He spent a few days walking back to the Mail Boxes Etc. during his downtime and then called her with the fax number.
“I’m not asking for anything,” she told him.
He didn’t understand. Then it dawned on him that she meant money.
“You should take what you need,” he said. “I’ll sign whatever you send me.”
“I don’t need anything,” she said.
He walked, and after he woke he returned to the Mail Boxes Etc. and found the fax waiting for him. The woman at the counter was also a notary public and together they signed the paperwork. Then he paid to have it faxed back to the lawyer.
He stopped in the alleyway and removed the phone from his pocket. The battery was dead and he hadn’t bothered to recharge it for some time, maybe two months. He stood considering it awhile before tossing it inside a hollow dumpster where it hit with a cheap and lonely echo. He moved off, past the kids playing catch. He turned right and his presence was replaced by that window of space, no longer than a car’s length, in which cars passed one another all day long, shooting off little sunbursts of glare.
He watched her from the back of the crowd. He wore his beard and snow cap and backpack, as if his age were not sufficient to set him apart. He was drowsy.
He had stayed put, approximately, near this ground zero, going on ten days. When he found himself twelve or fifteen miles out, he fought the urge to crash, turned around and walked back. Deprived of sleep, his body was pliable. It was his again. It was also sleep-deprived, and he struggled to retrace the dozen miles. He was not only tired on the return but weak and hungry, too.
She wore army-surplus pants and a denim jacket and a faded T-shirt that said Heavenly Lake Tahoe. She was moody and focused and she punished the mike stand. She moved around with iconic revolt as if the world that contained her was that murky bluish stage and she was thrashing and screaming for release. She removed her denim jacket and her T-shirt was soaked at the pits. She had gained back her weight and more.
He drifted over to where the crowd was thinner and rested his head against the wall and dozed standing despite the enormous sound.
To his surprise, she clung to him desperately outside the venue. She broke down in his arms while he worried that his clothes might smell.
“I’m sorry that it’s been so long.”
“You’re so thin,” she said, releasing him, but gripping his arms as if she feared that he might slip away.
They sat in a booth along the far wall of a Greek diner. Periodic voltage drops grayed the gold fixtures and darkened the cake display. Everyone at some point looked ceilingward.
She asked him if it was gone, and he said it wasn’t.
“Then how did you make the show?”
“I’ve been circling the city since you posted the tour dates. I turn around and walk back.”
“Without sleeping?”
“Part of the challenge, not sleeping.”
“When do you sleep?”
“When I get close enough.”
“And what do you do with your downtime?”
“Get closer.”
“And then you walk away again?”
He nodded.
“Isn’t that exhausting?”
He shrugged. “Gives the day its purpose,” he said.
It was an act of willful defiance, looping, circling back, keeping within a certain perimeter. It imposed a pattern on the random arrivals and departures, even if that pattern was just to see a show, or to pick up a few pieces of mail from a p.o. box. He was collecting p.o. boxes, he told her, all across the country.
“Speaking of which,” he said.
He unzipped the pack and brought out a freezer bag. He removed the two CDs he had ordered over the Internet. He showed her that he had uploaded them to his iPod as well. “I also have a concert tee and a poster of the show you did in San Francisco.”
She was surprised and touched. “You’re a good dad,” she said.
He demurred. “Just a fan.”
“I thought you only liked David Bowie.”
“That was in the room,” he said, remembering the months he spent in the hospital bed and the music she had introduced him to. “Out here I listen to everything.”
He put the CDs back in the freezer bag and returned them to the pack. The power dropped out again and didn’t return. There was a stir as people murmured and faded to shadows and shifted unsurely in the murk, as if from this point forward they would require absolute guidance as to how to proceed.
The waitress came over. “Your order didn’t go through, hon.”
“That’s okay,” said Becka. “Are you okay?” she asked him.
“I’m okay.”
“Can we just have some more coffee?”
He wondered, in the dim light, if his eyes had played tricks on him. The sundress was gone. There was nothing skinny about her.
“The last time we saw each other,” he said. “When was that?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“You were with your mom and Fritz.”
She shook her head slowly in the darkness. “I wasn’t with them.”
“You look wonderful,” he said.
“There’s more of me, anyway.”
He didn’t reply immediately. Then he said, “Does it still bother you?”
She puffed out her cheeks like someone about to burst, eyes popping wide. Then she settled into a grin shaded with resignation. “It’s my one go-around,” she said. “What do you do — hate yourself till the bitter end?”
“I’ve always thought you were the most beautiful girl in the world.”
“You’ve always been biased.”
“I’m glad you don’t hate yourself.”
“Acceptance,” she said. She shrugged. “It’s a bitch.”
Out in the parking lot she offered to give him a ride but he needed to be no place. Occasionally he stayed the night in a motel or at the YMCA and she tried to encourage him to do so that night but he said it was easy to fall back into the custom of television and a real bed, which later made his nights in the tent harder to reckon with. He was happier avoiding those places. And he no longer did cars.
“What does that mean, you don’t do cars?”
“They’re not an option,” he said. “If I need to be somewhere, I walk.”
“Not an option?” She rattled her enormous collection of keys in an unspoken admission that what he said was deeply strange to her. “Well, will you at least sit in the front seat with me a minute?” she asked. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Her mother was sick. She had debated a long time over whether it made sense telling him. She knew his limitations and she didn’t want him to feel guilty about what was out of his hands.
“Is it serious?”
“It’s cancer.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
“You don’t know what cancer means?”
“No, of course I know. I’ve just lost track.”
“Lost track of what?”
He paused. “What does the man say?”
“What man?”
“The man she married.”
“Michael?” she said. “She never married Michael.”
“She didn’t?” He was taken aback. “Why not?”
“I don’t know the details, Dad. She broke things off.”
How long had it been? He had lost track.
He looked out the window and down at the parking lot, a frivolous patch of blacktop into which one sprung toward a better destination or from which one departed in an onward spirit. But he would do neither. He would soon get out of the car and remain. Becka would drive away, and an empty evening ache would press down. And there was nothing he could do for either of them, for any of them.
He turned to look at his daughter. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said.