Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

by Brock Clarke

  We didn’t say anything after that, not for a little while. I hadn’t met the Sociologist, and at this point I barely knew anything about him, but still, I thought I understood his fondness for train travel. My aunt’s room was toward the back of the train, and I had the strong sense that there was a long life in front of me and a short life behind.

  “Yes, my son died of kidney stones,” I repeated, wanting to stay in the moment, the occasion of my first good lie. “And after that Dawn and I were never the same.”

  104.

  After we talked about my fake son, my thoughts turned to my aunt’s real one.

  “What kind of name is Zhow?” I asked.

  “A Portuguese one,” my aunt said.

  “Why does he have a Portuguese name?”

  “Zhow’s father is the Sociologist,” she said. Which didn’t answer the question of why he’d been given a Portuguese name. But it did answer my next question, which was going to be, And why are you and Zhow so estranged?

  Neither of us said anything for a while after that. The cabin grew dark, but neither my aunt nor I turned on the lights. It was pleasant, to not have to do anything, to have something else move you through the darkness. But my mind was moving through the darkness, too. There was something nagging at it, and me, something my aunt had said earlier: “A mother does like to see what her children have been up to.”

  “How many children do you have?” I asked my aunt.

  “Enough,” my aunt said quickly. She looked away from me and toward the door, like she very much wanted to be on the other side of it.

  105.

  And was this the moment when I began to suspect that my aunt was really my mother? Possibly. Because I came away from this conversation—about my marriage and divorce, and the fake death of my fake son, and the existence of my aunt’s real son—anxious, impatient, desperate for the rest of the long life in front of me to get started. As though I already had wasted so much time.

  Nine

  106.

  I left my aunt’s room, went back to my own. The train stopped when it reached the German border, and I grew tired waiting for it to start moving again, and I fell asleep. I dreamt no dreams. When I woke up, it was around five o’clock. I looked out the window. The scene outside the train was flat, dreary, depressed: rain-soaked parking lots, rain-soaked backs of buildings, rain-soaked fields. The weather had gone bad inside the train, too. Maybe it was something my aunt and I had talked about before she’d left and before I’d fallen asleep. The terrible fate of my imaginary son seemed to hang there in the room, like a blanket over a lamp, and I suddenly felt a kind of longing for his mother.

  107.

  Hostile Territory

  My dear readers, thank you for all your helpful hints about how I might handle heartbreak. Smear campaign! Identity theft! Maiming! Murder! A new pellet stove! And in fact, I have had my eye on Casco’s newest Lilac model, ideal for those moments when you want your energy-efficient, environmentally healthy primary heat source to do double duty as a potpourri dispenser.

  But I’m going to say something shocking, posse: there is some warmth even a pellet stove cannot give. Which is why I’m thinking of leaving my house here in Charlotte and going on a trip, to Europe. At first, I thought I’d travel to Sweden, but then I thought no, maybe I’d visit Denmark. But now I’ve decided that I’d like to see Germany and that I’d like to see it by train. Germany is hostile territory, as you know: that country is the black sooty heart of the international industrial “conventional woodstove” syndicate. Which is why I don’t want to travel by myself. But I’ve gotten word of an old friend in those parts, an old friend who became a new enemy but who I hope will become a friend again. These are my questions for my old friend: Can we forgive, and forget? Will you travel with me? Will you let me travel with you? As soon I hear from him, I’ll be on my way. Wish me luck, posse, and expect further reports from the road—or the rails!

  108.

  I read this post several times. I was disturbed, of course, that Dawn seemed to know exactly where I was. But I was also disturbed by Dawn’s conciliatory tone: I’d never heard her use the expression “forgive and forget,” nor did I think her capable of forgiving and forgetting. Which is why, maybe, it seemed like she might be up to something. But it was also true that since I’d met my aunt, it seemed like everyone might be up to something.

  Anyway, after I’d read and reread the post, I went to my aunt’s room, which was next to my own. I raised my hand to knock on the door, but before I could actually knock I heard my aunt say in her high warbly voice, “All I could think when I felt the bullet going through me was, I hope that’s not the femoral artery.”

  And then another voice, a woman’s, younger but also more gravelly, said, “Can I tell you about the time right after my divorce when I was all alone in my awful new apartment with no furniture and no utensils and I saved myself from choking on an unmicrowaved microwavable chicken burrito by ramming a Slim Jim down my throat?”

  “Come in, Calvin,” my aunt said, even though I still hadn’t knocked. I opened the door. My aunt’s room was the same as mine. On one side was a couch. On the other was the sleeper bed that folded up into a couch. But it was unfolded now, and its sheets were mussed up. My aunt was sitting on it, her shoes off, and holding a plastic cup of red wine, mostly gone. On the floor, at her ankle-socked feet, was a large bottle of red wine, half-empty. And sitting on the other couch was the woman who, I guessed, had said that strange thing about saving herself with the Slim Jim. Her hair was short, pixieish, and gray, but her face was much younger than her hair: unlined, round cheeked, tanned, lightly freckled. She was wearing a slim tan skirt and a long-sleeved light blue blouse buttoned to the second to last button, and there was a tan blazer rumpled on the couch next to her, and there was a red bandanna knotted around her neck, and on the floor next to her bare feet were shoes, tan shoes, no heels, flat, soft looking, rounded toe, more slippers than shoes. She looked like a woman who was going on a job interview who then decided to go to the rodeo who then decided to be in a ballet. Her brown eyes were big and seemed to have a hard time settling on something: they darted from my face, to the cell phone in my hand, to the bottle of wine, to the corridor behind me, to my aunt, to my face again. She was also holding a plastic cup of wine, and, as with my aunt, she’d mostly finished hers. And then she did finish it, and my aunt picked up the bottle and refilled the woman’s cup and then her own, and then said, “Calvin, this is my neighbor.”

  “One oh eight,” the woman said, and when she saw how this confused me, her eyes darted to the door, which opened inward, and I saw the number 107 there and realized that her room was next to my aunt’s. “Caroline,” she said, then smiled, the kind of smile that showed no teeth but with the lifting of the corners of the mouth seemed to elevate the rest of the face.

  “Caroline and I were just swapping war stories,” my aunt said. She then paused. I knew I was supposed to say something but suddenly felt incapable. My aunt let me hang there for a moment, adjusted her glasses, and then said, “You seem momentarily very stupid, Calvin. Was there something you wanted?”

  In truth, I’d forgotten by now what I wanted, which was to tell my aunt about Dawn’s post, and about how she was coming to Germany, and about how she seemed to know that I was on this train. “I was just checking in on you to see if you were all right,” I said, which was just as stupid as my silence: if anyone didn’t need checking in on, it was my aunt. And then I told Caroline it was nice to meet her and then backed out of the room. I noticed that the train was slowing again. I passed a porter in the corridor and asked him why, and he said that we were pulling into Hamburg, where we would be stopped for an hour and a half.

  109.

  I have mentioned my head and how I’d shaved it. But of course I used to have hair. And oddly enough, my hair, when I had it, was like Dawn’s: curly, coarse, wild but also, in places, matted down as though slept on, although it looked that way even when
I hadn’t slept on it. And they called me Geeker. I’m thinking of when I was a teenager, fifteen years old, and I had glasses, and I also had braces. But I think it was mostly my hair that caused Charles Otis and some of the other boys I went to school with to call me Geeker. I say “some of the other boys,” but really most of the boys called me this. Several girls also. None of my teachers, as far as I knew.

  110.

  I mention this, about my nickname and my hair, because I hadn’t shaved my head in four days now, and I could feel the hair sprouting, but only in patches and, with it, the return of my past and my nickname. And then, too, I’d been wearing the same clothes—jeans, flannel shirt, running shoes—since we left Congress. And while I’d brushed my teeth in the Stockholm hotel (they’d given me the brush), I’d left it in the room when we’d fled. Up until now, this hadn’t bothered me: the professional blogger is rarely bothered by his appearance, as people rarely see him. But now that Caroline had seen me, I was bothered. And so when the train stopped in Hamburg, I got off to see if I could buy any of these things—a razor, some clothes, some toiletries. The train station seemed like it was made of glass, and within the glass there were stalls and stores, and many of those were made of glass, too, and in some of those stalls and stores were the things—a razor, some clothes, some toiletries—that I needed, and I bought them with my credit card, and while I didn’t see anything else of Hamburg before I got back on the train, if it’s anything like its train station, then it’s a bright place, full of the things you need, especially if you need the things I needed, and I highly recommend it.

  111.

  But before I got back onto the train, let me tell you what happened to me in the men’s clothing store. I had already decided on a pair of brown leather ankle boots and a shiny blue-collared shirt, and socks, and underwear, and now I was trying on a pair of jeans. The jeans were expensive. Also, they were said by their tag to be distressed (everything else on the tag was in German except for the English word “distressed”), and it did, in fact, look as though something terrible had happened to the jeans—they were bleached and holey in spots and frayed in the pockets and at the cuffs—and of course when you think of something terrible happening in Germany, you think of the Holocaust, and when I when I realized that the jeans would always remind me of the Holocaust, I didn’t really want jeans anymore and was just about to return to the dressing room to take them off when I saw behind me, reflected in the full-length mirror, someone I knew. He was turned sideways, pretending to be just another shopper, flipping through a rack of shiny jackets. I couldn’t really see his face, but I recognized him anyway, from his terrible posture: he was the flat-voiced minister who I’d seen sitting with my mother in her church many years ago and then two days earlier in the Boston airport.

  112.

  Before I met my aunt, I would have pretended that I hadn’t seen the flat-voiced minister; I would have kept my head down, averted my eyes, walked in the other direction, avoided conflict. But this was another thing she’d taught me, another commandment: “Thou shall avoid conflict unless the other person wishes to avoid conflict, and in that case thou shall pursue it.” I walked right up to the flat-voiced minister. It was the most aggressive thing I’d ever done up to that point. It felt good. Although I was conscious of the tag identifying the jeans as distressed. It drifted and flapped at my hip as I walked.

  Once the flat-voiced minister noticed me walking toward him, he momentarily sank deeper into the rack of coats but then must have realized there was no hiding from me. He righted himself. Turned to face me. Adjusted his hat—the gray, crown-dented, flat-brimmed hat I remembered from before. He was still wearing that gray suit, too. Before, I’d thought of his clothes as funereal and ministerial. But now that I knew my aunt was looking for the Sociologist, and that other people were looking for him, too, the man also looked like someone who might be looking for someone else. He looked like a spy, in other words, in addition to looking like a minister. Because this was another thing my aunt taught me: that someone is always also someone else, or at least has the capacity to be someone else, if someone else is indeed what he wants to be.

  “Who are you?” I asked the man.

  “You know who I am,” the man said, and from the way he said that, I could tell he was offended. “I am the Reverend John Lawrence, from Hebron, Iowa.”

  I didn’t recognize the name or the place. “Never heard of you,” I said. I could tell this surprised him. I wondered if my mother had told him that she’d told me about him. The Reverend John Lawrence’s shoulders went back. Not all the way back. He just became a slightly less perfect question mark. He took off his hat, regarded it, made sure the crown was properly dented, and ran his fingers along the brim, composing himself. I imagined his sermons. There would be plenty of pauses. I imagined his church. There would be plenty of empty pews. And then I pictured the pew that he and my mother had been sitting in those many years ago. And then the Reverend John Lawrence returned the hat to his head and said in a slightly less flat, more hopeful, more desperate voice, “Where’s your mother?”

  This, of course, surprised me. Because now that I was thinking that he might be a spy, I’d half expected him to ask where the Sociologist was. But also because the Reverend John Lawrence knew as well as I did where my mother was.

  “My mother isn’t anywhere,” I said, and that sounded terrible, and so I amended it: “My mother is dead.” Which, oddly enough, sounded much better. “She was pulverized by a train.” That sounded better yet. The Reverend John Lawrence winced when I said “pulverized.” And I knew I would be saying that for the entirety of our relationship, however long that ended up being.

  113.

  Back when I’d first spotted the Reverend John Lawrence sitting with my mother in the pew in her church, I thought he was more or less her age. But I realized now he was much younger, in his midfifties at most. Like Caroline, his face was younger than his hair and his posture. His clothes, on the other hand, looked as though they’d been worn forever. That before he’d worn them his father had worn them, and before his father had worn them his grandfather had worn them. I knew what these clothes were trying to communicate, because my mother’s clothes had tried to communicate the same thing. The Reverend John Lawrence was someone who had renounced all worldly things and wanted to announce to the world that he’d renounced all worldly things. And when I realized that, I decided I would be buying those distressed jeans after all.

  114.

  The Reverend John Lawrence. John. I knew, without him telling me, which Protestant theologian he’d been named after.

  115.

  When the Reverend John Lawrence asked where my mother was and then winced when I’d said she’d been pulverized, I had an inkling that my mother had been something more to him than just the author of a famous book about John Calvin; I had an inkling that while he probably wasn’t a spy, he might have been my mother’s illicit lover (because that was another thing my aunt taught me: pretty much everyone in my life had an illicit lover). Which was why I set out to punish the Reverend John Lawrence, but cheerfully, as my aunt might have done. “Wait, do you think my mother wasn’t pulverized by that train?” I asked, making sure my voice went up at the end of the sentence as though it were my aunt talking and not me. Odd: each time I said the word “pulverized” my mother seemed more alive to me even though the word was meant to suggest how very dead she was. “Pulverized,” I said again, and the Reverend John Lawrence winced again, and then a furious look took over his face and he clenched his fists. He took a step forward and I thought, for a moment, that he was going to hit me. But then he stopped to fiddle with his hat. The Reverend John Lawrence’s hat to him was what my aunt’s sunglasses were to her.

  “I loved Nola,” the Reverend John Lawrence said, and the simple unadorned way he said this made me want to murder him, which remained the case for the rest of our time together.

  “You loved her book,” I corrected, and then when this di
dn’t seem to have affected him, I added, “and you loved John Calvin.”

  “That was who she was,” he said. “She was her book, and she was John Calvin.” The Reverend John Lawrence paused and looked at me squarely. “And she loved me,” he said in that same simple, unadorned way, and I knew that he really believed it was true, and that maybe it actually was true, and I realized I couldn’t have said with the same certainty that my father had loved her or that she had loved him, or that I had loved my mother or that she had loved me.

  “I doubt it,” I said. And then, again, with emphasis: “Pulverized.”

  “The volunteer firemen said they’d never seen anything like it,” the Reverend John Lawrence said. His voice sounded paranoid. I could imagine him sitting in a darkened room, thinking these middle-of-the-night thoughts.

  “You think the volunteer firemen lied,” I said.

  “They didn’t lie,” the Reverend John Lawrence said. “They were good, honest men.” I wondered how he knew this, except that maybe, in his cosmology, volunteer firemen were always good, honest men. I wondered if he’d still think this if he’d met the Otises. Unless he’d already met them. I had no idea, I realized, how much and for how long his world and my world had been the same world. “Your mother fooled them.”

  “Into thinking she’d been pulverized,” I said.

  “We were supposed to go a cruise together,” he said simply, and I remembered what my mother said at my father’s burial about not wanting to go on cruises alone, or maybe at all, and I believed that the Reverend John Lawrence was telling me the truth about that, too.