The light was warm over the kitchen table. A sixty-watt yellow glow that obscured the exactness of things not directly in the light; they lingered in the shadowy edges the way actors stand in the wings before a cue leads them into the floodlights. I could hear rain falling in the alleys. It rattled over our stoop and set the neighborhood dogs running. They barked close and then distant and then I heard children sloshing near the manhole covers that bubble up when it storms. Lightning flashed, but there wasn’t much thunder and soon the storm passed, leaving soaked kids and a coolness behind. I left Kurt and Vera in the kitchen and walked down the alley to St. Jude’s. The streets were slick and pure, black mirrors reflecting the gray ghosts of clouds racing overhead in the wind and, every now and then, a break in the clouds and a glimmer of moon. The rain had cleaned the dust from the church’s stained-glass windows; I studied the deep, rich colors of the saints, the artistry of their beards and hands and their eyes, the way they followed you, watching you from up there, frozen, but at night, after a rain, they seemed alive. I walked to the front of the church; water poured from the drain spouts and made mud beneath the holly bushes. The stairs were slippery, the railings rusty.
Father Heaney’s head was bowed in the rectory window. He was likely reading one of his mystery novels. He once told Kurt they cleared his head after tending the sick and hearing confessions littered with “misdemeanors and a few felonies from the unexpected.” Russet-haired with a pink Irish face, Fr. Heaney had given me my first communion years earlier. There is a lot to think about in that second when Jesus hovers before you, crisp and hard and then softening on your tongue and melting into you and becoming part of you in a slow dissolve as you cross yourself and walk back to your pew, tasting cardboard and grain, but knowing it’s Jesus who rose from the dead to save your soul. I like that moment of believing. Fr. Heaney told Kurt — he was always pulling Kurt aside after Saturday-evening mass — that the act of communion was “transcendence of the spirit.” Transcendence was one of my first dictionary words. Transcendence will lead you through the dictionary, which is really a book of clues, to spirit, revelation, and redemption. The only problem with communion was that you had to go to confession first, whisper your sins through a web of cheesecloth to the silhouette of Fr. Heaney, who knew who you were no matter how hard you tried to disguise your voice. Once I tried a Peter Lorre imitation and Fr. Heaney laughed and said: “Jim, just give it to me straight.” I didn’t tell him all my sins. Some of them belonged to me and not to God.
I was going to knock, but I left Fr. Heaney alone with his mystery novel. The city was quiet, its great energy washed and calmed by the rain. Dogs were rooting in the garbage of a blown-over trash can, and I walked home and stepped up the stoop and into the kitchen. Kurt and Vera were drinking vodka and lemonade, sitting across from each other like two poker players; Kurt cagey and Vera garrulous, making you wonder if she had a full house or a handful of nothing. They weren’t drunk but they were happy.
“When you hit a backhand, Vera, your body flows in one long twist. People think a forehand is easier to hit than a backhand, but I disagree. A backhand is more natural, and much prettier when hit correctly. It’s like opening up your wings to fly.”
Forty-six words. Kurt had spoken forty-six words. A paragraph. Without stopping. It might have been a record.
“Teach me to hit a backhand, Kurt.”
“One day, maybe.”
“Now.”
“It’s dark and there’s no court.”
“In the alley.”
Tennis was sacred to Kurt, and Vera was asking him to hit in the alley, which I suspected may have been sacrilege. Kurt sat for a minute. He sipped his lemonade and vodka. He got up and left the room, and I figured this was the end of Vera. But Kurt returned with a tennis racquet (not his best one) and two cans of balls (old). He walked into the alley.
“Jim, get down there. Vera, come here.”
He gave her the racquet. She slipped between his arms. Kurt bent her body and taught her the flow of the backhand. Vera hit wet balls down the alley. I chased them and threw them back. She was laughing and Kurt was telling her to concentrate and to pretend she was lifting into flight. One time she did and the ball zipped down the alley with topspin, water streaming off it like a shooting star in a telescope. I ran after it into the dark, my breath and heart beating harder, my sneakers soaked, a smile breaking across my face. The whole neighborhood was sleeping except the three of us and when I turned with the soggy ball in my hand, Kurt and Vera shimmered like cutouts in the night. As I walked closer, I heard their voices and for a moment pretended that Mom was home and nothing had changed. Another rainstorm rolled in and Vera and I went running for the house while Kurt jumped on the stoop and back off again, juggling two balls in puddles beneath the sputtering streetlight like some crazy kid or a guy with a night pass to the carnival.
two
There’s light through the window shade. It’s morning, or perhaps some luminary trick. I’m lying on my back like a corpse, waiting for what, I don’t know. I think something’s supposed to happen. It seems to me there should be sounds by now, some shape moving toward me. I try to remember my name. I can’t, but I know I am somebody; I can count my fingers. Is every day like this? I don’t know. I know Kurt and Vera by heart. They live inside of me, and I know that they were real. I can still hear them. The shade is bright with light and someone, a woman in white, is saying, “Good morning, James.” I must be James because she’s pulling down my sheet and propping me up on a pillow. She hands me a glass of water. It seems like this scene has happened a million times, but I can’t recall what happens next. The woman in white opens a drawer and rattles things; she combs my hair and holds a mirror up. An old man looks back. Not old, entirely. Maybe fifty or fifty-two. Lines fan out from the eyes, but the face is sharp, perhaps a bit slack under the chin. The hair is gray and black, the color of a sweater Kurt used to wear, but Kurt’s is not the face I’m looking at, although there is a resemblance. The man in the mirror, not a bad-looking guy really, seems lost, as if he’s trying to remember where he put the car keys, or how he ended up at the bank when he was aiming for the grocery store. I look at the woman in white. Then to the mirror. “That’s you, James. Hurry up, we’ve got to get you ready. Eva is coming today.” I can’t recall who Eva might be, maybe another woman in white. Flowers sit in a vase on a table near the bed, and there’s a little desk in the corner under the window. The desk is covered in papers and books. “Are you going to write today, James?” I don’t know. Is that what I do? The woman in white pours me juice and hands me a pill. I seem to know what to do, so this must have happened a million times, although if it did, the woman in white should know I prefer grapefruit juice to orange juice. Prefer comes from preferential. The woman in white pulls up the shade, and for a moment she disappears in the light that rushes into the room. “A new day, James.” I guess it is.
“Where am I?”
“You’re where you’ve been for the last two years. St. Jude’s home.”
“Is this heaven?”
The woman in white laughs as if I’ve made a joke, but I feel completely serious.
“No, James, this is earth.”
“What city?”
“Philadelphia.”
“Philadelphia.”
“You were born here, not far from where you’re sitting right now, if you look out that window across the rooftops and the steeples. There’s not as many steeples as there used to be, with churches moving out to the suburbs and leaving us in a city without God.”
“God is a concept by which we measure our pain. John Lennon said that.”
“Well, I don’t know about John Lennon, but seems like a little of that memory of yours is kicking in. Might be one of the good days.”
“John Lennon was a Beatle. The best one in my opinion, although Paul had a gift for melody. The others I can’t remember. Who’s Eva?”
“You know who Eva is, James. Think.”
A man, a doctor, slips into the room and asks me questions and writes things on a clipboard. He says I have a far-back but not close memory; my childhood vivid, my adulthood dormant, colorless. What I see, witness, experience one day disappears the next, like that shiny plastic paper I wrote on as a kid; when you lifted the paper off the inky board, whatever you had drawn was gone so you could begin anew. There are, apparently, endless analogies for what’s happening to my shriveling mind. A small part of my brain resembles a glacier with deep recesses sunlight cannot penetrate. He says it’s like when ice climbers descend into a fissure and the light dims as they dangle on ropes in the darkness. The doctor says there will be fewer fissures of light, and eventually all will be black, except for an occasional flash of unexplained lightning that may revive a memory for a few seconds or maybe an hour, but it doesn’t matter because it won’t last and the memory won’t be remembered anyway. Confetti in the wind; a shattered mosaic; these are other examples he uses. He brims with metaphor. The doctor is heavyset with a broad face and curly brown hair that glows in the window light. He speaks quietly but in a determined, uninterrupted flow, like a book on tape, or a man telling you interesting facts between train stops. He is intrigued by me or, more precisely, my case; I am younger than the ashen-faced droolers lingering in hallways of piss and peppermint and that antiseptic scent that makes the floors sticky. That’s what excites him, my youth. I am, he says, very young “for such depletion.” Usually, a mind in my state is seventy or seventy-five years old, but I have somehow “depleted” earlier and this concerns the doctor, who says it’s happening more and more as baby boomers age; a whole generation dangling in the dark. He says he suspects “environmental causes mixed with the stresses of modern life that somehow, in its technology, has done something to the mind.” He speaks of synapses, brain circuitry, and promising drugs that have done wonders with rats. I have a headache. I want to ask him a question but I don’t. I just sit in my powder smell, staring at the flowers until he leaves. What is there to say about lost ice climbers?
“Do you want one of your books on photography, James? You like those.”
Does the woman in white ever go home, I wonder.
I shake my head and she leaves the room. I go to the table. It’s messy with Philadelphia Inquirers, books (Emerson, Updike, Edward Weston), pens (Uni-balls), and notebooks scrawled with pictures, words, and stray, strange symbols. On one page “James” is written one thousand times in minuscule letters as if with a rat’s paw. On other pages paragraphs seem to lift out of nowhere as if they arrived uninvited, without context. One notebook is full of stories copied exactly from the Inquirer, except for the bylines, which all read “James.” I am James. I write the name James; the penmanship is the same. These are my notebooks. There’s a box on the table. I open it. There’s a stack of newspaper clippings inside, most from the Los Angeles Times. I pull the top one out. It’s dated September 12, 2001. The headline reads TERRORISTS ATTACK NEW YORK, PENTAGON. Fireballs and huge blossoms of smoke roll out of two buildings that look like silver pillars in a war without soldiers. Under the picture there’s a story written by James Ryan. There’s that name James again. I pull other clippings from the box. They are all written by James Ryan; some go back twenty years. I am James Ryan. I write for newspapers. Do I still? If this is me I’ve been to Prague and Budapest, Baghdad and Tehran, and many other places I don’t remember. But these are documents and datelines; they don’t lie, don’t appear mysteriously out of folders; no, they are real. There are pictures with the stories. One is of a crowd in the snow, stony faces peeking through a gray dusk dotted with ripped umbrellas, raised gloved fists, and a husky man with a full mustache and a bullhorn suspended above the crowd, transfixed in twilight, his eyes like dark fire. The caption identifies the man as Lech Walesa. I know that name, but I don’t; who is that name? I stare at the face, run my fingers over it, but he is meaningless to me, a stranger.
Another picture shows bearded men in the desert, bandoliers crisscrossing their chests, their faces hard and thin, their white teeth flashing, all of them standing in the back of a pockmarked pickup truck. They seem a ragged army of bank robbers or castaway nomads in the desert. The caption says they are mujahideen fighting American forces in a place called Anbar. I study their faces, too. But nothing comes. How can it not come? My name is there in ink. James Ryan. James Ryan was in Anbar with wild, bearded men. How does one forget that?
My head hurts. I close the box. I pick up another notebook. Pages and pages filled with spirals drawn in red, black, and blue ink; they look like twisters and tornadoes, storms whirling across paper. Another notebook is full of noses. Drawings and drawings of noses, fat, slim, long, bulbous, pert noses. They remind me of when I was a boy with Kurt and we went to a Halloween store to try on masks and I picked out a big waxy nose attached to black glasses and bushy eyebrows. Kurt said I looked like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. Why can I remember Jerry Lewis and not Budapest?
I pick up the Emerson book and sit on my bed. I don’t read it. I hold its worn hard cover and let the sunlight warm me. I see steeples out the window, crosses pricking the sky, sneakers draped over phone lines. It seems familiar to me, as if out there on those streets part of me wanders. I step closer to the window. I am suspended over the city. I see a bridge, a twist of river, row houses, pigeons, laundry on rooftops, a silver train silent in the distance, racing beyond the car traffic and out of sight, so sleek and beautiful. There’s a park to the left. The leaves are yellow, plum, and brown. It must be the last days of autumn; I imagine I can hear the fallen leaves scratching the street, spinning in crinkly coils in the alleys. I try to go back to that last image, but it’s gone; my thoughts are ether, burning one brilliant moment and then vanishing. Perhaps they return, but how can I know.
I hear shoes squeaking. I turn from the window and see a woman in white. She smiles and steps into the room. There is someone behind her. The woman in white smiles, turns, and leaves the room. The lady standing near the window with me has dark hair, black, I think, but I can’t say for sure — sunlight plays tricks with color. Her face is sharp and pale, not sickly pale, but radiant, as if lit from inside. Her eyes are aluminum blue; her lipstick is red, but a quiet red; her hands are the long hands of a magician, or maybe a seamstress or a sculptor. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a paper scribbled with ink. She unfolds it; it makes no sound. She looks at me, then at the paper. She reads:
The world is changing around us. The tanks, the placards, the snow and winter’s bite, a revolution moving like a ripple through water. I love you. I love this hotel. Outside, the streets are finally quiet. It is nearly dawn. The last protestor is clopping home. You sleep in your clothes; I carve you from the darkness. I write another story. Can you hear the keystrokes? Dawn is an hour or two away, and soon we’ll be off again into history …
She
folds the paper and slides it back into her purse. She puts her hands on my face, her thumbs skimming gently beneath my eyes. Her perfume I do not know. She looks hard into my eyes, studies them, as if something is written on them, a language or thoughts to decipher. Her hands slide from my face, brush my shoulders, and withdraw. I look at her, maybe the way a man looks at a map from another country. She sighs.
“You don’t remember that, do you? You wrote those words in 1989. In Prague, after Havel led them through the streets. James, you must remember. They are your words, in your hand, to me. I was the one sleeping in my clothes in the night. Don’t you remember how we laughed about working so hard that we slept in our clothes and woke up wrinkled.”
She steps closer and whispers into my ear.
“Sometimes we slept without our clothes. You must remember, James, the snow falling outside. Who am I, James?”
I want to know who she is, but I do not.
“I am Eva. The girl you met when the world changed.”
three
I am the woman in white.
He doesn’t know my name; doesn’t remember my face. Every day he asks: “Are you the woman in white from yesterday? I think there was one yesterday.” I listen to Eva tell him those stories; what a time it must have been, on the brink of so much. How can he not know this? He is young and handsome, the way men get when they start to gray, an angular classicism. His mind shouldn’t be so decrepit. These other drones in here, okay, they’ve slipped away. I see them, blank and ghost-eyed, fortunate their bodies move to permutations other than thought. Or is it? I don’t know. But he is younger and should not be so lost.
Shadow Man: A Novel Page 2