“You’re here to see Kurt, huh, Jim?”
“Yes, Father. He and that time, the one summer, are the clearest things to me.”
“I know, Jim.”
Father’s cane taps the broken sidewalk. I walk close behind him in case he stumbles. James is at his side. Kurt’s resting place is the third one in from a tree, between Bobby Laughlin, a welder, and Chris O’Boyle, a rookie cop shot and killed one night on patrol. I still cry when I see Kurt’s grave, and I’m crying now, looking at the gray stone, pretty calligraphy around its edges and a cross at its center, laid on this ground before I was born. James kneels and runs a finger across the shallow rivulets of Kurt’s name and dates. He takes off his scarf and polishes in slow circles, a dull gleam rises through the grit. He stands and drapes the scarf over the stone.
“I always felt bad, Jim, that Kurt and your mother weren’t buried side by side. Her family bought their plots years before she met Kurt. She lies over there, near the corner along the fence. You knew this once, but you may have forgotten. You visited her when you were a boy, before you moved away, and you’d sit over her for hours reading her words out of that dictionary of yours. You loved words. You used to try to disguise your sins in big words when you’d come to confession. I guess you thought they didn’t sting as much that way.”
“Do you still read mystery novels, Father?”
“I do.”
Kids walking home from school hurry past the cemetery. Little tilted armies with book bags dangling. James looks toward them and back to the brown grass beneath his feet. The sky feels like snow.
“The day before Kurt died we swam in the ocean beyond where the waves begin to lift and curl. The water is calm out there, Father. We floated and talked. The tide moved deep beneath us. We could see specks of people on the beach, but we couldn’t hear them. Even the seagulls were silent. Kurt told me about the ships he painted and how far they sailed, and he told me to make sure I see the world because he said he wondered what it would be like to be standing on one of those ships as it sailed into a faraway port.”
“You saw a lot of the world, Jim.”
James steps back from the grave. Father holds his one hand. I hold his other. We stand in silence. Lights click on in nearby row houses, silhouettes in windows, dinners on stoves, homework undone. The factory and dock men will be heading home soon, walking through alleys beneath sputtering streetlights, opening doors and listening to voices that will carry them toward sleep. There is peace in the twilight. James’s scarf blows off Kurt’s marker and tumbles across the dead. The scarlet is pretty against the gray. The scarf lifts in the wind, twirling like a bird or a bright rag toward the coming moon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Shadow Man would not have been possible without Sorche Fairbank, my agent, and Chip Fleischer and Roland Pease at Steerforth Press. I thank Peter Holm at Sterling Hill Productions and Kari Howard at the Los Angeles Times for her style and grace with words. A special gratitude goes to Marcella Aigner and Angie Slattery for the wisdom in the stories they have told. And, as ever, my thanks to Clare, Aaron and Hannah.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Fleishman is the Cairo bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, he has covered the revolutions of Arab Spring and wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Libya. He is the author of Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad.
Reading Group Guide for
SHADOW MAN
by Jeffrey Fleishman
Note: Before your group begins discussing Shadow Man, invite each member to take one minute to present his or her general impression of the book, without interruption or comments from the other members. This preamble to group discussion provides an opportunity for everyone to voice their opinion, and does not hinder the discussion that follows.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Describe the relationship between Jim and Kurt.
2. Discuss the narrative points when Vera went from enchanting storyteller to dangerously delusional.
3. What role does Jim’s dead mother play?
4. What does Jim’s journey with Kurt and Vera to Virginia Beach symbolize?
5. How does the relationship between Kurt and Vera affect Jim, if indeed it does?
6. The lady in white hovers at the edge of James’ recollections. What kept her so composed?
7. What do you think of the depiction of early onset Alzheimer’s from James’ point of view? Is this how you you would imagine it to be?
8. Discuss the bonds that held Eva and James together as they chased newspaper stories across the world. Does anything remain of those original bonds?
9. When Eva left James in the next to last chapter, did you think that she would ever return?
10. What part does Alice play in the coming-of-age narrative that is Jim’s only remaining memory?
11. Was there ever a man from Marrakesh, and if so, how much of Vera’s story seems to be true?
12. Are we the sum of our memories, and what happens to us when they’re gone?
13. What are the similarities and contrasts between the central female characters - Vera, Eva and the lady in white?
14. Was the novel redemptive, or in the end were James and those who loved him doomed to a single memory?
Shadow Man: A Novel Page 20