by Walter Kirn
“Has Communist China, as far as you’re aware, ever engaged in kidnapping or killing American space researchers?”
Rayermann, still in solemn witness mode, took the question seriously. He answered it in the negative, definitively, and assured me that his experience in the army put him in a position to know such things. Then he asked me why I’d asked. I told him it was complicated and that there were a number of topics I wanted to discuss with him, beginning with John’s and his favorite TV show. Had Chichester ever watched it with them? No. Before today, said Rayermann, he’d never even seen the guy.
I asked him if he was free for dinner.
TEN
IT WAS THE summer of 2002, about a month before my fortieth birthday and the terrible accident-miracle involving my son Charlie and the blue truck. Because I, like the rest of the country, was in a crouch, bracing for the next bombing, I don’t remember the weather that season, just that there was some. I don’t remember the headlines, just that they could have been much worse. Clark was living in New Hampshire, where he’d moved in early 2000 from New York after first retreating to Nantucket following the supposed nervous breakdown that led him to ask me about staying on my ranch. He’d bought the estate of the late Judge Learned Hand, a famous mid-century liberal jurist of whom I knew nothing except that I probably should know more. Clark seemed proud of the place and insisted that I come see it every time we spoke.
One reason I finally agreed to visit was that he’d been hounding me for ages about a series of novels he’d written and wanted me to edit, for a fee, which would presumably be more than I’d gotten for hauling Shelby to New York. I was headed to Boston anyway for a meeting with my Atlantic editors. I hadn’t flown much in the run of months since the World Trade Center fell, and it was time—time to mount up again, to normalize. Still, Clark sniffed out a certain hesitation, and said he’d pulled strings to secure a room for me at his Boston club, the Athenaeum.
The staff treated me like a proper Rockefeller, not the favor-taking guest of one. I hated the establishment nonetheless. Its rooms had an eerie, evacuated quality, as though the club’s departed members had inhaled all its air and energy and carried them down into their tombs. Clark loved such lamplit, varnished dessication, but without him beside me fizzing with boasts and tattle I felt out of place. Princeton had had the same effect on me. The density of its traditions weighed on me. I lay in my bedroom with nothing else to do, too jazzed from flying to go to sleep, and meditated on the Yankee heritage that Clark identified with so eagerly. Its New York version stimulated me, exuding glamor and excitement, but its pinched, moralistic New England version unsettled me. I associated it with ghost stories—Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the like—and with Hawthorne’s tales of repressed hysteria. The local blend of religion and enlightenment, virtue and reason, left me worse than cold; it struck me as bloodless and inhuman, a formula for manias and crusades. Learned Hand—what a name! Was his portrait around here somewhere? He sounded like a bony, spry old warlock.
At lunch with Robert and Michael, my editors, the talk was of Iraq, the coming war. Michael, who supported it, would later join the troops in Baghdad and be the first U.S. journalist to die there when the Humvee he was riding in was fired on and overturned in a canal. The news would darken my memory of our lunch and throw into high relief its comic element: a long conversation about Clark. Robert had heard my best stories over the years but not my latest one: in the Cornish village barbershop, Clark had sat next to his neighbor, J. D. Salinger, and chatted with him about old movies. This weekend I might even meet the hermit myself. Clark had boned up on his movements through his wife, Colleen, whom he’d met, he said, in village “quilting circles.” And how about this one? At some secret, insider auction, Clark had bought Jean-Luc Picard’s prop captain’s chair from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. He was storing it in a Rhode Island warehouse along with a collection of Buick station wagons—late-model Roadmasters, not antiques—which held an appeal for him that I couldn’t fathom. He owned seventeen of these ugly cars, he’d told me, but don’t tell Sandy.
My last anecdote, my best, was so far out that reciting it required facial discipline. Since leaving the freelance central banking field, Clark had immersed himself in a research effort aimed at developing futuristic “beyond Speed of Light” propulsion systems for spacecraft. He said the program was backed by the Defense Department and the Boeing corporation, who’d put up the money for a hush-hush company that was performing cutting-edge experiments in a lab based somewhere “across the border.” I’d assumed he meant Mexico, which made little sense, since I’d never heard of defense work occurring there. Plausibility hardly mattered in this instance, though; Robert’s and Mike’s laughter was enough for me. We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.
I set out for New Hampshire after lunch, but traffic and poor directions slowed me down and I reached Cornish toward evening, hours late. Stone walls, white fences, crows on barns—a rich, deciduous, colonial gloom. The town where I grew up in Minnesota, Marine on St. Croix, had been settled by New England merchants whose homes and commercial buildings imitated the clapboard structures I was passing now, but the atmosphere here was nothing like the Midwest. The dust of attics and cellars was in the air. I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers’ houses.
Parked in front of Clark’s property, facing the main road, was an empty police car. It looked abandoned. His house was a ponderous old behemoth surrounded by messy heaps of building materials and scarred by what looked like a botched remodeling effort. Whole windows were gone and sheets of siding were missing, exposing filthy structural underlayers. Two columns supported a roof above the porch, but what really seemed to be holding the place together were rodent droppings and spider webs. Behind the building rose towering, aged pine trees whose shadows fell crabbed and arthritic across the lawn. The lawn was expansive and in good, green shape. It offered contrast. It was like a fresh haircut on a drunken tramp.
Clark rushed out to greet me as I parked my rental car—perhaps he’d been watching for me at a window. I hadn’t seen him in person in almost two years and he seemed to have lost some polish in the interval; his khakis weren’t fresh but country rumpled and in his face were lonesome lines and hollows. No sign of Sandy—he’d said she worked in Boston now, I think, and only came up on weekends. We shook hands, hugged. I sensed his relief at the shedding of his solitude, and his surge of fussy, pent-up sociability made me feel not only welcome but needed, critical. I felt as though I were restarting time for him.
He didn’t show me into the house but walked me briskly over the lawn and down a hillside to a shady pond. The pond had a cute name in the manner of eastern country properties, but I forgot it the moment Clark uttered it. His mood changed from gleeful pride to bruised resentment. “The neighbors sneak in through the woods to swim,” he said. “I’m always having to run them off. They think they have rights to our pond. It’s highly vexing.”
“I have the same problem with hunters on my ranch.”
“It’s trespassing,” Clark said. “It’s a violation. Certain persons refuse to understand this.” His habit of saying “persons” when he meant “people” caught me up short, the way it always did. No one else I knew spoke this way. I didn’t get it. Did he think it sounded squire-like, more formal? To me, it sounded tin-eared and legalistic. High-born types sometimes took pains, I’d noticed before, to sound even higher born than they were, like denizens of an aristocratic fairy world, but in my experience it was usually women who did this.
I strolled the grounds with him and absorbed the backlog of all that he’d wanted to say to me, or at least to someone like me, during all the time we’d been apart. (Sometimes I wasn’t sure he even knew me; the usual signs of recognitio
n weren’t there. He remembered my wife’s and children’s names and that I was a writer, but not much else.) My impression was that Clark’s friendships, if he had any, because he never mentioned any other friends, were narrowly, individually sorted, and the topics defining any two of them didn’t overlap. He was, that is, a new person with each one of us, whoever we might be, and what he said to me was not what he said to the others, if they existed. Sometimes I wondered if my problem was liking too many different kinds of people, including types that I didn’t like much at all but felt I had something to learn or to gain from.
I’d been there for an hour and he still hadn’t invited me inside. We’d reached a stately tree with a ladder leaning against its trunk. Talking, blabbing, he prodded me up the rungs. “See my hive? In the hole there, in the crotch? I’ve been harvesting wild honey.” I peered into the designated declivity, but like other sights with which he’d sought to impress me—the latest being a rare songbird somewhere in a thicket near the pond—the hive was undiscoverable. This was fairly maddening, especially as he continued to effuse about it, characterizing the honey’s taste and the personalities of the bees. I strained but saw nothing, then strained harder and saw less. Behind me I felt the pressure of his enthusiasm but I lacked the words to comment on a hive whose shape I could neither see nor clearly picture. “Cool,” wouldn’t do—he expected more from me, and that simply wasn’t how we spoke.
I shut my eyes and tried to summon a picture. I was still trying when he rattled the ladder as a signal that I should climb back down.
The perceptual warping soon intensified. Resuming our tour, he rued the timing of my visit. “Britney Spears was out last week,” he said. “You missed her. And it’s a shame you can’t stay longer. Chancellor Kohl is driving up.” I was still trying to integrate the first name into an improvised map of Clark’s existence when the second name emerged and rendered the task futile. The effect on me was like what I had read the best Zen koans produce, suspending or annihilating thought. I drifted free of my own mind. By then, he’d brought up a new guest, a mathematician, who had either just stayed there or was scheduled to come, a certain Dr. Stephen Wolfram.
“Are you familiar with ‘cellular automata?’” he asked me.
“No. Are they his specialty or something?”
He filled me in. It was quite a science lesson. Most of it sailed right past me, but not the gist: reality was a computer program. The depth and splendor and nuance of the universe could all be accounted for by the repetition—the endless, incessant, robotic reiteration—of certain extremely basic rules or “codes.” Information was all and life was an illusion. Its apparent surprises and swerving, capricious ways arose from a mathematical effect that Clark, or Wolfram, called “nonlinearity.” Novelty was merely sameness multiplied. Mystery was a machine.
Though maybe I’d misunderstood, because I do that, especially where science is concerned: I make metaphors of things that aren’t and find morals where they don’t exist. In any case, cellular automata delighted Clark because they accounted for all the mysteries that bedeviled conventional investigators from various disciplines—cosmologists, biologists, even linguists—and showed all these puzzles to have the same solution. Reality, as Clark would have me understand it, was on the verge of being figured out, and in a manner that Einstein, for example, would find shocking.
“Wow, that’s cool,” I said. My vocabulary was drying up.
“It’s an exciting moment,” Clark replied.
“You’re friends with this Dr. Wolfram? What’s he like?”
We were walking so fast that I didn’t catch Clark’s answer. I’d started to worry that we’d be sleeping outside that night, perhaps in the bee tree, upside down, like bats. He wasn’t tiring, he wasn’t losing momentum. Maybe he was a cellular automaton whose heart pumped digital blood. We reached a spot on the lawn beside the road that he gestured at significantly but didn’t explain the meaning of until we’d gone a few yards farther.
“That’s where Shelby died,” he said.
I turned my head around, befuddled. I wasn’t sure that he’d told me this before. Pretty little Shelby, black and red, withered toward the tail, with those eyes that I thought had said to me, “Save me from being saved,” was gone? The dog that I remembered Clark cooing to in his teensy-weensy doggie voice was dead? I cast back over our phone calls but couldn’t recall how he’d broken this news to me, which I thought would have left an impression. The curious thing was that I hadn’t expected to see her here, suggesting that I was aware of her demise. Life had moved so fast these last few years. All I clearly remembered were the status reports about Shelby’s medical progress, how Clark had liberated her from her wheelchair through nutrition and acupuncture and other treatments.
“Someone ran her over with a car,” he said. “They didn’t stop to inform me. I found her body. It was very sad.”
He didn’t sound sad reporting how sad he’d been; he sounded factual. Maybe he’d had to harden himself. Poor Shelby, the plaything of people who wanted the best for her. She’d recovered just enough mobility to meet the fate she’d skirted the first time. My mother had been right: I should have put her down. All I’d done was to place her fate in others’ hands until she had figured out how to snatch it back.
Clark finally asked me into the house. The puny front room, which I took to be a station on the way to a more commodious inner room, was where we sat down, on a sofa not new, not nice, but like something frumpy dragged in from an estate sale. I asked about the empty cop car, which I’d misfiled under “Humdrum topics for small talk,” not “Jarring sights needing urgent clarification.” Clark said, “Oh that.” He said “Oh that” a lot, but only during a jailhouse meeting with him after the trial did I grasp the phrase’s function. It offered him one and a half seconds to think, which is all that a brain like his requires to summon up a casual-sounding lie.
“A security measure,” he said. His explanation was jumbled and incoherent, something to do with China’s alleged ambitions to extend its influence into space and technologically leapfrog the United States using any means at its disposal.
Extracting from Clark a context for these remarks would take much of the weekend. The action item heading our formal agenda—my work on his unpublished novels, for a fee—was equally hard to get a fix on. He hadn’t divulged the nature of these books to me, and because his actual life was so outlandish, the fictional subjects that might attract him were impossible to guess at. Beside the works of Dr. Stephen Wolfram, his reading tastes were a mystery to me. I’d probed a few times to see if he’d read my books, or even my magazine pieces or reviews, but was always met with a change of subject, or silence. Modesty kept me from pressing the issue, but a time was approaching when our friendship seemed destined to go flat without some reciprocity from his side. We knew no one in common, we shared no deep experiences, and Shelby, who’d brought us together, was in the ground.
At some point as we sat in the bare room I mentioned a small lien on one of my bank accounts for unpaid taxes. “State or federal?” Clark asked me about the tax bill. Federal. He produced a pen and a small notebook he had with him. He tore out a page and wrote a number on it.
“Here,” he said. “Call George.” As established earlier that evening in a long rant about his people’s troubles with the Bush clan, a favorite topic of his, “George” meant the president. The sitting one. My impression was that the clash of dynasties came down to temperamental differences. The Rockefellers were public-spirited, truly devoted to the common good, while the Bushes were out for themselves.
“This isn’t the White House switchboard,” Clark informed me. “It’s his private line. He’ll answer personally.”
The notebook page was pressed into my palm. Operating on programming, on habit, I thanked him in my best middle-class way for it, but inside I was reeling. The power to call the Commander in Chief at will, though it wasn’t a power I ever planned to exercise—the repercussions were inco
nceivable: a knock on the door from a Secret Service agent?—did not fit neatly into my self-concept. I did, though, glance down at the numerals. There were ten of them. They weren’t all sixes, nor did they seem random. They appeared authentic. Compared to what, though? I’d never paused to think about how a presidential phone number might differ from the civilian variety. It wouldn’t, I decided. It would be inconspicuous, like this one, in case foreign agents discovered it by accident, perhaps while burglarizing Clark’s house. They wouldn’t look twice at it. Maybe I shouldn’t, either. I wasn’t sure I wanted it in my memory, a target for possible interrogations. It couldn’t be real. I looked again. It was. An actual phone number, but undialable. There might be consequences.
The scrap of paper was deep inside my pocket when Sandy arrived, an emissary from the normal solar system that was out there somewhere, and which I missed. She looked punished and flayed by adventures in the business world and was wearing those clothes that they make women wear to prove they’re serious and don’t think of sex much. Words passed between her and Clark about her week but they were few and lacking in warmth, a minimal interaction after an absence. Their sight lines crossed as they spoke but didn’t meet; he gazed past her at the door and she gazed past him at a pillow on the sofa. Then Snooks appeared, delivered by a nanny, I think; whoever the person was came and went in seconds. Clark hogged the child’s attention from the start, instructing her to walk to him. I pretended to hang on her every step. My stomach gaped. The Rockefeller hosting style, from what little I’d experienced of it, disdained guests’ appetites and physical comfort in favor of the pleasures of proximity to private family goings-on. I felt duly privileged, but I needed food.