by Alon Preiss
By January, test screenings for Promises, Promises were proving no more optimistic than those for Angry Whisper had been. Irina received a tepid response, many audience members claiming that her lines were incomprehensible. “They’re eliminating the Russian angle,” a Variety source reported, “and hiring an American actress to dub all her lines.” The studio adamantly denied this.
“From my understanding,” said a spokesman, “Irina has been working with a speech coach, and her English is just remarkable. She’s a tremendously talented young actress.” Faced with mounting leaks, in February a famous Hollywood movie star admitted re-dubbing every one of Irina’s lines. Promises, Promises went straight to video. The comedian’s career lay in ashes, he and Irina broke off their relationship, and he gave a prolific number of interviews to the press in which he blamed his ex-lover’s “attitude” for destroying his big-screen debut. Irina sat around for a few months, fielding increasingly insubstantial offers. Then, a million dollars in tow, she returned to Moscow, where either a more successful career or a wealthy retirement seemed to wait. “Too bad about your old girlfriend,” Katherine remarked over dinner with a wickedly loving smile, their daughter sitting at the table in her high chair. Emmett laughed and punched Katherine playfully in the shoulder, just a little bit too hard.
The next day, a lengthy, headline-grabbing search reached its culmination when Senator Solomon’s body was finally found, ripped limb from limb on a deserted stretch of highway in rural New York. Gunshot wound to the head, one leg blown completely off, as though by a land mine, mouth completely intact, smeared with red lipstick from a passionate kiss that had been inflicted, police reported, prior to his death. Based on the severe deterioration of the body, the coroner added, death had occurred much earlier, perhaps the very day he disappeared. The body had been stashed somewhere, probably in a garage, then ignominiously dumped by the side of the road, probably the night before it was found, according to the diagnosis of a highly respected maggot expert. “Perhaps,” the Times surmised, in a mournful yet critical editorial, “the murderer could not part with the body, so amused was he by the country’s ensuing obsession with the mystery,” a mystery that, it seemed, might never be solved; the man had no known enemies. I might not agree with his support for genocide, a well-known Cambodia expert told the papers, but he always kept me on my toes, and today I bid a worthy opponent adieu. “Even you must admit that it was a terrible thing, what happened to Stephen Solomon,” Katherine said, and Emmett replied, “Probably vengeance by the ghosts of all the third world children he’s murdered,” and he almost believed it, too. He had continued to complain that “financial impropriety” was too mild a transgression with which to charge the esteemed Senator, that Stephen Solomon deserved to be accused of a harsher crime and punished with a harsher sentence. Now perhaps he had been, from beyond the grave. “You act as though this makes you happy,” Katherine said, without much surprise. The swirling mist of darkness was gone from his life. “He was very nice at our wedding,” Katherine added, when Emmett remained silent.
Months earlier, when Daniel returned home from his trip to California, his wife awaited him in the airport. Tears in her eyes, she grabbed him and held him tightly. “What’s all this?” he asked, and she whispered, her mouth very close to his ear, “I had the feeling you would never come back.” Her tears dripped down her cheek and onto his suit. “Come on now,” he said, moved. “I’m here now. I’m back.” She didn’t let go, just held on to him, squeezing him close, running her fingers through his thinning hair in the airport with tourists and businessmen rushing by, flowing past them like an ocean. She wouldn’t budge. “There, Natalie,” Daniel whispered. “I’m home. Don’t worry. There’s no reason to cry.”
*
All the great movements of history have been made up of small moments, tiny, forgotten events that have somehow shaped the world without ever having been recorded, and great, epic battles that left thousands dead, but which are no longer remembered. For example, as Daniel rushed from Susan’s apartment, she whispered, “Please, just don’t go. Please stay.” Had Daniel heard this plea, he would not have left, he would have sworn never again to consider such a thing, and he would not have gone back to his wife; as a result, Natalie would have felt free, upon encountering Daniel’s cousin on the street, to invite Charlie to dinner that evening. Their rendezvous would have been so successful that Charlie would have moved to New York, leaving Joyce behind, frustrated at her refusal to break with Senator Solomon. Without Charlie’s support, Joyce would have lacked the courage to go to the press with her story, and the war in Cambodia would not have ended. So if Susan had simply spoken up a bit, loudly enough for Daniel to hear her, the war in Cambodia would have dragged on and on.
Had Emmett not thrown a coffee mug at a partner’s head, he would not have been fired; he would not have become a journalist and would not have gone to Turkey and would not have seen Chernyy Glaz; Irina would not have been discovered by Hollywood; the gangster would not have found Irina, and the two of them would not have assassinated Senator Solomon. As a result, Senator Solomon would have recovered from his little scandal in due time and eventually amassed enough political clout to push for aid to Burmese insurgents. Had Emmett not thrown a coffee mug at a partner’s head, many people in Burma would have died horribly in the war that Senator Solomon would have started; instead, thanks to Emmett’s mug-thrown tantrum, those people in Burma instead lived long and relatively okay lives, and they had children, who also lived relatively okay lives.
Also, had Emmett not thrown the coffee mug at the partner’s head, and had Senator Solomon thus remained in office, the very nice senator who was elected to replace Senator Solomon after Solomon’s murder would not even have run for office, and he would have spent his life in obscurity; he would not have had the opportunity to be the swing vote on so many things that would make American life much, much better; and so, America benefited in real and measurable ways, all because Emmett threw a coffee mug at a partner’s head.
On the other hand, where would you be had Jayavarman VII not defeated the Cham?
The rest of Emmett’s life began with Katherine’s death, which occurred some years before old age set in, ruining plans he had held since 1984. Emmett learned from her well-hidden diary that she did not trust him absolutely, that her jealousy had been endless, that she had been certain that one day he would leave her. At the sight of these words, repeated so resolutely, day-after-day, year-after-year, something died inside of him. All along, Katherine had known of his inherent faithlessness, as though his one act of unsuccessfully attempted adultery had been carried through time and space back to the very day of their wedding and had consequently consumed their entire marriage. After that, he could believe in nothing, and the days lost their meaning: he could not work, he could barely eat. He spent his days yearning for Katherine to return to him, as she had once promised, to climb through a wormhole with her pick-ax and her helmet. Joe sent him some money sometimes, and the devoted Paulette, a successful investor in Moscow, sent him a quarter of her salary every month.
A year after Daniel’s return from California, and a year in which he woke up screaming at least once a week into the darkness of a New York night, screaming for Susan, although his ever-careful unconscious prevented him from screaming her name, a small group of partners summoned Daniel to a large conference room where, smiling, they invited him to join the firm of Johnson & Tierney as a junior partner. Daniel tried to grin, but he froze. “Are you all right?” Carter asked him.
“S’funny,” Daniel said, tactlessly, not even thinking about his words. “I had so many plans for what I would do when you rejected me.”
Carter nodded. “You don’t have to accept, you know.”
“Of course I accept,” he said slowly. “You know, how could I not accept? Of course, I’m delighted. Thank you all very much.”
At home, Natalie said the same thing. “You can leave. We can sell our apartment, buy a big h
ouse out in the woods with two big sun-lit studios. You’re so talented, I’m sure ... well, even if you never sold a single painting again, you would be thinking, working things out .... You’ve saved a ton of shekels, and I make enough to keep us afloat.”
He shook his head. “I’ve already accepted,” he said. “And this is what I’ve been working for during all these years. I’ll make a million dollars a year, soon.” Daniel was not waiting for a wormhole to swoop down from the heavens and deposit him in some perfect universe. He was prepared to stay true to Natalie as his wife, to Susan as his love, and to oblivion and obscurity as his destiny. He became devoted to these three ideas, and his life became suddenly more simple. If he lost a bit of hope, he gained a peace of mind that he would not have traded for the long-ago passion that had once consumed him. Decades later, after the communications revolution sent the vestiges of America’s institutional elite to remote farmhouses, where they sat at their smart phones and their laptops composing clever retorts, their backs aching, their eyes bloodshot and their skin clammy white, and after grassy, park-like hills had grown from America’s urban rubble, after the local government of a water-logged New York city, broke for years, had all but given up the battle against the resurgence of ocean and Nature, Natalie and Daniel lay asleep in the fortress their apartment had become. Suddenly, flashlights roused Daniel from his tranquility, and he stared down the barrel of a gun. Four masked men pulled him from his bed as Natalie screamed and grabbed desperately at him. The police told her not to pay the ransom demanded, one million dollars. She obeyed, trusting their promises that letting the authorities work through the proper channels presented the best chance for Daniel’s rescue. A few days later, Daniel went free. Neither he nor Natalie would ever know that Susan, sitting alone in a big house by the ocean, had read of his travails and had contacted the kidnapers, ultimately paying them a half million dollars for Daniel’s release. How would Natalie have felt to learn that only the generosity of her husband’s long-ago lover had saved him from death, and that Natalie’s cautious and obedient conduct had nearly killed him? Respecting Natalie’s feelings, Susan never told anyone of this act of salvation. “What did you think about, when you were captured?” Natalie asked Daniel once. He replied: “All I wanted was to see you again.”
As for Susan, Daniel’s savior, as she sat by herself in her big house waiting for her husband to return, she thought about Daniel and about Joren, and their faces became blurred in her mind. How this could happen, she did not know. She loved them both, and now her love for Daniel could not be separated from her love for Joren. When she awoke with a start, walked to her window and stared out at the ocean, she called to them both.
*
The snow outside was covered with a coating of frozen rain. Daniel knew he shouldn’t brave it anymore, he could feel the cold seeping through his coat, into his pores, floating through his bloodstream. His boots cracked the ice, and he skidded for a moment. His arms flapped, and he regained his balance. Another old man laughed and jeered at him, crazy eyes flying about. Daniel ignored it all.
His elevator took him to the fifteenth floor, to his empty apartment. He felt a headache coming on. He felt sniffles. He opened the blinds and stared out at the ocean and the tall, metal buildings freezing the night sky. Glazed faces stared back at him. Fires burned on every corner. He stared into the dark sky, and his face reflected off the window pane. He was old, he was very old, and he could no longer remember exactly how old. That was a lie he still kept telling himself.
A half hour later he straightened his tie, took some aftershave out of his medicine cabinet and carefully dabbed on a conservative amount. His sense of smell was no longer keen. Then he sat down on his couch, dimmed the lights to hide his wrinkles and looked out again at the sea, to which he had retired at a respectable age to face infirmity and death.
After a while a woman appeared at the door, a diminutive figure all in white: white dress, white hair, white skin. Fragile, drained, pale eyes, looking him up and down.
“Thank God you’re here,” he said. “Susan.”
She smiled. By way of greeting: “Look how old we’ve gotten.”
He nodded. He didn’t stand. “You look beautiful, though. You look impossibly beautiful.”
“You too,” she said. Then she laughed. “Not really. About you, I mean.” She carefully walked to the couch, and she sat down slowly.
“If you’d like to stay for dinner, I’ll order some.”
They both ordered something mild and flavorless, provided by a restaurant two blocks away that catered to the town’s sizable population of senior citizens. They walked through swinging wooden doors to Daniel’s dining room and eased themselves into the elegant, cushioned chairs on either side of the table.
Daniel took a loud slurp of soup and caught a few drops with his napkin. “I slurp my soup now,” he said. “I am sorry that I slurp my soup. Very disgusting.”
“I heard about Natalie’s death,” she said. “Or I suspected that she had died. I thought of you, suddenly, on the day she passed away. I hadn’t thought of you in a very long time.” She shook her head. “No. That’s not true.”
“Natalie was very good to me,” Daniel said. “We lived out our old age fairly peacefully, considering everything. We were always happy to see that the other had survived the night.” Then: “Did you marry?”
Nodded. “For forty years. He died so long ago. He was wonderful in his own way. We talked. Held hands in a sort of nice way.” She vanished into her thoughts. “He kind of disintegrated, just sort of floated out into the night like dust. In the end, only his smile was left, like the Cheshire cat.”
Daniel was silent for a moment, then he said softly, “When I was younger, what was before my eyes was all there was. I was an empiricist. But now things work differently. One moment I’m here, the next moment, I don’t know, a nerve ending in my brain comes loose and I’m somewhere else, then I’m back again.” He reached across the table and touched her hand. “Susan,” he said softly, “I may have loved her first. But I’ve always loved you best.”
Her dry eyes showed the faintest trace of a tear.
Out on the beach, they shivered in the uncharacteristically cold night.
“You know the moment when I fell in love with you?” Susan said. “When you tied your tie instead of sticking it into your pocket.”
“When I vanish into myself I start to think – ” Daniel’s voice cracked. He felt her hand trembling in his. Then, slowly, each word purposeful and difficult: “Once, I think, I was on a busy avenue, and I saved you, I kept you from being run over by a taxi, and we both fell to the hard concrete. Once I was imprisoned, and I lay bleeding in a dark jail cell. When I’m not here in the apartment, I can almost taste the blood in my mouth, I can almost feel myself breathing the soot.” He paused. “And I can see your eyes, your eager young eyes peering in at me between the bars. And I can hear the key in the lock.” He held her hand more tightly. “Do you remember saving me? Do you remember my saving you?”
Now tears flowed freely down her cheeks. Susan’s whole face trembled and she nodded, slowly and surely.
Arm-in-arm they wandered along the shore, dressed in many layers to guard against the cold, as the lights of the city twinkled from the ocean depths. Voices screamed from windows, unintelligible threats and warnings. Somewhere hundreds of miles away, the last remains of old New York blazed on the horizon.
“I lost you in a crowd,” Daniel said. “A lifetime ago. I wish that I’d chased after you. I wish that I’d looked for you everywhere.”
“I wish that we’d had children together, Daniel,” she said. “Remember, when we talked about having children together?”
“I remember. We thought we were planning the future. We were really just telling stories. Nice stories, though.”
“What do you think our children would have been like?”
He turned and held her gently. She was a tiny, frail woman. He didn’t let go.
“Our children would have been wonderful,” he said. “I’m sorry we never knew them. I’m sorry they never existed.”
He asked her what she wanted to do, and she said, “Everything. Everything that we have time to do before we die,” in a loud whisper into his ear. “Hold me tighter.”
They held each other tightly, the black clouds of smog parted briefly, and for a short, passing moment, the city shone brightly with the light of the full moon surrounded by an exploding universe of stars.
THE END
of
A FLASH OF BLUE SKY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There is a lot of history in this book, and I’ve tried to get it right, including the description of Russia and the rest of the USSR in the 1980s and early 1990s. I thank those who helped, even those who just talked to me about their lives. The history of Cambodia is based on extensive research. The court cases in the book are based on the actual debates that were being batted about back then, as America began to take its first stabs at cleaning up the mess of decades. However, the EPA would not have been involved in the later stages of a genuine litigation, and the appellate decision that lifts Daniel’s career is pure fiction, as is any direct contact between any US politician and Pol Pot. My late 1980s admiration for the Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen, shines through on these pages. I think that in the specific struggle depicted in this book, he was the good guy. Later years have shown a different side of his character.
There is also a lot of history to this book. I spent the better part of a decade writing and researching this, and back in the late 1980s, my agent sent it out to every publisher he knew. Two editors expressed interest, but before we could ink the deal (if indeed a deal was to be inked), one lost his job, and the other moved to a new position handling non-fiction. I periodically took my masterpiece out of a box in my closet, updated it, scribbled little notes in the margins. And so it went, till Chickadee Prince saved it from total oblivion. The tome you hold in your hands is the result of three decades of work, the writing of a young man filled with energy and certain that he is about to conquer the literary world and of a middle-aged man filled with experience and some realism. To anyone chagrined by the young writer’s persistent reference to geriatric 35-year-olds, I have grown to share your pain. I really don’t know what to call the period covered in this book – roughly the final third of the century – so I have chosen to name it the “thirtover” years, which sounds as though it refers to the last third of a century that’s over. (It could also refer to a century that is only a “third over,” but that’s not what I’m going for. Anything could mean anything. Words are just words.) To make this idea more appropriate, back in Thomas Hardy’s day, “thirtover” meant perverse and cantankerous, which is a good way to describe the last gasp of the 20th century. Or the last gasp of any century, come to think of it. Or any given period in human history, of any length, I suppose. Humans are perverse and cantankerous, and that’s on a good day.