Did you and Mom speak to each other in French?
Do they speak French in heaven?
Do I have cousins and uncles in France?
Did you bury her, or was she cremated?
Did you take me to her funeral?
Yes, darling.
No, darling.
No, my darling; it didn’t happen like that.
Perhaps so, my love. Now go to sleep.
We can talk about it later, Clem. Go back to sleep.
Her questions—weren’t they what I lay awake for, alone in my watchtower? When they arrived, I told myself, I would be prepared. She would take what she needed, learn what she wanted to know. I couldn’t give her her mother, but I could give her her story. That was, as I understood it, my job. At times, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, her questions would subside, but then her curiosity would flare again like a fever I could not cure.
Did you say goodbye?
Did she know me?
Did you give me my name or did she?
Where are my grandparents?
Why don’t we see them?
Eventually, the urgency abated, or so I thought. Clementine seemed, if not content, willing at least to let it rest, perhaps to let me rest. Perhaps (I began to think) she had her story now. My mother died when I was born, I heard her say in the playground, in the coffee shop, on the telephone. Did I detect an emerging inflection, fleeting, a hint—could it be—of pleasure in her proclamation? My mother died in childbirth.
One day—she must have been twelve or thirteen—she delivered the news to an inquisitive saleswoman in the corner pharmacy by saying, “Sadly, my mother perished in childbed.” Had she become, without my noticing, the curator of what she had collected, the bits and pieces of what I had told her arranged like objets in the gaslit interiors of a fin de siècle novel? What consolation I took from that thought! If her story was part of a book, then it must have a beginning and an end. It must revolve around itself, suspended at a safe remove.
Clementine was studious, precocious at school but goofy at home and with friends, inoculated by my patient, dedicated attentions (I liked to think) against the miseries of middle school, the ennui of the only child, adrift on the slack-tide of her solitary afternoons. On evenings when I saw patients, she would sprawl on the lobby floor of our building, doing her schoolwork, or reading, or chattering at Itzal in her rapidly improving French. Of course I knew (or thought I knew) that it all had to end, that the storm-front of adolescence would arrive one day and blow everything sideways….
* * *
—
When can I get pierced ears?
Thirteen, like everyone else.
Thirteen! That’s more than five months away! Other girls got their ears pierced by now.
They’re probably thirteen already.
No, Dad, they aren’t. I swear to God.
But when I insisted she wait, to my surprise she acquiesced and asked only if she could borrow the kitchen calendar. That night, with scissors and tape she produced what she called her “countdown machine.” She had found a second calendar for the month of April and had cut it into little squares, one for each day. These she had pasted with great care on top of the days of the intact calendar, but in reverse order, counting down until her birthday or, as she labeled it, “Day Zero,” marking it with a thumbtack right in the middle of the “Zero”: her birthday, the day of what she insisted on calling her “puncturing.”
Do you have to call it that, Clem?
I do, and anyway you’re a shrink and you’re supposed to be able to deal with these things.
Was I? I suppose I was.
Don’t worry. You’ll get over it. In time.
Nothing more than a moment’s breeze, it seemed, shook the days from Clementine’s reverse calendar and turned the Day Zero thumbtack into a little gold stud in each earlobe.
* * *
—
One morning not long after that I found her at the table with a Merck Manual open in front of her.
So, what was it, a rampant systemic infection? Or an ombolism? Or was it a stroke? What’s an ombolism anyway?
An em-bolism. It’s a kind of blood clot.
You couldn’t save her?
The doctors couldn’t save her.
But you are a doctor.
She couldn’t be saved.
(Clementine was still looking down at the book.)
How do you know that?
* * *
—
What was she asking me? That was, I thought, all I needed to know. That was my profession, after all; if one could never know the answers, one could, at least, know the questions. There were so few to know. Among my patients, every quandary and confusion proceeded from one of the few, the elemental questions: What can I change and what must I accept? Of what, of where, of whom am I the issue? Can the past be touched? Can it be healed?
That, as I had understood it, was my task as an analyst: not to answer the unanswerable question, but to accompany my patient to the threshold of the mystery. It was not the answer that healed. Indeed (I thought), belief in answers was the root of all anguish. What healed was the articulation of desire, the act of setting it down, laying it out, offering it up. I believed that it was only in uttering its question—not in receiving the answer—that the soul came into being, released into longing, which is its native element. In such a way I believed myself to be the midwife of the new soul, a creature squalling and alive because hungry and exposed.
You see now how I have been repaid for such a belief, such a presumption. See with what new and terrible questions I have been repaid, questions demanding an answer: Who is the killer of Jessica Burke? Where is my daughter?
ELEVEN
Yes, Clementine has gone.
What she must have suspected in some way all along, she had proved. The old article about her mother’s death floated to the floor. The door slammed, and she was gone. Is gone. For more than a month now. For me, forever.
Forever? you say. Without hope of reconciliation? But God is merciful, you say. Like God, you say, a child is capable of more forgiveness than we can imagine, more even than we can bear.
But she had said, Jesus, you are sick! when she stomped her belongings into her backpack like you’d stomp garbage into a pail. She had repeated, Sick, Daniel, sick! and slammed out the apartment door, having informed me how much more viable her life would be had you never existed, had you, Daniel, been the one to die, you and not Miriam.
Surely then I could search for her, raise the cry! alert the authorities! Of course in my panic, in my denial, I did so. I made my urgent plea at the precinct house. The officer who took my statement asked me, Was I certain she was missing? Maybe she’d just gone off with some friends? Between missing and gone—almost no difference, yet all the difference in the world.
Gone, then, and all for something I could have told her years ago, something like the truth. How easy to imagine her a child once again, the same child, yet with a slightly different story, announcing to a stranger that her mother “succumbed to postpartum depression, and took her own life.” I can hear even now (in the ringing silence of the apartment) how she would have said it, her voice alive with the thrill of this news. One way or another, Clementine would have had to extricate herself from the tarry shadows of the primal rejection—My mother abandoned me when I was a baby—but who is to say that suicide must blight more deeply than ill-chance or sickness? We would have managed. I could have helped her. I could have explained (my tone sad, patient, grave, schooled) that postpartum depression is a condition no less bodily than septic infection, no less lethal than the “om-bolism” Clementine had discovered on her own. She was the same smart girl, the same resilient creature, my daughter, my Clementine! I could have helped her! We could have managed!
But I did
not help her, and we did not manage. Instead, one evening, a conversation I had feared and rehearsed for years spun out of control until she had stomped the contents of her laundry basket into her backpack, sobbed and then choked back her sobs, and posed her obliterating question: “Daniel, has it ever occurred to you how much more viable my life would have been if you had been the one to kill yourself, not Mom?”
“Clementine—”
“Has it? Just once? Ever?”
“What do you know?” I said.
“What do I know? What do I know?”
“Clem, there is nothing—” I said.
“Nothing you wouldn’t deny, Daniel. Just watch: you’re about to deny this too.” And she threw, or rather shoved toward me through the air, an unfolded sheet of paper. Once out of her hand, it floated in scooping arcs to the floor. In the wavering moment of the paper’s descent, she had gone. An echo had already subsided, and she was gone.
I don’t know where she found the article, though from the look of the gray, greasy mimeographed sheet, she had printed it from microfilm or microfiche in a library. What library in New York, I wondered, as though the question could possibly matter, subscribed to Le Journal du Centre, the paltry regional newspaper that had reported Miriam’s death? There they were again, in my hand, the old words:
The body of Miriam Levaux…Pont de Loire…suicide the likely cause…no foul play suspected…after midnight Monday, 12 March…residing in Paris…
I had read these very paragraphs before, on a day when under a cold Parisian sun they appeared in fresh newsprint, a copy of Le Journal du Centre set down before me on the café table. Mathieu, my friend from the institute and Miriam’s neighbor, had found me there, in the company of a single glass and an empty bottle. The body of Miriam Levaux…The little moment it took me to read the article was sufficient for the crowd to swallow him. In a clatter of chairs and breaking glass, I sprang after him in the direction I thought he’d gone, but the waiter seized my arm.
Monsieur! Monsieur! S’il vous plaît, il faut payer!
As indeed I must. Indeed, sir, I must pay.
TWELVE
Who will console me? Would you, Father? Could I not console myself, if only with falsehood? How is it possible that I, having fashioned for years such an intricate, vaulted structure of lies, could have lost, at last, my capacity to lie? Couldn’t I say to myself: Clementine will come back? Today or tomorrow or the next day, a backpack will thump on the vestibule floor, keys and cellphone will clatter on the vestibule table, because she will have come home? I can almost convince myself, just as I can almost convince myself that I am not here alone in the apartment, another envelope open before me on my desk.
I waited until I got home to open the envelope from Jessica Burke’s postal box. Its surface was the same smooth, striated beige of those that had come before. My fingers recognized at once the weight and gloss of the sheet it enclosed: another photograph. Would I have to look once more at the abstracted countenance of Jessica Burke, sealed in its plastic sack? Or would I see this time not Jessica Burke’s face but Clementine’s?
Instead, the photograph was an image of nothing at all, just a muddled blur, crowded glints and shadows, a mottle of blacks, streaks, and washed-out patches. I squinted at it, drew it up to my face, held it at arm’s length. Was it even in focus? Was it even a photograph, not just a mass of smears? But no, it was a photograph after all, the image of an expanse of water, flecked, clouded, some distance away, though taken from directly above. Perhaps the photographer had suspended himself somehow over the surface. This picture, however, disclosed nothing, only the water, its surface without reflection, without limit save the rough edge where, it appeared, the top portion of the photograph had been torn away, and a smooth edge at the lower border, where the printing of the photograph had left a narrow margin of unexposed paper.
So I thought, so I continued to think, even after long minutes of staring, paralyzed by foreboding. What did it mean? The earlier picture, the picture of Jessica Burke in the bathtub, had delivered its news like a blow. Look, it had said, what you had thought was an overdose, what you had thought was an accident, was not one, but instead the accomplishment of an aim, planned and executed, recorded for your eyes alone. But here, in this image, there was no face, no story, only the gaze of nothingness itself. Look, it said: here the unmarked depth where your daughter was drowned.
Minutes passed before I could beat back the panic of this conjecture. The picture was not of Clementine, said nothing of Clementine, was of water only…
Who could have conceived such a torment? The image suspended the idea of my daughter drowning in an element of pure possibility. That possibility was not a threat, not a warning, but something that quite simply had either happened or not. The very indeterminacy of the photograph had delivered me into the hands of a pure and formless dread.
Finally, however, when I had marshaled the resolve to look at the photograph again, I saw that the white edge at the bottom of the photograph was not, as I had previously thought, the border of the print, but a part of the image itself. This element of the picture, a strip of foreground at the base like a sill or threshold, made little more than a pale band. I rifled my desk until I found a magnifying glass, peered through it at the pale band. Only by pulling the glass back so that the magnified section swelled up into the lens could I see that the band bore the imprint of hatch-marks or scoring—no, not hatch-marks but writing—crude, worn, almost erased, but unmistakably writing. I could not have made out the characters had I not known already what those letters spelled. I had, after all, cut them myself:
ML12III90
These characters designated with merciless precision the coordinates of my own inescapable past, incised with the name of Miriam Levaux, the day of 12 March, the year 1990, inscribed in the very place where she died.
The body of Miriam Levaux was recovered from the river 400 meters downstream from the Pont de Loire. The medical examiner’s office has yet to release the autopsy report, but a source close to the police stated that suicide is the likely cause, and foul play is not suspected. It is believed that Levaux drowned sometime after midnight on Monday, 12 March. Levaux, 27, was a native of Nevers but had been residing in Paris.
And so I understood the message of the photograph. It said: This is where it happened. It said: Your lie, the lie you nurtured and refined throughout your daughter’s childhood, is for all that still a lie. No less than the scene of Jessica Burke in the bathtub, the event recorded here was also the work of hands, careful, painstaking, thorough. That is what this photograph had said. It said: Remember me.
With that recognition, abruptly, the terror was gone. I knew then, finally and without doubt, what the photograph had wanted me to know. Though I had lost my daughter, my daughter herself was not lost—not yet. She had been granted a stay. She had been suffered to remain in this world—for now.
How did I know this? I knew it the instant my eye returned to the opposite, upper border of the photograph, the rough edge where the paper had been torn straight across. I knew it as surely as I knew what I would find when I turned the photograph over, the lines of the poem from the very first letter I had received, transcribed as before, but with a difference:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand…
There it was, the same refrain, the same regular stanzas, copied in the same blocked-out hand, just as before, except that paper had been torn away at the top below where the first stanza of the poem would have been. What remained were the final verses. The four stanzas I’d first received were now three, and where there had been fifty-three lines, there were now forty-one.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s mor
e full of weeping than you can understand.
This foreshortening, I understood, meant that a clock of sorts had begun its countdown. The poem was shortened because the time remaining was shorter. I had no way to arrest the movement of this clock, but neither would the clock be hurried. This poem-clock afforded me a freehold, a shrinking freehold to be sure, but while I had it, it was absolutely mine. Just so, I thought, had Clementine fashioned her reverse calendar, the “countdown machine” that anticipated her thirteenth birthday, when she could pierce her ears. Both the poem and Clementine’s calendar were machines for marking time, time that could be neither stopped nor sped up.
I had been given time, a little time. Because I had been given time, I had been given a choice. I knew this, and I knew what I would choose. I knew what I would do in time—in time, but not yet.
SPURLOCK
1:07 A.M.
One night, not long after Luis had begun opening the church to the homeless, Spurlock had approached one of the men at random. “Hi, I’m Father Spurlock,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“King—John,” said the man as he squeezed the ash from the tip of a half-smoked cigarette and stashed the butt inside his jacket.
“Pleased to meet you, John King,” said Spurlock, extending his hand.
“King John,” said the man, making no move to accept the handshake. “I am King John.”
“My name?” said the next man Spurlock had approached that night. “Sprinkles, they calls me. So you going to call me Sprinkles too?”
“You’re welcome here,” said Spurlock, adding “my friend” to avoid calling the man Sprinkles.
He had learned his lesson. From then on, he would say nothing more than “Welcome” to the visitors, though most acknowledged even that greeting with obdurate silence, a silence that Spurlock understood to combine two simultaneous and incompatible replies: “Of course I am welcome here—are you?” and “You lie, you lie, you lie.”
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