Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [94]
The Disappeared
WHAT HE FIRST NOTICED about Detroit and therefore America was the smell. Almost as soon as he walked off the plane, he caught it: an acrid odor of wood ash. The smell seemed to go through his nostrils and take up residence in his head. In Sweden, his own country, he associated this smell with autumn, and the first family fires of winter, the smoke chuffing out of chimneys and settling familiarly over the neighborhood. But here it was midsummer, and he couldn’t see anything burning.
On the way in from the airport, with the windows of the cab open and hot stony summer air blowing over his face, he asked the driver about it.
“You’re smelling Detroit,” the driver said.
Anders, who spoke very precise school English, thought that perhaps he hadn’t made himself understood. “No,” he said. “I am sorry. I mean the burning smell. What is it?”
The cabdriver glanced in the rearview mirror. He was wearing a knitted beret, and his dreadlocks flapped in the breeze. “Where you from?”
“Sweden.”
The driver nodded to himself. “Explains why,” he said. The cab took a sharp right turn on the freeway and entered the Detroit city limits. The driver gestured with his left hand toward an electronic signboard, a small windowless factory at its base, and a clustered group of cramped clapboard houses nearby. When he gestured, the cab wobbled on the freeway. “Fires here most all the time,” he said. “Day in and day out. You get so you don’t notice. Or maybe you get so you do notice and you like it.”
“I don’t see any fires,” Anders said.
“That’s right.”
Feeling that he was missing the point somehow, Anders decided to change the subject. “I see a saxophone and a baseball bat next to you,” he said, in his best English. “Do you like to play baseball?”
“Not in this cab, I don’t,” the driver said quietly. “It’s no game then, you understand?”
The young man sat back, feeling that he had been defeated by the American idiom in his first native encounter with it. An engineer, he was in Detroit to discuss his work in metal alloys that resist oxidation. The company that had invited him had suggested that he might agree to become a consultant on an exclusive contract, for what seemed to him an enormous, American-sized fee. But the money meant little to him. It was America he was curious about, attracted by, especially its colorful disorderliness.
Disorder, of which there was very little in Sweden, seemed sexy to him: the disorder of a disheveled woman who has rushed down two flights of stairs to offer a last long kiss. Anders was single, and before he left the country he hoped to sleep with an American woman in an American bed. It was his ambition. He wondered if the experience would have any distinction. He had an idea that he might be able to go home and tell one or two friends about it.
At the hotel, he was met by a representative of the automobile company, a gray-haired man with thick glasses who, to Anders’s surprise, spoke rather good Swedish. Later that afternoon, and for the next two days, he was taken down silent carpeted hallways and shown into plush windowless rooms with recessed lighting. He showed them his slides and metal samples, cited chemical formulas, and made cost projections; he looked at the faces looking back at him. They were interested, friendly, but oddly blank, like faces he had seen in the military. He saw corridor after corridor. The building seemed more expressive than the people in it. The lighting was both bright and diffuse, and a low-frequency hum of power and secrecy seemed