by James Sallis
"You have a place to stay?"
"Slate gave me a list, halfway houses and the like. Takes care of its own, you know."
"Yeah. Sure it does. Join our happy little family of guys lying awake all night flat on their backs staring at the ceiling and trying not to scream."
I told him my address.
"If I'm not here, the key'll be under a brick in the flowerbed out front, one nearest the door. It's a big house. Stay as long as you need to, come and go as you want."
Silence again. "You sure about this, Lewis?"
I thought about Vicky years ago, asking Cherie to stay with us until she got her life together. Remembered before that, before he was killed, Cherie's brother Jimmi sitting up in the bed next to mine at the halfway house reading a book on economics. And how Verne's last years, past the shutters of her personal pain, were given over to others. She made a difference in a lot of lives around here, Richard Garces had told me.
"I'm sure," I said.
"Then maybe I'll be seeing you soon, huh. After all these years."
I'd barely hung up, had the thought I'd love a drink and triumphantly decided on coffee instead, wandering out to the kitchen to see about assembling some, when the phone rang again. I picked it up out there.
"Mr. Griffin?"
"Yes."
"You may not know my voice. A number of years have passed since we met."
"I know it."
"Yes. I suspected that you would, of course. I also suspect that you well may choose not to speak with me."
He waited without saying more.
"Go on."
"Thank you. This is quite difficult for me. Perhaps for both of us."
My turn to wait now.
"I will not apologize for our past encounters, Mr. Griffin."
"I would never have expected you to."
"Very well."
Wondering if I'd ever actually heard someone say Very well before, I watched a mouse ease out from beneath therefrigerator and inch along the baseboard. Part of its tail was missing.
Guidiy, Dr. Guidry, was Alouette's father, the one who had pushed her mother away, sequestered Alouette from her. Just before she died, LaVeme had been trying to get in touch again with her daughter, at that time a runaway. And just after LaVeme died, because she would have wanted me to, I found Alouette up in Mississippi, only to have Guidry descend with well-dressed lawyers and threadbare threats. Alouette chose to come back with me to New Orleans, and for a while it looked as though things were going to work out for her-but I guess it had looked that way before. I came home one day and she was gone.
"I may have misjudged you, Mr. Griffin."
"You're not the first."
"It is possible, also, that you may have misjudged me."
The mouse had found the gap in the cabinet door under the sink and hoisted itself up and over.
I said nothing.
"I'm in touch with you now," he said shortly, "because some weeks back, I had a call from my daughter."
Frogs have been known to fall from the sky without warning. Pianos. Hailstones like fine crystal.
"It was, as you will understand no doubt, a terrible surprise, wholly unanticipated. Years have gone by. Years in which I have had no word from my daughter and, despite considerable efforts on my part and behalf, proved unable to learn even her whereabouts. I suppose, in fact that I had come to resign myself to her continued absence-inasmuch as one ever does." He paused. "You're a father too, as I recall."
"Did she tell you where she was calling from?"
"No."
"Or why she was calling after all this time? Did she ask for money?"
"Perhaps she intended to. She would have gotten it, of course. Whatever she needed, without question. But very soon-we'd scarcely begun talking-we were cut off."
"Probably she just spooked, when it came down to it, and hung up."
"That is certainly possible, of course. But I think not."
Very well and Ithink not, both in the space of minutes.
"She said she was in trouble, Mr. Griffin."
"Trouble's pretty much where she lives. You know that."
"Which is why I have to think that, for her to call me, the trouble this time must be extraordinary. At any rate," he said after a moment "it occurred to me that, whatever trouble she might be in, as long as sheremainedcapable of doing so, you're the other person Alouette would be likely to contact" He cleared his throat. "Have you heard from my daughter, Mr. Griffin?"
"No. Neither recently, nor since she left here. I'm sorry."
"I see. And could I ask a favor? You've certainly no reason to grant me one, I realize."
"I'll call you if I hear from Alouette-yes."
"Thank you, Mr. Griffin," he said quiedy. "Perhaps we might get together for lunch one day."
Moments went by.
Then the dial tone.
The third call came later, as I settled ever deeper into my old white wood rocker by the front window. Shutters pulled, blinds drawn. Murmur of a rising wind outside. I was on my third cup of coffee, playing a Mozart serenade for winds that was a favorite of Clare's.
I picked up the phone on the fifthring and said hello.
Though no one answered, the line stayed open, and for whatever reason, I didn't speak again. I stood listening, feeling the presence there at the other end, on that other shore.
Then the dial tone.
In a drawer of my desk I had a seven-year-old tape with two twenty-second segments that sounded and felt exactly like this. Back then, not long after I pulled the cassette from my answering machine, sitting in darkness like a cat with the fruity smell of gin and a murmur of wind outside, I had known that the old man's bottle and mute acceptance in that final scene from my novel were my own, and that I would not see my son, would not see David, again.
15
I can tell you in a few words who I am: lover of woman and language, in terror of tlw history wlwse responsibility I bear, a man awake at night and alone.
At 3:52 A.M., to be precise.
I put the book down and picked up, for the second or third time, my empty glass. The radio was on, Art Tatum silk-pursing some well-nibbled sow's ear of a popular song. Zeke had turned up around nine and now was installed, and asleep, upstairs. I could hear the window unit in his room laboring; whenever its compressor kicked in, lights dimmed momentarily, like a caught breath.
This time of night, this circle of light with music welling up outside, this solitude-we were all old friends. Over the years we'd sat here together many nights just this way. With houses and apartments empty around me, with Alouette asleep upstairs, with Vicky away at the hospital taking on the nightly freight of violence that finallysent her, low in the water, home to France.
Or with LaVeme out working. We'd climb from bed at five or six, when most of those caught up in the world outside our window (so very, very different from the world inside) were ending their day, to begin ours.
Suddenly Bat emerged from the darkness around me and sprang onto my lap.
Ezekiel had been something of a surprise too. Not long after I got back home, he'd come knocking at the door and when I opened it, said, "Lewis?" Peering up, because he topped out at about four foot six. "Here I am."
He looked not at all like any of the photos of him I'd seen. What he looked like was a cypress knee someone had carved into the likeness of a man.
I fed him leftover red beans and rice while we sat at the kitchen table going through a couple of pots of coffee together. Topics? How exciting and scary Zeke'sfirst months at the prison paper were, and how uninspired the last years, when only a sense of duty and need of something to do kept him plodding doggedly on. Praise for Hosie Slaughter's crusading work with Tlie Griot — now published out in Metairie and given over exclusively to "aits and entertainment." Excited questions about movies like Boyz N the Hood and Spike Lee's, which of course he'd not seen. Mention of the novel Zeke thought he might someday write. Until finally he said, "O
kay, Lewis. Point me to my comer. 'Cause this ol'fighter's'bout to fall down."
High point of the afternoon had been when I dropped by Deborah's, about six, to say hello and make a date for dinner the next day. "You mean I'm getting asked out? Like normal people?" she said. I asked her if Commander's would be okay, and she told me it always had been. "But let's go early. Because afterwards, I have a surprise for you."
Low point of the afternoon was everything else.
Following that morning's three phone calls, I'd sketched out my itinerary: head uptown to see what I couldfind out about Daryl Anthony "Dap" or "Dapper" Payne at Tulane's registrar; revisit the tract house on Old Metairie Road where I'd come across the body and where surely some subtle, obtuse clue awaited me; along the way, check out outlying missions and shelters.
That was an awful lot of moving about.
I called Don back.
"You using your car?"
"What for? No way they're letting me leave here, not with all this shit going down. For all I know they've got it booted, so I can't get away."
"Okay if I borrow it?"
"Why not? It's in the lot out back. I'll send the keys down, let them know you're coming-Hang on, Lew, I've got another call, supposed to be urgent." He was gone four, five minutes. A couple of times other people came on, asking if they could help me, and I told them I was holding. Then Walsh was back.
"That was Danny, Lew. He's okay. Says he met an old friend at one of the malls, some guy he went to school with. Been staying over with him, catching up on old times. They saw a movie or two, had some burgers. He's home now. Said he'd probably sleep right through to tomorrow."
"That's good, Don."
"Yeah. So, you gonna bring the car back here when you're through with it, or what?"
"I'll bring it back."
Though for all the good it did me I might as well have left it there in the lot, and sat in it myself the whole time.
Yo, black sheep. Got any wool? I'm down for it, man. Three bags full.
And wool's all it was.
No one at Tulane could tell me anything I didn't know already. Out on Old Metairie Road a lawn mower had been run through the ankle-deep rotting leaves and sashes of yellow police tape clung to trees, but nothing else had changed. The two or three mission-looking places I found were closed-whether permanently or just for the day, I couldn't tell.
So around six, swimming upstream of outbound traffic, Middle America making its way home, I drove back into New Orleans, dropped by Deborah's to say hello and set up our date (parking illegally out front: most cops knew Don's god-awful old Regal by sight), and returned the car. Don and I had dinner together, my treat, at Felix's. Danny wasn't mentioned.
Then I'd come home by streetcar and, within minutes, answered the door to find Ezekiel peering up at me.
Once he was tucked in, I poured a Sharp's and settled down in the rocker to read, sleepy but still wired. I tried going back through what I'd written in the legal pad that morning but couldn't concentrate, couldn't stay afloat on it. Next I tried a small-press book I'd bought several months past, on pure impulse, at Maple Street. It had sat on the coffee table ever since, cover curling from humidity so that I'd kept turning it over, back to front and back again.
They come in the dark and do terrible things to me. They go away.
But I didn't do much better with that than I'd done with my own stuff.
I found myself thinking about the notebook Lola Park had given me at the hospital that morning.
I went over and got it from the breast pocket of the coat I'd hung on the back of the hallway chair.
I'd carried the notebook for over a year. It was about eight by four, the size of a large wallet and half the thickness of a deck of cards, tape binding pulled away in the middle from constantrecontouring to pocket and body. Stitched pages, blue and white composition cover.
As with many good ideas, at first I'd used the notebook readily and often, before letting it slip into neglect. A dozen pages or so bore scribbled notes for classes and stories, snippets of overheard conversation, bits of description, the occasional address or phone number, errand lists, wobbly columns of Dewey decimal numbers copied from the school library's computerized catalog, lists of trees or of lawyers' and street names. Some of the notes were impenetrable, whatever import they once may have had now lost in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.
All of that had been entered the first month or so I carried the notebook around. Therest of the pagesremainedempty.
Now, though, they were filled-literallyfilled, top to bottom, left to right, had to be fifty, sixty lines to the page-with a tiny script that managed simultaneously to look like a continuous, unbroken line and put one in mind of cuneiform.
"My book. One of them," the accident victim, the man I'd first thought to be David, Lew Griffin2, had said.
And what he'd done in this notebook I'd left him (I realized upon reading several pages) was recast The Old Man in diary form. The central situation, individual scenes, settings, dialogue: all were there. But so were elements that had nothing to do with my story-scenes and language that never belonged to it, never belonged in it, never would.
The notebook's unnamed, transparent diarist lives on the streets, moving freely through the city, watching people come and go and afterwards, in an attempt to understand them, making up stories about them: who they may be, how they pass their days or nights, what's important to them and what scorned, memories, dreams.
One day on Magazine he watches two men, thefirst older, white, the other a young black, leave a bar together, shake hands and strike out their separate ways. He thinks how very much, for all their visible differences, the two men resemble one another, self and shadow. And from that moment of unpresuming observation, the story-the notebook's remaining pages, its retelling of my novel-gains force and spins itself out.
When, years later, I met the younger man's son, it was with mutual, quiet recognition. You're David, I said.
Yes.
16
The past is no insubstantial, thready thing, sunlight slanting through shutters into cool rooms, pools and standards of mist adrift at roadside, memories that flutter from our hands the instant we open them. Rather is it all too substantial, bluntly physical, like a boulder or cement block growing ever denser, ever larger, there behind us, displacing and pushing us forward.
And yes: in its mindless, rocklike, solid, unstoppable way, it pursues us.
Once, I'd begun a short story comprised of a series of footnotes to another, undivulged text, footnotes that were to form among themselves a coherent, though discrete, text.
Another time I planned a novel each chapter of which would end midsentence, the next chapter scooping up the rest for its own beginning. Each chapter also was to be in some way-thematically, symbolically, parodically-a mirror image of the one before.
"Footnotes" meant to express the way I think we live, our days and actions little more than second thoughts, improvisations, elaborations, trills, upon some unperceived, unseen, probably imaginary text.
Going On, by contrast, was my fumbled attempt to insist upon an underlying unity, to imply connection among these disparate moments, to conjure up linearity.
That both stoiy and novel were abandoned cannot mean nothing.
If we must learn to put our distress signals in code, perhaps it's not because that way lies communication, perhaps it's only because the codes seem so much more meaningful, so much more fraught, than are our lives. Because we have somehow to imagine ourselves larger than the sun's footprint. And if we can't have meaning, then at least we'll have the appearance of meaning: its promise, heft, import.
I'd first come across that phrase, You must learn to put your distress signals in code, while browsing through literary magazines at Beaucoup Books on Magazine. I bought the magazine and carried it off to Joe's (not Joe's from the Quarter but a later, uptown incarnation that soon folded), where, drinking my way into evening, I read the rest of t
he magazine yet managed to arrive home without it. Years later I'd been in the audience when the poet David Lunde came to UNO to read.
— Some of the things Deborah O'Neil and I talked about after her play on Sunday. A kind of heady conversation I seldom had. Guiltily looking about as we sat in Rue de la Course (also on Magazine) over coffee, tea and biscotti, feeling again like the undergraduate I'd been for only the shortest of times.
Deborah's play was the surprise she'd promised.
She told me about it over dinner at Commander's, fine pate woody cabernet sauvignon, swordfish steak with bearnaise, grilled mushrooms, that amazing bread-pudding souffle they do.
We slid into seats front row center moments before the show began. The theater was a warehouse off Julia Street whose conversion seemed as superficial and tenuous as any Hollywood set. Behind pressed-fiber walls there would be echoing spaces of bare support beams, girders thick with cobweb and grime, uninhabitable spaces. The whole thing could be struck in a few hours. Seats were of the stackable plastic sort-contoured, they call them, though for what species I can't imagine. People sat in suits and dresses, in torn jeans, flannel shirts, all black, in designer warm-ups and overalls and not much at all, sipping white jug wine from plastic cups.
Onstage, characters at a dinner party swirled in eccentric orbits about one another. Obviously few were familiars; conversation was mostly phatic, with sudden intrusions of intensely personal remarks that brought silence crashing down. Domestic employees ferried through with platters of drinks, squab, canapes, tureens, covered dishes, but would not be detained.
All the actors wore masks, and the very moment we thought we had one of them pegged (manipulative CEO, poor-little-me wife, kindhearted friend) he or she would trade masks with one of the others and in so doing become a wholly different character.
Apparently there was also dissension among partygoers as to appropriate music. The sound track careened from Carl Orff to Willie Dixon to Sinatra to REM. At one point "Sympathy for the Devil" and the 1812 Overture played simultaneously.