Your Face in Mine: A Novel

by Jess Row

  The backyard has emptied now; a young woman from the catering staff circles the pool, stacking abandoned glasses in a bus bin. On the far side of the house, soft screeches and pounding feet: the roundup of the children has begun. Every animal, every being, is ignoring me. This is what I tell myself. No one, no one but these two people, has any interest in what I’m about to say.

  It’s very simple. I went to see him; he looked bad. Tired. Said he needed his insulin shot. I got him the needle and went downstairs to make him some soup. When I got back upstairs he was asleep. He’d cooked up and hid the evidence; I realized that later. So I left. End of story.

  And you never told anyone—because?

  I raise my hands over my head in a parody of a sleepy stretch, trying to slow my breathing, to give myself a window of coherent thought.

  Why the fuck do you think? Because of this. Because of how you reacted just now. I didn’t want to complicate things any further for anyone. He died by his own hand. By choice. Whether I was there or not didn’t matter. He would have just gotten up off the couch and found the syringe himself. Maybe not that day. But the next day, or the next. Believe me. He was ready to die. He wanted to die. In his mind it was as good as done. Was it selfish? Of course. I take full responsibility for that. Was it criminal? Was it immoral? I don’t think Alan would have wanted me to fuck up my life because of an absolute, incontestable accident. With the wrong DA I could have been accused of involuntary manslaughter. Do you know that? I could have spent five years in jail.

  You talked to a lawyer?

  Years later. In graduate school. After an acute attack of conscience. And you know what he said? He said, you’ve suffered enough. Go live your life. And so I did.

  An enormous lump rises and beats in my esophagus, a vibrating tumor. I feel like a bullfrog.

  And so I have to ask you. Are you going to let me live my life, Martin?

  He gets up and throws his arms around me, around my arms, confining me in a reckless hug.

  I want to do more than that, he says. I want to give you a life. You’ve had too much wretchedness for one already. Let it go, man! We both ought to let it go. Don’t you think? We can help each other do this thing.

  Is that what all this has been about?

  Of course not. What am I, some kind of stealth therapist, some self-help guru in disguise? This is about business. This is a transaction. But sometimes in a transaction more than just money changes hands.

  So you can buy happiness, after all. What a relief.

  Don’t start on me with that liberal BS. Money isn’t happiness. Money is life, the energy circuit, the good and the bad. Turn the circuit in your direction and you get happiness. But it’s never just about accumulation, it’s about use. Use value. You feel me? The way things are going, I could probably retire in five years and play golf. Do I look like someone who wants to spend the rest of his life playing golf and avoiding capital gains?

  See? You are a self-help guru. With a clientele of one.

  Well, hopefully not just one, he says. Listen, is this enough? I’m worn out. Worn out and revivified, true. But I need some sleep. Bangkok’s in three days.

  That’s not quite enough, I say. I need a commitment from you. No—more than that. I need an oath.

  An oath?

  This dies with us. Saying the words, I feel like a character in a Hitchcock movie, like the hapless tennis player in Strangers on a Train. This conversation never happened.

  He grins at me. Yeah? Okay. Scoot over. He reaches down and rolls up his right pants leg, flap over flap, tighter and tighter, a tourniquet he pulls up over his knee. Right above his kneecap is a wavering of the skin, a ridge of scar tissue in the shape of a parenthesis.

  Eight years old, he says. Corner of Lorraine and Barclay, right outside New Po Shun Carryout. The bullet hit the back of my leg and passed out here. Missed the knee by an inch. Otherwise I wouldn’t be walking. If it had nicked the femoral artery I’d have bled out before the ambulance arrived. As it was I spent a good ten minutes with my hands wrapped around the base of a pay phone before they picked me up. One ambulance, two paramedics. Policeman finally put me over his shoulder and drove me to the hospital himself. Black policeman. Weren’t so many in those days. Put my eyes against his neck. I fell asleep and dreamed my father was carrying me. My real father, not the one back at home. I dreamed up a black man to be my father, right then and there. Tall. Kept his hair in a close Afro. People called him Eight Ball. Wore two silver rings on his left hand, index and pinkie fingers. Smelled like baby powder and witch hazel. Always picking me up. Always putting his hand over the top of my head, like he was measuring my height. When I woke up in the hospital, when I woke up from that dream, I hated my life so much I wished I had died.

  So what are you telling me, Martin?

  I swear an oath to you, he says. Swear on this scar. Will you take my word? Jesus, I sound like Gandalf. But I mean it. Take my word?

  —

  Only later that night, at the blurring edge of sleep, as a police cruiser passes silently under my window, lights flashing, do I bolt up in bed and see what he has done. The double bind. I’m not his employee now. I’m his servant. His dependent. If it weren’t wrong, if it weren’t terribly, terribly wrong to say so, I might almost say that Martin Wilkinson owns me.

  In Maryland, there is no statute of limitations for involuntary manslaughter. I learned this from Steve Cox, whose office, above an antiquarian map store in Harvard Square, had a sign that advertised All Legal Questions Answered $50. He had a silver mustache, rimless glasses, and wore, in the middle of winter, a guayabera with a pocket protector. Every surface of his office was crowded with Mexican curios: dancing skeletons, carved santos, miniature sombreros. It doesn’t look great, he said, when I finished my tale of woe and he’d checked the state database on his computer. Maryland’s common law, and the definition of manslaughter is wide open. The prosecutor might get hung up on establishing cause. But I wouldn’t bet on it. You’d be looking at ten years in one of the state prisons down there—Jessup is the biggest. Not happy places. Good behavior, no previous record, you might get it down to three to five. Maybe even a suspended sentence, five years’ probation. But then you’re still a felon for life. Does anyone else know about this?

  No.

  You sure? You never got drunk and told some nice bartender, some girl you hooked up with in college? Ever taken acid? People tend to confess crimes when they’re on acid. Happens all the time, don’t ask me why.

  Never. Never.

  Well, okay, then. The best thing is to keep this tamped down for good. You married? She know?

  No, I said. Not exactly. She’s from China, I added, as if it helped.

  Don’t tell her. Think divorce. Think blackmail. Hate to put it this way, but that’s the situation you’re in. Give you another piece of advice? Quit drinking. Or at least take it one drink at a time. Don’t take drugs. Avoid anesthesia. Keep it straight and sober. Keep it till your deathbed. Either that or move to Costa Rica. I’ve got friends in real estate there. Set you up real nice for next to nothing.

  —

  The standard explanation I’ve given myself is simple: when I heard the words from Cheryl, when she called from the hospital, my mind went black, my throat filled with cold sand, I nearly passed out, and it wasn’t until hours later that I realized I’d never said to her, but I saw him only half an hour before that. It wasn’t a conscious omission. It wasn’t an omission at all. I had lost my mind; I had lost my memory; all I was thinking of was how to live the next seventy-two hours, how to make it to the funeral.

  As it turned out, it fell to me to drive Cheryl and Rebecca there. She wasn’t able to drive herself, she said; she couldn’t be trusted behind the wheel, after two days of Valium- and doxepin-induced sleep. They sat in the backseat, as if I were the chauffeur: collapsed against either door, their black dresses folded about them, like dying crows. Rebecca and I nearly carried Cheryl into the service; Rabbi Kau
ffmann and I nearly carried her back out again. She clung to my neck like a cramping swimmer reaching up for air. She said, you were his better self. If only he had listened to you more. She said, something of him lives on in you.

  Afterward, because there was no wake, because we were all back from college and hadn’t seen one another and needed to confirm, as all mourners do, that we were still alive, Ayala and I and Rina and Trevor and Jake spread the word that we should gather at Kanazawa, the nearest place we could think of to the funeral home. Martin was there, of course. I hadn’t seen him in eighteen months. I wouldn’t see him again for eighteen years. He wore black jeans and a black polo shirt with a navy jacket over it, an outfit so frighteningly ugly it almost seemed it had been planned that way. His face looked like it had been scrubbed with a Brillo Pad: exceedingly pale and raw, which made his nose seem larger, or perhaps he was having a late growth spurt. At the entrance to the chapel we’d hugged, awkwardly, a first in our lives. Thank god, I’d said, thank god you’re here, and he said, why wouldn’t I be? Why wouldn’t I be, Kelly? But then the music had started—the first song was “Freak Scene,” by Dinosaur Jr., from a mix tape Alan had made for Rebecca just a week before—and I hadn’t had to answer.

  There was no table large enough for us, so the waitress gave us the tatami room in the back, and we took off our shoes, gamely, and sat cross-legged, as if we were kindergarteners again, playing duck, duck, goose, and ordered large bottles of sake, proving once and for all that we were sophomores in college. I sat at one end of the long table, and Martin at the other, saving us from having to talk to each other.

  Why did I think we were angry with each other? We had fallen so thoroughly out of contact that it seemed there must be a reason, though we’d never fought, or even disagreed, since the band broke up. Maybe it was still that. That could have been the reason I gave myself. But the look he gave me wasn’t the wariness of an old wound; it was fresh outrage. As if he wanted some kind of an answer. Finally, I thought: he blames me for not seeing it coming. For not warning Cheryl. For being too busy being who I was supposed to be, for not dropping out, if that’s what you would call it, for not going into full-time mourning before the fact. For not being self-evidently shattered. And I thought: fuck you, Martin. Fuck you and get me out of here. At the end of the meal we hugged once again, even more awkwardly than the first time, our arms curved into stiff hoops like jai alai baskets. I’ll see you, he said, and ambled down the sidewalk in the opposite direction of the parking lot.

  —

  I’ve lived with this guilt for so long—nearly twenty years—that I’ve accepted it as a condition of living, a solid vestigial node, like a tumor, like a bullet lodged near my spine. Has it cast its own pall over my life? Of course. Is there a certain relief in knowing that someone else knows?

  There would be, if that person was an impartial listener. A therapist. Wendy. Why, again, did I never tell Wendy? Not because I was afraid she’d betray me; because she would have been appalled that I avoided the consequences. To her the shame would have been unbearable. She would have wanted me to confess.

  Did I say I’ve been living in white dreamtime? The time in which all crimes are historical. Back then. Lessons learned. Things are different now. Who would have thought that history could whip around, like a dangling snake, and bite me across the knuckles? He owns me, I’m thinking. His way or three to five in Jessup. Of all the ways I expected to be transformed by grief, by loss, by a catastrophic personal loss over which I had no control, this was never one.

  The thing about blind spots, someone told me once, is you don’t see them.

  —

  So listen, Cox’s voice is saying now, on my voice mail, which I’m only listening to now, having fished my phone out of my jacket to charge it before bed. I found something. Took me nearly a month to confirm it, but here we are. Martin Lipkin, aka Matthew Wilson, aka Mark Wilbury, aka Wilbur Martinson, Internet aliases including BodyMore, Grnmnt10234, XcashKingX, and Alan93. Served eighteen months at Northern State Penitentiary in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. November 1998 to May 2000. Credit card fraud. Identity theft. Story was, he worked for a business that leased ATMs to gas stations, and figured out a way to get the card numbers out of the machines in his spare time. Pretty minor-league stuff. Or it would have been, if the purchases hadn’t been so large. He maxed out every card he found—tens of thousands of dollars, maybe two hundred thousand altogether. Strange thing was, the purchases were all overseas. No cars, no jewelry, no Xboxes or WaveRunners. Nothing that could be seized. In fact, the D.A. never discovered what it was he was buying at all. That’s why he served his full sentence. Kid had no traceable assets, nothing with which to pay a fine. Of course, insurance covered the banks’ losses. Probably ruined a few people’s credit ratings, though. And after release, he skipped parole and disappeared. There’s still a warrant out for him in the state of Vermont.

  —

  I need to hide, I can’t help thinking, I need to leave, I need a conduit, a way out. I need to become not me. As I settle back into bed, beyond sleep, I feel myself grasping Martin’s hand at the edge of a cliff, the wind behind us, straining my calves to stay upright, and then, by some wordless signal, we jump at the same moment, jump over the thick shining waves, the stone-dark bottomless ocean.

  1.

  Out of a dream of my childhood, a hike up Mount Cardigan on a bright autumn day, scampering up a long granite face at a gentle incline, bursts of October light filtering through canopies of yellow and red and orange—I open my eyes to the sun streaming through a gauzy curtain above my bed, the shutters drawn back, the branches of a rubber tree thrusting up into a pale sky strewn with jet trails.

  Five or six different species of birds are singing all at once, competitively, trying to drown one another out. An avian pep rally. It’s the sound of mid-morning, they’re saying, the day fully established, the hard business of seed cracking and grub probing under way, and I look down at my watch and see 10:30. Someone should have come to get me by now.

  But since they haven’t, since the day seems unscheduled—not that Martin ever gave me an itinerary, an agenda, not that I have any proof of being here other than a stamp in my passport and a boarding pass jammed into a shirt pocket—I sit up in bed and take a long breath, a waking breath, whatever that means. When you wake up in a new country, I’m thinking now, your senses are the sharpest. Newness, to the touch, to the nose, to the tongue, is a series of small insults. I ought to be paying full attention. I’m on retainer, after all: a professional visitor. A professional writer. Why is that so hard to say? I should be taking everything down.

  The room—which was dark when I came in, past midnight, and I tumbled into bed without even turning on the bedside lamp—is much bigger than I imagined. The bedroom opens into an alcove with a writing table and a couch, and the look is Thai Resort Classic, even I can see that, all teak and rattan and silk, lustrous green-and-gold scarves hung on the walls, a pair of brass kneeling monks on the coffee table, an antique-looking map labeled SIAM over my bed. Thorough, expensive, and generic: too perfect, like a stage set for one of those reality TV shows where I’m a strapping nitwit from Des Moines, a doe-eyed dental hygienist from Wilkes-Barre. On the writing table, in a square glass vase, a bouquet of orchids, of course, bound up with pencil-thin shoots of yellow bamboo. The room smells of incense and also something drier, more chemical: wood polish. Antiseptic. Pledge, Dettol, Febreze. Someone has put a lot of time into this, I’m thinking, a room that says, you are having an experience. You are getting what you paid for. Without demanding of you anything at all.

  Someone downstairs—the birds have died down for a minute—is speaking Japanese.

  It’s been years, and I hardly studied it conversationally, mostly just scholarly Japanese, the stock language of articles on Asian literature and linguistics, but I can pick out a few words, here and there, the shape and direction of the sentences. Of course we pay for . . . the airport . . . no visa requireme
nts . . . full private bath. Yaha. Yes, Yaha. What does Yaha mean? I wonder. I will mail you the brochure! he says, whoever it is, speaking formally, as to a client, a customer. Call me back! I can almost hear the bow. In Japanese, even speaking on the phone, you bow.

  A secretary, I’m thinking. An assistant of some kind. Maybe, from the sound of it, a separate business on the side. Nothing unusual about that. Just that Martin didn’t mention it. But who thinks of everything? In a place this size, would I expect to be all alone?

  The house belongs to him. I’m remembering this now. How, in the car, pulling through the gate, Martin couldn’t resist a proprietary smile. You get sick of staying in hotels, he said. No matter how nice they are. And in any case I have business interests. Makes sense to maintain a presence. An address. I let clients stay here sometimes. These perks, you know, in the business world, sometimes that’s all that matters. People are shallow. Sometimes all they want is a gesture.

  It’s a pretty elaborate gesture, I might have said, though just to make an obvious point.

  Now I’m up and moving around, feeling a hollow cramp of morning hunger, postflight hunger. My laptop bag is on the writing table, untouched. My suitcase stands to one side in the bathroom, or dressing room, since it has mirrors, a chest of drawers, a pressing stand. Empty. Someone came and put my clothes away while I was sleeping, and added a bathrobe, a set of blue silk pajamas still in their plastic wrapper, a pair of plastic flip-flops and a pair of leather thongs, and, as I see when I open the closet, an off-white linen suit, more or less my size. Or, when I slip on the jacket, almost exactly my size, the cuffs only an inch too long. What is this, I want to say to Martin, Fantasy Island? Or callbacks for a Tennessee Williams play?

  On the other hand, it’s a pretty nice suit.

  I need coffee. Coffee, a few words with Martin, a plan for the day. I shrug the jacket off, leave it hanging on the doorknob, choose what seems to be the most neutral outfit, a black polo shirt and jeans, and slip out the door, in my stiff new sandals, into the blue-tiled hallway, open to the outside, with tall arched windows at both ends, and down the stairs, only dimly remembering where to go. When we arrived last night the house was dark, floating in a constant hum of crickets or katydids, and there was only Phran to greet us, a short, stocky man, very brown, in a blue sarong and a Dallas Mavericks T-shirt, who carried all our suitcases upstairs at once. Now I come into a kind of central gallery, a breezeway, done in the same blue tiles, and, following a smell of coffee, flowers, and overripe fruit, into a large, open kitchen, or kitchen/office. At the kitchen end a woman in a blue smock dices vegetables with a cleaver, her face covered with a surgical mask; at the other end, along one wall, sits a bank of three computer screens, and a short, slender black man in front of them, his dreadlocks done up in a knot atop his head, tapping a pen on the desk and speaking, into a headset mic, in the voice I heard upstairs: perfect, unhesitating, native Japanese.