Carmen wept a little after the mass, when a few rare individuals still attached to Frannie gathered around a tasteless buffet, and for the first time Simon felt distant from her distress. Claire and Alan were showing signs of impatience, unaffected by the death of a woman they had not appreciated when she was alive, while Jessica tried to conceal the enormous camera with which she was photographing the event — inconspicuously, she believed — as though it was a county fair. Exasperated by his family’s behaviour, Simon left the lunch without saying goodbye to the guests.
Ever since then something has been brewing inside him. When he quarrels with Claire she ascribes everything to a midlife crisis, a vague and stupid notion far removed from what he is actually going through. Simon has no wish to seduce other women or buy a convertible or Botox the frown lines on his forehead. What he wants is to find a cave, seclude himself in it, and huddle far away from the light of day and shouting voices. He wants to taste the magmatic solitude of geological faults. His crisis has nothing to do with life’s high noon; it is a Cyclops, a yeti, a cave painting.
The receiver sputters the report of a hold-up a few blocks from the intersection where Simon and his partner are wolfing down their muffins. They switch on the siren, utter some numbered codes for the dispatcher, and the car pulls out cutting through some giant puddles. But not even speeding up hills or running red lights can stir Simon’s blood anymore. As he presses down on the gas pedal, all he can think of is burying himself in rock and chewing on stones. A way to be completely alone.
During all those years Carmen never once touched that orange coat, still abundant but transformed by the absence of life. The pliant fur lets itself be stroked without reacting, without standing on end or secreting the invisible oils animals drape themselves in to neutralize human petting. It is nonetheless a pleasant, even soothing gesture, and Carmen has come to understand what for so long she took to be a compulsion of Frannie’s.
For three days now she has been looking for an appropriate spot for Bastard the cat, which she has inherited along with a pile of knickknacks. When she came home from the Yukon she found in her hallway three boxes containing what was apparently her share of Frannie’s things. Simon no doubt deposited them there after his wife had retrieved from the deceased’s apartment the few rare items of any value. Carmen wonders who bothered to reattach the stuffed cat’s head after it had been separated. Simon, maybe, out of a sense of guilt for having dashed it against the hospital wall? The question is added to the list of things she would like to ask him, which she patiently enumerates in his voicemail in the hope of getting an answer, now more and more belated.
Meanwhile she has tried everything: the living-room coffee table, the bookshelf lined with detective novels whose edges have been chewed up by bathtub readings, the window sill, among the lush green plants… It turns out to be terribly difficult to fit a stuffed cat into one’s decor, especially when it was loved to the point where parts of its coat have been worn thin by petting.
The remainder of the boxes’ contents leaves her just as baffled. What is she supposed to do with a hair-straightener from the sixties, a collection of dried out lipstick and hardened blush, a guitar-shaped cookie box adorned with rust spots, and a rabbit’s foot dyed pink? The dead woman left behind a strange hodgepodge of objects, the absurdity of things that have survived but which, taken together, never account for the life lived.
When she finally reaches the bottom of the last box she discovers a collection of poems by Pablo Neruda. She grasps it in disbelief; she never saw Frannie read anything but the TV guide. The book bears its original Spanish title: Odas elementales. Inside, in the top right corner of the first page, is an inscription in black ink: Magenta, 1963. A shiver takes hold of Carmen and she forces herself to lay the volume down on the floor.
An hour later the sunlight strikes the hills. Carmen grabs a dust frame with a picture of her when she was twenty taken after her first marathon. It was during that race that Carmen first encountered “the wall,” the stage of paralyzing exhaustion that sometimes occurs at the midpoint of the race. Inexperienced and stubborn, she reacted by stepping up her pace, with the result that she was forced to walk the last stretch. In the picture, her smile cannot hide the humiliation she had felt at having to cross the finish line walking.
After dusting the frame she carefully places it on the mantelshelf next to her trophies and medals. Among all these testimonies to her resilience, she places Bastard the cat. Satisfied, she steps back to contemplate her work steeped in the light of the setting sun. Then, on an impulse, she buries her hand in the earth of a ficus and closes her fist. She would so much like to grasp something — a root or mislaid pirates’ gold.
The angst that has Simon in its grip has grown to such proportions that it now seems hard for him to move about the house, as if the air has been thickened with invisible plaster. Claire’s evenings are increasingly devoted to so-called yoga lessons, Alan lives in his room, and Jessica comes back to the nest only to sleep and shower. The infrequent family gatherings are so fraught with tension that Simon has accepted a night shift to avoid them.
The term “graveyard shift” is perfectly apt: the darkness and silence of a cemetery always mask a ghostly existence, the invisible dramas of the dead and their mourners. He patrols solo from midnight to eight in the morning. The hour of knives and black stones, the hour when parties explode in a huge viscous uproar, and wrecks rise to the surface again. It’s in such moments that Simon truly feels he is keeping watch over the city, when he gets out of his car and listens to a vagrant wheezing in his sleep, or when he observes from a distance a young woman finding her way back home on foot, torn between fear and intoxication.
At six o’clock he buys a last cup of coffee to wash away the sand from behind his eyelids. For a brief quarter hour he shuts off the dispatcher’s gravelly voice and lights a cigarette. He restricts himself to just one a day, and it must be mooched from a stranger. A drunk, a bouncer, a jaded hooker, a bewildered teenager — any Joe Blow will do, so long as Simon doesn’t know him.
One night, as he is about to light the unfiltered cigarette given him by a French tourist, the dispatcher’s weary voice jingles out on the radio. Some passersby noticed suspicious goings-on at the Sutro Baths on the seashore. Nothing but ruins are left of the old swimming pool complex, whose heyday had passed in the early twentieth century, but the place continues to attract curious visitors and carousers. Simon puts away his cigarette and heads off toward the ocean.
As soon as he meets the scent of iodine and stale water, it comes back to him. This is where he and Claire ended up on their first date, walking among the half-empty pools and contemplating the remnants of an opulence that still made its presence felt between tides. They kissed inside a small tunnel in the rocky cliffs, and Simon did not dare touch the breasts of this woman too beautiful, too smart for him. Pulling over at some distance from the baths, he takes a swig of cold coffee to flush out the chalky taste that has spread over his tongue.
He leaves his headlights off for about ten minutes, long enough to see what is happening. Very quickly he concludes there is more going on here than a mere teenagers’ party. Torches placed at regular intervals are lighting a gathering, which even from afar appears calmer and more orderly than the groups that usually take over the beaches at this time of day. Here and there he can make out bodies diving headfirst into the abandoned pools.