“I guess it does sound like the dream,” I admitted. “But what I was feeling just now, dredging all this up? Was the opposite of what I feel when I’m having it. Like, there was a moment back there, right around the time of the blackout, when everything seemed on the edge of becoming something else. And now I can’t imagine a life besides this one.”
“Maybe behind the veils is a mirror. Maybe you’re scared you’ll look and see your father.”
I knew then that I’d said too much. That I’d hurt her. “That’s not what I meant, Julia. I don’t know what I meant. I love you. I love Agnes. I love having, you know, a patch of grass out back and good avocados year-round. It’s just where the limits are that scares me. I’m almost forty.”
“Well, I’m scared too,” she said. “Because I love you, Will, but I don’t know how much more of this either of us can take. Whatever else is back there, you’ve got to face it.”
And so here I am, attaching page upon page, seemingly unable to stop. I’ve started to feel like I’m stuck now inside the dream. Or like I’m losing my mind. I keep thinking, while driving, while cooking, while in the office preparing briefs, about a veiled city, hiding something. And I keep returning to the night of the blackout, and the question of just what changed there, in the dark.
And then there’s the last thing Bruno Augenblick showed me before I left the gallery that night. He’d insisted on calling a car to take me back to my hotel, given the heft of Evidence III, and out of some obscure Continental courtesy had followed me to the street. It was cooler there. We waited in the autumn dusk, listening to car horns sail up the building faces, watching headlights knife by over on the avenue, while behind us, inside, the little show went on. And finally, just to say something, I told him there were still things I didn’t get. Like the title: “Evidence” of what? “And then, if those white signs on the wall in there are Evidence I, and this box is Evidence III, what happened to Evidence II?” At this, he smiled his clinical smile, light but no heat, and gestured at something down the block. At first I couldn’t tell what was being indicated, but then I saw it: what hung from the stop-sign pole at the corner was not a stop sign, but a canvas, imperfectly octagonal and only approximately red. I moved closer. Just above and to the right of the “O” was a blue halo of sun, and most of the lower left portion was dappled with leaf-shadow. What I mean is, what at first seemed to be an ordinary stop sign was really a painting. To look at it straight on, by twilight, was to see it from below, by day. Impressionism, I guess, is the word. You could see the brushstrokes, the hand of the artist, the dead man who’d signed it: Billy III. A fissure seemed to have opened in objective space, or subjective space, or in some third space altogether, and for a second, as I stood there looking, this factitious quality spread to take in the elevator-shaft warning on the building across the street—likewise fake, or real—and the orange construction placard by a subway entrance farther off. My uncle hadn’t wanted to white out the city; he’d wanted to reimagine it. To exchange the inside of his head with what was beyond. Who knew, in fact, how many more pieces of Evidence II I’d passed on my way down here without noticing? Who could be certain, this far from the altered skyline, that he hadn’t tucked skyscrapers of cardboard in among the ones made of steel? Who knew which city I was even in? It was 2003. It was 1974. It was 1961. I wanted to ask Augenblick about the scale of all this, how far Evidence II extended, but when I turned around, he was gone.
BOOK V
THE DEMON BROTHER
[ JULY 12–13, 1977 ]
The imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams …
—WALTER BENJAMIN
The Arcades Project
71
THE DAY CAMP REGAN HAD CHOSEN was all the way up on East Eighty-Second Street. This was in the winter, when slots were filling up fast, and it had seemed important that the kids have some sense of continuity with the old neighborhoods. What it had not been, especially, was logical. She wasn’t thinking about forty minutes on the train to drop them off and then fifteen back down to the Hamilton-Sweeney Building for work. When she was Will’s age, she’d ridden the subway alone, but nowadays you might as well have set your kids up with a drug habit and a loaded gun. If they weren’t bathed, dressed, and breakfasted by ten to eight, the better part of valor was just to put them in a cab. Currently, it was 8:23 a.m., July 13, two days into a heat wave. She watched Will work to isolate a Cheerio on the end of his spoon. “Do you think you could speed it up, honey, possibly?”
He made a cherubic trumpet of his mouth, sucked the Cheerio down. What rankled was the shrug that followed. Their connection had once been clairvoyant; he would materialize beside her without her having heard his approach, as if he could sense the pressure building within and had no other means to ease it. Indeed, she suspected it was the weird way he saw through you that made Keith want to pack him off to boarding school. But she hadn’t even been able to let Will go to sleepaway camp, and now he seemed to be punishing her for it. In the twenty-four hours before a custody visit, he resented even her gentlest suggestion. He would prefer not to, the shrug seemed to say.
Then Cate came kiting in from the bathroom, which in the new apartment, through some architectural oversight, abutted the kitchen. “Can I have some Cheerios?”
“You had eggs, honey, not fifteen minutes ago. Did you light a match?”
She nodded, and Regan decided to withhold comment on her mismatched socks and on the nest of hair that appeared to have been sucked through a cotton gin. “Go get your bag, sweetie.” No doubt the camp counselors would look at her and think, Negligent parent, but that was fine, it was all a penance, besides which, there was no time. In sixty-four minutes, Andrew West would be in her office to run back over the statement they’d drafted. At 1:30, they would ride the elevator to the newly renovated press room on the fortieth floor to tell the assembled microphones that, to the charges of tax fraud and insider trading, her father would enter a plea of not guilty. The U.S. Attorney was apparently hours away from finalizing an immunity deal with a second informant anyway, and once that happened, Daddy’s chance at a plea bargain would expire, along with the symbolic power of refusing it.
Everything that was going to happen would happen today.
Sixty-three minutes.
She forced herself not to say anything, knowing that if she did Will would downshift even further, to a gear somewhere between deliberate and geologic. She tried to reopen their connection. Come on, honey. Of course, given that he was a male, frustration was just another way of loving him. The foxed neck of his tee-shirt. The freckled bridge of his slightly upturned nose. His long hair, his probably unwashed hair, falling artlessly in his eyes.
“William Hamilton-Sweeney Lamplighter, you have exactly ten seconds to finish your breakfast.”
“Can’t.”
“Excuse me?”
He put his hands up, as if to show he was unarmed. “I’m full.”
“Then andiamo, already.” She pretended not to see the way he left the bowl out for her to clean up later.
They were at the door, Regan one sleeve into her suit jacket, when she noticed something was missing. “Where’s the overnight bag, Will?”
“Oops.”
“You didn’t pack?”
“You didn’t remind me.”
“I didn’t remind you to put on pants, either, but you managed to get it done.”
Again, the shrug, which had acquired italics in her mind. Her watch said 8:34, and she felt that if she said another word to him, he would know he’d won. She knelt and buttoned her daughter’s polo shirt. Time was, it had been Cate dragging her feet and Will who was dutiful. “Honey, tell me your father keeps a change of clothes for you guys.”
Cate smiled and twisted away. At some point, she’d lost a tooth. “We have TVs in our rooms now.”
“It’s true,” Will said. “He lets us watch whatever we want.”
“God damn it, Will
, you can do this or I’ll do it myself, and I will pick clothes that make you regret it. Don’t make me count to three.” It never crossed her mind that maybe it wasn’t her he was resisting. That maybe, secretly, he really didn’t want to go.
WHAT TO DO WITH CHILDREN IN SUMMER was a question to which she’d never given much thought, prior to this annus horribilis. Even working full-time for the firm, she got paid leave, and the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day was supposed to stretch into a succession of long weekends at Lake Winnipesaukee with her kids and husband splashing in the water, days passing leisurely as sailboats beyond the blue cordon of buoys.
Now the fact that the camp only ran from nine to three, with aftercare costing extra, seemed a kind of scam. She’d called ahead to let the camp people know Keith would be picking the kids up today. He was supposed to take them to a Mets game and then keep them through the weekend, and although she would miss them, as she always missed them, there was a part of her right now, and this must represent some kind of progress, that thought, Let’s see how he deals with all of this, with Will’s too-long showers and Cate’s nightmares, with waking at midnight to Cate hovering out in the hall and asking in her most forlorn voice, Can I sleep with you tonight? as if she hadn’t already assumed the answer was yes. The problem was that it probably wouldn’t bother Keith. He was a man who struggled with cause-and-effect. Late for camp? No big deal. The pilfering of an entire jar of Vaseline? Boys will be boys.
No, the problem was, actually, that she missed him. She missed his laugh, missed the way he balanced her out, missed sometimes not having to be the one who let things slide, and when Cate piped up from the doorway, she had to check to make sure her own face was dry, because with the lights off, except for the tranche of streetlight from between the curtains, she kept trooping back over their life as a family, trying to find the exact spot where the ground had given way. Climb in, sweetie, she would say.
When she thought now about sharing her bed with Andrew West, Andrew of the poreless skin and hair-model hair, what she felt was more like this indulgent mother-love than like the hunger she wanted to feel. She had put off mentioning him to the kids for a number of reasons, one of them being that Will might view him as a rival, and another being that there was probably something to that. Andrew was only twenty-eight. She had also put off sleeping with him. Still, she’d decided that tonight, when it was all over, she was going to let him do to her anything he wanted. She hoped Will hadn’t noticed the leg of lamb and the bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge when he went for the milk. Or, given that the kids were her only remaining conduit to her husband, maybe she hoped he had.
IT WAS OUT ON HENRY STREET playing Spot the Cab that Regan realized she didn’t have the fare to make it all the way uptown. Will didn’t have any cash, either—he’d blown his allowance on those damn wizarding cards—so her options were to be late for her meeting with Andrew or to put them on the subway alone. A pinkish fog crowned the tops of the bridges, humidity mixed with auto exhaust and the ash pouring out of the ghettos. Motes of birds hung motionless, white. Forecasters were predicting record highs today, and she could already feel her blouse starting to cling. She looked Will over. He was still a good boy, she thought, a good and bright and courageous boy, and the only people on the train at this hour would be commuters. She launched into a practicum on avoiding strangers, but he cut her off.
“We ride by ourselves all the time when we’re at Dad’s, Mom.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said, meaning she had no way of knowing if it was just bluster. When she tried to follow them down into the station to make sure they got on the right train, Will groaned. She gave him a kiss on the head before he could duck away, and then one for Cate, and watched them disappear into the ground. But why, seconds later, was she following at a discreet distance? The turnstile wouldn’t let her through without paying, so she stayed there on one side of the bars, watching her progeny wait on the platform, flanked by older kids canoodling in hormonal fury and by West Indian women in nurse’s shoes and by people on benches who already seemed drunk. In one hand, Will had his yellow duffel, with his school’s crest on the side and a little bloom of tee-shirt caught in the zipper like a weed in the sidewalk. In the other hand, he held his sister’s.
Regan wished, not for the first time, that she were someone else, someone who would trust these eminently capable children, and so wouldn’t have to follow them down here, as if to jump the stile at the last minute, to scoop them up and save them from growing any older. But as they boarded and sat down facing her amid the entropic graffiti that now covered the windows completely, she couldn’t look away. Cate spotted her and waved before the doors closed, but Will just stared blankly ahead like any other adult with places to be—like William, somehow, the uncle he’d never met. Between them at any rate was enough space for another child. And she knew as the train pulled away that all these disappearing kids would be the picture in her head when she spoke before the cameras about the future of the company that was her family, and later as she watched her junior colleague and would-be seducee fumble with the corkscrew, and finally in the darkness when he began to snore and Regan was left on her own again, as one always apparently is.
72
IF YOU THROW A BANANA AT A WALL, there’s a small possibility it will pass through the wall. Or so, at any rate, Jenny Nguyen had thought, straphanging on an uptown bus thirteen hours earlier. It was a thing she’d heard on the radio that morning. “Dr.” Zig Zigler had been ranting about riots in the street, or their absence, and though Jenny knew first-hand the futility of civil disobedience, his weird case in point for low-probability events (why throw a banana at a wall?) seemed eloquently to evoke the odds of her ever being other than alone. Her most recent dial-a-date, the one from which she was returning, had been big and russet-haired and eager as an Irish setter, which had only made her feel, by contrast, pinched and premenstrual. The entire thing, from sitting down to splitting the check, had lasted under an hour. Now burnished buildings and cars slipped free of her outline on the bus’s window. She wasn’t totally repulsive, she didn’t think—she’d shaved her legs; her new antiperspirant was holding its own against the ninety-degree heat—and if she could just not have had so damn many opinions … but why futz around with counterfactuals? What the Jenny in the window was doing was lugging a totebag full of grant applications back to her un-air-conditioned apartment to order in Chinese and spend another hour working, and then, maybe, as a treat, allow herself a couple more pages of her dead neighbor’s manuscript before sleeping, waking, doing it all over again. On one hand, you couldn’t count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely.
Maybe that was even a good thing, because two and a half months after the last time something really had changed, she still felt a jolt of loss every time she set foot in her building, a kind of gamma signature scintillating through the metal partition between her mailbox and Richard’s, and radiating from behind what she still thought of as his door. She hadn’t noticed yet that the hallway upstairs was hotter than it should have been, heat wave or no heat wave. The bouquet of kerosene she chalked up to ethnic cooking in 2-J. Still, there was a slight hesitation between working the key into the sticky lock of her own door and opening it—a second in which the apartment remained a black box. One/zero. Did/didn’t. Involved/uninvolved.
Then she was ahead of herself, hands flying to nostrils. A window had been propped open, loosing a cross-breeze on the charred black papers plastered over everything. Smoke drifted near the light fixtures. Drawers gaped at crazy angles. Wet clots of clothes and paper clung to the countertops like confetti to windshields after rain. The boxes she’d stacked so carefully in the corner—the boxes and boxes of Richard’s things!—had been torched and then soaked, it seemed. Claggart, socketed in one corner of the sleeper sofa, looked a little rheumy-eyed, but otherwise intact. She was about to call him to her when she realized that an ar
sonist could still be lurking in the apartment, listening to her breathe.
She grabbed the dog and rushed down to the lobby, taking the fire stairs two at a time. It was what the fire stairs had been here for all along. But what had been the likelihood of them ever fulfilling their purpose? Then again, maybe the odds depended on whether you were for or against, the banana or the wall.
THE COPS, WHEN THEY FINALLY ARRIVED, were thinking burglary. She’d tried to point out that nothing was missing. Plus why the fire? The taller of the officers held the curtain back from the window, examined the scaffold beyond. “Usually they’ll be looking for a TV.”
She didn’t have a TV, she said.
“How you expect she fits a TV, with all these boxes?” Mr. Feratovic was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, scattering the napalm of his disapproval over everything. It had been his idea, over Jenny’s opposition, to involve the police, and now she saw why. “You keep this much things, is a fire hazard. Officer, you agree this place is a fire hazard?”
“Officer,” she said, “would you agree that that scaffolding out there is an invitation to burgle?”
“Junkies looking for an easy score,” the tall officer continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “They see they aren’t going to get what they’re after, they decide to trash the place.” When Jenny asked if he was planning to dust for fingerprints he just laughed.
Later, Mr. Feratovic brought up some fans to help pull the smoke out. He’d seen worse, he said. By morning, she wouldn’t even notice the smell. But in fact she would find that night that she couldn’t sleep with the windows open. The idea that someone had been here, treading her carpet, breathing her air … it rattled her. And there were hundreds of break-ins in the city every day, according to the shorter cop—what if these burglars should come back? Well, at least Richard’s manuscript was undamaged; when she’d folded out the hide-a-bed, it had been lying in the space underneath, where it must have fallen the night before.
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