by Andrew Pyper
I’m about to leave when I spot Tess’s journal on her bedside table (I’d placed it there after bringing it home from Venice, returning it to where it often rested after her jottings). I’d never thought to read it when she was alive, my fear of her discovering my betrayal far greater than any curiosities I may have had about her secret thoughts. Now, though, the need to hear her, to bring her back, outweighs discretion.
A movie ticket stub marks the entry dated the day we left for Venice. Which means she must have written it on the plane.
Dad doesn’t know that I can see how hard he’s trying. The “funny” smiles, the hype about all the stuff we’re going to see. Maybe he is kind of excited. But he still wears the Black Crown.
I can see it more today than ever. It’s even like it’s moving. Like there’s something alive in it, making a nest. Worming around.
The trouble with Mom is part of it. But not all. There’s something waiting for us he doesn’t have a clue about. The Black Crown is coming with us. He’s wearing it but doesn’t know it’s there (how can he NOT know it’s there??).
Maybe the thing that waits on the other side wants to meet Dad, too.
All I’m sure about is that it wants to meet me.
This is followed by a page or so about the flight over, the vaporetto ride to the hotel. And then the journal’s final entry. Dated the day she fell. Written in our room at the Bauer during the time I visited the address in Santa Croce.
It’s here.
Dad knows it now, too. I can feel it. How scared he is.
How he’s talking to it RIGHT NOW.
It won’t let him go. It likes that we’re here. It’s almost happy.
Maybe we were wrong to come. But staying away wasn’t a choice. It would find us. Here or there. Sooner or later.
Better that it’s happening now. Because we’re together, maybe there’s something we can do. If not, it’s better if it takes us at the same time. I wouldn’t want to be the one left behind. And if we have to go THERE, I don’t want to go ALONE.
He’s coming now.
They’re coming.
The journal drops from my hands with a whisper of pages.
She went to Venice to face it.
I turn off the light and close the door. Rush to the bathroom to kneel retching over the toilet.
She went to wear the Crown so I wouldn’t have to anymore.
When I’m able, I head back toward the kitchen to freshen my drink and notice Tess’s door is open. The light on.
It’s an old apartment, but there’s never been a draft that could open a door. And we’ve never had electrical problems. So I hadn’t closed the door and turned off the light.
I turn off the light. Click the door shut. Start away.
And stop.
Only steps from Tess’s room and there is the clear snick of the doorknob being turned. The squeak of the hinge.
I swing around in time to see the light go on. Not already on. The room going from dark to yellow as I blink it into focus.
“Tess?”
Her name passes my lips before the puzzlement settles in my mind. Somehow I know this isn’t a hallucination, isn’t a waking dream. It’s Tess. In her room. Maybe the only place she could be strong enough to reach out to me. Tell me she’s still here.
I rush in. Stand in the middle of her room with arms outstretched, fingers grasping.
“Tess!”
There is nothing to feel but the room’s air-conditioned emptiness. Though the light remains on, she is no longer here.
I am, as crime reporters say of their sources, a “highly credible witness.” I hold a Cornell PhD, a handful of distinguished teaching awards, publication credits in the most respected critical journals in my field, a medical history free of mental disturbance. More, I am an insistently rational sort, a spoilsport by nature when it comes to the fantastical. I’ve made an entire career out of doubt.
Yet here I am. Seeing the unseeable.
IN THE MORNING I AWAKEN TO FOUR MESSAGES ON MY PHONE. One from Diane, asking, in the tone and script of bill collector, to call her back as soon as possible “to resolve an outstanding issue.” One from the detective in Venice I’ve been primarily corresponding with, informing me of the news that there is no news. And two from O’Brien, demanding to see me, the second of which advising me that I’ll “go batshit crazy up there all alone if you don’t talk to someone, and by ‘someone,’ I mean me.”
Because she’s Tess’s mother, and because I can only manage one human-to-human conversation this morning, I prop myself against the headboard and call Diane back. It’s only as her phone is ringing that I realize I’ve slept in Tess’s room.
“Hello?”
“It’s David.”
“David.”
She says my name, her husband of thirteen years, as though it is an obscure spice she’s trying to remember if she’s ever tasted before.
“This a bad time?”
“Stupid question.”
“Yes, it was. Sorry.”
She takes a breath. Not the hesitation of someone reluctant to cause pain to another, but merely, again, the pause of the bill collector, pulling out the right dialogue sheet for a particular subcategory of delinquent.
“I wanted to make it official,” she says. “My moving out. Beginning the process.”
“Process?”
“Divorce.”
“Right.”
“You can use Liam if you’d like,” she says, referring to the lawyer in Brooklyn Heights who did our wills. “I’ve already spoken to someone else.”
“Some Upper East Side tiger to take on Liam the tabby cat.”
“You can choose the counsel you wish.”
“I didn’t mean to accuse. I was just being . . . myself.”
She makes a sound that could be a small laugh, but isn’t.
“I just don’t understand the urgency,” I say.
“This has been going on for a long time, David.”
“I know that. I’m not fighting it. I will be the most helpful, acquiescent cuckold in the history of New York State matrimonial law. I’m just asking, why this morning? Less than a week after Tess went missing.”
“Tess isn’t missing.”
“They’re still looking.”
“No, they’re not. They’re waiting.”
“I’m still looking.”
A silence. Then: “Looking for what?”
You can go as balls-out insane as you want to. My inner O’Brien, coming to my rescue. But do you have to let her know you’ve lost it?
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not making sense.”
“So you’ll speak to Liam? Or whomever? Expedite the application?”
“I’ll expedite. You’ve never seen such expediting.”
“Fine. Good.”
She is in pain, too. Not that she’s shown me any of it. I can only assume Will Junger is offering the comfort and bearing the brunt, though he doesn’t strike me as much of a brunt bearer, not for long. In any case, Diane is Tess’s mother and now her daughter is gone and it can only be tearing her into tiny, useless pieces as it is me.
Yet here’s the thing: I can’t stop wondering if I might be wrong about that. There is loss in her voice, and resolution. But there’s an awful satisfaction in there, too. Not about Tess never coming home, nothing so monstrous as that. But satisfaction that I was the one who was there—that it was my failure—when it happened.
“I don’t care if you blame me. If you hate me. I don’t care if we never speak again,” I say. “But you have to know that I tried to save her. That I didn’t let go. That I didn’t just stand by. I fought for her.”
“I acknowledge what you’re trying to—”
“Every parent says—or at least thinks—they’d lay down their lives for their child. I don’t know, when the test comes, if that’s true for everyone. But it’s true for me.”
“But you didn’t!”
This shout comes so bright and hot
down the line that I have to pull the phone from my ear. “You didn’t lay down your life for her,” she says. “Because you’re still here. And she’s not.”
You’re wrong about one thing, I want to say. I’m not here.
Instead, as I’m readying some farewell, an acknowledgment of our time together and the one thing we did right, the one thing we’d never regret, she hangs up.
WHO SITS IN A CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE OF A WEEKDAY AFTERNOON? Drunks, runaways, addicts in all their varieties. The lost who have only themselves to blame. I know because I sit among them. Praying for the first time in my adult life.
Or trying to pray. The iconography, the forced quiet, the stained glass, all of it feels overcooked. Yes, it’s a church: it’s supposed to be churchy. But I feel no closer to holiness here than I did outside on 43rd Street moments ago.
“You get disconnected?”
I turn to find a slightly grizzled man in his midfifties. Rumpled suit, hair in need of all manner of attention. A businessman—or former businessman—belonging to the drunken class, would be my guess.
“Sorry?”
“Your prayer line. To the Big Guy. He put you on hold? Does it to me all the time. Then damned if you don’t get disconnected.”
“I never even dialed the number.”
“You’re better off. If you’d gotten through, it would have been press ‘1’ for miracles, press ‘2’ for picking the winning horse in the eighth at Belmont, press ‘3’ for ‘I’m sorry for what I did . . . but not so sorry I wouldn’t do it again.’ ”
“Might as well just go to my shrink.”
“Yeah? She good at picking horses?”
She. Are most therapists women? Or could I possibly know this guy? A guy who knows both me and O’Brien?
“She doesn’t gamble,” I say.
“No? Well, you know what they say. Can’t win if you don’t play.”
He leans his arms across the back of the pew. It brings a whiff of recently applied deodorant. A crude perfume meant to cover the earthy scent beneath it.
“I don’t mean to pry, but you look a little lost, my friend,” he says.
He offers a look of real concern. And then it comes to me: He’s one of those street missionaries. A recruiter for the church in civilian clothes, prowling the pews.
“Do you work here?”
“Here?” He looks around, as though noticing where we sit for the first time. “They got jobs in here?”
“I’m just not up for a sales pitch for salvation. If that’s what you do.”
He shakes his head. “What do the T-shirts say? ‘You’ve mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.’ I just saw a kindred spirit sitting here and thought I’d say hello.”
“I’m not trying to be unfriendly. I’d just prefer to be left alone.”
“Alone. Sounds nice. Hard to find a moment’s peace where I live. Pandemonium. A man can’t think. And believe me, friend, I’m a thinker.”
That word again. The same one O’Brien used to describe Grand Central. Milton’s hell.
Pandemonium.
“I’m David,” I say, and offer my hand. And after a pause, the man takes it.
“Good to meet you, David.”
I wait for him to share his name, but he just releases my hand.
“Think I’ll be moving on,” I say, standing. “I just came in here to get out of the sun for a minute.”
“Can’t say I blame you. Personally, I’m an indoors cat.”
I make my way to the aisle and, with a parting nod, start toward the open doors. The day blazing beyond.
As I go, the man recites part of a poem in the pious murmur of a prayer.
O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell
Milton. Writing Satan’s words.
I turn. Slide along the pew to where he sits, his head now lowered, hands reverently clasped. Grab his shoulder and give him a rough push.
“Look at me!”
He jerks away in a defensive reflex. Winces up at me in anticipation of a blow. Not the man who was sitting here a moment ago. A priest. Young and clean-shaven, his skin blushed in alarm.
“I’m so sorry,” I start, already backing away. “I thought you were someone else.”
As I make for the aisle again, the young priest’s expression changes. His surprise turning to a smile.
“I’m ready to hear your confession,” he says.
His laugh follows me all the way out onto the street.
IT WAS THE VOICE AGAIN. I’M SURE OF THIS AS I LURCH AWAY FROM St. Agnes’ to Lexington and lean against the doorway to an Irish bar, catching my breath. It was the same presence that passed from me to Tess, that spoke to me on the rooftop of the Bauer. Quoted from Paradise Lost just as the man in the church just did. And the Thin Woman, too, though I’m less sure she was an incarnation of the voice herself—the being I have started to think of as the Unnamed—rather than an on-the-ground, human representative. For some reason, I had to travel to Venice, to Santa Croce 3627, for the Unnamed to be introduced into my life, and it was the Thin Woman’s job to see to it that I accepted the invitation to do just that. Which would suggest she didn’t work for the Church or one of its agencies as I suspected.
O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
In Milton’s poem, this is Satan speaking. Cursing the light of day as a painful reminder of his fallen state, of all he’d lost in his self-imposed exile in the darkness. Is that who the Unnamed is? The Adversary? The man in the chair—or the plurality of voices speaking through him—said it was not the “master” whom I would soon meet, but “one who sits with him.” In Paradise Lost, this would mean the fallen angels who formed the Stygian Council of ruling demons in hell, with Satan sitting as Chair. They were thirteen in number, each given distinctive personalities and skills by the poet. It would seem that the Unnamed is one of them. An originating demon, cast out of heaven. A being capable of the most convincing shapeshifting and mimicry, assuming human form—the old man on the plane, the drunk in the church.
Then again, perhaps these are borrowed shades of those who have already lived and died. Perhaps the Unnamed is limited to inhabiting the skins of those in hell.
It’s clear now. I have lost my mind.
Instead of grieving Tess head on, I’m creating gothic distractions, Miltonic puzzles, demon dialogues—anything but facing the unfaceable. I’m using my mind to protect my heart, and it’s a cheat, a dishonor to Tess’s memory. She deserves a father to mourn her, not construct an elaborate web of paranoid nonsense. I’m sure the shrinks have a term for this. Cowardice will do.
By the time I get back to the apartment and check my phone, more messages have been left for me, a couple notes of sympathy from colleagues at the university, and two grave warnings from O’Brien that if I don’t call her back soon, she’ll be forced to take matters into her own hands.
Why don’t I call O’Brien back? I honestly can’t say. Every time my finger hovers over the button to speed-dial her it loses the will to press it. I want to speak to her, to see her. But what I want has been negated by another purpose, an influence I can feel in my veins as an alien weight, heavy and cold. A tingly sickness that, above all, doesn’t want O’Brien anywhere near me.
And besides, I’m busy.
Opening the medicine chest and pulling out the bottle of Zolpidem that Diane left behind. I fill a glass of water and go to Tess’s room. Sit on the edge of her bed and, one by one, swallow the pills.
Suicide? And with sleeping pills? Chickenshit and cliché.
O’Brien is here with me, but at a great distance. Easy enough to ignore.
Will I see you, Tess, when it is done?
Yes. She is waiting, says a voice, neither my own nor O’Brien’s. Go on, Professor. Sip. Swallow. Swallow. Sip.
I don’t believe what it says. Yet it’s impossible to resist.
Sip. Swallow.
SMASH.
A framed photo falls to the floor. Shards of glass now winking over the rug, lodged in the cracks between the boards. The nail still firm in the wall, the wire the frame hung on still intact and secure.
I know what photo it is, but I go to it anyway. Bend and turn it over.
Me and Tess. The two of us laughing at the beach near Southampton a couple summers ago. Below us, out of view, our sand castle being dissolved by the incoming tide. What’s funny are our hopeless efforts to save it, to buttress the walls with fresh sand, bail out the courtyard with our hands. The picture shows the pleasure in our being together in the sunshine, on vacation. But it also shows the joy in taking on a task with someone you love, even if that task is too great to be achieved.
“Tess?”
She is here. Not just in the memory the photo evokes. She was the one who pulled it off the wall.
I crawl to the bathroom. Stick a forefinger down my throat. Empty my stomach of tap water pinkened by tranquilizers. When I flush it away, the heavy thing in my blood goes with it.
For a while I lean against the tiled wall, my legs out before me. If I don’t move, it’s easy to pretend this isn’t my body. There is no order I could give that would make any part of me move.
Find me.
I’m being the old David again, the man of inaction Diane was probably right to leave. Because there is still something to be done. An impossible task, admittedly: find and retrieve the dead—or half-dead—from darkest limbo.
And then there is the matter of not having any idea how to begin.
I stand under the shower fully clothed. Feel the bookish references and snippets of poetry slide off me like oil. Soon there is nothing left.
Except for the feeling I’m not alone.