The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  It was easy to analyze history, to see a grave and assess a life, when the dull stuff of everyday life disappeared, leaving the subconscious to decide what was worth keeping.

  *

  Nate was not guiltless. There were other reasons beyond his relationship with his father that had kept him away, reasons connected to what might have been conceivably criminal acts. Nate had done something awful before he left for Canada.

  In its most poetic terms, he had taken down the fawn of innocence, or that was how Frank Grey Eyes might have put it if he had known about it. There were legal terms, though, for what he had done, statutory rape was one that fitted with the way he had pushed himself on his best friend’s kid sister Janice Marsh, compelling her to give up something that should have been cherished and preserved for someone truly deserving.

  He kept nothing back from Ursula. She had quieted him, told him how she loved him and to stop. It was enough. She told her own story over his. When she walked, she had a slight limp from when Frank had kicked her and broken her hip. Each time she walked she felt not her pain, but the dull ache of Frank’s regret, so it was completed, in the way everything was completed. When she limped, she did so with the memory of Frank, the bone wove his anger and love and frustration into her hip.

  Nate thought about it as he drove in a slow circle through his old neighborhood before heading back into town, the way the circle might be closed.

  He checked the digital clock. It was not yet quite six in the morning. In looking up, he nearly collided with a Lincoln as big as a hearse. It was his fault. He made eye contact with the driver to acknowledge that he had been in the wrong. There were two men sitting up front. He saw the red pulse of a cigarette glow in the dark orb of the driver’s head, and a soft glow showed the pair of eyes of the passenger, but just for a moment.

  14.

  DANIEL EINHORN GAVE his lawyer the location of a deposit box and where a key was hidden for his Chicago Union Club locker. There was a stash of money, along with bonds and securities that could be accessed and that, with discretion, if his children adjusted and spent wisely, if they stayed below the radar of the IRS, if the sum of their purchases was not too extravagant – they might find helpful, and, in the long run, when the IRS stopped looking, when the present scourge of accountability passed, they could resume life in the natural order where there would always be a separation of the rich from the poor.

  Einhorn was not a snob in believing this, more a realist, aligned with how even Jesus conceded the poor would always be among us, so the Almighty could live with around 7 per cent unemployment, the best that could be hoped for in an imperfect world.

  He was deadly serious in his general assessment of the economy and life in general. Nothing was a given, nor could anything be taken for granted. It was all earned. You were as good as how far you could stretch a lie, reel in expectations, and deliver within a margin of agreeable return.

  Yes, there was the grim understanding that it had all been a great cash grab, the millions stashed in the deregulation of markets that allowed and damn-near sanctioned fraud when circumstances might have turned out differently if expectations had been tempered, if the realities of a flattening of growth and wages and the demise of what was formerly known as the middle class had been acknowledged. But expectations had not been tempered. It was not just the Wall Street fraudsters, but greed spurred by those insufferable alleged victims, who, in demanding upwards of 20 per cent minimum return on investments, simply looked the other way as financial shenanigans were set in place to hide the truth that there were no more good paying jobs, and that what had existed in their parents’ time, a true and honest middle class, was long gone.

  What Einhorn believed, if he were truly pushed, was that there was a point just before the grand deception of his and Saul’s fraud, when there had been Vision and Hope. He had worked with special interest groups related to gaining eminent domain along a corridor running through three contiguous states for a Wind Farm along Tornado Alley. They had a prospectus drawn up, the facts and returns. It was a legitimate venture. The valuation ran into the billions. It would have covered all the losses, reconciled the Ponzi scheme and made it right. They were ahead of the curve on Thinking Green. This was good for America, for sustainable homegrown energy and domestic jobs, a win-win along fallow tracts of land that could easily have been used, and yet, it proved an insurmountable legal undertaking tied to absolute bureaucracy at the State and Federal levels.

  There had been an abiding patriotism and a great outlay of cash that included the savings of Pavel Mateˇjcˇek. The first monies were spent judiciously, until it was understood there would be no corridor, and funds set aside to influence the election of candidates who might vote Green in future elections were not guaranteed. Politics was like pissing against the wind, so, eventually, said monies were syphoned off for personal use.

  What Einhorn believed anathema to the system was faithlessness. Faith required a willful commitment to that which might never be fully explained on a balance sheet. Or, put another way, what Daniel Einhorn needed was more time, and, during his more prone, vulnerable and sanguine moments, he imagined himself a disconsolate Moses stopped by some shortsighted Rabbis who wouldn’t give eminent domain to part the Red Sea. He had planned on using the line under oath to make those accusing him understand the monumental will that Creation demanded.

  *

  Einhorn was about to exit the walk-in closet when he saw on a shelf a series of small boxes tucked away and tied with a coarse, old-fashioned string. He smelled a dank musk of animal oils, a water-repellant greasiness of worn woolens, sweaters, socks and scarves still redolent with a whiff of a crystalized sea salt from the winter his youngest daughter, Rachel, had spent along the Brittany coast under grey clouds and unassailing winds.

  It stopped him cold, how some of the money spent could never be fully understood or explained, how it had played in the coming-of-age of his beloved daughter Rachel, who on a semester abroad program in France had come under the sway of Philippe Rotheneuf, a rugged Breton with big weather-hewn hands and a Roman nose, a Spartacus or an Argonaut look-alike.

  Einhorn searched the driveway again. He was sure he could hear a noise at the front door. He moved further toward the back of the closet.

  What he rallied around was the memory of Rachel, how she had made her appeal to him, and not to Elaine, when she got into trouble in France. It was no small comfort to find his youngest, the brightest of his children, needing him, so there was an act of generosity and kindness bestowed along the way. A life had been saved. The money had mattered. It had made a difference!

  He held his breath. My God! To have it end like this. He thought of calling Rachel, but it wouldn’t have been fair. She might be the only one to mourn him truly, or maybe, with his death, a great secret would be ended, and she would be left assured that only she alone would remember. It was difficult deciding which way she might see it.

  At the time Rachel needed him, she was in the flush of a radiant emergence that was all from his side of the family. She had inherited the looks of his ill-fated, beautiful mother. For Einhorn, he had a feeling that here was a reclaimed beauty resurrected in the world, and that this time it could be made right. Rachel was the envy of other girls, and often had to appeal to boys for friendship. As with Einhorn, her looks had worked against her.

  There had been much resistance on Elaine’s part to letting Rachel go abroad, but it was Einhorn’s gift to his daughter. He insisted. In his heart, he knew his life would end horribly, and that if he had lost his elder three children, he would make amends with Rachel. She deserved this much.

  She had a boyfriend at the time, the son of a notable family who had funds tied up with Saul, so the boyfriend felt sufficiently secure in taking advantage of Rachel. It was tacitly endorsed, if not promoted, by Saul. This was the essence of big-time fraud, the swagger of familiarity, the intersection of lives and family, so proper accounting procedures were not adhered to,
because Saul worked a sort of magic that needed a measure of faith, and, though everyone knew Saul was most probably a crook, he was their crook.

  It turned out in the end, for all the elaborate planning and application letters and references, the boyfriend had also been accepted into the program, so a freedom gained was suddenly taken. Einhorn saw it in his daughter’s eyes, the shock and the awareness she had been caught out. She was her father’s daughter. He was deeply pained by how it was made known to his daughter just how calculating the world was, but he was insistent that she learned it early. The boyfriend sprung it like a surprise, so, in a calculated maneuver, he had a continent between Einhorn and Rachel.

  Einhorn kissed Rachel and told her to live life and to call often. He saw her off at O’Hare, as you might see an immigrant off to new lands. He hugged her, his lips on the crown of her head, so she was embarrassed, but he was entitled as a father. It was ending soon. Rachel reached up and touched his nose.

  There was culture over there. She should try every cheese and wine. She should know her options. He was shouting ‘Run’ without actually saying it. He believed she understood. Saul accompanied them to the airport. He didn’t like the exchange rate. That was all he said.

  *

  Einhorn drew further into the closet. He regretted now not having a gun. He heard noises downstairs. They were, of course, fucking, this boyfriend and Rachel. At the boyfriend’s insistence, they boorishly wore matching college sweatshirts, hoodies, and high-tops and toted knapsacks with attached water bottles to the airport.

  He received photos through email. Part of the process of parenthood was coming to terms with stomaching the shit-eating grin of a guy banging your little girl.

  At the time, Philippe Rotheneuf was the proprietor of a stall at the Bird Market at the Ile de la Cité. He was selling domestic parakeets and finches, but also exotic parrots and cockatiels. For Rachel, the contrast was so shockingly glaring, an out-of-body experience, the sum of her life revealed in a damp market in early November, the beautiful alternative, the vagabond intrigue of Philippe. He coaxed a finch onto the crook of his index finger and, reaching for the tips of Rachel’s fingers, the bird hopped from his finger to hers, the black drop of its eye staring at Rachel before it hopped back onto Philippe’s finger. He reached into his pocket, gave her posies, and explained as best he could the nursery rhyme ‘Ring Around the Rosie’, and its connection to the Black Death.

  The boyfriend, quietly seething, had a map of sights circled like a general. They were to meet friends in the Latin Quarter. He said it petulantly, and what had passed a moment before, the intensity of a touch, suddenly ended in the conspiracy of a shower that had threatened and finally opened in the heavens.

  She had acted like a whore. They were headed toward the Left Bank. The boyfriend had trouble with the map. He hated the warren of goddamn streets. He could pronounce none of them. The French were all assholes. He couldn’t wait to get back to America, the study abroad program affirming, not a tolerance and acceptance of other cultures, but rather his Americanness and American greatness; this, the undisclosed truth about pretty much all study abroad programs.

  Notre Dame loomed as an afterthought in the grey slant of rain. Pigeons roosted in the crook of gargoyles and the beseeching outreach of saints looking heavenward, Parisians everywhere just then stopped under the awnings of cafés in an accommodation of the weather, the women in stockings and heels, and all smoking. By contrast, Rachel and her boyfriend were in North Face expedition jackets brought for the contingency of rain. There was the whispering whoosh of espresso machines and the boyfriend’s voice in her ear. She was fucking him, and she felt absolutely nothing for him.

  The next day Rachel returned. She had a bottle of champagne. Einhorn knew this. It was credited to his Visa card. A week later, she and Philippe traveled in a medieval pageant of caged birds on a rural train line to the fortified city of Saint-Malo. Philippe had aspirations of opening a culinary school and raising any number of babies. He was a peasant through and through. It became apparent to Rachel, not what she wanted, but what she didn’t want.

  Einhorn flew to Charles de Gaulle six weeks after it was discovered Rachel was no longer at school. The call came not from the school, but from the boyfriend’s father, who called Saul, who immediately challenged Einhorn. The boyfriend was upset. He had accompanied Rachel to France to protect her, and beneath the revelation, Einhorn swelled with a secret pride that Rachel had done what she had set out to do and had found true love.

  An investigation turned up a phone number that led to a series of calls. It was not exactly as Einhorn imagined. Rachel was hesitant. She thought he should come see her. There was concern in her voice. Her mother wasn’t to know. It was agreed she and Philippe would meet Einhorn off the train at Saint-Malo.

  It drove a wedge between Saul and Einhorn. Saul contended that the French had let the Germans march right into Paris. He held the country in the greatest disdain possible. He hated, equally, existentialism and a faithless disregard for God. It was almost too much to stomach for Einhorn, what they were doing between them, the lives under ruin, and to talk in these terms, to deliver such a sanctimonious assessment of a culture and a people.

  Einhorn took the precaution of securing a driver off the flight from Charles de Gaulle. He had the driver drop him at a station before Saint-Malo, so it seemed the most natural of arrivals, when he had the basics of the escape plan established. The driver would await instruction. He worked with embassy attachés and was professionally accustomed to quick getaways and absolute secrecy. His rate was $1,700 a day.

  Philippe was everything Einhorn expected, his hair pulled back in a ponytail. His face had an equine quality of strong peasant breeding. There was no awareness of what would happen in the coming days, or why Einhorn was there. Philippe was pleasing and hospitable and believed in his heart that Rachel loved him. He called Einhorn, Mon Pere.

  It would have been easier if Philippe’s motivations were less obvious, but Philippe embraced Einhorn in the way the peasant French greeted, slapping Einhorn hard on the back, kissing him on both sides of the cheek. He was like a great statue, say Michelangelo’s David, who had stepped down from a pedestal and set about life in the ordinary world. Einhorn felt in his loins the flicker of what his daughter must have felt, and he had the most disconcerting thought, that if he could swap out his life for this life, to be in the company of Philippe Rotheneuf, he would have done so.

  They drove in an old Renault borrowed from a neighbor, Philippe scattering sheep with the horn. He used his fist like an anvil. The car could not accommodate his size. He negotiated a series of blind turns run along hedges that made the road dark and patchy with a black ice. He talked in his broken English, his head touching the roof of the car.

  The seaside village appeared around a bend, sudden and complete, the fierceness of the Atlantic pulling smoke from chimneys against a sky hung on a shroud of grey mist. The smell was so insistently strong. It was in their nostrils, the charred wood, the coal and the salt, all of it mixed and defining a life by the sea. Further on, a crescent of beach was garlanded in a tidal swell of shifting seaweed.

  The proposed location of the culinary school was halfway down a steep decline to a horseshoe pier that boiled in a chop of waves breaking over an ancient stone, while black-clad fishermen looked up momentarily, stitching and repairing nets in a fingering spool of filament like earnest spiders.

  At the establishment, the one in question, for it was hard distinguishing it really, since the houses were all part of a long grey façade running toward the pier, they saw it, or saw chairs upended on a table. It was desolate, empty and cold. A laced curtain hung like a veil. Rain fell out of a grey sky.

  They looked at it a second time. They might see it tomorrow. It was Sunday. It wasn’t going anywhere. The owner, a devoted Catholic, observed the Sabbath, Einhorn, aware how a marrow cold morning might pass in medieval devotionals while a roast cooked in a sizzling fat and
how, afterward, against a pull of windblown storm, an afternoon might be given to a roaring fire and a read of papers with a well-deserved plug of tobacco.

  They passed the house going down the hill a third time. Philippe pointed through the streaking rain, the throated gurgle of gutters spluttering in a glazed runoff, whitewashed walls stained a sanguine iron-rust. Philippe spoke of a recipe that he had learned from his grandmother for mussels cooked in a white wine, served with a goat cheese garlic crouton. He would prepare it later.

  Einhorn listened in a quiet betrayal, inventorying Philippe, infatuated by the immensity of his knowledge, Philippe’s muscular hand on Einhorn’s thigh in a familial familiarity of peasant closeness. It was evident, Philippe believed in the singularity of fate and could see no other reason Einhorn was here other than to sanction this union. He wore a cravat around a muscular, veined neck and emanated a hot ripeness of stale sweat in a layering of shirts with worn collars.

  In the rear-view mirror, Einhorn averted his eyes from Philippe. He caught sight of Rachel, her mouth curved in the vague expression of resignation. She was already pregnant and fearful and wanted to be home again. She had bouts of morning sickness and looked grey as the landscape.

  Philippe wanted Einhorn to see something. Rachel should stay. Philippe kissed her hand with a subtle intimacy that only the French could affect, the bud of his lips on the back of her hand. They proceeded down along a ragged coastal road against the pull of wind. The bay churned in a pewter swell. Against Philippe’s advancing strides, Einhorn tried to keep up. He had to eventually trot, until they arrived at a series of caves where Philippe explained how, during the Neolithic age, man first committed his history in the simple story of the hunt. It brought Einhorn close to tears. This was everything he ever wanted, this life, this apparent freedom, this man.