Shadow Man: A Novel

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “Place me, James. Feel my face in your hand. Something in you must know, a tissue, a nerve. How can all those days, months, years vanish from you? I keep asking the doctors, how? Wonderful explanations they give. Did they tell you the one about your mind as a glacier, with fissures and light and some such drivel. They don’t know. Medicine doesn’t know, James.”

  I sip wine. It’s warm and it’s not such a pain sitting in the wet with this lady.

  “Eva. Say my name, James. Eva.”

  “Eva.”

  “I’m going to ask you later what my name is and you’re going to say Eva.”

  “Okay.”

  A surfer battles against the shore waves and paddles through to calmer water. Deep and cold, a swirl beneath him, the unseen power of the earth, a mystery of conspiring elements. Creation in a ball, flung into orbit. The wine is good. The lady pours me another glass. The rain falls hard but we don’t move. She holds my hand. The surfer sits in the sea, the point of his board bobbing like a flash of fin. The lady whispers to me about another time she wants me to remember, and it all sounds wonderful, exciting. I like the rain on my face. It’s cold and I have a chill. I don’t want to move. I want to sit here and finish this bottle of wine, and what’s wrong with that? This is what I know now. I see the glass. I see the wine. I taste. This is who I am. Now.

  “The communists were scattered and scared. They knew …”

  The surfer finds his wave.

  “We thought there’d be tanks, like before, like in ’68 …”

  He’s up.

  “Hardly a shot was fired. We went from city to city. Champagne and barbed wire …”

  The wave lifts quickly, steep, sharp.

  “They were waiting for magic …”

  The surfer slices down the folding water.

  “Democracy and capitalism will save us …”

  Faster he moves.

  “A new vocabulary spread overnight across half a continent …”

  He’s in the curl.

  “A wall fell. New faces with new power. The unimaginable before us …”

  He’s lost.

  “You wrote about it, James. Every day for months …”

  He’s free of the curl, racing along the wave’s last remnant.

  “An era ended. The missiles in their silos. It can happen, the impossible.”

  The surfer rides to shore, standing, he doesn’t fall.

  “What a time, James …”

  He picks up his board and jogs toward a twisted towel in the sand.

  “C’mon. We’re soaked. We have a hotel room down the beach.”

  He takes the towel and walks, shrinking in the distance.

  “Okay, James. What’s my name?”

  I cannot answer her.

  six

  Eva’s going to keep him out tonight. She does that sometimes, tries to spill herself into him, compressing all their years into hours. Maybe it’ll bring him back. Maybe the mention of Prague or Budapest at the right time in the pitch of night will glow across his synapses and become as real to him as Kurt and Vera. I pray for his tangled brain to see. It can happen. There are miracles. A miracle led me to James. He and I are forever entwined.

  Before she died, and what a sad way it was, Vera told me in a letter barbed with notations and thick as a book that she was my mother and Kurt my father. It was a startling revelation; a voice echoing across time. The letter was kept from me for many years. It lay in a taped box beneath a floorboard hidden by a Persian carpet in a small house in New England. I had walked over that carpet all my life and never knew that just below my feet was the story of how I came to be. Secrets, though, like air bubbles, wriggle their way to the surface. When I finally read it, Vera had been dead a long while, but her words, ahhh her words, coiled through me and found home. “This tale, my daughter, is for you.” Is there a sweeter phrase? Page after page, Vera whispered to me. I pieced her story together and made a map of words and memories that led me to James. My half-brother doesn’t know this side of Kurt and Vera. Things changed, were altered back when he was a boy, and by the time he became a man, and his name went from Jim to James, he had no inkling. Why would he? We were orphans in different places, children of worlds that touched briefly and bounced away. The letter told me this. Yet there is still much I do not know. Imagine you have a life but then you discover you have another that lies in the murk of an addled man’s mind. My story lives inside his darkness. James must remember more. I wait. I perch like a blackbird on a branch, patient for lost trinkets and flashes of tin.

  When James is out like this with Eva, I come to his room and sit in the moonlight. The halls are quiet, the deranged sedated and tucked away for the night — it’s amazing how the muddled brain can slumber — and the only sound is the occasional shuffle of nurse shoes on polished floors or pills spilled across a counter, drumming like rain on a roof.

  I read James’s newspaper stories and try to put myself in those moments of history. It will bring us closer if I can experience them the way he did: NO SHOTS FIRED IN CZECH “VELVET REVOLUTION.” SLEDGEHAMMERS, FREEDOM BREAK OPEN BERLIN WALL. ROMANIAN PRESIDENT EXECUTED BY FIRING SQUAD. And my favorite, from a village in the Balkans, A BOY’S JOURNEY THROUGH WAR TO MANHOOD AND, FINALLY, DEATH. I try to imagine beyond the words, like when you read a book and you sense another world happening that doesn’t exist on the page but exists because of the page, and that makes it true and part of the story.

  James’s story is my secret. I almost told it to the owner of the corner market, Earl, who watches me in the aisles and knows I prefer paper to plastic. He has a nasal voice and a lazy eye but he alerts me to specials on pastrami, pickles, toilet paper, and milk. The big chains, says Earl, are killing the small grocer; he may sell out one day to a dry cleaner or a tattoo parlor. Earl’s had offers. We chat about family. Earl’s quite open about such things; he’s the kind of misbegotten soul they invite on afternoon talk shows, earnest and giving of details most would prefer to keep private: Vietnam flashbacks, estranged wives, a son’s suicide, a stint in jail, a recidivist 12-Stepper. He mixes highs and lows like a brawler in a Tom Waits song and sometimes I imagine him sitting in a small apartment and weeping through the night until dawn. But there is something about Earl. With his white smock and pocket of pens, his slow rhythm of ringing up prices on an ancient cash register, Earl has a tenderness I find rare in this world.

  “What’s your brother do?” he asked the other day.

  “He was a famous journalist. He’s retired now.”

  “You see him much?”

  “Every day.”

  “I wish I was that close to my sister.”

  I left it at that. It was a pretty thought.

  I go to James’s window and point my face toward the moon, feeling its crystal, cool light and studying my reflection in the glass: a mirage dressed in white, the circle of my stethoscope shining, my face as faint as fog, my hair pulled back, my deep-set eyes, James’s eyes, shadowed like caves at the forest’s edge. I seem a girl at a dance, a picture in a locket, an image, frozen. I run my fingers over my name tag, tracing the letters and looking out over the city, James’s boyhood city, the city my mother, the “enchanting” Vera, escaped to on a summer night of rainstorms and lightning.

  seven

  “Vera, what’s your story?”

  I yelled into the dark wind of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. Kurt accelerated and the bay pressed down in its arc over us. We raced toward the square of light at the tunnel’s end, the Impala roaring back into the day. I squinted in the sun; a spit of beach in the distance, the gray hulks of navy ships sailing heavy and low toward Norfolk. Vera stood up in the car like a lady general, holding on to the windshield, her black hair blowing as if painted against the sky. She screamed something into the wind, but I couldn’t hear what it was. She sat down and held my hand. Kurt reached for the radio, but Vera slapped him away and laughed and said let the day and the wind and the bay and the birds speak for themselv
es. Kurt shook his head and I sat between them on the front seat as we came off the bridge and the Impala, gas dropping toward E and temperature leaning toward H, rolled onto the sandy plains of Virginia.

  “My story is a long one, Jim.”

  That was all she said. She opened her purse and pulled the rearview mirror toward her, shading on lipstick and eyeliner, smoothing her hair, and disappearing behind her sunglasses like someone incognito. We drove a stretch of highway and came to a road of traffic lights leading toward Virginia Beach. You could smell summer: cotton candy, popcorn, french fries, snow cones, tanning oil, all mingling, metastasizing (a good dictionary word) around us like we were in another place, a new planet. The Jersey Shore near Philly was similar in summer, but it was more exotic in the South; it seemed summer was more at home here, more relaxed and welcoming. Kurt pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought us Slurpees, cola for me, cherry for Vera, and a lime for him. I listened to the people going in and out of the store; they held on to syllables longer, their consonants were softer, their words seemed to float, especially the words of three girls who walked into the 7-Eleven in their bikinis, sand on their brown shoulders, their long hair damp and flat against their backs. Kurt saw me watching.

  “Hey, Jim, why don’t we ask those girls if they want to play miniature golf? There’s all kinds of miniature golf down here. Volcanoes, gorillas.”

  I blushed and sucked on my Slurpee.

  “We can wait for those girls to come out, Jim. They’re probably getting Slurpaaaays, too.”

  “Listen to Kurt with his new accent,” said Vera. “Take me to your plantation, sir.”

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  Kurt and Vera laughed. As we backed up, the girls stood at the counter, their brown fingers sliding coins to a clerk in a red shirt. Kurt turned on the radio again. The Jackson Five. When Michael sang about something as lowly as a rat, it calmed you, made you think of something religious. I closed my eyes, the sun warm on my face and arms, my hair windblown and feeling like straw, the Impala moving slow in the traffic. Kurt’s patience could be measured in centimeters, but this traffic, which would normally have him squirming and cursing, didn’t bother him; he sat there sweating and humming to songs as Vera uncapped silver nail polish and, leaning over me, painted a star, the kind you got for getting an A on an arithmetic exam, on his cheek. Kurt found a parking spot after he bargained with a guy. We pulled the top to the Impala shut and Vera chased me out of the car. She hung a towel in the window and changed into her bathing suit. I thought it would be a bikini, but it wasn’t, it was a sky-blue one-piece that made her legs longer. She put on an old fedora and one of Kurt’s buttondown shirts bought years earlier when he thought he might look for a job with a desk and an air conditioner. He never found one, but I don’t think he searched too hard. I had to admit, I never could have imagined him coming home from work without scratches on his arms and ship rust in his hair. We followed Vera over a small dune through tall, itchy grass to where the sand tapered to the beach. The waves were green and white-tipped, kites snapped in the air, and Vera threw down a blanket near the edge of where the last wave rolled up the farthest.

  “It’s cooler down here.”

  “Tide’s changing. We’ll have to keep moving the blanket.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  I hadn’t noticed before, but Vera had a scar on the side of her upper right thigh. Hard and white, it was the size of a quarter, round and a little ragged, like Pluto through a telescope. Vera held a transistor radio to her ear and Kurt slept facedown on the blanket. She rubbed lotion on his back with her free hand and burrowed her feet into the sand. I walked toward the pier. It was crooked, pilings were missing, and the wood was ancient and dark. It was like a shipwreck without sails; a splintered galleon from a history book. Surfers shot through the pilings, shadowed for a moment, and then zipped with the wave into the sun. Their girlfriends sat on the beach, laughing and squeezing lemons over their hair; maybe it was the southern sun, but the girls here tanned better than the ones up north, the color was even, natural, a second tempting skin. One of them waved to me but I kept moving. The air beneath the pier cooled and I walked on. The dunes slumped closer to the beach, blankets were fewer, and I imagined an unchartered country, a stretch touched only by God. Like at the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston comes upon the Statute of Liberty toppled on the shore; both he and the statue, looking sideways at him from the sand, seem confused, and Heston realizes that the alien planet his spaceship landed on was really earth in the way, way distant future, like starlight shooting backward, and all he ever knew and loved before was gone. Buckets, kids, a woman with a white robe and glass of iced tea waved to a man who stood in the blurry heat of a charcoal fire on the porch of a big house. I looked to the horizon. Vera’s world was out there, the silk bazaars and desert fires and farther east the Nile Delta, where Moses, according to the Bible and Fr. Heaney, was set adrift in a basket. I glanced back toward the pier and saw Vera walking toward me, passing through the shadows, her bathing suit flashing like blue magic.

  “What’s your story, Jim?”

  “It’s a small one.”

  “I left Kurt sleeping. When the wave hits the blanket he’ll wake up quick.”

  Vera laughed, playing it out in her head. She stood beside me. I felt Kurt’s shirt brush my arm. The surf swirled around our ankles. Pelicans raced in dark succession over the ocean, their wing tips inches from the waves; farther out fishing boats waddled silently where the water met the sky, reminding me of tin ducks at a carnival shooting stand. The bay we had crossed earlier was salty, tangy, tamed, almost restful with its bulrush and bone-gray trees, but this ocean was wild and pure and rough, its colors changing with sun and cloud from blue to deep blue to green to the foaming white edge of the wave’s curl. The waves struck the beach and pulled back, rushing out to their deep, hidden source, moving in warm and cool currents, invisible serpents. I ran from Vera and jumped into a wave, my body slicing through the water, feeling the pressure and the tug, the immense weight, and then surfacing, water running off me, shining in the sun, my face warm until another wave knocked and rolled me, my back scraping the sand, stinging and cool, and laughing with my mouth closed beneath the water, surrendering to its power. I walked out, dripping, toward Vera. I shook my wet hair.

  She squealed and pushed me away. We stood looking at each other, smiling; me young and sand-scraped in the light, and Vera, her back to the dunes, her face toward the ocean. What is that word when all seems right, when a moment marks itself in you somewhere and you keep it? Resplendent. My dictionary called it resplendent.

  “Let’s swim to the other side.”

  “You’ve been there.”

  “I’ll go back. You go, too, Jim. See what’s out there. So much. There was a church in Carthage on the cliffs. It had clinging vines and loose stones. The mosaics were fading. In the afternoons an old man would walk up the hill and play piano in the church. I never knew what he was playing, but the notes rolled out of that old church and over the sea and for all I knew they kept going and never quieted. I sat there many afternoons listening to that old man’s music and watching far-off boats. Can you picture it?”

  “Yeah. It’s like in the near sunset, when a guy’s on his stoop, drinking a beer and smoking a cigar and listening to the Phillies on the radio. You can smell the aftershave coming off him and hear his wife inside through the screen door. It’s as if his day is done and for a couple of hours he lives inside that radio.”

  “Those are the things you carry forever, Jim. Those scents and sounds.”

  Vera walked back from the water and sat in the sand. I sat with her. Late-afternoon clouds, white, not threatening, hung before us. Sand crabs skittered; the tide crept up. Vera rubbed her scar.

  “Sometimes it itches. It’s hard like a stone. Feel it.”

  She was right.

  “It’s part of my story, Jim.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.” />
  “I thought you wanted to know.”

  “I do, but a scar like that, I guess, is personal. I just don’t know why we’re on this trip or where we’re going.”

  The man was from Marrakesh. He was not a spice merchant; he was a rich man’s son Vera had met in a tea shop. He said he was a jeweler, but he was a smuggler, a man who traded diamonds and guns across Africa. He was tall and lean with long muscles and he moved, Vera said, as if he never touched the ground. He fed her pomegranates and saffron rice. Vera had been traveling with friends, but she stayed behind in Marrakesh with the man until she found out all of his lies, or most of them, or enough to spoil what was once enticing. She left one night and he came looking. He found her in Casablanca.

  She ran away again and he tracked her down in Rabat, where he shot her with a small pistol on a drunken night; a woman doctor dug out the bullet, cleaned the wound, and stitched her. Vera said she remembered the way the brownish antiseptic mixed with the blood, turning her skin yellow and sepia like a strange vegetable under the steel examining room light. The doctor told her to escape and said Vera didn’t understand that she had become a trapped prize; a woman with fair skin and blue eyes on the North African coast was precious. Like a diamond to be possessed but never loved.

  Vera made her way to Spain and flew home to the Cleveland suburb where her father sold Cadillacs and winter came in hard and the scenery was so changed from Marrakesh that she felt safe, as if delivered to a new shore with no trace of that other world. But the man began appearing, in a mirror, a store window, a distant figure on a sidewalk. She felt him everywhere: the shadow behind her in the movie theater, the stranger with his face hidden by a newspaper in a café. The man, his name was Mounir, hovered but never arrived, as if he wanted to haunt, like a wild dog slinking through tall grass on the African plains before it strikes. Vera said he would kill her; she was sure of it. She ran again.