A reasonable woman who thinks of color as a material that comes in flat, matte, and satin, a comforting practical woman, a fearless woman, Denise said, “That is because you are an acid casualty. And a goon.” But months later when he told her Amber had died it was she who encouraged him to go home for the funeral. “Don’t you want to see your friend Chapa?”
The name in her voice was jarring to Jim. It didn’t sound right. “I guess.”
“The whole time I’ve known you, you’ve never visited the guy. I’m starting to think you made him up. Your magical Indian friend. Which, by the way, are you aware that the way you talk about him, it’s maybe a little bit racist?”
Jim must have made a face, because she repeated herself, altering her emphasis.
“Just maybe a little bit racist. How close were the two of you, anyway? Why have I never met him?”
“I don’t know. We lost touch,” Jim said. “He isn’t on Facebook.”
“Go home, Jimmy! Go see your friend. Take a selfie with the guy. I want to see him with my own eyes.” Denise is amused at best by Jim’s brambly thoughts, but because she urges him to confront his own mind, he knows she will always protect him.
And because he knows she would be happy to receive a picture of him beside his old friend—he’s pictured the picture many times: both of them grinning, holding beers, Chapa taller and stunning, Jim balder and paler but made handsome by joy—he is all that much more disappointed today that Chapa’s not here. At the brief wake he did see Chapa’s mom, Win. How’s Chapa doing? he asked her, and Win squinted up at him, squeezing her left arm with her right hand, black lashes gray hair, too distracted by grief to be glad to see him. You know Chapa, she said, and Jim nodded and looked down at the ground, because you’re supposed to give people enough silence and space to keep their grief to themselves. Now he regrets not saying, Actually no, I don’t, not anymore, regrets asking how when he could have asked where. Could have asked for his number.
Could he have asked for his number? Would that have been weird?
The trouble is, Denise’s interrogation still rings in his mind. How close were the two of you, anyway? He’s not sure he knows. How many times did they get fucked up together in this very gully? Two dozen times? Ten times? Twice? Maybe Denise was right, in a way, and he has made Chapa up—not entirely—just maybe a little bit—just the same sort of way that a kid makes up an idea of his mother before he’s able to understand what kind of woman she actually is, or the way a person who’s never been to, say, India, pieces together his own mental collage out of, let’s say, some crowded street he saw in a film, rock-cut temples from an in-flight travel magazine, Bollywood, tigers, lotuses, the Taj Mahal, and a memorable GQ photo shoot of Priyanka Chopra. The Chapa he thinks he knows is not much more than a collage of teenaged memories, fantasies, the light trails he still sees, and his own dim understanding of history. Let’s not forget that Jim’s ancestors’ hands were stained by Chapa’s ancestors’ blood. Once in this very gully, tripping balls, Chapa told him: Your people massacred my people. If time is a circle, and time is a circle, Jimmy, you massacred me. Teenaged Jim looked at his friend lying there on the red earth, and as he watched, the earth became blood. It seeped out of and pooled around Chapa’s brown body, and Chapa was still, and Jim was dumbstruck by the violence from which he was descended. For hours he was convinced he had lost the ability to speak.
In his memory the river is a stop-motion rainbow machine, but today it is muddy gray. Jim stands and rolls up his pants and wades into the shallows. The water’s so cold it feels boiling hot. Not only is the river less colorful; it is narrower now. The region has undergone a long drought. He is struck by the absence of life. The trees at the edges of the gully are still winter-bare, their black branches like cracks in the sky. A fish skeleton lies on the shore, in a bed of its own dried-out skin. Amber is dead and her brother’s dead, too, and so are twelve other people Jim once knew. And so is the fish, and so are the shrubs, and so are his toes, which have gone white and stabby, and so, in the end, is his friendship.
And then, deep inside his memory, something is lifted. Some small corner of memory is peeled up, and he has a clear, true recollection. That day he tripped so hard he thought he was mute? He and Chapa were not alone. Amber was there. She was sitting beside him. She was watching Chapa, too. He remembers her bare ankles, the cigarette between her fingers, he remembers her narrow, love-struck, teenaged face. She loved Chapa as hard as Jim did. She kept him company in that embarrassing love. He wants to tell her so. He wants to thank her. He wants to apologize for leaving her out of the picture for so long.
But he can’t, of course. So he wades back to shore. Brushes off his feet. Puts on his socks, one by one. He forces back on his two stupid shoes and turns back toward the rental car he left parked on the shoulder. He is numb, he is dumb. He is heading back to the airport.
• • •
