The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  “As for the cognitive issues—the reading and writing—it’s possible that those can be reversed. Given time and the proper treatment.”

  “And what would that—”

  From somewhere in the apartment came a rapid-fire clacking—like gunshots or tree branches snapping in a storm. The two men followed the sound into the dining room, where Michael sat before a typewriter, his gaze fixed on the wall and his fingers working madly at the keys. He was surrounded on all sides by chessboards. The table, the sideboard, even a few of the chairs were covered with them. On each board, a miniature skyline of royals and their courtiers fanned out in elaborate formations of attack and defense. Vanquished pawns, rooks, bishops, and knights littered the gaps between the boards. And with each fervent punch of the keys, the pieces on the nearest boards jumped.

  “Stop that!” Van Hooten shrieked. “Stop!”

  WHEN MICHAEL HAD set out with Francis that morning, he had no idea where they were going. Perhaps a return visit to Martin’s apartment? Another amble down the broad street of jewelers and churches? For the life of him, he could not figure out what they were doing in New York City. Had he played any part in planning this voyage? Had they come only to visit their brother? Did Francis have some new occupation that had posted him, in high style, to New York City? That last option seemed the least likely. Francis had been in prison—that much Michael remembered—but had he been released already? Was the pit in his memory so wide and so deep that it contained all of Francis’s prison time within it? As the cab navigated the traffic, the two of them sitting side by side, Michael was struck suddenly with an image of his brother’s profile in another automobile, at another time. Francis was at the wheel and the engine whined with exertion and beyond the open window lay rolling hills quilted in green and bordered on all sides by stacked-stone walls. Francis wore a blue suit and Michael was swathed in a cassock that went from his notched collar to his scuffed black shoes. Wind poured into the car—he felt it stiff against his face, rich with the smell of wet grass—and he was hooting in mad celebration. I’m free, that’s what he’d been thinking. I’m free!

  Whatever he was remembering, it was before… before… before the Noise, and the constant silence, and Yeats, and New York City. The moment in the car, racing across Ireland, was on the far side of the lost time. If he could only concentrate and connect this moment to what came before and what came after, he was sure that he could reassemble the shattered jigsaw of his memory.

  The taxicab came to a lurching halt in front of a tall building on a boulevard lined with other tall buildings. Francis took Michael’s arm in his and ushered his brother into the lobby, where they were met by the doorman. In his epaulets and high, gold-braided hat, he looked like a general stripped of his medals. Then: elevator, corridor, middle-aged man with wispy blond hair, handshake, library, his feet on an Oriental rug. All of it passed in that echoless silence that made him feel as if he were floating. He had never realized how much he counted on the sound of his own footsteps to make him feel grounded, substantial, alive.

  When he looked up from the carpet’s pattern of lotuses and twisted vines, he found Yeats leaning amiably against the wall in the corner of the room. The table next to the poet held all manner of polished medical devices: a stethoscope, a tiny mallet, syringes in four different sizes, a circular mirror attached to a leather strap. The blond-haired man—A doctor, Michael said to Yeats, finally!—peered at Michael from a variety of angles. The doctor’s mouth moved, Francis moved his lips in reply, and so it went.

  “What are they saying?” Michael asked.

  “They’re talking about people you haven’t met.”

  “Shouldn’t they be talking about me?”

  Yeats shrugged. Noncommittal.

  “Does he know what’s wrong with me?”

  Again, Yeats shrugged.

  “Worthless,” Michael said.

  “Are you referring to me or to the doctor?”

  Michael shrugged.

  Yeats pursed his lips, a sour-apple expression that Michael had come to know too well. When the poet was displeased, he made no effort to hide his feelings. He removed his glasses and while buffing them with a handkerchief, he wandered out of the room.

  “Now where are you going?” Michael said. He followed Yeats out of the library and into the parlor, a musty, tomblike space occupied by brocade furniture tricked out with bronze nail heads and gold cord. The walls were hung with gilt-framed portraits of stern, shaggy-cheeked men, and women bound up in wimples and forbearance. Beneath the portraits, Oriental rugs abounded. The room was equal parts Ali Baba and Oliver Cromwell. The dining room was decorated to a similar standard. Its claw-foot table could seat six, the gloomy breakfront displayed a family fortune in silver platters, and on the walls were more lace collars and blanched faces. But it was a dining room in name only: a man would be hard-pressed to find space among the chessboards for his morning tea and toast.

  A typewriter crouched at one end of the table, a neat sheaf of carbons next to it. Michael had little interest in chess, but he was drawn to the typewriter. It was similar to the model he had used at St. Columbanus to compose his coded letters to his brothers. He sat and tapped his fingers against the keys, but so faintly that the levers lay idle. He closed his eyes and in his head, he recited words, then sentences, and let his fingers find the letters. Muscle memory. He could feel it.

  Opening his eyes, he saw Yeats with one hand poised above a white queen. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t touch that.”

  “It’ll be checkmate,” Yeats said. “Or did you have another move in mind?”

  “It’s not your game,” Michael said.

  “Go back to your typing.”

  Michael again scrutinized the machine with its bristling ranks of keys. Isolated as they were, one letter to each black button, he could make sense of them. The letters seemed to pulse and flex, to come apart at the corners, but then to pull themselves back into shape. Here was an E, there a D, lower down an N. Once combined into words, the letters ceased to make sense—on restaurant menus and shop signs, they slithered and separated, forming new glyphs he could not decipher. But he thought again of that feeling of muscle memory. If he could find the G, then he would array the fingertips of his left hand to one side of it and his right would find its place two keys over. Brother Bartholomew, who had run the office at St. Columbanus, would be proud of how easily Michael fit his hands to the task. He deplored the way that educated men used their fingers to chicken-peck the keys into submission, and would not abide typists who stutter-stepped through their work. Michael drew one sheet from the stack next to the typewriter and wound it into the cylinder. Slowly at first, and then with speed and authority, he began to type.

  michal dempsey

  michael dempsey

  michasel dempsey

  Yeats looked up from another chessboard. “How am I supposed to concentrate with that pounding? And the bell is quite distracting.”

  “Come over here,” Michael said. “I want you to see this.”

  “I know what a typewriter looks like. George had one just like it.” Yeats again reached for a chess piece—a bishop this time—before yanking back his hand.

  “You need to tell me what I’ve typed. I might have found a way out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Of myself.”

  Yeats slowly came around the table, his limp more noticeable than before.

  “Now watch this.” Michael was feeling cocky and took a chance with the Shift key.

  Willliam butter Yeast

  William Butler Yeates

  William Butler Yeats is a stodgy old git

  “What do you see?”

  “Names, and then a poor attempt at literary criticism. And it looks like we have company.”

  As Francis and the doctor entered the room, Michael locked down the Shift key and typed in a mad rush.

  WHAT HAPPENED TOME?

  WHAT AAPPEED TO ME

  WHAT H
APPENEND TO ME?

  WHAT HAPPENED T

  Van Hooten darted across the room and stilled Michael’s hands on the keys. “Oh, look what you’ve done!”

  Michael freed his hands and beckoned Francis to come to him, but Francis smirked and gave a slight shake of the head. Francis had diagnosed this doctor as a nutter and was ready to be on his way. He made a Let’s go motion with his thumb. Michael stood reluctantly and shuffled to join his brother.

  “You look as if you’ve got your work cut out for you here,” Francis said. “And we really must be going.”

  Van Hooten looked from his chessboards to the brothers. This was a bad ending to the examination, and he was suddenly nervous about what his guest might say to the Binghams. Would he say the doctor had treated him rudely? Or that he had been unable to offer a proper diagnosis? Van Hooten couldn’t allow that to happen. It could mean the end of everything.

  “Please be sure to give my regards to the Binghams,” Van Hooten said. “And if there’s anything else I can do for you—anything at all—please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “I’ll be seeing them on Saturday at the fair,” Francis said, “and I’d be most happy to report any progress you’ve made on my brother’s case.” There had been talk during the examination of specialists—men who studied the ears, the throat, the brain—who could be consulted on Michael’s behalf. Francis wanted Van Hooten to know that he expected this information posthaste.

  “The fair?” Van Hooten said.

  “Yes. I’m to accompany them to meet Their Royal Majesties.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Francis wondered whether he should have said Royal Highnesses instead. He needed to figure out his formal modes of address before he stumbled into another Earl of Glamis situation.

  “Of course,” Van Hooten said. “All of the best families are meeting the royals. Isn’t that just what the Times reported.” It was difficult to tell whether Van Hooten was speaking to himself or to Francis. With each line, the doctor recognized, his voice was growing fainter, as if it had turned inward. Spending so much time alone had made it difficult for him to tell the difference between talking aloud and talking in his head. Often he caught himself midthought and wondered, Did I just say that? Or merely think it?

  Right now, all of Van Hooten’s thoughts were focused on Saturday, and the few hours of freedom he would enjoy. The papers had published an exhaustive schedule of all the events around the royal visit; surely he could expect the phone to stay silent for hours. He could go out for lunch, or walk in the park. He could go to a museum. How he longed to wander the galleries of the Metropolitan, to see the bright colors of Titian and Raphael. He had enough dour Flemish shadows right here at home; he wanted color and sunshine, beatific faces that had never known the depredations of time.

  “Doctor,” Francis said, and then again, louder. Van Hooten looked as if he’d been shaken from a dream. “You spoke about proper treatment for my brother. Where could such treatment be found?”

  Van Hooten stumbled through a list of names, only to realize that it had been years since he had been in contact with anyone in his profession. How many of the doctors he once knew had retired or moved to other hospitals, other cities? With great effort, he tried to put aside the heady prospect of a few hours’ furlough on Saturday—what about a musical? He had read the reviews of every show on Broadway in the past decade—and promised Francis that he would make calls, provide references, and pave the way for them. “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said as the brothers exited his apartment. “And do enjoy yourself on Saturday. It promises to be a great day for your country and for ours—and just a lovely day all around.”

  GRAMERCY PARK

  GAVIGAN HAD BEEN TROUBLED by strange dreams. He woke in a sweat, stiff-limbed and sore-headed, the sheets in a pasty tangle. Firing up his engine was difficult on the best of days, but on mornings like this he felt just how much this life had cost him. He moved like a man waist-deep in a river whose current was against him. Every day his lungs filled with a vile yellow sludge that could find release only through strenuous fits of coughing. It was a dog’s life, but it was life and that was better than the alternative.

  He sat, with no small effort, and tried to bring focus to the particulars of the dream. A waste of time. His dreams always dissolved in the light, leaving an aftertaste that could sour his mood for hours to come. In last night’s shadow play, he had been double-crossed. He didn’t remember how or by whom—not that it mattered. He wasn’t some loon who believed that dreams could give him the straight dope on his waking life, but still, that sense of betrayal clung to him as he extracted himself from the sheets. Nothing rankled Gavigan like disloyalty, and to wake with thoughts of a Judas kiss—that was a hell of a way to start a Tuesday.

  At this hour the house should have been ticking like a Swiss watch, steady and almost imperceptible. Helen would be making the porridge and putting the kettle on to boil. In another minute Jamie would ascend the carpet-wrapped stairs to tap at the door with an Anything I can do for ye, Mr. Gavigan? That Jamie was a queer one: he had a sixth sense that alerted him the moment Gavigan opened his eyes. It was never the knock at the door that woke Gavigan, but as soon as he was awake, Jamie was there; he never kept his boss waiting. He was steady, that one. A soldier to the end.

  But this morning it wasn’t the soft knock that he heard first, it was Jamie’s voice raised and then another, buffeting it: Tommy Cronin’s. If Tommy was downstairs, there could be only one reason. And coming so early in the day was proof positive that Tommy was eager to get back to that farm of his, with his wide-hipped country wife and that plump baby he’d put in her. Gavigan had had a good laugh about that: Tommy Cronin, a man of the earth, on that tumbledown homestead out in the boonies. Gavigan couldn’t think of two nights in a row in his whole life that he’d spent outside the city. He was Manhattan to the bone: born and battle-bred in Five Points, he’d made his name in Hell’s Kitchen and come to roost at this spot in Gramercy Park.

  Half the reason he’d moved here was that people like John Gavigan weren’t supposed to live in Gramercy Park. It was reserved for the posh set: fancy-pantses and silver-spooners, book readers and theatergoers. Dutch Protestants, English Protestants, people so rich they had no need for God. That crowd had put up a statue in the park of an actor whose own brother had shot Lincoln. (That was a notion Gavigan could get behind: To hell with Lincoln, who’d made the Irish fight to free the colored. What had Lincoln ever done for New York, anyway?) Living on the edge of the park entitled Gavigan to a key that unlocked the wrought-iron gate—this was no public park—but he hadn’t once set foot inside it. What did he care about flowers? All that mattered to him was that he could. Back in the old days, Tommy had been the one who slipped in and out of the park. He thought he was sly about it, but Gavigan knew. Thinking back on it, he should have seen it as a sign of things to come. It disappointed Gavigan that the man could have settled for so little; that he had abandoned his post to grub in the dirt with a woman who spooked when a stranger appeared at her door.

  The commotion downstairs grew louder. Gavigan hooked a finger into the dressing gown that hung from his bedpost and struggled his arms into it. At the top of the stairs, his hand resting on the banister, he cleared his throat of the dreck that was already creeping into his lungs. A single hacking cough was enough to call a truce to whatever Tommy and Jamie were battling over.

  “Jamie,” he said. “Is that Tommy Cronin down there?”

  “It is, Mr. Gavigan.” Never a yes or a no from an Irishman—It is; it isn’t. No word for “yes” in the mother tongue; no word for “no,” either.

  “Has he found Dempsey?”

  “He claims that he has.”

  “Did he bring him here?”

  “He did not, sir.”

  Gavigan coughed, the sound of something thick and wet being torn in half. “Show him to the study. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  THE STUDY LOOKED the same as it had
in Cronin’s days with Gavigan, the same as it had looked for decades before Cronin set foot in America. It was an odd name for the room; study suggested a bookish nook where a man went to ponder questions of science or philosophy. Meaning-of-life-type questions, angels on the head of a pin. But the only studying that went on in this room was of a more personal nature. Gavigan would sit at his big oak desk staring into the face of the man opposite him, a man in a wingback chair who had come seeking something. Gavigan would study this man’s face for signs of weakness, for the soft spots that would allow him to push this man in the direction that Gavigan needed him to go. A man might have come seeking a favor, money, or a promise, but Gavigan was always looking into the future, toward the favor returned, the payback, the other side of the bargain, and Gavigan always got back more than he gave. Most men knew this, and whatever relief they felt for having their wish granted was weighed against the leaden certainty that a day of reckoning would arrive. On the rare occasion that a man left that room thinking he’d gotten the better end of the deal, that was a sure sign of his own stupidity, and a guarantee that Gavigan would be rewarded ten times over.

  The desk, a stout plateau of dark wood, enforced a distance between Gavigan and whoever sat on the other side. It was the same reason medieval lords had cleared the land around their castles: to emphasize the prominence of those high walls and to give those inside plenty of time to respond to any barbarous incursions. The room itself was festooned with trophies and keepsakes from Gavigan’s eighty years. Along the mantel stretched a rust-furred cutlass of Civil War vintage, Gavigan’s weapon of choice when he’d been a young brawler battling his way up the ranks of the Five Points gangs. A shelf held a replica of the death mask of Robert Emmet, presented to him as a gift by the New York chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians for “diligent support of the cause of the betterment of the Irish people, at home and abroad.” Near it hung an original pressing of the Easter Proclamation, slightly singed along one edge. On another wall was a framed and faded handbill advertising a music-hall performance by a Miss Daphne LaVerne (née Dorothea Gianopolis), the only, and unrequited, love of a much younger Gavigan. Behind the vast desk, daubed in muddy hues of brown, sage, and ocher, peered out a portrait of Gavigan’s mother. She had refused to sit for the artist—Who am I to put on such airs?—and so the rendering was based on a single meeting between the painter and Meem Gavigan, dead now these twenty years. If the portrait didn’t look much like her, it managed nevertheless to capture her defiant heart, her scorching humility.