Omnitemporality in a Strip Mall

Searching for a missing boy, a private investigator finds more than he bargained for —over apps at Chili’s

I took a sip from my coffee, momentarily wishing it was fortified with bourbon but glad that when we’d met in the line at Starbucks, Vanessa Rusakova, my prospective client, had assumed she was paying. That boded well, for all sorts of reasons.

Due to unexpected traffic on my way in, I’d barely been on time for our meeting, which a decade of detective work had trained me to feel was actually late. Luckily, she’d been late, which a decade of detective work had trained me meant to feel she was used to being a big fish in whatever pond she swam in, and that she was less worried about her problem than she had intimated on the phone when we’d spoken last night. The way people use, abuse, and think about time matters; it says something about them.

Rusakova had ordered a non-fat, half-caff, pumpkin-spice latte, which both the barista and I managed not to roll our eyes over. The barista turned to me for my order.

“Three packets of sugar in the raw in a venti of your dark roast with room left for two shots of espresso, and top it with an ounce of light cream,” I said. “Sorry for the special order, Maddie, but I like how the sugar melts when it goes in before the cream.”

“Like I said yesterday, Mr. Crow,” Maddie, my favorite barista on Earth, said, “if I had hang-ups about tricky coffees, I’d probably work somewhere else.”

While Maddie took an order from the guy behind us, my new client and I shuffled down the counter to wait for our coffees.

“Are you a regular here, Mr. Crow?” she asked, implying some other questions she’d get to sooner or later, so I headed her off at the pass.

“Maddie knows me both because I come here to meet clients, and because she’s a former client herself,” I said. “Prolly why she was okay with extending that level of familiarity across the counter.”

I didn’t mention I’d helped Maddie recover her cat from a vindictive ex. I don’t discuss my clients’ business with anyone and besides, the whole thing with Mittens might embarrass my new client. I knew I was embarrassed about it, and I’d been paid for that adventure.

“We’re meeting here instead of my office because I don’t have an office,” I explained. “I used to, but it was a grim little place, and ninety-eight percent of my work is walkin’ around, talkin’ to people anyway, so I got outta the lease as soon as I could. Never looked back. The coffee’s better at my new place.”

“That makes sense,” she said, gesturing to the most distant table we could possibly sit at and still be indoors, which was a blessing, as this wasn’t one of New Hampshire’s three warm months.

“At any rate, as I said on the phone, I got your name from one of the police officers here in Keene,” she began, once she’d sat down and taken that first mandatory sip and nodding as if to confirm some thought or suspicion she’d had about the coffee. “They were unable, or unwilling, to help me, but the policeman I met spoke very highly of you, Mr. Crow. He assured me both of your discretion and that you could assist me… if anyone could.”

Harry Kovac had given me a heads-up that she’d be calling, partly so I could be ready, partly so I’d know who to thank. Harry liked to be thanked in the form of Amazon gift cards, which seemed cleaner, at least to him, than the discreet wad of folded bills I used to give in exchange for referrals.

“Your son is missing,” I said by way of invitation. “Possibly in trouble of some sort.”

The next ten minutes flowed haltingly, very much along the lines of most of my client meetings: mincing, choppy, embarrassed, awkward, filled with half-apologies, criminations and recriminations aimed at missing and/or absent family members and a mix of public servants and college employees. Rusakova was up for some form of promotion or advance at work and had concerns that it would reflect poorly on her if her son were involved in a sordid scandal. There were also — as happens so often I’m no longer surprised by it — a few hints of defensive anger with me, the one who’s going to be helping her. A large part of the reason I’d dumped the office in favor of Starbucks was that clients were far less likely to pace or slam doors, shout or cry in a coffee shop than in a detective’s office. I nodded and smiled and uh-huh-ed, enjoying the coffee and the sight of Ms. Rusakova’s legs and the blue sky and the conflagration of turning leaves on the trees outside what I think of as my Starbucks. She eventually ran down like a grumpy, worried clock, and I dipped a net into my subconscious’s skimmer for the pertinent fact-niblets and ran them back at her for both of our benefits.

When I had completed my summation, she nodded, sipped at her dessert-in-a-cup — which left a heartbreakingly cute mustache of pale brown foam across her upper lip — then served up the question I always used to fumble before developing and practicing at length, my stock answer.

“Just how are you going to proceed, Mr. Crow?” she asked. “Time is very much of the essence in this, as is your complete discretion. I hope that’s clear.”

“Most of my work is throwing stones in a pond, then chasing down the ripples,” I began. “Not literally, I mean, I won’t throw stones in a pond while I’m working for you… probably. I’ll explore the setting, the environment, based on what you’ve given me to work with, the background for the case, and react to feedback as I go. It’s a very organic process.” I stopped talking, took a long pull on the coffee, running back through my delivery of this essentially meaningless set piece to gauge the efficacy of my oration.

Three minutes later, despite my talk of ponds and throwing stuff, I left with an advance of six crisp Benjamins reverently folded and placed in my wallet, which until now had contained seventeen dollars and a dry-cleaning ticket for some suits and shirts that had been ready for a few weeks. I’d been unsure about whether or not my credit card could bear the strain, so hadn’t gone to the one-hour cleaners on West Street before now; I mentally penciled in plans to head over in the afternoon if I could make a bit of headway on the Rusakova case first.

I sorted the very little tidbits I knew into an action plan, and got behind the wheel of my car, moving forward through a series of starts and stops and turns. Movement and direction comfort me in the absence of sufficient information.

My first stop was The Home Depot on the edge of town, which had come up in our conversation a few times. I worked my way down the line of registers, starting with the customer service desk, showing the picture she’d been reluctant to hand over… the one she wouldn’t lend me for longer than it took to capture it on my iPhone. I asked if they’d seen the guy in the previous day or two. As luck would have it, perhaps as karmic payback or penance for overgazing at Rusakova’s foam-stache, I didn’t find anyone who recognized her son until I got to the last register.

“Yeah, sure,” the orange vest behind the counter said. “This guy, I remember him. He was buying a mess of milk crates and one-by-twelves. Dorm, or first apartment furniture, I’d say. Twelve crates, four boards, which translates to a fair amount of shelf space for a dorm room, probably an apartment. Crates kept falling off his flat cart, and he apologized like a million times.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Did he seem upset or nervous or preoccupied or anything while you were with him?”

“Nah,” he said, “the kid seemed fine, although we said mebbe six words to each other in the minute I was standing across from him, apologies aside, then he left. Seemed fine, happy really.”

“Huh,” I said, “did you, or anyone help him get his stuff out to his car?”

“Nope,” the guy said, “he swiped a credit card, took the receipt, and left.”

I turned and started to leave, but he called out a second later.

“Wait,” he said eagerly, “I think I saw him spill some of the milk crates on his way across the parking lot, and Jesus came over to help him pick them up.” He pronounced the name Gee-zoos.

“Jesus?” I asked, “or Hay-Soose?”

“Little South American homeless guy hangs out somewhere around here most days. Spouts religion stuff alla time. Some people call him Jesus, some Hay-Soose. I don’t even think that’s his name. Yeah, sorta racist and uncool religion-wise now that I think about it, but you know, people dehumanize it to make it seem less real, less horrible… the thought of a guy living outside like that.”

I thanked him again, and left him to his thoughts on how we treat, and think about, those less fortunate than ourselves. I went out to the parking lot to see if I could find Jesus.

I saw nobody matching the checkout guy’s description anywhere outside The Home Depot, so I climbed up into my car and started a slow circuit of the entire shopping complex, which comprised acres and acres of parking lots outside of large format stores of all sorts. I eventually found him pulling a stolen Target shopping cart across the Price Chopper parking lot. He arrived at the nicest tree left standing in the whole area just as I pulled up about twenty feet away. I’d parked a short distance from him and his cart to give him time to settle, and also to avoid crowding him; it was just possible he’d have something useful for me, but he could also be violent, off his meds, or just unwilling to talk with me, so I paused a few seconds to study him before shutting off my car and moving in. I got out and spent longer than necessary checking my pockets and locking the car door, reaching out with my sensory array to get a feel for this guy; he was talking to himself.

“Platypodes,” he said. “Honestly, what was I thinking? Bangladesh, kiwis, bats, the retinas of vertebrate creatures, none of it great work, honestly.”

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I wonder if I could ask you a question?”

“You already did, Connor,” he said, not looking up at me from the small rock he was turning over and over in his hands, “but you may certainly ask me another.”

“Okay, thanks. Have we met before?” I asked. “How’d you know my name?”

“I’m positive that’s not what you were planning on asking me,” he said, finally looking up. “You’ve always asked me something else entirely.”

His eyes were of the palest blue, and seemed infinitely deep, and infinitely tired; he stared at me, through me, and beyond me, all at once.

“Huh? No, you’re right,” I said, plowing right through his confusing manner of speaking. “I was hoping that you could tell me if you saw this young man yesterday.”

I held out my phone so he could see the picture of Trevor.

“I did,” he said. “I have. I am. I will. I see him come into this world, screaming and bloody. I see him an old man surrounded by grandchildren. I see his body moldering in the cold earth, food for worms and other low things.”

A large part of my job involves not letting my face react to the crazy shit people say. I’d heard much more bizarre stuff from people who didn’t have what appeared to be a collection of doll heads in their pilfered shopping cart, so I forged on. I stuck a pin in the question of his knowing my name, hoping to circle back to it later if I had the chance.

“Can you tell me where you saw him yesterday?” I continued. “What he was doing when you saw him, and who, if anyone, he might have been talking to?”

“Home Depot, spilling bright green milk crates all over the parking lot, and after we speak and stuff his purchases into a Subaru, an angry woman about his age is yelling at him until he climbs into her Toyota sedan and they drive away.”

His use of the present tense for past events hurt my head a bit, but that aside, he was the most helpful witness I had spoken with in weeks, including the old man with the oven-warm cookies in what I like to call The Peculiar Case of the Asswipe Who Shot Out Streetlights in Swanzey for No Good Reason. The events Jesus described seemed to suggest some form of duress, especially in combination with Trevor leaving his Subaru behind and missing a date with his mother, so after excusing myself from the discussion with Jesus, I stepped a few feet away and called a friend with Verizon to try and ping Trevor’s cellphone. He sounded harried and apologized that it might take a bit to get back to me. I considered waiting out in the cold parking lot, but then I thought about Jesus spending all of his time out in the cold, and it gave me an idea.

“Would you care to join me for lunch over at Chili’s?” I said and pointed south through contiguous parking lots to the restaurant. “My treat. I’ve got some time while I wait for an associate to get me some info. You’ve been helpful, and I’d like to pick your brains a bit more if you don’t mind.”

It was walkable, so he could bring his cart. I’d smelled worse B.O. inside a Chili’s before, and it’d probably be worth enduring in case he’d noticed the plate or something else about the Toyota Trevor had left in. Maybe he could be prompted to remember it with a bit of food and low-pressure poking and prodding. Beyond that, I was a little in love with the idea of getting a hot meal into this guy. He looked like he’d skipped more than a few in his time. I became a private detective to help people after all, and this was a guy I might be able to help. The idea was as much of a plan as I’d had in a week.

“I couldn’t possibly,” he said. “There’s an earthquake about to happen in Qinghai province, an LNG tanker explodes an hour from now off the Faroe Islands, and… actually, that’s a kind invitation, Connor, and I’d be grateful.”

“You seem to know my name,” I said, “but I have no idea of yours. I assume it’s not really Jesus?”

“Earl,” he said. “I have many names over the ages, but my favorite name is Earl.”

“OK, Earl,” I said, ”let’s go get us some of the best Tex-Mex food you can get on the outskirts of Keene, New Hampshire.”

I bweep-bwooped my car’s locking system and started walking with Earl, pushing his cart for the last half of our short walk after he stumbled a bit at one point. He was looking up into the clear, cold, autumn sky, mumbling something about souls and aftershocks and tunnel collapse and shockwaves. The woman who greeted us at Chili’s door gave me a less enthusiastic expression when Earl followed me in, getting a where’s the manager look in her eyes for a second before I palmed her a twenty and nodded her over to an empty section of the restaurant.

“How about a table over by the window?” I said, pointing to an empty and distant booth thirty yards and dozens of windows away from the sparse crowd eating before eleven thirty.

“What can I get for you gentlemen to start?” our server Cindy asked.

“I think water for us both, and I’ll have an iced tea,” I said.

“Cindy, I love the Mango Arnold Palmer when I eat here a year ago,” Earl said, “and when I eat here again in six months, I love the smoked wings and the Grass-Fed Sunrise Burger, so I have that today as well.”

She looked at him quizzically and seemed about to say something, so I cut in with my order.

“Thanks, Cindy,” I said. “I’ll have fried pickles to start, and follow that up with the Margarita Chicken Bowl thingee, okay?”

“Sounds good,” she said, back safely on autopilot, “I’ll put your orders in, and be right back with your drinks.”

A minute later she had delivered the drinks and looked up at the ceiling when Earl started muttering half aloud about manatee pelvises and church roofs collapsing. She then smiled brilliantly at me before fleeing back to some other, safer, part of the restaurant. I leaned in and whispered, more confidentiality than was called for, given our isolation in the restaurant.

“Mumbling about disasters and sea-cow naughty bits, and talking about past and future events in the present tense can be a little off-putting for people with a limited perspective, Earl,” I said. “I’m just sayin’ is all.”

Those clear, blue, knowing, and distant eyes came up from the table and goggled at me for a few watery seconds before a single tear ran out of his left eye, curving along his grimy cheek to the point of his chin before dripping to the table.

“I can’t help it, Connor,” he said. “The voices, the lives, and deaths, and dramas, more than a hundred billion of them, racing forward and backward like a mob of puppies through my head, in front of my eyes, day in and day out. So many. So, so many. I’m tired.”

Cindy started to swoop in with our appetizers at that moment but paused when she saw Earl crying. I waved her in. She dropped ’em and dashed away like a Halloween trickster leaving a bag of nasty at our front door, instead of an array of yummy fried and greasy nibbles. I felt the moment hanging there when I could have reached across the table comfortingly to give him a pat and say the right thing, but I shoved a couple of fried pickles into my face-hole instead. I’ve always struggled with exposed hurt, obvious crazy, and the tears of strangers; Earl had served up all three, so instead of reacting, I ate my pickles, savoring the hot, sweet saltiness instead of doing the hard thing, with which I’d noticed the right thing so often seemed to be co-located. I had no idea what was going on but planned to push ahead as if I did, which has worked for me more often than you’d think.

“It drives me more than a little crazy over the ages,” he said, “and that’s when I make mistakes. Obvious mistakes, stupid mistakes, just tired of all the noise in my head is all. I make mistakes.”

“Bangladesh?” I asked. “Platypodes? Manatee Pelvises?”

“Bangladesh, perfect example. I make this beautiful land,” he said, “fertile soil, nice climate, but plop it down a meter or two above sea level, in the perfect place to get absolutely clobbered by cyclones and tsunamis all the damn time. And, I mean, you’ve seen a platypus, right? Duck’s bill, poison foot-spurs, eggs, fur; seriously, what is going on in my head that day, right? Manatees have pelvic bones, but they’re not used or useful, just buried in muscles along their back ends. I’m embarrassed to even talk about them and get wrecked each time I think about them bobbing about in Florida waterways, getting chopped up by speedboats.”

“Earl,” I began in the tone of voice I seem to use when I’m about to say something I don’t want to say, but think I should. “I like talking with you, but I think that maybe you should meet with this social worker I know. She’s a really smart lady and maybe could help with all the stress you’re dealing with. Maybe she could find somewhere indoors for you to sleep as winter comes on.”

“That’s sweet of you, Connor,” he said, “but I’m not crazy, just overworked or maybe a bit overstimulated by my job.”

I’ve found in my time, and in talking with more than my fair share of crazy people, that being crazy is something that nobody thinks they are, just like most people think they have a good sense of humor and can drive well in snow.

“And your job is?” I asked, knowing I couldn’t possibly like, or be comfortable with, whatever answer he was about to serve up.

“I’m the Lord God,” he said, just as Cindy put down our lunches, and backed away without a word, possibly crossing herself discreetly. “Maybe a God, I’m not sure if there are others. I’m the only one that I’m aware of… at any rate.”

“And you’d know,” I said, regretting my lack of filter the instant the words slipped out, “being God and all.”

Earl laughed and nodded, taking a huge bite of his hamburger, which seemed, oddly, to have a fried egg on it.

“Yessir,” he said, a string of yolk running down through his ratty beard. “Omniscience is a tough load to carry, seeing into every life, every place, every mind, every mood. The topper though is existing and acting through every moment in time at once. That’s what results in discussions like this: a month ago, that nice cop in Brattleboro. Twenty-three days from now, your social worker, the good Brenda Mulvaney. Seeing not just everybody and everything, but seeing it all at every possible moment in time contemporaneously, and in the ongoing present from my perspective.”

Putting aside for the moment the creepiness of him guessing who I’d been talking about when referencing Brenda a minute ago — which I frankly had more than a little trouble putting aside — I felt as though the back of my head might blow out as what he’d said filtered through the enjoyment of my chicken salad. A huge mouthful of which I was using as an excuse not to react to, or answer, him. He was, of course, crazy as a shithouse rat. If God exists, he’s not slumming it in a supermarket parking lot in Keene, pushing one of Target’s shopping carts filled with doll heads and dirty blankets and a mostly empty three-liter bottle of fruit punch around and around, but apparently going nowhere. I forced a derailment of my thought-train concerning omnitemporalism and struggled to focus on my realities for the day: finding Trevor for Rusakova, getting Earl together with Brenda and out of the weather, and not watching Earl eat his nightmare-burger so I could enjoy my Margarita Chicken something-something bowl.

I excused my behavior but remained at the table while sending Brenda a brief text about Earl. I aim for Twitter-post-length in my texts on the assumption that nobody reads past the first few lines anyway. She bing-bonged back to me forty seconds later that she couldn’t come immediately but might be able to swing by the parking lots in this mall sometime this afternoon. I assured her that would be adequate. He was a deity after all, and that notwithstanding, he’d been on his own until about fifteen minutes ago, and doing okay-ish. I turned back to Earl after flipping my phone face down on the table, now trying to figure out a way to expense his lunch without lying to my client. I still knew virtually nothing in terms of advancing my case for Rusakova, while Earl apparently knew everything about everything.

“Earl,” I said, “Do you think you can remember anything more about the angry woman you say you saw Trevor speaking to over at The Home Depot yesterday?”

“I remember everything about her, from the moment she comes squawling into this world until she dies in a hospital bed in her home’s living room fifty-three years from next Wednesday,” he said. “Lisa Dunning lives over in Surry, attends Keene State, and is carrying Trevor’s child, who I don’t know because she’s never born into this, or any other, world.”

I got an eerily timely text from Mickey, my friend with Verizon, giving me an address in Surry from which Trevor’s phone had responded to the ping, and apparently been at for the last twenty-five hours. I didn’t know how Earl knew what he purported to know about Trevor’s location, among other things, but I’ve found out all sorts of stuff in ways that might seem like black magic to people outside the circles in which I move, so I wasn’t ready to start going to church again… just yet. It did feel weird, however, reflecting on how much more about everything this guy seemed to know, compared to me.

“Earl,” I said, “I’d like to thank you… for the information, but also for an interesting and thought-provoking lunch. I’m going to head over and see if I can find this particular prodigal son, and bring him back for some fatted calf, albeit a day late, with his mother.”

That was a bit more Bible-reference-y than I would normally serve up, but I gave myself a pass and slapped two twenties down on the table as I stood.

“I meant what I said about the social worker, Brenda,” I added. “I hope you’ll talk to her, and let her help you, both spiritually and in finding a place to sleep with a roof.”

He smiled up at me from the table as I adjusted my jacket, then answered me, “I speak with her eventually, but tonight I’m heading down to Brattleboro; in three days, there’s a school concert I enjoy watching tremendously. Don’t worry about the other thing, your young man is at the house, and everything works out more or less all right for him for the next seven years while he crashes into, and through, the lives of many people not so fortunate.”

“Couldn’t you fix it, stop it?” I asked, unable not to, “I mean, if you’re God, why not stop the bad stuff… or at least the horrible stuff… from happening?”

“Everyone asks.” Earl smiled, a little sadly. “It’s too much, too big a game, too many pieces, like chess on an infinitely big board. It’s at once a gift and a punishment, but mostly it’s just my job. From time to time I meddle, a few thousand years back, ten years from now, when the dinosaurs are gobsmacked by that meteorite… it never works. Two hundred years from today, I intervene to stop a hemorrhagic viral pandemic, can’t help it. The next thing just comes along anyway, even more horrible, or less, doesn’t matter. Then I learn my lesson, until the next time.”

“Well,” I said, somewhat gobsmacked myself, “it was nice to meet you, Earl. Good luck with everything.”

I drove out to the address Mickey had given me and got through the missing kid rigamarole with Trevor Rusakova in less time — and with less effort — than it took anyone to read this sentence, operating the whole time to some degree on auto-pilot, thinking more about Earl than Trevor.

My friend Brenda didn’t manage to connect with him later that afternoon when she orbited the various parking lots of the Monadnock Marketplace for an hour, hunting for him; she did, however, have him walk into her offices a bit more than three weeks later, just before the big snow, mentioning my name, and asking for her help finding a bed inside for the night.

I never saw him again, although I’ve often thought about the day I met God. I still wonder about his existence and, as he put it, “His gift, his punishment, his job.” It gives me a headache if I think about it too long, as it must do to him. I don’t pray, but I wish him well, and I wish him what peace he can attain as he listens to, and witnesses, everyone and everything, all at once.

I’ve tried to apply what I saw and heard that day with Earl to my job, my life, and in trying to avoid my own platypode moments.