What I Loved

agitated. I raided the minibar, retrieved a tiny bottle of Scotch, and turned on the television. A man was lying dead in the street. I turned the channel. A woman with tall hair was advertising a chopping machine. A huge telephone number hung over her head. I waited for a call from Mark, drank another Scotch, and fell asleep near the end of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers , when Kevin McCarthy is running blindly on the highway at night as trucks loaded with the transforming pods screech past him. By the time the telephone rang, I had been asleep for hours and was dreaming about a blond man whose pockets were filled with tiny pills that moved in his palms like white worms when he held them out to show me.
    I looked at the clock It was after six.
    "Teddy here."
    "Put Mark on."
    "Mrs. Giles is asleep."
    "Wake him up," I said.
    "She asked me to give you this message. Are you ready? This is it: Iowa City. Got that? The Holiday Inn, Iowa City."
    "I'll come down to your room," I said. "I just want to see Mark for a couple of minutes."
    "She's not in the hotel. She's here. We're at the airport."
    "Mark is going with you to Iowa? What's in Iowa?"
    "My mother's grave." Giles hung up.
    The Iowa City airport was deserted. A dozen travelers in parkas rolled their suitcases through the halls, and I wondered where all the people had gone. It turned out that I had to call for a taxi and then wait in an icy wind for twenty minutes before it came. The woman at the check-in counter in Minneapolis had refused to tell me whether Theodore Giles and Mark Wechsler had been among the passengers who'd left on the seven o'clock plane that morning, but the departure time matched Giles' call. When I'd telephoned Violet from the airport, she had told me to come home, but I had said no, I wanted to go on. I looked out the cab window and wondered why. Iowa was flat and brown and bleak. Its drab, mostly treeless expanse was varied only by dirty patches of unmelted snow that lay beneath a huge overcast sky. In the distance I saw a farm, its gray silo jutting up from the plain, and I thought of Alice and her seizure in the hayloft. What did I hope to find here? What would I say to Mark? My legs and arms ached. My neck had a crick in it that made it painful to turn. In order to look out the window, I had to shift my whole body, which put pressure on my lower back. I hadn't shaved, and that morning I had noticed a stain on my pants leg. You're an old wreck, I said to myself, and yet there's something you want from all this—some idea of yourself—some redemption. The word "redemption" had come to me for a reason, but I didn't understand it. Why did I feel that a corpse was always lying under my thoughts? A boy I didn't know, a boy I had seen only once. Could I even describe him accurately? Had I come to Iowa for Rafael, whose name was also "Me"? I couldn't answer my own questions. It wasn't a new experience. The longer I ponder something, the more it seems to evaporate, rising like steam from a cave in my mind.
    The Iowa City Holiday Inn smelled dank and moist, exactly like the swimming pool at the YMHA where I had taken swimming lessons not long after I came to live in New York. As I examined the obese woman with crinkly yellow hair behind the desk, I remembered the resounding echoes of the diving board when I bounced on it and the feel of my bathing suit sliding down my legs in the dim light of the locker room. The odor of chlorine saturated the lobby, as if the unseen pool had leaked into every wall and carpet and upholstered chair. The woman was wearing a turquoise sweater with large pink and orange flowers knit into it. I wondered how to frame my question. Did I ask for two young men or a pale, thin man and a tall blond woman? I decided to use their names.
    "I've got Wechsler," she said. "William and Mark."
    I looked at the floor. The names hurt me. Father and son.
    "Are they in their room?" I asked her. My eyes settled on a pin she was wearing above her enormous right breast It said MAY LARSEN.
    "They went out an hour ago."
    As she leaned toward me, I could see that May Larsen was curious.
    Her watery blue eyes had an alert, shrewd glint I pretended not to see. I asked for a room.
    She examined my credit card. "They left you a message." She handed me my room key and an envelope. I moved away from her to read it, but I felt her eyes on me as I opened the paper.
    Dear Uncle Leo,
    Now we're all here. Me 1, Me 2, Me 3. Off to the cemetery.
    Lots