by Steve Tesich
“I was speeding,” Saul said through broken teeth. “I’m positive that I was.”
Officer Kovalev looked up from the sketch in his lap and bestowed upon Saul a long, lingering look. Those eyes spoke of many things. Of his glory days as a high school hero. Of the disappointment that the glory days had been so short-lived and led nowhere. Of the gradual diminution of his athletic prowess. Of his attempt to make the best of things in his current occupation. But his gaze also informed Saul that this case was closed, that the blame, during Saul’s comatose days, had been assigned and that Saul’s opinion that he had been speeding was now neither here nor there.
Saul began to insist on his guilt, but reducing his guilt to a mere case of speeding seemed even more loathsome than being declared innocent of the crime.
His whole life had been a life of crime. To insist now that his responsibility was limited to exceeding the speed limit had the corrupt sound of plea bargaining. He would not stoop that low.
The question of speeding vanished in the silence between them.
The instant death of the couple in the other car caused a frightening question to be born in his mind during that silence.
“You said,” he stammered, “that they were killed instantly.”
“Yes. Both of them.”
“The couple in the Oldsmobile?”
“That’s correct.”
“And what about …” He could not bring himself to pronounce their names. “In my car. The couple in the car I was driving?”
“Same thing.”
“Instantly?”
“Yes.”
“Both of them.”
“Yes.”
They sat there in the hospital lounge on the third floor, both dressed in uniforms, the police officer in his blues and Saul in his official hospital-issue green. Both wore name tags. The officer had his on his chest. Saul wore a plastic ID around his wrist.
He didn’t know how to phrase the next question properly. It seemed obligatory that even questions should wear proper uniforms.
“Concerning the current status, I mean, as far as the remains of the deceased are …”
The officer understood and appreciated the form in which the question was put and took it from there.
Consulting a steno notebook (with a list of often misspelled words on the back cover), Officer Kovalev described the chain of events that had brought the mothers of the deceased to Pittsburgh and the manner in which the remains of the deceased had been taken to their final destinations.
All this was told to Saul in Officer Kovalev’s polite and neutral police prose, a genre of communication that was beginning to grow on Saul the longer he sat in the hospital lounge.
They had found Billy’s driver’s license in his wallet, giving his home address. They got the telephone number for that address from the telephone company. Dianah answered the phone. There were no details about her response to the news. She flew out to Pittsburgh in order to identify the body at the morgue and to claim the remains as her own.
It took longer to notify Leila’s mother. The only items of identification on Leila’s person were a social security card and a card of a member in good standing of the Screen Actors’ Guild.
Both of these, when traced, led to an address in Venice where the telephone recording of the deceased was the only reply in their repeated attempts at trying her number.
A gentleman from the film industry, Mr. Jay Cromwell, showing up at the police station after he heard of the accident, offered his assistance. Through his intercession and several calls to Los Angeles, he was able to determine that Leila’s birthplace was Charleston, South Carolina, in which city Leila’s mother still resided. When the prospect of travel to Pittsburgh on such short notice and for such a purpose proved both emotionally and financially too taxing for her, Mr. Cromwell interceded again and chartered not only a private plane to fly her out but a driver and a car to take her to the airport. He also made all the arrangements for the transport of Leila’s remains back to Charleston. Billy’s remains were flown back by Dianah.
The status of the personal belongings left in the hotel was this. Billy’s were signed for and taken by Dianah. His own and Leila’s things were still in storage at the Four Seasons Hotel, where they could be picked up at his convenience.
No, Officer Kovalev did not know anything about the nature of the funeral arrangements of either Billy or Leila.
Was there anything else he could tell him? Any other questions?
No, Saul shook his head. But he wished he could keep the young officer as a permanent companion who would render into neutral police prose the remainder of his life.
As soon as Officer Kovalev left, Saul’s capacity to focus departed as well. A dull, incoherent, but widespread pain engulfed him. A pain without a center or precedence or a proper person to feel it.
He meant to get up, to leave this hospital lounge, and return to his room, but he didn’t know as who.
So he sat there, in his Naugahyde-upholstered chair, with his hands in his lap, as if waiting for somebody. All eight of his fingers and both thumbs were capped with white bandages down to the knuckle. He remembered a movie of a criminal who had tried to burn off his fingerprints with acid and grow new ones so that he could elude the FBI and start a new life. Unfortunately the experiment didn’t work. After much pain, the fingerprints regenerated themselves into the exact same pattern as before.
Saul now knew what that felt like. The old was intolerable and all hope for the new was gone.
8
His telephone had been disconnected while he had been in the coma. There were many messages for him taken by the hospital switchboard. He didn’t want any of them. He took them but didn’t read them. Nor did he want his telephone to be made operational. There was no one he wanted to call, nor was there anybody he wanted to call him.
9
On his last Sunday in the hospital a priest appeared in his room, just as he was waking up from another dreamless sleep. The priest, another man in uniform, was tall and thin with thinning hair. He was almost a one-man exemplar of thinning, he seemed to be thinning as he stood there, his voice thinning as he spoke and offered Saul the services of a nondenominational chapel on the fifth floor. The service would start in forty-five minutes and then again at eleven fifteen.
“Sometimes,” the priest said, “it helps to turn to God in times of woe.”
“God,” as pronounced by the priest, sounded so thin and insubstantial that Saul agreed to come to the early service.
He took the elevator to the fifth floor and followed the signs to the chapel. It was a small chapel with benches on which sat people in pajamas and bathrobes, all facing the same way, as they would in a movie theater or a concert.
Something about this image struck him as wrong and self-deceiving.
The whole notion of turning to God struck him as absurd. If there was a God, then surely you were surrounded by Him and couldn’t avoid turning to Him even if you tried. If there was no God, then turning in some agreed-upon direction in order to find him was a gesture of such futility that he was better off without it.
So he took the elevator back to the third floor.
10
Two days later, after undergoing some final tests in regard to the sequence and the pattern of his brainwaves, he was pronounced fit to resume his normal life and released from the hospital.
His room was by now half filled with flowers sent by secretaries of people he knew in the movie business.
Before checking out, he made the necessary arrangements for the hospital bills he had incurred. No, he told the woman in charge of these things, he had no insurance. He had no health insurance of any kind. But his accountant would take care of it. The nonexorbitance of the hospital bill disappointed him. He would have preferred something in the astronomic range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. His need to pay for what had transpired would not be easily satisfied.
He took a cab to the Four Seasons Hotel.
He had spent Thanksgiving in a coma and now Christmas decorations festooned the business district and he heard the sound of Christmas carols. He gave the cab driver a tip so preposterous that there was something underhanded and ugly about the generosity of the donor which the driver perceived and which thus robbed him of whatever joy he might have had in getting such a tip.
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” the driver parroted back Saul’s greeting, but it was strictly pro forma and without even a hint of sincerity.
At the front desk of the hotel, Saul settled his account for the illfated luxury suite in which he and Leila had spent one night. The bill for Billy’s room had apparently been paid by Dianah.
A bellboy brought him his garment bag and Leila’s suitcase and he, also, was made uneasy by the tip he received from Saul.
Despite the bandages on his fingers, Saul insisted on carrying the bags out of the hotel himself. The pain he inflicted upon himself by doing so was all too slight for his appetite for pain.
Another cab to the airport.
He still had his and Leila’s return tickets to New York, but the date of that return had come and gone. His ticket was still valid, but its validity was a joke compared to everything else that had perished and expired. Having no reservation, he bought a ticket on the next available flight to New York City.
It would be a considerable wait, he was told.
Carrying his bags like a traveling salesman defeated by the size of his territory, he went to the gate and sat down to wait.
Flights arrived. Those waiting greeted those disembarking. Other flights took off. New travelers arrived to wait where he was waiting and then they too got up and left and were replaced by others.
From time to time, he regarded Leila’s suitcase like some crazed terrorist who knew there was a bomb inside of it.
He didn’t know what to do with it. With that dress. That wedding gown. That once-in-a-lifetime dress meant for the premiere of her one and only film.
Once again and for the last time the film had rolled on without her.
And Billy.
As on a tape loop, a single thought kept going around and around in his mind. A son separated from his mother at birth and then separated again from her, their remains flown to different destinations after their deaths.
He, Saul, had brought them together for a brief period of time.
For what?
What had he done, what had he done, by trying to play God?
His pain was so huge, he couldn’t get at it to feel it. All he could feel was a profound depression at his inability to rise to the occasion and be savaged by the pain. Be torn to shreds.
When his plane began to board, he took the name tags off his garment bag and Leila’s suitcase and dropped them into a trash container. Then, after making sure that there was nothing in either piece of baggage to identify its owners, he left the bags where they were and boarded the plane with nothing in his hands except a boarding pass and the bandages on his fingers.
The plane took off on time, shortly before sunset, and in making a sweeping turn it dipped its wing to Saul’s side. With his forehead pressed against the window, Saul beheld the confluence of the three rivers below. Nor was he spared the memory of the metaphorical meaning he had assigned to that confluence in happier times.
All gone.
For so long, it seemed, and with such high hopes, he had waited for the trip to Pittsburgh and the happy ending he had conceived.
And now?
Now he felt like some doomed, hubristic voyager who had endeavored to journey through time and space so that he could behold his own future. Defying the odds and the gods, he had set his course for nothing less than that. The price for his arrogance was high. His spacecraft collided with his future and in the resulting explosion his future was destroyed and everyone on board perished except for himself. He alone was rescued and was now being flown back to earth, where he would have to live out his days in the knowledge that he had no future.
CHAPTER TWO
1
SOME FAMILIES JUST keep on growing in wealth and power, as if each successive generation is genetically driven to outdo the previous ones. Other families begin well, gather momentum, seem destined for greatness, only suddenly and inexplicably to lose their vitality and sink back into mediocrity.
Individuals are subject to the same unpredictable laws of rise and fall.
In the beginning, the story lines of individuals are almost always epic in nature, beginning with the drama of birth. What could be more epic than that?
The epic of growing takes it from there. The sense of progress and overcoming challenges is a daily thing when the hero is a toddler. The hero walks. The hero talks. There is much applause and cheering from his parents to convince even the most modest toddler that he’s bound for some glorious destiny.
The oral tradition of recapitulating every deed the young hero performs is not lost on him. A day spent saying a few barely coherent words and taking a dozen or so stumbling steps on his own takes on the aura of heroic accomplishment. He hears his name mentioned over and over again. His illnesses are catastrophic. His recoveries, festivals of rejoicing.
To the hero, to the toddler, to the child, he is not just a child. He is made to feel like a redeemer come to rescue the kingdom of the household from certain destruction. Just by being born, he has accomplished much and is made to feel like the child of whom it was said, “And unto us a child is born.”
The epic continues. The epic of the young body growing. The mind expanding. The metamorphosis of both.
Somewhere along the way, he develops his own internal narrator, the I of the hero, the storyteller who speaks in his name. The narration of this personal story line almost always favors the epic genre as the only one suitable for the job.
The I of the hero proclaims, “I am,” “I like,” “I don’t like.”
Certain epic phrases are used to connect disparate episodes into a coherent story line. Phrases such as “And then I …” or “And after that I …”
The epic of puberty. The epic of first love. Of sexual initiation.
Somewhere along the way, the cheering that attended his every act tapers off.
But that’s all right.
The epic of leaving home picks up the story line just in time and takes it to a new and higher level. Oh, the epic of leaving home. What could be more epic than going off to college in a car of one’s own with the hero at the wheel, captain, navigator, and crew all in one. The car radio is playing, but the real music the hero hears is the music of the first-person narrator, the I inside his mind, the voice that says, “And then I …” or “After that I …”
There is a sense of progress again as the hero works his way up through the ranks from freshman to sophomore and so on. He is asked to join a Greek fraternity. Not the undisputed number one fraternity he wanted to join, but it’s one that’s right up there with the rest. He is disappointed, to be sure, but he thinks of his disappointment as a learning experience and his accommodation to reality as something that sharpens his skills of survival. In no time at all, his disappointment is transformed into the “best thing that could have happened to me.”
“It taught me that I …”
“After that I never again …”
The epic of going home for the holidays.
How small the kingdom of the household now seems to him. Claustrophobic, almost. How much taller he is than his father. He takes to draping his arm around his father’s narrow shoulders and assuming classical poses in doing so.
The growing distance between the hero and his parents only confirms to him that he is growing himself, branching out, heading forth, and that they’re not.
But they are still, after all, his parents. He still loves them and is moved profoundly by his capacity to love them.
And then he’s off again, back to the campus.
Car radio playing.
But the song that’s being sung is a song of himself.
/> “And then I …”
He has no idea where his story line is going, but what epic hero ever did? Destiny awaits.
The girl he falls in love with on the campus, madly in love, from the number one Greek sorority, is unfortunately in love with someone else and nothing the hero does seems to convince her that she’s in love with an out-and-out barbarian. An animal. A dumb jock. A human genital. The hero suffers much over this unrequited love, but not for long, because he has developed a mechanism for dealing with such episodes. In no time it becomes “the best thing that could have happened to me.”
There are not only many fish in the sea but there are many seas as well, and so he’s off again on yet another voyage.
Away from that provincial Midwest campus to the city of the rising sun. New York City. Grad school. The first apartment of his very own. What could be more epic than that?
New York City, he discovers, is full of epic heroes like himself. Their numbers suggest a swollen army of heroes gathering there for some epic campaign against the established order.
There is a sense of progress again, but not as exhilarating as before. From master’s degree to PhD dissertation in three years. He becomes a doctor without a practice. In the meantime he has fallen in love with a girl who has also fallen in love with him. He is thrilled by both aspects of this love affair, but more so by the latter than the former.
For reasons that he can’t quite explain, his story line starts to lose its epic quality. There is a sense that he has arrived somewhere without having reached any destination in particular. The comfort of arrival, however, feels pleasant. He thinks of it as temporary. Just a little pause before he sails away again in pursuit of his destiny.
The epic story line of his life remains in his mind. It’s vivid for a while. Then it starts to fade. First from reality and then from memory.