Recognition went off like a firecracker in his head.
"Oh shit oh no! Eurydice."
Finally. He knew what they'd been saving him for.
Los Angeles
Garner understood the deadness in his feelings. He didn't begrudge it. He knew what it was, and he knew it wouldn't last.
The numbness made it possible for him to drive to police headquarters, where the main morgue was. It made it possible for him to park the van and to say to himself, from time to time, It's not necessarily her, it doesn't have to be her.
But it made him tunnel visioned and mechanical. He locked the van and walked to the front of the LAPD building but he didn't really see it. He had an impression that there was a metallic LAPD symbol on the front of the building somewhere. He was vaguely aware that it was drizzly out today, not raining out but the wind a wet one, and he thought it was probably sometime in the interminable afternoon.
Inside there was a counter and, behind it, a black woman in uniform. Her face was a blur. It was like one of those TV reports where, for legal reasons, they'd used some kind of computer-video effect to block out someone's face with swatches of cubistic blurriness…
The sergeant who took his paperwork had a cloudy face, too. But the heavy set cop led Garner back to the morgue. There was the chattering of computer printers tattling on someone; there were squares of paper on bulletin boards with little black and white faces on them, and those, paradoxically, came into focus more readily than the faces of the flesh-and-blood cops around him: Wanted sheets displaying two grainy black and white views. Bland, ordinary faces. Many of them murderers. They all had a patient look about them. You've got me now, and you're taking my picture, and you're going to put me in a cell, but I'll wait, I have only to wait…
A blur who called himself a Morgue Orderly took him and the Sergeant into a cold room.
"You won't be called upon to identify the body, per se," the Sergeant said. "It's not really… identifiable. We're not even sure it's a…" Not even sure it's a body, he'd been about to say but decided that was unnecessarily gruesome, considering. "The hair was taken. We have only the necklace and the one finger to show you. We've identified the finger from the print but… The lieutenant wanted… well, if it were up to me you wouldn't have to…''
The cop's words phasing in and out of Garner's consciousness as a drawer was opened. There was a dark green bag of heavy plastic in it. It was a lumpy bag that, from its lumpiness and shapelessness, might have been filled with garbage. There was no hint of a human body, except in the little freezer bag, next to it. A zip-lock bag. In the zip-lock bag was a small, slightly frosted human finger, with a distinct pink nail polish. A plump finger he knew quite well. As he stared at it, the Sargeant produced a Polaroid snapshot from his pocket. When Garner didn't turn away from his fixed stare at the finger in the freezer bag, the cop sighed and thrust the polaroid into Garner's field of vision. Garner had to make a world-wrenching effort to focus his eyes on the photo. It was a picture of a slightly bloodied necklace lying on a white paper towel. Her gold necklace. Spelling her name.
"Yes," Garner heard himself say. "Yes. Yes."
Garner followed himself out of the morgue, into the blurred hallway; the blurred chatter of the offices. It seemed that way: that he was following himself around. He could see himself walking with the cop. But he was not quite part of it. He was floating near the ceiling like a lost helium balloon. Bobbing along, detached, swept along in a slipstream by these strangers.
Another paradox: liquor brought a strange clarity to Garner's world. It dispelled the blurriness. He knew that was temporary, that booze would bring its own cloudiness, its own distancing, when alcoholism pulled him into the world of the bottle.
For the moment it had screwed him back into a definite point of view. He could see the big red X on the signpole in front of the adult bookstore complex across the street; he saw it with a new clarity. It was two stories high, that X, and its lower end was a good twenty yards over the parking lot. Just a big X on a pole. It seemed to signify more than just dirty movies here. It was like a hot-iron brand on the flank of the city. Or a cancel sign, a crossing-out of the city's dreamy ambitions.
It said, All this? It ain't shit. Cross it out. What was that line from Lou Reed? Stick a fork in their asses and turn 'em over, they're done.
Garner was in a weekly rates motel at the raw end of Hollywood Boulevard. He'd checked in, thirty-two minutes after leaving the police station. He was sitting at the grayed-out window looking at the boulevard, drinking Early Times Kentucky Bourbon from a plastic cup. He'd drunk his way down to the label on the fifth. Long way to go, yet. He remembered Early Times. It was cheap but it tasted pretty good.
He had seven hundred dollars left. He thought about that a lot. Used to be his savings. Might call that little putz James and tell him to sell everything in the house. Send the money, if the pimply motherfucker could be trusted.
The police thought that she had been put into some kind of machine. Maybe a crop thresher of some kind, or "some kind of processor," in some old factory somewhere. That would explain the Wetbones effect. The pulp and broken bone ends that had been his daughter. They'd taken her hair, like an Indian taking a scalp, and, presumably, it was displayed somewhere, in some basement room. Maybe the son of a bitch was jerking off over it, right now.
Your baby was put into a machine…
Your baby was probably raped and tortured and then put into a machine that…
And the fucking son of a bitch, probably put her in alive!
It was a fucking marvel how the world went on. How the cars continued to pass; how children continued to play Nintendo and talk about the Lakers; how Smurfs continued to gambol in cartoons for other children; how the President continued to lie in press conferences. All the usual shit went on. And someone had tortured his baby to death.
He looked out the window at the fibreglass dinginess of the monumental X sign; the razor brilliance of the points of coloured light coruscating the reptile-skin of the adult bookstore's parking lot: sunlight on broken glass. The dumb persistence of the Mexican crone with the aluminium walker, her back hunched with age, inching along the dirt path beside the curb, in one of the many ones of Los Angeles hostile to pedestrians.
"Give up and die," Garner told the crone with a mutter.
A jet, coming over the hills from the Burbank airport, seemed to shoulder sullenly against the sky as it veered West, probably for some unsuspecting tourist's nightmare sojourn in threadbare, polluted Hawaii.
The wall of the Mexican bar, beside its small gravel parking lot, was etched with the pathetic psychological watermark of Hispanic gang graffiti. Above it, something unfelt hung from the powerlines with the tennis shoes someone had tied together and tossed up there as a practical joke; something fell with a translucent blizzard of hydrocarbons from the smoggy sky.
Five years old, Constance came to him with her first Barbie. "I think Barbie's sick, Daddy." Constance had been morose, and unable to eat much, for weeks before.
He looked at the doll and there was nothing broken on it. He thought Constance wanted to play, so he said, "Uh oh. I'll be the doctor and you be the nurse and we'll -"
"No!" She was crying, now. "No, she's really hurt."
He stared at his daughter and somehow knew this was about her mom being dead. He had taken her into his arms and said, "How about you? Are you hurt?"
He'd coaxed her into talking about it and she'd begun to cry in earnest – and then to heal. There was no dramatic moment, no 'Barbie feels better Daddy!' But, as weeks passed and he stayed close to her and drew her out, he could see her begin to bloom, see her become interested in playing with other kids again, and he'd almost wept with relief. He had shown her – and himself – that he could be there for her. She's going to make it. We're going to make it. We'll be all right…