by Andrew Pyper
“It’s not the place. What I mean—” I start, then try to think of a palatable fiction. Decide on the truth instead. “I mean I’m not sure we’re safe.”
I don’t intend to frighten her. And she isn’t frightened. Her face shows something else I can’t quite read. Something like resolve. The grimace that shows a willingness to take on a fight.
Whatever it is, it’s my fault. What the hell was I thinking, saying that?
The answer is it wasn’t me who said it. It’s the thing that’s followed me here. A being other than Tess or me in the room with us.
“Pack your things,” I say. “I’ve got a couple calls to make.”
MAYBE IT IS THE FOCUS REQUIRED IN THUMBING MY IPHONE, CALLING the airlines, finding a flight that leaves that night (getting lucky with Alitalia to London, then British Airways to New York). Or maybe it’s just a matter of bringing some distance between myself and the man at 3627. Either way, I feel almost instantly better. The breeze through the open doors cools the sweat on my neck, my stomach calmed. Even more welcome, the dark thoughts that plagued my return journey on the vaporetto have retreated, leaving me more buoyant than I can remember feeling for the last few weeks. Has the day been weird? Sure. A conspiracy cooked up in the underworld? Not too damn likely.
So what to do about the video camera? When I’m done on the phone I spot it on the coffee table. The eye of its lens staring at me. Inside the machine is the man in the room. His gnashings and flailings. But also the cities and numbers. The lifeless voice. My father.
I consider leaving it there but quickly pack it instead, burying it under my socks as though concealing it might render its contents impotent. I’m too addled at the moment to say how I know this, but the documentation it contains may be important. Not that I will ever view its contents again. But the academic in me—the archivist, the enlightened opposer to the destruction of historical record—doesn’t like the idea of it disappearing. In the manner of any text, it may have something crucial to say that isn’t evident on the first reading.
I zip up my suitcase. Comb fingers through damp hair.
Good-bye, gloriously expensive hotel suite. Good-bye, magnificent Chiesa della Salute, postcard-framed by the window. Good-bye, Venice. I won’t be coming back. And when the next plague comes, go ahead and build another church. Whether they cure the sick or not, they’re certainly beautiful.
“Tess? Time to go, honey.”
I roll the suitcase to the living room, expecting to find Tess there. She isn’t, though her bag is. The handle extended but the case lying on its back on the floor, as though abandoned.
“Tess?”
Check her room. Both bathrooms. Open the suite’s door and go outside to stand in the empty hallway.
“Tess!”
The living room window. Doors open wide, the curtains coaxing in the hot breeze.
I run to the balcony, look over the side. Below, the arrivals and departures of the hotel’s dock. But no commotion. No Tess.
Call the front desk. That’s what I should do. Have hotel staff look everywhere at the same time. The police, too. If she left the hotel it would take no time at all to become lost in the city’s maze.
Don’t just run around. Think. I have to put the next steps in the right order. What I do now will decide everything—
She’s on the roof.
O’Brien’s voice interrupts again. Except this time it’s not my imagined O’Brien, but somehow the real thing. My friend here with me.
Il Settimo Cielo. Go, David. Go now.
Even as I’m running out the door and taking the stairs up to the seventh floor, I’m wondering if this voice, among all the others of this day, can be believed. It could be a lie. Maybe everything I heard in the room at 3627 was a lie.
But this one is true.
I run out onto the patio restaurant atop the hotel, and there she is. My daughter standing on the edge of the roof. Meeting my eyes alone through the crowd of panicking patrons and waiters.
“Tess!”
There is something authoritative about my shout—I know her name—that parts the crowd, quieting the calls for the police, for someone to do something. It allows me to approach in what I hope to be a calming pace, my steps as sure as I can make them.
All the while Tess’s eyes stay on me. But as I get closer I see that I’m wrong. They are her eyes, blue as mine. Yet it is not Tess who sees with them. It’s not my daughter who stands on the edge, her arms out at her sides, fingers splayed apart to feel the wind pass through them. There is a rigidity in her stance that betrays an unfamiliarity, the testing of balance and strength. Her posture is that of someone contained within a prison of bones and skin. Her body, but not her.
When I’m almost close enough to reach her, she rears back. Extends her leg out behind her so that she is balanced on one foot, the other wavering in the air.
It’s meant to stop my approach. It works.
Hello, David.
An entirely different voice this time. Male, measured, the fine pronunciation that marks the affect of sophistication. A voice not unlike the ones I hear at university conferences or from the country-club parents of students who donate money in order to put their names on campus buildings.
“You’re the one I was told I would meet,” I say.
We’re going to be so close. Not friends, perhaps. No, certainly not friends. But unquestionably close.
It lowers Tess’s leg so that she stands on both feet once more. Yet to show this isn’t a gesture of concession, both feet shuffle backward an inch. It leaves her heels hanging off the edge.
“Let her go.”
It replies in what sounds like Tess’s voice, though it’s not. The same phrase, the same intonation she used when I said I wanted to leave Venice less than an hour ago. A brilliant mimicry, though emptied of life.
I like it here.
“Please. I’ll do whatever you ask.”
It’s not about my asking you to do anything, it says, speaking in its own voice again. This is for you, David. A journey of your own making. A wandering.
That word again. Wander.
The old man on the plane had used it, too. And the Thin Woman had said that about herself, hadn’t she? That she was not a traveler, but a wanderer. Even at the time I’d noted this term bears particular meaning for Milton. Satan and his underlings wander about the earth and in hell, self-directed but without destination. It is widely interpreted as connoting the homeless nature of demonic existence, the drifting movement within purgatory. Ungrounded, loveless.
And then, as though reading my mind, the voice cites Paradise Lost itself.
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Lies through your spacious empire up to light
Alone, and without guide, half lost, I seek . . .
“Then tell me,” I say, my voice breaking. “What are you seeking? I promise I will help you find it.”
I have already found what I seek. I have found you.
Tess’s feet scratch back another inch. All of her weight gripped to the edge by her toes like a highboard diver.
There is much to discover, David. Though little time.
“How much?”
When you see the numbers, you have only until the moon.
“Why? What happens then?”
The child will be mine.
I lunge forward. Grab Tess’s hand.
Even though I pull as hard as I can—even though she is an eleven-year-old girl less than half my weight—it’s all I can do to just hold her there. Her strength is not her own but the voice’s. And what it shows me at the touch of Tess’s hand is of his design, too. A collage of pain, colliding and burning.
My brother inhaling the river’s water.
Tess screaming, alone, in a dark forest.
My father’s face.
A severed thumb, spouting blood.
Tess’s lips part. Say something I hear but can’t immediately make sense of. Because she’s going a
nd I’m trying to hold her. There is nothing but the effort to not let go. Her fingers drawing closed. Slipping through mine.
“TESS!”
And she’s gone.
Her freed hands held out wide like wings. She doesn’t push away from the edge but merely falls back, slowed by the buffeting air. Her face stricken in terror—her face again, her eyes—but her body still and composed, her braided hair pointed straight up above her head like a noose.
I rush to the edge and watch her tumble, once, before crashing into the canal.
And with the impact comes the words she whispered to me before the fall. Whispered not in secrecy but because it took all of her strength to push aside the other being within her. A gap when she was in command of her own tongue long enough to utter a plea.
A girl, mine. Calling for me to bring her home.
Find me.
II
THE BURNING LAKE
8
GRIEF HAS A COLOR.
It has other characteristics, I know now, collectively forming a personality of sorts. An antagonizing figure that arrives in your life and refuses to leave or sit anywhere but next to you or stop whispering the name of the departed in your ear. But for me, more than this, grief expresses itself primarily as a shade of paint. The same disheartening turquoise on the kitchen walls of the cabin where we spent our summers and, after we had to sell our house in town, where we lived until Dad walked out into the woods one Sunday in July carrying only a photo of my brother and a shotgun and never came back.
It is the color of my mother crying while standing at the sink, her back to me. The color of my father sitting alone at the kitchen table through the night, rousing only to pick up the unringing phone and ask “Hello?” of the dead line. The color of the river my brother drowned in.
And now all of New York is washed in turquoise. I see it everywhere. The smallest splashes of it leaping out and demanding my attention, a guerilla ad campaign promoting nothing. A bleeding turquoise that touches everything, like a watercolor that spreads out from where the brush meets the paper. I see the city through an aquamarine gel, the Chrysler Building, the storming cabs, and the canyons that crosshatch Midtown all brushed by an underwater glaze. Even my closed eyelids are backlit by sadness. It is the color of seniors’ home interiors and bus station bathrooms. The color of the Grand Canal.
It has been two days since I returned from Venice, five since Tess fell from the top floor of the Bauer Hotel into the water below. I would have returned sooner, but the police in Venice were searching for her remains all that time and I couldn’t leave until they stopped looking. They never found her. It was, apparently, not unusual for those who drowned in the canals to disappear, drawn out of the city by tricky, stronger-than-you’d-guess currents, through the lagoon, past the outer islands and into the Adriatic Sea. And there were all the underwater buttresses, tunnels, and waste passages of the city itself, a network of invisible pockets where a body might become lodged. They had scuba divers working the case (ours was briefly a news story meriting mention and a photo of frogmen jumping into the canal with a striped-shirted gondolier in the background) but they found nothing, which seemed not to surprise them.
Nobody ever suggested she might still be alive. I didn’t think it possible myself. But it had to be asked, and I asked. Every time I did it provoked the same look. The kind of look you give someone who has suffered a brain injury that has stolen coherence from their faculties and therefore there is no reply to offer aside from a compassionate stare.
The point is Tess was never returned to me, and when they called off the search (promising to remain diligent and in frequent communication) they encouraged me to go home, as there was nothing more for me to do in Venice. I have never felt more disloyal as when I boarded the plane and left my daughter’s body somewhere in the waters below.
Diane and I have spoken, of course, both on the phone from Italy and in person, a couple times, here in New York. And O’Brien has left multiple messages, offering to move into the apartment for as long as I need the company. I declined via text. Instead of accepting offers of comfort, I have spent my time clogging up the Venice police’s answering machine with queries to every department that may be of relevance to searching for victims of drownings. That, and wandering around the turquoise city. Remembering Tess.
Wandering.
Maybe this is what the voice meant when it said what awaited me. To move about aimlessly like this is to come as close to the dead as the living can get. Trekking from Wall Street to Harlem and down again, detouring at random. Unnoticed and absent as a phantom.
And as I go, some backstreet of my mind is making impossible connections.
This is the beginning of madness. Guilt so unbearable it twists the mind. To think these thoughts is to let go of the world and, if they are to be even partway believed, never return.
Knowing this doesn’t stop me from thinking them.
Maybe the voice that came out of Tess’s mouth was an independent presence, a spirit that took control of her for the last twenty minutes of her life. Maybe it was what pulled her hand from mine. Maybe it wasn’t suicide that claimed my daughter (as the coroner and authorities unavoidably concluded, once suspicion directed my way was erased by witness accounts) but a murder committed from within. Maybe the voice belonged to the demon promised to visit me by the man in the chair.
Certainly not friends. But unquestionably close.
Maybe this presence piggy-backed on me from the room with the man in the chair back to the hotel, and from there transferred to Tess. It would explain some things. Why I felt so suddenly ill after I escaped from Santa Croce 3627—and then suddenly better again once back in our room at the Bauer. Why I saw the screeching pigs in the street. Why Tess went up to the roof. Why the last words she spoke asked me to find her. Why her body hasn’t been found.
This is how far I’ve fallen.
No. Not true. I’ve gone even further than that.
What if the personality trait Tess and I share, the mostly disguisable birthmark of melancholy, was never just a temperament but an indication of our being chosen from the very start? If this were a lecture hall and the question I’ve just asked myself came from a student, I’d know the precedent I’d recite from heart: Mark 9. Another instance of Jesus casting a demon out of an afflicted soul. A boy this time. His father begging the savior to relieve his son of a foul spirit that had often thrown him “into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him.”
The waters.
Suicide. Demonically provoked.
Christ asked the father how long the boy had suffered in this way.
And he said, From childhood.
HERE’S ANOTHER DEFINITION OF WANDERING: EMOTIONS SO GREAT they require superstition to explain them. This is the core observation of my field of study, after all. Fear—of death, of loss, of being left behind—is the genesis of belief in the supernatural. For someone like me to suddenly find himself entertaining the myths of primitives can only be seen as symptomatic of a psychotic break of some kind. I know this to be as verifiable as the street numbers I walk past, as the time on my watch. I am proposing that a demon took my daughter from me. Just stop and say that out loud a few times. Just hear it. It is the sort of theory that rightly justifies locking someone in Bellevue for long-term observation.
So I move on. Surrounded by blue-green people on blue-green blocks.
And feel almost nothing.
That is, I miss Tess, I mourn for her, I am heartbroken. But to “miss,” to “mourn,” to acknowledge a “broken heart”—these are words so inadequate they border on the offensive. It’s not about finding a way to go on. It’s not about being angry at God. It’s about dying. About wishing to be dead.
The only things that register are children. It’s always been that way. There probably isn’t a parent alive who can watch strangers’ children play and not think of their own child. The laughter, the invitations to give chase, the anguish at the scraped kn
ee or pilfered toy. All of it leads back to how our own did these same things, the quirks that marked them as both like and unlike every other child in the world.
There: A girl playing hide-and-seek with her mother amid the boulders and trees near the Turtle Pond in Central Park. It reminds me of playing the same game with Tess. Every time she hid—even if it was within our own apartment—there was always a half-second of real terror as I looked for her in the usual places and didn’t find her. What if, this time, she was really gone? What if she was hidden so well that looking behind trees or under beds or in laundry hampers wouldn’t be enough?
And then, just as the fizz of panic started up from the bottom of my throat, she was there. Jumping out at the first surrendering call of “Okay, I give up!” from me.
This time, Tess is hidden and never coming back.
Yet she begged me not to give up.
Find me.
I stop by an iron gate and watch the mother pause to look about her. Pretending to be stumped by her daughter’s location. But when she tiptoes over to a maple and pokes her head around—Gotcha!—the girl isn’t there. And instantly, the worry comes. The thought that this time the game is not a game.
“Momma!”
The girl rushes out from the quack grass that surrounds the edge of the pond and the mother picks her up, the girl’s legs flying out behind her. Then the mother spots me. A man standing alone by the gate. It’s the first time anyone’s fully registered me since my return to New York.
I turn from them, shamed by my inadvertent invasion of their privacy. But the mother is already bundling the girl into her arms and starting away. Protecting her from the man who’s clearly missing some essential part. Someone not entirely there but all the more dangerous for that.
A wanderer.
THE TURQUOISE DAY TURNS TO TURQUOISE NIGHT. I RETURN TO THE apartment and make toast. Butter the slices and cut it into fingers the way Tess used to like it. Sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar. Throw them out without tasting them.
I pour myself a vodka on ice. Walk around the apartment and notice the light on in Tess’s room. The Lion King poster over the bed (we’d taken her three times to the Broadway show, requests from two birthdays and a Christmas). A map of North Dakota on the wall (part of a school project, an in-depth study of one of the fifty states). The crayon drawings I’d honestly praised and had framed. The stuffed animals on the floor next to the chest of drawers, toys now long ignored, though still loved enough to avoid removal to the closet. The room of a girl in transition from childhood to the murky confusions of whatever follows.