by Noah Hawley
“Digging. In a suit.”
“It’s a long story.”
She looks at him. She is learning what everyone else already knows, that Scott is not a particularly casual person, that he doesn’t know how to make small talk, to smile and talk about the weather.
“You’re not one of those crazy people, are you?” she says. “Who seem normal, then mail you packages of human hair?”
“No. I’m just the regular kind of crazy. Standard maladjusted, issues with authority, a healthy amount of denial and self-destructive instincts. Plus all the grief.”
She looks at him. There is something in his face she recognizes, something familiar, something that makes her want to help him. He reminds her of someone. An old boyfriend? She doesn’t know, but she feels the need to reach out, to help him. She pulls the baby carriage to the foot of the stairs and sits down next to him.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” he says. Now that she’s this close, he can’t look at her. It takes all his strength just to hold himself together.
“I’m Joy,” she says.
“I know.”
“And you’re this crazy guy I met in the supermarket, and I don’t mean to be forward, but there is something really wrong with you.”
He nods. His face is burning and he is blinking to keep from crying. He feels like if he relaxes, even for a second, he will fall apart. He will start to leak like a dam, and then he won’t be able to stop. Joy takes a deep breath, puts her hand on his arm. She reaches out to him in sympathy, one human being to another, a stranger bridging the gap. The feel of her hand, the warmth, the firmness of her touch, is all it takes. He is a house of cards.
“My dad,” he begins. She waits. “Died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And, uh…” Tears are forming in the corners of his eyes. “His, um, memorial service—like a party—is today.” Everything around him is liquid now. The egg of sorrow has cracked, and it is worse than ever, making a tragic, sticky mess of everything. Sorrow coats the street, the girl, the baby, like glue, sticking Scott to this stoop, to this place, this moment.
“What time?” Joy wants to know.
“Now,” he says. “It, uh, started about a half hour ago.”
“You should go.”
“I know.”
“You should go.”
He nods.
“Where is it?”
“Around the corner. The White Horse Tavern.” His voice cracks. He is twelve years old again, going through changes. Together they watch the delivery boy ride off into the slush.
“My dad died when I was sixteen,” says Joy.
He nods. She is saying, You’re not alone. We are all part of this secret society, the whole human race. It is a culture of death and loss, a secret club of grief.
“I can’t go,” he says. “Not without them.”
“Without what?”
He looks her in the eye. There is a part of him, internal, subterranean, that embraces failure, because it is easier to give up than to persevere. Easier to see the world as a place where malevolent forces conspire to keep a good man down, where quitting isn’t just an option, it is the only option. Because the alternative is complete and utter annihilation. And yet what kind of man would he be if he didn’t try?
So he tells her. Everything. His dead father, the dog tags. He explains his plan, the clipped fence, the shovel, and the setbacks; the frozen earth, the man in the undershirt. When he’s finished she doesn’t know what to say.
“How do you know they’re even still there?” she says.
“Because I’m on a quest.”
She thinks about this.
“You are a little crazy, aren’t you?”
“I’m usually not this bad, but I think I’m going through a rough patch.”
“Yes. I’d say you are.”
She stands and brushes at the seat of her pants.
“Wait here.”
She takes her baby from the stroller and climbs the steps to the front door. He stands.
“What are you doing?”
She rings the bell.
“Let me do the talking,” she says.
He considers bolting, turning and racing down the street in his ruined dress shoes, a half-frozen man, arms pumping, heading God knows where. But he doesn’t.
The door opens. A man is standing there, early fifties. And there is a little girl behind him, peering through his legs.
“Hi,” says Joy. “I’m Joy.”
“Stay inside, honey,” the man says to his daughter. To Joy he says, “Can I help you?”
“I live around the corner,” she says, “and this is going to sound weird, but my friend grew up here.”
“I can’t let you in,” he says quickly.
“No,” says Joy, “we were just…my friend buried something in the yard when he was a kid, something of his dad’s. And it’s his father’s memorial service today. He wondered…”
“The dog tags,” says the man.
They stare at him. The man puts his hand on his daughter’s head.
“We found them when we were redoing the yard a couple of years ago. My son thought they were the coolest thing ever.”
Scott’s heart is in his throat.
“Do you still have them?” asks Joy.
He nods, looks at Scott.
“My dad died last year, too,” he says.
Scott nods. He, too, is in the club, the secret society of lost fathers.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Scott’s throat is dry. The words are almost a croak.
“What’s your father’s name?” says the man.
“Henry, Joe Henry.”
The man nods.
“Wait here.”
He closes the door. They hear him climbing the stairs.
“I don’t know what to say,” says Scott.
“We need these things,” says Joy. “These rituals, memorials. They help us say good-bye. Otherwise it just lingers. People die and we pretend they’re just missing, and it drags on for years, this level of denial, waiting for them to come back. Trust me.”
Scott closes his eyes. He is remembering how every year on January 2 in San Francisco, businessmen throw the pages of last year’s paper calendars out the window. For half an hour the downtown streets fill with a flurry of white, dates and appointments all floating to the ground. It is a moment where time literally flies, all of last year’s activities filling the air, the highs and lows, the pithy aphorisms, all the words of the day, the major holidays, professional milestones. If you stand on the street and look up, all you see is time. It descends gently from the sky, fluttering in the breeze. It fills the gutters, the detritus of another year, all the days and nights now gone. Getting rid of it makes people feel lighter, cleansed. They are casting off the weight of what came before. This is what Scott thinks as he stares out at the blanket of white. But what about the things you don’t want to let go of? What if letting go of the past feels like a betrayal, an abandonment? Doesn’t he owe it to his father to never say good-bye?
Overhead, the sky is cloudless and so brilliantly blue it hurts. In the cold everything feels sharper, like each breath he takes cuts him in some way. You are alive, thinks Scott. Right now, in this moment. In this one. He wants to stop the clock, to hold on to this feeling, this crazy, beautiful, flushed agony, but he can’t. It, too, is destined to recede. Years from now he will remember that there was a moment here, but he will not remember what it felt like. Right now, though, standing on a New York City street corner, everything is crisp and real. This woman is his woman and this baby is his baby, and he is a man in the prime of his life in a black suit with dirt on his pants and blisters on his hands from trying to burrow down into the frozen earth. Any second now the door will open and his Grail will appear. It will happen because it has to.
The door opens and the man and the little girl are standing there.
“My son is going to be upset,” says the man, “but he’ll und
erstand.”
He holds up the dog tags. They’ve been cleaned, polished. Scott reaches for them.
“There’s a shovel in my backyard,” says the man.
Scott freezes.
“It looks like someone tried to dig a hole in packed earth in February,” says the man, his body language hostile now, guarded. “Bad idea.”
Scott looks at the dog tags, then at the man’s face. It is a moneyed face, nice skin, gray hair well cut. The next few seconds are critical. Scott takes a deep breath, tries not to panic. He is on a quest and a troll is testing him. He must not fail.
“That was a mistake is what that was,” says Scott. “An error in judgment.”
“He hasn’t been himself recently,” says Joy. “Has he, honey?”
She coos to the baby. The man watches her, a young mother with a beautiful child, happy, smiling, and softens. His daughter is behind him in the hallway spinning in circles, making herself dizzy.
“I stole them,” says Scott. “He was my father and I stole from him. I have to bring them back.”
The man takes a deep breath, sighs.
“You’re lucky I understand grief,” he says, “or you’d be talking to the cops right now.”
And then, just like that, he tosses the dog tags to Scott and closes the door.
Scott’s heart surges. The dog tags are smooth in his hand, worn. He holds them up, reads his father’s name. It is there, worn but readable. Joe Henry. Proof. The man lived. He was here. He mattered. Scott starts to cry. He did it. He is not a fuckup. He is a good son.
“Amazing,” says Joy, because she is always amazed by the kindness of strangers, the small heroic things they do every day.
“What time is it?” he asks, wiping his eyes, the tears already freezing against his skin.
Joy checks her watch.
“Twelve fifty-five.”
Scott panics. He is so late. The day has gotten away from him.
“I have to go.”
He starts down the stairs.
“Wait,” says Joy. “Are you gonna be okay?”
“Thank you,” he calls, his feet pounding against the pavement. He will be running soon, tripping into full speed. The quest isn’t over. He has found the Grail, but now he must deliver it.
“Thank you so much,” he shouts, leaning into the wind. “I mean it.”
Joy watches him go, shaking her head.
“What a strange man,” she says to her baby. Sam smiles at her with those big brown eyes. For the thousandth time today she falls in love with her baby all over again. He is her man, when her man is away, which is always.
“What a strange, strange man,” she coos, trying to make Sam laugh.
Then she sees Scott’s bag on the stoop, a black messenger bag to be worn over the shoulder.
“Wait,” she cries, turning to look for Scott, but he is already gone.
She picks up the bag, not knowing. What is her obligation here? To a man she barely knows, an emotionally unstable man on his way to a memorial? Already she has done more than most. Already she has crossed lines that most New Yorkers wouldn’t even look at. But deep down she is a small-town girl, a woman with manners who believes in helping people. A woman who believes that the good things you do in life come back to you. So she lowers Sam into the warmth of his carriage, hangs the bag over the handles.
The White Horse Tavern, she thinks. It is four blocks from here. She will bring Scott his bag and then take the baby home. It is bath day and she will peel her son like an onion, pulling off his tiny coat, his gloves and mittens. She will lower Sam into the warm water of the kitchen sink, will anoint him with hypoallergenic shampoos, gently washing every nook and crevice. Then she will dry him with terry cloth, as if he is royalty, a tiny king to be pampered and inspected. She will powder his bottom and sing him to sleep.
She releases the brake on the baby carriage, heading east.
“Come on, Sam,” she says. “Good deeds are always rewarded. Remember that.”
This is what Joy believes is true, even though she cannot prove it.
Except in this case she is 100 percent wrong.
The White Horse Tavern stands on the corner of Hudson Street and Eleventh. The ghosts of a thousand poets drink inside. Set against the new-fallen snow, its black-and-white facade is a tonic of clarity and precision. Here, it seems to announce, is a place where the truth can be told, where understanding can be had. Inside these walls there are none of the multicolored complexities of the outside world. There is only alcohol and bar food. There is only black and white.
In the final moments before the guests arrive, David Henry wanders the segmented rooms of the pub, going over last-minute details with the caterer. It gives him something concrete to focus on, something mundane and manageable, something to distract him from the other thought that’s going through his head, which is this:
He’s with God now.
This is what he thinks as the guests begin to arrive, the uncles and cousins, the nephews and aunts. My dad’s in heaven. It is a thought he is trying on like a pair of glasses, seeing if the world becomes clearer or less focused. In his mind, heaven is a magnificent cloud city, like the one from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The palace where Lando Calrissian lived. David had the poster when he was a kid, Luke and Leia standing together, light saber raised against the malevolent black of Darth Vader’s helmet. Fathers and sons, thinks David, this is what it all comes down to. He looks around at all his relatives, old men in black suits with ear hair, women with stretch girdles and too much makeup. They are drinking the booze he paid for, eating his snacks. He greets them as they enter with a squeeze of the shoulder, a kiss on the cheek. The White Horse was not his choice. He wanted to have the memorial someplace classy, but his mother insisted that they do it here. She didn’t want some soulless ballroom. She wanted someplace earthy and significant. Under his instruction, the bar has been transformed into something elegant. The tables have been covered with white cloths. Waiters pass crudités around on delicate platters. Ten pounds of shrimp have been flown in from the left coast and assembled into towers. The place looks good, regal even. He owes it to his father, he thinks, to spend money, to elevate the tone. This isn’t some trailer-park get-together, some AA send-off with its jittery, coffee-black decor. We are saying good-bye to a titan, not an ex-con in a speakeasy under a paper banner that reads Bon Voyage, PeeWee!!!!
Christopher is sprawled out on the floor near a plate-glass window playing with Cousin Eddie’s boys. Looking at his son in this place, David sees himself. He is standing where his own father once stood, a beer in hand, and in the repetition he sees connection. This is the other face of time, not a straight line, but a circle, a cycle of days and weeks, of seasons. Everything comes around. It is disconcerting sometimes. We find ourselves repeating moments our parents lived, echoing their triumphs and mistakes. We try so hard not to become them, not to live blindly by their examples, not to fall into their patterns. It is something David thinks he has accomplished. He is not an alcoholic, not a victim to his vices. In his family, he thinks, he alone has broken the cycle.
He has been reading the Bible recently. Ever since his gutter revelation the other night, he has taken every spare minute to familiarize himself with the word of God. After the Hudson Street miracle (after he was hit by a speeding cab and emerged unscathed) he hurried back to the Waldorf-Astoria. In his bedside table he found a Bible (even at the Waldorf-Astoria apparently there is the chance for redemption). It had the flimsy leather binding and tissue paper pages he remembered from the private-school chapel of his youth. He opened to the first page, traced the words with his fingers—in the beginning God made the heavens and the Earth—the tiny royal font, all those numbers and colons, the ancient proper names: Moab, Barnabus, Gemeriah. It felt sturdy to him, this volume, substantial, and yet simple somehow. Here, in six hundred–odd pages, was the history of the universe, the explanation for everything. He read about Adam and Eve and the expulsion fr
om the Garden. He read about Noah and the drowning of the world’s sinners. He stayed up all night studying the text. When his family arrived, he had the Bible in his coat pocket. As Christopher came running down the airport concourse, David put his hand on it, drawing strength from the binding.
Now Tracey stands beside him wearing a tasteful black sheath, greeting people. She is doing exactly the right thing, as always. He is a lucky man. He sees this now. Blessed, really. We are put on this earth to take care of each other. This is what his father believed, how he lived his life. And this is how David wants to live. He has made a mess of everything. He knows that. But, God willing, he will make things right. It is simply a matter of follow-through, commitment.
Last night at the hotel, David excused himself and disappeared into the bathroom. He did this every half hour, taking the Bible with him. Tracey asked if he was feeling all right. He said it must have been something he ate at lunch. He sat on the toilet with his pants up flipping the rice-thin pages. The children played loudly in the room outside, jumping on the beds and rifling through every piece of candy in the minibar. In the midst of their chaos, Tracey talked on the phone to her mother. David turned on the sink faucet, creating a soothing rush of white noise. Don’t get him wrong. Having his family around him again was a relief. They were his oxygen. His sanctuary. But at the same time there was a need in him for peace and quiet. It was important. He was on the verge of an essential awakening. He was trying to see the world in a new way, and every time he felt close, there was a shout from a child, or the baby would cry, or Tracey would ask him something and he would lose his train of thought.
The truth he sought felt like one of those multicolored posters you stare at. In plain sight is one image, but if you squint, if you cock your head at just the right angle and unfocus your eyes, you can see a second, deeper image. This is what he was doing in the marble-tiled bathroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, reexamining everything, trying to see the world with a different eye.
Sitting on the toilet, he read the following passage, Genesis 11:1–9:
[1] And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. [2] And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. [3] And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. [4] And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. [5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built.