“Oh, right,” Dubourg said, rising. “May I have a minute?”
The man nodded, and we watched him walk out the door. Through the glass we could see him smiling at passersby.
“Are you in trouble?”
“No,” he said. “Interfaith people,” he rolled his eyes. “The hazard of spending too much time in airports is they start to recognize you.” He faked a smile to the man.
“Can I pray before we leave?” Dubourg asked me, and he didn’t give me a chance to answer, only put one hand on my shoulder and bowed his head. “God, this is Dubourg Dunbar in the Atlanta airport. I say a prayer of safety and tranquility for my cousin, if it’s Your will. Look after him on his journey. You are all powerful and loving God, and it is in Your son’s name, Jesus Christ, we pray, amen.” He patted my shoulder.
“Well, thanks,” I said, picking up my bag.
He frowned. “Sandy, do you need a sign as literal as the dog’s eyes to believe something?”
Dubourg and I stood inside the fishbowl of cancer, being watched by the interfaith man through the glass, and I searched my memory for the meaning of “the dog’s eyes.”
“I remember the dog’s eyes,” I said. “Was that when you had the experience? I thought it was that camping trip.”
“These feelings of understanding God’s love happen a lot,” he said. “It’s ongoing and magical. One aspect that William James observed with conversions is that the experience can’t be explained. The feeling I got when I saw the dog’s eyes couldn’t be explained.”
This was before we were teenagers. We were playing in the graveyard at night. Someone dropped the flashlight and ran. This was my memory: A dog barked and cousins ran in different directions, and there was stifled yelling and laughter. Dubourg picked the flashlight up. One of the dogs stood in the beam of light. The dog’s eyes were floating gold orbs, disks, reflectors, and Dubourg saw me behind a grave marker, but he didn’t turn the light on me. He shook the light at the dog’s eyes and said, “That’s proof God exists ’cause they protect him from getting run over by cars at night.” He turned the flashlight up at the sky as if to search for God. “He made dogs with reflecting eyes!” Dubourg had yelled and claimed he was overcome with comfort, a feeling of ease in the universe. It scared the shit out of me. What is an anxiety attack and what is a religious experience?
I said to him on concourse C, “Come stay with us. Please, Du.”
“I will when I can.” He opened his arms and we hugged again, me taking a good whiff of his body odor to remember him. Elizabeth and I were going to Chicago, and at some point I was going to have to tell her we were going to Alabama too because I had this feeling I would find something there, maybe not the violin, but it was important to go.
I said, “Have you ever lost your luggage?”
He let go and held me at arm’s length, his legs straddling the valise. “Are you shitting me? I can’t lose contact with this.”
“You don’t have any idea what’s in the case?”
“Nope.”
“And yet you carry it around because the church told you to?”
“Faith,” he said, “sacrifice.”
“You must have pissed off the wrong person to get this assignment,” I said.
“I can’t imagine it being any other way now.”
“Hey, have you ever heard of this place in Birmingham with the lost luggage?”
For an answer, he pushed his glasses up with a knuckle, exactly the same way Van Raye did and shrugged his shoulders. He waved. “Thanks for the cigarettes,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”
He turned and began walking fast with the big case beneath his arm, duffle hanging on the other side of him, and I saw that his white shirttail was untucked and hanging below his jacket. His shirttails never stayed tucked.
CHAPTER 16
In Chicago, while Elizabeth attended the board meetings, I sat in an empty waiting room and read the Universe Is a Pair of Pants, a chapter titled “Musings in a Quake Zone.” He wrote, “Twenty-five years ago I had a wonderful little theory. This was before planetary science distracted me. I arrived at it while in San Francisco where I met a wonderful violinist.” He described the violinist as “sophisticated and worldly.” He wrote, “We went back and forth in my tiny apartment above Beulah Street, each playing separately — my French horn, her violin — then together, working ourselves into a frenzy, and not a single neighbor complained. It was a perfect night.” Van Raye wrote that they had a “continuous concert” together, and the chapter was really about cosmology and his “wonderful theory.” “When we were done and almost asleep,” he wrote, “a mist fell through the open window on my face, and I heard a junkie puking on the street below, some guy who’d wandered off of Haight, retching right beneath the window, and I thought—Exactly! And that was when I began to formulate the shape of the universe in my mind, which could be both infinite and bounded. .”
I read through eight pages of cosmology but then I kept rereading the beginning.
When Elizabeth came out of the meeting, I told her that we were going to fly through Birmingham. “I have to show you something in Charles’s new book.”
“Birmingham?” she said. “Why?”
“There’s a store I want to go to,” I said.
“What store? Another magic store?”
“Did you hear me? There’s something in Charles’s book I want you to read.”
In the gate area, waiting for our plane, I watched her eyes beneath the cheap rhinestone readers go over the words about the violinist in San Francisco.
“You can stop when you get to the cosmology part,” I said.
She finished and shut the book.
“That’s about you, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “who else?”
“It’s the only time he’s ever mentioned you in a book!”
She handed the book back to me. “He mentions everyone in his books.”
“Not you and me.”
“Is that what you want, Sandeep? To be a couple of paragraphs of an excuse for him to talk about what he wants to talk about?”
“I just don’t think I’ve done anything interesting enough for him to write about.”
“Self-pity isn’t productive,” she said.
I leaned back. “Well, we’re going through Birmingham.”
“I don’t mind spontaneity,” she said, “but don’t spring it on me.”
It was late afternoon by the time our Airbus glided out of the overcast and touched down in Birmingham.
We got a green minivan cab, and I gave the driver the address. I asked him if he’d heard of the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage. He’d simply replied, “No,” and put the address into his GPS and sighed because he saw the fare would barely earn him over his minimum.
“What is it?” Elizabeth asked.
“Just somewhere I wanted to go.”
He drove us through the same indistinct buildings and warehouses you’ll find at the southern end of any airport. The driver turned off the main boulevard and went down a narrow street, then across a small bridge, and I had this sinking feeling that there wouldn’t be any kind of store here, not even a pawn shop.
Big drops of rain spotted the windshield, and the wipers smeared the pollen. A simple green utility sign beside the road announced WAREHOUSE 122-A and had an arrow pointing to the next street.
A single piece of hard-cased Samsonite luggage was wrapped to an oak tree with yellow crime-scene tape. A single word, LUGGAGE, had been spray-painted on a board against the fence.