by Michael Helm
Fourteen billion years ago the universe began with form but no predictability. In time, patterns formed. Complex systems. Life. And inside it all—I hear it—howling chaos.
—
Durant called my cell later that afternoon to ask that I meet him for dinner in Monti, near the Santa Maria Maggiore. It was only while I was in the taxi, as the driver called out to friends along the street, as if Rome were a village, that I had enough distance from Amanda’s visit to think clearly about what I’d learned. If Durant saw allusions to his daughter in the poems, he would want to test his readings—he was a man of science, after all—but there existed no empirical measures of meaning in language or art. Had he brought in Amanda, and now me, to confirm that the poems had something to do with his daughter or to rescue him from going over a final edge?
I’ve been calling her “Durant’s daughter” but before I left for dinner I played detective and tried to hunt up her name. There was nothing online so I called Larunda and spoke to what sounded like the same program assistant I’d spoken to days earlier. I said I was from the Petros One Group, a(n invented) private insurance company, and that I had to file something on behalf of August Durant but was unable to reach him. Again I met with resistance. “I just need to finish a form,” I said. “A certain interval has passed and I need his daughter’s first name. It’s illegible on the document I have.” She said, “No chance.”
He was waiting for me at a window table, more than halfway into a bottle of red wine. The moment I sat down I sensed someone had preceded me. He received me with his usual warmth but did I detect a slight strain in his smile? Or was it that I saw him differently now? His voice was already full, but crisp—there was no suggestion that the wine had brought it forward—so maybe someone had been sharing the bottle with him. And then, yes, I noticed the stain of a red drop on the tablecloth, under the edge of my plate.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Not long. Have you had a good day, James?”
“I can’t say. There’s no way of taking my bearings.”
“Well, let’s stop working, then. Have a drink and let the mind unclench.”
Durant’s side of the conversation was wonderfully far-ranging. Tracing how exactly a comment about the wine had taken us to serial-killing lions, I found that his connections moved associatively, playfully, like my cha-chas, rather than logically. The route went more or less from the 2008 Le Cupole Rosso Toscana to its label’s colour of red like those in the frescoes in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme to cave paintings to the life of cave dwellers to the fear of cave bears to predator habits to anomalies within predator populations to serial-killing lions. By the time he took a pause we were onto a second bottle, our plates were lined with small rabbit bones, and it was time for dessert. What struck me then was the size of the man’s passions. He took a huge interest in the world but his enthusiasm was disciplined. His nature wasn’t acquisitive so much as embracing. When he held up his glass he seemed to read the properties not just of the wine’s colour but of the light that revealed it. He wanted to know life in all its registers. How else could someone who had suffered such a loss let himself be opened by poetry?
“When did you first learn of Three Sheets?” he asked.
So we hadn’t stopped working after all.
“A girl I was living with told me about it.”
“How did she come across it? Could you ask her?”
“We’re not in touch. Likely someone sent her the link.”
He nodded.
“They say it’s organic, the way information travels on the internet. But it’s not. It lacks the full range of human emotion and intent, the nuance of the conversational gambit, or the necessity to share that binds a speaker and listener. I must sound like your grandfather.”
“Studies show a decline in oral skills among young people in recent decades. And so-called social skills. Sort of what you’d expect.”
“But you have the skills, James. Where did you learn them?”
“I don’t know. I was very shy growing up. I learned to listen. Then in school I learned to converse, debate. I had a few professors who expected words on demand.”
“And so you have political skills, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’ve never thought of them as political. I try not to play angles on people.”
“And yet when you sat down here, you asked if I’d been waiting long. It wasn’t simply a polite inquiry, was it?”
It was what my mother used to call a “God-in-the-garden” moment, my thoughts rendered naked and ashamed.
“I sensed I was entering upon someone’s exit.”
“There’s your sharp intuition at work. You sensed an absence, someone missing.”
“I suppose. But it’s no concern of mine.”
“And so why ask the question? It must be that you wondered if I was meeting someone specific, someone you know. Am I right?”
“If you weren’t right then I’d think you were paranoid.”
“You’ve met those in the building. But who else do you know in Rome except me?”
“I’m not sure how well I know you. Maybe I know no one.”
“There, you see? A politician’s answer.”
He took an interest in the dessert menu and recommended the amaretto semifreddo with chocolate sauce.
“She likes you,” he said. I took a sip of water to stall the moment, as if the gesture might help me decide what to think, but the motion of my hand up and down seemed only to give away what I felt. Confusion, a tinge of guilt, anger. “She thinks you’re better suited for the job than she was.”
“There are no innocent conversations, are there? Drinks on the piazza, dinner on a rooftop, and here now, it’s one constant performance review.”
“She’s not an investment analyst. But I’ve been right to put money on you.”
“A spy, then.”
“Not a spy either. This afternoon I remembered about her watering the plants. I invited her here and sure enough she’d just met you. She says you looked at one poem together but she wouldn’t give you a reading.”
“Did she tell you which poem?”
“You doubt what I’m saying, but she wasn’t spying. We have to trust each other, James. I’m relying on complete honesty from you.”
“But you won’t tell me what I’m looking for.”
I wondered if it was hard for him not to tell me about his daughter or if the undisclosed story sheltered him, the unsayable private in the place of telling all. I was the one being duplicitous. There was nothing good about the feeling, except a kind of self-punishing guilt I didn’t understand but was used to.
“I don’t tell you out of respect for scientific method,” he said.
“A politician’s answer.”
He smiled.
“Write something up by the end of the week, just a report on what you’re seeing, even if it’s not much.”
“I have to say, August, I’m beginning to think this isn’t even about the poems.” So I was being dishonest, trying to open an angle. “It’s like I’ve been selected for training toward a job I can’t know.”
“Maybe I’m a guide of some sort.”
“Or a spymaster.”
“Spies again. I hope your other hunches won’t come from the movies. Your objective, ours, is to solve the mystery of the poems.”
He topped up my wine. I was learning his conversational habits, the way he’d counter anything that might seem a criticism of me with a kindness. But the kindness itself was often complicated, reminding me who was paying the bills, so he wanted the criticisms to stand. It was hard around Durant not to see myself as I imagined he saw me, a young man with ideas and plenty of feelings but few convictions. And not so young as to excuse the fact that I engaged with the world more fully through the mediating plane of language than I did directly, standing in the rain in an ancient city, as he’d found me the previous night when I’d gone out for a walk and gotten turned
around in the streets near his apartment, and ran into him by accident (or so he said) as he was out to buy coffee. He led me back under his umbrella, talking about the patterns of Roman rain. He must have seen that even my willingness to challenge him was only a way of pretending to gravitas. We were both aware that at any moment I might be lifted by a breeze and carried away.
—
The next morning I began to write a profile of the Poet. In the forty-three poems so far posted at Three Sheets, he presented two personae. One of these, evident in just four poems, could not be biographically approximated. The voice was genderless, its concerns not at all personal, and in fact seemed intent on superseding the personal to play a kind of avant-garde jazz, drawing its notes mainly from pop culture, history, the languages of one arcane knowledge or another, and the sounds of pure nonsense.
The dominant voice in the other poems, I still thought, was of a likely white, likely North American male, in his late fifties or older. These poems tended to be in free verse, lyric, prose-dominated, with similar line lengths, the occasional suspended syntax, small tensions formed at line breaks, variously parsed, annotated, or end-stopped. Often the reader was wrong-footed, then rebalanced. Because of their little mysteries the poems managed to be slightly larger than they seemed, but much depended on whether or not the mysteries were earned.
On questions of poetic principles, the two voices could not easily be reconciled. The suppositions underlying them, about language, convention, the very nature of meaning, these were opposed to one another. And yet I felt sure that the poems were the work of the same (very likely) man. What they shared was the woman described, addressed, or remembered, a woman I now couldn’t help but think of as Durant’s daughter. It was possible to construct a montage of stills about her, a few dramatic scenes. Sometimes she was even quoted, as in “The Art of Memory” and in what I thought of as its sister poem, “In Cities.”
Seven cities in three years with this same
street holding light at the penned
unseen dog’s angle of howl. Turning left
out the door, then west at the fourth
corner will run you past the same
bar with the tree overhanging
the parking lot and the women’s darts league
playing for keeps on Tuesday nights.
Much of this, imagined and half-forgotten,
imagined and said and they’re serious, the darts.
They’re in the air here tonight,
where the barkeep serves the house wine in
flasks, and the parking lot is an
alley lined with mopeds,
the tree a tree, and the howl is in the
pitch of the roofs opposite just now
catching what you once asked while
looking off at them. “How many lives
can I walk away from?” Meaning
not yours, as I thought, but others’,
mine. And I had no answer for
you or the penumbral rim of lighter
red around the drop you’d spilled
on the white cloth.
I got up from my desk. I’d read the poem maybe two weeks earlier, but somehow the last lines hadn’t come to mind the previous night when I’d seen the wine stain, like a drop of blood on the restaurant linen. Because the slightly uncanny coincidence had to be meaningless, I attributed it to that suggestible mindstate we find ourselves in when travelling or reading, in which days fold on themselves upon synchronicities. Many people know the feeling, one that in the past I had tried to disarm with research. But the explanations for coincidence—probability analysts talk about anomalous statistical clusters, mathematicians predict the logical frequency for seeming miracles, psychologists speak of cognitive bias—are all inadequate. Such moments are among those we file away as interesting and inexplicable, and best not made too much of in conversation if we don’t wish to be teased by others who pretend not to know what we’re talking about. I told myself I should expect such echoes, given that I was both away from home and reading intensively, which is to say, there was a lot of the world streaming through me.
Part of that world was Amanda. I’d failed all morning not to be distracted by our planned meeting. What revelations might she have for me today? She had knowledge I wanted and a confession to offer, should she decide to tell me about her meeting with Durant. For the first time in months I looked closely at my face in the mirror, a good way of quieting my imagination and resetting expectations. I’d always hoped I’d be more attractive as I aged—my best features are character ones, the squared-off eye-nose combo, the mouth a notch too wide and disrupting the line between chin and barely pronounced cheekbones—but still in its youth the face was unremarkable and, I thought, a bad champion of my capacities.
On my way out of the building I ran into Carlo. The top buttons of his safari shirt were undone to display a jointed necklace made of some nacreous stone polished to the same reflectiveness as his bald head. He asked where I was going and offered a lift. His car was parked in a gated courtyard on the next block. The moment I saw the ’65 Aston Martin I knew it would be our topic of conversation. He asked if I recognized it. I said James Bond, and so on. We discussed Ian Fleming, his favourite author.
“People think he was just a writer,” he said. “But first he was a war hero, a man of action.”
I said that, in fact, Fleming was the hidden commander behind the Dieppe Raid that killed nine hundred Canadians in 1942. The raid was a disaster, poorly planned and supported, and the losses were viewed by some as a cover for an attempt to steal one of the German four-rotor Enigma machines used by Axis powers for passing coded messages. It turned out Carlo knew about Enigma machines, too, about the Italians’ failure to update their naval versions before World War II, and the British intelligence successes in cracking the code. He had no time for fascists, he made a point of saying. One day, he said, he’d show me a painting of Bletchley Park that hung on his office wall.
“Are you meeting someone in the park?” he asked.
If I said no he might invite himself along, but my meeting with Amanda was no business of his. I said I just wanted to take a walk to help sort my thoughts.
“Grass and trees,” he said. “Bletchley was all grass and trees. Very good for hard thinking.”
When I closed the door I thought he’d speed off like an asshole but the bright silver car just pulled away and slotted into the traffic like a cog in a rotor assembly.
The park was full of young families strolling, couples and tourists on rented bikes, older tourists on small motored trains, and possessed the distinctive Italian features of unkempt grass and foliage. What is it about city parks that their every colour and point of light return us to our moods? And yet the feeling was so familiar to me, from so many parks in so many cities, that it made me only more aware of myself and my history of moody park days, and removed me from the natural beauty itself. It said something about me that I still recalled from years earlier my visit to the Villa Borghese, and especially the Bernini sculptures, as a distinct experience that really did seem to bring me closer to the Maker, not Bernini but Whoever was at work in him, Someone Who’d mastered Nature, and now had, through intermediaries, taken on Art. Not that I would ever share such a thought, so easy to dismiss as empty or pretentious, or to ridicule in any number of ways.
I stood before the statue of Byron, our meeting spot, and looked back through the shaded path. There she was in the distance. Somehow in our short time in the apartment I’d registered her walk (I must have seen all of three full strides), and now it was her movement that marked her out among the others, straight-backed, with a sure but light unhurried step, her feet seeming to come off the ground even as they fell to it under a print skirt with blue tiger stripes. Her head was up, eyes no doubt forward, taking me in, as characteristic in my attitude, looking out in bafflement from a stillness, as she was in hers. I tried to look away but failed. As her face came clear by degrees I saw s
he was smiling at me, though there was something else there, some unsettling counter note, and I was further surprised that she didn’t slow but came straight to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and kissed me on the cheek.
“We’ve been found out,” she said. She spoke in the manner she strode, directly and with purpose.
“I know. He told me.”
We began walking. Her friends would expect her in thirty minutes outside the zoo. She talked more about Durant, a more precise timeline of her history with him, his way of accepting unfavourable readings—
“Where did you go to grad school?” I asked.
“Small place in Oregon.”
“Are you from Oregon?”
“Michigan.”
“How did you end up in Oregon?”
“I don’t want a speed date, James. I need to explain something to you.”
“Why don’t you email about it? We can use this time to enjoy the park together.”
“So you’d rather be told something important by email than face to face?”
That I was silent at the question only supported the possibility that I was not a serious enough man to be in her company, but she seemed to soften then and began the explanation of how she ended up in Oregon. It would be another few minutes and we’d be sitting on a bench outside the zoo entrance, watching a large, apparently ownerless shepherd-collie chasing birds, until I realized that the story was leading to the thing she had to tell me.
“I went west to go to school at Rhyce College. My undergrad degree was in political science so it took some persuading to get them to consider me for a lit degree, but I told them I wanted to write about the decline of the political novel in American literature. I made my argument to a man named Carlson Werling, in the English department, and said I wanted to study with him. The political novel was Werling’s specialty. I appealed to his interest, to his vanity, really, and he pressured to have me admitted. What he didn’t know until a few weeks after I got there was that I wasn’t interested in studying the political novel, but in studying him. Like a lot of faculty and administration at Rhyce, Werling had done work for the CIA. Before teaching he’d been in Central America at the same time my brother was. I thought it was very likely that he knew my brother, or knew of him, and he might know who murdered him.”