The Apartment A Novel(31)

About a month before I returned to Iraq, I got an email from Josephina’s mother. It was one of those emails that say, I don’t know if this address works, or if this is who I think it is, but I am so-and-so, and I know you from such-and-such, and I’ve been looking for you. I found you on the internet. I was sitting in my office downtown, twenty-two storeys up in a twenty-five storey building. It was around midnight. I had a nice view of the western half of the city, twinkling green and yellow and orange and red and blue and violet. The interstates made long white loops that carved the city into pieces. But for a moment, and I was never able to regain the sensation in a meaningful way, I realized the overwhelming blackness of the view. The sensation of suddenly noticing not only that the scene was more dark than light and more still than twinkling, but also that the darkness was far more intense than the lights, was like closing your eyes and opening them to discover that anything beyond what you perceive is attainable only in death. Beyond the outermost suburbs, where the black was most intense, the horizon rose into jagged, black, invisible mountains. There wasn’t anything above it. Maybe one or two stars, maybe a planet. It had been a long, long time since I’d thought about Josephina, and when I remembered her letter I immediately remembered that I’d written back to her. I’d forgotten this for a long time. I cannot recall much of what I wrote to Josephina, and it may be that I was not supposed to write back, that I crushed the sentiment of her farewell in the same way you crush the farewell of a person who says goodbye to you on a street by continuing to walk with them. I believe I told her something like: I will pursue a destiny of justice and righteousness in your memory. I mailed my letter and became an ensign.

I telephoned Estelle immediately upon receiving her email, and the next day I drove south to meet her. It was my first trip home since I’d left. The drive takes about three hours. The landscape changes gradually from sand and dirt and rock and cacti and brush to sun-bleached grass fields, deciduous trees, milkweed, blue palmettos, and little flowers like rock lettuce and dandelions. You take the interstate south for a while, but you have to turn onto a small state highway that doesn’t get much traffic. The day was warm and sunny, and incredibly bright. I really hated the place as a kid, and I had gone on hating it my whole life. In some ways I even recognized that what I really hated about America was the fact that I hated everything in proximity to this particular place, and the further away I got, the less hatred I felt. It was like some kind of epicentre, but there was no event, no tragedy, no cause. I was born to hate the place I came from. That day, however, I fought a curious and unexpected nostalgia as I approached. I was thinking of what I’d say to Josephina when I got there, and I had to tell myself that it was not Josephina I would be seeing, it was Estelle. I listened to the radio. Mexican music. Norteña music. I stopped at a roadside stand and bought some dried chilli peppers, not because I needed them, but because I wanted to get out of the car on the side of the road and stand in the sun.

I arrived around eleven. The town was as I’d left it. You hit a patch of houses built close to the road, many of them derelict – they were derelict when I lived there too. There’s a gas station. Then you hit some tracks, over which the old downtown stands, where there is nothing but empty offices, empty rusted mills, empty rusted warehouses, and a tall, rusted water tank with the name of the town on it. The task of renovating the old town was too formidable, so they just left it to rust to death. Beyond it, there is an amorphous collection of houses down lonely, woody roads, then you come to a large highway, and past that a series of strip malls appears, and suburbs that drift back behind them. Josephina’s house was not far from mine. I decided to speak with Estelle before I drove by my house. Estelle had not explained why, after all these years, she had suddenly looked me up, and until that mystery was solved I’d be too distracted to appreciate anything else. Nobody would be at my house. My mother hadn’t got a decent offer on it before moving to New York, so she hadn’t sold it. I didn’t have a key. I just wanted to stand outside it for a little while, or walk around the front and back yards.

I pulled up at Estelle’s and turned the engine off. At that time I was driving an old metallic-green hatchback Toyota – a car that was as beat-up and modest as my little apartment by the stadium. The house was a red brick ranch-style bungalow with a two-car detached garage with an apartment on top of it, and a long but shallow screened-in porch. I do not remember the first day I ever met Josephina, but a photograph taken that day by my mother, in which Josephina and I are standing by bicycles outside that porch, hung on a wall full of pictures in our dining room. She had a green bike with a banana seat, and I had a black dirt bike. I watched the windows, on either side of the porch, for motion. It was a funny place to be, a funny thing to be doing. I pulled the keys out of the ignition, got out and walked to the front door. I rang the bell and waited. There was noise, some footsteps, then the door was unlocked, then it opened. There was Estelle, short, a little overweight, with short white hair, wearing a red shirt and tan slacks. She shook my hand with both her hands, and she said it was wonderful and strange to see me again. I was so tall, so handsome. Come in, she said. We sat down in her kitchen, at a small round wooden table with flowers in the centre and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of a rooster and a hen. It was only when I noticed these that I realized I was sitting in a shrine to farm animals. Ceramic figurines, from the thimble-sized to the whiskey-bottle-sized, crowded shelves on the walls, bookshelves, and filled display cases. Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens. The centrepiece was a large collection of photographs of Josephina as a child and teenager, which I did not linger upon.