The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  For a moment he panicked about the equipment, but when he checked the library and mudroom he discovered that nothing was missing. He went for the freezer and the bottle of vodka that was in it. Meade, and the others, he could understand. He had been increasingly difficult—no, he had to admit, he’d become impossible. He hadn’t slept longer than three hours a night for the past three weeks, he’d drunk well beyond his fair share of vodka and homemade espresso, he had been open with the cast and crew about the problems he was experiencing holding the thing together. Deplorable, he thought. Never complain, never explain—Andrew Carnegie and his father were right in that. Piteous whining, who needs it, especially when it comes from the mouth of a supposed superior.

  Could he splice together what he had into something that might be viable, make back the money so that no one involved with the Trust would find out what had happened? He still had some days left before he had to get everything out of here (What was today, anyway? he wondered as he brought his mouth down to the bottle and lifted back). No, not really.

  The vodka got Berg going. He knew he could turn this thing around. He had to depend on himself. He had to depend on what he had done thus far that was useful, to get him through whatever he had done to thwart himself, which meant (for one) to stop reviewing these scenes, stop trying to interpret them, make of them what they were. Give it up, man, like Christ on the rood when he was talking to his father who had put him in the position of becoming ritual carnage in the first place said, It is done. Well, it was done here, too. Some things aren’t meant to fly. Could he tell Analise that? Without having to grovel? Of course he couldn’t because there he was, already not depending on himself. And anyway, Analise—what was she but a deserter?

  This was the same predicament he had found himself in as a seventeen-year-old—exiled then, exiled now. The film was wrong, the whole idea was wrong. Who was he to try to make a portrait of these people he had never understood? Max being Berg, who was Max? Berg, being Berg, could ask, Who is Berg? and know that he would never get it together enough to know. Berg couldn’t hope to claim self-comprehension, so why create an image meant to represent an idea of himself that could never, ever be so much as passingly accurate? For instance, Max was no virgin, he knew better. Max might have been a very confused soul, but he understood that those cretins under the tent on the beach represented not shelter, but exposure. So why all the pretense? Why all the playing God—indeed, if there was a God, and Berg was pretty sure there wasn’t, he could have it, man. Whatever perks and prerogatives might come with the office surely were overshadowed by these the messiest of questions.

  Which brought up another interesting question. When are you exposing yourself and when sheltering? The vodka was not as cold as before, but it still tasted of freedom (tasted of freedom, yes, because alcohol never tasted good,but did smack of release)—and he was able to come to the thought that all these words were tangled up in the most intriguing way, just as he was. You expose film to show things, but you come to an island named Shelter and what right do you have to show what you believe you know? In the skin trade, Berg had learned that those who went in front of the camera were those who seemed—to those who stood behind in the semidark—the ones who were most protected.

  When the telephone rang he considered whether or not it was prudent to answer, given the state he was in. It kept ringing. Someone on the other end clearly knew he was here, and intended to let it ring until he picked up. He answered, as much to stop the harsh jangle as anything else. He didn’t say hello, just listened.

  “Berg? It’s me,” said Analise.

  His heart was beating too fast, and he lifted the bottle again. He knew what she was going to say; he wasn’t so confused as to hope that she was about to save him.

  “Berg, did you read the contract you and I signed when we started this project?”

  He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

  “I tried to talk you out of doing this, all right, in the first place, you have to remember that now. I never wanted you to let yourself in for it, I knew it could happen, and it did. You wanted to go ahead, nothing I could have—”

  “Analise?”

  “Yes,” she answered, encouraged perhaps by how even was the tone of his voice. She always liked Berg. This debacle was a shame, in fact. Why did he have to be so ambitious and secretive about this film? He was getting in his own way.

  “Piss off,” said Berg.

  And, unprepared for that but not one to be outmaneuvered, she said something to the same effect before putting the receiver down hard into its cradle.

  “There are no leaps in nature: everything in it is graduated, shaded. If there were an empty space between any two beings, what reason would there be for proceeding from the one to the other? There is thus no being above and below which there are not other beings that are united to it by some characters and separated from it by others.” So Charles Bonnet says in his Contemplation de la nature, as quoted by Michel Foucault in his book The Order of Things, which I still carry around with me sometimes, though I had loathed him when I read him those years ago in school. I am not French, I am not a philosopher, I am not a scholar, nor was I even a good student; it isn’t intended as a pretense on my part to parade this bit of thinking before you, but even though Foucault’s recipe for headaches, which I have tried, that business of mixing walnuts and wine, only made me sick—I’ve always been sort of fond of this quotation of his from Bonnet. Bonnet had this idea about an absolute encyclopedia, in which knowledge, action, language, and everything conceivable would be interwoven. Truths of every kind would be contained in it, and I suppose every sort of falsehood would have to be there too. All words, all acts, things that could never be accomplished. Everything linked, all branches interwoven into a principal beauty. Arbitrariness would stand proudly holding hands with order. Chaos and the sublime would form its grammar. Faith, charity, evil—you wouldn’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, as it were, and yet in a way you would, since there would be a steady progress in which all systems would be both partial and universal. A divine mishmash, and all at once so crystalline.

  I don’t know why this came to mind, when I stood there again at the window of Djuna Cobbetts’s bedroom, not knowing precisely why none of the lights in the house up the hill were on as they had been the night before. Still Isensed there was someone moving around in the rooms. I hadn’t noticed that the cars in the drive were gone, and I didn’t know at what stage in the film Berg and his crew stood. There was movement in the house, I couldn’t see it, but there was, and whoever was walking around inside either didn’t care about running into furniture, dusty chairs and the like, or else, like a ghost, knew the place well. Then I got it. Berg was alone. Of course, he had been left to his own devices. It felt like a leap of knowing, but, as I say, I think Bonnet had a point—it was a graduated thing, this understanding of my brother’s abandonment.

  Berg was in trouble. He deserved to be in trouble. But still I wondered hard whether he had made a mistake that would deserve the kind of punishment he might have set himself up for. Barely knowing what he had done, or was in the process of doing, I sensed that he had made no real mistake. He was lost, is all. I had figured out that the girl in the orchard was supposed to be me, that Desmond was the naked boy sent in to make love to me, that the stranger at the edge, watching, was both the voyeur audience and the character Berg.

  Sex was a fiction in the fact of life that I felt I’d made my peace with—I could take it or leave it, all it ever had done for me was either get me into trouble emotionally, or shatter a relationship that I felt was better off before sex entered into it. I had no quarrel with Berg’s casting me as some kind of incestuous nymphomaniac—I knew that I was and wasn’t. Nothing he could invent would ever match what had happened in my life. Nothing anyone could invent could ever match what happens to any of us. I didn’t care that much about the artistic integrity of his endeavor. Other than the money, which again I didn�
��t care about except insofar as it might cripple Faw, none of what he was doing affected me, did it? I had to admit to myself that though I only glimpsed his contorted portrait of me, I understood that it wouldn’t finally make much difference to me one way or another what he thought of our past, andhow he described it to others, who would never perfectly understand it either, no matter how they tried, no matter what form the presentation took. What had Berg ever given as a brother to me, beyond this funhouse-mirror movie portrait he was proposing to complete?

  I could hear my blood beating in my ears, and my breath coming in and leaving me. The distance between the carriage house and the farm seemed long. Tonight there were clouds that hazed out the stars and moon overhead, and it had been quite a lot chillier when I rode across the open causeways. There was a damp over the island that smelled of rain. Dressed in my blacks, I had walked across the field to Mrs. Cobbetts’s this time with considerably more courage than the night before. The key had gone into her back door lock with far greater ease, the staircase though shrouded in dark I found and ascended without the same trepidation I had experienced on Tuesday. But now it seemed that all my confidence had flowed out of me. I could have gone back downstairs, and across the dying grass to the house, walked in, and discovered precisely what was going on over there, and been well within my rights. Instead, I dialed the house.

  Berg answered, “What,” in a guilelessly nettled voice.

  “Berg? It’s me, Grace.”

  He hesitated; I sensed he was working through whether this boded well for him or not, whether I could be of some use or not, and as I heard that silence, and divined his process of thinking about me, I realized that I myself had reached a moment of profound change toward him, toward the whole family, such as it was. I didn’t have the energy to wait for him to decide how best to use me—was it energy, or immaturity that empowered such behavior in people? a question with an obvious answer, it seems to me now. And so I burst in on his silence, “Berg, I know more or less what you are doing. I know that you’re in trouble.”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  It wasn’t the right question. He was buying more time to think.

  “Berg. I think you, and maybe Faw, too, are in deeper trouble than you understand. Someone knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  This infuriated me; here he was, so transparent that even I, his sister, had been able to observe his activities at close quarters without being detected, so vulnerable that his extravagant fantasy had been found out even before he had begun to indulge it, and yet so blind to his own plain pretenses that he could even now feel comfortable prattling along to the one person who might stand beside him. Given that, though I didn’t know—in some ways may not ever know—how freely he had entangled me in his illegal whimsy, I understood there was more at risk than Berg’s or my feelings, I didn’t bother to chastise him, or preach. I said, simply, “We’ve got to get all that stuff away from the house, destroy the film.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “You don’t do it, and I’m going to have to go to Faw.”

  There was a kind of shredded laughter, choked, that I heard, before he said something to the effect that he wasn’t impressed. “Going to tattle,” was in his outburst, and then he said, “Where are you?” and it felt remarkably threatening. I have always had this problem of measuring my own perceptions, trusting the clarity of my hearing and seeing. Impressionable I know I’ve been in the past, and box-drama tutored; but he was cornered, and sounded it.

  “Berg, I’m willing to help you. Let’s get the equipment out of the house. Then we’ll decide about the film.”

  “You don’t understand, Grace.”

  “I do.”

  “You’re willing to help, you say, well if you’re willing to help just steer clear, all right, just leave me alone.”

  If there were an empty space between any two beings, what reason would there be for proceeding from the one to the other?Bonnet hadn’t written these words to mean what I then garnered from them. The night yard that stretched beyond the carriage house seemed now to extend in such a way that it became swollen with anger. Maybe I cared more than I thought, at least about that empty space that loomed between me and my brother. Or else, maybe there was a reason for choosing not to proceed toward him. Berg might assume that I wouldn’t go to our father, but did he know that I might, in fact, be willing to take him up on his instructions to stay away? A peculiar wave of liberating peace came over me—if only that anger could be reconstrued into some sort of indifference, then maybe I’d find a way to be able to love Berg, as a sister, from a sister’s distance.

  I must have been crying, because he was telling me not to cry. I didn’t understand anything about his project, he was saying, and there were no serious problems with anything he was up to with it. He hadn’t meant to be so short with me. Nothing he was doing was intended to cause trouble for anyone, least of all the family. He didn’t know what I was talking about when I said that someone knew, someone had something on him—everyone’s got something on everyone. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. His intentions were good, he said it twice.

  I let him finish his monologue without interrupting because what I was searching for was the key to my indifference, which would be the key to my being able actually to hear my brother, even maybe help him, if there was anything that could be done to help him. The insight that came to me, as fallacious as it might have been, helped me to discover, possibly, the beginnings of what it was I thought I wanted from myself in order to survive (I recognize this is abstract, but it is the closest I can come to formulating in words what happened to me, then). You see, it dawned on me there was someone else who might have had a motive in sending me that anonymous letter. Berg himself. Why not? Wouldn’t that have given him the perfect means bywhich he could escape falling alone? I considered asking him, but now I understood that anything he might say would have to be taken with a grain of salt. Everything is graduated, shaded, it is true.

  When I finally agreed to consider Berg’s request that I stay out of his way, and that I keep what I know to myself, I sat on Djuna’s pliant bed and noticed how heavy the receiver had gotten in my hand. It seemed I could hardly hold it up. I was trying to remember something that I knew, not something that was pertinent to what Berg and I had been discussing, no; it was a sensation that now spread over me. That Berg had set the phone down, maybe on the counter in the kitchen, maybe on the desk in the library, became faintly clear to me through this apprehension of weight in the dark around me. I hadn’t hung up, I knew, because there was no dial tone coming from the handset. My throat was a little sore, and my ears hurt, especially my left ear. When I put down the handset on the bed, quietly, because I just couldn’t hold it up anymore, it occurred to me to go to the window and open it, and get some fresh night air. I stood, and made my way to the nearest casement, unlocked it, feeling drugged or dryly drunk, and pulled up, and got down on my knees and rested my head on my forearms on the sill. I breathed in slowly and deep. I remembered Dr. Trudeau once telling me about breathing into a bag, and to stay calm, not to be afraid, not to begin hyperventilating—and though I didn’t have the strength to go about searching in the dark through Mrs. Cobbetts’s closets and drawers to find a bag, I did tuck my face into the top of my blouse and drew in air that was caught between skin and fabric. The ocean, I thought; my damp skin smelled a bit like the ocean, salty and of apricot.

  Several of the lights in the farmhouse had been turned on by the time I recovered my senses. From where I sat against the wall I could hear the tone signal from the telephone, a three-tone scale that strode up, quiveringly, high-pitched. Whether minutes or hours had passed I couldn’ttell, but I would guess that it was the former. My petit seizure—this is what must have occurred—had passed, and now my senses were clearer than spring water. I was still moving in a sort of slow motion as I hung up the telephone, and it was an almost (almost) pleasant feeling to swim back to the window. The a
ir was very brisk. Though my clothing was damp from sweat, my skin and mouth were as dry as if they’d been baked.

  When I put my fingers to the frame and began to pull down on the window, the light, or lights, up the rise, up in the cherry tree by the house, flickered in the most cheerful way. Pygmyish, bantam lights; and for a second I thought, megrim, which would explain my having passed out. But they seemed, and I hope you will understand, less realto me than any of my megrim lights, less internal to me, less a part of me: they were out there; and their being out there brought them into an even more frighteningly sharp focus.

  What was Berg doing up in the tree? was my first thought, or hope. The light—now it seemed to be just one light, but jostled, perhaps in the hand of whoever was climbing the tree—was white, another indication that it wasn’t the flare man out there, who finally had found his way out to Shelter Island, to his old friend, Grace. But then I realized that, of course, no, it wouldn’t make sense for Berg to be up there. It had to be the author of that cryptic little message I received the other day, or someone else who was aware of Berg’s film or the Trust scam—aware, that is, of the “mistake.”

  Now, I have never been a brave person. As one gets older the wisdom that one gains, whether by purpose or chance, allows less and less for one to flirt with the impudence of things unknown. “Even paranoiacs have enemies,” a poet once said, and he was surely right. Nevertheless, what could I do? There were only a couple of possibilities here. National Council of Churches, I thought—I would have laughed but for the fact that I preferred to maintain myown cover. Or else it was Neden, or Pannett, or more likely one of those types—skin trade brethren of Neden and Pannett—that Berg had obviously gotten himself entangled with and possibly betrayed.