Now Lenox wonders who attended the double funeral.
The hardest moment is facing the person who comes to notify the police about a disappearance. Although it is a fairly consistent scenario, variations on the same scenes and events, Lenox has still not managed to build up adequate barriers between himself and the grief. At first they shut themselves up at home and wait for news of any sort, even the news of death. Then come the phone calls in the middle of the night, when Lenox pretends to be encouraging, murmuring hollow clichés pulled from his reservoir. And of course the despair, a companion that grows more and more constant as time goes by. Even when the notifiers stop visiting the police station hoping for information, Simon T. Lenox can’t stop seeing their eyes. They are nailed to his consciousness, as though he holds the key to these people’s happiness or calamity. When he tries to fall asleep, he is pierced by that gnawing longing in the loved ones’ pupils. He will be spared of all that with this case, thank God, because the State of Israel has no eyes.
Most of the missing people eventually turn out to be dead, as Lenox informs the department rookies year after year. He warns them to prepare for the moment of identification by arming themselves with any defense mechanisms they can muster to prevent the outbursts of pain and compassion. Above all he loathes the “floaters,” the ones spat out by the ocean and the rivers, whose faces have been washed clear of any human expression. The first time he had to identify a floater, he puked his guts out. He’s built up immunity since them, although the thought of the Israeli’s face sends shockwaves through his body nonetheless.
This is his twenty-eighth missing person. Why does he count them, categorize them, and shuffle them?
His first Israeli. He was preceded by the Irishman who jumped off Mount Rushmore, the seventy-year-old Greek who left his wife, children, and grandchildren and ran off to Reno where he married a seventeen-year-old waitress, and the New Zealander who just forgot to call home. Who came first? Lenox can’t remember.
And the Israeli?
Without a trace.
THIS ISN’T my Israeli.
It’s not anyone’s Israeli.
Simon T. Lenox wakes up in the middle of the night. If he dreamed, the dreams are gone. He stands over the toilet but the urine takes its time. The pressure cuts through his groin. Like a tomahawk strike.
Fuck the Israeli.
THE SALESWOMAN at the Duty Free shop in Ben-Gurion Airport also recognized the missing man. Her affidavit was taken in her native Russian.
A tiresome business, the medley of foreign languages in the Middle East. Lenox is planning to ask for overtime because of this case. Had he been present at the interrogations, he would have monitored the witnesses’ body language, all the hidden signals that reveal what they themselves do not even know is important information.
Did the subject bother the saleswoman about Yuri Gagarin, too? Lenox skims the affidavit wearily, disappointed to find no mention of the Russian cosmonaut. But since the encounter preceded the incident with the flight attendant, it is possible that it was the saleswoman’s Russian accent that jogged the subject’s memory with Vostok 1.
What language did they talk in?
Hebrew.
Lenox is impressed by the young Russian woman’s quick mastery of a new language.
She is a “New Olah”—the Hebrew term is noted in the margin. Lenox will have to find out what that means. Why not just “immigrant”?
A deceptive language, Hebrew.
Moving on.
The subject purchased a pair of sneakers at the Duty Free, and made a point of confirming that they were waterproof. The soles would have to withstand a slippery surface, he explained to the saleswoman. But the sneakers weren’t the reason Valentina remembered him. The pair he chose was simple and unembellished, although she tried to talk him into getting a newer model, with air cushions.
Valentina. The name flashes through Lenox’s mind—distant thunder—and he circles it.
The subject told her that if she had immigrated to Israel thirty years ago, they would have made her change her name to Vardina or Adina.
Why? Lenox wonders. The Israeli investigator had not bothered to explain.
It was the boarding pass that made the subject stick in Valentina’s memory. He was clutching it the whole time, and inadvertently tore the stub off.
A façade of serenity, Lenox notes, and looks at the photograph again.
The man paid in cash, dollars. He put the new sneakers on at the store and left his old pair by the checkout counter. When the final boarding call for flight 001 to New York came over the speakers, Valentina found the boarding pass stub sticking out of one of the customer’s old shoes. At first she thought it was a note, and she had a moment of doubt: opening strangers’ letters was a rude invasion of privacy, and she was a well-bred young woman from Saint Petersburg.
Did you abandon your post? asked the Israeli interrogator.
Simon T. Lenox hopes Valentina wasn’t fired.
She ran to Gate 3 and found her customer holding up the line with a long trail of grumbling passengers behind him. She was so excited that she had trouble explaining to the flight attendant what had happened. All that came out of her mouth was Russian. The flight attendant was furious. At first she refused to match the two parts of the pass, but finally she inserted the stub in the machine and scolded the passenger.
Did the man thank Valentina? Without her, after all, he would not have been able to get on his flight. Or perhaps he had changed his mind? Was this a desperate attempt to sabotage his own disappearance?
In the document faxed from Israel, the silences are not recorded. Lenox is convinced that Valentina paused for several seconds before answering. Either way, the text is blurred and he cannot decipher her reply.
OLD-FASHIONED SNEAKERS. It’s doubtful that is what Yuri Gagarin would have chosen to take on Vostok 1 for his voyage beyond gravity.
Sipping his third Jack Daniels later that night, from a bottle whose label reads, “Every day we make it, we’ll make it the best we can,” Lenox scans his apartment and cannot find a single object so precious that he would be unwilling to part with it. Even his notepad is replaceable. What’s already written is less important than what has yet to be written.
The glass in his hand is cool. A cheap tumbler—he bought three of them at the drugstore across the street after his third wife left with the entire contents of the apartment.
If he were going on a voyage beyond gravity, all he’d take would be a bottle of Jack, so he could have a few sips while he watched the bluish-green ball from above. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to piss on everyone.
The pain in his groin again.
Israel is so small that you can barely see it from outer space.
Fuck Israel.
Irritating raindrops tap on the window, but even the drizzle doesn’t open up his bladder.
HE NEVER files his notepads. He promised the commissioner that on the day he retired he would box them up in sequential order and deposit them at the archive. Behind his back people make fun of his techniques. He always starts by collecting testimonies in reverse chronological order—going back in time—and then he examines each one discretely, as if they did not form a series of events in one person’s life. Simon T. Lenox believes that every human encounter is an autonomous event, a closed circuit, which can only be assigned meaning when it is over, in the light of previous events.
The theory of traces.
There are those who believe he inherited the approach from his Native American forefathers, but Lenox dismisses this idea out of hand. His