Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  Later, however, some months after Blik was laid to rest, as we sat together one night in her kitchen drinking wine, Helena admitted, “It was just death, really. Just that I couldn’t see any way out of it, couldn’t see what Leon needed in order to cope. It’s funny, you know,” she said, staring into her wineglass, “but most people would want to be around family at a time like that. My brother just wanted to be alone … with his sentence … his radios. And I guess I was selfish enough to be afraid, even though it was his death.” She paused, swirling her wine around. “Or is that wrong? I wonder sometimes, you know, whether our deaths, of all things, should be ours to do with as we like, or whether they’re the one thing we must share with those around us.” I sat for some time across from her, the surface of the table dark in the absence of an overhead lamp, and heavy to the point of breaking with the question she’d placed upon it. I had no answer for her then, though it’s just as possible she didn’t want one, having sent it out—uttered it into dead air— knowing there was no suitable response.

  After the nephews left with Blik’s books, the men from the radio shop arrived, though not before I’d had a chance to poke around the workshop a little more, flipping switches, turning dials, bending antennas back and forth for better reception, putting my ear to speakers as if Blik had left me the task of listening. After the men finally arrived, were led downstairs by Helena, introduced to me as “a friend helping to clear Leon’s junk,” and shown around the room, they began to look at the radios and smile, holding back from open laughter at first, probably out of respect for the dead, though finally unable to restrain themselves.

  “Hey, Theo, check this out,” one of the men whispered, chuckling. The echo of the basement, now emptied of Blik’s books and manuscripts, magnified every laugh. “Take a look at this.” He pointed to a radio Blik must have been working on shortly before his death, occupying as it was the space where he normally worked. “What do you think that is?” the man asked.

  Theo bent over and gazed at the back of the radio, where the back panel had been removed. He turned it into the light and poked at the wires with a screwdriver taken from a peg on the wall. “It’s like he was trying to turn the receiver inside out,” he said, shaking his head in amazement. “Everything’s the wrong way around.” He gave the radio’s innards another poke or two, and then straightened up.

  After their inspection I could hear them talking to Helena upstairs, telling her some of the units could be refurbished, once they’d “undone” the damage caused by Blik’s “repairs,” but that most were little good for anything but spare parts. Helena said she just wanted everything gone and would be happy to take whatever they offered, provided the basement was emptied by the end of the week. While they were speaking I went over to the bench and lifted Blik’s last radio, bundling it into a garbage bag. I then opened one of the dirty windows of the cellar, set high in the walls and level with the ground outside, and pushed the package through, setting it down gently in the grass. Upon leaving, I went around and retrieved it.

  Plugging it in later that evening, I blew every fuse in the house. The spark thrown off by the wall socket was so large my wife and youngest daughter (the only one of our seven children still living at home) actually saw it from where they were watching TV in the next room, and came running into my study to make sure I was all right. I was, of course, though only physically. Because down in my basement, while fumbling with a flashlight and the fuses, I held my hand on the switch, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to bring the lights back on. What had Blik been doing? Despite the mockery of the repairmen—a ruse to make Helena and me think Blik’s junk was worthless—I knew Blik had at least a basic competence when it came to radios, which meant the last one he’d worked on was not misrepaired but sabotaged. But who was the intended target of this? And for what reason? Blik had spent the last days of his life turning a radio inside out, as if it were some kind of animal whose throat you could reach into, grabbing the guts and pulling them upwards, bending the jaws back until it was shiny purple and pink on the outside and fur-lined within. I couldn’t imagine the sort of anguish—physical, mental—that could have made him turn against the work he loved. And because I couldn’t imagine it, I felt there had to be some answer other than the obvious: that Blik’s mind had been so clouded by the emotional turmoil of dying that he’d started gutting radios, and leaving his precious writing to the wrong man. No, I preferred fixating on his last, inexplicable acts in the form of a question.

  Not that the answer was forthcoming. In fact, it seemed to recede from me day and night. The more time I spent in my study staring at the radio, or studying manuals on radio repair, or reading the unending sentences in Blik’s journal, the more I felt that the answer wouldn’t be achieved by concentrating on these relics left behind, and the more I felt like jumping in the car and driving up to Holman’s Ridge—until it was only with my eyes fixed on those impossible panoramas, their unaccountable distances, that I felt released from the information Blik had left (that he continued to leave), and the way it made me feel.

  Of course, the journal was right there with me, and the moment I relaxed I had to open it up, destroying all that peace those distances brought.

  It was only a matter of time before Helena found out what I’d done. I was in my office on the northwest corner of the top floor of the McLaren Building, at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, when she walked in.

  Now, not everyone can simply walk into my office. You have to climb through a bank of secretaries just to get to the front door, which is usually closed. You have to answer at least two questions, “What’s your name?” and “Do you have an appointment?” to which an answer of nothing to the first, or a “No” to the second, guarantees my privacy. If you’re intent on getting through without either of these passwords, then it’s best to start with surveillance, making sure I’m in the office, followed by a fast attack: rushing to the doorknob and bursting into the room with the secretaries hot on your heels.

  Which is exactly what Helena did. “Owen, you stole it!”

  “You’re not allowed in there,” shrieked Marilyn, coming into my office a second after Helena, and grabbing her arm.

  “It’s okay, Marilyn.” I rose quietly from behind the sales forecasts I’d been looking at and gestured weakly toward the door. Marilyn looked at me a second, then at Helena, and then turned back with a questioning look. I nodded and she very carefully turned and shut the door as she left. The click of the latch seemed to last several seconds longer than it normally did.

  “Why?” said Helena, not moving from the spot where she’d stopped.

  I lifted up the sales forecast sheets and picked up the open journal underneath. “I can’t …” I held the journal in my open hands for a while, unable to speak, and then closed and pushed it across the desk. She made no move toward it.

  I sighed, still standing by the desk, and lifted, for a few seconds, my hands to either cheek. “You know how many brothers and sisters I had, Helena?” She looked at me, but I could see she was beginning to let her shoulders drop to normal level. “Eleven.” I laughed. “One of my earliest memories is wandering around the house with a book in my hand, looking for a place to read, stepping into all these rooms to find them filled. Hostile glances. Everyone thinking I was planning to violate the kingdoms they’d established, measured out in square feet. Everyone pretending the others weren’t there. And then here I come, wanting to make even less room.

  “We weren’t poor or anything, at least relatively. There were just a lot of us. What do you call the opposite of loneliness?” I asked Helena, looking across at the book and shaking my head. “What is that? I’ve been trying to think….”I bit my lip.”Since Blik died I’ve been trying to think of it….”

  And in a second, as fast as she’d burst into my office, Helena was there by the desk, wrapping me in an embrace, her arms encircling my own, which dangled uselessly by my sides. But it took me only a second to break free and move to t
he opposite half of the desk. “No,” I shook my head. “I don’t want that right now,” I said, unnerved by the feeling that the consolation she offered wasn’t meant for me but, in some way, for Blik, for the part of her brother she was seeing in me.

  “I need to finish,” I said. “When Father Infante married June and me, I remember wishing my mother and father could have been there; I remember missing all that family, scattered or dead or feuding. Seven years, seven kids later, I’m waking mornings in the back seat of the car, wandering into the house to find June on the couch with Billy. Mary and Louise are in our room. Everyone in the wrong bed. I think we’d all gotten about three hours sleep, especially June and me, wandering from one crying kid’s bedroom to the next, trying to keep them from waking each other.

  “And then it’s in to work, sitting out there,” I gestured at the wall, meaning the large room beyond, where the copy pool toiled over their word processors and allotted fragments of advertising. “Sitting out there … it was like some dream factory, Helena. That’s what that job did to you. You started turning the work into something else.” I laughed. “You know I studied literature at university? It’s why they hired me. They wanted someone who could pump out clean sentences. And that’s what I did, day after day, polishing them and polishing them and polishing them, as if I could turn copy into literature. It’s what trauma does, you know. And it is trauma, or a form of it: doing that work for years, trying to ignore the time. You find little rituals, ways of controlling your corner of the world. Token acts that help you shut out what’s controlling you.

  “There was a guy there. Joe Racky. I still don’t know if that was his real name. A mathematician. I can see him staring at sheets of paper, trying to come up with a formula that would allow him to figure out how much copy he’d churned out in a day. Louise Morillo. She was into breaking her own record. Working at a million miles an hour, trying to outdo however much she’d managed to do the day before. Oh, she didn’t care about the work. Just the challenge. It was how she managed to get through the day.

  “Blik was my boss back then. But he had ten years on me. I’m sorry,” I said, stopping. “I’m going too fast; it’s all jumbled.” I walked over to one of the cupboards in my office and took out a bottle hidden behind a bunch of empty folders, two paper cups stolen from the stack beside the water dispenser. I poured drinks. Helena unfolded her arms and took up the cup but didn’t lift it to her lips. In the end, I didn’t drink from mine either, walking over to the window and turning my back to her.

  “I was obsessive.” I laughed. “Still am, actually. But back then I thought I could … get out of my situation, that if I was patient enough my kids would learn to look after themselves, that I would discover a few lost hours to the day—over and above the twenty-four—when I could fill out some applications for graduate school, work on my writing, even just sit and read ten pages in a row. I honestly thought it would work out, that this soul-crushing situation was just temporary. But you know how the years go…. After a while you’re not even thinking that way anymore. You’ve forgotten how much you wanted. Or, rather, your consciousness has forgotten, though the rest of the brain goes on dreaming.

  “In my third year or so I started writing these sentences. They were long things….” I laughed. “I think I’d read an article on Proust. I used to read The New York Times Book Review whenever my kids let me sit on the toilet for more than ten seconds at a time. I remember it, though I don’t think that what happened to me, in the end, had much to do with Proust. It could have been anything. The article talked about how Proust didn’t write sequentially— like most of us do—from beginning to end. Instead, he wrote in three dimensions: clause interrupting clause interrupting clause, until you felt like you were falling through a series of trapdoors, as if you were travelling not across the page but into it. And I started writing these sentences at work. I don’t know why,” I said. “It was what a lot of other people were doing: finding a way to personalize the job. I just started playing around with how long and complicated I could make the copy.”

  “When the deadline came I’d have to hand it to Racky. He was like the rest of us: someone who’s got a real knack for suffering in silence; the kind of person who can’t articulate his rage. He’d just take it from me and whittle away the sentences. The sentences, in the meantime, got longer, and he’d be looking at me out of the corner of his eye as we worked. I don’t know … I think at first I thought I could do both: do a bit of writing at work and still churn out what the company wanted. But the more I worked on the writing the more fixated I got, until it crowded out everything else.” I laughed again. “I don’t know what I was thinking, really. I don’t recall consciously trying to turn all that dreck into literature. But that’s what I was attempting, in effect.” I turned toward Helena, and saw a film of scotch on her upper lip.

  “Of course it fell apart. I don’t know what it was. Maybe the looks from Racky, which by then were pretty much straight on, as if he’d discovered he did have a capacity for anger after all.

  “One day I just put my head down on the page. I couldn’t finish the sentence. Tried it a hundred ways. The more I fiddled the longer it grew. The longer it grew the more options there were. I was exhausted.”

  Helena put her empty cup down on my desk. “That’s how you became friends with Blik.”

  “He didn’t need to be sitting out there with us in the pool. He could have had his own office.” I pointed at the wall again. “The present manager has his own office. But Blik wanted to be with us. And not because he liked to keep his eye on things. I think he worked better when there were other people around. Company. Not that we ever treated him like one of us. Alone but a part: that’s how Blik liked it. Anyhow, he saw my head on the desk and took me outside.”

  “Blik never told me why he’d taken an interest, and it took me quite a while to understand it. He just invited us over. All of us— June, the kids, me. It seems like we were there every weekend, or every other weekend, at least. After a while he put up swings in his backyard. A sandbox. As the kids got older he’d take them sledding, swimming. As for us: he gave June and me that room at the top of the third floor—the one that eventually became your bedroom. Said we could sleep, or write, or whatever. I remember the first time: June and I just sat in there together, on the bed. We’d get up to check on the kids and Blik would wave us away. We’d go back to the room. It took a while to get used to it. Eventually June stopped coming; she found other things to do, elsewhere. That’s when I brought in the books and the desk, though I never got much done. Mainly, I slept. It helped me get myself together at work. Promotions.” I gestured around my office. “That kind of thing.” I had walked from the window to the back of my chair by this point, grabbing the backrest and swivelling it lightly from side to side, as if I was proud of the chair, wanting to show it off to best effect. “I never really understood why Blik did it until you moved in,” I said. “God, I didn’t even understand when he first showed me the radios!”

  “Leon was lonely,” said Helena. “He was always lonely.”

  “Even before … well, before …”

  “Before our father left?” Helena looked at the journal on the desk. “Whenever I think of Leon now, or back then … Even in my earliest memories Leon is lonely. He loved being around your kids. I think him asking me to move in, following my divorce … well, it had more to do with missing them.”

  But I wasn’t listening to the last part of Helena’s speech, thinking instead of that terrible verb tense, “Leon is lonely,” as if even now, on the other side of life, Blik was still sitting in some dank cellar, twisting a tuning knob, desperate for an incoming message. And then it occurred to me, remembering him around my kids, how Blik’s face wore his expectation back then, looking at them as if his ear were bent to one of those radios, as if what he wanted was neither loneliness nor company, but an affection whose measure was the distance between people. It was as if, for him, loneliness had come to mean
presence. Maybe it’s what he’d come to love, having been denied his father: the consolation of space, a separation so vast you’d need a million antennas to make contact, each word spoken into the speaker as poignant and ludicrous as prayers for the dead. I once joked with him that he should invest in ham radio, in a medium where you could actually make transmissions, and he gazed at me with an expression that is only now beginning to make sense: the look of a boy who’s been denied contact so long he has come to love the only thing that connects him to his father: the authority of voices that speak without listening, that communicate without engaging in dialogue. The dead air of a distance across which nothing can travel. I suppose this is why Blik looked relieved when the children and I left: not because he wanted us gone, but because he’d spent too long with anticipation not to prefer it. It was a distortion of character—his consolation—a place you come to after considerable harm. And I’d failed to see it.

  “Blik never told me why your father left,” I said to Helena.

  “Because we didn’t know why,” she replied, “though Blik always felt we’d had an explanation, once, but that he was too young at the time to understand it, and since then everyone else had forgotten.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling indulgently. “But, you know, he didn’t talk about it much. My brother was a sweetheart. Eccentric, but a sweetheart.” She looked down at the journal. “What are you planning on doing with that?”