After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  May we continue? You were separated from your wife? (Yes.) And two children, Patty and Jeff, who went with her. (Yes.) Your wife moved into the house of a Professor of Romance Languages, you moved into an apartment, and your house was rented to another family. (Yes.) The house is still jointly owned by you and your wife, and she will have to wait until you can be declared officially dead. I presume you don’t want to speed that process. (What can I do?) Nothing, probably. You can’t deed the house to her without revealing your failure to die.

  Jack Rome closed the folder and tilted his head back to think. Now, he said. Who are the survivors? (Survivors?) People who think you are gone, whom you would rather not meet on the street. You’ve left an ex-wife and two children. A grandfather institutionalized in Chicago. Colleagues and students in your home town, as well as neighbors. (Yes.) I presume you would prefer to stay away from your town for that reason. (Yes.) Chicago too. (Yes.) Any place else? (I don’t know, I haven’t figured it out.) At any rate, unless you repeal your suicide, your freedom of movement is constricted. Does that bother you? (Not so far.)

  There’s one question I must ask. Is there any possibility of your going back? Here comes Peter Gregory, back to life after all these years. (I wouldn’t dare.) Think again. There’s a lifetime ahead of you, which may be longer than you thought when you headed into the river. Will Peter Gregory stay dead when you are sixty years old? (He’ll have no choice.)

  No? So you say. He looked at the ceiling like some right wing intellectual on a talk show, and said, What happened before you went into the river?

  Undifferentiated circumstance and bad feeling.

  My question is why you did such an extraordinary thing. I apologize for asking, but you know why I need to know.

  You didn’t know, and you asked, Why do you need to know?

  I mean to give you a gift, as I already told you.

  What kind of a gift?

  That’s to be decided. Your cooperation is essential.

  What do you want with me? Why are you after me?

  Again his harsh little laugh, and the smoke around his ears. I mean you no harm, he said. I mean you nothing but good.

  But why? What am I to you? You’ve got everything, why me?

  Curiosity, will that do? Not everybody has done the extraordinary thing you have done.

  I don’t want to go back, you said. It would kill me.

  You’ve demonstrated that. You won’t have to go back.

  What is it you want to know?

  Very simply: why did you jump into the river?

  Maybe I was depressed.

  Depressed people bore me. Give me something more interesting.

  You remembered explaining to Amy and Joe, how your answer evaded your memory. You repeated it anyway: I was separated from my wife.

  That so? Skeptical silence while he thought it over. You waited for the obvious objection. It came: an act of spite? After two and a half months?

  You remembered the additional explanation you thought of in the car while listening to free enterprise, an explanation you never got a chance to give: There was another mess the last week. A student named Florry Gates.

  Well, well. So what did Florry Gates do to you?

  Cursory summary: how she approached you, offered sympathy, and how her father discovered you and threatened to sue. That was one week before your jump, and there was also the time she threw you out of the car and made you walk home by yourself, whenever that was.

  What’s that got to do with jumping in the river?

  You thought it self-evident. No? The threat of criminal charges? The humiliating exposure? The public embarrassment?

  What? A little scandal? Your wife had already left you, so what was at stake?

  People go to jail for statutory rape.

  You don’t really think there was a danger of that, do you? Didn’t you want to fight it out?

  It wasn’t just that.

  What was it then? You tell me.

  You were tangled in things, you tried to tell. You mentioned Jock Hadley. An old man, a vicious old man, who lived across the street.

  Vicious eh? What about him?

  You said, He was murdered by someone the newspapers called the Hammer Man. Who went around smashing the skulls of lonely old men.

  What’s this got to do with anything?

  The world was falling apart. Everything was going down the drain.

  What’s the matter? You can’t stand a little excitement?

  You said you thought you were going mad.

  He looked displeased, and suddenly you feared disqualification as beneficiary. The view from his sunny blue window to the floor had thickened, an unspecifiable overcast had depleted the light of its shine.

  Maybe you should tell me why you changed your mind in the river.

  I saw the lights in the water.

  What does that mean?

  I saw the lights and decided to swim out. That’s what I remember: the lights, the decision, the act following the decision. I don’t remember the reasoning behind the decision.

  All right, then. So what did you do next?

  You slept on the shore and in the morning bought breakfast and started hitchhiking.

  Okay, next question. Since you had changed your mind, why didn’t you simply go back to your apartment and pretend nothing had happened? Would anybody have known the difference?

  It never occurred to you. Or if it did, it was forbidden.

  Forbidden. You were guided by magic signs and dark taboos.

  They seemed like logical imperatives.

  But you forget the logic. Never mind. You started hitchhiking. What was that like, hitchhiking across the country?

  It was a challenge.

  Exhilarating? Tell me about it.

  You told him. The peony kids, sleeping in the woods, washing your clothes, making up names, the man named Roy Clements. You did not mention the body in the woods, but you told about the man who called you bum, and the car you stole, the amusement park, and the people who gave you rides.

  When you told him about Crazy James, Jack Rome laughed. Right hand man, eh? I wonder who that was? You told about his Me Grant, and Rome laughed again. All during your narrative you were jostling him, looking for signs revealing his source.

  He liked your adventures. Now you see why I don’t believe your reasons for jumping, he said. Couldn’t stand conflict, suicide because you couldn’t bear the embarrassment? Bullshit, my friend. Bullshit because you swam out. You took up a new personality and tried to establish it in the world. That’s a bigger challenge than anything you ducked. What you’ve done the last couple of months requires more energy, more effort of character, more conflict, risk of embarrassment, than any troubles you were trying to avoid. Now I want you to stop lying to me and tell me the real reasons for your jump.

  Lying to you?

  Not telling the truth. Not the real truth.

  What am I leaving out?

  You know what you’re leaving out.

  What do you know?

  I know things you haven’t told me.

  This was the abyss dropping underneath. There was the whole world in what you had not told Jack Rome.

  He said slyly, When that What’s-her-name Florry Gates offered you sympathy, as you said, what did she offer you sympathy for?

  You thought it through and realized what he knew. Yes, you said.

  Is that it? Am I right?

  Yes.

  You had a certain notoriety, didn’t you?

  Yes, yes. You shuddered now, secretly, afraid of the power he had over you, and no choice but to admit, Yes.

  Okay then. He was excited. That’s all I need to know. We’ll talk again tomorrow. I need to know more before I decide.

  Decide what?

  What to do with you. Come back at the same time.

  I have to work then. Mr. Crestmeyer depends on me.

  Mr. Crestmeyer is profiting more from your absence than he would from your pre
sence.

  What if I don’t come back?

  You will.

  What if I don’t? What’s to make me?

  Your curiosity. What I can do for you. I could give you a fortune. I could make you rich. If I wanted to.

  Would you do that?

  Come back tomorrow and see. You can’t lose.

  Jack Rome relaxed and became familiar. He looked at you with his black robin’s eye and said, You may think I’m a tycoon, but at heart I’m a philosopher. It’s true I’m a man of wealth and power, but my spirit is with the minds hidden away in third floor offices of college philosophy departments. The human condition, that’s what interests me. When you swam the river, you stepped outside the human condition. Once, however, you were a high school English teacher. So you should be able to express yourself. Tell me then, what’s it like outside the human world? What’s it like to look on and be no part of it?

  You had no words for what he wanted. Only discredited figures of speech. You told him how you sat in the harbor feeling your present getting thinner and thinner as past and future faded away.

  He liked it.

  He sent you home with one final warning. Don’t tell your friends. Say you interviewed for a job and filled out forms.

  What shall I say when they ask how you found me?

  Blame it on a mysterious and well-connected customer at the typewriter shop to whom you were surprisingly helpful. That will suggest you are being considered for a research job. Low level. That will satisfy them.

  SIXTEEN

  Back to Crestmeyer that afternoon, with a feeling of exile running wild and exhilarated patience waiting for the good. Mixed with the nausea of blackmail in a concentration camp. In the afternoon quiet you sat at a table in the store and tried to interpret, looking for deception and hidden meanings. Your friends were curious about Jack Rome. You put them off. Night came and your sleep was full of futures.

  Back to Jack Rome’s office in the morning, stranger than the first time because of familiarity. An explorer the first day, now a sleeper returning to a dream.

  Jack Rome was wearing a white suit. He looked smaller than you remembered. He said, Why are we meeting today?

  You asked me to come back.

  Why?

  You wanted to continue our conversation.

  What did we talk about?

  Don’t you remember? I’m the one who jumped into the river and swam out.

  I remember. The suicide kid. Hitchhiked to New York. Why did you do that?

  We talked about that.

  Because your wife left you and took the kids. Because someone’s father charged you with statutory rape. Baloney.

  Here was a new crabby Jack Rome, a man of unreliable changes, showing how silly your hopes of good from him actually were.

  But then he said (as if this were part of a strategy), Let’s talk about your moment of fame.

  A new shock.

  Your moment in the papers, your notoriety, which you neglected to mention yesterday. (But which he had discovered, like everything else, as you should have known.)

  Do we have to? you said.

  He waited for you to see your stupidity.

  You had hoped to put it out of your life, you said.

  So that’s why you jumped? Why didn’t you tell me?

  You said nothing.

  I thought so, he said. You’re dumb. If it weren’t for that I’d not have bothered with you. So now we’re going to talk about it. You get nothing from me unless you tell me everything. The newspapers say you were drunk. Is that wrong?

  You took a deep breath, defeated. It would all come out. Despite the dread of being caught, you felt relieved, and surprised by that relief, to admit this thing which you had washed out of mind in the river. You acknowledged it: No, you said, it’s true.

  According to the newspaper, according to the police, according to your defense at the trial, you were so sloshed, looped, whatever your favorite slang is, that you truly didn’t know where you were when the accident occurred. Is that the truth or is there a catch somewhere?

  It’s the truth.

  You were driving your car in this condition and you turned up the exit ramp of the expressway and headed into the oncoming traffic? Wrong way.

  Why are you digging this up?

  You know why, so shut up. You went up the exit ramp ignoring the sign that said Do Not Enter and the sign that said Wrong Way. The bright red danger color of these signs, which did not, I assume, register on your retina at that hour of the night. You had your headlights on, I presume?

  The witnesses say so.

  But you were too blind to notice. Do you remember the Do Not Enter signs?

  I don’t know what I remember. That was two years ago.

  Your true memory is corrupted by your attempts to reconstruct a memory, is that what you’re saying?

  I suppose so.

  Well, that’s all right. What have you decided you can remember from that episode? You tell me.

  You tried to tell it now, not knowing how much came from the source and how much from telling it before, to yourself and to the lawyers and the police and Linda and the high school principal and the children. You said you didn’t know if you remembered the warning sign or not. What you remembered in this uncertain way was the plausibility of Peter Gregory’s having had a thought saying, That sign says Wrong Way. And a thought saying: Drunks go through signs saying Wrong Way, so it’s natural to notice it. However, since I am not going the wrong way, I must have misread the sign. On expressways where exit and entrance ramps run parallel to each other, the Wrong Way sign is often visible to the person on the ramp to which it does not apply. Peter Gregory had often experienced the shock of properly entering a ramp and seeing the Wrong Way sign on the adjacent ramp, requiring a complex series of inferences to figure out. So when he saw the Wrong Way sign, if he saw it, that could have been what he thought, which, realizing how easy it was to make such a mistake, he put quickly out of mind.

  And drove right up on the highway, Jack Rome said.

  Forgetting the sign if he had ever noticed it, you said. Then (to the best of your knowledge) noticing he was on a two-lane highway, he realized he had missed his turn onto the Interstate. There was a car coming toward him in the opposite lane, a single pair of headlights, that’s how he knew it was a two-lane highway. The car blasted its horn as it went by, which he attributed to drunks on a spree late in the night.

  Jack Rome said, You’re telling me this. Are you sure there wasn’t some underlying defiance in your mind, encouraging self-deception for self-destruction’s sake?

  That was shrewd and psychological of Jack Rome, you thought, his mind perhaps a shade more interesting than you had supposed, and you conceded yes the possibility of some hidden anger encouraging him to make mistakes and talk himself into nonsense.

  Jack Rome grinned. He liked this kind of talk. What happened after the car passed in the other lane?

  Well, then he saw two cars ahead, one passing the other in front of him in his own lane, against all rules.

  Against all rules, yes.

  Coming right at him, damfool idiot, taking his time getting back to his side, forcing Gregory to apply the brakes, and there was another blaring of horns as the cars went by, a wild crowd of reckless drivers and merry makers and drunken daredevils on the road this dangerous Friday night. You remembered (if you didn’t make this up later) thinking Friday, yes, that accounts for it.

  And then, exactly how did it happen?

  You read the newspapers, you know the answer.

  Give me your version.

  No doubt there was another car behind the car that was passing the car on the left and behind that still another, all in his lane coming at him, and when it swerved—and he swerved too, because things were getting out of hand, with still another car coming and nothing he could do but make for the shoulder, with brakes jammed, causing a skid as well, and a smash and—

  Does your memory include the s
mash?

  It seems to, the back half of a car close in the headlights, bang! swiped, and bang his chin on something like the steering wheel, and his head, and flying around, skidding and swooshing and banging and bumping, not knowing where the hell anything was, realizing the car was rolling over and coming to rest down low in the dark, with lights up behind somewhere.

  Then what?

  His thought was Uh-oh, the realization he had had an accident, and accidents have consequences. About the same time but in a different part of the brain it occurred to him that with so many cars coming the other way all trying to pass illegally, perhaps he had been going the wrong way on a one-way highway.

  Jack Rome laughed.

  You said it wasn’t funny. People were killed.

  Right, he said. The Sebastian family. That poor man’s family you wiped out, the mother and her two little girls. Mary, Jenny, and Jacky, leaving poor Thomas bereft.

  Well, actually it was the car behind.

  Oh yes, I forgot. You sideswiped him and sent him into a spin, then the car behind him going much too fast crashed him broadside, doing the dirty work while you went smoking into the ditch. More his fault than yours, would you say?

  No no no, not his fault, no. It was mine.

  Or, to be more precise, Peter Gregory’s fault, not yours?

  You couldn’t tell what he thought, sitting there in his white suit watching the smoke circle in wisps around his head.

  Afraid of his irony, you took the blame. No, it was my fault, I can’t get rid of it that way.

  All right, your fault. But not Stephen White’s, right? Or Murry Bree’s?

  If you like.

  We’ll see. Tell you what, Stephen. To keep differences clear, let’s discuss these matters in the proper names. Instead of talking about you, let’s talk about Peter Gregory, what he did and didn’t do—to keep things clear. Is that all right with you?