After James

by Michael Helm

  Maybe Shelley wasn’t murdered, I thought, but over the centuries writers and poets were murdered by governments all the time. If not Shelley, then Lorca, then Mandelstam, then Neruda, Saro-Wiwa—

  “I know plausibility isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “But the problem with your theory is the poetry. Slogans control people, not poems.”

  And yet we were all in Rome because he’d read “The Art of Memory.” And Amanda’s search for evidence of her brother’s murder had been directed by a poem mentioning a Guatemalan general who possibly didn’t exist. What if these two, my American friends, had been led to look in the wrong places? I held to my theory but left him unchallenged. He was moving now, inviting us to walk, struggling, I thought, to find the energy he’d had when our meeting began. Whether he knew it or not, his physical self suggested we were closer to the truth, which meant his daughter wasn’t speaking to him in poems, which made it harder to believe she was alive.

  We returned to the gate on Caio Cestio. Amanda gave us both a hug and left for work. We watched her leave, trotting across the avenue and walking, turning a corner, and I heard Durant take a little inhalation. I pretended not to have heard and gave him a moment by walking up to the carabinieri, three of them talking at once, and asking if they could tell me the name of the street we were on. One of them did so and then their conversation resumed and I returned to Durant.

  “You have a lot in your head, James. You read well, think well. But that’s not what we’re here for, is it?” Again I’d missed something. I thought reading and thinking well were exactly what I was there for, why he’d hired me. “I’ll see you tonight at the apartment.” We came and went in each other’s days too frequently to bother with greeting or parting gestures, but now he gave my arm a brief squeeze. He walked back into the cemetery.

  I stood for a while, without destination. In time I went through the gates and looked for him. I needed to ask what he’d meant in telling me the world is not a shell game, and in hinting I didn’t know why we were there. I expected to find him lost in thought, staring at a grave marker or a tree trunk, more alone than he’d been in years. But though I walked the circuit of paths, I couldn’t find him.

  —

  An hour later I was back at my desk, sitting in general uncertainty. The meeting had revealed gaps in my understanding, in my knowledge. I went online and tried to learn about what Durant had called the “mess” Mary Shelley had made after Frankenstein. He must have been referring to her later novel, The Last Man, apparently a futuristic, philosophical, gothic thing about the end of the world brought on by plagues in the twenty-first century. Critics agreed that she didn’t really have control of her material. Looking up at the framed art, the one Durant had likened to a graph of plagues, I thought of nature and art sprawling beyond their understood forms. How could we grasp radically new creations from inside our moment in time? We didn’t know our world any better than did Shelley’s twenty-first-century characters, flailing around in a sprawling plague novel.

  I’d been absently scratching my shins. I rolled my pant cuffs and examined the little marks I’d raised up. A few of them had a pleasing Greek alphabetic character, lazy zetas and pis, or so I imagined. I thought the trouble was less likely bubonic than allergic, the issue of Italian fabric softener. I showered and found a pair of unlaundered jeans. The brand name was Viral.

  It used to be we saw beasts in the shadows, gods in the clouds. Now we’d shaped the common mind to accommodate new visions carried, according to Pierluigi, on microchips, bringing us news of the end. But was the end there in the information carried on the card or in the chip card itself? Plague or integrated circuit? Of course the end of the world could spring as easily from the natural world as from the artificial. From the ox or the house, the camel or the door, aleph or beth, gimel or daleth, the letters in some tongue to come would bear the last word on us all.

  In one of his dinner-hour holdings forth, Durant had told me of a magical microchip designed by the military of a country he couldn’t legally name. The chip could identify any virus introduced into its circuitry through a liquid solution. “Think about resistance. These soldier-scientists can use the microchip to design vaccines or treatments to ward off biological weapons and outbreaks. One kind of resistance put in service of another. How hard it is, James, to bring together usefully the biological and the mechanized. Usually they collide like a car into a tree, but this little technology might save us from a great plague.”

  The comment had stayed with me but only now did it set off a cha-cha. I thought of Camus, hero of the intellectual Resistance during the war, and author of The Plague (a novel inspired partly by his struggle against tuberculosis), who was killed when his editor drove him into a tree. Some things I made studies of, and some just stayed with me in sharp detail for reasons that weren’t always clear. The car crash produced memorable ironies and coincidences. Two women passengers in the backseat were unharmed but a dog travelling with them, name of Floc, which can be translated as something like “splat,” was never seen again. Camus had a fear of cars but died in a 1956 Facel Vega, the fastest four-seater in the world (how shameful that the names of the car and the dog were in the record I read but not those of the women). Though it took two hours to extract his body from the wreckage, in Camus’s pocket was a pristine, unused train ticket to Paris, the car’s destination. Nearby, in the mud, was found the unfinished manuscript of the novel he was working on, Le premier homme, raised from the earth as its creator was returned to it, by the doctor who attended the scene, also named Camus.

  Camus is sumac spelled backward.

  The car crash has variously been attributed to a blown tire, faulty bearings, and—where had I read this? likely somewhere online—the KGB. I recalled that Camus had published a newspaper article criticizing the Soviet foreign minister, who didn’t much like artists and had chaired a congress that denounced Shostakovich, and warned against the dangers of jazz and rock music and the caveman orgies they incited. Camus accused the minister of ordering killings during the Hungarian uprising. The theory is that the minister, unhappy with his critic, ordered spies to doctor the tires of the Facel Vega.

  Like my parents, Camus was a victim of either murder or a car accident.

  I found myself searching through my files on Three Sheets, choosing the one tagged “Political” in my pointless sorting system, trying to find the poem that was floating in mind now, half-remembered. I’d read it once and never again, maybe, subconsciously, on purpose. When I found it I sat back in my chair and looked for a few seconds at the view out the window of a burnt umber wall.

  Reunion

  My family was randomly generated

  My generation is overfamiliar with the image world

  Leading members of my family imagine a world beyond the sky where we go after

  Dinner went well I thought, despite a bad start

  That comment about the royal accident, the tunnel and the tree

  Was a sumac forking against the night sky as the courses came and

  When was the last time this mode of thinking worked

  In light of the image world. I know my lifelong presences

  Better now as cyberfolk, wish they’d known their dead this way

  The table was long and complicated, extended across zones

  And tongues quoting lines from the Bible, the Koran, the minutes

  Of the accident in the park. A distant cousin fell to sneezing, an Algerian

  Reaction to the tree, dramatically rising up and leaving the table

  As we rushed around carrying whatever was fragile came down

  In sheets and inside now chills, trigger-eyed blessings fired off all

  Around with real violence until you

  Can’t think in here. I’m looking for my cyblings.

  I mean you know what I mean.

  And there it ended, like an imprint of my confusion, or a spirit waving at me from the edge of a dream. If I stared long enough at
the spirit—I cannot explain this—it had my father’s face.

  Though “Reunion” had been posted recently, after I moved back to Montreal, I hadn’t remembered it well. It was the kind of poem that didn’t linger past the experience of reading it. Yet now I felt called back to it, so the lines must have made a claim on me without my conscious knowledge. The scene presented a dinner party at a family reunion. The speaker thinks of absent family, some dead, some he knows distantly, and siblings he feels connected to mostly through the internet. The reunion includes Christians and Muslims and the conversation gets heated just as a storm kicks up and people rush around saving things from the table. Or something. If I believed my theory, there were details from my life here, but also a new false detail that could direct me away from an important truth. I read and reread it. A heat formed around “the minutes/Of the accident.”

  On my laptop I had screenshots of the accident report in Turkish and a text of the translation. The document was titled “Kaza Tespit Tutanağı,” which translated as “Minutes of the Accident Report.” Was this a chance echo? On my first and only reading, I’d allowed myself to wonder why my parents hadn’t been wearing seat belts. Now I gave the record the full attention I hadn’t the heart for when it was sent to me. The telling line was stark in light of the poem: “Araba park halinde, motoru çalışır vaziyette bulundu.” “The car was found parked with the engine running.” If they’d died in a crash, why was the car in park?

  Apocalypse. From apokalyptein (Greek), meaning apo—“from” + kalyptein “to cover, conceal.” The world had ended for me almost two years ago when I got the call from my parents’ colleague in Turkey. With the Londoner it was brought back to life. Now in Rome in my little room I felt death-haunted and electric. Things had about them a nimbus of fatal promise, possibility. I wanted to sleep with Amanda again, more than sleep. I called her and she reminded me she was at work. I told her to phone me after her shift. Almost in the same motion I tapped end call and pressed redial.

  “Can’t talk I said.” There was music in the background.

  “I’m taking the night off. Where should I go?”

  “Your voice sounds strange,” she said.

  “How did you first hear of Three Sheets?”

  “Same as August. In a pop-up on my computer. How did you?”

  The Londoner had shown it to me, sent it to me, kept drawing my attention to it.

  “I want to be alone with you.” I needed to stop thinking. “What’s the Palatine?”

  “It’s a hill with a lot of old rocks that used to be buildings.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Detta and Cinzia will have fun plans. I’ll have them call you.”

  “Something’s got me thinking apocalyptically. I need something present, and real, and not too beautiful.”

  “If you want real ugly you could always go out to Ostia and watch men in Speedos play volleyball.”

  “Ostia is where Pasolini was murdered.”

  “They play on little fake beaches beside the real one.”

  “He was a neorealist. He conjoined the sacred and the profane.”

  “You’ll get me fired here.”

  “He was a champion of the common people but they weren’t his audience.”

  “Your tone sounds sort of flat. What’s wrong?”

  “Something is about to happen. Something really big.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “My parents were murdered. I’ve never told anyone. I’ve never told myself.”

  She said nothing for several seconds. I heard her tell me to stay on the phone. I heard her talking to others, her manager, I guess. She asked me where I was and told me to stay there. I tried to say I was sorry, that I hadn’t known I was going to say that about my parents, but she directed me to other topics.

  “Tell me more about Fellini.”

  “Pasolini. He always connects in my mind with Apollinaire, another dead poet nobody reads. Do you know him?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  So I did.

  —

  Against instructions I left the apartment and walked up the stairs to the top floor. Yves’s wife was coming out of their place.

  “James.”

  “Hello. I’m sorry, I don’t think I ever learned your name.”

  “Anthoula.”

  “Anthoula, hi. I was hoping to find a way up to the roof that doesn’t involve going through your apartment.” I saw her look at me more closely now, my clothing, maybe for signs I was drunk or in some kind of emotional trouble. “My girlfriend’s coming to visit and I was hoping to take her up there.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s no other way up.”

  I asked after Yves. I was polite. I tried to concentrate on how she looked. Was it Greek? If I didn’t know her or her name, would I see her and think Greek? Mediterranean? Her face was dark and slightly masculine, handsome. She looked very specifically like herself.

  “No one’s permanent here,” she said. “We all just rent from Carlo. I find him charming and brutish. What about you?”

  “Carlo reminds me of some of my father’s friends. They were all military guys.”

  “Brutish Canadians. I can’t imagine.” We smiled. “I’m going out but I can give you the key. Just drop it in our mailbox and I’ll pick it up when I come back.”

  As if to refuse I shook my head but at the same time thanked her. I feared she wanted to talk more. I was not present to myself or to her. I was floating somewhere over a rocky plain. Feeling transparent, I patted my pocket and withdrew the cellphone, pantomimed answering it, said, “Hello, hi!” Anthoula pressed the key into my hand. There was everything despicable about my behaviour. She whispered she’d be back around eight, holding up eight fingers. I offered a foreshortened bow to thank her again, asked my nonexistent caller to wait, and kept thanking her until she waved me away. When she was in the stairwell I put the phone in my pocket and said in full voice, “That’s right. Just keep following— Yes, just follow— I don’t— There’s— Yes…No…Yes…” until I was sure she was gone.

  I hadn’t really looked at the apartment as I passed through it on the night of the dinner. The main room was orderly, dull, a faint smell of coffee. Late light streamed in through high porthole windows of coloured glass, casting blue swirls on the walls. To be alone in a strange room felt nearly right. The only book to be seen sat on the little dining table. It was in French, a catalogue of photos from a gallery show of Anthoula’s work. The pictures were of electrical fields or firing neurons laid over barely visible human faces or portraits, heads and shoulders. In the figures obscured by the webbed lines the eye kept capturing faces and losing them again, like flashing memories of someone half-forgotten. The faces felt dangerous. I closed the book, opened the dormer window, stepped out. The table and chairs were in place, their legs loosely tied together with nylon rope, the whole assembly attached to a satellite dish, as if they were being held hostage. I took a chair and looked out at the city from three storeys up. Higher roofs all around, green shuttered windows, cream brick walls. Yellows and umbers were everywhere but did I detect my love for them fading? I’d needed to be alone but out of Durant’s place, outside but not in the street.

  Amanda’s brother and my parents had died in accidents that weren’t accidents. But imagining the accidental as a principle removed from intention overlooks the role of design inside chance. The degree of accident isn’t the same in every crash or chance occurrence. Whatever killed my parents, their last weeks and days were shaped by thousands of intentions, their own, their agency’s, those of refugees, agitators, soldiers, rogue leaders, and all the rest. My parents had only wanted to establish a small spot of order amid chaos. I knew a version of the feeling.

  My detective work, conducted to solve an unknown crime, if there’d been a crime, had pointed me toward atrocities, in Guatemala and Turkey, so distant from each other that the discovery of a link between them, if that’s what it was, promised a dark su
dden knowledge. Since learning of the disappearance of Durant’s daughter I feared I’d find in the poems evidence of a murder. Now I was facing murder itself. The social constant of it, the standing condition. Murder in history, murder in nature, not in art. Never until now had I admitted that murder, the real thing, might know me personally. It had known my parents even before they died. They struggled for others against murder and neglect, starvation, hopelessness. There was murder inside their convictions, murder in their eyes and hearts. Murder is with all who, by circumstance or choice, have their feet in the real world. My parents died for the hearts of, and maybe at the hands of, desperate souls.

  Pigeons wheeled through the sky. The world, ongoing, verified nothing. It wasn’t even something to look at. I felt a small breeze, felt a shiver on my thigh, and the breeze died and the shiver returned and I realized it was my phone. Amanda had said she’d call me again as soon as she arranged to have someone take her shift, but I didn’t want to talk to her or anyone now. I didn’t want to hear my own voice. Wrapped up in words, I had failed the people I most loved.

  I felt at the beginning of a long period of self-recrimination and raging decline, when I might become a danger to myself. Somehow knowing what was to come, placing myself on my personal timeline, allowed me to feel need. Though I still didn’t want to hear my voice, I now needed quiet connection. I checked the phone for a message, found none, checked my email, which suddenly made me feel not at all alone, given that someone else might be reading it, too, if not now, then in the future.