After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  Again the vacant feeling, What next? and now he ascends the hill and enters the university campus on his way to the campus McDonald’s. The gateman, the same old black man to whom he used to nod, nods again as he passes, not realizing he has not seen this face for a while. He passes the library, the administration building, where the dead lawn spreads down to the street and fraternity houses below, a few stragglers on the walk, and some playing frisbee on the lawn, all the trite old views. In McDonald’s, almost empty, he gets a hamburger and sits, just as he sat long ago at the picnic table, for as long as he can stand it, letting the time pass. No one speaks to him except one familiarlooking educational face going by his table, who says “Hello” without surprise to his own familiar-looking educational face. Gradually as the afternoon tilts toward evening, he realizes that it was not for this he came, but for the evening, that his purpose is gathered in the night, though he does not yet know what it is. Around five o’clock, he gets up from his McDonald’s table and finds another telephone book in the student union, where he looks up more names. Sebastian, Thomas, still lives bereaved (unless remarried) in his house on Lafayette. Gates, Magnus, has not moved, and the telephone book still does not tell you whether Florry lives there or somewhere else. Long, AJ, is where she always was. All these numbers not to call, these reasons not to have returned. Another idea comes to him, an impulse to find a name he never looked for before: Indigo, Sam. He too is listed, on a street close by in the university neighborhood. In a few minutes Gregory is there, looking for the number. Again, it is not a question of forcing recognition, only of exposing himself to the possibility. He identifies the house as he approaches, and looking ahead sees this time he will not escape so easily.

  Though by now it is almost dark, the man is in front, working on his car, the man himself, though all Gregory sees are his legs from behind as he bends over the engine under the hood. Now he regrets and crosses to the other side, wondering whether to retreat, but that too would be against his plan—while the man straightens up and shows himself, lean body, stooped shoulders, almost bald head, wiping his hands on his jeans. Unable to turn back now, Peter Gregory walks on, seriously hoping the man won’t notice him, but you can see the pause in Indigo’s look, the memory interrogation preceding positive recognition before he speaks: Hey there, pal. How’re you doing?

  There’s a momentary stop in time, Peter Gregory wondering for a few seconds if this is actually his trip’s objective, and they stare at each other across the street. But when Sam Indigo starts to cross over, Gregory turns away, with a quick wave not to be rude, and not running but walking fast, not looking back, down the block and over to the avenue, not knowing if Indigo is following but hearing no footsteps.

  He waits at a bus stop. The bus takes him downtown where he has dinner at another quick food restaurant. With another long stay at his table after dinner, waiting for whatever it is.

  At nine o’clock that night, Peter Gregory leaves the downtown Wendy’s, finds a taxicab and asks the driver to take him to the park. The driver thinks he’s crazy, why anyone would go to the park alone at nine o’clock on a cold November night, but he takes him and leaves him by the playground. Park closes at ten, he says. Gregory watches him drive off, the headlights disappearing behind the trees like Florry Gates’s when he refused to come out after she came back in remorse to pick him up having thrown him out.

  As a result of which, we shall now walk again the walk we walked before, down the wooded hill, across the bridge over the industrial valley, up the long residential street back to the university district, to the apartment where we lived. A strenuous long walk, not quite so bad this time as the landmarks pass more quickly, aided by a sense of purpose lacking then. A sense of purpose—not the same as an actual purpose. The walk recalls the other indignation, angry thoughts, inner speeches and shame, ranging from Florry Gates to her father and to Anita Long, long gone, to Linda and Louis the Lover and the principal of the high school and the other teachers and coming to rest in the misery of an automobile crash and the righteous judge and the righteous reporters and all his lousy earlier life, reanimated in the mixed assortment of landmarks in the dark, streets and houses and bridges and shops, lights in homes protecting people from the chill, a chill which was abating then in the advance of spring and is intensifying now in the acceleration of winter.

  He passes the corner of the street where he knows the Sebastian family used to live before he killed them, and obeys a masochistic impulse to look at that house which in the old days he never dared to see. He recognizes it by its number, sees it, unexpectedly large, windows blazing with light downstairs and up, a virtual mansion with a large lawn and a semicircular driveway, occupied by the rich. Yet remembering from the telephone book that Thomas Sebastian whom he bereaved is still living there, he can conclude, with another slight drawing of relieved breath, that Sebastian has made a new life. No doubt that entails no forgiveness, but it’s something anyway.

  He returns to his route. This time there will be no warm though dreary room to shelter him at the end of the walk, but neither will there be the flashing police lights and floodlights all over the street as he enters the last block. His heart clutches with remembered dread as he approaches this scene, anticipating surprise: what? The tall bald figure of Sam Indigo, perhaps, sitting on the porch waiting for him? He remembers now keenly the flashing colors and white floodlights on the Hadley house, which caused him to change course, avoid this street altogether, and go around the back to his apartment. He remembers his inability to believe it only a coincidence or to avoid believing the real purpose of the lights was to illuminate his predicament with Florry Gates, to publicize that and all his other troubles so brightly as to obliterate distinctions and make him suspect in all the crimes which police lights announce. He turns the corner. The street is empty, peaceful, innocent with its spaced streetlamps and lighted windows. He stops. He remembers the strange fear that seized him last year in the airplane at the time his Trace fortunes were just beginning to collapse, the strange crazy fear that he might have been the murderer of Jock Hadley in a deed obliterated from memory. He had forgotten about the fear itself in his subsequent adventures, but remembers it now as this simple realization erases all its grounds: since the floodlights were already on Jock Hadley’s house when Peter Gregory returned from his walk, Jock Hadley must have been already killed, with time enough to be discovered and the police called. Therefore it was impossible for Peter Gregory to be involved, as he really did know all along.

  He remembers a conversation earlier that evening when Florry Gates came for him in her car. It was Jock Hadley calling him across the street, Hey Mister. That gal’s too young for you.

  Ignore him.

  I know your type.

  Who’s that? Florry Gates said. Then, in a loud voice, clear and young and virginal: Shut the fuck up, you old fart.

  No one knew there was a boundary near in Hadley’s historical time, these possibly the last words his ears would hear if the murderer, coming in less than an hour, did his work without speech.

  He takes a breath, grasps his courage, and enters the street. He goes by the quiet lot with doghouse and dog which does not bark: where the illuminated bungalow with its mean and nasty voice used to be. He approaches his apartment, where Sam Indigo once asked him innocent questions. Another simple realization occurs to him: at the time of the lights, Peter Gregory did not know what they meant. He did not learn of the murder until the next morning. It was only his memory that mixed things up, confusing before and after, transferring shames, one for another, making all his fears both screens for others and screened by them, so that everything was merely a screen for something else.

  When he is past there’s another crisis of transition, What next? but this is evidently a false crisis because he keeps going as if he knows. He is going downtown. A dark destination at the downest part of downtown. Now it occurs to him with a thrill for the drama of it: I am re-enacting. I am acting out so as
to remember what I rejected and thereby rediscover the connection between the old Peter Gregory and whoever I have become since. As he walks the memory grows clearer, while his feet carry downward, down the long hill he had climbed in the afternoon, through the slum, beyond to the shops, the hotels.

  He constructs a chronology, like this:

  Sunday evening: Florry Gates drove him to the park, and there, after a dispute, she made him get out of the car and when she changed her mind and invited him back in, he escaped and walked home by himself. When he arrived, there were police lights in front of Jock Hadley’s house, the meaning of which he did not learn until the next morning.

  Monday: in the morning, Sam Indigo, gathering information, called on Peter Gregory, just as he was about to go to school. He asked him what he might have seen or heard. He knew this Sam Indigo, who had questioned him once before, after the Sebastian accident. Why the homicide detective, if that’s what he was, was involved in the accident case, he did not know. He remembered him both times mild and sad, as if not knowing what he wanted to find out. In this interview, Gregory, afraid of the scandal of Florry Gates, said he was in all evening and heard nothing. A little later, from his classroom window, he saw Sam Indigo outside coming into the building. To question him again? It occurred to Gregory that Indigo must have realized he had not told the truth about last night. A lie: that was the lie he had tried so hard later to remember. Not having a class in this period, Gregory decided to leave. He went out to the faculty parking lot and got his car. Drove out on the Interstate to a shopping mall, cruised around a parking lot, went on to another mall. He had lunch at a cafeteria there. He doesn’t remember what he was thinking, whether it was Florry Gates or Jock Hadley or the career of Peter Gregory and Linda, and doesn’t know if he knew he was being irrational, nor if he was making excuses, nor if he had any purpose in mind. In the afternoon he returned to the school, went to his classroom and realized—he does remember the shock of this—that he had missed all his classes.

  This gave him the idea he was going through a crisis and was therefore free to act in an appropriate way. He went home without speaking to anyone. That night he turned off the lights in his apartment, so he could revel in the sensation of being hunted. His burrow, hutch, lair, cave, Peter Rabbit and the goshawk. This is really irrational, Peter Gregory remembers telling Peter Rabbit. Play acting. There was play acting in everything he did, then and always, long before, and now. Drama, tragedy, comedy, before the imagined audience judging, wondering, appalled.

  Tuesday: He woke up refreshed, feeling fine. Good, he said, a crazy interlude, now I can get back to work. Then the telephone rang, and everything resolved was unresolved again. The ringing telephone was the lawyer for Mr. Gates. Friendly and respectful, meet you in the principal’s office at ten.

  He remembers packing his suitcase—two suitcases, cramming the stuff in, everything he could stuff. He remembers at the same time remembering everything bad he had done in his life. Now (walking) he does not remember those bad things, only the act of remembering. All that stupidity, cowardice, lust, self-deception, things like that. With a certain exhilaration in so much shame, for the justifications it might give.

  He can’t remember where he meant to go with his packed luggage (now: having passed the struggle of the migrated mountain folk trying to make new lives in the city, he is in the midst of the downtown hotel district, by dimly lit closed airlines offices, luggage and computer shops). He got into the car, leaving his packed luggage in the apartment. He went downtown, ate lunch, went to a movie which he doesn’t remember, coming out into a wash of white reality in the late afternoon. Another meal. Couldn’t go home because of the packed luggage he had left there. So he went to a motel. Went into the motel room, but couldn’t go to bed because he had no luggage.

  He wrote the suicide note in the motel. You would think, as Peter Gregory in fact did think until this moment (now: going down from the downtown center past the garages and warehouses), that writing the suicide note implied an intention to act, that in the motel room he must have reached the bottom of depression and misery. But now (the public landing coming into view, darkly ahead) he remembers the suicide note as another theatrical experiment. To see what it was like to write one. Because the real Peter Gregory was too domesticated, ritualized, civilized, pasteurized, intellectual, skeptical, multisided, for anything so consequential, and all he could do was pretend to be different, pretend to be crazy and full of despair, concocting a note like an actor, and by such imaginative projection to stand for a moment on the edge of himself and get a glimpse of the animals inside.

  He remembers this now, as his walk finally breaks out on the public landing itself: he never intended to kill himself. That was not the idea at all. Writing the suicide note was a game, a gesture. Writing the suicide note was exciting and fun.

  THIRTY SEVEN

  The public landing is a large concrete plane sloping down to the river. There’s a little theater in a barge moored at one end. In the daytime the slope is full of cars parked at an angle. Now in the night it is a black hole below which the water trembles with snaky light. Behind and above are the concrete struts of highway ramps leading to the bridge, and the great circular void of a coliseum which on that other night contained, unheard outside, the spiritual noise of Osgood Landis and his daughter the Virgin Miranda.

  The landing slopes down from Gregory’s feet to death at the bottom. Real death, simpler than his imagination, tugging with a slight but definite force. He holds back, not wanting to let the magnetism or gravity get stronger, while an internal argument goes on, challenging the notion his suicide note was phony. That charge was disproved, so the argument goes, by the fact that he went into the river. He really did.

  He feels the pull of the slope in his feet, in the obtuse angle to which his ankle is stretched. The other time he had the car. The least he can do now is go on foot half way down, to where he left it then. The pull of the slope is not too great for that: he walks easily and still feels relatively safe.

  Yet the danger is palpable, unless it is only memory of the first time. He has reached the crystal point of his mission, from which looking back he sees what a long and postponed mission it has been: from the far point of his eastern trajectory in a Venetian hotel room, the rebound seeking to reverse that trajectory, flung back to the west with such acceleration that he missed the river and landed in Seattle. Now that he has found his way back it would be criminal not to finish it.

  What does that mean?

  He goes down to the edge.

  The pull is there but it’s resistible. An attraction but not a longing, rather a fear that he will go against his desires. His desires are with Bonnie Brown back in Seattle, who unfortunately went back to Jay.

  And there is all the alertness and clarity of simple thought, neither hypnotized nor confused, which denies any reason to go into the river and cannot remember any plausible reason why he went in before. Hank Gummer, who leaped down the stairwell, also had no reason, they said.

  So the mystery remains right to the water’s edge. It’s at his feet. He looks down at it. The waves on the concrete go slurp, they slobber, they lip their tongues, they slosh and splash, vulgar sounds like drinking soup, slopping at him like a lover.

  Peter Gregory standing here at the threshold can’t remember what he wants to know.

  Someone is watching him. He knows before he has evidence, no sound, nothing visible in the dark. He knows because of some memory in the river’s flood, leaking through the locks. It makes him stumble, almost fall, touch the pavement with his fingers to regain balance.

  Over to the right somewhere, he hears the footsteps, sees the shadow in the shadows, too fast to be casual, hurrying down the slope near the bridge.

  He steps back, slips, his foot skids on suddenly slippery pavement like a coat of slime, he topples and as he rights himself he slides into the water. He steps back a little more to regain his footing, and there is no footing. Submerged
for a second, thrashing in the powerful November current, cold. Damn it.

  While his busy mind says, Don’t panic, you can manage this, another busy part notices the familiarity. So that’s how it was. Water sloshing in the nose, the primal scene again. Drifting fast, he treads water off shore, keeping his head above the waves watching for the prowling figure.

  He notices the gap between himself and the shore widening fast, is it faster than he can swim? which shocks him into urgency: watch out, get busy, you’ll drown. The water is real closing over him, whistling cold and black, tasting of mud, his clothes dragging him down, while he thinks, Stupid stupid, have I gone and lost it because my foot slipped?