Point Omega - Don Delillo [24]
Outside the sheriff told me that at this point there was no evidence of a crime to investigate. The procedure over time would be to coordinate a program with officials of other counties in order to examine motel records, phone records, car rentals, airline reservations and other matters.
I mentioned the caretaker. He said he’d known the man for thirty years. The man was a volunteer naturalist, an expert on local plants and fossils. They were neighbors, he said, and then looked at me and listed a few categories of people in distress, ending with those who come to the desert to commit suicide.
Elster agreed to make the call, finally, the one to Jessie’s mother. I tested locations for him and the clearest signal was outside, late afternoon, the man facing away from the house. He spoke Russian, his body sagged, it was hard for him to lift his voice above a whisper. There were long pauses. He listened, then spoke again, every word a plea, the response of an accused man, negligent, stupid, guilty. I stood nearby, understanding that his one lapse into awkward English was a helpless mimicry of hers, an expression of shared pain and parental identity. A helicopter appeared in the pale sky to the east and I watched him straighten his back, slowly, head raised, free hand blocking the sun.
Later I asked if he’d done what I’d told him to do. He looked away and walked toward his bedroom. I’d told him to raise the subject of Jessie’s friend, the man she’d been seeing. Isn’t this why her mother had sent her here? I stood at the door to his room. He sat on the bed, one hand raised in a gesture I could not interpret. What’s the use or what’s the connection or leave me alone.
He wanted pure mystery. Maybe it was easier for him, something beyond the damp reach of human motive. I was trying to think his thoughts. Mystery had its truth, all the deeper for being shapeless, an elusive meaning that might spare him whatever explicit details would otherwise come to mind.
But these weren’t his thoughts. I didn’t know what his thoughts were. I barely knew my own. I could think around the fact of her disappearance. But at the heart, in the moment itself, the physical crux of it, only a hole in the air.
I said, “Do you want me to call?”
“Doesn’t make sense. Someone in New York.”
“It’s not supposed to make sense. What makes sense? Missing people never make sense,” I said. “What’s her name, Jessie’s mother? I’ll talk to her.”
It wasn’t until the following morning that he agreed to give me her phone number. Busy signal for half an hour, then an angry woman who resisted answering questions from someone she didn’t know. The conversation went nowhere for a while. She’d met the man once, didn’t know where he lived, how old he was exactly, what he did for a living.
“Just tell me his name. Can you do that?”
“She has three friends, girls, these names I know. Otherwise who she sees, where she goes, she doesn’t listen to names, she doesn’t tell me names.”
“But this man. They went out together, yes. You met him, you said.”
“Because I insisted. Two minutes he stands here. Then they leave.”
“But he told you his name, or Jessie did.”
“Maybe she told me, first name only.”
She could not recall the name and this made her angrier. I put Elster on the phone and he said something to calm her. It didn’t work but I wasn’t giving up. I reminded her there was something about this man that she didn’t like. Tell me, I said, and she responded ungrudgingly for a change.
For a week or longer there were phone calls. When she picked up, the caller put down the phone. She knew it was him, trying to reach Jessie. The ID screen displayed Blocked Caller. It was him every time, putting down the phone softly, and she could remember him standing in her doorway like someone you see three times a week, a delivery man with groceries, and you still don’t know what he looks like.
“Last time I see Blocked Caller I pick up the phone and say nothing. Nobody is speaking. We are playing