“Are you sure? I remember a Discover card”—the Discover card being one of the great running jokes between us; the imaginary card that we used to pay for awful, tacky things that no one else would ever want to buy. We walked into animal gift shops and stores that specialized in embroidered pillows with the faces of “loved ones” just so we could ask the clerk behind the counter, “Do you take the Discover card?”
“You actually looked over at me then and said in all honesty, ‘God, it’s hot in here.’ I wanted to laugh, but you looked like such a little boy that I was afraid you’d cry if I did.”
To the “God, it’s hot in here” line she added, “I can’t believe someone would do that,” and “It’s really been a pleasure meeting you.”
“You say that to everyone. ‘It’s really been a pleasure meeting you.’ Serial killers, street vendors. I think if someone robbed you the last thing you would say to them as they walked away with all your money would be, ‘It’s really been a pleasure meeting you.’”
And now that night she added one more to her list: “We don’t have to do anything,” a statement that was intended to express a vast array of possibilities, from leaving each other to staying together until the bitter end, but that failed to convey either extremes or anything in the middle.
“Did you go to work today?” she asked me.
“Yes.”
“Did you go see someone else tonight?”
“No.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“Of course not.”
While normally Angela could interrogate for hours, we stopped short that night after those few questions. If you’ve ever lived in close confines with someone you love, then you know what I mean when I say that our words became a part of that apartment that night. In larger apartments, in greater spaces, what’s said in one room has a way of staying there. Bedrooms can be avoided. Kitchens, living rooms—these can be walked around if the space permits, but in our cramped little apartment what was said once stayed hovering over everything. Angela stood up and went to the bathroom to prepare for bed. I could see her through the crack in the bathroom door with a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, and I imagined her saying to that toothbrush, We don’t have to stay like this. I extended that sentiment to every object in sight—the couch, the television, the hand-me-down stereo system given to us by a richer friend, the duvet cover, which was hers, along with the one chest of drawers we had space for and then finally the three pots, two pans, and half-dozen plates and cups that formed the whole of our kitchen supplies. To all of them I said that night, We don’t have to stay like this anymore.
XIII
Regardless of how hard I try, I can’t imagine my mother waiting for my father to come find her in the woods. It would have been too coy a gesture for her, a halfhearted, poorly played game of hide-and-seek. Instead, she would have gone to him, picking the nettles off her clothes as she emerged out of the forest into the harsh bright light of the meadow. My father knew better than to ask her direct questions about her motives. Simple inquiries, particularly those involving the words “Why did you?” were always fraught, and he had learned to avoid them. This time, however, he felt he couldn’t resist, and when he found her, he told himself he’d put the question to her directly and take whatever came next. “Why did you leave?” he was going to ask. Not “Where did you go?” or “Where have you been?” The destination hardly mattered. It was only the reason for leaving that counted.
Standing there looking for her he had maintained his composure while secretly beginning to fear that he had been suddenly abandoned. They had been the only two visitors at the fort. No one had arrived since and no one would come after. When my father came to the spot where he thought my mother had been waiting for him and found no one, he had instinctively turned back to the parking lot to see if the 1971 red Monte Carlo was still there. It was. He turned then to the guard’s booth, but from where he was standing he couldn’t see if it was empty or occupied. He considered running over and saying something like “My wife is missing.” Or maybe something less dramatic and urgent such as “Excuse me, sir, have you seen my wife? I think it’s time we left now.” He suspected then that perhaps even the guard was gone. He had abandoned him as well. For much of his life he had believed such a moment was possible, and for several years after his mother’s death he had been convinced that the entire known world would someday pick up and vanish without a trace and never tell him. It was easy for him to picture as a child. His father, cousins, uncles, and aunts all waking up in the middle of the night and deciding that they had someplace else they would rather be. He learned to sleep lightly, for no more than four hours at a time, always alert and vigilant, half awake and expecting even in his dreams to see his father tiptoeing across the living room with a tightly bundled cloth sack tied to the end of a stick. He had once attributed this fear of abandonment to losing his mother at such a young age, but he realized later, after he had seen more of the world than the countryside village he had grown up in, that it was not so irrational a thought at all. It was something that could be expected to happen at some point or another, just as one expected to someday marry or have children. There were abandoned thatched-roof huts all over the countryside in Ethiopia and again in Sudan, with people taking off and disappearing in both directions, everyone in flight. He had seen makeshift Sudanese refugee camps sprouting up along the desert terrain just before he had left. At least a thousand people were there, with most of them crammed into white tents propped up with a few pieces of wood. He had heard rumors of similar ones being built for Ethiopians in Sudan but had told himself that regardless of what happened, he would never go. The total effect was one of mass confusion punctured by silence, with deserted villages everywhere he went. He was sure that there were hundreds more now, and that more likely than not, there would be hundreds more again in the near future. Hiding in the bed of the pickup truck that had carried him all the way to the port in Sudan, he had spent entire days staring at them from underneath the blue tarp that protected him from the sun—one empty village after another, and by his rough estimate forty-three in all. Each had been made up of relatively the same size and structure—fifteen to twenty round thatched-roof homes, with a few brick structures lying farther on the edge. Some were still almost completely intact, others had been thoroughly looted—one town nothing more than a shell of empty boxes, suitcases, and metal safes, with everything that had once housed them burned cleanly to the ground.
They had stopped at what was left of one village to rest and found a handful of old men who had chosen to stay behind to wait out their last days. Over a cup of tea one of the men had pointed to a mat of straw and brick lying just a few hundred feet away. He spoke in a language my father didn’t understand and so the man clasped his two hands together in the shape of a triangle to tell him that this was where his house once stood. A second later he swiped the air clean, as if decapitating it. Whether the houses stood completely upright or in ashes, the sense of emptiness that hovered over them was always the same.
This forgotten fort was America’s version of a similar event—three hundred years earlier but a similar event nonetheless. My father knew for certain that this was why he had come here. He never said it to anyone, but he knew that in one of those villages, just as here in this fort, a child, a boy, had been accidentally or deliberately abandoned and that he was wandering out there in the savannah-turned-desert or in the forest searching for whoever it was that had left him behind.
When my mother came walking out of the forest, my father’s first unmediated response had been to hold out his hand as if beckoning her to join him. He was relieved, almost delighted to see her, and there was something edifying in watching her emerge from the shadows, as if she were coming to rescue him. She caught the gesture from the other side of the meadow and rather than continue to walk forward came to an abrupt halt. He held his hand out for a few seconds longer, expecting her to take it at any moment, or for her to at least take a few steps in his direction as an acknowledgment that a sort of truce was being offered. When she failed to do so, he promised himself that he would never reach out to her again.
Let her stand there for the rest of her fucking life, he thought. Let her fall down, drown, sink into a pit, and die. She’ll never have my hand to help her up again.
PART III
XIV
I called in sick to the Academy the next day. The dean of students when I spoke to him laughed affably enough at my attempt to sound ill over the phone and concluded by saying, “We all like you very much here, Jonas. Let’s not make this a habit now.” I wondered precisely what the “this” he was talking about referred to. Was it the getting sick, or the pretending to be sick, or the calling in at the last minute when it would be impossible to find a substitute in time, leaving him to fill the role, or was it the fact that I had openly lied, and not with that much effort or conviction, and why if it was any of these things, or all of them at the same time, he should worry about it becoming a habit since I had never done it before and at the time as far as I could see would never do it again.
When I left for work the following day, I was still carrying traces of my father with me. His boat sketches were in my pocket, and as I walked to the subway and again on the train, I occasionally ran my hand over the images without taking them out. Appropriately enough, I thought of this time together as being the closest we had ever been, and whether I wanted to or not, I had to take advantage of the situation.
On an uptown-bound local train stuck just a few feet shy of Forty-second Street, I began to explain to my father all the reasons why he would have hated New York, had he ever dared to see it. We never had a conversation like that before—one in which I talked and he listened. Until then I didn’t think of it as something that haunted me.
“These trains alone,” I told him, “would have killed you. You never had much patience. Anything could make you angry. Five minutes of waiting on one of these platforms for a train would have been too much for you. The crowds would have only made it worse, especially in the morning and after work. Remember you hated tight, enclosed spaces. As you got older, even too much time in a car could make you upset.”
Had he actually been there he would have agreed. It was like traveling with a tourist who understood nothing about the world you inhabited and was discovering himself through it. If I knew something about the history of the train lines that ran under New York, I would have shared that as well. The one thing he liked was man-made history—the story of planes, buildings, anything that had been constructed against nature. At the Seventy-second Street stop I pointed out to him that we were now firmly on the Upper West Side. “Which can say a lot about who you are,” I explained. “It can be a good or bad thing. It depends on how you see it.”
I decided to get off the subway a few stops early. We exited on Eighty-sixth Street. I continued the conversation once we were walking north on Amsterdam Avenue toward the academy.
“That’s the academy right there,” I told him. “You can see the top of the bell tower through the trees. I’m the only one who calls it the academy. That’s not its real name. I stole it from a short story by Kafka that I read in college—a monkey who’s been trained to talk gives a report to an academy. That’s the title of the story: ‘A Report to an Academy.’ I used to think of that story every day when I first started teaching. I never told anyone that, not even my wife, Angela. I used to wonder if that was how my students and the other teachers, even with all their liberal, cultured learning, saw me—as a monkey trying to teach their language back to them. Do you remember how you spoke? I hated it. You used those short, broken sentences that sounded as if you were spitting out the words, as if you had just learned them but already despised them, even the simplest ones. ‘Take this.’ ‘Don’t touch.’ ‘Leave now.’ That was how you talked. I never wanted to sound like that. I’ve lived here my whole life, and even with all my education, I’m still afraid I do.”
When we reached the gates of the academy, I pointed out to him that this stroll we had taken from home to school on a bright, warm fall morning, with broken leaves scattered on the ground and what a poet once described as slanted light that one could almost walk on, was one of the most important things in my life that he had missed out on.
“This was the best part of the day for me,” I told him. “I’m probably the only child in history who woke up each morning looking forward to his walk to school. I loved leaving that house, and I should tell you that on many mornings I hoped my mother and I would never return. Sometimes we came close, and even though we always came back, because I was young I never stopped believing that it was possible that someday we wouldn’t. After two blocks I’d find myself thinking that at any moment now we were going to head off in a different direction. I imagined cars and helicopters coming to pick us up, and I would have had my mother entirely to myself. I wonder if it surprised you that we didn’t disappear.”
We parted at the school’s front doors with a promise that I would see him later. I arrived in my classroom ten minutes before the first bell rang. In my first days of teaching I had always arrived at least thirty or forty minutes early, in large part to gape in wonder at my classroom and my place in it. Other teachers used the room later in the afternoon, but it was mine at the beginning of the day; those were the best hours to claim it. As the sun rose higher, I would watch the light stream in through the windows and spread across the darkly polished wooden floors and the desks that in previous decades had been bolted to them. For the first couple of years it had always struck me as a remarkable sight, one worth waking up a little bit earlier to witness and for which I would often remain grateful throughout the day. Recently I had stopped doing this, and generally arrived only minutes before the morning bell.