I Saw a Man

by Owen Sheers

  “Go?” Michael said. But he knew Josh was right. They couldn’t continue like this. “And what do I tell them?” he said. “I can’t just disappear. They’ll be suspicious. They’ll call the police.”

  Josh laughed. “The police? Yeah, as if they’d be of any fucking use!”

  “It’s lucky for you they weren’t,” Michael snapped. Josh stepped towards him. “And me,” Michael said, raising a conciliatory hand. “And for me.”

  “Tell them whatever you want,” Josh said, turning away again. He was pacing back and forth, back and forth, as if trying to recall some lost instinctive movement. “You’re the fucking writer, aren’t you?”

  Michael got off the bench and went to pick up his fencing bag. “If I go,” he said, “will you tell Samantha?”

  Josh looked at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign language. “And tell her I wasn’t there?” He shook his head. “No. But,” he said, pointing at Michael, “if you come back. If you write to them, or call them. I will. I swear. I’d rather bring us both down than have you fucking anywhere near them.”

  Michael looked at Josh. He was a new man. A man transfigured by loss, by anger. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes both alive and dead. A man with nothing and everything left to lose.

  “Tonight,” Josh said, dropping his hand. “You have to leave tonight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IT IS EARLY evening in Manhattan, at the beginning of the Easter weekend. The sun is just an hour from setting over the New Jersey skyline. In a few minutes the red Colgate sign will light up over the Hudson and Statue of Liberty tourist boats will unfurl their sails to steer by the wind towards the mouth of the estuary.

  Michael is sitting on a bench beside the river, on a pier across the highway from West Twenty-Sixth. He is at the pier’s end, beside a large steel waterwheel that is turning, water and light falling from its paddles. On one side of him a young woman in shorts, vest, and trainers is stretching her hamstrings, a low fizz leaking from her headphones. On the other, a Mexican couple is sitting on a bench, rocking their baby in its buggy. From farther down the river, at the next pier, Michael can hear music playing from The Frying Pan, a floating bar on a decommissioned fireboat. Together with the pulse of the traffic behind him and the sound of the water falling from the wheel, its faint beat completes a soundscape he’s come to think of as calming. Manhattan is never quiet, but this, whenever he has needed to find space, to think, to remember, to capture a sense of quiet if not quiet itself, is where he comes.

  It’s been almost a year since Michael left London. The note he wrote to Samantha on returning from the Heath that day was short and to the point. He told her that leaving was simply something he had to do. That he knew he should say good-bye to her, to Rachel, but he couldn’t bring himself to say those words with them standing before him. The note had made him seem weak and selfish. He knew Samantha would think it a reaction to her offer for him to move into the house. It would anger her. She would think herself a bad judge of character. One day, when Rachel was old enough, she’d tell her to forget him or, at best, forgive him for being so damaged and for passing on that damage in hurting them.

  His own hurt is gradually healing. The last letter he received from Daniel, like all of them sent via his publishers, had made it clear it would be just that. The last letter. He had given Michael everything he could. They both needed to move on, he’d said, so he would not be writing to him again. In the same letter he’d told Michael he’d recently moved back east, that Cathy had returned with the girls to upstate New York and he’d decided to follow them. He hoped, he’d written, that one day he might move back in with them. Until then he’d found a cabin to rent outside Hudson and a job at a local organic distributor. Twice a week he drove into Manhattan, delivering local farmers’ produce to downtown delis and restaurants.

  Michael often thought how strange this was, that twice a week the two of them were in the same city, on the same streets. That over these past months, unknown to either of them, maybe they’d already shared a sidewalk, or a bench like this. Although Michael had searched for Daniel more than once online, he’d never found an image, so he’d never know if they had. Even now, Daniel might be driving down the highway behind him in his truck, leaning his elbow out the window. If, while stopped at a red light perhaps, he were to glance to his right, then he’d see Michael sitting at the end of the pier. A tall man silhouetted beside the turning wheel, looking over the glimmering waters as he presses play on a Dictaphone to listen to the voice of his dead wife, killed by a “fire and forget” missile on a mountain in Pakistan.

  Guess who’s upstairs? Caroline whispers to Michael from across the years. Want to come and join me?

  But then Daniel wouldn’t know either. So as the lights changed to green he’d look away from the pier and drive on into the city, unaware he’d just seen the man to whose life he’d brought death, and who in turn had brought death to the lives of others.

  ―

  Michael listened to Caroline twice more, then removed his headphones and put the Dictaphone back in his pocket. He rationed himself such listening now. Just as he rationed his looking: at photographs, her news reports on YouTube, a video they’d taken on their first night together beside the fire in Coed y Bryn.

  Rising from the bench he turns from the river and begins his walk home. It is a short walk, down along the Hudson then turning left into the streets of the Village. His apartment is on the top floor of a five-storey walk-up. It has a fire escape that looks onto trees, a desk beside a window, a bedroom in which he has hung one of Samantha’s prints of the pond. So he might remember, he supposes, or never forget.

  It is beside that pond that Michael always imagines Josh when he thinks of him. Sitting at dusk on a bench facing the backs of all those houses, their rear walls and rooms more window than brick, the ponds, the trees, the willows, the Heath. He imagines Josh sitting there after a day’s work, his arms tired and cut, perhaps sipping on a coffee, watching as those windows light up in the evening. Watching, as in a few of them, his wife and then maybe his daughter appear and disappear, going about their lives, inhabiting the place he’d once called home and which he hopes, one day, he might again.

  Michael crosses the highway and enters the city at Christopher Street, passing gay and lesbian clubs, sex stores and psychics. He watches the people walking towards him, the young women, and tries to picture what Samantha might have been like when she’d been here as a student. When all her world was still possible, and only just beginning.

  Michael has never heard from Samantha. He knows this is for the best—that the note he left must have provoked the hurt and annoyance he’d intended. He’d wanted his leaving to be complete. It was, in a way, his final offering to her. Which is why, telling his agent he wanted to work on it some more, he’d withdrawn The Man Who Broke the Mirror from publication. And why he’d taken up a teaching job here in New York rather than embark on any more books. So that Samantha and Rachel wouldn’t ever have to see his name again in a shop window or in a magazine. But even though Michael knew this was how it had to be, for several months after he’d moved back to New York he’d still often found himself scrolling to Samantha’s number, or hovering his cursor above her email. For a long time he hadn’t been sure why he did this. Any contact from him would only be painful for her and he had, after all, made a promise to Josh. But then, as the months passed, he’d come to understand.

  It was because he’d never told her the truth. He’d never let the true story of what had happened in her house, to her daughter, exist in the world, and in not doing so it had remained unfinished within him. It was like Caroline had told him back in Coed y Bryn—an untold story, it was like landfill, unseen but still there, seeping into the soil. Which is why, six months ago, Michael decided to find a way he might keep his promise to Josh, but still also release those true minutes and finally tell the true story.

  All he had to do, he’d realised, was what he’d always do
ne best, and turn the authorial technique he’d practiced throughout his adult life upon himself. Rediscover the alchemy of experience formed into words and disappear himself from the page again, although this time in a different way to how he’d ever done so before. Not by removing himself from the story, but by putting himself into it. If he forced himself to do this, every day and every night, then eventually, regardless of whether what he wrote would ever be seen, it would at least be over.

  ―

  Michael leant back in his chair and looked at his screen, its white page printed with the black of all he’d done, all he’d remembered. Reaching forward he scrolled back to the first page of the document, centred the cursor, and wrote a dedication:

  For Samantha

  Which it was, even if she’d never see it. Although of course he knew it was for himself too. And for Caroline, perhaps, who’d always, regardless of the consequences, so badly needed a story to be told—and who’d also have understood why he’d had to tell it like this. Not with just the facts, as she’d quoted to him in the Frontline on that first night they’d met, but with everything else, too.

  Whether it would be enough, Michael would know only in time. He’d once told Samantha a story didn’t need a reader to be complete. But now, as he printed off the pages he’d just written and added them to the pile beside his desk, he was no longer so sure. Perhaps Samantha had been right and this would only be a temporary solution. Perhaps one day he would, after all, have to follow the example of the man who’d killed his wife, and slip these printed pages into an envelope addressed to the house where this had all begun: 32 South Hill Drive, Hampstead, London, NW3 6JP. But until that happened, if it ever did, then this pile of pages beside his desk would have to suffice. At least in them Michael had finally told their story. He’d offered what he could. He had brought it into the world. As a confession, yes, but also as an attempt to bring it to a close for all of them—for Samantha, Caroline, even Josh. To bring it to a close, their truths told, with this last sentence, these last words, and this full stop.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel is written in memory of Deborah Rogers, literary agent and exuberant champion of readers and reading.

  Several books were particularly helpful in my research, including Drone Warfare by Medea Benjamin and Barbara Ehrenreich, Wired for War by P. W. Singer, Mirroring People by Marco Iacoboni, and The Hunters by James Salter. NBC’s interview with Brandon Bryant was an invaluable insight into the life of a UAV operator.

  I am grateful to Alan Little, Derek Gregory, and Giles Hannah for sharing their specialist knowledge, and to the staff and administrators of the London Library, Burgh House and Hampstead Museum, Fenton House and 2 Willow Road. I would also like to thank the following institutions and individuals for providing me with space, time or both to write this novel: The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the University of Falmouth, the Pavilion café in Victoria Park, David Harrower, and Francesca Simon.

  My thanks and gratitude to my editor Sarah Savitt and all at Faber & Faber, to my agent Zoe Waldie for her unfailing guidance and support, and to Nan Talese for her graceful faith and patience.

  Lastly, and firstly, thank you and more to Katherine and Anwyn, for making sense of it all.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Owen Sheers is a poet, author, and playwright. His first novel, Resistance, was translated into ten languages and adapted into a film. The Dust Diaries, his Zimbabwean nonfiction narrative, won the Welsh Book of the Year Award. His awards for poetry and drama include the Somerset Maugham Award for Skirrid Hill, the Hay Festival Medal for Poetry and the Welsh Book of the Year for Pink Mist, and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award for his play The Two Worlds of Charlie F. He lives in Wales with his wife and daughter. He has been a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow.