Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

by Brock Clarke

  “I want to understand this,” I said. “You believe my mother faked her own death. You believe that my aunt and I also believe that my mother faked her death. And that we know where she is. And that we’re going to find her. And that by following us, you’re going to find her, too.” I paused to let him hear the ridiculousness of his beliefs, but he just looked at me sternly, and I knew that he’d do anything to prove his quest wasn’t foolish or futile. I wondered if it had been he who’d told Dawn that I was on a train in Germany. And I also wondered if it had been he who’d left the copy of my mother’s famous book on the couch in my hotel room in Stockholm. But I didn’t want to stop to ask just then. I figured I would have another opportunity later, and I was right about that. “My mother loved you,” I continued. “But she pretended to be pulverized by a train. Just so she wouldn’t have to go on a cruise with you.”

  And the Reverend John Lawrence’s hands went to his head, and he fiddled with his hat for a few moments, and I could tell that this was a problem for him, that this was a snarl in his belief system that he could not quite untangle.

  “I love her. We’re supposed to go on a cruise together,” he insisted, except this time he was talking about my mother and their cruise in the present tense. I felt sorry for him, and although I still wanted to murder him, I also wanted to help him understand the depth of his delusion. Although to force a person to understand the depth of his delusion is also a kind of murder.

  “Hero-worship,” I said, quoting John Calvin, “is innate to human nature, and it is founded on some of our noblest feelings—gratitude, love, and admiration—but which, like all other feelings, when uncontrolled by principle and reason, may easily degenerate into the wildest exaggerations, and lead to most dangerous consequences.”

  The Reverend John Lawrence didn’t say anything to that at first. His hands went once again to his hat. He took it off, fiddled with it for a few moments, put it back on again, and then said, “You’re traveling by train. Nola was killed by a train. And do you know who loved trains?” I suspected he was talking about my mother, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of telling me another thing about her that I should have known but didn’t. “The Sociologist,” I said instead. The Reverend John Lawrence looked at me, baffled, for one beat and then another, and then said flatly, “No, the Conductor.” And then he turned and fled the store.

  Ten

  116.

  The Reverend John Lawrence had presumably returned to the train, but before I could follow him, I had to first retrieve my old clothes, my wallet, my passport, and my train ticket from the dressing room, then pay for my new clothes (I wore the distressed jeans out of the store), and then run to the train, which I barely caught before it pulled out of the Hamburg station.

  I went first to my room, where I deposited my bag. I half expected to find the Reverend John Lawrence waiting for me there. He was crazy, my mother was dead, but if he were not crazy, and my mother really had faked her death, then I wondered if it was because she saw the future, and in it, no matter where she was, the Reverend John Lawrence would always be waiting for her. Because that was how I saw Dawn—that no matter where I was, no matter whether we were married or divorced, whether she was in Charlotte and I was in Congress, or Europe, that she would be waiting for me, that she was fated to be in my life forever, because that’s what I deserved. And for that matter, until she died: that was how I felt about my mother and John Calvin, too.

  117.

  My aunt was sitting on the bed, drying her hands with a bathroom towel. On the bed next to her was the knife. It looked like she was cleaning up after a murder.

  Caroline wasn’t in the room. There was no sign that she’d ever been there. Even the bottle of wine, even the plastic cups, were gone.

  It’s hard to tell if a person wearing sunglasses is tired. This, I’m sure, was yet another reason my aunt wore them. But still, the way she raised her head slowly to look at me, the way she wearily dried and dried her hands with that towel, communicated to me how very tired she was. But then I remembered the missing bottle of wine, which was probably an empty bottle of wine, and I thought I’d located the reason for her fatigue.

  Anyway, I told Aunt Beatrice about how I’d confronted the Reverend John Lawrence in the clothing store, and how he’d apparently loved my mother and said she loved him, and how they were supposed to go on a cruise together, and how he believed my mother had faked her death, and how he believed we were somehow in on the deception, and how we were taking this train to meet her, and he was clearly deluded, he was clearly crazy, but he also mentioned something about the train that had hit my mother, and also the train we, and presumably he, were on, and also “the Conductor,” and what was that about? What was “the Conductor” supposed to mean?

  Meanwhile my aunt dried her hands and dried her hands until the drying of her hands began to take on a religious aspect. Finally, she stopped drying her hands, then lay down on her bed and placed the towel over her face, like a veil, or a shroud, and then that took on a religious aspect also.

  “Why do you think he’s crazy?” Aunt Beatrice finally asked, and the towel puffed up with each word.

  “You think he’s not?”

  “I think he’s in love.”

  I hadn’t really argued with my aunt up until now. Maybe up until now I hadn’t wanted to start an argument because I hadn’t thought I’d win the argument. But I really did believe I was in the right this time. So I repeated the facts, as I understood them, and then said, “That’s not love. That’s delusion.”

  My aunt didn’t respond right away. She was quiet for so long that I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Her breathing was so shallow, it didn’t even disturb the cloth. And only then, right before my aunt spoke, did I realize that my aunt believed the Sociologist was alive, just as the Reverend John Lawrence believed my mother was alive, and so when I said he was deluded, I might as well have been saying my aunt was deluded, too.

  “You can be so stupid, Calvin,” Aunt Beatrice finally said. It was the second time in as many hours that she’d called me stupid. And though she said it in her normal bright tone, I could feel and hear how much she really meant it.

  “Did I hurt your feelings, Calvin?” my aunt said in that same tone, her face still underneath the cloth.

  I admitted that she had and then waited for her to apologize. She didn’t, of course. She did remove the cloth, though, so that maybe I could better see and hear how sorry she wasn’t.

  “Good,” Aunt Beatrice said, and then added, “I said what I said because it was true. And because I wanted to.”

  Fuck you is what I wanted to say and is what I should have said because it was what I wanted to say, and that was the lesson here: say what you want to say. “Just because you say something is true,” I said instead, trying to control my voice, trying to keep the pain out of it, “and just because you say what you want, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”

  My aunt nodded. “If it doesn’t hurt,” she said, “then you’re not doing it right.”

  118.

  I left my aunt’s room without saying goodbye. But then I didn’t know where to go. Home, I thought. It was early afternoon there. My house would be empty. The dog had probably run off by now. The green would be empty, too. It would be too early in the day for the Otises to commence one of their public battles. It would be peaceful, empty, and I would be alone, and there would be no one there to point out my stupidity. I missed it suddenly, and desperately, the way you do a place that you can’t get to as soon as you need to. I could go to my sleeper room on the train, of course. But to do what? I wasn’t tired. I could write my blog, but my aunt had told me not to. She’d told me I didn’t know anything about lying, and now she’d told me I didn’t know anything about love either. Well, fuck her again that was my thought, a thought that didn’t seem suitable for a blog post or a sermon or my house or even my room. And so I went to the train’s bar car.

  119.

 
; If you need proof of how thoroughly Aunt Beatrice was in my life, and my head, by now: I went to the bar car in flight from my aunt, and when I got to the bar car, my first thought was how much my aunt would hate it.

  Because the bar car wasn’t gloomy. It was brightly lit—not as brightly lit as the place where we’d been given the gerbil film but not far from it. On my left as I walked into the car was a counter, and at that counter you ordered your drinks and also your food if you wanted some. I couldn’t imagine wanting some: the car smelled like long-suffering meat, and there was something bubbling on the stovetop behind the bar and something being overcooked in the microwave above the stovetop.

  Which was fine. I wasn’t there to eat. I ordered two Carlsbergs from the bartender. I wasn’t expecting anyone to show up to drink the second one—not my aunt, not the Reverend John Lawrence. No, I planned on drinking them both, fast. And then ordering two more, and then two more, as needed.

  The bartender gave me the cans of beer, and I paid him and then turned to face the rest of the car. On my right were three booths. They were filled with happy beer drinkers, four people to a booth. On the left was a tiny high-top table bolted to the wall and floor, and next to the table, two stools. The stools’ seats were covered with a bright, busily patterned fabric that reminded me of the smocks dental hygienists wear. The stools were bolted to the floor, too. They were close enough to the table for you to put your drink on it but too far away to lean on. There was no footrest on the stools themselves, and so you either had to let your feet dangle or to prop your feet on the wall-length baseboard radiator, which was blasting very hot air. I did that, and the hot air seemed to immediately saturate my distressed jeans. I leaned forward and tried to look out the windows—that side of the car was mostly windows—but the bar was so bright that all I could see outside was darkness. From behind me I could hear the Germans in the booths laughing. I knew they were Germans because I could understand a few random German words—mainly ja and nein—and that I could understand a few words, whereas before I could understand nothing in Swedish or Danish, might have seemed like further progress, it wasn’t: because these were words that even a child, even a non-German-speaking child, would know, and I’d known them as a child, and I’d felt lonely as a child, and I felt even lonelier now. And that was not progress. I looked out the windows into the dark nothing, listened to the laughter behind me, finished one beer, then started drinking the other, and I decided that once I finished that beer I would kill myself.

  And I must have said out loud, “I’m going to kill myself!” because Caroline sat down on the stool next to mine and wanted to know more about it. Now when or why, but how.

  “Booze,” she said, her eyes going to my Carlsberg. “No, that’d take too long. Knife,” she said, her eyes going to the counter, but the knives there were only plastic. “Self-inflicted gunshot? But you don’t look like you’d own a gun. Or know how to fire one.”

  “I could throw myself under the train,” I suggested, and Caroline seemed to like that idea. She sipped her glass of red wine and nodded thoughtfully. I wondered if my aunt had told her how my mother had died. And I also wondered how it had never occurred to me until that moment that maybe my mother’s death hadn’t been accidental, that maybe she had driven her car on the tracks on purpose, that my hypothetical suicide had been her actual one.

  120.

  Now that Caroline was there, I didn’t want her to leave, and I wanted to say something to keep her here, but I didn’t know what, and so I asked Caroline to tell me the story she’d been telling my aunt earlier. She nodded grimly, and her eyes went to the top of her head as though she were trying to remember where she’d left off.

  “Can I tell you what Ron liked to eat?” she asked. I said she could, and she said, “Ron liked to eat kale,” and she said “kale” like Dawn said “conventional woodstove.” “So after we got divorced I decided I wanted to eat the opposite of kale. I wanted the most disgusting food I could find. A microwavable chicken burrito and a Slim Jim from the Red E Mart. I brought the food back to my new apartment. It was the kind of apartment in a building off the interstate with a billboard saying if you’d lived there you’d be home by now.”

  She paused to see if I was following her. In fact, I had never seen one of those signs, but I still said, “You know, by the time I see those signs, I’ve already passed the exit.”

  Caroline nodded. “The apartment was not as convenient as it first seemed. Can I tell you what it smelled like?”

  “All right,” I said, as was habit by now. Dawn would have hated me for saying that and would have said so, but Caroline didn’t seem to notice.

  “It smelled like chemicals, like dry cleaning. Let me remind you that I had no plates, no utensils, no furniture.”

  “It sounds wonderful.”

  “I let Ron take everything. I wanted to start over. I had no money, no health insurance. All I had was the apartment, the Slim Jim, the microwavable chicken burrito. Junk food. Isolation. Deprivation. I wanted to live like I did in college.”

  “I never lived like that in college,” I admitted.

  “I didn’t either. I wanted to live like other people lived in college. I was really looking forward to sticking that burrito in the microwave and then forty-five to sixty seconds later hearing that ding.”

  “So you did have a microwave.”

  “I did not have a microwave. I’d unwrapped the burrito, stuck it in the cardboard sleeve and then stood there, in front of the counter, where the microwave would have been in a normal kitchen. I stood there for minutes, just coming to the slow understanding that I did not have a microwave. I don’t know for certain, but I must have been slack jawed. Can I tell you how I felt?”

  I’d noticed by now that Caroline liked to ask if she could tell you something, and so as an experiment I said, “No.” She smiled at that, her mouth once again elevating her face, although she then went ahead and told me how she felt anyway.

  “Bereft. Like something essential had been taken from me. Because you know who had a microwave?”

  “The Red E Mart?”

  Caroline didn’t respond right away. The Germans were still in their booths but were quiet, as though they, too, were listening to Caroline’s story. The lights had dimmed in the bar car. It felt more like a place my aunt might like. Outside the bar car’s windows I could see the outlines of trees and then a house, dark, except for one light on upstairs.

  “You know,” Caroline finally said. “The Red E Mart probably did have a microwave. And had I thought of that, then that would have probably changed the trajectory of this story. But no, not the Red E Mart. It was Ron. Ron had my microwave. This is what the jerk had done to me, Calvin.” Caroline sounded tired, as though she’d lost her enthusiasm for the story. It was the way my mother had sounded when she’d delivered my father’s eulogy. It was the way I felt when thinking about Dawn, and the end of our marriage, and also the beginning and middle of our marriage. But I didn’t want the story to end, by which I mean I didn’t want her to stop talking to me, and so I tried to encourage her by saying, “He stole your heart and then he stole your microwave.”

  “Well, actually, it was Ron’s microwave. From before the marriage.”

  “Oh,” I said, and Caroline nodded, her eyes on the ceiling now, and I waited for her to finish telling the story until it became clear to me that she wasn’t going to finish telling the story.

  121.

  This was one of things Caroline and my aunt had in common. They rarely told you the whole story. My aunt never told you the whole story because she wanted you to figure out the rest for yourself; Caroline didn’t tell you the whole story because she often hadn’t yet figured out how the story she was telling was supposed to end.

  122.

  I said earlier that Caroline’s eyes were always in motion. They were moving now. They seemed to operate almost independently from the rest of her face. They flitted to me, to the window, to her almost empty glass of
wine, to the bar, to the window, to me, to the ceiling.

  Look at me! is what I wanted to say. But I was afraid that would sound stupid. And I didn’t want to sound stupid anymore. I wanted to say something that Caroline would remember, but I did not want her to remember how stupid I sounded. But how would I do that? What would I say? Suddenly, one of my aunt’s commandments came into my head: “Thou shall lie, but only if thou lies well.” And so I said, “I was married once. To a woman named Dawn. We had a son. It’s still too painful to even say his name. To even think it. Because when he was a year old, he died. Of kidney stones. And after that, Dawn and I were never the same.”

  And Caroline looked at me, and then kept looking at me! That’s what I remember. That she looked at me, straight at me, her large brown eyes, slightly threaded with red. That she looked at me and kept looking at me for a very long time.

  123.

  The rest of the night was like a dream if your definition of a dream includes getting very drunk in the bar car while hurtling through the German night before having sex with a strange woman in her room on a train, which is next to your elderly aunt’s room and then, afterward, trying to organize your feelings while one of the Lord of the Rings movies is playing with the sound off on the strange woman’s laptop computer.

  “This is the one where someone’s always looking off into the distance, hoping for the arrival of the wizard and his cavalry and whatnot,” Caroline said.

  Caroline, it turns out, was from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She told me that she’d been in Copenhagen for an international convention of seafood processors and that she was taking the train to another international convention of seafood processors in Marseille.