by Brock Clarke
But why? I asked the Sociologist. Why did he want to kidnap my aunt and bring her to Lisbon? Did he want reunion or revenge?
“That’s a good question,” the Sociologist said again, but he didn’t seem like he was being evasive: I just don’t think he himself had yet decided on an answer.
“But you don’t need to kidnap Aunt Beatrice,” I said. “She has all these gifts for you.” I explained what they were and added, “She’s been looking for you.” This seemed to astonish the Sociologist. He took off his glasses, letting them dangle from their string while he rubbed his face. When he removed his hands, the Sociologist’s face looked young, the way old faces can look when revisited by some kind of young hope, or fear.
“You know this?”
I told him I did. I told him that Aunt Beatrice had admitted she was looking for him. Although, again, I didn’t realize until later that this was true only in the sense that my aunt had allowed me to believe that it was true.
191.
The Sociologist then turned to his son, who looked as astonished as his father. It was easy to picture João, thirty-odd years into the future, white haired, white bearded, long shanked, rubbing his face, wondering how so late in life he’d gotten something so fundamental so wrong. “She didn’t,” João began to say, then stopped himself. I could see he was wary of me listening, but the Sociologist nodded for him to go on. “She didn’t even mention you.”
“Tell me,” the Sociologist said.
“I already told you.”
“Please tell me again.”
João did. He recounted the conversation he’d had with Aunt Beatrice in Stockholm, the one that I’d heard but not understood because it was in Swedish. He’d asked what she wanted, and she’d said, “I just wanted to spend some time with my son before I die.”
“She sounded pathetic,” João said to me and his father, and I heard my aunt’s voice, sounding pathetic, when she’d said something similar to me back in Boston. “But there was nothing wrong with her except that she was a liar. That’s what I told her. And then I told her that I wasn’t her son. I told her, ‘As far as you’re concerned, I’m no one.’”
The Sociologist didn’t say anything to that. Me neither. I couldn’t believe that anyone had dared say something like that to my aunt. I had the sense that João couldn’t quite believe it either. He had a look on his face I’d only seen once before, when my old classmate and neighbor, Charles Otis, had won a hot-dog-eating contest at the Congress town fair. Like Charles, then, João now looked proud, and queasy.
“That was wrong,” the Sociologist finally said. His voice was even softer than normal, maybe because he was talking to himself.
“But she betrayed you,” João said.
“People are betrayed,” his father said in his usual solemn, obvious way. “But usually, before or after they are betrayed, they are the ones doing the betraying.”
Once again no one said anything for a time. The message was obvious enough, but the sentence had wound around it, and it took both João and I some time to untangle the cord.
“Well, shit,” João finally said, and once again I could hear the state of Ohio in his voice.
192.
The Sociologist then told João what my aunt had told me in Geneva: the story of how the Sociologist and my mother had had sex, which was why my aunt had betrayed him. I knew this already, of course, but I was surprised to discover that João had not.
As I learned over the next couple of days, João was eighteen when my aunt had admitted to João that she’d betrayed his father and that the Sociologist might, in fact, still be alive. João had then fled Ohio, and had gone to Europe, where he’d found the Sociologist, because the Sociologist had allowed João to find him. And while they’d never lived together for fear of alerting Interpol to the Sociologist’s existence, they’d been in close contact. In fact, João had contacted his father after we’d seen João in Stockholm, and they’d decided to have their mercenaries follow us, kidnap us, bring us to Lisbon.
But what I found most revealing about all this was that my aunt had simply told João that she was the betrayer, and not that she’d been betrayed first, and that the Sociologist had never bothered to tell his son the complete story. Until now.
Why hadn’t Aunt Beatrice told João the whole truth? Because she would rather have been known as the victimizer than the victim. And why didn’t the Sociologist tell João the whole truth? Because he would have rather been known as the victim than the victimizer. There are two kinds of bad people. There’s my aunt, who did bad things and didn’t mind if you knew about them. And there’s the Sociologist, who very much minded. Although I never did learn whether he regretted having done bad things or just regretted other people’s knowing about them.
193.
Anyway, now that he knew that my aunt was looking for him, the Sociologist had no choice but to tell. When he was done with the story, João asked if I would leave them alone for a moment. I stepped into the hall, and João closed the door behind me. Downstairs there were work noises—hammering, sawing, drilling. Men shouting in Portuguese over the sounds of their tools. Yes, things were starting to happen downstairs, and upstairs, too.
194.
The Sociologist opened the door a few minutes later and asked me to come back in. When I did, I noticed that João was sitting in the chair. Just like that, he’d taken his father’s place. João’s lips were pursed, as though he was determined not to say something. The Sociologist spoke for him.
“How can we contact the Admiral?” the Sociologist wanted to know.
“I don’t suppose either of you has a cell phone,” I said. But the pile of antiquated machinery in the corner told me that of course they didn’t. They hadn’t forsaken technology, just the theory behind it that suggested that the only thing that qualified as technology was the newest technology. Whereas the Sociologist and João only found useful the most antiquated technology. Not that I could argue with their belief system. And not that I could have done anything with their cell phone if they’d had one. I hadn’t memorized my aunt’s phone number. I had trusted that my cell phone, now destroyed, would keep it memorized for me.
But I did have one other idea.
195.
The three of us descended the stairs into the work zone, where there were a dozen men with their belts and their tools. The Sociologist nodded and waved and said Bom dia! to the men as we passed through their zone and then outside.
“You’re having a lot of work done on your house,” I said, and then winced at how obvious a statement that was, but the Sociologist seemed to enjoy it. He flashed and then extinguished that sudden, fleeting smile again, and said, “Oh, it’s not my house.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a hotel. Or it was a hotel. It’s going to be one again when they’re finished renovating it.”
“Is it your hotel?”
“Of course not.”
“Do you have permission to stay in it?”
“Who says I need permission?”
“Did you tell the workers you have permission?”
“No.”
“They why do they let you stay there?”
“Because I act like I don’t need anyone’s permission.”
And I began to understand a little why my aunt had loved him before she betrayed him.
196.
We left the hotel and walked down the hill. After a few minutes we reached the van—it was where João had left it, still blocking the intersection that was blocked by those three black poles—climbed in it, drove to an internet cafe. We walked into the cafe, paid for our hour, sat down in front of a computer. I could see in the upper right-hand corner of the computer that it was June 15. That meant that I’d been on the ship for three days; it’d had been eight days since I’d left Congress. A lot had changed for me in those eight days. But not everything: after all, here I was, once again, staring at a screen, preparing to write yet another blog post, one th
at I hoped would somehow travel through the void and reach my aunt, wherever she was.
My plan was to post a comment on Dawn’s blog: my aunt might not check Dawn’s blog, but then, she might. In any case, it was the only thing I could think to do. But first, out of desperation, I tried my own blog. “It’s probably still frozen,” I warned the Sociologist and João. “Someone published a pornographic post under my name.”
This seemed to galvanize João a little. How pornographic was the post? he wanted to know. I didn’t answer him. I suspect he would have been disappointed in me, that the post would not for him have crossed the threshold into pornography proper. In any case, the pornographic post was gone, but my access to the blog had been mysteriously restored. There were no posts and no responses—not from Dawn, which was a relief, nor Caroline, which was a disappointment. But then, this was what I was there to do: give people something to respond to.
Journey’s End
I apologize, dear readers, for my long silence. Since you last heard from me, I was impersonated, fired, assaulted, kidnapped, imprisoned, mentally tortured. Or at least that’s what it feels like to be here in Lisbon, without access to a pellet stove! But fear not. I’ve been hired as a consultant for the Journey’s End (Fim da Viagem, for my Portuguese posse!), a hotel being remodeled on Rua Costa du Castelo by the owner, who is an old friend of my aunt’s and my mother’s. The hotel’s grand reopening is on June 18. It’s going to be huge celebration, and the owner says that all are welcome. It may be too warm to fire up the Vitra 2000s (one in every room, and the Max model in the lobby), but I feel better just knowing that they’ll be installed and that you’ll be joining us!
197.
The party was the Sociologist’s idea, and it was also his idea that it take place on June 18. The eighteenth was my aunt’s birthday, he explained. But of course I knew that, because it would have been my mother’s birthday, her seventy-ninth birthday, had it not been for that train.
Before I hit Send I warned the Sociologist, “If I do this, Aunt Beatrice won’t be the only one who shows up. There might be lots of people.” I named them: Dawn. Caroline. The Reverend John Lawrence. His sister Connie and the Butcher. “Who knows who else?” I said. Because I was sure there were other people. Other people who were reading my blog. The pellet stove industry, for instance. Other people who were looking for my aunt, and other people looking for the Sociologist himself. Interpol, for instance.
The Sociologist considered what I’d said. Nodding, nodding. I could sense something building, something huge and disappointing, the most obvious of all his obvious aphorisms. “We have the room,” the Sociologist finally said instead. “After all, we do live in a hotel.” I could hear it then, in his voice, and I can still hear it: the loneliness of all his years in exile. Small rooms, empty hotels, caves, boxcars. Fields, attics, cellars, penthouses. Maybe even churches. The Sociologist had been so many places. And he’d been alone in all of them. I knew what he was thinking: that anything would be better than more of that loneliness. “Please just do it, Calvin,” he said. And so I did what the Sociologist asked me to do.
Sixteen
198.
After I’d posted on my blog, we spent the next two days cleaning up the hotel. The workers had quit for the weekend (it was the weekend), and the Sociologist, João, and I picked up where they’d left off. We concentrated on the ballroom: first, we patched and painted. When we were done with that we scrubbed the floor of its last carpet remnants, buffed it with the power buffer. When we were done with that João went out and came back with a long buffet table, and on it he put a pair of speakers and, in between the pair of speakers, a CD player and a receiver. When we were done it looked like a room that had seen too many parties but was somewhat recovered and ready for another one.
199.
While we worked I had two significant conversations.
The first one was with João. We were spackling the ballroom’s walls. Ever since he’d found out the truth about why his mother had betrayed his father, João had been quiet, thoughtful. I knew what he was feeling: I’d felt the same way after I’d learned about my father and my aunt, and then about my mother and the Sociologist. When someone puts a new thought in your head, you want to let it stay there for a while until you’re ready for it to come out of your mouth.
“I suppose she never talked about me,” João said. He was referring to his mother. It was true that Aunt Beatrice had rarely mentioned João, and one of the times she had, she’d said he was no one. But I wasn’t going to tell João that. No, I would tell him a lie. Because under the same circumstances, I would have wanted someone to lie to me.
“She talked about you all the time,” I said.
“That’s obviously a lie,” he said. But I could tell he was trying not to smile.
We spackled for a while in silence, and then João asked, “You don’t really believe she’s dying, do you?”
“No,” I said, because I didn’t, but I thought of the recording I’d made of the Butcher back in Paris, and how now that my phone was destroyed, I’d never be able to listen to it, although I was wrong about that.
200.
The second conversation was with the Sociologist. It was later on that same day. João had left the house on an errand. The Sociologist was on a ladder, rewiring a chandelier, and I was steadying the ladder.
“I had sex with your mother because she wanted to, Calvin,” the Sociologist said. My foot was on the bottom rung, and each hand gripped the side of the ladder, and I thought how easy it would be to just knock over the ladder and kill him. But on whose behalf? Not, I realized, on my mother’s behalf, and not on my father’s either. No, if I were to kill the Sociologist, it would have been on my aunt’s behalf. As though she were something more than just an aunt.
I said earlier that when someone puts a new thought in your head, you want to let it stay there for a while until you’re ready for it to come out of your mouth. But what happens when the new thought stays in your head for so long that it becomes an old thought? It does what all old things do. It dies. And I didn’t want it to die.
“Did you ever wonder if my aunt was really my mother?” I asked the Sociologist in a rush before I could decide not to.
The Sociologist was rummaging around in the ceiling’s innards and didn’t answer at first, didn’t answer for a while, and I thought again how easy it would be to kill him. But of course, if you have that thought twice, that means it’s not so easy.
“Yes,” the Sociologist finally said.
“Did she ever say so?”
“No,” the Sociologist said. “But she talked about you all the time.”
“That’s obviously a lie,” I said. But I found myself smiling as I steadied the ladder.
201.
By noon the next day we were ready for the party to begin. But then it was five o’clock, and still, no one had shown up. The three of us had been very talkative earlier in the day, but now we were subdued, deep inside ourselves. I wondered if João and the Sociologist were thinking what I was thinking. Of how, if my aunt didn’t show up, they’d have to go back to their old lives: João peddling his pornography on the streets of Stockholm; the Sociologist on the run, alone. Me back in Congress. I’d get insurance money for the house, and I supposed I’d use it to build a new house in the same spot, and restart my old life, such as it was. The thought made me tired. Not because it seemed impossible but because it seemed inevitable.
Is it any wonder we drank too much that day? Neither João nor the Sociologist had had anything alcoholic to drink since I’d met them, and neither had I. But the waiting had been too oppressive, and around five we started to drink cheap red wine. The Sociologist had bought dozens of bottles of the stuff. It was hot that day, too, and soon I became flushed with the heat and with the wine, and that caused me to drink more wine and to feel even more flushed.
Flushed and also itchy. It had now been thirteen days since I’d last shaved my head, and it itched,
and so did my cheeks, and neck, which I’d also not shaved, and my beard felt gruesome and unkempt and slick with wine. Also, I was still wearing my German clothes. I’d washed them the day before in the bathroom sink, but still the shiny shirt felt reptilian against my clammy skin. I loosened a button to cool off, but I did not feel cooled off, and so I loosened another one.
202.
At eight o’clock, we were five bottles of wine in, and still no one had shown up, and the Sociologist and João began to argue about the music.
Days earlier, after João had found out the truth about his mother and father, João had seemed the ascendant one, and his father, the fallen. But their roles had reversed since: the father was once again the father; the son, the son. And the father had chosen the music. I didn’t know what any of it was, but even I knew that it was painfully dated and not the kind of music you played at a party. It was the kind of music you shushed people who were talking over it so you could all admire the lyrics. Several times the Sociologist shushed João and me so we could all admire the lyrics.
“I don’t hear it,” João finally said during a pause in the vocals as a harmonica bleated.
“Me neither,” I said.
“In order to hear,” the Sociologist said, beginning to aphorize and also overgesticulating with his wineglass, which he then dropped, and it shattered on the floor. I went into the kitchen to find a broom and a dustpan. You know what it’s like after a major cleaning, when you’ve put away the instruments of your cleaning so completely that it’s hard to find them again. But I finally did and was holding a broom in one hand, a dustpan in the other, when I reentered the ballroom and saw João and the Sociologist standing there face-to-face with Dawn. She was wearing her black riding boots, jeans tucked into them, and her hair was wild and springing out in all directions, and in the moments before I remembered that she was mostly awful and that she’d burned down my house, I was surprised at how pretty she was and how much I wanted to say that I’d missed her.