“You want to go inside now?”
Clarke looked at the surrounding plants, the pot he was working in when Jimmy arrived. “I’d rather stay out here. This is where I’m most at peace.”
Jimmy put his hands into the pockets of his coat. The rental-car keys there, his sunglasses, the cold metal L.
“I’ve never said anything, Jimmy.” Clarke’s eyes were wet. “I’ve been quiet.”
“I believe you, Chip.”
“I’ve been quiet.”
Jimmy nodded. He watched Clarke’s hand tremble as he lifted his cigarette, Clarke’s lips reaching, desperate for it.
Jimmy’s hand tightened in the pocket of his coat. Everyone he saw, he was seeing for the last time.
4
Dickie had told her everything. She’d wanted to leave and he had told her that she couldn’t, that the Sons would find her, so she’d climbed up onto the roof to get away from him. He could hear her up there, pacing, the boards creaking in the high ceiling.
He took a couple of sedatives, drained a bottle of wine, knowing that it would be a long time before he swallowed another pill, another drink. He turned on all the lights in her work space, sat with her photos, her brother’s postcards, the picture of her father. A final impression of Henry March, Henry Gladwell, the man fading, the photo fading, black and white and gray.
At one point he thought he saw Mary Margaret sitting on the sofa at the other end of the work space. At one point he thought he saw the security guard from the bank. This could be the sedatives. This could be the alcohol. This could just be what he carried with him now, the company he would keep.
In a shoe box he found the pictures that Henry March had taken when Hannah was a girl. She’d told him about these, photos of San Francisco meant to alleviate her fear of nuclear war. Dickie could see the first stirrings of her work in them, shots of buildings standing solid against the sky, or fixed among the uncertainties of human motion, blurred pedestrians passing. She had her father’s eye, his interest in the periphery, the movement at the edges of a frame.
He had told Hannah everything except how he felt that he understood her father now, his ledger. What happened when you took an accounting of your sins, a book filled with the names of the dead and damaged. Dickie could have his own ledger. He could account for his own names. He could commit to paper what he had done. They weren’t so different, he and Henry March. He wondered what he would find in Mexico. What happened to men like them.
You could still run.
This was Father Bill’s voice, coming from the couch behind him. Dickie doesn’t turn, he just listens. This could be the sedatives. This could be a dream, though he doesn’t think it’s a dream. It could just be Bill because Bill is who he talks to, Bill’s voice is the voice he hears now when he’s alone in a room.
You know how to run, Bill says. You could get out of this. Cut your losses.
Dickie lights a cigarette. There’s not much left to cut.
You’d be surprised, Bill says. There’s always more. But you want to find this man.
Yes.
And if it’s him?
Then they can have him.
This group? These killers?
Yes.
You’ll trade him for her? She won’t go along with it.
Dickie places the photo of Henry March in the center of the table, surrounded by the photos March had taken, the city twenty years in the past. Making him solid again, a man in a time and place, surrounded, visible. Willing March’s image not to fade entirely, not just yet.
But then, Bill says, I suppose she doesn’t have to know.
* * *
Everyone had lied. Dickie, her father, Ginnie, who could not have shared a bed, shared a life with that man without knowing something.
That man. Hannah thought of Henry as someone else now, a stranger moving through her memories. She stood on the roof of her studio, watching plane lights blink across the blue-black sky. Everyone had lied.
Your father shaves in the morning, leaning over the bathroom sink. The mirror fogging from the hot water pouring from the tap. His glasses sit on the edge of the basin, their lenses clouded with steam. His face appears in the mirror, pulling the razor down across his cheek, creating a pink trail in the cloud of white foam.
Your father dresses in his bedroom, shirt, slacks, socks, shoes. Looping his tie in the mirror. A man’s secret, the intricate sleight-of-hand that leads to a tight knot at the throat. Combing his still-wet hair. The chemical-sweet smell of aftershave and hair tonic. Humidity from the shower and sink, warm weight in the air.
Your father eats his breakfast at the dining room table. He takes a lunch your mother packed in a small brown paper bag. He kisses your mother, your brother. He kisses you, just above the left ear, his aftershave and cigarette smell strong for a close moment and then gone as he walks down the short hallway, out the front door.
How could she reconcile her memory of her father with this life she’d been told he’d led? These things he may have done, may have been a part of. This man in the morning; this man in the station wagon beside her, driving along the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. This man in the photo outside the Merchants Exchange, staring into the camera lens, saying good-bye.
She’d gone up on the roof because she needed to get away from Dickie, from what he’d told her. He wouldn’t let her walk back out onto the street, but she had to go somewhere, so she climbed and was relieved when he didn’t follow.
The things he said her father had done. The things he, Dickie, said that he’d done. A man dead in a bank in Irvine; a man dead in an office in Portland. A woman he’d been involved with, a girlfriend, dead in a car, shot by the police. He’d told her these things to establish his legitimacy, she guessed, so she would think of him as a reputable source.
She could climb onto the adjoining roof and make her way down to the fire escape at the far end. She could go to the police. She could run. She could call Bert. She thought about Dickie’s descriptions of the members of this group he’d been with and tried to remember having seen any of them on the street, around the gallery, in one of her countless photos of kids and buildings throughout the city.
Or maybe no one had lied. Maybe Dickie was crazy, maybe he had escaped from an institution somewhere, had just happened to wash up on the bus-stop bench. A drug addict, an alcoholic. She’d taken him in and confided things and he’d turned them back on her, warped and distorted. He was playing through some dark fantasy that now included her and her history, her secrets.
He’d described her father’s handwriting and that could be a coincidence, a lucky guess, but she remembered the ledger from their cross-country drive, the nights in the motel rooms and her father recording all sorts of minutiae about his camera and film and shutter speeds, apertures and light. It was the first time she’d ever seen those terms and she’d never forgotten how they looked on the page.
Dickie had listed the towns and cities they’d visited on their trip in exact order. Charleston, Lexington, Louisville. He knew the names of the roadside motels where they’d stayed, every one, and she knew them, too. He had an astonishing memory and she’d never forgotten.
He’d said the Apple Tree Lodge in Carmi, Illinois, six dollars, and when he spoke she saw her father writing the same words in his book in that motel room and she knew that her life was not what she’d thought it was.
* * *
She climbed back down the ladder as the sun rose. A few lights on in her studio, in the gallery. It was so quiet that at first she thought he was gone, but then she smelled coffee coming from the kitchen.
“I found half a can in the back of a cabinet,” he said. He held up the coffee container. He had to prove everything now. He was standing at the counter, wearing the same clothes as the night before, the burgundy cardigan. His hair had dried to a high frizz. The teakettle was on the h
ot plate, the heating coil turning pink, then red.
She took off her jacket and draped it over the stool by her worktable.
“I can’t go,” she said.
“You can’t stay.”
“What if Thomas comes?”
“You won’t be here. If you stay, they’ll take you.”
“This group.”
“Yes.”
“This is insane.”
“Yes.”
“This is how they teach you to talk?” she said. “Under questioning? Yes, yes, yes, yes.” She grabbed her cigarettes from the edge of the counter. She’d been dying for one all night but hadn’t been willing to come back down just for that.
“What if you’re lying to me now?” she said. “What if you take me right to them? Isn’t that possible?”
“It is.”
“How do I know you won’t do that?”
“You don’t.”
The teakettle began to whistle. Dickie turned off the hot plate, lifted the kettle, poured the steaming water into a mug on the counter.
“How long do we have?” she said. “Until they lose patience with you. Until they come.”
He lifted the mug, crossed to her. “I don’t know. Not long.”
After a moment she took the mug, held it with both hands, absorbing its warmth.
“What if it’s him, down there?” she said. “Then you give him to these people? Knowing what they want to do?”
He didn’t say anything. He was still standing a few feet in front of her, arms at his sides.
“And if it isn’t true,” she said, “then you finish your job and go on to the next one?”
He didn’t say anything.
“And what if there’s no answer?” she said. She wanted to throw her coffee at him. “What if there’s nothing there?”
He looked down at her hands, his.
“What if there isn’t,” he said. “Yes. I don’t know.”
5
They took everything worth taking. Notes, drafts of books he was working on, interview transcripts. His pills sometimes, his crystals. Sometimes not taken, just moved. He’d come out of the bathroom and things would be different. This thing here, that thing there. Letting him know what they were capable of.
They never touched the guns, the ammunition. They left the bedroom alone. This did not seem strange to him. When the time came, they wanted a fair fight. They would not kill an unarmed man. That was something they left to others, that they had left to him, originally.
He sees the Chinese man in the liquor store reach for the telephone on the wall and so he raises his gun, fires.
He was looking for a particular notebook but of course it was not where he’d left it. The notebook in which he’d written Walter’s story when Walter first told him. He read through that notebook often, as Walter’s story was similar to his own in many ways, and it helped lift his memories from the dirt where they were buried. He read Walter’s story and more of his own fell into place. But the notebook was not on the high shelf in the living room where he was certain that he’d last left it.
It was like they knew what he’d want, what he’d be looking for, before he knew himself.
He sees the Chinese man in the liquor store reach for the telephone on the wall. He has not fired a gun since the war. Ten years, longer. He raises the gun and fires and the Chinese man falls back, disappears behind the counter.
The war. This is something he remembers. The seasick ocean journey. The Belgian forest. Blood and smoke and screams in the trees.
He moves paper while he looks for the lost notebook. Towers of manuscript, books, letters, notes. Tall, dry, brittle. He carries what he can lift and pushes the rest into position with the foot of his crutch.
He had written stories before the war, before the forest, sent them to publishers, magazine editors. Received letters back a few months later. Thank you but no. Sometimes not even that polite. Outer-space stories, journeys to the moon, Martian invasions. Things he knew nothing about, things he had written because he didn’t know what else to write. Then he had gone to war and the forest and come back and what had he done? What had he done?
Sometimes pieces fell away, back into the dirt, and he fought to remember. Reading others’ stories helped. If he could find the notebook, Walter’s story, that would help him dig, reclaim.
He watched the Chinese man fall. He stood in the middle of the liquor store until he heard sirens. He didn’t know how long he remained there. Sirens jarred him out of his sleep-mind. He slid the gun into the pocket of his coat and walked out of the liquor store into the rain. He was careful not to run. He did not want to draw attention. There were a few people out on the street, other Chinese who had heard the gun. He was out in the rain but he was not getting wet, he could not feel the rain on his face, and then he remembered the mask and took it off. A grinning panda, a child’s mask. The sirens were getting closer. He walked out of Chinatown. Somewhere he lost the mask and the gun. He couldn’t remember what he had done with them, only that they were there and then they were gone.
He stacks the paper into towers and then moves the towers, building walls, leaving a single winding trail from the front door to the bedroom. Soon he won’t need any of this. It has served its purpose. It brought the others to him: Javier, Walter, Sarah. How many others? Scores over the years. It brought them to him but now they are ready, they are his rage, focused, and they no longer need him.
Sometimes the missing things in his house are simply put somewhere else and sometimes they’re actually taken. He cannot find the notebook with Walter’s story. Walter’s story would help him remember his own. He could remember some, but he wanted to remember it all.
Standing in the high weeds across from the apartment. The apartment sat on top of a mechanics’ garage and he didn’t know the city but he had found his way back by walking every street he could find, looking for that garage. Not sure how long it had taken him to get back. Standing in the high weeds on the embankment across the street. Lights glittering on the dark water behind him, down the hill. Lights in the apartment windows above. Curtains moving.
He wrote stories but the stories were no good and then he went to war, into the forest, and he came back from the war and what had he done?
He takes another pill for his foot. He pours himself a drink. Pushing the paper towers with the base of his crutch. Building walls. Living room, kitchen, bathroom.
A man finally came out of the front door of the apartment. The man was tall and thin, wore glasses and a gray overcoat. He followed the man with glasses through the city. When the man got into a car, he got into a car, pushing its driver out to the pavement. He followed the man across the water to a house on a hill. He watched the man enter the house. He saw a woman in the front window, a girl. They appeared to be arguing.
He followed the man back and forth from the apartment to the house on the hill to a motel in the city. The man was the only thing he knew. He did not remember how he ate, where he slept. He only remembered following the man.
The man’s name was Henry March. He stood on the house’s doorstep one morning when no one was there and held the man’s mail in his hands.
Night on the ocean. He turns on the lamps in the living room, watches the light focus through the crystals. Feels the healing rays on his foot, bringing the dead stump back to life. He wants to be able to stand on both feet, like a man, when they come.
He returned from the war and what had he done? Sometimes it felt as if the answer was right beside him, but whenever he turned it was gone.
He followed Henry March to a bus station and March put something in a locker and paid for the key and when March was gone he pried the locker open and took out a leather-bound ledger filled with black ink.
Here is his lighter, right where he left it. Here are his cigarettes. Here is a newspaper, recen
t, with a picture above the fold. His delivery boy brought this. The picture is a security-camera photograph of a bank robbery. Blurry figures as seen from above, standing with guns drawn. The figures are wearing animal masks. He knows this not from the picture, which is too blurred, but from the artist’s sketches that accompany the article. Illustrations of smiling cartoon characters. Panda, pig, cat, dog. Familiar faces.
He’s read interviews with writers who talked about seeing their books turned into movies, watching their creations projected up on the big screen, but that is nothing compared to this.
He read Henry March’s ledger. It was a book in code but it made perfect sense to him. He could see the words behind the words. He read the ledger and his head opened and he remembered. He remembered the interior of that apartment and the girl and the men and the liquor store in Chinatown. He remembered the mask. He couldn’t remember how he had gotten there, what had come before. He could only remember what they had done to him, not what they had taken away.
By the time he had finished reading the ledger Henry March had disappeared. All of the men had disappeared. The girls. No one came in or out of the apartment. He stood in the weeds and watched, but no one came.
He created a new life, a false life, out of what remained. He found his way down to Los Angeles. He started writing again, but this time he knew what he was writing about. Others found him through his writing. They’d all had revelations, moments packed with remembered truth, and he envied them those moments. He’d had no such thing. Over the years some memories had come back, in dreams, sometimes, but he knew not to trust dreams. When he slept his defenses were down and they could talk to him then, tell him lies. He knew not to trust dreams.
He had gone to Denver. There was an address in the ledger. At the address there was a house and inside the house was a woman and two girls. Twins. There was a name in the ledger and that name matched the name on the mail on the doorstep in Denver. The name meant nothing to him at the time but he knew that it would, someday. He knew that the people inside the house meant something to him but he could not remember what and after what he had done in the apartment on the hill and in the liquor store in Chinatown he had no right to enter the house. He walked away and never returned. He pulled that page from the ledger and burned it, his only defacing of the book.
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