by Brock Clarke
“Do you believe in God?” I asked my aunt in a whisper, and she responded, not in a whisper, “People believe in God because they’re too frightened not to.”
This kind of argument, I knew, had always infuriated my mother. “Cynicism,” she had said in one of her sermons and had also written in her famous book, “has failed to bring us closer to the truth and instead has only further estranged us from goodness and from God.”
“Does that mean you do or you don’t believe in God?” I asked my aunt, thinking I knew the answer. But my aunt surprised me.
“Oh, I do,” Aunt Beatrice said.
“Me, too,” I said. And that was the first and last thing we ever said on the subject.
96.
“Now, Calvin,” my aunt said. “Tell me what you’ve learned today.”
I’d been quizzed enough times by my mother on what I’d learned from reading John Calvin to not be surprised by the request. But I never answered her the way I was about to answer my aunt. Maybe it was the spirit of Calvin’s rival, Martin Luther, or maybe it was the spirit of my mother’s rival, my aunt, or maybe it was my own spirit, which I was in the process of trying to find. And as I knew very well, if you really wanted to find your spirit, you needed commandments to guide you. I consulted my phone and said, “Thou shall never travel by car or truck unless they’re stolen. Thou shall lie, but only if thou lies well. Thou shall honor through dishonor. Thou shall have sex with thy sister’s husband because thou wants to. If thou loves someone, then thou shall pretend that someone else other people love doesn’t exist. Thou shall betray the ones thou loves the most. Thou shall drink in the morning even though thou shall probably regret it. Thou shall try very hard. Thou shall steal while thy partner distracts. Thou shall not obey those people who tell thou that what thou is doing is inappropriate. Thou shall expect to get punched in the face for thine inappropriate acts. Thou shall not apologize to the person who has punched thou, nor should thou expect an apology. Thou shall believe in God, even, or especially, if thou doesn’t believe in acting godly.” Then I paused, and when I did, I became aware that I was panting. Learning lessons is like hard exercise, especially if the lessons you’re learning are the opposite of the lessons you’ve already learned. Still, I managed to quiet my panting, looked at my aunt in what I hoped was a bold manner, and added, “Thou shall learn many languages, not so thou may communicate with as many people as possible but so thou may speak freely in front of people who don’t speak those languages.”
When I said that, my aunt smiled hugely and clapped, like a pleased child. Aunt Beatrice loved it when you told her that you knew she was up to something. Although of course that didn’t mean that she would then tell you what she was up to.
My aunt’s phone buzzed, and she removed it from her purse, looked at it, returned it to her purse, and then stood up abruptly. “God orders what we cannot do,” my aunt announced, quoting John Calvin, “that we may know what we ought to ask of him.” Then she ran out of the church and into the street, and it took me a few moments to catch up with her.
“What ought we ask of him?” I asked, still breathing hard, harder than my aunt, I noticed. It seemed that our time in church had restored her, just as her sister, my mother, had always insisted it was predestined to do.
“That he delay our train,” my aunt said.
“Train?” I said, because that had been one of the commandments I’d forgotten to recite—“Thou shall not speak of traveling by train, let alone travel by train”—and besides I hadn’t known that there was one and that my aunt was intending for us to catch it. But there was the train station, right in front of us, its PA system summoning us out of the fog. And there was our train, waiting for us at platform 12, even though it was fifteen minutes past its departure time. And we did catch it, and only after we took our seats did my aunt say, “Because I betrayed her brother, who was also my husband,” and it wasn’t until after the train pulled out of the station that I understood that Aunt Beatrice was telling me why Wrong Way Connie had knocked out her tooth.
Eight
97.
Our tickets were for Madrid, but Aunt Beatrice said to never mind about that, that she and Morten (who was my aunt’s husband and Connie’s brother) had taken hundreds of trains and not once had they ended up in the place where they were supposed to go.
98.
Aunt Beatrice and I were on the train in her sleeper room, an hour outside of Copenhagen by now. I’d asked her why we’d left Copenhagen so quickly. “Oh, I was there to steal the knife,” she said. There were two couches in the room: one that was permanently a couch and one that folded out into a bed. My aunt was slumped on the one that folded out into a bed, but her mentioning the stolen knife seemed to remind her of something, because she sat up and said suddenly, “Calvin! The film.” I didn’t understand, and this seemed to agitate her. “The film!” she said. “The gerbil! Zhow’s gerbil film!” It took me a minute to understand what she was saying and that Zhow was her son’s name. It was an odd name; I couldn’t imagine my aunt choosing it. But I decided not to say that. Instead, I reached around, pulled the DVD out of my waistband, showed it to her, then placed it next to me on my couch. My aunt snatched up the DVD and stuffed it into her purse, where, presumably, the knife still was. There was already quite a collection of illicit objects in there, I thought.
Anyway, after my aunt had put the DVD in her purse, she slumped back on her couch. I pressed her to tell me more about Morten and she said, “Morten loved trains.” And I understood why my aunt and he had been on so many of them and, if she’d betrayed him, and had had a good reason to betray him, why she was less than fond of them herself. “And he hated Copenhagen.”
“Where was he from?”
“Copenhagen,” my aunt said. “We lived there from 1973 to 1975. And Morten tolerated it. Because I was happy and because our business with Connie was so profitable. But it was too cold for Morten. He always wanted to live somewhere where he could wear shorts.” My aunt paused, transparently thinking of Morten and his shorts, and of course I thought of Dawn, wearing her shorts in Charlotte, and I wondered when Dawn would come into my life again or if she would come into my life again. “Morten had excellent legs,” my aunt continued.
“How did you betray him?” I asked.
“Of course, Morten was a smuggler. Smugglers in general have good legs,” Aunt Beatrice said. “I don’t know why it’s true, but it is. Gun smugglers have the very best legs, as a rule. Then, in descending order, art. Jewels and diamonds. Pornography. Human traffickers—”
“What did Morten smuggle?” I interrupted, not wanting to hear what was lower than human trafficking, and my aunt smiled broadly again, and I saw the space formerly occupied by the tooth that Connie had knocked out, and I suspected the answer was, Everything.
99.
I excused myself to go the corridor bathroom (our rooms had sinks but no toilets). Once in it, I didn’t use the toilet except to sit on it while I listened to the recording I’d made earlier of Connie and Aunt Beatrice. Of course, they were speaking in Danish, and I didn’t understand any of it. But my phone had another function I’d never used before—Translate—and my phone could translate anything it had recorded into English. Maybe that’s why all the signs in the Copenhagen museum had been in English and why Carl had spoken English, too, knowing, inevitably, that everything would be translated into English.
Anyway, I translated the conversation into English. The miracle of technology: not just the translation but that my aunt’s voice and Connie’s voice when translated into English actually sounded like their voices. I’d assumed that their voices would come out sounding automated. Like the voice on my phone back in Congress, telling me it was “clear sailing.” Either that person had wanted to obscure his voice, or he’d been working with some outdated technology.
“ . . . the knife?” Connie said in midsentence because I’d started recording midsentence.
“Among other things,”
my aunt said.
“Clear sailing,” Connie repeated. “You think that was my brother. So you’re wandering around Europe, gathering and stealing things, hoping you’ll find him, or that he finds you, and then you’ll give him these things.” My aunt didn’t respond to that. I could picture her, fiddling with her glasses.
“I’m sorry, Admiral,” Connie said, and I could tell by her voice that she really was sorry. “But I think he’s dead.”
“Probably,” my aunt said, although I couldn’t tell by her cheerful voice whether she thought he was or wasn’t.
“You killed him,” Connie said.
“Only figuratively,” my aunt said.
“Does Calvin know what you’re doing here?”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
“You should tell him.”
“It’s better that he doesn’t know anything.”
“I still hate you,” Connie said.
“That’s because you know everything,” Aunt Beatrice said.
Then there was a pause, after which Wrong Way Connie said, translated from the original Danish, “He should know at least something.” And then she pointed out in English that my aunt had never gotten her tooth replaced, and then I stopped playing the recording and put away my phone.
100.
Up until this point, I hadn’t been able to figure out a sense of purpose to our trip. Up until this point, it had seemed as though my aunt, as she’d announced earlier, really did just want to show me some of her old haunts. And that the things she’d been given, and stolen, were trinkets, keepsakes. Only when I listened to the recording did it occur to me that they might be meant as gifts for someone. Only when I listened to the recording did it occur to me that we might be looking for someone. What Connie had said made sense. After all, I was running away from my Dawn; why shouldn’t my aunt be running toward her Morten?
101.
I left the bathroom and returned to my aunt’s room. She was sitting on her bed, looking at the gerbil DVD. I don’t mean she was watching the film itself. Because of course she didn’t have proper technology. Because of course the proper technology was obsolete. Her phone, and my phone, had made it so. No, Aunt Beatrice was looking at the DVD case, looking at the gerbil on the front, then flipping it over and looking at the gerbil on the back. I could tell how frustrated she was. She was actually grinding her teeth, so badly did she want to watch that film.
“We’ll have to find a DVD player,” I said to my aunt, and this startled her, as she fumbled with and nearly dropped the DVD. Which pleased me. It made me feel like I was starting to get somewhere. If to be grown up was to have the ability to startle, then maybe I really was starting to grow up.
“Yes,” she said, returning the DVD to her purse. “A mother does like to see what her children have been up to.”
I didn’t say anything after that. I was thinking of how to tell Aunt Beatrice that I knew who we were looking for. But I didn’t want to let on that I’d recorded and translated her conversation because I suspected I’d have occasion to do so again. So I sat there and I sat there as if I were mulling over some great puzzle, and then, as if thunderstruck, I said, “Clear sailing!” My aunt stared at me, sitting on her bed, her legs crossed at her ankles. I wondered if she was onto me, if my epiphany sounded as phony to her ears as her claims of feebleness sounded to mine. But I continued. “You think that was Morten. Telling you that all’s forgiven. Telling you to come find him if you want to. And you want to. That’s why you got Zhow’s DVD. That’s why you stole the knife. They’re presents to give to Morten once we find him.”
Of course, Connie had come up with this theory, not I. But this was another commandment I learned during my time with Aunt Beatrice: “Thou shall record other people’s conversations and pass off their ideas as thine own.”
My aunt took off her glasses at that, swung them by the stem with her gnarled, veiny right hand while she considered me. I said earlier that her eyes were like marbles, but they were also like brains: red lined and rutted and oddly discolored, and frankly gross and totally beyond me. “Why would he call you and not me?” she asked, and I could tell she was testing me. But I’d already thought of this.
“Because people are still looking for him,” I said. “Whatever he did, and whomever you betrayed him to, those people are still looking for him. And if people are looking for him, they’re probably looking for him to contact you. But they wouldn’t be looking for him to contact me.” I didn’t bother to mention how he knew to contact me. Because he’d read my blog. My blog! It seems I had quite a readership after all, although I don’t know how likely it is that any of these readers ended up buying a pellet stove. “And so that’s what you need to do,” I added. “You need to find him before these other people do.”
Aunt Beatrice put her glasses back on. “Very good, Calvin,” she said, and her voice went even higher than usual, and her approval was like the sun, finally burning off the cold and wet of Copenhagen.
102.
I still wanted to know how and why my aunt had betrayed Morten. But I’d already asked her that question, and I knew that if I asked her again that might even further delay my getting the answer. And so I asked her something else. This is yet another thing my aunt taught me. You’re more likely to get an answer to a question that isn’t important than one that is. Which then might end up being more important than you thought it was.
“What’s Morten’s nickname?” I asked. Because there was no doubt in my mind that he had one.
“The Sociologist,” my aunt said. I waited for more, but there was no more. From college, of course, I knew that sociology was a discipline, a course of study, a major, but I had no idea what it really was or what a sociologist really did.
“What is a sociologist?” I asked.
“A sociologist,” my aunt said, “is someone who likes to say things that sound profound until you think about them and realize that they’re mostly just obvious.”
“But why was he called that?”
“Because before he was a smuggler, he was a sociologist.” I didn’t say anything to that, and my aunt must have taken my silence for disapproval because she shrugged and admitted, “Some nicknames are better than others.”
103.
We were on the subject of romantic failure and betrayal now, and apparently my aunt wanted to stay on that subject. She asked me, “Why did you and Dawn get divorced?” I hadn’t mentioned that Dawn and I had been married, let alone divorced, but by this point I’d stopped wondering how my aunt knew things I hadn’t told her. By now, I just assumed she knew.
“I was lonely,” I told my aunt, and she shook her head. Not out of sadness or dismay; no, she shook her head because she thought that was the wrong answer.
“Dawn cheated on you,” my aunt said.
“No!” I said, and I was surprised at how loudly I said this and how badly I wanted what my aunt had said not to be true. Not because Dawn’s infidelity would have hurt so much but because I was certain I knew Dawn and that was not what I was certain I knew about her. Where did I learn to be this certain about women? From men, of course, including the theologian John Calvin, who was certain that “undoubtedly the dress of a virtuous and godly woman must differ from that of a strumpet.”
“No, you’re right,” my aunt said. She fiddled with her sunglasses. The train blew its horn and I turned and looked out the window, and another train was rattling past us, a freight train so close that I could imagine reaching out and touching the graffitied cars.
“Say you had a baby,” my aunt said.
“All right,” I said. I thought she was speaking merely hypothetically, but then I realized that she really wanted me to say that.
“I had a baby,” I said.
“Give the baby a sex, Calvin,” Aunt Beatrice said. “And an age.”
I had no idea my aunt was doing, but I wanted to find out. “A boy,” I said, maybe because I’d been one. “One year old.”
“A
one-year-old baby boy named . . .” Aunt Beatrice said, and then quickly, before I could respond, she added, “No. You don’t like to think about his name. It’s too awful.”
“Because he died,” I guessed, and I immediately felt that I had said something true, even though what I’d said was false. And then I understood what my aunt was up to. She was teaching me how to lie, how to be a better liar.
“Of cancer,” I said, warming to the assignment, and my aunt winced, as though my answer had caused her real physical pain.
“Cancer,” she repeated flatly. “Please, Calvin. You have to try harder than that.”
It is terrible to disappoint the person you love; if you disappoint the person you love, what hope do you have of doing better with the people you don’t? So I tried harder to find a better way of dying for my son. My life, after all, had recently been emptied by death. My father. My mother. But I didn’t think a child could die of a heart attack. And it seemed too implausible that another family member would be struck by a train, even though I was on one. Meanwhile, my aunt was growing impatient. She was fiddling with the strap of her purse, fiddled with her glasses, her purse strap, and I felt an urgent need to please her and also a strong sense that I would fail to do what I urgently needed to do. “Kidney stones!” I finally blurted out, and my aunt smiled.
“Rarely fatal,” she said, nodding, “and almost never in children unless left untreated for a long time. Pain. Neglect. Shame. Bewilderment. Denial. Death. Kidney stones. Very good, Calvin.”