by Brock Clarke
And how did this make me feel to say this true thing meanly? Did it make me feel grown up? I don’t know. I do know that it made me feel good. Because I’d wanted to hurt the Reverend John Lawrence again, and I’d done it again. This was another thing I’d learned from my aunt, another of her commandments: “Thou shall hurt other people because it feels good.” Although of course, only for a moment, and only before those people start hurting you, and also other people.
214.
Just then, the table supporting the stereo equipment came crashing down. Everyone turned to look, and the people standing near the table began to protest their innocence. But since most of the people standing next to the table were young people, the older people seemed generationally disinclined to believe them. Recriminations began to fly, in many different languages. Only after a few minutes of this did I notice that Wrong Way Connie was no longer standing next to her brother, and right after that her brother seemed to notice the same thing. The Sociologist squinted myopically into the corners of the room and, not finding her there, ran in the direction of the kitchen. In the kitchen I knew there was a narrow set of stairs that led to the cellar, and in the cellar I knew there was another narrow set of stairs that led to a bulkhead, which led to outside.
“Calvin,” Caroline’s voice said from behind me. I turned, and there she was, just a foot away, looking just as lovely as she’d had on the train. And I was suddenly aware of how I looked worse—flushed, drunk, toothless, unshaven, ungroomed, unbuttoned—and how I must have looked to her when I hadn’t shown up to meet her in Marseille, and how I also must have looked to her when she’d read that blog post. I suddenly wished Wrong Way Connie would come back, so she could create a distraction so that I could disappear.
“I didn’t write that blog post,” I told Caroline, for starters. And when she didn’t respond, I elaborated: “It wasn’t me.”
This caused Caroline to do something odd: she put her hands on my shoulders—not as a lover might but as a parent would a child—and her eyes flickered around the room as she considered what to say next.
“Can I tell you, Calvin,” Caroline said, her eyes finally looking at mine, “that not for one second did I think you were the one who wrote that blog post.” She didn’t say this unkindly, but still, I felt diminished, like I was all of a sudden less than a person. Because this was another thing, perhaps the main thing, that my aunt taught me: if you are not capable of surprising someone, then you are not capable of being fully human.
“I don’t think you’re from Sheboygan or that you’re a seafood processor,” I told Caroline, hoping to surprise her by passing off my aunt’s opinion as my own. When she didn’t respond I added, “I think you’re Interpol.”
Caroline didn’t immediately respond to that either. Instead, she looked confused, and for a moment I thought she was going to confess that she didn’t know what it meant to be Interpol. But instead Caroline sighed and said, “Well, shit.” She removed her hands from my shoulders, then slowly lowered her arms. Caroline’s eyes narrowed. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking over my shoulder at something behind me in the ballroom.
I turned to see what she was seeing. There, at the opposite end of the room, at the mouth of the kitchen, was the Sociologist. He’d returned to the ballroom and now looked blankly at the room. He rubbed his eyes, then blinked, as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Or maybe it was just that he couldn’t see much of anything. His wrecked glasses still hung from his neck.
I say that the Sociologist looked at the room. But really he was looking at the Reverend John Lawrence, who was standing ten feet away, pointing a gun at the Sociologist. The Reverend was holding the gun in his right hand, which was shaking, and so the gun was shaking, too, and so he held it with both hands, and then it was steady.
“Who are you?” the Sociologist wanted to know. Although it didn’t sound like he cared terribly much about the answer. His voice was far away, and I wondered if he was thinking about his sister and how she’d left, and my aunt, how she hadn’t yet arrived. Meanwhile, Caroline had stepped to my left. She was wearing a white dress, and over that a blue linen blazer, and her right hand was in the right pocket of that blazer.
“I am the Reverend John Lawrence,” the Reverend John Lawrence said, sounding very much like a drunk man trying to sound sober. Each word, each syllable, was pronounced carefully, as though being spoken for the first, or last, time.
“Never heard of you,” the Sociologist said, and that was the wrong thing to say. The Reverend John Lawrence took a step closer, and I saw, out of the corners of my eyes, little movements, shufflings, as the young bloggers and old criminals tried to scurry away, like mice, along the edges of the room.
“You had sex with Nola,” the Reverend John Lawrence said, and then glanced at me, because of course I was the one who’d told him so. And of course that meant I was one of the people responsible for whatever was going to happen next. I knew that then, and I know it now, too.
The Sociologist rubbed his eyes again, and while rubbing his eyes, he yelled, “Come on, man, that was forty years ago!” It was the first time I’d heard the Sociologist raise his voice. And what a thing for him to yell! What a thing for him to say, or even think! As though it mattered whether he’d slept with my mother forty years earlier or two weeks earlier. After all, John Calvin had died 452 years earlier, and right up until her death my mother still quoted him, and for that matter, so do I.
“We were supposed to go on a cruise,” the Reverend John Lawrence said very quietly now, and I noted the finality in his voice, and I wasn’t the only one.
“No!” Caroline yelled, and she had her own gun pointed now, at the Reverend John Lawrence. But the Reverend John Lawrence didn’t listen: he did the only thing that he thought was left for him to do, and then so did Caroline.
Seventeen
215.
At the end of my mother’s famous book, my mother wrote, “We are empty shells. But even so, there is not room inside us to keep everything. If you keep nothing else from this book, keep John Calvin. Lose me. Lose my son. Lose the book. Lose yourself. Keep John Calvin, who will save you in the way I, and my son, and it, and you yourself, cannot.”
It is fair to say that by this point I had lost myself. How strange, then, to turn away from screaming, the cordite (that was the smell I’d smelled in Paris), the bodies, the wine, and to look at the doorway and to realize that I’d been found. Because standing in the hotel doorway was the man wearing a T-shirt that read im difficult to kidnap. It took me a moment to remember where I’d seen the T-shirt before: in Paris, right after my aunt had seen the Butcher and stolen her prescription pad and procured the pills and right before she’d told me that my house had burned down. And then I saw that it wasn’t only his T-shirt that was familiar. I knew the man wearing it, but his also wasn’t a name that I’d thought to write on my ship cell’s wall.
216.
It was Charles Otis, my old classmate and neighbor from Congress.
Charles. I had barely lived a moment, I realized, in which Charles had not been there, watching me. There he was—in preschool, elementary, middle, and high; on my father’s football, basketball, and baseball teams; in the back pew in my mother’s church. He’d not gone to college with me, not gone to college at all, but once I’d spotted him on my college campus’s academic quad. This was during my junior year. “Charles!” I’d yelled and run over to him, more surprised than happy to see him there. The college was two hours away from Congress. Charles had looked sheepish, as though he’d been caught at something. He’d said he was there for work. “What work?” I’d asked. “Firefighting,” he said, and then walked away.
Charles: he had been everywhere. And for months after that night in Lisbon, Charles stayed with me, in my dreams, and what was especially strange about those dreams is that they seemed not just to be my dreams but also João’s: in those dreams, Charles was still wearing his T-shirt but was otherwise naked, and
a small rodent was on top of him, moving erratically, but Charles wasn’t looking at the rodent—he was looking at me.
217.
I walked toward Charles, and once I reached him we began walking down the hill, toward the river. I struggled to know what to say to him. There were too many things, and they all seemed outrageous, and so finally I decided to ask him where his father was.
“I had to leave Dad at home,” Charles said.
“Why?”
“Old man stuff,” Charles said, shrugging. “Bad knees. Bad back. He has these really bad headaches. He forgets things. I don’t know why.”
I managed to not remind him of that time he’d knocked his father unconscious with a full bottle of laundry detergent. Charles shrugged again, looking sad, trying to rally.
“No big deal. Just typical old man stuff,” he said, and I could hear how badly he wanted that to be true.
I searched for something encouraging to say about his father. There wasn’t much. But I did remember that news article, the one Aunt Beatrice had shown me on her phone, the one about my house being burned down. Charles wasn’t in the photo. Now I knew why. His father had been in the photo, but I remembered how his back had been to the fire, not fighting it.
“Your father wasn’t too old to burn down my house,” I guessed, and Charles smiled. I didn’t ask Charles why his father had burned down my house, because I knew that his father hadn’t done it on his own behalf any more than Charles had followed me to Europe on his own behalf. I was sure now that my aunt had hired Charles’s father to burn down my house, just as she’d hired Charles to watch over me in Europe, just as she’d had him and his father watch over me my entire life, keeping me safe, until she could come get me herself.
218.
One more thing about Lisbon before we left it then, and before I leave it in memory now. We walked, in silence, until we got to a plaza by the Tagus. It was only five in the morning, but even so the plaza was full of people walking in pairs. I don’t mean young lovers walking together. I mean old couples. And I don’t mean one old man and one old woman. I mean, two couples, together, two old men, two old women. I saw a dozen of these pairs of pairs. And always, the women were walking in front, linked arm and arm. And always, the men were behind, heads slightly down, hands clasped behind their backs, close enough to be touching but definitely not touching. This sight made me feel hopeful, and also desperate. I couldn’t have told you why. Although of course I could have told you why.
“What would you do,” I asked Charles, “if I looped my arm through yours right now?”
He seemed to think about it for a minute. Or maybe he’d already been thinking about it. Maybe he’d noticed the couples, too.
“I’d punch you right in your fucking head wound,” Charles finally said, “and then I’d knock out your other front tooth.” But it sounded like this was something he had to say, and I didn’t really think he would do it. Charles’s left hand was in his pants pocket, and I looped my right arm through his left and felt his skin against mine. Charles yanked his arm away, and shouted, “What the fuck!” which, in that early hour, sounded like a gunshot. But he did not punch me. He may have wanted to do. But he didn’t.
219.
We’d walked down to the plaza because that was the only place to get a cab at that early hour. We got one, took it to the airport. Got on a plane. I won’t tell you where the plane went. There are reasons even now why I wouldn’t want you to know. But I will tell you what happened after Charles and I got off the plane, at the end of a very long wait and a very long line to get through customs.
“Look at us, Calvin,” Charles said. And I thought I knew what he meant. Look at us, two guys from Congress, here in ________, surrounded by so many people who don’t know us, so many people who are so unlike us.
But then we got to passport control. Charles was in charge. He was holding both our passports and handed them to the customs agent. The man said something rapid fire in yet another language I didn’t understand, but he must have asked who was who. Because Charles pointed to himself and said, “Charles.” And then Charles pointed to me, and said, “Geeker.” Which I suspect was his revenge for me looping my arm through his.
“Geeeeeeker,” the customs agent said, really drawing out the middle vowels. English wasn’t his first, or probably even his second, language, but it sounded like he knew exactly what the nickname meant. Although of course he couldn’t have known.
220.
From the airport Charles drove for an hour, crossed a river, and a border, from one country into another, and then drove for another hour. The vegetation grew greener, the roads dustier. Suddenly, on our left the vegetation disappeared and in its place, sand, dunes, tall as foothills. On our far right, the ocean and, between the road and the ocean, shacks with corrugated tin roofs, leaning telephone poles, ancient metal signs with the names of gasoline companies that didn’t exist anymore, and, underneath them, pumps that didn’t have any gasoline in them. Once in a while one of these gas stations had been turned into a cafe, plastic tables scattered around the pumps. I didn’t see any women. Only men, sitting at the tables, smoking, watching us as we rattled by.
Finally, we turned right off the main dirt road onto a smaller one that got narrower and narrower until it became clear that we were driving on a road that was actually a path and wasn’t meant to be driven on. By the end it was too narrow to drive on at all, hemmed in by spiky, dense green shrubs on either side. We got out of the car, and the shrubs pricked me and tore through my shiny German shirt and my already distressed jeans. In front of us was a house. Two stories, white stucco, with a long-pitched roof. A large window facing the path. Charles had parked the car in front of a set of large double doors, wood, closed. It reminded me of a church. But then, if you grow up the son of a minister who named you after John Calvin, every building reminds you of a church.
221.
We walked into the house. It was another first floor dominated by one large room, although this room wasn’t nearly as large as the hotel’s ballroom. And like the hotel’s ballroom, there wasn’t much furniture in this room. Just a long wooden dining room table. At the head of the table was John Calvin’s chair, and on the table was João’s DVD, and the bejeweled knife my aunt had stolen in Copenhagen, and the skull she had stolen from the Butcher in Paris, and also several other objects that I hadn’t seen before: a hand grenade with the pin still in it; what appeared to be our host country’s national constitution, an early draft, tattered, with words crossed out in faint blue ink; a capsized large brass church bell with the clanger missing; a tennis racket signed on the handle by I suppose the famous tennis player (I’d never heard of him) who’d played with it; a black velvet bag overflowing with ancient-looking coins; a lamp made of deer hooves; a dozen small plastic bags full of what I guessed was marijuana. My aunt had been busy. Although I wondered for whom all these things were intended if they weren’t for the Sociologist. I dared, for a second, for much longer than a second, to think that maybe they were for me.
Charles yelled “Hello!” but no one responded. So we left the house and took a rutted path through more of those spiky shrubs, toward the ocean. It was high tide, and only a thin strip of beach remained. But there my aunt was, sitting on a chair, her back to us. Not a beach chair. A kitchen chair, wooden, spindle backed, with one of the spindles missing. Charles yelled “Hello!” again, and my aunt stood up—haltingly, unsteadily, I thought, and in getting up, she grabbed the back of the chair for support and the chair itself rocked back in the sand and I thought both of them were going to tip over. Neither did, and by the time we reached her, she was standing independently of the chair. I noticed that her glasses were missing, but otherwise she seemed unchanged, eternal, and all of a sudden it seemed silly that I’d ever wondered if I was going to see her again. Because of course I would.
“Welcome, Calvin,” she said in her bright voice, and then smiled at me, and there, I saw another thing different about he
r: since last I’d seen her, Aunt Beatrice had gotten a new tooth.
“Calvin, come closer so I can see your poor face,” she said. I did that, and the lines in her weathered face deepened as she squinted at me. “And now your mouth.” I opened it, and she saw immediately what was missing, of course, and then she looked at Charles accusingly.
“What,” he said, and I was surprised to hear how much defiance was in his voice. “You’re not the boss of me.” Which was an odd thing to say. Because of course she was.
222.
Charles then left us and walked back in the direction of the house. I sat down on the sand, my aunt in her chair, and we talked for hours. It took a long time for my aunt and me to go over how I’d ended up in Lisbon in the first place and then what had happened there. I expected my aunt to be saddened by news of the Sociologist’s death, but no: she acted as though his violent death were preordained, and maybe she was right about that. She only had one question of her own before I started asking her mine.
“Did João see his father die?” my aunt wanted to know.
“No,” I said, and my aunt nodded and said, “Good,” and I was glad that I’d not told her the truth: that, after I saw Charles, I looked back at that big room and there, at the top of the stairs, was João. He’d already seen his father, lying on the floor. And now he was looking around the room with wild, desperate eyes. Finally, they came to me, settled on me, and I could tell he’d found what he was looking for: someone to blame. And I’m sure that he blamed my aunt, too, for not being there, although of course he would have also blamed her had she been there. Except that she’d never had any intention of being there.