The Great Perhaps: A Novel

by Joe Meno

  The sergeant lowers the saber and turns toward the prisoner, muttering, “Und jetzt der mann.” The soldiers reload their rifles, some quickly, some clumsily, and turn and face Bernard. Bernard Casper, now shivering, has begun to weep. He weeps without embarrassment. His cowardice is well known. In this moment, it feels like a gift. The sergeant raises his saber. It looks golden in the sudden light of the sun. The saber falls. Seven shots ring out, all at once, each round delivering certain death. But one, a single bullet, tears through the gray wool of Bernard’s pants, cutting hard across the bones of his hip, puncturing what has always been most important to all men, his scrotum, then continuing on, the bullet screaming through the open doors of a barn, cracking the front windowpane of the Edel family, the town’s only tailors, passing through a gray cloth curtain to where a young girl named Elsie Edel is, at that moment, precariously balancing on the edge of a zinc bathtub. The single shot pierces the soft fruit of her navel and impolitely imparts her womb with the impossible mystery of life.

  Though the wound is not very deep, it is this, this second and more final act of cowardice, that results in the mysterious birth of a boy who, by many accounts, never would have been conceived if not for his father’s first act of treason. Elsie Edel, choosing the disgrace of the dead over the disgrace of the living, gives her child the name Jacob Casper. The town watches as the boy grows quietly into manhood, following closely at his mother’s unsullied skirts. No one is surprised when, at the age of five, it is revealed that both of the boy’s feet are hopelessly clubbed.

  Sixteen

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, AT THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL History, Jonathan confides in the life-sized models of aquatic animals in the World Under the Sea exhibit:

  “She’s leaving me. If she hasn’t already, then she probably will anytime now,” he whispers, staring up at the giant humpback whale. “I blew it. I really screwed it up bad this time. And I lost the grant. And the French found a live specimen. And now my life is total shit.” The enormous purple giant squid does not seem moved by the news. Fixed there, in the shadows of the closed exhibit, it does not even seem to be listening. Jonathan sits on the bench and stares up; he is the only moving shadow in a room full of white sheets covering displays that have yet to be finished.

  “I am a mess. I really am. I am a fucking mess. I mean, I’m not even supposed to be in here. The museum canceled my research hours. They asked for my fucking key.”

  Some minutes later, an odd jingling echoes down the tiled corridor. Jonathan straightens up, trying to comb his greasy hair with his fingers. He looks like hell. The bags beneath his eyes are sunken and black. His blond beard is tangled and uncooperative. He has been wearing the same yellow and red T-shirt for the past three days. Roger, the security guard, ambles down the hall and smiles, taking a seat beside Jonathan on the small wood bench.

  “Professor.”

  “Roger.”

  “Thought I would find you down here.”

  “Yep.”

  “I heard they asked for your keys.”

  “They did.”

  “How did you get in this morning?”

  “I didn’t give them back.”

  Roger nods, scratching his hairy, tattooed neck.

  “I think I’m supposed to get those keys from you.”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you want to give them to me now or do you have to clean your lab out?”

  “No. I cleaned it out yesterday.”

  Jonathan sighs and reaches into his pants pocket, finding his key ring. He unthreads the museum’s three keys and hands each—one, two, three—to Roger, planting them in his pinkish palm.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” Roger says.

  “Me, too, Roger. I’d been working on this project for fifteen years now. More than fifteen. Like eighteen. It’s hard to just watch it all turn to shit.”

  “What happened anyway? Did you get fired or something?”

  “No,” Jonathan says, smiling. “Not yet anyway.”

  “Oh.”

  “We lost our funding. So…well, we can’t afford to keep our space here.”

  “That’s too bad. You were still studying those squids and everything?”

  “Yep.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Jonathan leans forward, sighing again. “I don’t know, Roger. I really don’t. You got any suggestions?”

  “Nope.” He scratches his neck again, uncomfortable with Jonathan’s gloominess. “Do you want to get high?”

  “Okay, Roger,” Jonathan says, almost inaudibly. Roger reaches into the front pocket of his blue uniform, finding a stubby joint. He lights it and takes a long drag and hands it to Jonathan, who stares at the joint for a moment, studying it. A small wisp of smoke rises from the lit end, up and up and up, curling around the innumerable tentacles of the giant squid hanging overhead. Jonathan closes his eyes and takes a long drag, feeling the same cloud quietly surrounding him, the cloud expanding and growing, until he is only just a suggestion, a puff of smoke, a figure of breath himself.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, Jonathan shows up late to his History of Paleontology 101 class and finds the enormous lecture hall mostly empty. There are only about nine or ten students out of a class roster of fifty. He does not despair. He accepts the lousy turnout as another insult in the ongoing depreciation of his life. He smiles to himself in grief, then sets his briefcase behind the beige podium and begins sorting through his notes, hoping to stall. Maybe five or six more kids will show up. But no one comes. Jonathan glances up at the small, bright, clean faces of the students who have bothered to attend his class this afternoon, hoping some of them will seem eager, willing, wanting to learn. But no: they hate him. It is obvious now. The girl with too much makeup on in the front row is filing her nails. A boy wearing an iPod is singing along to himself. A girl in the back of the hall checks the time on her cell phone and yawns again. Jonathan looks over the empty seats and then opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He lowers his head, grabs his briefcase, and then races out.

  JONATHAN SITS in the Peugeot in the garage behind his house, staring at the empty spot where his wife’s car ought to be. Jonathan can almost make out the shape of the Volvo station wagon, of where it should be, of what it ought to look like, imagining it as a series of invisible, angular dashes:

  Instead there is only a blank space, a background of dull, repetitive concrete bricks, a pattern of chipping mortar, of small cracks, a cobweb triangular and menacing in one corner. There are boxes upon boxes, stacked high atop each other, some ready to fall over. Somewhere within those dilapidated cardboard shapes are all of Madeline’s books from graduate school. There is a box somewhere in that stack that contains her field notes from Ecuador—a six-month research trip to study the social behaviors of migratory birds. There are the goofy letters and flaky love notes that Jonathan wrote to her while she was away, a note folded to look like a heart, another that was supposed to look like a bird. And somewhere within those notes are the words, the feelings, the vanished glow, the panicked urgency, the wonderful, needful alarm, the proof of love, the thing that really matters. If Jonathan had the right kind of oscilloscope, if he had an X-ray machine or a magnifying device, maybe he could discover where he went wrong, where the awkwardness, the factitiousness began, where he started to follow the evolution of a prehistoric species more closely than the three people he should have been observing. Jonathan sighs, staring at the evidence before him. It is one of those incalculable, extraordinary moments when, in adult life, like in the field of paleontology, the physical proof is so undeniably clear. In those dusty, duct-taped boxes, somewhere beneath all this clutter, are the invisible, interred remains of the relationship with his wife. In the blank space where Madeline’s car should be is the overwhelming enormity of what Jonathan has been missing.

  INSIDE THE EMPTY HOUSE, it seems that his daughters have also vanished. Jonathan pokes around, calling their names, searching for their boo
k bags sprawled somewhere on the floor, their shoes kicked off in the middle of a room, for some sign, some note, but no, there is nothing. He checks his watch. It’s almost four o’clock. He paces around the house once more, picks up the phone, finds there are no voice messages waiting for him, hangs up the receiver, putters around, then takes a seat in his gray chair in front of the television. Jonathan flips through the channels slowly, then, suddenly remembering, he searches out CNN, leaning forward in his seat, muting the noisy chatter of the blank-looking host, a woman with dark hair and a square jaw. And then he sits there waiting, ignoring the news of the latest conflict in Palestine, of the war in Iraq, of the upcoming presidential elections, he sits there biting his fingernails, uninterested, until finally a purple icon of a squid appears in the small headline box above and to the right of the host’s head: SEA MONSTER IN CAPTIVITY, the box reads. Jonathan quickly unmutes the television. It’s not much, really, only a ten-second story: there are a few shots of Dr. Albert and his stupid-looking goatee. There’s one quick shot of what appears to be a giant squid held in an enormous tank, then footage from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Jonathan squats before the television set and when the program flashes back to the footage of the squid, floating silently in its glass prison, Jonathan places his palm along the screen, trying to cross the impermeable void of static and electrons, to feel the cool glass of the gigantic aquarium against the flat of his hand. And then, just as quickly, the next story is being reported, the woman’s expression unchanging, the headlines behind her a blurry field of text Jonathan does not care to understand. Once again, CNN, with its sound bites and tabloid format, has missed everything. When he has knelt before the TV long enough, when he is sure there will be no more mention of the giant squid for at least another hour, Jonathan stands, calls his wife’s name, and listens to the keen silence. Returning to the kitchen, Jonathan glances out the tiny kitchen window, standing there wishing that he was not so appallingly alone. He watches the sun begin its descent as the final traces of light cause the faintest, farthest clouds in the west to glow.

  Seventeen

  A. On Wednesday, the cloud-person seems to be lost. Today Madeline has not gone to work. She has followed the cloud-person all day long. But the cloud does not seem to be following Madeline’s map. Madeline very nearly causes an accident as the Volvo lurches around a slow-moving minivan. The cloud seems to have forgotten the rules. It is zigzagging now, from the lake to Hyde Park, then veering recklessly, the wind carrying it quickly toward the north side of the city. Madeline is frantic, honking her horn, banging on the steering wheel, she does her best to avoid the traffic, but the cloud seems to be drifting north, crossing over the high buildings of the Gold Coast. Madeline tries to watch it and the road at the same time. She glances in the rearview mirror and sees her two suitcases and her travel bag. By now she has packed everything: all of her clothes, shoes, photographs, all of her toiletries, anything she thinks she might need if she finally decides it is time to just leave. The suitcases sit silently in the backseat, waiting. They are waiting like Madeline is waiting, though Madeline suddenly believes she might no longer be waiting for anything. She thinks maybe she has already made her decision. Maybe she is just waiting for the right moment now, for an opportunity, maybe for a chance to say goodbye. Maybe that is it. Maybe she is waiting for someone to notice she has been missing, just so she can say goodbye, and then, and then that will be it. Traffic has stopped moving along Lake Shore Drive, and Madeline, panicked, watches as the cloud continues to hurry off without her. Madeline begins to honk her horn, but the line of cars does not respond. The cloud-figure does not slow down. Madeline murmurs, “Wait…wait…please don’t go…don’t be an asshole…just wait,” then throws open the driver’s-side door and, leaving the Volvo stranded there, parked in rush-hour traffic, she begins to follow on foot. The cloud drifts higher and higher until it is only a faint impression, and then its gone, once and for all.

  Eighteen

  AMELIA FINISHES THE BOMB ON WEDNESDAY MORNING. With the Internet’s instruction, she has built an explosive device that runs on a simple timer—the stolen watch, which will, in turn, trigger the explosion of one densely packed length of metal—the toy airplane, filled with the mixture of clipped-off match heads, taken from the professor’s cigarette case, and the black fireworks powder. The bomb is silver and its wires are red and white. It looks amazing. It somehow looks exactly as Amelia had always imagined.

  Staring down at it, preparing to place it inside her book bag, Amelia is now too afraid to touch it. The Internet has warned that pipe bombs are the most unstable of explosive devices, that the gunpowder or match heads might suddenly ignite from the slightest, most minuscule amount of friction, and that a number of would-be terrorists are killed every year by unplanned, amateurish explosions. Gently wrapping the device in a small cloth towel and then an old gray sweatshirt, she carefully, slowly, fitfully—holding her breath—places the bomb in her book bag, and then gently zips the zipper up, once more afraid to breathe. She lifts the bag upon her narrow shoulders. The bomb does not go off. It does not destroy the second story of her parents’ house, it does not kill anyone or cause unnecessary collateral damage; the bomb, perfectly assembled by Amelia, does what it’s supposed to at this point, absolutely nothing. Though her heart is throbbing in her thin chest, Amelia is quite pleased with herself. She has gotten through this first, difficult, nerve-wracking phase of the operation without dying. She is not an amateur. The rest of her plan is going to be easy, or so she whispers to herself, staring at the shiny reflection in the mirror before her. With the book bag sagging on her shoulders, Amelia nods once more to herself, and then cautiously places her black beret on her head. She looks exactly right, a missionary with black eyeliner, a revolutionary poster girl—she imagines, years from now, an independent film starring someone like Winona Ryder, but younger, portraying this exact, amazing moment. Saluting her reflection, Amelia then turns from the mirror and marches vigilantly down the stairs.

  WITH THE PIPE BOMB resting only a few centimeters from her spine, Amelia decides to skip breakfast. She ditches her sister at the end of the street and walks carefully down the empty tile hallway of her school, trying not to jostle her backpack. At this time on a Wednesday morning the school is almost completely deserted. She stands before the abandoned student newspaper office. THE MIDWAY, it says in silver letters along the glass window of the wooden door. Amelia glares at the faded lettering, feeling betrayed even by this, the newspaper’s middling, uninspired title. She finds the office key in her book bag, careful to avoid upsetting the explosive device. She glances down the hallway once more to be sure she isn’t being watched, then unlocks the door and sprints inside, barely breathing.

  Inside, the office looks like it always does; it’s a complete mess. Mr. Wick has left the wrappings of yesterday’s lunch on his desk: a crumbled-up, half-eaten cheeseburger from the cafeteria, some molten-looking french fries, and an empty cup of chocolate pudding. No wonder this newspaper is so useless, Amelia thinks. How can it be anything but a reflection of the small, infantile minds who carelessly throw it together?

  Amelia glances up at the round clock that hangs above the office’s two computers. 8:49. She has eleven minutes to plant the bomb and hurry to her first-period class. Amelia tenderly slips the book bag off her shoulders, and then, as lightly as she can, she places it on the photo editor’s desk. Black plastic tooth by black plastic tooth, she unzips the bag and then slowly reaches inside. She grasps the bomb’s heavy wrappings and carefully lifts the explosive device out, placing it on the desk before her. She looks up at the clock again and already another minute has gone by. She must plant the device and get out of the office before Mr. Wick shows up at nine o’clock, still half asleep, powdered donuts and giant coffee from Starbucks in his enormous, unwashed hands. She nervously looks up at the clock again. 8:50. Unsteadily, Amelia begins to unwrap the device. One of the lead wires is caught on a stitch of the sweatshirt’s f
abric. She begins to panic. Her neck immediately erupts with red welts, her forehead bristling with sweat. Okay. Okay. Okay. Breathe, breathe. All she has to do is pull the stitch from the wire without detaching it and setting the explosive off in her hands. 8:52. She breathes deeply, scratches the hives on her neck and left shoulder, then tries to breathe again. She places her hand over her unsteady heart and sighs, then takes one more deep breath, closes her eyes, and lightly tugs on the sweatshirt’s hem. The thread breaks free, the bomb does not explode, and Amelia glances up at the clock once more. 8:54.

  Holding the pipe bomb as far from her chest as her slender arms will allow, she hurries over toward the advertising desk, vacant these last two months since Patsy Walker, the advertising editor, quit. Amelia slowly places the pipe bomb in the unlocked top drawer of the black metal filing cabinet, gently setting the timer for 11:00 a.m., when she knows the student newspaper office will be deserted, as that’s when Mr. Wick has to teach his journalism seminar for juniors and seniors, and all the other student editors are busy in their own classes. The timer beeps once, twice, then a third time, and Amelia nervously slides the drawer closed. She finds the key to the filing drawer on her key ring, slips it into the silver-colored lock, and double-checks it to be sure the cabinet cannot be accidentally opened. There. 8:59. She sighs, grabs her book bag, heaves it onto her shoulder, stands behind the office door, glances through the window, which by now reveals a hallway full of sleepy kids, then walks briskly among the unknowing masses, stepping quickly toward her first-period civics class.