The Upright Man

by Michael Marshall

  As I walked I thought about what I knew, which boiled down to this: I had been wrong about just about everything to do with my life. I had believed I’d been born to Don and Beth Hopkins in northern California, where they had been living well-tempered lives of average tedium. They mowed the yard and kept the car clean and they bought enough material goods to keep the gods of commerce smiling upon them. My father built up a realty business and, after I’d left home, had continued to enjoy some success as a broker of luxury houses until a car crash had taken both of their lives. But on the day after their funeral, when I’d gone to their house to try to understand what I was supposed to do about it, I’d found a message. It had been hidden in such a way as to draw the attention only of someone who knew my father very well.

  The message had said, simply, that they weren’t dead.

  This is the news everyone wants to hear—everyone, that is, whose relationship with their parents is marred merely by distance—and it was enough to make me spend the afternoon searching their house. I found the videotape my father had sealed into a VCR in his study, and this ultimately led to my discovering just how wrong I had been about my life. Wrong—or deliberately misled.

  I had thought I was an only child. A section in the video showed me with a brother of the same age, a brother deliberately abandoned on a city street, somewhere back in the late 1960s.

  I had thought my parents’ death had been an accident. They weren’t my parents and it wasn’t. They had been murdered by the group my natural father had belonged to, thirty-five years earlier. This group was called the Straw Men, and they believed themselves the only portion of humanity uninfected by a virus promoting social conscience above the cold-hearted individualism they believed inherent to our species. Whether they genuinely thought this, or it was just a convenient cover for acts of violence and depravity, was not clear. What was clear was that the group was wealthy and well connected. It was also evident that their point man, a person who called himself the Upright Man but could more accurately be designated as Paul, my lost brother, was about as dangerous an individual as could be imagined. The night before Bobby Nygard died we watched a government tape together, a compilation of the world’s atrocities over the previous two decades. Shootings, explosions, mass killings. We saw the Upright Man in the background of a number of these events, mutely claiming the glory. In addition he had been acting as a procurer for the occupants of The Halls, a group of men—and, for all I knew, women—involved in considered and repeated acts of serial murder. And to cap it all, he looked exactly like me.

  The first steps had been easy. I did my initial research a hundred miles down the road from Relent, sitting in a wired coffee bar with a laptop. I hated the idea that someone might think I was writing a novel, and kept glaring at people who smiled encouragingly at me, but I needed the net access. What I had to do first was confirm the city in which my sibling had been abandoned. Paul had sent me a message in which he claimed he had been left in San Francisco, but I was not inclined to believe anything he said without evidence. I had nothing else to go on except the short section at the end of the videotape my father had left me, which I had converted to a DVD.

  The last section was in three parts. The first showed a train journey. There was no locating information, but I knew my father well enough to be confident he would not have included it just for background color. The washed-out look of the transferred 8 mm stock, along with my mother’s hairstyle and clothing, did help date the segment, but this was more easily achieved by the sight of my two-year-old self. So my guess was the first part was to signal that a journey had been undertaken—and that it was far enough from our house to make sense by rail, but not far enough to take a plane. This gave me a choice of maybe thirty or forty cities and towns in or around northern California or Oregon.

  The tape cut then to a wide street in a downtown area. The camera followed my mother as she walked down a sidewalk, hands held down and out of sight: holding, as the final part would make clear, the hands of two young boys. There was not much else to see except passing examples of the fashions of the late 1960s, in the shapes of suits and cars; and understated storefronts of the kind that made you wonder what made anyone buy anything in those days. Nothing remarkable, except . . .

  I froze the image. Over on the right side of the road was a small department store, opposite a grassy square. I could just about make out a name—Hannington’s.

  Ten minutes on the web told me there were no department stores by that name still in operation in the U.S., or at least none who’d made their existence known to the internet. So I had to let scientific detection methods go hang, and work back from the conclusion.

  I tracked down a selection of “San Francisco of Yesteryear” sites and spent a while dredging through evocations of the city’s days of yore. My eyeballs were beginning to melt by the time I found a reference to a Saturday morning ritual for one little girl, now grown old, whose long-dead mother used to take her to look at fancy haberdashery in a store called Harrington’s. They couldn’t afford any of it. They just went to go and look. I found I couldn’t think about that for very long.

  I flipped back to the freeze-frame and saw yes, I could have misread the sign. The angle wasn’t good, and the sun was hazing out the film in a way that would have been difficult to predict when it was being shot. A quick check said there was no Harrington’s still in business either, on the West Coast or anywhere else. It seemed unlikely there’d be two nearly identically named department stores both gone bust, and further web-mining with the new spelling established that the store had once sat on Fenwick Street, and it had been a big deal in its day. Big enough a deal, probably, that my father might have assumed it would be there forever.

  So. I had decided San Francisco was confirmed. My brother was evidently capable of telling the truth.

  FENWICK WAS TEN MINUTES’ WALK FROM THE HOTEL. The streets were crowded, flocks of end-of-the-afternoon strollers and shoppers casting long shadows on clean gray pavements. Though the road had been widened, and just about every ground-level aspect of the architecture had been altered, it wasn’t hard to see I was in the right area.

  When I drew opposite to the huge building that had once housed Harrington’s, I ground to a halt. People cruised around me like leaves skirting a rock in a steady stream. The old storefront had been split into two and now held a Gap and a vast makeup emporium from which women of all ages were emerging with expressions of glee and very, very small bags in each hand. The floors above appeared home to the lairs of attorneys.

  I found my eyes drawn to the sidewalk in front of my feet. I didn’t remember having walked over this precise spot, but I had. I had walked here holding my mother’s hand. My father had filmed us. They were gone but the place was still here, and me along with it. I was older now than they had been then, but at the time I had been about the same age as a toddler I saw being pushed past me in a stroller, a small being so different to me that I found it hard to believe I had once been one.

  Time is strange.

  NEXT MORNING I WAS ON THE PHONE AT FIVE AFTER nine. By ten-thirty all I had established was that you didn’t get information out of Social Services in a hurry. After a while I had spent so long pushing buttons in menu systems that I began to be afraid I might eventually be put back through to myself, which I knew would freak me out. So I got onto the street and walked over there instead.

  Within five minutes I wished I’d stuck with the phone. There’s nothing like the waiting room of any office of the government or its allies to remind you how lucky you are. You enter a nonplace, nontime. You sit on battered chairs in murky blues and greens that nobody ever names as their favorite color. You stare at signs that have no bearing on you, nonspecific communiqués from the land that punctuation forgot. You wait until the waiting loses all sense of direction or purpose, until you become like a stone deposited in a field millennia ago by a careless glacier. You are here. This is all you have ever known. In the meantime you
are stripped of any sense of individuality, of the idea that you might be different from anyone else in the room except by virtue of your particular problem; and so you become that problem, defensively, accepting it as identity, until it swells and suppurates and becomes all you are. As a species we’ll tolerate being close to others, but not so close, and not in those circumstances and when we feel so small: we become rows of dry, fretting eyes, hating everyone around us and sincerely wishing our neighbor dead so we can move up one place in the line.

  Or maybe it was just me.

  I spent a long time waiting before I could even delineate my basic needs to someone. It then took us a while to get around the fact that I didn’t have a proper address, and for him to accept the Armada’s details instead. I explained I had a brother who I thought had been taken into care in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s, probably around 1967; that I believed his first name to be Paul; that I was trying to trace him; and that I had no other information whatsoever except that he might have been found wearing a sweater with his name stitched into it. The man wrote down what I said but the looks he gave me said it was going to be a long day. Finally he handed me a number, and I was released back into the milling, coughing herd of problems, psychoses, and whines.

  Two hundred thousand years later, my number came up. I was invited down a long corridor and into a room in the far back of the floor, where a middle-aged black woman was sitting behind a desk covered in paper. A sign said she was called Mrs. Muriel Dupree. The wall behind her was covered with posters in which one word in three was underlined and confidentiality was usually guaranteed.

  “I can’t help you,” she said before I even sat down.

  I sat down anyway. “Why?”

  “It’s too long ago, that’s why.” She referred to a piece of paper in front of her. “Says here it’s about a brother, and you think it was around 1967. That’s before my time, I’m hoping you realize. It was also before a lot of other big things happened. Those, for a start.” She nodded toward a computer so old I wouldn’t trust it to hold my laptop’s coat. “Only about twenty years ago all this stuff started going on computer, and then we had a bad fire in 1982 that took out the tapes and files in the basement, so we lost most of the information prior to that date anyhow. Even if something was written down about it, the old-fashioned way, and it wasn’t burned, it wouldn’t have been a whole lot and you’d have a better chance of finding God than finding it now. I don’t mean that personally. You may know Him already, which case, good for you.”

  She read the disappointment in my face, and shrugged. “Things were different then. Today no one gets ‘put up for adoption’: the mother makes an adoption plan, there’s legally binding contact arrangements, and everybody gets that a blank canvas isn’t the best thing for the child, that child needs to own the information about his or her own past, da da da. But back then it was, “Okay, you been fostered or adopted or whatever. Welcome to your new life. Don’t look back, because there ain’t nothing happy there to be found.” People would change the kids’ names, birthdays, whatever. You know how they say the expression ‘put up for adoption’ came about?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. I didn’t care, either, but Mrs. Dupree was evidently viewing me as a welcome five-minute break from people who would shout at her.

  “Way, way back they would take the orphaned children out of the cities on the coasts, put them on trains. They’d take them out into the country and stop at the itty-bitty stations and the kids would literally be ‘put up’ onto the platforms in the hope that some farmer with a bit of room—and a need for some more labor, of course; there was a deal going on here—would take one or two in. Here’s the kid. Feed it. That’s that. Everything prior is dead and gone. Things weren’t still that way in the sixties, I’m not saying that at all, but in some ways they kind of were. Half the time the kids wouldn’t get told they were adopted ever. Most of the rest, the parents would wait until they thought the children were old enough, which meant probably they’d been voting for a few years—they were spaced out to all hell to find out Mom and Dad could have been hundreds of miles away at the moment they were born. It was not a good system and we know that now, but at the time it was thought to be for the best—and a whole lot of those children grew up to have happy and productive lives. Honey, you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking back up at her from my hands, which I had been inspecting while wondering if I would ever prove to have a happy and productive life myself. “I didn’t expect to get so stopped, so soon. And . . . this is very important.”

  “I know it is. I understand.”

  I shook my head, wanting to be somewhere else. “You don’t, I’m afraid, but thank you for your time.”

  I got up and headed toward the door. My hand was on the handle when she asked, “You sick?”

  I looked back at her, confused and caught unawares. For a moment I thought she was suggesting something in particular.

  “What do you mean?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I mean is this about you having discovered you have a medical condition that someone else needs to know about, because they might have it too?”

  I looked her in the eyes and considered lying.

  “No,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. But there’s something very wrong with him.”

  I left her sitting behind her desk, and walked the long corridor back toward the outside world, where I could smoke, and breathe firsthand air, and where my problems were only part of what I was.

  “SO WHAT NOW, BOBBY?”

  Silence. He was AWOL again. Off somewhere in the spirit world with a beer and a grin, freaking out the other ghosts.

  It was late afternoon and I had a beer of my own and was sitting at a table outside L’Espresso, a café-bar just on the corner up from the hotel. My feet felt aggrieved and full of bones. San Francisco is a pleasant enough place but, frankly, it has too many hills.

  In the face of the complete bust of the morning, I’d done the only other thing I could think of. Maybe, I thought, just maybe Paul hadn’t even gotten into the system. Perhaps he’d been picked up by someone off the street, taken in by some kindly shopkeeper’s wife. I knew this was a fantasy born of Mrs. Dupree’s tale of baby trains in the Midwest, but I really didn’t see any other avenue open to me and I had to do something to find him. I had drifted for too long. This was my job. No one else’s.

  In the absence of any useful visual reference, I tried another approach. I knew my parents weren’t the people to just throw a child to the wolves. It was likely that they would have left the child somewhere they believed not to be openly dangerous, and where there would have been a decent flow of pedestrians. They were on foot. There is a limit to how far you want to walk with two-year-olds. Thus it was likely, or at least possible, that I was looking for a busy area within very easy walking distance of Union Square. Worst case, it would be somewhere that also matched that description, but on a tram line.

  So I bought a map, and I walked. And I found nothing, which meant I had nowhere else to go. I had tried, a couple of months back, responding to an email Paul had sent. The message was bounced back to me within the hour, his address unknown, unheard of, impossible to find. His messages were statements to me, not attempts at communication. There was no trail there either.

  I finished my beer and walked the few yards back to the hotel. As I headed through the reception area I heard someone call my name. I turned, slowly.

  The fresh-faced young guy at the desk was holding up a piece of paper. “There’s a message for you.”

  That sounded unlikely. Nobody knew where I was. The few people whose contact I might have welcomed would have called me on the cell phone. I walked over to the desk, feeling as if I had a target on my back.

  I took the piece of paper, thanked him, and turned away. When I opened it I saw the following message:

  This lady might be able to help you. If she wants to.

  There was a phone numb
er for this unnamed woman, and the name of the person who’d left me the message. Muriel Dupree.

  A PHONE CALL, A VISIT TO THE WEB, AND A FAST shower and then I went back downstairs and hailed a cab from outside the hotel. It took a while to find someone who was prepared to take me as far as I needed to go, which was over the bay and then some, and then, it turned out, a good way more. The one I wound up with was intent on exacting a bonus through my providing an audience for a long series of diatribes. Luckily he was too wrapped up in his own dialectic for me to have to play a speaking role. I grunted and said, “Right,” and watched out of the window as city and then suburbs passed me by.

  The phone call I’d made had been to Social Services, hoping to speak to Mrs. Dupree. This had turned out to be as vain a hope as it sounds. I’d have been better off trying to go back in time. I still had no idea who I was going to see, therefore, but the web had told me the number belonged to a Mrs. Campbell, and also where she lived. It’s one of the things I know how to do. Yes, Muriel’s intention had obviously been that I call ahead, get permission to visit, state my business, and generally do the right thing. Guess what: I hadn’t. I didn’t know who this person was, or what Muriel thought she might have to say to me, but my limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you’re coming after it. And yes, I do know what I’m talking about. Bobby and I met while working for the CIA.

  Eventually the guy in front stopped talking and started glancing at a map. We pulled farther and farther from through routes and eventually hit some straggled blocks of residential streets. The neighborhood was white, semi-run-down, no Realtor’s dream. We went back and forth through it for a little bit before I took hold of the map and guided us in. We stopped halfway up a street of small wooden houses each on its own very little plot.