by Norman Lock
Yes, I was content to be in Santa Monica with Jameson for as long as we were together. Which was long enough for happiness, but not so long as to see happiness become like the porridge set before me with a thump on the table by Miss Watson as a punishment, the spoon tasting like tarnish, stiff in the cold gray mound. What made me happy was the perfect ordinariness of our years together. Days passed, one merging without comment into the next. She made her picture books. The Boy in His Winter won a Caldecott Medal. I wrote articles for a yachting magazine. My style was praised. I rode in boats, but my voyages by river or by sea were finished. We took our meals together. We watched television or read. We made love when desire summoned us. We rested, slept, and submitted to our separate dreaming on the black rivers of sleep, which never will converge. Returning, we kept those figments to ourselves, like two guilty persons surprised by what is either too precious or too disturbing to share.
Were we ever bored?
Many times. Boredom is an aspect of time, impossible to escape. (I was never bored during that aeon on the raft with Jim, because we traveled outside time, or beyond it.)
Did Jameson love me?
Who can say what another person thinks; how he or she loves or hates? Dragons nesting on their golden hoard, we guard our deepest feelings—tender or base—like a wound that secretly thrills. That is, if we are aware of them; I think the most important lie too deep for sounding. But yes, I suppose Jameson did love me. She behaved toward me like a woman who loves someone over the course of years, constantly and inconstantly. I read her feelings, even those hidden from herself, the way a pilot does a river’s bars and shoals. She was sometimes warm and at other times cool as our affection waxed and waned and waxed again. So yes, all in all, Jameson loved me, and we endured.
I remember little of our nearly twenty years—shy of twenty by a little less than two. Our marriage was like a journey down an unknown river so uncommonly wide you can’t see the shore. Afterward, you recall water, moving fast or slow, not much else. Let’s see. I remember black umbrellas tipping rain when the mourners leaned to look at Jameson’s father lowered into the raw, blackish earth. That was the beginning. And that was at the end, also—only it was Jameson’s turn to disappear and mine to watch alone. My umbrella was furled; the rain had only threatened; the earth was not so black, but raw notwithstanding. But those dismal parentheses enclosed a life, which passed, for beings like us, with the speed and terrible suddenness of time.
I’ll tell you something else I remember: a picture. For years and years while I was with Jameson, I had not thought of Jim or Tom Sawyer. Or if I did, they seemed figures in a childish dream. And then on an afternoon when I was going through her things—handling them as if they carried, like a light-sensitive emulsion, the memory of her face—I came across a book of Civil War photographs made by Brady, Gardner, Gibson, O’Sullivan, and the rest. And among those taken at Vicksburg, was one of Jim in front of a white tent, fixed forever in time and space. And the black and formless shape (a smudge of shadow) caught in the tent flaps’ narrow darkness must be Huck. Must be I. I tell you it has to be! I recalled how the photographer had shooed me inside, to shuffle nervously among dead men stacked in waiting for the cart. The photographer had wanted only Jim for his wet-plate negative. He may have chosen him for no other reason than the picturesque effect of a black man posed against a white tent. But by an accident of color and falling light, Jim’s existence had been confirmed, while Huck’s—mine—had not. The picture unnerved by recalling me to the long-vanished past while, at the same time, it caused me to doubt it. In panic, I came near to forsaking Albert Barthelemy for Huckleberry Finn!
I stayed in the apartment where Jameson and I had lived, with its view of the Pacific Ocean, which in Huck’s time had been America’s manifest destiny. (Because the nation’s impressionable years coincided with my own, its destiny may well be mine. If this is true, I’ve spent 240-odd years trying to evade it.) You may think me like the starling, which appropriates the home laboriously carved from a dead tree by the industrious woodpecker. But I was jealous of the place where she’d lived. She lingered yet in the curtains, the wardrobe, the drawers, in the spoon she used to stir her tea. Even now, so very many years later, I can hear its pleasant clatter against the bone of china cup and saucer blooming with mauve roses.
So I stayed on, writing boat reviews and collecting, as her assignee, royalties from her picture books, which did well, especially “ours”; I mean The Boy in His Winter, whom I was fast becoming. Like a loose tooth we wiggle in the gum—half in fear of pain, half for the pleasure it incites—I would read it during days of nostalgia or self-pity. It’s gone, that book; I don’t know where I lost it. I wonder if it’s in print anymore. I still have Jameson’s book about the giraffe. Remember, I recited the first page. The last went like this: “I see a giraffe, standing at the edge of the world. On one side is the night. But he is not looking at the darkness. He faces the light that is spilling over the earth’s shining edge. See how he is standing in it?” Mother and Father looked. And they saw Rupert. They saw him wading in a flood of golden sunshine as the sun began to rise. I like to think it was Albert who was looking at Rupert, whose name might as well have been Jim. Do you know I’d forgotten what Jim looked like? If it weren’t for the photo of him at Vicksburg, he would have vanished forever. My past had haunted me and then, what’s worse, it deserted me.
I tried once to write a book of my own: a time-travel novel, of all things. But I couldn’t imagine a machine to shuttle between the tenses as gorgeously as Wells’s had. So I gave it up and, turning seventy, stopped writing for the magazine and yielded entirely to stillness. I could no longer afford the apartment with its view of the ocean, and found a cheaper one in town, on Euclid Street near Fourteenth. I smiled to think what Jim and Tom would say if they knew I’d arrived, at last, in Mexico, even if it was only “Little.” I frittered away time, happy to squander that element which had figured even more than water in my life and its story.
I dawdled in the streets of Little Mexico, drinking cervezas or Mexican sodas on the corners with people whose faces looked as if they’d been shaped from red clay and earth. I loved them, though I suspect they merely humored me. They called me Señor Alberto, and the young women flirted because they found me comical. I did so myself. There were no rivers left for me, and I came no nearer to the ocean than the end of Santa Monica Pier, which I visited at night to be still amid a moving crowd, listening to tender words or unkind ones, or to the popular music of the time as I had, in an earlier age, to the songs of Stephen Foster or the shameful tunes of minstrelsy. I stood on the end of the pier, like Rupert at the edge of the world, and watched fishermen dream of once more lifting into the gaudy light Pacific mackerel, bonito, halibut, and thornbacks—banished sadly and forever from the animal kingdom. I never held a rod again, or a woman either, except, in farce, a brazen señorita in the Euclid Street Laundromat.
I became a tourist on the Internet. I would sit at my computer, poring over satellite maps of—what else? Rivers! In my room in Little Mexico, I went over every stretch of fresh or brackish water I had known, beginning with the Mississippi and ending on the Rhine. Next, I sought out rivers I did not, and would not, ever know: the Nile, Orinoco, Volga, Zambezi, ancient Tigris, golden Mekong, labyrinthine Amazon. There are many rivers, and I spent months and years on them, seeing them as roving satellites must and—at the limit of magnification—as I would have, standing on their heights. My delight was to edge up, by degrees, until—suddenly—the river revealed its vessels to me: stolid tugs on the Hudson, coal barges on the Danube, oil tankers on the Jordan, dhows leaving the Indus for the Indian Ocean, junks tacking on the Perfume River, fragrant with fallen blossoms, past the tombs of the Nguyễn emperors.
Hunting for rivers, I happened on a map site called Minkowski—.org or .net—I don’t remember which, and it doesn’t matter, because it proved to be a phantom of the Internet: there one day and gone the next. I used it
to look at the Mississippi at Hannibal and—magnifying the river—the town came into view as it had been in the past. My past. I saw Hannibal as it had been in 1835! Muff Potter’s shack and Pap’s squatting on the mud, Marie Laveau’s place in the pine woods, houses belonging to Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, Aunt Polly, Judge Thatcher, the Phelpses, and the Wilkses, the jailhouse, circulating library, church, schoolhouse, the granite works and the sawmill, the square with the granite monument to the War of Independence, which Tom and I had desecrated with broken eggs the night before Halloween—my last in town.
You say you don’t believe it?
Haven’t you learned by now how fantastic a business it is to be alive? Haven’t I told you even more wonderful and strange things than this?
Restless, I walked past Euclid Park, down Colorado to Ocean Avenue and the pier. I stood at its end, looking out to sea, at the lights trembling in the darkness. I remembered a vanished night on the Hooghly River when the searchlights had swept the black water for bodies of the floating dead. Squinting the way I did when I wanted to bring the invisible into view, I thought I saw Tom Sawyer, Jim, and Huck Finn, like bundles on the water, navigating silently for home, according to hydrology. The carrousel was turning musically behind me on its axis, making an eternal figure in the night as surely as the wheeling stars. The time had come round for me to go home.
AND SO I CAME TO BE, ONCE MORE, in Hannibal after a 235-year absence. The year was not 1835. The Web site, fugitive as it had been, was not a time machine. It couldn’t restore or reprise the past. Its gift was one of retrospection—for an old man, a greater marvel. For old men—and women, too, for all I know of them—the glance is always backward. What is there to see ahead, except for the unmentionable destination? Unless the Widow Douglas had been right and is, at this moment, shaking a tambourine in heaven—unlike that harridan Miss Watson, who’s in the oven, broiling.
Can you guess what I did first on the afternoon of my arrival? No? I bought this—my corncob pipe. I’m forbidden to smoke it. My heart, you know. But I suckle it, tasting, like a child the milk of its mother’s breast, a rich residue of tobacco tar. I intend to have it burned with me: I’m to be cremated—it’s written in my will—and my ashes put into the Mississippi. A gorgeous joke! And my final escape from destiny, in that Twain would have had his Huck buried in consecrated ground, most likely in the Hannibal Cemetery, with a nicely chiseled stone recording the opening and closing parentheses of a normal human life. Old ironist and sinner, Twain might have installed a stone angel to weep its rust-colored tears over me, to irritate Hannibal’s self-righteous folk, who considered me a nuisance and a damned soul.
Before I arrived on this chaise longue, a skinny octogenarian in bathrobe and slippers, I took my revenge—twice daily, Tuesday through Sunday—playing the role of Mark Twain, river pilot and raconteur, at the Hannibal Riverside Amusement Park. Oh, how I relished it! Can you imagine me, made up and dressed to look like him as he was when he, too, got to be old? I lived for the two hours, six times each week, when I piloted a miniature steamboat—preposterous thing!—a half league downriver and back, telling stories of Tom and Jim and Huck to passengers who seemed more interested in the ducks than in what I had to say. But I didn’t care. I amused myself by playacting my nemesis, making him look ridiculous; and the stories I told were mine. Who was to know? Few people in the 2070s had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Have you? The fun went on for four years and a little more, until I crashed and sank The Mark Twain, as that silly tin-pot steamboat was called. I steered her into a snag and tore her bottom to flinders. The sun was in my eyes, and my eyes, overcast by cataracts, weren’t much use to me anymore. I guess I’d seen enough for one lifetime—for three or four lifetimes, as it happens.
That cloud, high above the river—see it? It’s the very same one that flew over my childhood.
This seems a good place for me to stop before lighting out for the Territory. I’ve had my say, and I’ve packed this book with life, knowing full well that life is always elsewhere.
You want to know how to finish this comedy—with what parting words?
With the same ones Mark Twain used to finish his, damn him!
THE END, YOURS TRULY, HUCK FINN.
Acknowledgments
DURING NEARLY FORTY-FIVE YEARS OF WRITING, I have been lucky to find many who have been kind to it and to me—enough, doubtless, to crowd this page with names. In the past, I have resisted the temptation to acknowledge friends and mentors, en masse, afraid to leave one or another out, because of my forgetfulness. But this seems a good time to try my hand at a comprehensive gratitude. So thanks—to my mother, who showed me the unmatched pleasure of reading, and to Mildred Osler, an English teacher who, in 1967, while students rampaged in the hall, stood, with diminutive frame but indomitable will, against the wall and recited from a novel by Thomas Hardy. My thanks to Philip Roth, who taught me how to read a story (if I remember rightly, we read, among other novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and, by his example, how to behave well toward others. Thanks, also, to poets Daniel Hoffman and Phillip Booth and novelists Jerre Mangione and George P. Elliott, who treated a young man like the writer he wished to be, but wasn’t yet. I’ve profited by the goodwill of friends like Gordon Lish, Marco Knauff, Brian Evenson, Faruk Ulay, Kate Bernheimer, Dawn Raffel, John Madera, Peter Markus, Tobias Carroll, Ed Renn, Dave Moore, and my persevering theatrical agent, Per Lauke. I’ve enjoyed the attentions of many editors—chief among them: George Plimpton (The Paris Review), Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler (New England Review), Celia Johnson and Maria Gagliano (Slice), Lee Chapman (First Intensity), Vincent Standley (3rd bed), Deron Bauman and Cooper Renner (elimae), Robley Wilson (The North American Review), Sven Birkerts and William Pierce (AGNI), Matt Bell (The Collagist), John Hennessy and Jennifer Acker (The Common), Richard Peabody (Gargoyle), Alice Whittenburg and G.S. Evans (Café Irreal), and Sebnem Basimi Holzer (Visual Artbeat). I’ve been fortunate in having devoted, selfless publishers like Kathryn Rantala (Ravenna Press), Eugene Lim (Ellipsis Press), Tod Thilleman (Spuyten Duyvil), Derek White (Calamari Press), R. M. Berry (FC2), J. A. Tyler (Mud Luscious Press), Christopher Gould (Broadway Play Publishing), and, on the happy occasion of The Boy in His Winter and Love Among the Particles, my estimable publisher, Erika Goldman, her Bellevue Literary Press team, Adam Beaudoin, Leslie Hodgkins, and Molly Mikolowski, the press’s meticulous copyeditor, Carol Edwards, as well as the painstaking Joe Gannon. I gratefully acknowledge a debt to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and, doubly, to the New Jersey Council on the Arts. And, lastly, I offer gratitude and love to Helen—for four decades my wife and friend.
The author is grateful to The Collagist, Construction Magazine, and Slice Magazine for publishing an excerpt from this novel.
About the Author
NORMAN LOCK’S recent story collection, Love Among the Particles, was published in 2013 by Bellevue Literary Press. The House of Correction enjoyed a successful run during the 2013 theater season in Istanbul and opened in Warsaw and Athens in 2014. His latest radio play, Mounting Panic, premiered in 2013 in Germany. He has won The Paris Review Aga Kahn Prize for Fiction and the Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, and has been awarded writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts (1999, 2013), the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2009), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2011).
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