by Nino Ricci
So he had made it here, to the top. He felt a tenderness in his bladder and pulled his zipper down, alone here in the open air, to lay his trace at the foot of the cross.
It was past eleven by the time he got home. She’d be asleep now, but not in bed: the news would be on and she would be stretched out in her La-Z-Boy.
There was a phone right there on the side table next to her.
“Mom? It’s me. It’s Alex.”
Today was the day that she got the results of her follow-up.
“Eh? Chi è?” Slowly rousing herself. “Oh. Ahlix. Sei tu.”
She had never quite managed his name, really that clipped final syllable.
“Scti vuon’l” she said. Are you well?
Given how rarely he used it now, their dialect had begun to feel like so much Arabic in his mouth.
“What did the doctor say, Ma? Your test?”
“Oh, you know. It’s okay.”
He knew this was about all he was going to get. It would do. He felt a tension he hadn’t even known he was carrying give way like a clog inside him.
“So it’s okay, then. It didn’t come back.”
“Sei. Sei. It’s okay.”
Another rush of feeling, this one seeming as much for his own sake as for hers, that he had actually called, that he hadn’t fucked up. He wanted to give her something, some sign he would change, make things up to her, be her son.
“Ma, I might be going away,” he said in English. “I might be going to Sweden.”
“Eh? What are you saying?”
She had kept on in dialect. It was like playing a game of telephone on the telephone.
“I might be going to Sweden.” He felt his heart rate spike. “I have a son there.”
A pause at the other end of the line. What had he been thinking? This was no gift. The woman had just come through a near-death experience, and he was throwing her back in the pit.
“What are you saying? I don’t understand.”
He couldn’t stop now.
“I have a son. In Sweden. Tinghe nu figl’.”
“What are you trying to say? Let me get your father, I don’t understand.”
Alex’s blood froze.
“Never mind, Ma. Never mind. It’s nothing. Just forget about it. I’ll call again tomorrow.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No, no trouble. We’ll sort it out tomorrow, Ma, it’s nothing.”
He grew utterly paranoid the moment he had set down the phone. He had botched his filial moment. I have a son. It had sounded like gibberish, random sound. Aihevusuhn.
He took his Per letters out of his new Per drawer, as if to assure himself not so much that the boy was real but that he was, that this notion of Alex-as-father wasn’t the figment it sounded like. There was quite a stack of these letters now, sometimes in Per’s own beginner’s hand but mostly in Ingrid’s teacherly transcriptions, notebook perfect but always true to the five-year-old mind. Alex read them as if they were riddles, palimpsests, ancient scrolls, as if there was some deeper message to be got to beneath the obvious one, though each one seemed as staid and formulaic as the one before, as beside the point. He’d done this, he’d done that, he had got a new toy. Alex had to remind himself Per was five, that this was what passed for being open for a five-year-old, for telling all. Later, he suspected, he would only get less.
There were many pictures. These Alex kept in a separate stack: one day he would mount them, pin them with magnets to his fridge for all to see or paste them to the walls, laminate them, make a book, blow them up poster-size or paint them on the ceiling. I have a son. For now, though, the matter still felt too private. For now, it was his own.
He always went back to the first one, the tractor with spiky back wheels and lopsided front ones. Per’s tractor, it turned out, the one from under the sea. Then beneath it, Per’s careful scrawl in the corner. Alex could hardly bear to look at it or bear to hold off, each time saving it and avoiding it as if it were obscene, too good to be true.
For Father. Only that. A little bombshell.
epilogue
And in short, I was afraid.
T. S. ELIOT
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Alex was in Esther’s hospital room. Blip, blip, went the monitor—ninety-eight point four, ninety-eight point three, ninety-eight point four. It was late now, way past visiting hours. He kept waiting for the shadow to appear in the door that would send him away, but though the lights had been dimmed in the ward and a hush had fallen over it, broken only by occasional muted laughter from the nurse’s station, no one had come. The sense had begun to build in him that he had been left here by tacit agreement. The only light in the room was the grainy one filtering in from the hall and the glow of Esther’s monitor, which together cast a bluish aura over her like the haunted light of horror films.
He was feeling oddly light-headed, occasionally straying into the strange back alleys that separated waking from dream. Ninety-eight point five. From the monitor his eye drifted to Les Misérables still on Esther’s bedside table, many weeks untouched, and he thought, Fahrenheit 451. The temperature at which books burned. Why had he thought that? There was a film, by Truffaut, he’d seen it, but who had written the book?
Savonarola. The bonfire of the vanities.
It must have been a bit of a blow, I’d think. All that work and then just to have the thing gathering dust in a university library. But what’s that quote from the Royal Society about Darwin? How it was too bad nothing big had happened that year?
(Chuckling) I think it was the Linneans, actually, Peter, though I’m not sure we’re dealing with quite the same situation. I’ll be honest with you, half the time I didn’t even know what I was talking about.
Well, join the club, then, sir, join the club. I’ll let you in on a little secret myself—I sit here every day making everyone feel like I know them better than their mothers do when mostly I’m just thinking about my next cigarette.
Ever since his meeting with Jiri, Alex had been blocked. At first he had blamed his and Jiri’s fucked-up dynamic, but he was beginning to think the matter had as much to do with Esther as with Jiri. She’d been his muse, he figured, because she’d believed in him without warrant and without restraint; because of those hours he’d spent reading to her, when something had seemed to shimmer before him like a grail, radioactive with meaning. All that mystical sense of impending revelation was gone now, replaced with a kind of positivist funk. The logical end of things, in his scheme, was a hopeless determinism: that was where you ended up once you took consciousness out of the picture, once you made it just one more adaptation like the rest, no more important than the third eye of a lizard or the illusory owl eyes on the wings of a moth. Even the randomness of the process was no escape—theoretically, it, too, could be plotted out, if you had all the data. All it would take was a mind big enough to hold the whole of creation, every breath, every birdsong, every flutter of a bird’s wing. The mind of God, perhaps. If you could do that, if you could trace every link, every cause and effect, every mistaken notation in a ledger that lowered a balance and lessened a return and ruined a business and collapsed whole economies and so shifted the entire course of human history, you could show that it wasn’t possible to so much as sip your tea on your terrace without the cup, the way you held it, the brand of tea, having already been chosen for you way back in the first instant of the Big Bang, for all the illusion you had that you did things as you pleased. Alex couldn’t believe this, of course, that he was just an automaton, an insect, an ant, otherwise how could he go on? But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Ninety-eight point two. He wondered why they had left him here, what they weren’t telling him. Some new bug had taken hold of Esther, he’d learned that much, pneumonia-like but not pneumonia, a Pneumonia sapiens, maybe, or Pneumonia habilis. Earlier, she had had her oxygen hooked up, but then one of the nurses had come to remove it. Why? Maybe they
pumped the whole building full of oxygen at night, hence his weird light-headedness. Or maybe they simply couldn’t be bothered to keep checking if she’d knocked her mask off or strangled herself with the strap. Esther’s mother used to bring houseplants into the room, begonias and African violets and wandering Jews, but they’d been banned now: at night, apparently, he hadn’t known this—how could he not have known this?—they actually started sucking the oxygen up and giving off CO2. Plant poo.
Her family had been by, the entire contingent. Mother, father, siblings, even Molly, alias Wamalie, coming and going in overlapping sets like a Venn diagram. Lenny had arrived with his new girlfriend, a nice Jewish girl who exuded warmth like a hearth and treated Alex as if she had known him from the womb and who clearly had a will of iron. Lenny deferred to her with such gentlemanly courtesy and attentiveness it was obvious at once that he must marry her. It was heartbreaking, really, this Victorian decorum between them. It made all of Alex’s past relationships look like schoolyard brawls.
In a lull after the girlfriend had gone and it was just Alex and Lenny, a woman had come in whom Alex had never seen before. Slightly older-looking and a bit chunky and suburban and ill at ease, with too much makeup on and a polyester dress that clung to her in the wrong places.
“I guess you haven’t met,” Lenny said. “This is Sarah.”
It was the fugitive sister. Not what Alex had expected at all. No combat fatigues, no windburnt leanness, no narrow-eyed look from gazing out to the far horizon for incoming mortar fire.
“So you’ve come back from Israel,” he managed, then at once regretted the “back.”
He asked fumbling questions about her life over there on the kibbutz, which she answered in the same slow speech as her father, still thick with the twang of Côte St. Luc. She lived in a house with her husband and son—“We get a two-bedroom,” was all she said in the way of description—and worked at the kibbutz’s credit union, doing accounts. Alex asked about sharing the farmwork and all that, but she acted as if she was hearing the idea for the first time.
“Oh, we don’t really do that sort of thing. I just work in the garden sometimes.”
He didn’t dare ask about the communal child rearing.
“It’s not like before,” Lenny put in. “People just live their lives. Like here.”
She might have been living out Esther’s shadow life, though not the exotic version Alex had imagined for her, but the banal one with a Jewish husband and a kid and a job, even if she had had to decamp to a war zone on the other side of the world to do it. He could see her there in her different house in her different country as if in one of those long takes in a foreign film, while her husband snacked in the kitchen and her son watched TV. Something seemed about to happen, then nothing did.
Not ten minutes had passed before she started making motions to leave. She went up to Esther’s bed with a look that seemed to require some next action, her hand coming up to touch Esther’s cheek or brush a strand of hair away, but the action never came.
“How much is a cab home?” she said, making a show of rifling through her purse. “I’ve got ten, is that enough?”
“Don’t be silly, I’ll drive you,” Lenny said at once.
Alex was on his own after that. The image of Sarah lingered with him. She must have moved to Israel out of some homeland instinct, that dangerous meeting point of the radical and the reactionary. He knew the family had lost people in the camps—it was all a bit gray to him, though Esther had mentioned a great-aunt on her mother’s side who was a survivor, living somewhere in Europe now.
“She came over once, but she and my grandmother didn’t get along. I guess because of the war and everything.”
All that history. It was too much to hold in your head. Sarah came at the end of it, on her kibbutz, and Esther lying here in her bed with her hospital bracelet, her different tattoo.
He thought of the trains shunting back and forth in the night behind Esther’s house, how Lenny had hated them. But not Esther.
“It looked so romantic, all those lights in the windows at night. That’s all I thought about then. All the places I’d go.”
She hadn’t opened her eyes the whole evening. He didn’t know these days if she was asleep or unconscious, or even what the difference might be between the two. No one bothered anymore with keeping their voices down around her when she was asleep. She had become a sort of thing, lying there—it wasn’t pleasant to think in those terms but they had all fallen into the habit of it, of carrying on as if she weren’t there. Maybe she wasn’t. Over the course of a day she might surface to consciousness any number of times, but it was hard to say anymore what she registered, how much her battered optic nerves could take in, or her lesioned brain. It had been weeks since she had shown any definite sign of volition, anything more than a turn of her head or the shift of a limb that could as easily have been a spasm; months since she had uttered a word. Somehow her body had continued to persist, hadn’t simply wasted away to nothing, but there was a quality to it, with its cut tendons and IV-sodden flesh, that made it seem to be melting there into her bed, to be losing integrity, whatever it was that made you discrete and whole, an entity, and not simply random particles slowly drifting toward perfect dispersion.
Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics.
How had he known that?
So there you have it, I guess, that’s where we’re headed, perfect disorder, not the other way around. I don’t know how that squares with your Mr. Darwin, but it makes you think. Of course, that’s assuming the universe is actually a closed system.
I’m not sure I follow you, Peter.
Well, it’s sort of obvious, isn’t it? The white light. The Prime Mover. The God spark. That would throw a monkey wrench into things, wouldn’t it?
(With mock surprise) Peter, I didn’t know you were allowed to talk about these sorts of things on the air. To even think about them.
Well, I have to think about something, don’t I? I hope you don’t believe I give a good goddamn about some quilting competition in Regina!
In one of the science journals, Alex had come across a study of people who had lost their sense of meaningfulness after they had had experimental brain surgeries of one sort or another. “God, a tree, a cup of coffee, it doesn’t matter,” they said. “It’s all the same.” That was what the world looked like beyond meaningfulness: no one thing mattered more than any other. Mental entropy. The theory was that a sense of meaning was itself just another adaptation, what allowed otherwise perfectly rational people like Alex to deny the obvious, that there wasn’t any.
He had purchased his ticket. It had seemed pointless to wait, macabre, almost, as if he were willing Esther to die, as if she were malingering. But then once he had booked a flight Esther had taken a turn for the worse, as if she knew. It was not a good sign that The Sister had come. A few weeks, she had said she was staying, as if that was all she was giving her.
In Sweden it had been one glorious long summer’s day after another, by Ingrid’s account. Ingrid was biting her tongue, Alex knew; soon her patience, her goodwill, would wear thin. “Per is always asking if you will come,” she had written lately, and the “if” had made his heart stop. Already most of the summer was gone, and all the outings he had planned in his head, the kite-flying, the days by the sea, would have to be crammed into the last hurried weeks before school.
Esther’s monitor had dipped into the ninety-sevens. He had seen it go as low as the ninety-threes and no one had batted an eye, though technically you were supposed to be dead by then. There was a call button whose cord was bandaged to one of Esther’s wrists, but Esther had grown so famous among the nurses for its overuse in her early weeks that Alex was always reluctant to consider pressing it without hard evidence of crisis. The trouble was that he wasn’t getting enough data—what he had always thought of as the plethora of machines surrounding Esther actually came down to a few minor ones, her temperature monitor, her oxygen feed
, her IV, none of them the kind that could pinpoint the moment of crossing over like the ones on T V. She could slip into death without anyone noticing, she could be slipping this very moment.
Ninety-seven point one. He watched her until he’d seen her head shift, until he could make out the heave of her chest beneath the sheets.
He had brought his Joyce but hadn’t been able to bring himself to crack it open. He had made it through the Odyssey, at least; it hadn’t been nearly the slog he had feared. Sex and violence: the old story. He was using the Butler translation, because Darwin and Butler had had a history, one of those mentorships gone sour, the sort of thing Alex might be able to work up into a clever meta-commentary about fathers and sons. If you are truly your father’s son, everyone kept saying to poor Telemachus. Alex could see the possibilities. Joyce was going to be a harder row—he made the Odyssey look like a potboiler. Alex had dug up a throwaway reference to Darwin in the Ithaca chapter, but that sort of thing was worse than useless—what he needed was what showed up in the text in spite of itself, what was coded in its DNA. So far the only thing he was absolutely sure of was Bloom’s gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrne’s.
I notice how you’re trying to slip in the Italian content. It’s not the first thing we think of with Joyce, is it?
Well, he did spend all those years in Trieste.
He could lead off with something more accessible—“The Dead,” say, the feast scene, to tie into Homer. Such a perfect little story. Maybe Joyce should have quit while he was ahead. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. What was it in that that cut him to the quick? The music of it? The sense of a journey? Of going west?