“How long has it been night?”
“Two or three hours.”
I am Jim. She calls me James. When did Jim become James? When did Jim get spots on the tops of his hands, gray hair on his forearms, wrinkles around his eyes, a crick in his neck? When did he age? What was it like? The body pulling ahead of the mind, leaving the mind behind, like a temple in a jungle. This thought disappears, too. Kurt, in that summer he told me to call him Kurt, one night pulled an abacus from his closet. It was old, with painted wooden beads. He’d had it since he was a kid. He said it was simple and exotic, that you could get to infinity by sliding beads. But I slide through the abyss. I am a broken abacus, beads skittering from side to side, numbers not adding up, infinity out there, or me lost in it. The lady kisses me on the cheek and wraps herself around me and I bend to hold her — I don’t know why — and her mouth slides to my neck and warms me as the cold blows over my back and through my hair.
“Get a room.”
The lady and I turn.
“Relax, just kidding. Nice evening. A little chilly, but you two seem cozy. Everything okay?”
“Yes, Officer,” says the lady.
“Vacation?”
“Just out of the city for the weekend.”
“That’s good. Got to escape the grind every so often. Best time to be here, now and in the winter. It’s almost here. I like the night shift in winter. Nobody on the beach. Nobody to cuff, no reports to fill out. None of the crazy shit the summer heat stirs up.”
He steps to the boardwalk and looks over the empty sand to the sea.
“Sometimes, with a full moon, the surfers come. They’re not supposed to, but I like watching them in the night. The cold doesn’t bother those guys. Wet suits. They’re mostly guys, but sometimes in the darkness you’ll hear a girl’s voice in the waves.”
He has hair the color of a threatening sky and a full belly, a round man wearing a blue coat and a silver badge. His polished-brimmed hat rides high on his forehead and his face is meaty, pale, marbled with faint blooms of capillaries. Yet it’s a nice face, inviting, coaxing. The radio on his shoulder coils up from his chest like a snake with a big head. His gun must be under his coat; he’s bulky, rattling with metal and creaking with leather, breathing in the cold air, his green eyes watering, his gloved hands strumming the railing.
“It’ll snow early this year.”
He seems sure. He checks his watch. A big wave breaks.
“It’s lovely, all this, don’t you think?” says the cop. “The cold brings purity. I’ve always thought that.”
The lady, the cop, and I stare at the ocean. His radio crackles.
“Charlie, we got a fire in a barrel out by the school. Probably just kids but you’d better check it out. Over. That Johnson kid. Over. Most likely. Over. On my way. Over.”
The cop looks into the lady’s eyes, glances at me and back to her.
“There’s burning barrels and mischief in the night,” he says, laughing and walking away, becoming one with the darkness.
The lady steps in front of me. “Let’s dance, James.”
She holds both my hands, and then slides one of her hands around my back. I put one arm around her. We stand like a wind vane. Still. I feel foolish. My feet are cold. No one is out. Just us in a circle of light, like a scene in one of those Lizabeth Scott movies Kurt liked so much. Lizabeth in a bedroom, long nightgown, a noise, eyes widen, the mouth tightens, a gun moves through the bedroom shadows toward the light. A scream. A pop. Music wells. Cut to a man in a fedora, smoking on a corner, looking to a window, seeing a silhouette …
The lady shuffles her feet, leans left, and guides me toward her. She shifts right and we do a little spin.
“There is no music, James. But there is the sea. Listen.”
The sea is dull, a muffled roar trapped in a shell, distant, but rhythmic. I want to walk into the sea to drown this void, this not knowing. I know enough to know that I don’t know. I am cognizant of my ignorance, that loss of self, except for that brief long-ago time (how long ago?) that I suppose now plays over and over; it’s even playing now, dancing with this lady, who I don’t know, but who says I do, who insists I do, but I do not. She whispers in my ear: Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Tirana, Trieste, Belgrade, Warsaw, Bucharest, détente, terrorists, Iraq, Iran, jihad, martyrs, suicide bombers, lemons, Sorrento, bandoliers, war crimes, mass graves, memorials, flames wisping from the earth, Montenegro, gunrunners, islands, sex, love, flowers, secret notes, a trip to Tunis, moonlight, pain, blood in a taxi, a baby lost, white linen, language, the meaning of words.
“Some things, James, are indescribable.”
“Like what?”
“Hope.”
We dance to the edge of the light. She stops, takes my hand. A dog runs out of the darkness, through the light, under the boardwalk railing and onto the beach. A young man follows in a sweater and a white scarf flowing like a ribbon. He nods and descends to the beach, running after the dog. The dog stops, bending down, leaning back, ready to spring. The man pulls a Frisbee from his sweater. It glows. Green. Like a spaceship, or a deep-sea creature. He throws it. The dog runs. Sand flies. The Frisbee soars, hovers, and is snatched from the black by the dog, who hangs briefly suspended over the waves; the sound of teeth clicking plastic. The dog runs to the man. The Frisbee spins again. The lady smiles. She rubs my cheek with a warm hand as if my face is an ancient genie lamp.
“One more night, James. Let’s go to the hotel.”
fifteen
Eva called again.
They drank wine, danced on the boardwalk, but nothing came back to James. Eva is upset. She is measured, but upset. She is learning that love has limits against the cruel designs of science and genetics. We spend most of our lives in between, I suppose, veering from one to the other until we are shriveled, put in the ground, or are burned and scattered in gray streaks across shorelines and valleys. My father, not my real father, but the man who adopted and raised me, Jeremiah, taught philosophy at a New Hampshire community college. His worldview was drawn from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Dinner table chat was brooding, recantations of misery pulled from that day’s newspaper: starvation, coups, wars, plagues, and death. It was there, every day, the great Hobbesian creed played out with centrifugal force and written in the black ink of headlines. My mother, not Vera, but Connie, Jeremiah’s wife, was a part-time nurse and social worker, and her inclinations were less foreboding than her husband’s. Things, people, the planet and souls, yes, even winos, druggies, and murderers, could be redeemed. Saved.
“How can you wake up with no belief in the power of the human spirit to change things?” she’d say at the table.
“Tell that to villagers burned and singed, blistered by napalm.”
I ate quickly when I was a child. One day I’d want to be a saint; the next a poet stewing in grim verse, like Rimbaud. I went into nursing. Maybe it was seeing Connie all those years in her folded white hat helping people in need. I don’t know. I was good in science as a teenager, intimate with mechanisms, precise in biology, drawn to the frog in the jar and the clues beneath the scalpel’s cut. I wanted structure and, not liking weapons or the prospect of barracks in distant lands, enrolled in nursing school and graduated a woman in white. I moved to Boston. My life was work, books, an occasional movie, an occasional party, brief affairs with surgeons and pharmacists; it’s amazing how self-contained, how incestuous, the world of medicine is. My days were parsed into specific hours, my hand reaching through the dark to turn on a light to read until I could sleep again. Years went by.
I was working the night shift when Jeremiah and Connie, after returning from a party where everyone had to wear a T-shirt with their favorite Hobbesian quotation (Connie, the quiet, compassionate rebel, refused and chose a peace symbol), phoned and told me to come home for the weekend. They sounded nervous but assured me no one was ill; they said they had something they wanted to give me, something that should have been given years before. I couldn
’t imagine what it was, and, when Friday came, I left Boston in a flash, down the turnpike and through a dusk of autumn leaves. I opened the door to the Tudor house on Mill Lane and found Jeremiah and Connie sitting in the soft light beneath the kitchen table, where for so many years of my childhood we played Risk and Clue. They were holding hands. They turned and Jeremiah slid a worn envelope toward me. Connie was crying. I unfolded the letter.
“This tale, my daughter, is for you.”
It took more than two hours to read. Jeremiah and Connie, who knew its contents, never moved. The only sounds were turning pages and wind at the back door. I finished the last page and folded my mother’s words back into the envelope. I could feel tears on my face. I was born and taken from Vera and carried away. I was processed and fingerprinted, a picture of my infant face stapled to a folder. I was adopted and given a name. I was loved. Connie made tea and told me Vera died when I was six and that the letter arrived a year later through the adoption agency. There never was a right time to give it to me. Once when I was sixteen, and once when I was twenty-three, Jeremiah lifted it from its hiding place beneath the floorboards. But he never could put it into my hands. He didn’t want the taint of an unknown ghost mother on our lives. That was selfish. I wanted to yell how selfish that was. I couldn’t. I wasn’t angry. I should have been, but nothing welled inside me, except the mystery of Vera and the revelation of James. I do not hold it against them, not too much anyway, the secret Jeremiah and Connie kept. I was their daughter before I could crawl. They bandaged, fed, and schooled me. They costumed me for Halloween, drove me to summer jobs, and held me through bad dreams. Could Vera have done more? But I remind them at least once a year now that if they had told me earlier, I could have found James before his mind crumbled. These words sting them but this is their penance. I am entitled to that. They are good people, they really are, dark and bright angels arguing over the world’s ills, clinging to their love, a strange communion, like oil and water. I cherish them. But Vera’s letter was vindication. There was something in me during childhood, not gnawing but ever-present, that suggested I was in the wrong place, like a picture tilted oddly on a wall. Where this feeling came from I do not know. We carry instincts into the world, woven into us before birth, intuitions there before learning. I never expressed this, never told Jeremiah and Connie of my faint estrangement to their love, but I felt the razor’s edge of identity when I read Vera’s letter.
What a letter it was, 133 pages; some written in longhand, some typed; some pages flowing with ornate penmanship, others a jumbled, dizzying thicket of words. I read of Egypt, deserts, souks, the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, horses and tents, ablutions, drinking wine and making love in whitewashed bungalows with sea-blue shutters. It wasn’t a letter. It was an autobiography of a mother. My mother. The man from Marrakesh was there, a lover at first, but growing more sinister as Vera’s story unfolded and her alphabet turned blockish with demons, yes, tiny devils drawn and lurking between q’s, g’s, and o’s.
Page 107: “He was there today, but I couldn’t see him, although I spotted him yesterday, slipping around the corner behind me, like a breath, a wicked breath. He will kill me. But when? I am an antelope; he a lion. The watering hole is shrinking. No one believes me. That’s because he’s clever, clever like the night. He will find me here, even in this place where the white shoes squeak and the windows are crisscrossed with wire. My daughter, wherever you are, believe what others do not. He is here. Omnipresent. Dust gathering and dispersing in an ancient wind. How old are you, my daughter? I do not know. They’ve taken my calendars, my maps. They even took you. You never suckled from me. They laid you blue and bloody on my belly, my legs splayed, held apart by shiny metal. I felt your life, your heat. You seeped into me. And then they carried you away, out a swinging door. Down the hall. Squeaking. If I can escape here I will find you. I will draw new maps and find you …”
It is not coincidence that I am a nurse and James is a man in need of a nurse. The world has joined what should have been bonded all along. The hand of God reaching through His sea of mortals has set something right, or maybe it’s just the power of nature to reunite blood. I am the woman in white. I stand guard over my half brother. He is fading, I know. He doesn’t know me. I haven’t told him yet. I haven’t told Eva, either. James doesn’t know that his skin, his pigment, the color of his eyes, the way he dips his head to the left when he listens are all me, too. I wonder sometimes that others don’t see the obvious.
In the morning, when I go into his room and open the curtains, I wonder if this will be the day that the sunlight hits him just right and brightens what’s dark in him. I know better. I am a nurse; I know biology, the sciences of decay. I chart with precision. But we can hope. People wake from years-long comas; drowning men are pulled from the sea.
Vera’s letter. Page 121: “My daughter. What have they named you? There is something you must know. Something to make you complete. You have a brother. I guess he is a half brother, since you are my only child. His name is Jim. He is thin the way boys are thin, unformed, knees, elbows, and arms, but you can see where the muscles and lines will be. Boys are like that, growing from the inside out. His mother died. But his father is your father. Jim reads the dictionary. All the time. He slips big words in, so you have to watch. A conversation is going along and then, out of nowhere, a strange word warbles out of his mouth. It’s cute. Jim is cute. I’ve lost him. I’ve written him letters, but have heard nothing. His last name is Ryan. He’s from Philadelphia. I don’t know if he ever believed me about the man from Marrakesh. Things ended quickly with us. I don’t know when, or if, you’ll ever get this letter. I’m looking at all the pages now; it’s certainly grown into a very, very long letter. A confession? An apology? I keep it in a folder. The people here are nice that way. Time, as I mentioned earlier, is vague to me. I can’t seem to grasp a minute, and I don’t know if the minutes are flying past, or dripping by, one slow drop at a time. But Jim will be out there. He may be a lot older, become someone much different than who I remember. But I remember him well. His hair going every which way in that Impala. His face tan. His diving into waves and laughing, and the way he looked at me sometimes, like I was a bird flown in from a distant wind. Sometimes he would smile and look down, bashful, as if he couldn’t figure me out, even with all his vocabulary. He liked the Beatles. The White Album, if I remember correctly, was his favorite. That is Jim.
“And now I have to tell you about your father. His name was Kurt. He painted ships and played tennis. It was in the morning I lost him. I think just before dawn; the air had that speckled, fuzzy grayness. It is a conspiring time when night meets the coming day. Things appear not as they are. Nothing is certain in twilight. You will learn this. Kurt was in the twilight, but there was another shadow commingling, too. You know, if you’ve read this letter, who that shadow was. He was there. I know it. He was moving behind Kurt, slinking like he did, like he did so many times, like a spirit, a jinn, but this time he was so much closer, there in the twilight with Kurt and me. Kurt didn’t see him, because as I told you, he was behind Kurt. I reached into my bag. It was a big macramé purse. I felt the handle. The next thing I knew, light had filled the room. Men with dark suits and radios surrounded me. They kept asking me questions. Writing things with their little pencils …”
sixteen
Vera’s eyes locked on mine. The crack of the door sent a blindfold of light across her face, like in those horror movies when the girl, usually a virgin or a babysitter, hears a sound downstairs in a big house on a windy night. The camera moves with the stealth of a spider, capturing the girl’s darting, spooked eyes, black doll’s eyes, while a tree branch scratches at the window and dead leaves blow in a courtyard. Vera looked to the gun on the nightstand, reached for it, but then must have recognized me. Her hand retracted under the white sheet and she curled around Kurt, who was in a deep sleep, his head tilted toward the open curtains to the balcony and the sea.
“Go to b
ed, Jim,” came Vera’s voice from the darkness.
I closed the door to Room 501 and tiptoed back to 503. I sensed somebody in the hall, just around the corner, but I heard no key slide and figured it was Alice’s gimpy uncle walking his night rounds, counting bars of soap and bottles of shampoo, inspecting shower curtains in vacant rooms, fixing the housekeeper’s cart, ordering more toilet paper, tinkering with the hidden machinery of the hospitality industry. I went inside and closed the door. Turning on the TV; turning it off. Flicking through the Bible and looking under the bed to see if an earlier guest had left something of value, some clue to bring two strangers together. A hotel room is a prison cell when you can’t sleep. The breeze billowed the muslin curtains; they seemed like big white lungs in the darkness, filling and collapsing, breathing. I went to the balcony.
“Out wandering, boy?”
Alice sat staring at the ocean through the railing.
“What are you doing?”
“Counting waves. Four hundred and seventy-three. Shouldn’t leave your door open. Don’t know who could come and gitcha in the night. My daddy says at hotel conventions managers tell stories of all the strange, unexplainable things that happen in their hotels. My daddy figures hundreds of people a year disappear from hotel rooms. Just vanish, like they were kidnapped by space aliens.”
She turned toward me, an ember like a firefly lighting her face.
“You wanna hit?”
“You Baptist girls sure smoke a lot of dope.”
“Tonight’s my night off.”
“Who’s at the front desk? Your uncle?”
“No. This guy Slim. Daddy knows him from church. He was gonna be a preacher but didn’t have the calling.”
“The calling?”
“The gift.”
She sucked again; the glow around her face brightened.
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