MARK’S FATHER’S DEATH HAD BEEN SUDDEN, BUT IT had been anticipated ever since the British doctor in Calcutta had made the diagnosis of congenital heart-valve defect and told them that death was not just impending but long overdue. In the end, the impending event took another six years to occur—perhaps, as some in the household maintained, due to divine intervention; perhaps, as others (well…just Mark) theorized, because the doctor had been a sadistic, fearmongering jerk. Either way, Mark and his mother had each grown exhausted by waiting, and as a result both were caught by surprise. Mark’s mother had no longer been armored by stoic acceptance. Mark himself had no longer even shared with his parents the same hemisphere. Because Mark’s parents had called every materially and spiritually undernourished corner of the planet—and so no place—their home, and because Mark had been a two days’ journey from his father’s body even after the three days it took his mother to reach him by phone, his father had been cremated. It would have been arbitrary to bury him in Indonesia, sentimental and expensive to fly him to the States, just as expensive and perhaps as arbitrary to take him to Sri Lanka—where he’d seemed happiest, but that was only a guess: who really knew? not his son; did his wife?—and the weather had been very hot, and the electrical grid overstrained, and the morgue’s refrigeration undergoing occasional brown-out. The decision to cremate had been unavoidable and yet completely haphazardly made, and it showed how little all the years of expectation had assisted in preparing for the actual event. Mark knew that his father would have wanted his body intact in the earth, against a nearing day of resurrection. Of their trio it was only Mark’s mother who shared the convictions that underlay this desire, but Mark felt his father’s desire as importunately. When he arrived in Jakarta, where his father had been pronounced dead in the Catholic hospital five days earlier of the heart failure that had finally struck as he walked with a young Christian convert to inspect the bore hole for a well that was under construction, Mark had scarcely been able to look at his mother. She hadn’t been able to look at him, either. All the painful, cleaving differences between them, the fruits of two decades of quarrels on every subject from peeling bananas to thrice-daily prayer, seemed as nothing compared to the severing power possessed by that moment of perfect agreement. Mark and Ruth had both known that the box of gray ash represented an inexpiable blunder. If relations between mother and son had not improved, as Mark had hoped they would, when he left home to live on his own, their sensation of shared failure showed signs of providing the final rupture. After Mark left Jakarta, he and Ruth did not speak for a year.
That had been nine years ago, the summer before Mark had turned twenty-one. Since then he and Ruth, after the one-year hiatus, had in fact seen each other four times—more than often enough, considering the distances involved, to let Mark conclude that the death of his father had not provided the final rupture after all, but the beginning of a gentle, and surprising, and to him desperately needed—that had been the main surprise—rapprochement. His father’s death, at the time, had appeared as a climactic catastrophe perhaps because it had come at the end of a period of Mark’s life that had been exceptionally eventful and, as he saw it now, miserable. Mark’s difficulties with his parents had at last driven him out of their house, then in Ghana, at the age of nineteen. The time between then and Mark’s reunion with his mother and his father’s dead body had been the most tumultuous and lonely of a short life that, up to then, had consisted mostly of tumult and loneliness. In the States, Mark had lived largely as he’d been taught, like a penniless vagabond, but without the ennobling purpose of service to God. He had lived with a series of girls, some actually girls, even younger than he, still in the homes of their spaced-out or drug-dealing parents; some more accurately women, who were parents themselves, of children nearer Mark’s age than was Mark to the woman with whom he was sleeping. One girl had taught Mark to cook heroin and then watched him turn blue on her living-room floor because she thought if she called for an ambulance, she would wind up in prison; and Mark had been saved by her neighbor, who was allergic to peanuts, and who came and stabbed Mark with her Adrenalin auto-injector, so that Mark came to life in convulsions, with his teeth chattering and his frozen blood screaming the length of his veins; later he’d prayed, secretly, and phoned his mother in Ghana. And there had been sufficient moments like that, of a helpless and harrowing sadness while lost in the wilds of his childhood’s end (which he mistakenly thought was the start of his life as a man), when he had needed his mother, and called her, and so put in her hands a crumb trail of his wide wanderings, though it still was a small miracle (not that Mark liked this word) that she had managed to find him at all when the heart attack happened.
There had been the year of silence, then, and then the start of the slow rapprochement, which Mark only dared see in these terms as he crept close to thirty. His life after his father’s death had not changed abruptly, but it had incrementally steadied itself. It had moved the balance toward legality, threadbare solvency, and monklike isolation. Mark was still, in his essence, a chaotic, disorderly person; he didn’t know why it was so, but he recognized the fact now, which he felt was the fragile beginning of authentic self-knowledge. By twenty-five he had sworn off all drugs, cigarettes, and hard liquor, though he drank microbrewed beer with the obsessive connoisseurship of the sublimating addict. He suspected he might enjoy wine but did not feel educated enough to try to buy a nice bottle. He grew chary in his encounters with women to the point of seeming strange and virginal, so that though he still drew attention in bars, where he would nurse a beer and read, the women who spoke to him always grew uneasy and eventually sidled away.
Ruth had broken the silence, by visiting Mark, while he was living in Ashland, Oregon, and working on a flower farm, hauling hoses and hefting bags of fertilizer. Their encounter had been awkward and brief and unexceptional until Mark realized, once she was gone, that her stated reason for coming—a conference of Christian NGOs being held in Portland—must have been a pride-preserving subterfuge. Ruth had always scorned conferences, rooms of self-loving people who spent their time talking instead of just doing. The following year Mark went back to Jakarta to see her. After having spent more than two decades, Mark’s entire lifetime, moving annually—if not even more often—from one benighted locale to another, Ruth had remained in Jakarta for almost four years. Mark suddenly felt that he understood why: The box of his father’s ashes sat alone on a shelf in Ruth’s small, barren room, in the home for impoverished and mentally ill women at which Ruth now worked. She had neither housed the ashes in a crypt nor scattered them; she had made one mistake and did not want to make another; and so she remained in Jakarta, Mark was sure, to be in the place where her husband had last taken breath, in the hope of some guidance from him. Seeing the box there pierced Mark. Ruth must have gazed on it all her nonworking hours. Perhaps she chastened herself before it, begged forgiveness from it, solaced it as she could. Mark had been an unpeaceful child, angry at he knew not what, wayward toward he knew not what, rebellious against God, he had claimed, but this had just been, in his family, the most incendiary thing to seize on. Yet he had never suffered parents who did not love each other; he had never known anything less than their flawless devotion. At the time he’d only seen it as another force ranged against him, a unified front he could not hope to conquer. He’d had to go far from them and live too close to—and sometimes inside of—some of the most miserable unions ever forged, to understand the rarity of their marriage, within which they’d tried so hard to shelter him, with so little success.
By the time Ruth reciprocated his visit, to join him for his twenty-sixth birthday, Mark had found something he liked, even loved. He’d found hiking. He had also been thinking, since the last time he’d been to Jakarta, of where his father’s ashes should rest. The mortifying fact of the ashes themselves had been blunted by time. Mark could take them as a given fact now, and work forward from there. He had moved again, from West Coast to East, and when his mother came, he took her on a two-and-a-half-hour hike he had specifically reconnoitered for a woman of fifty-five, forgetting, somehow, that his mother, for all that her stride was very short against his, was as hardy and quick as a goat and could easily have hiked four times as long on a grade twice as steep. But he’d had another reason for choosing this hike. Though seemingly tucked in unremarkable central New York, amid nameless hills and generically pretty farmland, the trail, after gently ascending through fern beds and second-growth woods, emerged suddenly at the top of a thousand-foot drop at the bottom of which was a lake that appeared to be perfectly round. The hills rose straight out of the lakeshore on three sides, like a horseshoe-shaped fortress, but the fourth wall was open and gave a view of the quilted farmland, rolling into infinity. It was a kettle lake, formed when a glacier had pushed its load of scraped boulders and dirt to this site and no farther—this was the horseshoe-shaped rampart—and then started melting. A great chunk had sunk into the ground, like an ice cube in sand, and once melted became the round lake, a strange eye gazing into the sky.
Mark knew that for all his mother’s devout Christianity, she was no science-denying zealot who disavowed the Ice Age. She was, in fact, a practical-minded woman who over the years in the course of her work had taken a keen interest in meteorology, geology, agricultural method, and even electrical engineering. This again had been a point of agreement between herself and her husband: the compatibility of Christian theology with scientific progress. She listened to Mark with clear pleasure. He knew that it had been a long time since he’d shown the sort of ardent interest in the workings of nature that had possessed him when he’d been a young boy. After they had taken in the view and Mark had shown her the direction in which Syracuse, where the airport was, lay—although, thankfully, it was not visible—Mark said, feeling his pulse quicken in trepidation, though he’d been trying to work up to it for the whole of the hike, “Sometimes I think about Dad resting someplace like this.”
She didn’t reply for so long that he began to feel claustrophobic, at the top of the dazzling cliff, with an hour’s worth of walking back down before they’d be in his van and driving quickly away from the place where he’d made this mistake. But when she did speak, he was startled by how well she’d understood him.
“Because it’s a beautiful place, and any beautiful place on this earth would be an equally right place for him.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You know,” she went on, as if it were a topic they’d discussed on and off for the past half decade, “I think the difficulty I’ve had in deciding what to do with his ashes has to do with just that. With beauty. Because all the places your father and I lived, all the places in which we were so grateful to be able to do God’s work—”
“I know, Mom,” he said, because he could never abide being preached to by her. But she didn’t bristle in return, which was another surprise.
“All those places were our homes, but they’re not…” She paused, caught between truth and conviction.
“They’re not restful places,” Mark said.
She looked up at him, surprised also. He was much taller than she, on top of all the other ways in which he failed to resemble her, both physically and temperamentally, but he could see that he’d spoken her thoughts. “They aren’t,” she admitted.
Of course they’d made no decision just then, and Mark had even shrunk back from his own idea, perhaps because of how readily Ruth had agreed. If choosing any one of the two dozen places where Mark’s father had lived as his last resting place felt too random, how much more random to choose a place to which he had no connection at all, just because it was pretty? But still, the idea persisted, not as a project requiring completion so much as a prism through which Mark now saw each new place he set foot. He had the sense, sometimes, of hiking alongside his father. There was nothing so certain as a voice in his ear or a second long stride ghosting his on the path. But he felt companioned, if not quite by his father then by a frail sense of purpose regarding his father, and his unhoused remains.
Meanwhile the odd jobs came and went, the apartments and towns were tried out and discarded, seven pairs of high-quality boots were worn out and replaced. One summer the derelict fire tower on Little Blue Peak, seven miles from his house, was rebuilt with state money, and on a warm day in April when the snow had been thawing for over a week, Mark packed tent and bedroll and three days’ worth of food and made camp at the summit. He surveyed it, as usual, for everlasting sublimity of the sort that would suit Lewis Gaither Senior, and found it lacking, as most places were. It was still a fine place to spend three days alone, eating freeze-dried stew out of a bag and sleeping under the stars. He’d turn thirty this fall and was surprised to realize that in careerless subsistence survival, in apparently purposeless wandering, his twenties had almost expired and he didn’t feel older but lighter. Part of some burden was gone. He still looked twenty-one, perhaps more than he had at the time. He still felt women, and sometimes furtive men, staring at him on the very rare occasions that he still ventured, battered paperback under one arm, into bars, slumping to distort his long-limbed, feline body, wearing a beard to conceal his face. But most men, the sorts of places he lived, far from desiring him, found him too pretty to supply his own woodstove, as he did, and felt compelled to be rude, and most women wanted to devour and mother him; so that, for the past half decade, since he’d given up serious drinking, it felt easiest to have few friends, no lovers, and certainly no one to whom he gave out his address. At the end of three days, he hiked home in the same deeply abstracted, unself-conscious trance by which he was always enveloped coming down from a mountain, scarcely aware of the smell of himself, or the raw spots his boots had chafed onto his feet, or the exhausted but pleasant vibration he felt in his calves. As his house came into view, it took a beat for him to fully perceive the two men, in a brand-new Ford Bronco, parked on the sprinkling of gravel that served as his driveway. He lived at the dead end of a very poor road that needled as far as it could into state-preserve land before giving up at a ROAD ENDS barricade, and people never happened onto his house unless they were lost, in which case they reversed in his yard and drove quickly away.
The Bronco, however, was waiting. He felt his rib cage constrict in alarm. He had to remind himself, as he approached, that he was now a law-abiding citizen. He possessed no narcotics. He paid his bills working construction and had taxes withheld. Even his van’s registration was current. “Help you gentlemen with something?” he called as the driver’s-side window scrolled down. He had a vanishing glimpse of himself in its glass, his dirty beard and long hair, his tall pack with his bedroll on top and his drinking cup dangling from one of the straps. The two men were clean-shaven and short-haired and dressed as if going to play golf, although there was nowhere to do such a thing in the region.
“Lewis Gaither?” the driver asked.
After a moment he said, “That’s my legal name. I go by Mark.”
“Your middle name,” the passenger said, which was a statement of fact, not a question.
Both men emerged from the car, holding out their credentials. It wasn’t the first time that Mark had faced cops—but the first in a long time. “I’d like to take off my pack,” he murmured, making clear he was docile. When they nodded approval, he lifted the weight from himself—tenderly, tremblingly—and then set it, his only true home, on his steps, before leading them into his house.
In fact he had faced cops all over the world. At ten months of age, so the story was endlessly told—its repetition by Ruth her failed effort to seem merely amused by the startling event—he had vaulted from his crib and not walked for the first time but run through the house (Tanzania), out the front door, and into the bush, from which local police and search dogs had been required to extract him. At six years of age, he’d first run away purposefully. That had been while they lived in Sri Lanka, so he hadn’t gotten far. He still remembered being led down a hallway, a khaki-clad Sri Lankan policeman to each side, each resting a palm on his shoulder. His waiting parents coming into view, his father’s face wrung with mortified anger and Ruth for once actually crying, a startling sight because rare. After that he’d run away from almost every domicile in which they had tried to install him, been retrieved and returned by grim cops of all colors and flags. He’d run away for no reason he knew—was he searching already? He’d held nothing against them, hadn’t even disliked them, let alone hated them, as they often theatrically claimed. He’d only felt separate from them, from the very beginning. Uncompelled by their faith, which was the whole of their lives, and so unable to connect himself to them. They had loved him, he knew, but he’d felt like a caged animal, restricted by all sorts of conventions that were contrary to him—and so misconstrued, and extremely alone. And perhaps this was why, though he felt he would like a companion, even after he’d forged his own life, the aloneness remained. Now he was forced to assume he must simply prefer it.
The conversation took place in his living room, the two special agents from the FBI perched uncomfortably on the block of upholstered foam that served as his sofa and pretending, Mark could see, not to absorb every detail of the thoughtless improvisation that was his house, which had been built—not by him—with components so shoddy that although Mark possessed all the requisite skills, he felt there was no point in ever replacing them. The Wonderboard in the bathroom was a soft mash of mold, the floor a spongy mélange of carpet scraps and plywood, the rest of the house an array of fire hazards, as if to offset the triumph of moisture. It was a house that rented for an almost token sum, even by the depressed standards of the local economy. No one had ever seemed to like living here, not because of the tangible defects but perhaps due to something more generally wrong, a misbegotten and mistaken sensation that applied to the entire site the house sat upon, and maybe even to the road that led here. There shouldn’t be a house or a lot or a road; it all sat in the shade of the unfriendly mountain, in fact butted heads with it, and lost. All of which had made it, in Mark’s view, the ideal habitation. The thing he’d grasped about the house at first sight was that if he lived there, he could walk out his front door and onto the mountain, which meant he hardly need live there at all. He had only ever cared for apartments or houses as places where he could store his equipment and park his car without getting a ticket. In his wandering youth, he’d once chosen the wrong place to live in his car while unemployed and without any money, and had wound up with tickets in excess of six hundred dollars, and a brief stay in jail, and a year on probation until the debt was resolved.
It had been a long time ago, although the emotions the episode provoked in him remained stormy and self-castigating. Even so, he was unprepared when the agents referred to the lapse. He’d been thinking they must be pursuing the methamphetamine labs that were now everywhere in his area and wondering if they could possibly think he had something to do with them, when the first agent, from the driver’s seat, said, taking out a small notebook and examining it, “Lewis Gaither, formerly of Morro Bay, California, is that right?” Morro Bay was the town in which Mark had incurred the six hundred dollars in parking tickets, almost eight years before, not long after his father had died.
“I realize you said that it’s Mark,” the agent went on politely. “But I’m working here from your arrest record.”
“Yes, that’s me,” Mark said after a moment, while within the constriction of his boots his feet suddenly boiled with pain, and within the darkness of his torso his guts somersaulted. He could not imagine in what way that incident was going to resurface now.
“Thank you,” the agent said with surprising simplicity, making a note in his notebook and closing it. “Special Agent Schoonmaker and I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“Would you like to take your boots off?” the second man, Schoonmaker, asked. “You must be beat, just back from a hike.”
“No, thanks,” Mark said, flushing at the unexpected solicitousness. “I’m fine, really.”
“If we could take one more minute,” the first agent resumed. Mark had forgotten his name already. “We may be looking for another Lewis Gaither, who shares the same spelling you use.”
“My father,” Mark said.
Both agents nodded, unsurprised. “And he’s currently residing…?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. When did he die?”
“In 1986.”
This seemed to cause some slight surprise. “Where’s the death recorded?”
“Jakarta, Indonesia. He was a missionary there,” Mark added, though this last was in answer to a question that hadn’t been asked. On the inexplicable introduction of his father’s name into this inexplicable conversation, Mark was aware of a rising rigidity, of a feeling of affront so powerful as to overwhelm any sense of caution on his own behalf, and even any politeness. “What do you want with my father?” he said. “My father never did anything but work for the church and for poor people. Are you sure you’re not looking for me?”
The first agent said, “Unless you’ve gotten a new set of hands since you left Morro Bay, I don’t think we’re looking for you. We’re looking for past acquaintances of a man named Lee. A mathematics professor.”
“I didn’t go to college,” Mark said brusquely. “What does that man have to do with my father?”
“We think there’s some possibility your father knew Professor Lee. Does that seem possible? Did he ever mention this person to you?”
“No,” Mark said, his voice sounding thin to him, almost shrill, with impatience. “Can you tell me what this is about?”
It was about, apparently, the fact that the person called Professor Lee had gone to some midwestern school with Mark’s father, where both were doctoral students in math. “That’s not my father,” Mark broke in, overwhelmed—almost weak—with relief, as if there could have been any chance that his father—so pious and remote and resented and insufficiently known, but not the least unpredictable—might in fact have had some other life, some dark secret, no hint of which Mark had discerned. “My father was never a doctoral student, and he never lived in the Midwest. He got a B.A. degree somewhere in Texas, Southern Christian Men’s College or something like that, and then he went overseas to do work with his church, and he stayed overseas for the rest of his life. You must have the wrong person.”
Both agents paused, to assimilate this. “Your father, to your knowledge, was never a student at the U of I?” Schoonmaker said.
“I think I would have known about that. He was interested in science—in reconciling science with religion—and I think it was his dream I’d pursue something similar, but obviously I didn’t,” Mark said, the unpremeditated, unsolicited, inexplicable, and far-too-intimate disclosure giving him the sensation of hurtling downhill too quickly, so that his center of gravity outstripped his feet, and it was all he could do to catch up, before painfully falling.
The encounter concluded in empty pleasantries about the region and thanks for his time that Mark barely heard, except for the final reiterating words of the agent who had driven, as the two men were preparing to resume their places in the Bronco: “Jakarta, you said? That’s where your father was buried?” Mark had the sense, far less pressing than other current emotions but still irritating, that this was the critical point for some reason, and that he was not quite believed. But they could check for themselves, and he was sure that they would.
“Cremated, not buried. Jakarta. Nineteen eighty-six.” They thanked him a last time and left.
It was only a moment before the sound of their engine had died in the distance and the sounds of his hills had reclaimed their dominion: a catbird in his backyard complaining; the breeze registering in the hemlock grove’s faint susurrations; and almost drowning these out, the machinelike emissions from some ubiquitous insect that had hatched in that week’s rising heat. Yet Mark was agitated, so much so that despite his exhaustion he could not sit still to perform the deferred liberation of his feet from their boots. It wasn’t only the intrusion of his father’s cremation into this brush with the FBI agents, as if the entire bizarre episode had been staged to reopen that barely healed wound. Mark had also felt a startled discomfort—which, rather than diminishing now that the agents had gone, was growing more acute—at the agents’ suggestion, completely mistaken, that his father might have once studied math at a graduate school. The idea was completely mistaken—but it struck far too close to a true fact, repeated by Mark’s mother as often and as tiresomely as the Tanzanian crib-escape story: that his father had dreamed of becoming a great mathematician. In fact, Ruth would say, he’d shown real mathematical talent. But he’d sacrificed all such ambition to serve church and God.
When Mark had moved into his house the year before, its mildewed basement had presented him with an ugly shock, if no surprise: it had been crammed with the leavings of a disordered life, if not several, and Mark had almost felt he saw the phantoms of those vagabonds as they’d been when they’d made their untidy retreat. No concrete idea of where they were going, no new pad yet; some fragile connection to somebody staying behind. I’ll be back for this stuff in a month or so, man. You’re totally welcome to play the records, just make sure they get back in their sleeves. There’s some good stuff in there. Then a year would have passed, and then five, the caretaker long gone…. Mark had been able to learn nothing from the rental agent. And so, after a few months of uneasy struggle with the ethics of it, he’d borrowed a small Dumpster from a construction contractor he knew and set to cleaning out the basement himself, not entirely free of the feeling that he was chucking some alternate past of his own. Most of what he’d found had been worthless. The records, sliding heaps upon heaps of them, American rock he supposed might have been his own sound track if he’d grown up in this country, all the jackets and even many of the plastic disks themselves now grown over with bright-colored cushions of mold. He’d found a ghastly box of women’s clothing, almost transubstantiated into a single webby fungus; milk crates of newspapery pulp, some of which he recognized as songbooks and some of which he couldn’t recognize at all. And he’d grown sadder and angrier, in equal and increasing amounts, though why either and not just irritated he couldn’t have said. What had happened to this music enthusiast, to his perhaps-girlfriend, to their whole sloppy circle of gypsies? Boxes of hostile, indestructible jumble: a filthy metal ashtray in the shape of a crab, a baffling sculpture of a figure wielding comedy/tragedy masks, all the components being hardware, like nuts and bolts, welded together. Himself pitchforking it like so much rotten hay.
Only two items had resisted disposal. They were two saxophones—two of them. In almost identical mildewed black cases, the velvet within two identical horrors of mold. But the instruments themselves, once Mark cleaned them and applied metal polish and buffed with difficulty around all the little levers and doors, were dazzling, a pair of gold dolphins. They seemed to have rocketed out of the muck. Mark had no desire to keep them, yet something about the whole episode began to feel ordained, the dolphin saxophones leading him somewhere…. Aggravated by this illogical, God’s-hand-in-it-all strain of thinking, which could have been Ruth’s, he wrapped the saxophones in towels and drove to Albany to pawn them, and there, in the pawnshop, found himself irresistibly drawn to an old Canon camera, though he’d never had the slightest interest in photography. He made a trade and left the store with a camera: God’s-hand-in-it-all after all.
Now it was hard to dismiss the aptness of the fact that out of the ruins of another life’s archive his own life had a record of sorts for the very first time. With their ascetic and wandering lifestyle, his parents had never kept anything. Not just sentimental ephemera—photo albums and scrapbooks, baby clothes, toys, and drawings—but even such basic documentation as Mark’s birth certificate were entirely missing. These lacunae had not bothered Mark. (Except, briefly, for the one where the birth certificate ought to have been. At age nine Mark had become determined to have his name changed and, being told by some helpful adult that he would need his birth certificate, had asked his mother for it and learned it was lost. “So you can’t even prove Lewis Junior’s my name?” he had said and, impelled by how clearly she’d blanched, “You can’t even prove you’re my parents? Or that I’m nine and not ten? Or that I even exist?”) This was because Mark’s own habits were identically monkish. He had always disliked household accumulation so much that even when he’d lived in his car, he had felt too weighed down. This was why he’d experienced such recognition when he’d first bought and outfitted a backpack: his every need anticipated and ingeniously jigsaw-compacted, a whole elegant homestead that barely topped thirty-five pounds. Yet, whether paradoxically or not, it was his hiking that first made him want to accumulate—not objects but a record of things. More and more often, he found himself holding his breath at the sight of a black bear plumped on its bottom pawing blueberries into its mouth, or a beaver pair churning their pond with the whacks of their tails, or a pileated woodpecker drilling a tree while its manic eye twinkled at Mark, as if to suggest it could do the same job on his skull. Mark knew he was just passing through, that the woods were not his, but he wanted these things to remember. He wanted some proof for himself. He wanted to formalize memory—he had the sense he’d begun reconstructing himself, so that these encounters, and not his childhood tempest, were the touchstones he harked back to when he asked how he’d gotten to where he was now. He was no writer; the self-conscious, hunched labor of keeping a journal was foreign to him. But the old Canon settled itself in his hands as if it had never been anywhere else.
Of course, no sooner did he carry the camera into the woods than the bears withdrew up-mountain, the beavers ducked underwater, the pileated cackled from an unseeable height in the canopy. Mark found himself photographing those things that could not run away. The scarlet fallen leaves of maples beneath a first skin of ice. Sunfish Pond frozen solid and purple. And then, after the thaw, waterfalls to which no trail led, multistepped cataracts beneath shawls of hemlock seen by just a few people, if that many, in any one year.
He was miserly with film and took a long time to use up a roll; he also kept his library books past their due dates; and he grocery-shopped only rarely, and then extensively, for shelf-stable food. Those traits had in common, besides him, only their effect: that he drove to town very infrequently. Yet now, without showering or eating or even changing out of his boots, Mark backed his car down his driveway, with his library books, his shopping list, and even the Canon, though his current roll was only half shot, on the seat beside him. He felt he needed not just one but several excuses for going to town—as if the two agents were watching his movements.
At the general store, he bought neither groceries nor film but a one-hour phone card, which translated, if he recalled correctly, to just under ten minutes when calling Jakarta. He hadn’t had a phone since the second time a bear pulled down his box and then sharpened its claws on the pole; by a tacit understanding, Mark now called Ruth from the pay phone in town every couple of months, while she wrote him brief, factual letters. When she picked up, she said sharply, “What’s happened?” It was the middle of her night, and she’d last heard from him so recently that he knew she’d assume an emergency.
“I’m all right. It’s just…something’s been strange.”
He told her, as concisely as he could, about the FBI’s visit and then was surprised by how long she was silent. It could not have been more than five beats of his heart, but that was a long time if you knew, as they both did, how expensive the call was and how finite his card.
When she finally did speak, the focus of her interest seemed entirely wrong. “What did they say that this man Lee had done?”
“Him? They never said.”
“They didn’t give you any reason for their questions?” She sounded annoyed, less with the incomprehensible manifestation of FBI agents than with Mark, the typically disorganized narrator. “You didn’t ask?”
“I might have, but it wasn’t my focus. I thought it was a total mix-up. Are you saying Dad did know this guy?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not unless it was long before I met your father.”
“Then how can you explain the coincidence?”
“What coincidence, Mark?”
“The one I’ve been talking about. That they thought Dad had gone to a grad school for math. Didn’t you say he always wanted to do that?”
“Mathematics was one of his interests. You know that.”
“But he never actually went to a grad school for it. That’s true, right? He never actually went?”
“Not so far as I know. No, he didn’t. He would have liked to, I think, but he didn’t.”
There was something very tepid in these answers. “Then don’t you think it’s kind of strange, that these FBI agents seem to think that he did go to grad school? They even named the school. U of I—”
“I think the whole thing is very strange,” she concurred, her tone no longer tepid but interruptingly final. “It’s obviously a mistake. Your father never broke a law in his life.”
He knew she hadn’t meant to imply a comparison, yet her comment still triggered an ache of remorse, and for a moment he thought not of his father’s strange past but of his own. “I thought it was me they were after—because of that thing.” Although she knew all about it, he still couldn’t say the word “jail.” It seemed crude and aggressive, although on some level he was aware it was more his own feelings he needed to spare.
“All that’s behind you now, Mark,” she said gently, and there in her voice was her tenderness, that it surprised him to realize he still craved: that beam of enfolding compassion, which as a child he had constantly fought to divert toward himself and which, when he succeeded, was an unstinting dazzlement, like the mercy of God. His father’s attention, by contrast, had pawed over him constantly, but in a spirit of dissatisfaction, which sapped Mark instead of succoring him. “It’s behind you,” she assured him again.
Then his phone card ran out.
Everything had bloomed late in the mountains this year. Even the mountain laurel, which every spring startled Mark with its instant appearance—the white froth of its blooms boiling over, the same way in the fall the tree line would abruptly ignite—seemed impeded, the usual process unfolding in syrup. While the buds formed, Mark had time to debate if the laurel would look best from far off, in its froth, or close up, as distinct little stars, and then he still had time left over to feel impatient. He’d often thought, in the spring and the fall, that he must be overly emotional, because of how intolerable he found the change of season—he couldn’t bear to see it start, nor could he bear to see it end. Stalking those ephemeral blooms with his Canon seemed like a fine way to rob them of their power, to assuage his aching heart with the complacent sentiment of possession, as he imagined the lepidopterist meant to in pinning his catch. But he was also aware that all this thinking about his emotions was an emotional smoke screen he’d blown for himself. Behind it squatted the increasingly unpleasant form of his actual preoccupation: the unsettling, unfinished conversation with Ruth.
April gave way to May. The mountain laurel bloomed and submitted to Mark’s Canon, and to his somehow diminished interest in its beauty and brevity. Mark took a job on a small crew erecting a modern-style house, very cheap and enormous with a vaulted living room that would require a fortune to heat. His days became purposeful and repetitive in the way they always were when he was working, and he felt the preoccupation recede from his mind, even as he felt himself scanning the streets of his town for the FBI agents, and scanning his empty mailbox, and passing with an accelerated step the town’s telephone booth. The agents did not return, and he never, in his terse lunch hours with the rest of his crew, heard them mentioned by anyone else. He felt that his rolls of film shooting the laurel had been thoroughly wasted; he knew that the pictures were worthless.
The Tuesday he drove to town meaning to drop off the film for development, he left the rolls in the glove box instead, where the heat would destroy them, and went to the library. The town library, a minute institution of two rooms, was open just two days a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, because the librarian was an unpaid volunteer, who spent Wednesdays and Sundays in a neighboring town, helming their equally unfunded collection. Mark also knew how Dorothy spent her Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, doing accounting for a few local businesses, and driving for Meals on Wheels, and striving to inspire her retired husband to a level of activity more like her own. Mark was a favorite of hers, in the way that autodidacts are always beloved by the librarians whose labors they justify. Dorothy often signed books out for Mark from the other library and waved away his fines when he was late, which was often, because apart from funny fiction, which was very hard to find, his taste ran to overlong nonfiction books that took more than two weeks to read. He’d had The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin for two months and was not even carrying it now, but instead a history of oil called The Prize, which he’d had even longer.
“There he is!” she said when he came through the door. “And he’s got—oh, it’s hard to see without my glasses, but I think he must have The Discoverers tucked under his cap. No? What’s that big square thing up there, just your brain?” Dorothy was not a librarian on the model of a delicate powdery granny with glasses on a long silver chain. She was a large, robust woman who more often served as a ranger for visiting backpackers, distributing maps and advising on weather conditions.
“If I needed to find out some things about somebody, how would I do it?”
“What somebody? Have you finally got a girl?”
“I’m looking at her.”
“Shut up, you.” As always when he came to the library, she indicated a small stack of books. “New arrivals. I hit a library sale in Ellenville over the weekend.”
Mark sat down at the room’s one small table, while Dorothy shuffled trail maps and newspapers out of his way. He knew she must spend her own money, not just on used library copies but on new books she read about in magazines and newspapers and then ordered by mail, many of which captured her interest solely because she imagined they might capture his—she was a careful student of his tastes, though she tried to conceal this. “Funny Englishmen?” he asked hopefully.
“Misters Wodehouse and Waugh. I hear they’re funny. I haven’t tried them myself.”
“You’re too good to me, Dorothy.”
“I’m just trying to soften you up to get Boorstin. I’ve actually persuaded a patron at the other library to put down the Time-Life Book of Home Electrical Repairs and try Boorstin instead. Help out a curious mind in its first little efforts, Mark. Maybe you’ll raise up another book lover. You don’t want to be Professor of Pine Hill with nobody to talk to.”
Mark abruptly put down Vile Bodies. “What made you say that?”
“What?”
“‘Professor of Pine Hill.’ You’ve never said that before.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. I just meant for all the reading you do, you ought to get a degree.”
“It’s just strange. The somebody I want to know about is a professor, but that’s all I know. And that he’s called Professor Lee.”
“The one they think is the bomber,” Dorothy said easily, as if this were another of their ongoing discussions, warmly but intermittently pursued, for example their debate on the books of Tom Clancy, which Dorothy was “hooked on” and Mark found despicable. “The Brain Bomber,” she supplied helpfully. “The guy who says he’s going to kill the Great Minds to save the world from war? Earth to Mark? Come on now, don’t be looking so pale. I don’t think you’re on his hit list just yet.”
“The Brain Bomber? What the hell is the Brain Bomber?”
“You can’t be serious, Mark.”
“I don’t read People, Dorothy.”
“It’s not in People. It’s in Time and Newsweek and USA Today. He sends bombs in the mail to brilliant professors on the argument that it’s better to kill them before they invent something that kills all of us.” Dorothy riffled through the piles on her desk and then through the pages of a copy of Time before handing it to him. “Now the police seem to think it’s this Oriental fellow named Lee, but he says that he’s not, and very frankly I don’t see it myself. He just looks like a little old Chinaman.”
Mark winced at her comment; he never could get over how narrow even the best-intentioned Americans were. Yet the man did, as she’d said, appear little, and old. Narrow-shouldered, a slight stoop from age that perhaps only Mark would have noticed, with his keen hiker’s interest in posture and gait. A complicated, weathered brown face, eyes concealed beneath the bill of an old baseball cap that appeared to have gone through the wash. A professor of math. Mark closed the magazine and returned it to Dorothy. “You want to know about him, but you’ve never heard of him,” she said.
“I just…I thought he might have known my father, a long time ago.”
“What would make you think that?”
Dorothy was the only person Mark could have called a friend in this town, yet he found he did not want to tell her about the FBI’s visit, though he wasn’t sure why. “My mother. She just mentioned this person, like he’s someone I’d heard of before.”
“Is she here for a visit?” Dorothy harbored a keen and poorly hidden curiosity about Mark’s life before he’d come to Pine Hill. She’d once said, “You never tell me about yourself, Mark.”
“No, Dorothy. She’s in Indonesia.”
“Well, excuse me. There are airplanes, Mark.”
“And there also are telephones, Dorothy.”
“There wouldn’t be either if the Brain Bomber had his way. He’s against all technology’s marvels.” Dorothy was filling a brown bag with Newsweek and Time. “If your dad really knew that man Lee, I want to hear all about it.”
“You said you don’t think Lee’s the bomber.”
“Well, what do I know? Sometimes it’s the least likely people. In Mount Olive about ten years ago, there was a mother who was a registered nurse who kept losing her babies in crib deaths, and everyone felt awful for her because she was such a nice woman, and she’d nursed people’s relatives and was involved with her church and all that, and it turned out she’d smothered every one of them. She did five in a row.”
For some reason this anecdote made him want to escape her, though it was no more gothic than any number of others she’d told him, being also a fan of true crime. Now he said good-bye to her with such haste he was more than halfway home before he realized he’d left the Waugh and Wodehouse books behind. If he didn’t turn back, he’d have to wait almost a week, until Saturday, and he was out of light reading at home. Yet the paper sack of slightly stale newsmagazines had the greater hold over him. Once in his living room, he read through them quickly but carefully. Most of the articles were devoted to the so-called Brain Bomber, who seemed not so unlike Mark’s childhood hero the yeti, composed as he was almost entirely of hearsay and speculation. Investigators opined that he was “a male,” of “between forty and seventy years of age;” that he was “fit” if “reclusive,” “with strong attachments to the West or Midwest.” No evidence was offered as the basis for this portrait, perhaps because it wasn’t a portrait at all. A member of a group comprising just under one-half of humans, the males; the same age as any one of over a third of them, the forty-to seventy-year-olds; uncrippled, unsocial, with a tendency to wander the region defined by the exclusion of East and West coasts? (The yeti hunts alone, Mark remembered. The last of his kind, he has no friend, no mate….) One eyewitness was sure she had seen him, a big, “fleeing” man with wild hair and long beard. Another eyewitness was sure he had seen him, a small, “furtive” man in a cap and sunglasses. That at least didn’t flatly contradict the image of Professor Lee, whom the newsmagazines seemed to treat with a gingerly bafflement. He was always outside the main story, inside his own one-column box, usually under a headline like WHO IS THIS MAN? He was a Person of Interest, whatever that meant, a professor of math, colleague of the man who’d most recently died, unmarried, near retirement age, lived alone, “kept to himself.” “We’ve never gotten to know him. He’s not very outgoing,” complained one of his neighbors. Mark examined the picture again: the slight, wary brown man with his eyes concealed under his hat. Mark couldn’t even tell if he was wearing sunglasses. That was the first thing the professor should change: he should take off that hat, get a haircut, and gaze frankly into the camera. Mark could better sense the motives of the unseen photographer than those of the captured professor. The photographer must have wanted the subject to appear evasive, hiding under his cap. And Mark thought of his Morro Bay mug shot, an opposite portraiture style but with much the same outcome. Anyone—trapped by that pallorous light, slightly cringing away from the necklace of numbers, forbidden the plea of a smile—appeared not just guilty of crime but grotesquely depraved.
He wasn’t sure what confirmation he sought until he’d stumbled upon it. The professor had earned his doctorate from U of I in 1969. A year Mark and his father and Ruth had been living an ocean away in Kenya.
It was just past four when he got back to town. Dorothy, who manned the library from ten until three, had gone home, but the general store was still open. Mark bought two calling cards and, back outside, fully closed the door of the telephone booth, despite the day’s heat. He felt furtive himself, somehow like an impostor, even during the preliminary call to directory assistance to get a general-information number for the campus. Then he was stammering a fractured explanation to the campus operator, although she was just as impassive as operators everywhere. “My father was a student, I think. It was a long time ago. I’m just trying to find out, is there any possible way, he’s been dead a long time—”
“Undergraduate or graduate?”
“I think graduate. I think.”
“What department?”
“I’m not sure. I think math.”
“I’ll transfer you to math. I don’t know if there’s anyone there at the moment, it’s summer vacation, and they keep shorter hours.”
But there was someone there, someone who answered so promptly and sang out “Math department!” so gaily that Mark’s overheated discomfort now edged into panic. He felt trapped, not just in the booth but in a chain of events that, though slackened briefly since the day that he’d talked to the FBI agents, now seemed to have pulled taut again and was hauling him forward. He could have hung up the phone but felt foolish to even consider it, and at the same time deprived of the strength that would let him accomplish it. The slim box of air had grown stifling around him. He explained himself as minimally and calmly as he could to the secretary, who said, “That’s well before my time, but you’re in luck, because Helen happens to be here today,” as if he should know exactly who Helen was, and so grasp the extent of his luck, and before he could ask, she had called out, “Helen! I’ve got a young man on the phone whose dad was here in the sixties…. No don’t move, dear, I’ll transfer him to you. No, Helen, don’t move! You stay just where you are! I’m transferring him. You just—”
For a moment Mark floated alone. Then the line opened again.
“Hello?” inquired a very old voice.
Perhaps he’d missed a cue; he was sweating, the handset of the phone slipping over his face. It had strangely fallen to him to integrate the person named Helen. “Is this…Helen?” he asked.
“Yes, dear. How can I help you?”
“I’m not…sure. I’ll just tell you what I told the other person, is that all right? My father, I think, was a student there, back in the sixties, and I’m wondering if there’s any way I can confirm…You see, I’m not completely sure—”
“What was his name?” she interrupted, politely, but when he spoke it, her manner decisively changed. “Oh!” she said.
“You…you recognize—”
“Oh, my land!” she cried. “You’re Lewis’s little boy? Can I really be that old?” He heard a peal of affectionate laughter, the pert woman, in the background. “You be quiet,” Helen admonished. “You’re Lewis Gaither’s little boy! This is mortifying, dear, but what was your name? I used to brag that I never forgot a student, but I’m eighty-two years old now. I’m so thrilled I came in today! I don’t come in every day anymore. I’m eighty-two now. What was your name, dear?”
“Lewis,” he heard himself saying.
“Of course. And how is your father, dear? He was such a handsome young man. So tall and so handsome! He brought me camellias once on my birthday. You see? I’m famous for remembering students. How is he?”
“I’m afraid…I’m afraid he’s passed away—”
“Oh, my goodness.”
“It was many years ago, almost ten years ago. He had a heart condition,” Mark told her, almost apologetically.
“Oh, my goodness. I’m so sorry. Are you calling about a bequest? We’re often honored by bequests from our students.”
“I was really just calling to confirm that my father attended, just…to get the facts straight.”
“Of course he attended. He was a wonderful student, like all of our students. So handsome. I remember him like yesterday. And your mother.”
“You knew my mother?”
“Just to say hello, but I remember her. Such a beauty. Like a page out of Vogue.” A note of discomfort had entered Helen’s voice, perhaps the strain of supporting the fiction that plain, stern little Ruth would have ever glanced at Vogue, let alone appeared in it, but Mark only remotely heard this. Perhaps it was the sticky public handset in his fist, or the last exhalation of the hot afternoon in the stifling phone booth, but he felt himself linked not to unknown, nostalgic Helen but to his own ghostly mother, at the same time as being aware of his distance from her. A globe’s thickness, across which his judgment could not fully reach. Was it true, as he suddenly felt—as he had always felt, but only now lingered over—that there had been the slightest tinge of a queasy uncertainty, a shifting of sands, a nervous improvisatory haste, to his childhood milieu? He’d attributed it to their vagabond lifestyle: a new nation of natives each year, sometimes even a new continent; a new shabby house long since soiled by previous tenants; a new school out of which to be thrown or to flunk. These circumstances were the cause of the feeling, of course, or were they in fact the effects? The effects of that queasy sensation, which had its cause somewhere else?
“And what was her name, dear?” the old woman, Helen, was saying. “Emily, Ellen…I’m sorry, I’m known for my memory—”
“Ruth,” Mark supplied, and then even more brusquely, “What were the dates? Can you tell me exactly the dates he attended?”
“Ruth,” the woman, Helen, was repeating forsakenly. “Was that really it? Ruth?” Now a new note of tentativeness: the long tapestry of the years coming fully unrolled, and beginning to turn into dust…
It was the younger woman, joining them on an extension, who got him the dates. “‘Lewis Gaither,’” she read into the phone. “Matriculated September 1963. Attended five semesters, through January ’66.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Helen confirmed, relieved that here at least her memory did not fail her.
“Three years before Professor Lee got his degree,” Mark heard himself saying, without adding that his father’s time as a student had also lasted, illogically and impossibly, until two months after he, Mark, had been born.
“Oh, God,” the younger woman said. “Don’t get me started on that. We’ve had reporters calling all hours for weeks. How do you think I found your dad’s file so fast? The sixties drawer has gotten quite a workout lately.”
“A terrible thing,” Helen said quietly. “And they were such good friends,” she added.
“They were?” Mark snapped. “Lee and my father?”
“Oh, yes. At least at the beginning. Isn’t it hard to believe, how two friends could turn out so different?”
He couldn’t end the call quickly enough; they were sending him a copy of his father’s transcript, but he didn’t give a damn about that anymore. He would throw it away when it came, his mother’s son to the core, because didn’t she, too, retain nothing? No documents, no photographs, nothing picturing herself as bizarrely remembered by foggy-brained Helen as head-turning and worthy of Vogue—
“Who’s Lee?” he asked as soon as she picked up. The middle of her night again, but he didn’t apologize.
A slight, perhaps entirely imagined, hesitation. “Who?” she said.
“Not Who. Lee. Don’t tell me you’ve become a late admirer of Abbott and Costello.” Of course she didn’t grasp this, and he wasn’t actually trying to be funny. He was angry, a physiological cluster of symptoms with no clear intellectual basis. Clenched jaw, clenched gut, clenched hand around the telephone handset. “Who’s Lee?” he repeated.
“I don’t know, Mark. Isn’t it the man that the FBI agents were asking about? I told you I’d never heard of that person.”
“Don’t lie to me again.”
“When have I ever lied to you, Mark?”
“You’ve always said Dad never went to grad school. Three weeks ago you said it. Now it turns out those FBI agents weren’t mixed up at all. Dad went to the U of I for almost three years, and you must have been right there with him, and me too, since he was still going there on my birthday. What’s going on here, exactly? Why’d you lie about this?”
“I don’t like your tone, Mark. I don’t like it at all. I don’t suppose you’ve been drinking.”
“If by ‘drinking’ you mean my occasional enjoyment of a bottle of beer, no, I haven’t been drinking. Answer my goddamn question.”
The line went dead.
“Oh!” he roared at the graffiti-scoured, heat-warped, sweat-steamed Plexiglas walls of the telephone booth. “So that’s worse? So I took the fucking Lord’s name in vain and that’s fucking worse?” The fucking Lord only knew what he might have said to her, his rage as powerful as it ever had been in his volcanic teenage years, if she’d answered when he called her again, the next moment, but she didn’t; she let it ring and ring and ring, and she never picked up. There was so much here not to believe: that his mother was turning her back, walking quickly away from her phone; that the phone really could keep on ringing for five minutes, six, with each shrill iteration exactly the same, with no chance of a lengthened or truncated pause, with no expressive ascent in the key, just the same harsh mechanical noise, his entreaty repulsed—and it was finally that, the monotony of it, that bludgeoned his anger to nothing, that left him bled out and unfeeling, and let him hang up.