Finally, in desperation, I went back to cleaning out the house. I finished my grandparents’ bedroom and started on the attic. I hoped there would be some treasure hidden there—a painting by Thomas Cole, a secret diary kept by one of my ancestors—but finding treasure in your grandparents’ attic turns out to be something that happens only in novels and on TV. What I found were cardboard boxes of sweaters, a trunk with a missing hinge, extra leaves for tables that had long since vanished, mattress frames, box springs, empty dressers and cracked leather shoes. I slept; I woke; I packed; I slept again. I carried skis and tennis rackets down to the garage, and a box of dolls that must have belonged to the Celestes, curiously unlifelike in their stiff smocks, with their big, blinking eyes. When did dolls first have movable eyelids, I wondered, it must have been in the nineteenth century, when realism was in vogue and the simulation of domestic life was the business of novelists and playwrights and even husbands and wives, all of them concerned with getting the details right, from wedding banns to mourning crepe, and what game would have been more in keeping with the Victorian spirit than to make dolls sleep? But what about peeing dolls? Not a nineteenth-century invention, I thought. For realism that extended below the waist you had to wait for Freud. And then also plastic. Sometime after the Second World War, probably, you got peeing dolls, doll diapers, doll messes, Henry Miller, the apogee of scientific psychoanalysis, Nabokov. I put the dolls with the things to sell or give away, guessing that some child might be interested in them, if the fashion in dolls hadn’t moved on to catch a new facet of the human experience: dolls who threw up, mentally ill dolls, dolls who grew old and hung on.
For the first time, I wondered who would receive what we were giving. A family of refugees, washed up on the American shore with nothing, maybe, or else a family whose belongings had been lost in a fire, although in either case, I reflected, looking over the great heap of Rowland junk, it would have to be a family with some unusual hobbies, or one that wasn’t particular about what it owned. I called Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and left them messages describing the situation. I watched game shows on television, then dramas, then the news, which told us that a group of African-Americans in Minneapolis were building a space ark. They showed pictures of the ark; it looked like a big silver egg studded with colored lights, a Fabergé egg that could seat up to a hundred people. The TV reporter asked how it was going to fly, and the spokesperson for the ark project, a light-skinned black woman, said it wasn’t going to fly, it would be picked up. “By whom?” the TV reporter asked, and the spokesperson said, “You will know them by their craft,” a phrase that’s stayed with me ever since. Still no word from Yesim.
I finished the attic and started on the study. The small room, with its single window that faced our other neighbors, the Karmans, was the place where my grandfather’s presence could still be felt the most strongly, and for this reason I had avoided disturbing it. It was as though Oliver continued to exist as long as his clutter occupied the space he had given it. When all the signs of his life were packed away, then he would truly be dead. Now I wanted that moment to come quickly. I threw away catalogs from building-supply companies, letters telling my grandfather that the Republican Party needed his help because the Democrats were up to unspeakable mischief, letters from a foundation that worked to reunite missing children with their parents, the kind of mail that old people get from organizations that prey on their absentmindedness and goodwill, each letter annotated by my grandfather, Can this be true? and Free calendar! I threw away the book of word-search puzzles in which he had marked unfinished puzzles with Post-it notes. All At Sea, Creatures of the Night, Roman Holiday.
By morning the drawers of my grandfather’s desk were empty. The closet was robbed of its wealth of original packaging, hard styrofoam pillows that fit the contours of long-gone machines. The bookshelf had surrendered its helpful volumes, Bargain Your Way to a Better Life, How to Be a Nice Guy … and Still Win, How to Make Time for Everything, to boxes with DONATE written on their sides, and now the bookshelf itself was labeled for donation. Maybe someone would take boxes and bookshelf alike, set them up in another study, and learn from them what they had been unable to teach my grandfather. More likely the books would be pulped. They would dissolve in a slurry of acids, fall fiber from fiber, until not a word of their advice remained, then they would be put together again in a new shape, cradling white, unbroken eggs. The floor lamp was gone, the set of five-pound weights was gone, the boxes of Christmas cards, which contained far more envelopes than cards, suggesting that my grandfather had written several drafts of each card he sent, was gone, although one box had a few cards in it, with pictures of a Japanese fishing boat and a fisherman waiting before a wave that was about to break.
All that remained were the dozens of thick folders related to Rowland v. Snowbird. They contained articles from law reviews and scientific journals, newspaper stories about snow-related accidents, photographs of cars and houses half-buried in snow. I felt a little thrill when I found the original complaint, with Richard Ente, Esq., listed as counsel for the plaintiffs. The facts were more or less as I remembered them from the research I’d done years ago: in October 1966 there was a big snowstorm in the valley. Sixty-two inches of snow fell in a forty-hour period, a white deluge that left Thebes submerged for days. Trees and power lines came down; cars went off the road. There were slips and falls, accidents of all kinds. And this was just after Joe Regenzeit had begun seeding the clouds—he’d even boasted about Snowbird’s “scientifically augmented snow” in an ad. It looked awfully like his cloud seeding had worked, and Oliver, along with a dozen other Thebans, set out to make him pay for it.
Seen close-up, some of Richard Ente’s arguments were far-fetched: could you sue someone for trespass because his snow fell on your land? If a storm knocked down power lines, was that theft of electricity? But there were masses of documents to support these claims. The files held analyses of the wind patterns in the valley, charts showing the seasonal fluctuation of temperature and precipitation in the area, affidavits from people who had seen the clouds change as the cloud-seeding plane flew through them, medical records of people who had slipped and hurt themselves. Then there were the counterassertions, doctors who admitted in deposition that their patients had been off-balance for years, meteorologists who pointed out that winter weather in the mountains was wildly variable. Had Regenzeit really made it snow? Had the snow hurt anyone? Behind or beyond these questions of fact were the questions of law. Did Joe Regenzeit have the right to seed the clouds that passed over Snowbird, and, if so, was he responsible for them when they passed over someone else’s land? Where did Regenzeit’s interest end, where did the public interest begin? Who owned the clouds?
I thought of Victor and MySky, which was making headlines with its weather mill, its promise of renewable energy from medium-altitude wind layers. When Victor told me what MySky did, I’d laughed at him; it wasn’t until I began to read about his company in the papers that I wondered if his engineer friends could really do what he said they could. Now they had weather farms in the Sierras where they were testing their technology, and protesters were gathering at their gates. What a strange world it was, I thought, where these dreams kept coming back. Human beings had been trying to harness the clouds forever, and no one had really managed to do it, but we didn’t stop trying. It was just like with the airplane, thousands of years of total failure didn’t deter us. And maybe MySky would get it right. Would the human race be better off if its weather mill worked? By any reasonable standard the answer was yes, clean low-cost renewable energy would make the world a better place to live, but a perverse part of me resisted this answer. For reasons I couldn’t articulate—maybe I was just jealous of Victor, who used to be a graduate student like me, and was now so rich—I wanted MySky to lose. I wanted humans not to control everything. I felt a wave of unexpected sympathy for my father, who had fought Joe Regenzeit with every legal argument he could think of. Why did he ru
n away, I wondered, not for the first time, and just then, as if in answer to my question, I came to a thin folder labeled Richard Ente, Esq.
I pressed my forehead to the cardboard in the hope that its contents might pass directly into my mind. But no, I had to open the file, to leaf through onionskin invoices for $100, $200, $500. Richard might have been cheaper than other lawyers, but he wasn’t cheap. There were bills from the months before the trial: $400 for an unspecified meeting, $212 for “initiation fees,” $675 for research. Where was Richard going, what was he doing? The last bill was for $3,000, trial prep, but it wasn’t the last document in the folder. That was in an envelope, addressed to my grandfather in a big, spiky hand I’d never seen before. My father’s hand. The letter was postmarked Denver, and it had been mailed in May 1970, about three months before my father died.
Dear Oliver,
You opened the letter. That’s a good start. Now be brave and don’t chuck it until you’ve read everything I have to say. First of all, forget about the lawsuit. You must know by now it couldn’t have gone any other way. Little money loses to big money every time in America, and even with a lot more money you wouldn’t have got what you wanted. The only way to beat the Regenzeits is to kick em in the nuts, I told you that. Now you know. And if you’ve really been thinking, you know the Turks are the ones who will lose in the end. You can twist Mother Nature but She springs back every time and woe to the one who bent her then. If it hasn’t happened yet it will soon, and you’ll be there to say you told them so. OK, now the tough part. Are you ready? Oliver, you may choose to be my enemy, and if you do, God knows you won’t be the first. Plenty of people have hated me for my faults—and believe me, I know what they are, I know them like a high-diver knows his pool—as if they had never in their own lives made a mistake. I don’t know if you can be bigger than that, I don’t even know if I have the right to ask you to be bigger, seeing how small I can be myself. But if you can, Ollie, if you see what I see, that we’re all creatures of more or less the same species dancing around on this planet for only an eyeblink and then forever gone, sans money, sans folks, sans everything, then maybe you’ll be able to do what I’m going to ask you to do now. I’m enclosing a letter for Marie. I want you to pass it on to her—give it to her if she’s at home, or else send it to her wherever she lives. For gods sake don’t read it. I can’t explain all the reasons why it’s important for you to do this, but I’ll tell you that in the last three months I have walked through hell on foot—literally, Ol, you should see my feet, what calluses, what cracks—and if she doesn’t get the letter I will have made the trip for nothing. And I don’t have the strength to walk back home.
I wonder if you’d know me if you saw me now? I’ve gone so far into my head these last few months, I’m as faint as a memory. I haven’t cast out my demon but I’ve got the bastard’s throat between my hands. And I’m squeezing. I’m asking you for help, Oliver, not just for my sake or even for the sake of Marie and her sister, but for your own sake. I know you won’t want to hear this, but you’ve got to see what big plants your daughters are, and how you’ve tried to choke them, to keep them from the light—it’s not just you, of course, but the whole system of socialization that came over in the Puritan ships—we’ve got to disentangle ourselves from it if we’re ever to be happy. Happiness is love. Love is freedom. OK, but enough Richard Ente–izing. I trust you to do the right thing. I can’t tell you how much depends on it.
Peace,
Dick
I wanted badly to know what Richard had written to my mother, but the second letter wasn’t in the envelope. My grandfather must have done as my father asked. Which was big of him, under the circumstances: his lawyer run off, his case lost. I credited Oliver’s gentle heart, but actually I didn’t see how he could have refused Richard. Even I was moved by the letter, and I’d never known Richard Ente. More than ever it felt like a shame that I hadn’t met my father: compared with Oliver, Richard was completely unreserved; compared with my mothers he was scintillatingly honest. He alone among everyone I was related to had an idea of what life was actually about, what it was for. But even as I missed this dead father whom I would never know, I mistrusted myself. Was Richard’s letter one of the ploys Charles had told me about? Was in the last three months I have walked through hell on foot real contrition, or just my father telling Oliver what he wanted to hear?
I read the letter again and again, as if by memorizing it I could learn Richard Ente’s heart. But his heart was not there to be found; all that happened was that my new affection for him was joined, more and more, by doubt. Who was Richard Ente, what had he meant, what had he wanted? The pain and guilt and life I’d felt when I read the letter for the first time gave way to a scholarly distance, as though Richard were becoming, before my eyes, a historical character. Soon, I thought, sadly, I’d be tracking down his references, people have hated me, even the whole system of socialization that came over in the Puritan ships. I called my mothers but no one was home. I phoned Charles at the shop and asked him about the letter. “I never saw it,” he said, “and I have no idea what Richard was thinking, but I’ll tell you, it doesn’t surprise me. He liked to keep us guessing, and you know what? We’re still guessing. God damn Richard Ente.”
After a brilliant cold night when the stars seemed to part as I looked at them, as if the planet were moving deeper into space, a fog settled in the valley. The mornings were white and the days ragged and soft. I spent a lot of time watching TV, and trying not to look over at the Regenzeits’ house to see if Yesim was there or not. It must have been around this time that I got an e-mail from Dave, the owner of Cetacean, informing me that my two weeks’ leave, which had by now stretched to four and a half weeks, was never officially approved, and that I was fired. I didn’t care. Honestly, it was hard for me to believe I had worked there at all.
THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT
Now I am coming to the hard part my story, but I don’t want to tell it, not today. Let’s talk about something else: history, for example. If I were to travel back in time, to check the accuracy of my guesses about the Millerites, one question I’d surely want to settle concerns their ascension robes, the white gowns they supposedly put on in order to go up to Heaven. Did the Millerites really wear them, or not? On the one hand you have a host of eyewitnesses who say yes, the Millerites wore white robes: a New Hampshire seamstress who made robes for her neighbors; a cloth merchant who ran out of white fabric as the final day approached; and so on. On the other hand you have the historians who say the Millerites never wore robes of any kind; they planned to go up to Heaven in whatever they happened to be wearing.
Just about everyone who writes about the Millerites weighs in on the ascension-robe question. You have to wonder, why was it such a big deal? When I was working on my dissertation, I thought about this a fair amount. The conclusion I reached was that the ascension robes, if they were real, were a sign that the Millerites’ fundamentalism—their belief that the world would really end after however many years and days it said in the Bible—was just as petty and materialistic as the world to which it was opposed. If you believed in Jesus, what did it matter if you wore a robe or not? The robes made the Millerites ridiculous in the public imagination, but I couldn’t help thinking that they also united the Millerites to a noble tradition of people whose actions respond, in the end, not to the real world but to some kind of dream. From the so-called pioneers of flight to the explorers who set off in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific, or even the timid people who sit down at their desks to write books, how much of what human beings undertake is based, not on a calculation of possibilities, but on the blind belief that if we just act on our desires, the world will somehow make them possible? Everyone believes what they want to believe, everyone sees what they want to see, if they want it badly enough, and all I can say is, the Millerites must have wanted the world to end very badly if they did dress up in white robes, but on the other hand I can understand them, I can
understand wanting something badly enough that you are willing to make yourself ridiculous. If there’s anything I can understand now, it’s that.
I don’t think you are reading these pages, Yesim, I don’t see how you could be reading them, but if you are: I’m sorry!
REGENZEIT
One morning in early October I was in the grocery, telling Carrie about the summers I’d spent in Thebes, and I was just coming to the story of Kerem and Shelley and Shelley’s brother’s party when Yesim came in, dressed not in her secret-agent outfit but in a long blue coat that I had never seen before. Her hair was all askew, her blouse wrinkled and untucked.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
Yesim looked surprised by my question. “If you have a minute, I’ll show you.”
In the parking lot she took my hand. “I’ve been up all night,” she said, “so don’t hold me responsible for what I do or say, OK?” She squeezed my fingers. It was as though a Morse message passed through her arm to mine, a secret pulse to let me know we were on again.
Luminous Airplanes: A Novel Page 17