The door to the roof faced south, opening out of the slant-backed structure that supported its frame. Against this structure’s wedge-shaped, east-facing wall had been constructed shelving of unpainted timber, long gone gray, and on this had been arranged, or abandoned, a variety of objects. A corroded bucket on casters, with a foot-powered mop-squeezing unit. Mops themselves, heads gone bald and gray, the peeling paint on their wooden handles faded to delicate pastels. White plastic kegs that warned with a black skeleton hand in a black-and-white diamond, but were empty. Several rusted iron hand tools of so great an age as to be unidentifiable, at least by Tito. Rusted gallon paint cans whose paper labels had faded past reading.

He took the vase from his pocket and polished it between his cotton gloves. Ochun must have countless homes like this one, he thought, countless windows. He stood the vase on a shelf, shifted a can aside, put the vase against the wall, then moved the can back, leaving the vase concealed between two cans. In the way of these rooftops, it might be found tomorrow, or remain untouched for years.

She rules over the world’s sweet waters. Youngest of the female orishas, yet her title is Great Queen. Recognizing herself in the colors yellow and gold, in the number five. Peacocks are hers, and vultures.

Tia Juana’s voice. He nodded to the shelf, the hidden altar, then turned and descended the stairs.

Letting himself back into his room, he found Vianca removing the drive from his PC tower. She looked up at him. “You copied what you wished to keep?”

“Yes,” he said, touching the Nano around his neck. A charm. His music stored there.

He removed his coat, hung it on the rack, and put his hairnet back on. Settling himself opposite his cousin, he began again the ritual disassembly, this meticulous scrubbing out of traces, erasure. As Juana would say, the washing of the threshold of the new road.