by Brock Clarke
Anyway, with my eyes still closed, I thought about what the voice had said. The message seemed clear enough, even obvious: I should open my eyes. I opened my eyes, but the room was only dark. And when I got up and turned on the overhead light, the room was only light.
181.
After that, I vowed to stay awake with the light on until the sixth tray came. I sat up in my bed, got up from my bed, walked from wall to wall, touching all four walls, just to remind myself that they, and I, were real. There were my markings on the wall. There was the defunct pen on the sink. There was my toilet. The toilet smelled. I smelled, too: my unwashed distressed German jeans, my dirty shiny shirt. I rubbed my head, being careful to avoid the wound. I’d bought a razor back in Hamburg but had never used it, had left it behind on the train. Mostly there was baldness, mostly there was nothing, but here and there I felt stubble that was more than just stubble, actual growing blades of hair, isolated patches, popping up like unconnected ideas.
By this point, I had decided I wasn’t even going to try to pass my stones anymore. I was going to wait until the voice told me what to do about them. And if the voice didn’t tell me what to do about them, well, I would just suffer them and keep them with me forever.
“We suffer most,” the voice said, “when someone we love has caused us pain.”
182.
John Calvin once wrote about his conversion from Catholicism to, well, Calvinism: “Being exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen, and much more at that which threatened me in view of death, I, duty bound, made it my first business to betake myself to your way.”
That was the way I began to feel about the voice. The more the voice told me, the more obvious the message seemed to be, the more it seemed I was not quite getting the message and the more desperate I was to get what I was not quite getting.
183.
Also, I really should have eaten something. All would have seemed less mysterious if I’d eaten at least from one tray. But hunger is like a narcotic. It prevents you from thinking clearly, sure, but you can also become addicted to it: when the seventh tray came sliding under the door, I remember feeling that I just couldn’t wait not to eat what was on it.
184.
The overhead bulb went out. It fizzed liked bulbs do when they’re about to quit, and then it quit, and then my room was completely dark.
“Why don’t you eat, Calvin?” the voice said, and I felt lit up from within. It was the first time the voice had asked me a question, the first time it had addressed me by name. And I thought then of how my aunt often addressed me by name, and how every time she did so, it felt like she was trying to remind me of who I was, or who I could be.
“Because of my principles,” I said. My voice was strange to me: it sounded thin, starved, wraithlike.
“Principles are merely rules,” the voice said, “that no one but yourself says you have to follow.”
“What are your principles?” I asked. This might strike you as a bold question for me to ask. But remember, I was in the dark now, and it’s sometimes easier to ask questions you shouldn’t in the dark. Also, I felt like I was ready to ask a question; the voice had made me ready, not just to be spoken to but to speak back, too. As John Calvin had said about his own conversion, “Having thus received some taste and knowledge of true godliness, I was immediately inflamed with so intense a desire to make progress therein.”
Meanwhile, as I waited for the answer, I could feel the engine catch, could hear the ship groan and turn, could hear its cargo shift all around me. And that noise, that groaning and turning and shifting, must have done something to me. I lurched over to the toilet and expelled the stone. I remembered from before that feeling of great release, and then, after hearing the puny sound of my stone plinking into the water, that feeling of mild shame that something so small had caused me such great misery.
Anyway, the voice never did tell me what its principles were, because just then the door swung open. I’d been standing at the toilet, but the light coming through the doorway was so overwhelming that I staggered back and sat down on the cot again. There in the doorway was the man who kidnapped me. He was wearing a paramilitary outfit: black boots, black pants tucked into the boots, ribbed black sweater with epaulets. But he wasn’t wearing the ski mask, and so I could see he was young or, at any rate, younger than I: blond, clean shaven, dimpled, a crew cut. I had never seen him before. He gestured for me to stand up and said, “We’re almost there.”
185.
Outside on the deck the night air was heavy and warm. The harbor lights sparkled in the distance, and farther in the distance car lights crossed a bridge, and even farther more car lights crossed another bridge. The bridges crossed a river, or a harbor, or a bay, some body of water rippling black. On both sides of the ship there were steep humped hills, the dark only occasionally dotted by window lights. But those few lights didn’t make it seem lonely. They made it seem like this was a place where someone always stayed up to wait for you. Up on the hill to my left I saw the outline of enormous statue, a giant or a Jesus, I couldn’t tell which, his arms stretched wide in what looked like welcome.
186.
It took a long time for us to ease into the dock, so long that by the time the ship finally stopped moving and the gangway was lowered, I could see the promise of daybreak beyond the hills.
The man who’d kidnapped me had disappeared for a time after releasing me from my room, but now he was back. “Ready?” he said, gesturing toward the gangway.
“Are you going to put a pillowcase over my head again?” I asked, and he nodded thoughtfully as though I’d asked a good question.
“No,” he said. “We only do that when we’re kidnapping someone. If you wear a ski mask and put a sack over someone’s head in public, it makes anyone who sees it assume that person with the sack over his head deserves it. That he really has done something terrible.”
“And if you don’t put a sack over his head?” I asked, and the man said, “Then people think he’s being kidnapped.”
187.
Minutes later, we left the ship and were following a thin strip of concrete that ran serpentine along and across canals and boat slips, past what looked like a customs house, an old one, chipping pale pink paint on crumbling stucco. We kept walking. To the left I could see a shipyard, stacks and stacks of blue metal shipping containers; to the right, bobbing in their berths, small sailboats, five of them, with white hulls and bright sails. The man escorted me past the sailboats, veering right and then continuing to veer right alongside and across a channel of water and then right again across another channel of water. Except that it was the same channel of water, and we’d crossed it twice. In front of us now was the ship I’d just been on, the SS Antonio. We were headed back to it. And in that way I discovered that whatever country we were in, it wasn’t an especially efficient country. It was a country that required you to do the most to accomplish the least.
Finally, we approached a plastic-covered pallet on the concrete, between an open cargo hold and an idling white van. A man was lifting up the plastic, peeking underneath, as if doing inventory. From behind I could see his black hair curling around his white shirt collar.
The kidnapper shouted something to the man in yet another language I didn’t understand. What the kidnapper had said was loud but full of shushing sounds. It was as though the kidnapper was bellowing at someone to be quiet.
The man turned around. It was someone I knew. But his wasn’t a name I’d thought to write on my cell wall.
“Bom dia! ” Zhow said, arms raised, and for a moment I thought he was going to hug me, like a cousin, like a brother, but he didn’t. “Welcome to Lisbon!” he said instead.
Then he stepped closer to me. Squinted, as though he weren’t sure I was who he thought I was. “Ow,” Zhow said, and I realized he wasn’t squinting at me but at my head wound.
“He . . .” I started to say, turning to gesture at the man who’d given me the head wound. But he was go
ne. I really hoped I would never see him again, and I never did.
I turned back to Zhow. “How do you spell your name?” and he told me: J-o-ã-o. I thanked him and then asked him if he knew where Aunt Beatrice was. His dark face darkened. Instead of answering, he walked back to the small pallet and began removing boxes from the pallet and putting them into the back of a white van parked nearby. I stood there uselessly until João gestured with his head to help. I walked over to the pallet. I was afraid in my weakened state that I wouldn’t be able to lift and carry the box, but it was surprisingly light. I peeked inside and saw stacks of DVDs.
“Are you smuggling pornography?” I asked João, and he smiled, as if to say, Of course. But that didn’t make much sense to me. You could get pornography anywhere. On your phone, for instance, if you had one, although when I’d had one, I’d never gotten pornography there.
“But why do you bother?” I asked, and my cousin shrugged.
“I like it better when it’s smuggled,” he said.
Then we got into the van and drove. To our right, what I know now to be the Tagus River. To the left were faded pink, yellow, and blue houses with wrought-iron balconies off the front. Laundry—underwear, socks, even sneakers—hung from the railings. The balconies were so narrow: it didn’t seem possible for a normal-sized person to fit on them. Maybe, I thought, they were there just to hang laundry.
We took a left and began switchbacking up a series of hills. The streets were narrow, barely wider than the van, and on either side of them were walls covered with gleaming sky blue tiles with thin white fleur-de-lis. I opened my window and got a whiff of citrus, and saw, above a courtyard wall, lemons and oranges hanging from branches, the shiny leaves fluttering in the wind.
João drove fast, his tires thumping against the cobblestones.
“You seem to really know where you’re going,” I said.
“I was born here,” he said, and I knew then why he’d been given a Portuguese name.
“But you’ve been living in Stockholm,” I said. And then I took a guess. “And before that you lived with your mother in Ohio.”
“I lived in Ohio for sixteen years,” João said. “I’ve lived in Stockholm for twenty. But I was born here.” And I could tell how much that distinction really meant to him. And of course I then thought about Congress. I was born there, had lived there all my life, had never really imagined living anywhere else. But now I hoped I’d never see it again.
Suddenly there were three black poles in the middle of the street. João stopped the van, turned it off. Just left it there in the middle of the street, with the pornography still in back, and from then on we walked.
We walked up. Up a series of steep stairs that led to streets that led to more steep stairs. After about fifteen minutes of climbing we reached a point where to the right there were buildings but to the left there was nothing really. A chain-link fence. The remains of a building, what once had been a foundation, some rubble. On the other side of the rubble the land fell off steeply into a ravine filled with bricks, garbage, fallen trees. The sun was now burning off the remaining misty morning. We came to the top of our particular hill. In the distance there was another one. On top of it was a church, some cedar trees. It looked like the highest hill. But probably there was no highest hill: Lisbon seemed like a city where you would never find the highest hill. On the ship I’d wondered if we were going to sail forever. Now I wondered if we were going to climb forever. If so, I would need better shoes: I could feel the cobblestones through the thin soles of my German boots. “How much farther?” I asked João, who was a few feet ahead of me. Two stories above his head were two black brackets, fixed to the blue-tiled wall, and hanging from the brackets were two gray tin pails, mini–palm trees in them, graffiti on the pails. Between and slightly above the brackets was a window, open. And out of that window a voice announced, “Distance is a matter of the mind and not just the map.” I recognized the voice. It was the voice I’d been hearing in my room on the ship. I’d assumed, on the ship, that the voice was speaking to me, and to me alone. But no. João was looking up at the window: he’d heard the voice, too.
188.
Seconds later, a door opened onto the street. A man stepped through the open door. He had a full head of white hair, curly, and a white beard, also full, but trimmed: he hadn’t allowed it to creep too far down the neck or climb too high on the cheeks. A pair of silver wire-rimmed glasses dangled by a thick strap around his neck, and when he put the glasses on to get a better look at me, I saw that they were round, scholarly. He was wearing a long-sleeved blue oxford shirt with two breast pockets, the sleeves rolled to the elbows and the shirt tucked into a pair of khaki shorts. The shorts came down to the middle of his thighs. His legs were thin, long, lightly muscled, tan, flecked with white hair. It was by them that I recognized him. My aunt was right: the Sociologist had really good legs.
Fifteen
189.
“A sociologist is someone who likes to say things that sound profound until you think about them and realize that they’re mostly just obvious.” That’s what my aunt had said on the train, after we’d left Copenhagen, when I’d asked her what a sociologist was. And I remembered her definition when I first met the Sociologist in Lisbon. As I said, the Sociologist put on his glasses to get a better look at me, and then, once he’d seen what he needed to see, the Sociologist glanced up, at a seagull soaring over our heads from hill to hill, and said, “The gull is truly a master of flight.”
When the Sociologist said that about the gull, I thought of the similarly obvious things he’d said to me on the ship. But from where had he said them?
“There was a speaker and a microphone in the floor drain,” the Sociologist said, eyes still on the gull. I hadn’t even noticed a floor drain. Earlier I said that no one ever looks up, but it’s possible that not enough people look down either. “A camera in the lightbulb, too,” João added. All this—the speaker, the microphone, the camera—seemed like needless flourishes, which reminded me of another seemingly needless flourish, the very first one, the one that caused us to leave Congress and come to Europe in the first place.
“Unknown Caller,” I said. “Clear sailing.” The two of them looked at me expectantly, as though waiting for me to say more. Clearly, it wasn’t them; clearly neither of them had called me in Congress the night before my aunt had taken me away from that place. So my aunt, I thought, had been wrong about that. But I didn’t realize until later that in fact my aunt had never told me she thought it was the Sociologist who’d made that call: Connie had guessed that Aunt Beatrice believed the Sociologist was the Unknown Caller, and I’d passed off that hypothesis as my own, and my aunt had not told me I was wrong. But she hadn’t exactly told me I was right either.
“Where’s my aunt?” I wanted to know, and the Sociologist fiddled with his glasses for a moment in a way that very much reminded me of my aunt, and then he suggested we all go inside.
190.
The Sociologist’s house looked like it was being remodeled. The first floor was essentially without interior walls. A vast rectangular space, like a ballroom or a basketball court. The walls had been stripped to the studs, and there were tools everywhere: hammers, crowbars, table saws, trowels, drills. Bags of plaster. Rolls of insulation. Stacks of flooring. Piles of terra-cotta. The ceilings had been ripped open, too, rusty nails sticking out of dark brown beams.
There were stairs at both ends of that large room. We took the far staircase, which was steep and narrow, open on one side, no railing. The upstairs looked more inhabited. A long carpeted hallway with five rooms on either side. At the end of the hallway there was an open door, and we walked through it. This, I realized, was the room the Sociologist had shouted from earlier. The room was large, even larger than my hotel room in Stockholm. The walls were painted bright yellow and glowed in the morning sun.
In the far corner of the room there was a heap of technology, much of it seemingly obsolete. An overlarge c
umbersome-looking microphone affixed to a short bulky stand. A CB. A ham radio. A TV with knobs. A DVD player. Several ancient apparatuses I didn’t recognize and couldn’t name. No cell phones. No computers. Nothing of the present, only of the past.
The only piece of furniture in the room was a large comfortable-looking white wingback chair. The Sociologist sat in it. João sat on the windowsill behind him. It seemed demeaning to sit on the floor, at the Sociologist’s feet, so to speak, and so I stood.
“The Admiral is missing,” the Sociologist said, “but only insofar as we don’t know where she is.”
“The two of you split up,” João said to me. It was an accusation. As though it were my fault Aunt Beatrice and I had separated back in Lyon. And I suppose it was.
“I just wanted to travel by myself for a while,” I said.
“So our hired muscle had to separate, too,” João said. It was interesting. João was speaking English, but it wasn’t a foreign-sounding English. It sounded native, colloquial, flat, much like the Reverend John Lawrence’s. He spoke English like an Ohioan, no matter where he was born. “One went with my mother, and one went with . . .” And then he nodded in my direction.
“Your hired muscle bounced my head off a urinal,” I said. “He said not to take it personally.”
“Our other mercenary evidently said something similar to your aunt,” the Sociologist said. “But the Admiral took it personally anyway.” And for the first time I saw the Sociologist smile. The smile just burst all over his face. He quickly corralled it, though, and was stoic again. But I saw it: for that brief moment I saw how happy it made him to think of the manner in which Aunt Beatrice had taken her attempted kidnapping personally.