Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  Eleven decades—four long generations. 1910 was so frequently discussed as modern, recent, as if the dawn of the twentieth century and the era of the first divergence were barely out of reach, but placed in human terms, one hundred years ago seemed distant. Even Hel’s great-grandparents were slightly too young to be Sleight’s contemporaries. Still, all the history that stretched before that, and everything that hadn’t happened yet—provided humanity could avoid the kind of disaster that Sleight had always predicted, the kind that had wiped out the world in which he’d predicted it—dwarfed that hundred years to the point of unfathomability.

  Maybe that explained why young Ezra, dead and gone and separated from her by a raft of years, could feel so immediate here in this gallery of thirdhand memory. How he could feel so close, as her feet echoed on the parquet of the hall.

  Once, over a year ago on a street in Midtown, Hel had thought she saw him. She thought she saw Jonas. She’d been on her way to Vocational Retraining, a few blocks west of Grand Central Station, the bright street sleepy and dusty through the lenses of her sunglasses, and she was thinking of nothing in particular as she walked the familiar route. She’d passed a building from which twin American flags dangled garish in the blinding sunlight, backlit like stained-glass windows, glowing blood red and electric blue. A bead of sweat trickled down the small of her back as, up ahead on the other side of the street, she observed a workman crouched in the middle of the sidewalk, polishing the gold Siamese head of the standpipe to a spotless gleam. A woman Hel’s age walked a dozen paces ahead in the same direction, and Hel noticed the way she pulled on her child’s hand to steer him around the obstruction. The woman wasn’t anyone she recognized, of course—no one was, no one ever could be—but as she saw the boy from behind—gangly and tall for his age, the hem of his pants just a little too short, ankles exposed in white socks, the slight and fragile back, the thin brown arms, the messy thick hair—she knew it was her son. It didn’t make any sense, but she knew it.

  “Jonas!” she called out, but the woman was still hurrying the boy along; he didn’t turn back. “Jonas!” Without looking, Hel dashed into the street. Two cyclists and a car swerved to avoid hitting her and a motorized cab laid on the horn. She dropped her bag right in the middle of West Fortieth and ran on. “Hey! Stop!” She was on the same sidewalk with them now, dodging other pedestrians. She swerved around a man with his dreads in a big stretchy cap and two punk girls walking arm in arm; she was right behind, yelling, “Jonas!” but the woman and child didn’t stop. Hel reached out and tugged at the boy’s shoulders, bodily turning him around.

  Even from the front, even from inches away, he did look a little like Jonas. He had wide brown eyes and caterpillar eyebrows and even the same kind of chin with a sweet cleft in the center, but that didn’t make him the boy Hel knew. This boy also had unwanted specificities—freckles across his nose and a scar on his forehead, provenance unknown. He was ten years old, a bit younger than Jonas would be now, Hel realized. The boy’s mouth hung open in surprise. She had grabbed him roughly, had confused him, hurt him, this stranger. Hel experienced regret, so much stronger than nostalgia, so strong it nearly made her sick.

  She could cope with distance. Almost five thousand klicks from New York to Palo Alto. After the divorce, she did it, exchanging strained and polite words with Raym, waiting for him to call their son to the ordinator link. She would see Jonas’s face then, blooming sometimes in digitalized squares that froze and then sprinkled themselves across the viewer, but other times clear: his beautiful face. His missing front teeth and then, some months later, the big teeth that grew in their place, too big for his mouth, white and strong and unimaginably dear with their fine, sawlike bumps. He showed her the comics he drew, his school report, the visor Raym bought him to play the newest game mods, the dirty skull of a cat that he’d unearthed in his California yard. Always cheerful, always so generous to her. He must have resented the divorce, her absence—of this she’d been certain, on some instinctual level—but he’d never let her feel it, her beautiful son.

  And then, the final two school holidays, he was old enough for cross-country airship travel alone. She remembered picking him up at Geoffrey Lyons Memorial Terminal from the steward and the ride back from Hoboken together on the ferry, his small suitcase in her lap. Both times, she was amazed at how big he’d grown. Both times amazed at the smell of his hair, his private and specific scent unchanged from the days of his babyhood.

  But being with him again full-time during those visits felt like a departure from the single life she’d rebuilt after Raym left. She loved Jonas more than anything, but perhaps, some small secret part of her admitted, she didn’t love him the way she ought to. The way other mothers loved their sons.

  She’d felt herself pulled in two directions. Her practice in New York, her friends, her home. Her son in California, her blood. It was hard to be apart from Jonas, but she believed she could do it. She’d believed it when she brought him back at the end each time, hugging him tight outside the terminal and letting him go. She could go on like this.

  But the Gate taught her a distance, a way of being apart, that was greater than kilometers, less permeable even than years. Ostalgie wasn’t the word. There wasn’t a word for what it was. An unmeasurable quantity, an unbridgeable remoteness. Her love, still oriented toward her son as a needle to magnetic north, an arrow permanently halted in flight.

  And there she was on the ground on the sun-heated sidewalk on West Fortieth, heaving for air with something hard pressed against the small of her back. Someone shouted at her and it wasn’t the woman, the boy’s mother. No, the shouting voice was a man’s voice. Hel’s sunglasses had launched off her face and skidded off somewhere; bright light assaulted her. Her cheek pressed against the pavement; she turned her head to the side as much as possible and saw a person in a uniform crouched on her back, the workman she’d noticed before. Not a stick—an apartment building’s door guard, maybe.

  “It was an accident,” Hel said then. The pressure on her back felt far greater than it should have. She sensed the weight of her whole creaturely existence pressing down upon her, the mass and heft of a missing world. A tiger was standing on her, digging rueful sharp claws into her skin. “I didn’t mean it,” she gasped. “It was an accident.”

  How could she have believed—how could she have forgotten—how could she have gotten it so wrong?

  The grand entryway of the former school opened around Hel, ringing with noise. A showpiece for a rich man, a gathering place for groups of pupils on their way out to the grounds for games lessons—now, the foyer served as reception area and gallery. She saw piles of vibrant fabric, folded and displayed on plinths around the room, and a roughly loomed shawl draped around the shoulders of a mannequin, its price tag dangling. The shelves against the wall were stacked with bowls and vessels of different sizes made by the potters who worked now in the studios upstairs. Their modern asymmetry, their intentional primitivism looked incongruous next to the mannered paintings that hung still on the walls.

  Stiff family portraits in oils, and still lifes of fruit and fowl. Hudson River prospects. Even other seascapes, a whaling scene. But none as tall as a doorway that a little boy could step through.

  No hand. No rope.

  In the Rendezvous an hour before, Teresa Klay: “When we get there, I have a suggestion. You can ask as many questions as you want—about the old boarding school, its history. About the drowning—though I don’t know what a bunch of hippies will know about that. About the painting. Whatever. But maybe don’t tell them your whole story, OK? I would appreciate that.”

  Hel, turning in her seat, fought the feel of the unaccustomed shoulder belt. Trees flashed by outside on the verge of the Taconic. “What?”

  “I’m not trying to be cruel. Your displacement status can just be . . . distracting. Polarizing, you know? You’re running a risk when you disclose it—some people are really bigoted. And even when they’re not, it stirs th
ings up. Remember Daniel? Remember how that went?”

  “Yeah, sure. Daniel.” The archivist at the Brooklyn Public Library, Klay’s friend. He’d shaken Hel’s hand with such zeal, once he’d heard what she was, that she took him for a Bible Numericist who believed that the initial lots of UDPs were in fact the 144,000 members of the tribes of Israel predicted in Revelations. But no, he was just excited to interrogate the differences. He’d spent the next twenty minutes testing Hel’s memory and her patience with subjects she remembered only distantly from lower school. Who discovered mechanical flight in her After and how did it evolve? What were the Inter-American Wars?

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Klay said. “I understand. It must be nice for you to have the chance to talk about that stuff, if you don’t often get to.”

  “I get pretty tired of it, actually—”

  Klay wasn’t listening. “And the attention must be flattering.”

  Daniel, at the library. Was he good-looking? Sure. He was attractive enough in a bland, floppy-haired way. A good person? Who knew? Daniel, pumping her hand, giving his meaningless condolences. A face, a set of fingers to grip, a heart, a penis. An unlikely collection of atoms, assembled in a unique and different way, utterly unspecial to her. A rock among rocks on a beach she wished she’d never visited. A man whose name she would be glad to forget, right now, if she could. Daniel, who didn’t—shouldn’t—exist.

  “No. I don’t care about that. I don’t like it.”

  “Oh.” Klay’s hands loose on the wheel, casual. “Cool. Then it won’t be a problem, this time.”

  In the foyer of the mansion turned school turned artists’ space, Hel looked around her. At the elderly woman in a patterned woven scarf, coming toward her to see what was wrong. At the greasy-haired visitor scrutinizing tiny vases in the display case, that same shitfoot from the yellow car. At Klay, behind her, bent over her phone, no doubt sending a dismissive text message to Donaldson. A picture of the picture that wasn’t there, a lack-of-progress report.

  With a howl, she sank to her knees.

  She would trade them all. She would let them all drown if only she could go back.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Next stop York Street stand clearatha closing doors.” The announcement echoed through the car, the voice on the PA distorted and barely intelligible. At home, Vikram recalled, NYAT used a recording—an anonymous lilting robot—on all trolleys and streetcars and the few underground trains that ran through Midtown. He couldn’t recall the substance of the precisely expressed message anymore, though he’d heard it countless times. Doors are closing, exercise caution. Something like that. “OK,” he decided aloud. “Next stop.”

  “We’re getting off?” Hel asked.

  “Yep. I called it. Those are the rules.” They’d started their game in Lower Manhattan, taking the 4 train uptown and switching to a 7 that brought them to Bryant Park before catching this Coney Island–bound F into Brooklyn. Vikram knew Hel had given a presentation to some museum people today about her idea. She wouldn’t tell him anything about it, but her mood now was brittle, a veneer of cheerfulness he didn’t think would stand up to much.

  “Can’t we change again?” she asked. “At least one more change.”

  “No. I’m the leader. It’s my turn to choose. Anyway, I thought you hated being underground. We’ve been riding long enough. Let’s get some air.”

  “Fine.” Hel slid closer to him on the bench and reached across his body for the bottle-in-a-bag he held in his other hand. She took a long pull. “York Street it is. You’re the leader.”

  “I missed this game. It’s more fun than I remember.”

  “That’s because you used to be depressed all the time when we played it. That’s why I invented it. To cheer you up.”

  Hel passed the bottle back. A woman sitting across from them tsked audibly. “We’re visiting from another country,” Hel told her. “We’re from a civilized land, where alcohol is permitted for adults on public transportation. We don’t know your stupid foreign rules.”

  “York Street,” the conductor muttered over the PA.

  “It’s OK, ma’am,” Vikram said to the woman, finding his feet. “We’re getting off.”

  They climbed together up the cement steps to street level. Hel walked ahead, her arms stiff by her sides, then dropped back, as if she’d remembered that the rules she’d devised required her to let him choose the way. The sky, brilliant blue overhead, faded almost before their eyes to whitish gold in the west. Working nights, Vikram always wanted the hour before sunset to feel like daybreak, but it never did. No matter how established his nocturnal routine became, his body still knew something was wrong.

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the leader.”

  They wandered downhill, away from the massive edifice of the Manhattan Bridge, past a fancy drugstore and a taqueria with a mural of a rooster. They looked in the windows of a specialty chocolate shop, closed today, and then wandered into a used bookstore where a live cat hissed at them from behind the register. “You can’t drink on transport, but you can keep a domestic animal in a place of business?” Hel said loudly before Vikram tugged her back out the door.

  “Let’s get a drink.”

  They settled into a booth in a very dark, very hip bar across the street from the bookstore. Exposed brickwork and ugly paintings. Vikram chose a dark draft of some adventive style. He wished he had sniff with him, or that smoking indoors were legal. Hel ordered an energy drink, which came already poured into a glass. When the server wasn’t looking, she topped it off with whiskey from their bottle. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “A disgusting combination.”

  “What’s disgusting is to charge seven dollars for a beer during happy hour in Gairville, of all places.”

  Vikram already had the browser open on his phone. “The neighborhood’s not called Gairville anymore. It’s DUMBO here.”

  “Dumbo?” Hel scoffed. “Really? Who came up with that?”

  “It’s an acronym.” He navigated to a related page. “It’s also a classic cartoon movie from 1941 about a small elephant.”

  “Who cares?” She sipped at her drink, made a face.

  She hated to see the gentrification of neighborhoods she’d known as poor. She also hated to discover formerly prosperous areas that had become run-down.

  “Be honest,” Vikram said. “You just hate change.”

  “At least the Manhattan Bridge is pretty much the same. I guess it must have been designed and built BS. That stands for Before Sleight,” she explained, before Vikram could ask. “I’m hoping it’ll catch on.”

  She had to be kidding. “Instead of just saying Before, you expect people to say BS?”

  “They’ll want to say it, when I’ve proved what I know about him. Let’s walk over the bridge.”

  Vikram waited until she’d reached the door to leave a tip on the table. Hel never tipped. Outside, the sun had slipped in the direction of Manhattan, leaving behind desperate colors. There in the dusk stood the skyline, lit up and famous, right but wrong. They found the pedestrian access near Sands Street and began to walk uphill on the south side of the bridge. On the initial approach, over land, the highway passed below them and they stared directly into the windows of the buildings around them, people working in some and seas of empty desks in others. On their left, a sports club spread out its tennis courts below eye level. On the right, tracks carried trains from borough to borough.

  The pedestrian walkway arched over the riverside park on the Brooklyn side and then they were crossing the East River itself, at last. Hel took his hand, but did not speak. A chain-link fence curled above them to preclude suicidal jumps. Through the grille, Vikram watched barges and boats far below, some carrying tourists. The watercraft parted the skin of the water in white-foamed cuts that closed seamlessly behind, scars that could heal perfectly.

  One-third of the way across, they reached the first of the supporting towers and stopped
to look out at the water. Vikram picked out the Statue of Liberty and the unfamiliar skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. The space where the World Trade Center buildings had stood, built before his birth yet destroyed before his arrival. No trace of them now to see, their absence important to everyone but people like him and Hel.

  “Remember, you’re the leader,” Hel whispered in his ear. “Turn around?”

  “No. Let’s keep going.”

  As they walked on, the suspension cables at their side dipped lower and lower. A jogger passed them right at the midpoint of the bridge, and a heavy MTA train rumbled past, its noise deafening. Vikram felt an unhelpful pang that he tried to suppress.

  Every big city has its ghosts. A line from the climactic scene in The Pyronauts in which John Gund pursues a fleeing Asyl into the incinerated ruins of Philadelphia. Sleight’s words wafting over from another world.

  It was just the density of population in urban centers that caused this feeling, the way that living chockablock with others encouraged anonymity, each member of a crowd consciously shutting out everyone else until one felt surrounded by ignored strangers. It was the tangible history; the new layered with the very old. “Every big city has its ghosts.” He spoke the words aloud. Someone in this world had probably said pretty much the same thing, only Vikram wasn’t sure what to read to find it. He thought again of the destroyed Trade Center buildings. Of the light from the window in the storage facility, flashing out like a beacon.