He turned the envelope over again and walked toward the house, which seemed to recede as he advanced. His knee joints were giving him trouble, and he grimaced. He was letting himself go, it wasn’t worth it anymore. His land was desolate. For years the gravel path had been poorly maintained, the grass was growing tall, came up to his knees, and the frost made it all look even dirtier, covering the countryside and robbing it of colour. What had he accomplished? Sold some bootlegged liquor, built a few useless inventions. He hadn’t saved anyone. He didn’t matter. But he might still be a patriarch. He might have had children with dozens of different women, all the women he’d met since the end of the eighteenth century.
I was born in 1760, or so I’ve been told, and my memories confirm it. He blushed at the thought.
He thought of secret dynasties unknown to him, his blood living on in frail mortal bodies and ending up in shallow graves, while he lived on eternally. A long and winding path led to his house, stretching as far as the eye could see. Aimé thought of his descendants in various cities and towns, illegitimate children who had themselves tried to understand their obscure origins, hair that didn’t match their brothers’ and sisters’. He thought of these children, poor or powerful, all carrying his genes; he only knew of one for certain, the one he’d had with Jeanne, who’d been called to the bench before turning forty. He thought about Jeanne too. And his own disinterest, selfish and total, in what had become of her after their short time together. Since their last meeting, more than eight decades ago, Aimé had made no attempt to find out anything about the child. He’d gone back to Phoenix, where he tended his dusty bottles and his flourishing business. But he imagined his son, imagined the child and later the adult this person had become, a man long dead and himself the founder of a new line. He was more of a founding father than Aimé. How could Aimé give himself that title? By what right? Because he was still here to bear witness. If he didn’t, no one would. He tried to remember the name of Jeanne’s first son, who had been recognized as a Langlois — she’d told him, someone had told him — the family of the man she’d married after he ran off into the night in Saint-Henri. Langlois took the adopted boy as his own son, he became the Langlois’s eldest child, a respected man, first a lawyer and then a judge, a man responsible for laying down the law, establishing truth, and meting out justice. Aimé was rifling through his memories, mail in hand, as he walked back home.
Justice Pierre Langlois, Supreme Court of Canada. Victor Langlois’s son. Now he remembered. The air was cold, even for a February morning on the Kansas–Missouri border. Later, a little snow would fall and the wind would kick up. A supernova had exploded several million years before at the edges of the visible universe, and yesterday they’d been treated to a glimpse of the luminous echo of its death. Aimé remembered his son’s name: Pierre, born in 1865, while he was deep in the Appalachian forest armed with a knife and worn-out rifle, a new name, and a blue uniform. He didn’t turn around to see the path he’d followed, just climbed the steps to his porch.
As he went through his front door, Aimé already knew what was in the envelope.
Chattanooga, October 13, 1986
Dear Mr. Simons,
I hope you won’t find me presumptuous for writing this letter in French, a language I have not had much occasion to use in recent years but one which, I believe, will enable us to understand each other fully. If you are still reading after these first few lines, my choice must have been a good one. I’m aware that I’m taking a risk, and am happy to do so: I haven’t come this far only to settle for the path of least resistance. That this letter has made its way into your hands is already a great victory for me, achieved after many years of searching for you; for you to read it in its entirety would be more than enough to confirm my intuitions and deductions. Time will tell whether I was right or wrong. I dare not venture a guess on that question myself. This letter, then, represents both the end of a long and painstaking search, and the beginning of a new phase during which my fantasies will confront reality head-on. I cannot say whether this encounter will be a fruitful one, but there is no reason to wait any longer. You are within reach, the window is open. I cannot be certain of anything, but have no choice but to act as if everything were now clear. There’s no time for any other course of action.
We’ve never met, but I feel I know you well. I know who you are, where you come from, what you’ve done with your life. I also know that we’re connected in the most astonishing manner. In spite of your best intentions and legendary discretion, you’ve left more traces on this earth than you imagine. Don’t be afraid, I’m not crazy, and I bear you no ill will — quite the contrary. Think of me as a simple researcher, a humble archeologist of continental shifts and the movements of the moon, a man whose vocation is panning for gold, knee-deep in rivers of tattered old documents. No, I’m not crazy, though I’m certainly obsessed, and determined as well. It’s my sincere belief that our destinies are inextricably intertwined. Only you can confirm it.
Aimé’s damp hands left marks on the letter that disappeared seconds after they appeared. He shook the papers, and quickly slid his finger between the pages to grasp the last ones, his eye drawn instinctively to the name smack dab in the middle of the paragraph. He skimmed what was written, apprehending its full meaning, and though he was rusty he was not tripped up by any of these words in his native tongue, they were snapping into place in his head.
But if it was Schoedler who triggered this passion of mine, one that has always stood me in good stead, the true beginning of my quest was something else, deep in my family history, which you were no longer part of. Not long after I discovered the Book of Nature, I found, quite by accident while searching through my grandfather’s things, Jeanne Beaudry’s journal covering the years from when she met you until her death in December 1900.
Aimé breathed deeply. He didn’t know what else to do, beyond going back to the beginning and rereading the introductory paragraphs, which quickly strayed into digression. On the third page, though, the tone changed slightly.
. . . allow me to briefly introduce myself, and in that way explain my purpose in writing you today, which I seem to have forgotten already. My name is Albert Langlois, and I was born in 1959 in the small town of Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, between the St. Lawrence River and the Chic-Choc Mountains. When I turned nineteen, I left my country to pursue the genealogical research that had become important to me. My investigations led me here, far south, to Chattanooga, where I met my wife, an American. We had a child, Thomas, who was born on February 29, 1980, as you may be able to guess. The feeling I’ve had since becoming a father is indescribable because this fundamental, deep joy available to all was compounded in my case by the certitude — perhaps noble, perhaps unhealthy — that destiny was being fulfilled. My son would be a leaper.
A leaper. The Order of Twentyniners. It came back to him, he remembered it all: inventing the federation, the love that had driven him to make it work. At one time the Order had saved his life, he was sure of it. He remembered corresponding with children all over the country. He’d provided certificates of authenticity, membership cards, buttons, and pennants. Aimé still had boxes of little collector’s items he had designed himself in his basement. It had been an accomplishment, and he had souvenirs to remind him. What had Albert accomplished?
I, Albert Langlois, through sheer force of will and good faith in my intellectual enterprise, had given birth to a leaper, one who would not only survive me, but also be privileged to know the shape of human civilization in the centuries to come. My son, Thomas Langlois, would be your direct descendent, and also your second coming, produced by the happy congruence of the earth’s revolution and pure math. But wait, I’m getting carried away again.
He was getting carried away indeed, Aimé thought. The handwriting looked dashed off, as if it had been set down on the page by an improperly calibrated mechanical wrist. There were more and more errors. Aim�
� noticed them even though many years had passed since he’d used French. Albert had crossed out certain passages, written with a sense of urgency; his tale skipped around all over the place before ending up in dead ends of conjecture and excuses.
. . . as Executive Secretary of the Order of Twentyniners. Please rest assured it’s not that. My aim in writing you is different: I’m not looking for advice or assistance, I just need you to listen, to be there. But you must also know that this position with the Order, one you likely no longer hold, was the spark in my mind. Yes: thanks to your letter, I understood. Suddenly it made sense. All the pieces in my personal puzzle slid into place, and I knew you were the one I was searching for. It was you. You were he. Kenneth B. Simons was you, and you were he.
But let me explain myself. Last year, as a treat for my son, to help him be patient as he waited for his second birthday, and demonstrate just how different he was from the others, just how special he really was, I took out an old letter I’d kept, and showed him. We sat down together, his tearful face straight across from mine, and I read it to him. I’d found this letter long ago, at one of many visits to local flea markets. It caught my attention because it seemed to conceal some hidden truth, another connection to you. Or, more accurately, to Aimé.
The letter didn’t say much, but everything of importance was there: a new leaper was welcomed, membership into the Order of Twentyniners confirmed, and a small donation requested. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, except perhaps for a careful observer such as myself. The paper, from the 1960s, impressed Thomas deeply, and the letter (signed by your hand) quickly became our most prized shared possession and a touchstone of our relationship. Thomas and I had a secret to share and to cherish: his membership in a secret fraternity open only to the most special children of all. My son (like myself) quickly became convinced that the letter was meant for him, and we read it together, over and over again, enthralled by this new bond that his mother, my wife, could never understand. But that’s another story . . .
He skipped a few lines, and reached for a pitcher of warm water on the other side of the table. It was a strange day, the light was barely sneaking through the windows. Aimé calmly continued reading, at once interested and skeptical. Somewhere in Tennessee someone had been trying to find out about him for years, had carried out research, connected his various identities, had — was it possible? — tried to a make his own son in the image of his forefather. Somewhere in Tennessee, Chattanooga to be exact, where Aimé had not set foot since the previous century, was a family that was, in the deepest possible sense of the word, his. The man who wrote this letter was a direct descendent of Jeanne Beaudry.
Though I was enthusiastic, and Thomas seemed receptive, I didn’t make the connection. A whole year went by before the evidence jumped out at me. I pursued my research, all alone, and started gathering the information I’d need to reconstruct, piece by piece, the story of this elusive ancestor, the original leaper, the one whose life contained the entire puzzle. I was reading your letter from the Order for the twentieth or thirtieth time when the solution finally hit me on the head. In recent months I’d managed to trace Aimé to his home in Pittsburgh, in the early 1960s, but I got the place name wrong. A single letter had thrown me. Of course, there was another Pittsburg, without an “h,” in addition to its much better-known namesake in western Pennsylvania, at the foot of the Appalachians. Aimé was in Kansas.
After days spent reviewing notebooks and notes and piles of documents, and reorganizing my synchronous piles, I went into my office to write this letter. There was no longer any room for doubt. We were ready to make contact and . . .
And nothing. The sentence hung there, unfinished. Albert had crossed out the words that came after, and begun writing again an inch below, with what was obviously a different pen. Aimé imagined the child Thomas had been and still was. He saw a seven-year-old, maybe wearing glasses, already a normal kid, sitting on his controlling, authoritarian father’s knee, the child fully absorbed by the father’s intensity.
There was no doubt about it: he idolized his father.
So here you are, witness to my confusion and excitement, all that remains for you is to decide how to respond. Let me lay my cards on the table.
Kenneth. William. Aimé.
My ancestor, my contemporary.
I feel you so near to me. I know you so well.
According to my calculations, you are fifty-five today, if we skip the non-leap year of 1900. That makes you twenty years younger than my own father, Jean Langlois, your grandson, who was born on July 20, 1910. I am his last child, born late in his life. This means that you are also, according to the chronological time of ordinary men, 226 years old. Forgive me if my hands aren’t shaking with wonder as I write this figure, it’s just that I’ve been obsessed with it for such a long time that I’ve gotten used to it. “Such a long time” — what does that even mean, to a man such as yourself?
Aimé looked at the page, one of dozens in his hand, all filled with this handwriting that grew indecipherable in stretches. Appended to the letter was a thick stack of photocopied documents. He was exhausted. “Such a long time”: it was the phrase that had dogged him, like a faithful companion or a nemesis, as long as he had lived; four words crushed into two, suchalong time, a nasal dactyl brought to a close with a thud. Albert was presumptuous, his writing convoluted, almost a provocation, but his purely rhetorical questions gave Aimé pause. He read between the lines. The big house was empty, and he was all alone with Albert’s words and a few primitive, rusty automatons to do the housework.
When I try to see the world through your eyes, my heart starts pounding, vertigo overtakes me, and I’m left speechless, at a loss for words that could calm me and restore some order to my thoughts. It was through words that I came to know of your existence; it is through words that I can still today conceive the inconceivable. Writing has always been a great help to me. It has always provided a way to organize the flow of information, synthesize it, keep it from descending into chaos.
It surely won’t escape you that my entire theory is based on science, not idle speculation. Obviously, you are the empirical proof of the validity of my original hypothesis (which is not mine alone, far from it) — that a human baby, born at a precise moment in the lunar cycle and planetary revolution, will be affected in its cells, just like the earth’s tides and currents. Writers since antiquity have discussed this phenomenon, you can find it in Archimedes and Thucydides, whose esoteric enthusiasm is not incompatible with scientific facts and verifiable data. Out of interest’s sake, I should say that my own obsession with this strangest of dates stems from the now sadly forgotten Dr. Frédéric Schoedler, whose great opus, Le livre de la nature, ou leçons élémentaires de physique, d’astronomie, de chimie, de minéralogie, de géologie, de botanique, de physiologie et de zoologie, was published in 1865. This was a respected scientific treatise in its time, and its theoretical framework is still current, no matter what a few cynical MIT astrophysicists have to say about it. Schoedler makes a fine teacher, and even a youth of twelve, as I was when I first laid hands on his book, could find something of value in it. I was immediately drawn to the description of the mathematical and astronomical history of the Gregorian calendar, in which he explains how leap years play a vital role in human affairs, and much more. According to Schoedler, the fact that the leap year can only be expressed in fractions (the famous ¼ added to the 365 days in the year) does not mean it does not exist, in the economy of the universe. This 29th day existed before we took notice of it. But have you read Schoedler, Kenneth? As I write, I ask myself the question and suddenly the answer seems obvious. One thing is certain, however, and I don’t think I’m overstepping the bounds of politeness to point it out: If you have read him, you couldn’t help but notice his mention of “leap-year babies,” as I did, which he notes with a list of a number of cases recorded since the Council of Trent, of children whose “a
bnormal” lifespan caused them to be deemed to be “heretics” by the Christian authorities.
Aimé hadn’t just read Schoedler, he’d attended the man’s lecture, on the meaning of what he called the “days forgotten by history and time,” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Of course, the eminent physicist had discussed leap years and the Gregorian calendar, as well as the famous ten years excised from the history books in October 1582. Impressed by the panel of historians and scientists, including Frederick Jackson Turner and Henri Bergson, Aimé had taken copious notes. He looked back on this lecture as one of the best moments of his life. Images of the magnificent fair grounds leaped into his mind. A new dynamo was on show, along with the latest internal combustion engine. Flying machines, both hot-air balloons and dirigibles, glided overhead. An enormous blimp, aptly named the Inconvenience, narrowly avoided a collision with the clock tower, but successfully crash-landed outside the fairgrounds. The ambulance, Aimé remembered, was electrically powered. His memories were indescribable, the omnipresent smell of gas and noise of telegraph waves and ringing telephones, and the joy of outpacing a bicycle-racer by walking on a rubber conveyor.
At the very end of the lecture he’d managed to slip himself into the crowd and shake hands with Schoedler, a giant of a man. He was getting on in years but still sharp, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Aimé’s signed Livre de la nature was still in his library.
The Longest Year Page 20