All Those Vanished Engines

by Paul Park

  “Keep that thought,” I said.

  We embraced, and then after a little while I fell asleep on the narrow bed. Past midnight, when I woke up, she was already gone. I heard a noise in the hallway. “No,” I murmured, but after half an hour of listening to my mother’s footsteps up and down the corridor—after her first stroke, she’d dragged her left leg a little bit—I got up to investigate. I didn’t have to get dressed, because I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. I walked between the bookcases, and when I got to the front of the house, I looked down over the banister where my mother had fallen. A tiny blue carpet now covered the discoloration in the wood. My father had bought it in a woman’s cooperative in Istanbul.

  I didn’t have to worry about making any noise, because my father would have taken out his hearing aids, and my sister would have put in her earplugs. Nothing could have disturbed them, not even the sudden crash down below, where Magnus, my mother’s calico cat, had leapt up onto her little desk opposite the front door and knocked something over. There was always a night-light burning down there.

  When I got back to my bed, I lay on my back, rubbing my face and eyes until Nicola called. “I’m trying to explain to Abigail how ridiculous your family is,” she said. “I’m trying to explain to her about the serial killer your father wanted to move in with you when you were kids. But she doesn’t believe it.”

  That’s not why my family was ridiculous, I thought. But I played along. “He wasn’t exactly a serial killer,” I said. “He only strangled his wives. Besides, he was down on his luck after he got out of the hospital.”

  “You mean out of jail.”

  “No, the first time he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. It was only after the second time that he went to jail.”

  I paused for a moment, then soldiered on. “He was a very plausible fellow, very distinguished-looking, a gifted singer and musician. Everyone thought it was a singular phenomenon. My father testified for him at his first trial, because he’d been his roommate at Harvard and at prep school before that. His best friend, really.”

  It was a relief to talk to Nicola, though not in the conventional way. Often she wasn’t aware of the games I played with her. In this one, I would try to reproduce for her the words and inflections that my father might have used with my mother long ago. I liked being a source of entertainment, to be laughed at rather than with, especially if people didn’t quite understand what I was doing. “My mother said no,” I said. “She was … protective of us.”

  “Hunh. She probably didn’t want to do up a new room.”

  “You’re too hard on her,” I mumbled. “Is Abigail there?”

  “These are just stories I get from you. I never met the lady.” Then she paused. “She came to help with Adrian.”

  I lay in the dark on the twin bed, remembering my father as if he had already died. Once when I was eight, after Uncle Dick was out of jail, my father had taken me down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to see him where he was living in a fishing shack next to the water, a single room on stilts, heated with a woodstove. He was there with a much older man, and I was curious about the whole arrangement, mostly because I’d never met a murderer before and didn’t know what I was supposed to say. My father, who was big on etiquette, told me it would be impolite to mention anything at all about the actual crime. As I compromise, I proposed asking Uncle Dick whether he had enjoyed being in prison, but my father said that was a terrible idea. “Indiscreet,” he said.

  Here’s what I remember about the fishing shack: to the right of the cast-iron stove stood a wicker basket for scrap wood, in this case a pile of broken, splintered bowling pins.

  “His name was Dick Holden,” I said. “Even at Cedar Junction he was still writing theatrical productions for the inmates. Musical comedies about prison life. Then they let him out again, and he resolved our dilemma by drinking himself to death.”

  “Obliging.”

  “My father thought so.” I was enjoying this, for reasons I might have found difficult to explain. “Is Adrian asleep now?” I asked. And then in a little while: “Did I ever tell you about Jack Shoots?”

  Later, after she’d hung up, I lay on my back and remembered the stupid stories my father had told me when I was a kid: How his table manners had been so impressive, the city of New York had erected a glass case in Sheridan Square for him to take his meals, and all the schoolchildren would spend their lunch money to come down on the subway and watch him eat. How his father had once taken him to the bean mines of Boston (now closed down), and for one awful moment he had gotten to see, skewered by the lantern light, one of the raw galleries of uncut bean. How the farmers in Connecticut had eaten poison ivy sandwiches on the first day of spring.

  I got up and went over to the file cabinet. I had my mother’s pencil flashlight, which I held in my mouth so I could use both hands. I squatted down and pulled out the second-to-last drawer. Earlier in the day, leafing through my mother’s poems, I had seen it there: a manila folder labeled “Jack.”

  In it were his letters over a period of twenty years. Here is a sample. Left-handed, he had terrible penmanship:

  July 1, Madrid

  Dearest Clara,

  I hope it’s okay for me to call you that. I’m here in the Escorial taking a break from being a tourist. Prado this morning. It’s very hot. I keep going over in my mind the last time I saw you, when you gave me a hug and a kiss in your downstairs hallway under that wall of books. How was I supposed to interpret that? I mean, am I crazy to think about the things I think about? I go over these scenes over and over, replaying them in my mind. Even here I think about it, in a different language. It’s very hot in the hotel and hard for me to sleep. I keep on thinking of the things I could have done or said, is that crazy?…

  Here’s her reply, dated two weeks later:

  Dear Jack,

  I’m sending this to the address you left for me. I hope it finds you. I’m so pleased you are liking Spain. What I found astonishing in the Escorial is the amount of work involved in it. I read a book once that described the sheer volume of Philip II’s correspondence, something like two million documents with his signature, and another two million marked with his initials in the margin, which he had obviously studied. Here he was, the most powerful man in Europe, slaving away over his desk like a clerk in a Dickens novel. I picture him in a black cap with an ink-spot on his chin. Terrible eyesight, I suppose. As for the Prado, what I remember most is that little gallery right at the top of the stairs in the east wing, with some little Flemish landscapes. Usually the big pieces—The Garden of Earthly Delights, for example—leave me a little cold. I feel I’m not really looking at them, except through veils of memory or preconception.…

  Interesting what you say about thinking in a different language. I’ve noticed that too. It’s not just a matter of speed or comfort, but it’s the quality of thought that varies, as if you’ve switched to a different key signature in music.…

  Her own handwriting was beautiful, a careful italic. These letters were Xeroxed copies of typed originals, preserved, I thought, with posterity in mind. But occasionally, like Philip II, she would write notes in the margins.

  Frugal, she had used wastepaper to make the copies. I turned one piece over. It was a letter to my father, also typed, and then crossed out with a purple line from top to bottom. Probably he had never responded. My mother must have fished it out of the trash beside the downstairs desk, where my father had finally disposed of it more than a quarter-century after it was written, perhaps around the time that he retired:

  Roy Whitney

  The Sprague Electric Company

  12 Marshall Street

  North Adams, Massachusetts

  Dear Professor Park,

  I am grateful for your response. In my experience with the Physics Department at your college, they are not interested in real-life applications. As I say, these discoveries have come as a by-product of various projects undertaken during the late war, more t
han a decade’s worth of research that I have pursued on my own time. Much is still classified, of course. But some of these phenomena are full of applications for civilian use. If the college could, for example, provide seed money of even $15,000 the potential rewards would be enormous, as well as any benefits to the field of rocket propulsion. I have already approached the NACA, and have also sent letters to Dr. Bode and Dr. Clauser, directors of research at Bell Laboratories and the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation (respectively) with no results. But I feel under the auspices of your department, and especially such a distinguished scientist as yourself, the Committee on Space Technology might be able to reconsider my proposal.…

  3. THE GHOST IN THE AIRSTREAM

  Before I left Baltimore, I’d had a conversation with Traci Knox about the end of her book. She had taken to heart something I had said, something about the constraints of a single-viewpoint narrative, whether first- or third-person. I told her to consider switching, in later chapters, to another point of view so as to vary the tone, and to introduce another source of information. I didn’t say completely what I thought, which was that I was tired of her narrator and her incessant complaints.

  But I wasn’t prepared for the choice she made. Scenes from Jason Hall’s college experience, instead of being described in a series of conversations between the heroine and her lover, now were narrated directly from the point of view of a new character, the English professor’s teenage son.

  “I think it’s a bold choice,” I said, in the coffee shop on Charles Street. “But I wonder if you know enough to do him justice. Or like him enough. Viewpoint characters, you have to like them a little bit. I mean, didn’t you say you thought he was kind of a loser?”

  “That’s what Jason said. But I’m thinking the truth is maybe more complicated, and it’s not as if Jason always told the truth. I think now maybe he was jealous of that kid. Just because of his proximity. Jealousy would have been a new experience for Jason, and one he didn’t understand very well. Besides, they were friends, in a way. When he was living there during his junior year, he said he used to go into the kid’s room and listen to Miles Davis.”

  “But you never met him.”

  She made a quick gesture with her hand. “You’re the one who’s always telling me to invent a little more, not worry about the facts. Make up your mind. No, I never met him. Not as far as I know. Besides, maybe I did see him once, at least at a distance.”

  I looked into the bottom of my teacup and said nothing. I had wondered how she had managed to render the English teacher’s house so precisely; no doubt Jack Shoots was a brilliant young man, but I found it hard to imagine him describing the layout of the rooms in such complicated and colorful detail. “He brought me up there once,” she said, “and he pointed out the house—he didn’t think anything about it. I didn’t let him know I was interested. But I saw a kid on the front porch. Glasses. Curly hair. I figured he looked a lot like his mother. At least that’s what I’m going to write.”

  “On the front porch? That could have been anybody,” I said.

  Irritated, she shook her head. “Sure, but that’s the person I’m going to describe. Do you have a problem with that? Besides, you’re wrong. He doesn’t have to be likable. Nobody in this story is likable so far. He doesn’t even have to be credible. Jason used to talk about him a lot. Even when I was half-crazed I was struck by some of the things he said about him, or what he said about himself, how he’d come home after school and his mother would be sitting in the living room with some adoring student, and he realized that she knew everything about this kid and nothing about him. He said it made him feel half-lonely and half-safe. That always struck me. He had an upstairs room at the back of the house. No one bothered him back there except for Jason.”

  Traci had a habit. She used to twiddle a curl of her gray hair under one ear. She was doing it now. “He told Jason a story once. When he was about eight, he spent a year in England where his father was at Trinity College. They lived outside Cambridge in a little subdivision. He had to wear a school uniform, shorts and kneesocks, and a crewnecked sweater and a tie. One day in December, a bunch of kids took him out into a field on the other side of the road. There was a fence of concrete posts strung with wire. The bottom strand of wire was only about a foot above the ground. These kids tied his hands behind his back and tied the end of his necktie to the bottom wire, and left him. It was about three in the afternoon and it was already getting dark. He just squatted down in that ditch, jerking his head back and forth, over and over again, until the tie finally came apart. By that time it was nine o’clock at night. He went home and he didn’t tell his mother what had happened. And this was the odd thing: she wasn’t even worried. She hadn’t even called the police.”

  As she spoke, I was thinking of the scene in Traci’s novel where the woman drives around the parking lot with her son screaming in the back. “What kind of mother is that?” she asked. “Something like that could ruin someone forever, just the one afternoon.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, startled. When she glanced up at me, I continued. “I mean we’d have to get a sense of the damage it did. Otherwise there’s no point bringing it up.”

  “I don’t think you’d be able to trust anyone ever again. I don’t think you’d be able to commit to anyone or anything.”

  “Just that one afternoon,” I said.

  “Sure—you could never forget that.”

  But actually, I had kind of forgotten. Now I remembered: the damp, cold, dark mist, the relentless rhythm as I jerked my head back. The boys were named Nicky Toller and Clive Bates. Now I could see their faces after all these years.

  As I envisioned it, the scene put me in mind of a scene I intended to write. Betrayed by Amnian mercenaries, Captain Lukas is tortured for information he refuses to divulge. He shines in moments like this. He can take a lot of punishment. Left to his own devices, he’s much better at resistance than at any kind of action.

  For reasons known ultimately only to themselves, the Amnians force him to squat for hours on end, perhaps in obeisance to their hideous divinity, whose altar, sensed nearby, is nevertheless hidden in the mist. “It’s possible he was lying for dramatic effect,” I said. “Maybe you want to keep that possibility alive when you describe the scene.”

  She gave me an exasperated look. “What are you talking about? It’s perfect.”

  Unlike my mother, whose experience with my autistic sister stretched out day after day, all of them more or less the same, Traci believed decisively in cause and effect. You can always recognize that in an author, especially from a sketch. Every scene is arranged in careful order. Each one has a purpose. Here is part of the new chapter, which she’d written out as an example of what the new point of view might sound like:

  … That summer he had grown his hair long and acquired the habit of playing with it. There was a long curl of hair under his ear that had taken on a special sheen. In the evening he’d stayed up late talking to Jason and listening to Bitches Brew Worshipping at the shrine of Jason Hall, so to speak, and in the morning he found his mind was still full of him, and the sight of him sitting up against the wall of his room rolling a joint, his big eyes limpid and intent, his straw-colored hair a mess.

  And in the morning he went downstairs to pour himself a cup of café au lait. He sat down at the kitchen table. He hitched his feet up on the pedestal, its base carved in the shape of rampant lions, whose eyes he and his mother had painted green and white when he was a child. His father sat across from him but paid no attention, a small man with a big head and a crop of thinning hair, which stood up nevertheless like a clown’s wig.…

  There was an aimless, misfiring attempt at conversation, and then:

  At ten, his mother led Elly downstairs and sat her down in the rocking chair, where she rocked desultorily and mumbled to herself. Still in her early teens, she had an indefinable sense of ancientness about her.… And as his mother made breakfast, he looked up at her face. How o
dd it was, after his conversation with Jason, that he was able so easily to see her as if she were a stranger, her short, curly black hair just beginning to turn gray; her thick, unflattering glasses; and the ugly mole on her nose—a plain woman with the airs and self-confidence of an attractive one.…

  In the morning after I had seen Constance at the bar, I looked this excerpt over and drafted an email:

  The goal of a point-of-view change is to establish a sense of a different voice, and something written and perceived by a different person. Do you think you have achieved that? To me, this section reads like an attempt to describe these subsidiary characters directly, and not through J’s eyes and your heroine’s memory of what he said. PS—I also don’t picture the mother making breakfast. I don’t think she ever made breakfast. To tell the truth, I don’t picture her getting out of bed until everyone else is up. In these descriptions you might want to find ways to suggest a deeper narrative, like for instance maybe she’s sick of dealing with the disabled sister, and maybe even clinically depressed.

  I fiddled with this email for a while. But I couldn’t get the tone right, and finally it seemed petty to me, and I didn’t send it. Instead I went downstairs. Elly had made café au lait, and set a place for my father, a big cup and saucer, and a smaller dish with an array of vitamin pills and other supplements. I hiked my feet up onto the lions’ head pedestal, which my older sister had decorated with pink and white paint so long before. In time my father shuffled in from the front room. He was leaning on his cane, and I noticed how diminished he seemed, a small man with a big head, now, in contrast. Since my mother’s death he had posted old photographs of her throughout the house, portraits not of her old age but from the first years of their marriage, or else publicity photographs from when she had first started to write books. In all of them she had the anxious, self-conscious look that was perpetual with her, but as my father took his seat now, with difficulty, under one of them—a head shot, shoulders hunched, leaning her cheek upon her hand—I could see as if for the first time how beautiful she had been. Of course it never had occurred to me when she was alive, or even looking at these same pictures, which were familiar. But perhaps age gave me distance; in these portraits she was younger, after all, than I was now.