After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  Stupid and triple stupid, the elephantine ego needing to know at all cost, even though the only knowledge is trivial knowledge, stupid knowledge, and the cost is drowning. He sinks. Then there’s a fight in the river, Peter Gregory resisting death. He did not know death could be so violent. First a blow on the back of his head, heavy splashing, then a blow to his jaw, hard as wood. Then death clutches him around the throat, pulling his head back into the water. He struggles and regains the air, but death won’t release him, holding him still around the throat, with the waves sloshing into his mouth, choking him down.

  Something pushes him. His hands scrape the pavement, he pulls himself up on hands and knees and flops down on the surface. He spits and coughs and breathes. He watches Death climb out of the river behind him, out of breath too, and both are soaking wet in their clothes.

  Sam Indigo says, What the hell’s the matter with you?

  It was an accident. I fell in.

  Some accident.

  Peter Gregory is too wet to argue. Sam Indigo is Death, Sam Indigo saved his life. He realizes this with surprise: You saved my life.

  Hell, man, what’s wrong with Long Island Sound?

  I don’t live there anymore.

  You don’t live here neither.

  Sam Indigo sitting there on his haunches, dripping ice water, shivering and looking at him. Gregory is freezing too, wet clothes on his skin like ice. The difference between this and the other time is between November and May. Gregory notices how carefully Indigo watches him.

  And you with all that money, too.

  What money? It takes Peter Gregory a moment to remember his money. I lost that.

  Lost? The big house, the fortune, the fancy cars? How did you accomplish that?

  Embarrassed as if he had failed at a job. I can’t remember, he says.

  Gregory squirms in his wet clothes. The movement incites a quick start on Indigo’s part, as quickly restrained. Watching me, Gregory thinks, ready to jump me. He looks at Indigo, hard, and Indigo stares back. Meaning is exchanged, though Gregory is not sure what.

  So he says, What?

  Don’t you move like that, Indigo says. I’ll conk you so you’ll really want to die.

  Gregory incredulous. You think I want to jump in that? I’m not that crazy.

  Sam Indigo gets to his feet. Sheds his jacket, rips off his shirt in the cold air. What are you doing? It’s too damned freezing. Come up to the car.

  Gregory doesn’t move. Takes a breath and asks: Why do you keep following me?

  Hell, man, why are you following me?

  I’m not following you.

  You found my house this afternoon, and you walked by it tonight. Lucky I saw you. I could have been watching TV. Everything he says comes shivering and trembling in the November air.

  You followed me to New York. You followed me to Jack Rome’s funeral. You followed me here.

  Whose funeral?

  Jack Rome’s. I saw you there.

  You’re imagining. I never went to no Jack Rome funeral.

  Shivering there, halted, barechested in the cold with his shirt in his hands, stamping his feet with impatience. Hell, man I followed you here because of your known propensity for suicide, and it’s a good thing I did because look at you. Now you come up to the car so I can get warmed up. Let’s go, don’t make me freeze here like an idiot.

  Peter Gregory pulls himself up heavily. His clothes would dry in time, settle on his body like a cold crust, he knows that from experience. The shirtless man’s shivering body emanates a faint freezing mist. He bounces on his feet, double time, swinging his arms, while Gregory trudges behind. I’m going to change clothes, Indigo says. I’ve got a blanket for you if you want it.

  Lagging behind, Gregory is distracted by a confusion, blending this November dowsing with the original May one. He is fixed on a familiarity noticed in the water, which has now become a familiarity of more than what water feels like when you’re drowning. A similar furtive feeling the other time, a similar desire to escape, a similar shadow slinking down behind him. As this familiarity articulates it becomes a memory never recalled during the non-Gregory years but too real to be invented, namely, that Sam Indigo pursued him the first time too, and that Gregory, never intending death but enacting the part of someone in extremity, slipped into the water as he tried to escape, then as now. It was only later, looking back at the evidence, that he supposed he had been trying to drown.

  If this was true, he says to himself gasping in the cold, the great change in his life was the result of nothing more than an accident, which means, thinking about the names he had adopted, his whole life was accidental. He had renamed himself for one accident after another, supposing in each case an important choice had been made. What an astonishing thought, he says to himself, what an interesting idea.

  Meanwhile Sam Indigo after stripping himself naked (stark, skeletal in the November night) has covered himself with baggy pants and a heavy sweatshirt from the car and tossed Gregory a blanket. Don’t know if that’ll warm you or not. While Gregory already is reconsidering his astonishing thought, suspecting it’s old stuff he has always known, Sam Indigo talks, saying: Listen man, you’ve got no reason to kill yourself. I got no patience with that. Life is good, man. I mean your basic, material life, the original thing. You got troubles, lots of people got worse. You and me, walking around in good health, it’s a crime to kill ourselves, don’t you know that?

  Peter Gregory ignores his irritation and says, The other time when I went into the river, did you follow me then, too?

  Hell, man, how paranoid can you get?

  You didn’t?

  Why should I?

  (It could have been someone else, a stranger, a bum looking for a place to sleep, a fanatic escaped from Landis in the Coliseum.)

  You didn’t come to my house in New York to blackmail me?

  Goddamn, did I blackmail you? Did I threaten? Did I ask for anything?

  Why did you come then?

  I told you then, you don’t believe me. Can’t a guy pay a friendly call once in a life? I was in New York, I had business, I knew you was there, I was interested. You were an interesting case, don’t you know that? Interesting. It had nothing to do with you.

  Peter Gregory, ashamed to be thought paranoid and groping for warmth, feels safe enough to ask. Do you think I killed Jock Hadley?

  What?

  Sam Indigo stands there. He squats down, slowly, near Gregory, looking again. Studying him. Saying, finally, Did you?

  I don’t think so. Alarmed by the physical symptoms in his body, accelerated pulse, pounding, shivering.

  What do you mean, You don’t think so? Did you have something to do with it?

  Not to my knowledge.

  Then why do you ask?

  I just wondered if you suspected me.

  Two men squatting on their haunches in the dark near the detective’s car, above the cold flowing river, one in wet clothes, the other dry, trying to figure each other out, while the wet man in accidental alarm wonders if he has already begun a new life as a penitentiary inmate. The dry man says, What’s your connection?

  None. I was out with a girl. Then I walked home. When I got home I saw the police lights. You have no grounds to suspect me.

  That’s what I thought until you brought it up.

  A silence for a while except the rushing floody river.

  I believe I brought it up because I didn’t like the man, and when I heard he’d been killed, I was glad.

  Is that all?

  To the best of my knowledge.

  Why do you keep saying, “To the best of your knowledge”?

  What else should I say?

  Say you didn’t do it.

  I didn’t do it. I have no memory of doing it.

  Memory blackout?

  If I had a memory lapse, there would be a hiatus, right? I was out with Florry Gates, a horrible evening with no hiatus anywhere. I couldn’t have done it. It’s not the kind of t
hing I do.

  You sure of that? I have a standing principle which is, Never be a character witness. If you didn’t do something, you shouldn’t go around asking people why they didn’t suspect you. Lucky for you, we caught the Hammer Man two years ago.

  Glad to hear it.

  The one you killed was the Sebastian folks. That’s the one you killed.

  That’s right, Peter Gregory said, angry and disappointed all over again.

  Can’t get away from it, huh?

  I got away from it. I got away from it three times.

  So you did. And here you are again.

  Peter Gregory was beginning to warm. Do you know why I came back? he says.

  Not yet.

  I’m living in Seattle now. Had a friend living with me, best ever in my life, and I changed my name to Mitchell Grape.

  A fine name. You like that better?

  I liked it fine. I was doing good for the world. Canvassing for the starving children in Africa. It does you good to do good for the world. Do you know about that?

  I did good for the world before I retired. I caught crooks.

  It’s good to do good.

  Guess so, if you say so.

  Only it didn’t last.

  How come?

  She left me. I keep forgetting she left me. She gave me advice before she left, integrate yourself. So here I am.

  Integrating yourself.

  Don’t laugh.

  Who’s laughing? So do you feel integrated?

  I discovered I fell into the river by accident. Makes me look like a fool.

  Nothing’s an accident, man. Don’t you know that?

  Is that so? Now I don’t know what to do.

  What more do you want? Go back to Seattle.

  She left, I told you.

  Stay here then. The old home town.

  What can I do?

  Put up a sign: Peter Gregory has returned. All questions answered for a fee.

  You’re not taking me seriously.

  Sorry.

  If I came back here, I’d need to know what’s happened in my absence.

  Lots, lots. The world has turned upside down in your absence.

  Come, tell me. I couldn’t find my wife in the phone book. Nor her lover either.

  Sorry, I have no information about that.

  What did the high school do when I disappeared?

  They made a fuss and replaced you and hushed it up.

  They wouldn’t like me back. There was a man named Gates who was going to charge me with statutory rape.

  Never heard of that. I guess he’d be satisfied to have you commit suicide.

  Would he still be satisfied if I came back?

  Hell man, how would I know? Go back to New York, then. Look up your rich friends.

  Impossible. They threatened to kill me.

  Well, maybe you should jump in the river after all.

  There was a silence.

  Maybe I should start over.

  No kidding?

  Make a fresh start in some new place.

  With a new name?

  That would liberate me.

  You have some experience with that kind of thing.

  Where would you suggest?

  How about the South?

  The South, yes. New Orleans, could I go to New Orleans?

  You could go by bus.

  I could hitchhike.

  You have some skill at that too.

  Yes, I know what to expect.

  You know how to do it, all right.

  You felt a rustling, rousing, coming back to life, as if you had been buried a while, like in a ditch under leaves.

  The whole world would be open to me, I could try anything if I wanted to.

  Just like always.

  Something always went wrong before.

  This time you’ll get it straight.

  You squinted at him, unable to determine his expression in the dark. You were thinking of the life ahead, and the old lonely fears began to arise. You remembered the renounced loneliness of your previous lives, which you were not allowed to think about in the harsh discipline of your names. You remembered prohibited mourning for children whom you could not acknowledge, and for thoughts you were not permitted to indulge. How surreptitiously, guiltily, you allowed your memory to play, illegally opening up the tomb where once, once, a gentle mother sang to you—you—in a time of no time, breathing love into you, planting it so it would grow, and a gentle humorous father secured it with quiet jokes. You longed to grieve, for the luxury and comfort of grieving, that useless nostalgia not allowed in the forward busy lives of people like Stephen White and Stephen Trace, Mitchell Grape, and Murry Bree. Lives full of boundaries, barbed wire and chain link fences. How wasteful, how bleak. You said, Do I have to go through all this again?

  Find someone, he said. You’ve done it before. Tell her your story. Tell her you fell in the river. If she don’t believe you, tell her the meaning is too deep for words.

  Eventually she’ll leave me.

  Or die. Or you’ll die and leave her. It happens all the time. Take me, Indigo said. My wife died. My kids off and married. I’m writing my memoirs.

  Ah.

  You could do the same. You got the material. Come, he said, You’re freezing to death. I’ll take you to a hotel.

  Where’s my luggage?

  What happened to your bag?

  My God. Peter Gregory looks at the river, a vast invisible black gap of turmoil downstream, across which light bobs and shakes from the lines of one shadowy bridge to another, exposing now and then an impurity, fragment, floating object for a moment before gone. Well, he says, it must have slipped out of my hands.

  Sam Indigo laughs. By accident escaping from me? Looks like I’ll have to lend you something. You can pay it back from New Orleans. Will you remember?

  Sure I will. You can trust me.

  THIRTY EIGHT

  You followed the retired detective’s suggestion and began to write. From now on, wherever you went, hitchhiking or by bus or plane, in style or threadbare, you had a text in your luggage. It had weight. Your name was written in it, typed on the first page: by So-And-So.

  No longer were you a mere first person trying to articulate in no particular medium or the evanescent air an identity different from the third person name you happened to carry. Instead you lived in the word you written into page after page, a fixative for memories turned into adventures. Evening by evening this written you accumulated, pages on pages in the distillation of a name, creating (if you could avoid the dangers of fire and loss) an imitation of permanence.

  You came into being in the river twice. The second time you completed your birth in a motel two nights later. By then you had hitchhiked three hundred miles south, thinking all the way what to write. Already the climate was warmer, pleasanter, more comfortable. Let off at a town square in a village in Georgia among the Southern speakers, you found a motel room and went to the drugstore for paper and pen. You had supper in a café on the square across from a Confederate monument and afterwards went directly back to your motel to begin. The motel was chilly, but once you started you didn’t notice. It was like every motel room. There was a heavy drape across the room-wide window, a small table and a stiff hard chair. You leaned over the table and wrote by hand, getting into it, lubricating yourself by describing where you were. The light was dim. There was a hum of machine noise, which must have been a heater since it wouldn’t be the air-conditioner at that time of year. There was muffled television, voices and an audience laughing in some near room, and the sound of a slamming door, and a can dropping into the slot in the Coke machine outside. You wrote it down. The next day you moved on, and thereafter what you did in the day made it possible to write at night. You wrote and wrote. You wrote this story you had previously tried to tell in the disappearing air like oral history to disappearing listeners. You got it down where the words would remain the same and anyone could appreciate it as much as anyone else.
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br />   You didn’t get a typewriter until later. Then you retyped everything you had written so far and went on from there. Writing added mass to your travels. The computer came after you had settled down and had some money. Now a year later there’s a study and a desk with manuals and containers for disks, and a view through the curtains of bare December trees with sparrows scrounging for berries and dried seeds, while you looking back remember the origins in the motel. You read back over what you wrote and remember the seasons and places and what was happening as you wrote all mixed together.

  When you started you wondered who would read it. Consistent with the notion not quite abandoned yet that you were integrating Gregory, you thought of your reader as his wife Linda. You imagined what to do when you finished, thinking you would seek her out and find her by placing personal ads in newspapers around the country. You’d send these ads to all the cities, the major papers. It would take a while, but you could wait, for you had found your vocation.

  The ads you imagined would address her by name: LINDA GREGORY. To make it more certain, add the children: ALSO JEFF GREGORY, PATTY GREGORY. And you would spell the original of all your names, no longer taboo:

  Peter Gregory your once husband and father is alive and well and has a story for you. Please write or call.

  You thought how courageous and emotional this was, this return to your first name. With an appropriate element of chance: you did not know the odds on your success, which might be for you or against you. Probability would decide—or be violated. Chance would determine what you deserved or did not deserve. There was a problem in that Linda Gregory never looked at personals. If she didn’t look, you wouldn’t find her, no matter how many cities you canvassed. But other people read them, which improved the odds, for any friend or acquaintance seeing such a notice would surely tell her. So you reasoned while you worked, full of the patience of the long term, postponing a closer look. You could wait. As long as you were writing you could wait.