Audio: David Rabe reads.
Aweek ago Thursday, my uncle Jim called. When I picked up the phone and said, “Hello,” he said, “Hello.” The voice was familiar and yet I didn’t recognize it. “Who is this?” I said.
“Jim,” he told me. “Uncle Jim.”
“What?” I was very surprised, because I thought Uncle Jim was dead. “Who is this?” I wanted to know. I really wanted to know.
“I just told you. Jim. I’m here with Hank. Is your mom home?”
“No,” I said. I thought Uncle Jim had been dead for years.
“Where is she?”
Now, the Hank he’d just referred to was probably his older brother, and my mom was their sister, Margie, and the thing of it was, the bewildering thing of it was that I thought they were all dead. “Is this some kind of joke?” I asked.
“We’re not laughing,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “I was in the middle of something here.”
“Oh, yeah? What?”
“Well, cooking. Dinner.”
“What? Is it dinnertime?”
“Yes.”
“What are you cooking?”
“Stir-fry. You know, vegetables in a wok.”
“You never did have time for us, did you?”
That was a new voice, a different voice. “Hank?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
He was right. I did.
“Anyway, Glenn.” Now Jim was talking again, and he said my name as if it were a window into countless flaws inside me. As if it revealed my essential weakness, grossness, as if it were the name of a fool.
I imagined the two of them somewhere handing the phone back and forth. “O.K., Glenn. We were just hoping to get ahold of Margie. If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“Look,” I said. “Look. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but—”
“I just told you, Glenn. We’re looking for Margie. That’s what we’re doing.”
“Stop saying that. Just stop it.”
“Stop saying what? Where’s Margie?”
“No. My name. Stop saying my name that way.”
“What way?”
“The way you’re saying it.”
“I guess you don’t like it, huh?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Don’t like the sound of it.”
“I just said I don’t.”
“Or is it us you don’t like?”
“We’re your blood, you know. Bloodline. Blood relative.”
“So why wouldn’t you want us to find Margie?”
“What?”
“She’s our sister.”
“She’s dead! You’re all dead!”
“So?”
They seemed to know something that I didn’t, some inherent mistake in my assumptions about what I’d just said. “Where are you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Where are you?”
“Why?”
“I’d just like to know,” I said. “I’d just like to know, O.K.?”
“He wants to know where we are,” one said to the other. I think it was Jim to Hank, though it could have been the other way around. Whoever was speaking, his report of my question made them both laugh. They found it very entertaining.
I looked out the window, half expecting to see them prowling about in the October air. A mist, on the verge of freezing into snow, waved under stressful crosscurrents. I could see rows of lights defining buildings. It was a certain kind of heavy black night, blotting out the stars that I knew were up there, twinkling like the last of something.
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the strangeness of their call, as I hung up and walked down the long corridor to the kitchen, because I did. I just didn’t know what to do about it, or even what to think about it, and I was hungry for the vegetables I’d left on the stove in their pool of oil. Halfway down the hall, I became afraid that I’d neglected to turn off the burner under the wok when I’d gone to the bathroom only to be interrupted by the ringing phone and my uncles. But the fire was off, the kitchen safe.
That night, they were on television. I was up late, restless, alone, because my wife and daughter were in California, celebrating my mother-in-law’s birthday. I sat with a bottle of Scotch and a glass, into which I poured and from which I sipped as I channel-hopped. I don’t know what I was searching for. I never do. And there they were. I hopped right past them, and then sprang back. They were sitting at a kitchen table. They had coffee cups and were leaning toward each other. Hunched over and talking, they appeared earnest and thoughtful. Their voices were very low and hard for me to follow. I held my breath, trying to hear. But I couldn’t understand a word. Or, rather, a word here and there was all I could understand. The sense eluded me. The subject matter appeared to be, if their postures were to be trusted, of the utmost importance. I had my suspicions about what it was and moved closer to the set. But tilting and arranging my torso so that I pressed my ear against the speaker brought no improvement.
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The obvious thing to try was turning up the volume. Something about this choice worried me, as if it might signal my presence when they were clearly being secretive. I lightly tapped the little arrow on the remote. But what my action prompted was a hum that further muffled my uncles’ conversation. It was as if wherever they were the signal was weak and couldn’t quite reach me. The quality of the image was sort of like in the early days of television, when signals searched out antennae on rooftops.
Hank and Jim were in my grandparents’ kitchen, I realized. The layout was one I knew. I’d been there many times, sitting in those exact chairs while something went on, or I waited for something. Maybe my grandmother was cooking, or maybe she and my mom were talking while they cooked. There were times when I sat at that kitchen table while the adults, Jim and Hank and my mom and their sister, Amber, and my dad, Matty, and Jim and Hank’s wives, Kate and Gayle, and Amber’s second husband, Harold, or her first husband, Arnie, played cards at the dining-room table, which was only a few feet away and visible through an open doorway. The rooms were small, the ceilings low. Everything was small there, the houses squeezed together on little square blocks bounded by narrow streets, as if there weren’t miles of open land, farmland, and woods all around. They would play poker sometimes, betting nickels and dimes and quarters, shoving their coins into the kitty, which was the name they gave to the spot at the center of the table where the money collected. They talked to their cards, asking for good ones; they groaned at bad luck or barked happily when the cards they needed came to them and they felt blessed, as if something somewhere cared about them, and for a second they’d been given proof.
But they weren’t doing that now; they weren’t playing cards. They were huddled together, talking in low voices, just Jim and Hank, as if they were worried that someone would think they were up to no good, even if they weren’t, or maybe they were. So they had to be careful.
The static or snow on the TV screen thickened over them and then blew away, and I saw them clearly, Jim and Hank with their special faces, their one and only faces, the features of brothers. Perhaps they were worried about everyone else. Perhaps they were wondering where all the others were, Margie and Matty and Amber and Arnie and Harold and Kate and Gayle, along with their mom and dad, my grandma and grandpa, Dorothy and Sam. Or maybe they were worried that someone would catch them in that house and throw them out because it belonged to somebody else now. It belonged to the strangers who’d purchased it. It had been sold long ago, right after Grandma died, Grandpa having passed before her, which was years before Jim and Hank themselves died.
It seemed important that I hear what they were saying. I tried the volume again, touching the remote stealthily, my fingers like feathers, the tips tapping with shyness, tenderness. One of my uncles was shaking his head. The snow on the screen was so thick, suddenly, that I couldn’t tell which of them it was. Their features were distinct, yet similar, and the snow, or static, call it what you will, was expanding, the flakes getting bigger, their wild movement driven in swirls, rising while falling, and sweeping in from both the left and the right, obscuring everything, the table, the window, and Jim and Hank, too, as if they were being swallowed up by a blizzard, while the humming noise intensified, grew shrill, and started to stutter with a kind of Doppler effect, pulsing louder at a higher and higher frequency. I thought I heard a word but I wasn’t sure, then I heard it again. “He.” The pulsing gave way to a vibrating drone that stopped for an instant and I heard, “He’s watching.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“I think he is.”
“He doesn’t care. He isn’t interested. He never cared.”
What came next was a hiss that evolved rapidly into a buzz that somehow contained their voices, compressed and distorted. It sounded as if they were screaming. The pang I felt was of such magnitude and loaded with such aching potential that I turned the TV off. I reacted without thinking. I was hurt by what I thought they’d said. I acted impulsively, not taking even a second to reflect on what I was doing. The silence felt abrupt, almost shocking. I was sitting on my couch. My TV was dark. They were gone. My apartment was dim. I could hear the wind outside, blowing through the high corridors formed by the streets in the geometrical patterns of the city where I lived.
Fearing that Jim and Hank would be gone when I turned the TV back on, I sat there for a long time in the gloom, wondering, but unwilling to test my theory. From where I sat, I could see the front door of my apartment. Beyond the door was a hallway, small and straightforward, with a wrought-iron bench against the wall, facing the elevator door, so that weary people might sit if they needed to rest while waiting for the elevator to come clanking and moaning up, or if they needed to pause for a moment as they tried to decide what to do next, whether to attempt to rouse me by knocking on my door or ringing my doorbell. Visitors to my neighbor, whose apartment door was directly across from mine, had equal access to these options. I imagined them out there on the bench, Jim and Hank, both nicely dressed, both handsome men, trying to determine their next step, wondering if I would let them in if they knocked, if I would walk over, turn the knob, pull the door open, and stand before them. I sat in the dark, waiting. When I turned the TV back on, what appeared was perfectly ordinary. The screen offered a smiling woman with a bright, eager, vaguely sexual manner, gesturing at a map to explain the weather, which seemed to excite her. The picture was clear, the weather not promising. Her every word was distinct. I turned her off.
As I lay in bed that night, I tried to forget what had happened. It was over. There was nothing I could do. But trying to forget something is a fairly futile enterprise, because, in order to succeed in forgetting what you’re trying to forget, you have to keep remembering what it is. My window blinds were open, and the moon was big and pocked and glaring. It seemed grudging and annoyed, looking down without seeing, stranded somehow way up in the black, where it was frustrated by something it couldn’t understand but had to contend with nevertheless, a puzzling, incessant pressure that would not reduce either its constancy or its impenetrable, insolent obduracy.
I had the feeling that Jim and Hank were in a bar somewhere nearby. They had always liked to drink; I thought maybe I should go looking for them. Their complaints about me were more or less familiar, in the sense that I had a pretty good idea what they were. That is, it would have been easy to guess them, the way one can surmise with certainty, or, in other words, intuit, others’ estimations of oneself—their impressions, attitudes, opinions—though more often than not, unless people lose their temper and erupt in raw confrontation, these estimations go unspoken, at least between the people directly involved, though other people, those with similar opinions, such as Jim and Hank must have held about me, might speak to each other, privately, offering observations that confirm flaws or recalling anecdotes that give clear-cut support to a common judgment regarding a specific failing.
Still, why had they called? What was it that they wanted? They were looking for Margie, my mom, their sister. That was their ostensible purpose. And there was no reason not to believe them. It might be odd that they were together but didn’t know where she was, but there was nothing odd in their worrying about her or looking for her. They had been a passionately connected set of siblings. A high romance of charged emotions, expectations, disappointments, and competition bound them. But, if they were all dead, why weren’t they together? Or, at least, aware of one another’s whereabouts? It made me uneasy. Not that this seeming incongruity was the only aspect of the night that deserved such a response. Certainly, I was aware of the larger concerns, the irrational, irreducible elements. I recognized them for what they were, irrational and irreducible, as uncanny as they were compelling. But that didn’t help me with them. Why had my uncles called? Why did they think I might know where Margie was? Their concern about her whereabouts made me worry, too. Was this what they wanted? For me to think about her, worry about her?
I went for a walk. I peeked in bars. I went into a couple. I had a few drinks. People were laughing. Televisions were on, playing mainly sporting events. The people got louder as the night wore on. They were howling, some of them, their faces red, eyes glazed with thickening moisture, as if they were drowning. But Jim and Hank were not to be found.
In the morning, as I sipped coffee, I was surprised that I had slept at all. But I had, waking and dozing repeatedly, until I’d jolted awake to the ringing of my bedside phone. I was in my underwear and a T-shirt. Certain that it was Jim or Hank, I grabbed the receiver, but was greeted instead by a pushy, motormouthed telemarketer that I didn’t immediately realize was an automated voice. I hung up with a groan.
I needed to talk to someone. I went online and started searching for help, perhaps a therapist of some kind. Maybe a psychoanalyst. Someone with whom I could establish a professional relationship. Professional boundaries would be useful. I started jotting down names, phone numbers, addresses. When I had a list of ten, I stared at it, as if each name might emit a signal, a subtle vibration that would guide me to the correct choice. On the basis of what I experienced as delicate sensations somewhere just behind my eyes, and interpreted as a kind of acceptance or its lack, mainly its lack, I started crossing off names. One after the other, the black slash of my pen like a sword lopped them off. I ended up with none. When I left my apartment, it was to visit the office of a private detective.
My elevator ride down led to a cab ride and then an elevator ride up in the detective’s building. When the elevator door opened on one floor to release a pointlessly smiling girl wearing a beret, and on another a hunched-over old man with dandruff on his shoulders and a faint odor of urine, I caught sight of shabby hallways, in a state of disrepair, the name of a dentist gouged into frosted glass on the first and a lawyer on the next, his long foreign name nothing but consonants. The elevator door screeched while closing, as if wounded, and the hallways I left behind, as I rose in a series of shudders, reverberated with a sound that was almost gleeful.
On the phone, the detective’s secretary had said that he’d had a cancellation and if I hurried I could see him almost immediately. As it turned out, this was true, but the minute I saw him I knew I’d made a mistake. His hair was stylishly coiffed and his suit, double-breasted and buttoned, struck me as all wrong, a kind of elaborate deceit implying fabled expertise and dark competence. When we shook hands, I found his skin distasteful, the palm soft and moist, the pads of his fingers too smooth. He smelled of aftershave, some aggressive assertion mixed with flowery scents. Someone had trimmed his nose hairs. I shook my head.
“Sit down,” he said.
I shook my head again.
“Why not? What’s wrong?”
He urged me to tell him the details of whatever had brought me there. I couldn’t remember what I had said to the secretary over the phone. I started rehearsing the facts, as best I knew them, cycling them through my thoughts, as if to find their most useful order, testing out phrases, but I was reluctant to speak. Something inside me knew better and would not allow it. I shook my head.
“You’ve come all this way.”
I wanted to tell someone, to unburden myself, to get it all off my chest. But why? Why should I want that? It made no sense.
His phone rang and he answered and started talking.
“Who is that?” I asked him. He smiled. Why was I even in such a room with a man who looked like he did, had hair and socks and pretensions as he did? “Who are you talking to?”
He held up his hand to soothe me, an apologetic palm that became his forefinger, meant in its solitary extension to tell me that he would only be a minute.
“No,” I said.
“What? Wait!”
I was going. He could say “Wait” all he wanted. I was out the door. The secretary looked up, smiling. I shook my head.
“He’s a terrible man,” I told her. “How can you work for such a man?”
“What did he do? Did he do something?” She beamed at me with a diffuse innocence, the glow of her computer screen a haze in which she had become difficult to see. But there was more to it, more than the strange effect the lights in the room had on her: she was obscured by her habitual practice of deception, most glaringly manifest in her conviction that she knew of nothing unsavory about her boss.
Outside, I began to worry that my behavior had been counterproductive. Not so much that my actions had been wrong but, rather, that I’d enacted them with insufficient cunning. My concerns had been blatant when they should have been sly. This whole situation was getting to me. I was acting as if I could figure it out, when I couldn’t. At least, not now, and perhaps not ever.
Exiting a cab in front of my building, I met a steady, almost silent downpour. The doorman looked out from the protection of the vestibule. He didn’t like me. He glowered at me, and then he nodded in greeting as I entered. It was his job, but he did little to disguise his distaste. He was from one of those Slavic countries, angular and crookedly handsome in a broad-nosed, corpselike way. I stood waiting for the elevator, and he came up and put his big palm on the wall, leaning there, looking at me. His brother was the super of the building and he had another, older, heavier, even grimmer brother, who also worked shifts as a doorman.
“Some men were to see you,” he said.
“What?”
“Two men. They look for you. Your name.”
“What did they want?”
“They don’t say.”
“What did they look like?”
“Older. Older than you. Older than me. They both older men. Plain in their clothes. From some other town.”
I described Jim and Hank, their hair, dark on the one, sandy on the other, thinning on both, at least when I last saw them, but still healthy, with a light dance of gray, and both with small, tender bellies, middle-aged bellies, crinkling skin around their eyes when they looked at you with their bright, bright smiles. The doorman stared at me as if he hadn’t understood a word I’d said.
“Did they leave a message?”
“No, they laughed when I tell them in so many words you are not at home. They laughed and shook their heads like this was what they know was to happen. They would come here and you would not be home.”
“What happened then?”
“They go. Out the door. What else? I don’t see which way. After a while it rains.”
By going to look for them, or, rather, by seeking someone else to look for them for me, by searching in the most roundabout way, by acknowledging my yearning only grudgingly, I’d missed them.
Iturned on the television as soon as I got to my apartment. I channel-hopped. I had to calm down. My wife and daughter would be home in a few days. This was how it was going to be, I realized. I’d have to get used to it. Go on with my life. And I did. Or tried to. Other people seemed to go out of their way to say “Hey” to me, because I said “Hey” to them. Or “Hi.” “See you.” “Stay in touch.” Other people said, “Hello. I think we’ve met before.” Niceties, pleasantries.
My wife and daughter walked in the door. Soon they were floating around the apartment, passing before me, bouncing down the hallway, settling in chairs. Hovering near the windows, like helium balloons. Drifting in and out of doors. We chatted, and I tried to do whatever my daughter asked. I wanted to meet all my wife’s needs, both those she expressed and those to which, although they were unstated, she gave clues. “You’re in an agreeable mood these days,” she said.
“Am I? Good.”
Every now and then, I saw Jim or Hank rounding a corner, getting on a bus, riding in a cab, or looking out the window of a car driven by somebody I didn’t know. I can’t say that they ever acknowledged me in a way that confirmed my belief that they were who they were. I thought about my mom a lot and wondered where she was. And my dad, too. It didn’t seem right to think of one without the other. But then, none of it did. Seem right, feel right, that is.
And then one night I was at my kitchen table watching a bug that I couldn’t identify crawl along the wooden tabletop and up the steep slope of a newspaper crumpled into creases and canyons, a sheer bluff from the perspective of the bug. Brown, with six delicate legs, like threads, really, the bug had feelers coming out of its head, pawing the air. Its wisp of a body appeared to defy gravity, poised upside down on a white slant of newsprint, its back legs bent like reverse elbows, as the other four legs danced and the feelers explored for something to sustain it. Though it wasn’t a spider, I worried that it would bite like a spider, like a certain brown-bodied spider I’d heard about whose name was, I thought, hermit spider, or maybe recluse spider, and whose bite was painful. When the phone rang, I grabbed the receiver.
Jim said, “It’s me, Jim. Uncle Jim. You got a minute?”
“I’m here, too,” Hank said. “I’m on the extension.”
“We’ve got some questions, Glenn. We just need a couple answers.”
I knew what was coming. It was what I’d been waiting for. I started describing the event they were calling about. It had taken place years ago, in a large Midwestern industrial town where we’d gathered for what we called a “family reunion.”
Hank named the city, pressing against my reluctance.
“All right,” I said. “I know. Grand Rapids.” I went on, laying out the details of the reunion, how we’d travelled from a variety of towns, smallish to larger in size and flung across the map. A combination of unacknowledged and forgotten impulses had scattered us in this way over the years, like the proverbial ripples radiating out from a stone tossed into still water. We balanced our push and pull, our repulsion and allure, through distance. Though most of us had remained in the Midwest, the complications of multiplying generations had spread us even to the East Coast, where I lived.
“Planes,” Hank said. “Cars. Trains. Buses. It took every kind of conveyance known to man to get us together.”
“Some of us got by using only one or the other,” Jim added. “Most of us had to use two or more kinds of transportation. I know I did. Cost me an arm and a leg.”
“For the food,” Hank said, “hot dogs on a barbecue. Burgers. Potato salad. Corn on the cob.”
“And the singing,” Jim added. “You remember that.”
“Yes,” I said. They loved to sing, the four of them, Jim and Hank and Amber and Margie, and they were pretty good. They harmonized, played different instruments.
“You remember that time out East? Near your place?”
Now they were pushing me to remember something else.
“You remember. The four of us in New York City.”
“The Big Apple.”
“And us together under that street sign for Broadway, the street lamp lighting us up like a spotlight.”
I didn’t want to remember any of it, but mostly I wanted to forget my embarrassment at the intimacy of their embrace, arms looping around waists and over shoulders, voices harmonizing in a shameless performance of “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square,” for the night, the stars, and all the passersby.
“Why didn’t you join us?” Hank said. “You just stood off to the side and looked at us.”
“Stared at us, really. You kept your distance.”
“That’s what we want to know.”
“That’s our question.”
“It was like you didn’t want to be seen with us.”
“We wanted you to sing with us and you wouldn’t.”
“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” Hank said. “Just singing. Having fun. But a person would have thought we were committing a crime.”
“And not just a crime,” Jim said. “But something really bad. Dastardly.”
“And another thing,” Hank said. “This has bothered me for a long time. We were all together for that family reunion in Grand Rapids? You remember.”
“We were just talking about it,” Jim said.
“Yes,” I said.
“This was in the living room,” Hank said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Your dad and I were talking. You were there. But off to the side again. Always off to the side.”
My dad had spent a lot of the reunion in the basement, which had been turned into a recreation room and where, in fact, we were all sleeping on cots for the weekend. So there was nothing strange about his being down there. But he was down there a lot. Except when there was a card game. For meals, too, of course, he came up. Everybody ate together and ate heartily. Off and on, there was singing upstairs in the living room, with instrumental accompaniment. Amber, whose house it was, had an organ, which she played with big florid hand gestures and a big florid smile; Hank had a trumpet, and Jim a ukulele. My mom contributed mainly with her pleasant singing voice, though she struck an occasional note on a violin. They sang and made a tape recording that was somehow too slow, so that when they played it back everything was elongated, the words dragged out and in a melancholy minor key, a spooky chorus, as if they were ghosts lost in a hauntingly gorgeous foreign movie.
“That was so stupid,” Hank said. “Stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“Complete waste of good tape,” Jim added.
I worked up the nerve to tell them, “I thought it was beautiful. Surreal.”
“You would,” Hank said, in that scornful tone I hated. It was his way of reminding me of what he really wanted to talk about. Which was the question he’d asked my dad during the family reunion, the three of us, Hank, my dad, and me, ending up somehow alone in the living room, while Hank practiced a little on his muted trumpet. Light seeped through the cracks of the closed blinds, and only a single floor lamp had been turned on. The wallpaper had a flowery pattern and there was some kind of plush rug in a dark color. Maybe it was already early evening and everyone else had gone off to get ready to eat. Hank blew the spit out of the release valve in the horn’s tubing and smiled over at my dad, who seemed to be daydreaming.
“You like music?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Yeah, I really like it. It’s a lot of fun,” Hank said.
“I like classical music.”
“Oh, sure. But that’s not as much fun, I don’t think.”
“I prefer it.”
“It’s good. It’s good. That’s for sure. No argument here.”
“It’s called classical for a reason. It endures. It has endured. It’s classic.”
“You’re not going to get an argument out of me on that one. So what do you like to do for fun, Matty?”
“Fun?”
“Yeah. You know.”
“Well, I like to read about the Black Death. It decimated Europe. The plague. It all but wiped out Western civilization. It was a horror story. No one knew how to stop it. It spread like wildfire. The corpses were stacked in piles. And Hitler, too. I like to read about Hitler. The camps.”
I pressed back into my chair, as if retreating into shadows could change where I was, and I watched shock give way to puzzlement on Hank’s face. It was understandable for Hank to be perturbed, though he tried not to show it. “Oh, sure. That could be interesting. I was in the Battle of the Bulge, you know. The Germans were some tough S.O.B.s. I saw piled-up dead. Mud. Snow. Planes high up letting out long ribbons of bombs. But they were tough S.O.B.s, those Germans. You can take my word on that one.”
“He was a history teacher, remember,” I said. “Remember that, Hank.”
Because they never did. They never remembered that about him. Like Jim, he had ended up working to make ends meet at the John Deere plant, and that was all they cared to know. My hope here was to excuse my dad, to exonerate him of the stain of his brooding, and I wanted Hank to speak, or perhaps laugh in acknowledgment, possibly even in agreement, but only silence answered. I waited before saying, “Hank? Are you there? Jim?”
I lowered the phone and looked at it, thinking that I might discover the cause of our interruption. It squawked at me, the disjointed alarm of a failed call. Ordered by a punitive automated voice to hang up, I obeyed. I discovered that I was seated at my dining-room table. The nearby windows offered a view of lighted apartments in layered tiers streaked with hints of a moon somewhere. There was more to it, we all knew, Hank and me, and my dad, too; more than history lurked in his dark interests.
The next time the phone rang, it was the middle of the night. I was restless. I’d been that way for days, sleeping in strange, deep blocks of solitude, and waking at the intrusion of a hand that was never there. My wife breathed beside me. I tried to sleep and succeeded, only to jolt awake in alarm. On this particular night, I’d risen and peed, then wandered down the hall into the living room, thinking I might have a drink. The moonlight startled me with an unnatural sheen, as if it were filling the room with ice and snow. I poured some Maker’s Mark and sat with my back to the windows. The ringing phone did not sound normal, and the caller I.D. was a series of signs and letters, more like a scientific formula, or perhaps a code, than a standard telephone number. When I answered, bringing the receiver slowly to my ear, the grumble of static seemed devoid of anything human, though I knew better, and my patient attention and increased effort drew from the susurration faint squeals, like the protests of drowning men fathoms deep. Then all grew quiet and the doorbell rang. It seemed softer than usual, suggesting concern about the late hour. I peeked through the peephole and saw our doorman scowling back. When I opened the door, he said, “They were here again.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In lobby and then outside. I ask them if they want me to go up and find you and they say no. But then I remembered what you had told me.”
“Sh-h-h,” I said, thinking I’d heard sounds from the bedroom.
“Sorry.” His apology twisted him with regret. He shook his head in misery, responding to invisible slaps. I peered back into the apartment, but saw nothing moving, no one coming. He was still shaking his head with his nearly crippling remorse. I stared at him, and he said, “You told me to tell you if they are back. I remembered and came up.”
“Where are they now?”
“Outside when I take the elevator. Near the curb. One stood with one foot in the gutter, his other foot on the sidewalk. The other stood in the street. They probably know I came up to tell you.”
I grabbed a coat and we rode the elevator down. When the doors slid open, I saw my uncles through the glass of the lobby doors. They gestured in my direction, as they no doubt caught sight of me, then moved off. I thanked the doorman and hurried out. They were rounding the nearest corner, or one of them was, Hank, I think, lagging slightly.
After a few blocks of hasty pursuit, I was close enough to see them, in a mix of milling bystanders, as they conferred, glanced toward me, and ducked into a bar. I was certain I would find them sitting at a table, or perhaps at the bar, but a quick scan left me frightened and alone. A bathroom door opened, but the man coming out was a stranger. Only strangers stood around me, their chatter bringing confusion and noise. Then my haphazard glance through the large front window found them, scurrying across the street. The Cineplex they entered felt conceived to keep them from me forever. Long hallways awaited me, and escalators leading to at least a half-dozen auditoriums. I had no idea where they might have gone.
Why wouldn’t they let me catch them? I ached to know, realizing then how strongly I wished to join them. I wanted to have fun. Wait, wait. Please. I wanted to explain. I could have sailed with Hank on the lake that was like his back yard, holding the rudder, if he let me steer. I could have worked with him in his business, selling musical instruments, making millions of dollars. I could have gotten drunk in the desert with Jim, trudging at his side over the rough roads, the beaten-down sand, joking with him, elbowing his ribs as he elbowed mine, weaving through patches where rattlesnakes lurked on our big adventure across the desert to play cards or bingo in a bar and drink. I could have gone to prison with him, when he was sentenced for drunk driving, wearing a colostomy bag and pushing a drip stand through clanging corridors. I could have died with him, drunk in his little room. But my father had kept me back. I did not dare to join in with the singing and leave him alone in his mind, wandering that medieval landscape where corpses festered. I could not leave him to stand without me at the concentration-camp gates, sniffing the air, eying the macabre chimneys. If Hank and Jim had known him better, if they’d been forced to flee his big hands in the kitchen, if they’d heard his howl, so lonely and sad, they would have understood. I would have died if I’d betrayed him. He would have died. We all would have died.
I begged them: Let me find you. I have questions, too, things I’d like to ask of you, and Amber and Harold and Arnie and Gayle and Kate and my mom, Margie, and my dad, Matt or Matty. You weren’t perfect. Not that anybody is. But you were giants with your singing and your laughter, your epic wounds and your colossal grudges that would not heal on the battleground of love. That was where we all were, where it all happened. That was where we all won and lost.
When my surrender to hopelessness returned me to the street, they were waiting half a block away. I called to them and waved, and they hastened off, leading me into Central Park, where they hid among the trees.
My daughter answers when, like my dead uncles, I call. “Dad, please. Dad, Dad, Dad.”
And then my wife is on the line, too. “You can’t do this. You can’t treat us this way.”
“Don’t yell at him, Mom.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Where are you, please?”
Their worry concerns me; I feel cruel, and I don’t want to be, so I tell them, “Listen. I don’t want you to worry. I had help. I was led.”
“Led where? By whom?”
Home, home, home, I want to say, but I don’t dare. I’ve wanted it for so long and now I have it. “Home, home, home, home.” It bursts out of me. When tears claw their way out, I allow them to take hold of my words with the relief I feel in this moment of release, fulfillment, confession, hoping that my heartbreaking stab of expression will convert my wife and daughter to understanding.
“What are you talking about?”
“Dad. This is your home.”
“Stop it. You have to stop this.”
“We’re home. We’re here. We’re all so worried, Dad. You’re not home. Where are you?”
“Don’t worry.”
“But we are worried.”
“It’s been weeks, Dad. Nobody knows what to do.”
Just this phone call and I will be finished. I’m far away. It’s colder here.
“I want you to know how to live,” I tell them. “I want you to know that I love you and you must go on, as I will. But with diminishing expectations that we will ever see or hear one another again. I see no other way. Though one day perhaps everything will change for you, as it did for me, and there’ll be a shift of some kind, a stepping from one place to another, a change in how it all appears, as you enter a different way of seeing, as you and your mind step out of one mode of sensation into another, and you will see where you are. Or maybe this shift will bring the opposite, and when you step through into the new place or plane there will be nothing. Not the perspective I just described but a darkness where you must learn that none of this happened and I never called, never mattered, perhaps even that I never existed. Nor did you. In the meantime, you must keep going, aware that should you feel chills every now and then, or an uncanny tingling in your blood, goosebumps, you must look closely at whatever might be advancing in whatever form, as those waves of irreducible longing wash over you.” ♦
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