My ten-year high school reunion, held in the fall of 1997, was a disappointment. This should not have been a terrible surprise, but I’m afraid I had bought into the scenarios played out in endless movies and TV shows, the ones where all the old animosities, the divisions between jock and nerd, popular and outcast, are put aside, and the former classmates discover that their similarities outweigh their differences—as, of course, they always had. What I found instead was that a decade had not been sufficient time to alter much beyond hairlines and waistbands. I learned other things, too.
The reunion was a two-night affair, with an informal meet-and-greet at the bar of the Castle, a local restaurant, on Friday, and a formal dinner at the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club on Saturday. In between, those who wanted to rekindle their school spirit brighter still could attend Our Lady of Fatima’s homecoming game Saturday afternoon. Starting Friday, I had the sense that the weekend was not going to live up to my hopes for it. For one thing, no one recognized me. To be fair, I had changed more than anyone else there. When I graduated, I was six feet tall, one hundred and fifty or sixty pounds if I was wearing a heavy coat. I had gained another sixty pounds in the intervening years, as well as a beard that was the same light brown my hair had darkened to in my early twenties. None of my old classmates had deviated as dramatically from their former appearances, so it was perhaps to be expected that they would not know me. They were not prepared to.
All the same, I found this disconcerting. I walked past people paired and grouped as they had been in the halls of Fatima, and their gazes slid over me without catching on anything. While I had not been the class president, or captain of the football team, or even the class clown, I had been in the drama club, acting the part of the villainous Jonathan in the senior class production of Arsenic and Old Lace; I had lettered in spring track (hurdles) twice; I had played an active role in discussions and debates in our English, social studies, and religion classes. Especially since our graduating class numbered one hundred and thirty-two, I assumed I had made some depth of impression on the people I had spent four years with. This did not appear to be the case.
After an hour of sitting at the bar, nursing a Corona and watching the room fill with people exchanging hugs, handshakes, and backslaps, I decided to leave my stool and introduce myself to my former classmates. Standing directly in front of them, I extended my right hand, calling them by their names and reminding them of mine. Yet even so direct an approach did not yield the look of pleased recognition, the firm handshake, the repetition of my name followed by an exclamation of pleasure. Instead, the men and women I greeted took my hand hesitantly, their faces confused, as if, while familiar, my name was not one they could immediately place. After uttering a platitude about how great it was to see me, they resumed the conversations whose breaks had allowed me to make my introduction. The forty-five minutes or so it took to complete my circuit of the room left me disheartened, depressed, and back at the bar. I had come on my own, so there was no point to ordering anything stronger than another beer. I poked the wedge of lime jutting from the bottle’s neck down into it, and toasted my reflection in the bar’s mirror. Here’s to obscurity.
To my left, a voice said my name. Mood instantly lightened, I turned on my stool, and saw Joel Martin—Mr. Martin, I couldn’t help thinking. Junior year chemistry, senior year physics, assistant coach of the boys’ junior varsity football and varsity basketball teams. Disgraced in the closing days of my senior year for an affair with Sinead McGahern, one of my classmates, which left her pregnant and him out of a job at which he had been a favorite. He looked terrible. His hair, thinning when I had sat in his classroom, had largely deserted his head, except for a few spots here and there where he had allowed it to grow long. The lenses of his glasses were scratched and scored, opaque in some places. The heavy five o’clock shadow that had always darkened his jaw had thickened to a heavy beard, which he appeared to have maintained without the benefit of a mirror. Never a big man to begin with—I would have put his height at 5’5”, his weight at one forty—he seemed smaller inside his shapeless black suit, shrunken. A martini glass, full, stood on the bar in front of him.
I was stunned. In the weeks and months after graduation, Joel Martin’s situation had gone from scandal to ongoing catastrophe, ending with him in jail, first in Argentina, then locally. During my first couple of years of college, when I still met some of my high school friends at winter and summer breaks, the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Mr. Martin and Sinead McGahern was among our immediate topics of conversation. As his actions had progressed—or declined—from the questionable to the out-and-out criminal, so had my mental image of him transformed from intense, affable science teacher to something darker, a seducer, a humiliated and desperate father. To encounter him here, looking different, yes, yet more threadbare than sinister, was a scenario I would not have anticipated. Which may have been why, when he held out his hand, I took it. His flesh was gritty, as if he had come directly from the beach without washing. I wondered if anyone else had identified him. Was Sinead here? I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen her, but had I seen everyone?
“How’ve you been?” he said.
“Good,” I said. It was the answer I would have given had any of the people I’d tried to talk to posed the question.
“What’re you up to these days?”
“Teaching,” I said. “I teach college.”
“Oh, yeah? Whereabouts?”
“SUNY Huguenot. Across the river.”
“That’s great,” he said, his voice full of its old enthusiasm. “What do they have you doing?”
“English,” I said. “Freshman writing, mostly.”
“Very nice. Say, you know what I’ve been sitting here trying to remember?”
“What?”
“The prank you guys pulled when you were juniors. Well, maybe ‘prank’ is too strong a word. No one got hurt or anything. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I did. “The ‘What the hell is that?’ routine.”
He snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Who came up with that?”
“No one. I mean, someone saw it on TV—Saturday Night Live, I think—and we decided to do it in school.”
Joel Martin was laughing now, albeit quietly. “What the hell is that?” he said. Keeping his hand close to his chest, he pointed at a spot above the bar’s mirror. “What the hell is that? What the hell is that? What the hell is that?” He lowered his finger. “You remember the time I joined you guys?”
I nodded. It had been our most successful staging of the bit.
“Long time ago,” he said. “Long, long time ago.”
With sudden and uncanny certainty, I knew that the man who had gotten me through both Regents Chemistry and Regents Physics was on the verge of broaching topics I had no desire to discuss. An emotion halfway to panic gripped me. I decided to forego finishing my beer and depart the reunion early. I was pretty much done already, wasn’t I? Joel Martin saw me withdrawing a ten from my pocket to cover my drink and tip. His eyes widened, but before he could open his mouth, I said, “I have to go. Have a good night,” and slid off my stool.
Excusing and pardoning myself, I navigated the groups and couples standing between me and the front door. The room had grown hot, stiflingly humid. The sports coat and turtleneck I’d opted for were too tight, constricting. I glanced back to see if Joel Martin was still at the bar. I couldn’t tell; there were too many people crowding the space.
Outside, the night air was blessedly cool. I pulled off my jacket, tugged my shirt out of my slacks. My car was in front of the restaurant, at the concrete divider separating the parking lot from the main road. I was unlocking the driver’s-side door when I heard my name shouted. I looked toward the Castle’s front door, and there was Joel Martin holding it open. I raised the hand holding my jacket in what I hoped was a noncommittal wave. From within the doorway, he called, “See you there tomorrow?”
I motioned with the jacket again, ducked inside my car, and almost broke the key off jamming it into the ignition. I was positive I was going to hear a tap on my window and see my former teacher’s smiling face leaning toward me. When I stole a look at the front door, however, it was, though still open, empty. It was as if I had just missed Joel Martin stepping away from it to return inside. I had the impression of something within the lighted rectangle, a cloud of dust or sand, but I was too relieved at my good fortune to pay much attention to it. I shifted into gear and drove out of the parking lot.
The following night, I spent the car ride from my apartment in Wiltwyck to the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club narrating Joel Martin’s fall from grace to Linda, my date for the evening. She was a former girlfriend who had broken up with me in order to pursue a relationship with one of her professors at NYU. They had split when she became pregnant, and now she was the mother of a two-year-old daughter, Elaine, whose father had visitation rights alternating weekends and two weeks during the summer. She managed a bank in Wiltwyck and lived with her dad, a retired cop who spent his days watching his granddaughter. Long past our post-relationship bitterness, we had lunch every few weeks, trading news about our latest romantic prospects and complaining about our respective jobs. After my most recent relationship petered out, Linda had agreed to accompany me to my reunion dinner as, she said, a psychological investigation into the forces that had shaped me. While she might have anticipated a certain level of pre-event nervousness on my part, she was unprepared for the agitation that had hold of me—that had not released me since the previous night. We hadn’t been on the road two minutes when she said, “All right. You better tell me what’s going on with you.”
The first part of the story was related quickly enough. Having lived her own version of it, Linda was less shocked than she might have been. “I take it things didn’t work out between this guy and the student,” she said.
“To put it mildly,” I said. “From what I understand, Sinead’s parents wanted to press charges against Martin—statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The problem was, she had turned eighteen the previous December, and both of them swore nothing had happened between them until the end of January. I think her mom still wanted to go after him, legally speaking, but her dad was less gung ho. This was the father of his first grandchild, and Martin was saying all the right things, how sorry he was, how much he loved Sinead, how he intended to do right by her and the baby. Plus, Sinead kept insisting she was in love with him. Eventually, her mom cooled off, especially when Martin proposed to Sinead at the end of the summer. That was the news in the fall, when I was home for Thanksgiving break. Mr. Martin and Sinead McGahern were engaged, with a wedding planned for sometime in the spring, after she’d had the baby and regained her shape. Martin had a job at a gas station, which sounded like a bit of a comedown after having taught high school, but maybe not. Supposedly, he was saving to rent a house for them.”
“I want to say they didn’t go through with the wedding,” Linda said.
“No, they didn’t. Sinead had the baby the day after Christmas, a little boy, Sean. Apparently, Martin was in love with the kid the moment he laid eyes on him. I heard that was part of what broke them apart. One look at his child—his son, right?—and he’s all ready to settle down with Sinead and start working on baby number two. Her, not so much. She’d been accepted to Penrose, and they’d agreed to defer her admission for a year. This was something she was not willing to give up.”
“Plus,” Linda said, “the bloom was off the rose, for him as well as for her. You start seeing someone in secret like that, someone who’s off-limits to you, who embodies, I don’t know, a certain kind of authority for her, a certain kind of youthfulness for him, and let me tell you, it’s pretty heady stuff. Forbidden fruit and all that. It doesn’t take long, though, for the fruit to spoil. What they had was a fling. Their mistake was in trying to prolong it—which, I understand, they did because of the kid. They would’ve been better hiring lawyers and drawing up a custody agreement. Did they?”
“Eventually. By that time, things between them were pretty dire. Her second year at Penrose, Sinead moved into an apartment with the kid. It was near the college. Apparently, Penrose offered pretty good childcare for its students and faculty, and this was where little Sean spent a lot of his time. Too much, according to Martin. He accused Sinead of dumping the kid at daycare or on her parents. Said that, half the time, he didn’t know where his son was. On one occasion, he showed up to collect the baby, and Sinead was out; she’d left her new boyfriend in charge of Sean.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Martin took her to court, but her parents hired a nasty lawyer for her, sicced him on Martin the way Sinead’s mom had wanted to in the first place. From what I understand, he shredded Martin into tiny pieces. I guess the judge was pretty sympathetic to Sinead too. The upshot was, Martin’s custody of Sean was limited to every other weekend; plus, he was put on the hook for all kinds of expenses in addition to child support.”
“Could have been worse,” Linda said.
“I’m sure,” I said, “but Martin didn’t see it that way. I don’t know if he honestly believed Sinead wasn’t taking proper care of their child, or if he was stung by losing the court case.”
“Or both.”
“Or both. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t let things alone. So he came up with a plan. He bought a dime bag of weed—”
“He didn’t.”
“Yeah, he did. Sinead had a habit of leaving her car unlocked in front of her apartment. He intended to drop the bag under the driver’s seat. Then, the next time she brought Sean to his place, he would just happen to notice the drugs. He would call the cops on her and, ultimately, gain leverage when it came to the kid. Unfortunately for him, Sinead’s boyfriend looked out of the window at the exact moment Martin had her car door open and was bent down inside it. She called 911. There was a police car close enough to show up before Martin had driven away. A big scene ensued. The pot was discovered. Sinead and the boyfriend accused Martin of planting it, said they weren’t into that kind of stuff. I gather they told the cops they could search the apartment if they didn’t believe them. Martin still had on the gloves he’d worn to ensure he left no fingerprints. Combined with him having been seen inside Sinead’s car . . . The cops took him to the station. I’m not clear what the charges were. Nothing too major. Sinead, though, used the incident to haul him back in front of the judge and have his contact with Sean reduced to one weekend a month.”
“Well,” Linda said, “this isn’t the worst story I’ve ever heard.”
“There’s more.”
“More?”
“This part I didn’t learn about until a few years later. For about a week, it was front-page news. One or two of the TV stations out of the city covered it. You would think Martin’s brush with the law would have taught him a lesson—scared straight and all that. It didn’t. Or it did, but the lesson he learned wasn’t a good one. Since his more modest efforts at rectifying the situation had failed, he decided it was time for drastic action. The legal system had shown it was no friend to him—or that he couldn’t manipulate it the way he wanted—so it could be ignored. He started doing research online.”
“This isn’t some kind of murder-for-hire deal, is it?”
“No,” I said. “What Martin had decided to do was take his son and flee the country. He spent months setting it up. Fake documents, fake IDs, fake passports, not to mention enough money to tide him over until he could find a job. Finally, when Sinead needed him to take Sean for a long weekend, he put his plan into action. He left his apartment pretty much as it was except for his computer. He removed the hard drive, wiped it with a magnet, microwaved it, and dropped it in the Dumpster outside the building. He drove to Stewart, where he took a flight to Orlando. He made sure to tell anyone who would listen that he was taking his son on his first trip to Disney World.
“The two of them actually spent a day in Florida, but only so he could make himself up to look like the photo on his new passport. From Orlando, Martin and Sean boarded a flight to LAX, where they passed most of another day before catching a flight to Buenos Aires, via Miami.
“Once they were in Argentina, he hung around Buenos Aires for a week, until he talked himself into a position as a tutor for the children of a cattle baron somewhere in the south of the country. That was where he was when the cops caught up to him three months later. He had done a good job at disguising himself and even the kid, but he was still a single man traveling with a young child. As soon as the cops figured out his new appearance, it was mostly a matter of sifting through hours of video from airport security cameras to reconstruct the route he’d taken. The way the papers presented it, he didn’t try to escape when the police arrived. He knew they had him. Sean was taken to Buenos Aires, where Sinead and her parents were waiting for him. Martin was thrown into an Argentine prison; although he lucked out—a little, anyhow. The guy whose kids he’d been tutoring liked him and had enough connections to have his sentence reduced from five years to nine months. The minute Martin was released, however, he was back on a plane to the United States, where his actions earned him another eighteen months behind bars.”
“Holy shit,” Linda said. “What happened to him after?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I assume he got out and went about trying to put his life back together. From the way he looked last night, I don’t think that’s gone so well for him.”
For a long moment, the two of us were silent. On either side of the street, large, well-kept houses signaled their owners’ wealth. We were almost at the tennis club.
Linda said, “The things we do for love.”
“Or revenge.”
“You don’t think he loves his son?”
“I’m sure he does. I’m also sure he hates his son’s mother.”
“Hmm. Was she there last night?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t see her.”
“Do you know if she’ll be at this thing tonight?”
“I haven’t the foggiest. We weren’t exactly close in high school.”
“All of a sudden,” Linda said, “things have become much more interesting.”
The second night of the reunion was in many ways like the first, with better food and with everyone in semiformal wear. At the entrance to the ballroom in which the dinner dance was being held, the reunion committee had set up a long table on which name tags had been laid in alphabetical rows. In addition to our names, the IDs of my former classmates and me bore wallet-sized reproductions of our senior portraits. As I pinned mine to my jacket, I let my eyes drift over the remaining badges but did not see Sinead McGahern’s. There were also name tags for a handful of former teachers, but Joel Martin’s name was not among them.
Linda and I were seated with a group of people with whom I had been friendly during senior year. One of the guys had taken over the family business, a sit-down Chinese restaurant at which his wife had been a hostess. Another guy was not long out of the Air Force, and not long married to the young woman with him, who kept expressing her concern over their daughter, who I gathered was only a couple of months old and being watched by his mother. I asked the restaurateur if he’d kept track of a few of my favorite teachers; he said he wasn’t positive, but he thought they were dead. I asked the ex–Air Force guy what he was up to now; he said he was managing a Radio Shack in eastern Massachusetts. During these exchanges, something that had occurred to me the previous night became clear. Of the people with whom I would have considered myself especially close during my four years at Our Lady of Fatima, not one had opted to attend our reunion. Who knew where they were? (I tried the restaurant guy; to each of their names, he said he wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d heard of a number of personal catastrophes including drugs, prison, serious injury, and devastating illness.)
This left me at an event like a restaging of my senior prom, complete with all the songs and dance moves that had not aged particularly well. Linda actually seemed to be enjoying herself. She had managed a Chinese place in Albany at one point, and her father had been in the Air Force, so she was able to maintain conversations with both of my former classmates. About halfway through the event, the DJ—a local celebrity who anchored the morning show on the classic rock station and had been a couple of years ahead of us in school—announced that it was time to read the memories people had written on the slips of paper provided at each table. (I had chosen not to.) In the midst of recollections about specific teachers’ classes, and sporting victories, and trips here and there, someone contributed a note that read, “I had sex with one of my teachers.” I felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over me. I’m not certain what response I anticipated from the rest of the audience, but the most the confession received was a scattering of laughs and a couple of approving howls. Linda gave me a significant glance. Had someone else slept with Joel Martin? Or, God help me, had one of my old classmates had an affair with another teacher? Yes, it was naïve to be this shocked, but so what? Apparently, I hadn’t left my younger self as far behind as my appearance might have suggested.
I was not expecting Joel Martin to show himself at this night’s festivities, not really. It was one thing to chance slipping into a room packed with people busy with one another and sitting with your back to them while you sipped from your cocktail. It was altogether another to stroll into a ballroom whose tablefuls of your former students would have little trouble identifying you. All the same, when I turned from the urinal in the men’s room and saw him standing against the door, the phrase that almost escaped my lips was “Of course.” It was as if that anonymous admission had summoned him here. I couldn’t imagine what he would want with me. I crossed to one of the sinks and washed my hands.
“Nice place, this,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “it is.”
“You ever been here before?”
“No. First time.”
“I was. Years ago. One of the senior classes a few years ahead of you guys had their prom here. I was a chaperone; brought my girlfriend at the time. This was—you would have been a freshman. Yeah, freshman.”
I finished drying my hands, dropped the paper towel in the trash. “I should be getting back. My date—”
“I guess you heard about my . . . troubles,” he said. “Yeah, you did. Who didn’t? Especially after they were all over the front page of the Goddamned papers.”
He was right; there was no point denying it. I nodded. “I did.”
“Do you have any kids of your own?”
“No.”
“Let me tell you, once you do, you will not believe you could love anyone that much. You look at this little wrinkled creature, its arms and legs still tucked up from being in the womb, and it is love at first sight. There is nothing you will not do for this kid. Your entire focus shifts from whatever bullshit you thought was important to making sure this child—your child—is okay. All the things you couldn’t imagine doing—changing dirty diapers, dealing with spit-up, waking up in the middle of the night to rock them back to sleep—become the order of the day. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“I do.”
“Everything I did, every last bit of it, was for my son, to keep him safe, to give him the kind of life he deserved. I have always wanted what was best for him. Always. I never stopped wanting that, even when I was locked up in Argentina, or when I came back here so they could lock me up some more. My son’s mother had taken him and left. She didn’t leave word where. Didn’t ask for child support from me, in case it allowed me to trace them. Was that fair? I ask you, was any of that fair?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess she felt—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Joel Martin said. “While I was in prison in Buenos Aires, I met a guy who let me in on something that is going to get my son back and make certain no one takes him from me again.”
“I’m not—”
“Do you know who Borges was?”
“The writer?”
“This guy I met was a friend of his. That’s what they called him, the other prisoners, the Friend of Borges, el amigo de Borges. He’d hung out with Borges when he was younger, at university. He was a mathematician, into some pretty exotic stuff. There was this one story Borges had written, ‘The Aleph’—have you read it?”
“The one about the point that lets you see all other points in space and time.”
“Exactly. The guy was fascinated by that story, by the math underlying it. Poincaré theory—how well do you remember physics class?”
“Not at all.”
“That’s disappointing,” he said, “but it isn’t important. The conversations with Borges took the guy only so far, but the writer put him in touch with one of his friends at the university, who gave him the name of another person, and so on, until he met with a group who were familiar with the theory underlying the aleph, and a lot more besides.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t get it. That’s all right. Do you recall me telling you guys that everything was just math?”
“Yes.”
“You thought I was talking figuratively—if you gave it any thought at all. I wasn’t. The group the Friend of Borges met understood this. They comprehended it. They were part of a . . . tradition of scholars who had been working with this exotic math for a long time. Like, longer than you’d believe.”
“I’m not—”
“These scholars had figured out all kinds of applications for the material they were studying. They had worked out how to employ it, using combinations of words and sounds and . . . mental images, you could call them.”
“It sounds like you’re talking about magic.”
“What you call it isn’t important. What’s important is that it works.”
“Then why was this guy—the Friend of Borges—in prison? Couldn’t he just magic his way out of there, teleport or something?”
“He was in hiding,” Joel Martin said. “Or, that’s not it, exactly. He’d had a falling-out with the other members of his lodge, and he had decided to secure himself within Unit 1.”
“Couldn’t he have found a better place to hide out?”
“That doesn’t matter!” he shouted. “You’re missing the Goddamned forest for the trees. I’m telling you I met the modern-day equivalent of fucking Merlin, and you want to know why he isn’t staying at the Hilton. Jesus!”
There was no doubt in my mind that my former teacher had traveled far, far around the proverbial bend. I raised my hands, palms out. “Okay. I’m sorry. You met the Friend of Borges, and he told you about this weird math. Did he teach any of it to you?”
“A little. You can appreciate, the conditions weren’t ideal for this kind of instruction. What he did was to tell me where I needed to go once I was free to travel again. Which took a while, and I had to work a bunch of shit jobs to save up the money, but in the end, I got there.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Where was it?”
“Quebec.”
“Quebec?”
“Quebec City. That’s where the nearest lodge—the nearest school is.”
“And they took you in—accepted you as their student.”
“They did.”
“So now you’re one of them, a . . . mathematician.”
“Basically.”
“But—why are you here? If you have access to the aleph, or whatever, shouldn’t you be using it to track down your son?”
Joel Martin’s face drew in on itself, to an expression it took me a moment to name: embarrassment. He looked down at his shoes, stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. “There’s been a slight complication.”
Here it comes, I thought, the escape hatch, the detail that allows the fantasy to exist yet remain ineffectual. “Oh? What kind of complication?”
“I’m imprisoned. The master of the lodge guards his knowledge jealously. He doesn’t introduce you to new material until he’s satisfied that you’re ready for it. I had passed all the basic tests with flying colors. Everyone said I was one of the best students they’d taught in years. They—the master wanted me to wait before studying anything more advanced. I was sure I didn’t need to. I was eager—I could feel time slipping away from me. Every day, and my son is getting older, whatever memories he has of me growing fainter. Have no doubt, his mother and whoever she’s with are doing all they can to erase me from his life. I needed access to the aleph now. I pressed the matter with the master. He wouldn’t budge. Things got heated between us. I made some . . . intemperate remarks. The master invited me to act on them. I did. It didn’t go well. When the dust settled, he trapped me in a place . . . It’s kind of a place between places. He said if I could figure my way out of it, I might be ready to start learning again.”
“You’re in prison,” I said.
“Imprisoned,” he said. “Again. It’s more complicated than the other lockups I’ve been in. There’s a limited amount of energy sustaining the cell. I can draw on it, but every time I do, the space constricts. If I had accepted my sentence, I could remain here indefinitely. But I told you I can’t do that. I have to get out of here. I tried reaching out to one of the other students at the lodge, someone I thought was sympathetic to me. I was wrong, and I shrank the prison. I decided I had to think more creatively—outside the box, ha-ha. It occurred to me that your ten-year reunion was coming up. I was able to find out the times and locations without making the cell too much smaller.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re in this cell.”
“Correct.”
“Yet you’re standing here talking to me.”
“This,” he said, removing his hands from his pockets to gesture at himself, “is a simulacrum. It’s as if you’re talking to me on a videophone.”
“Okay,” I said. “Couldn’t you appear to your son, then? Why waste time with me?”
“Because I don’t know where he is. I was able to draw on your memories—your class’s combined memories of me to locate this spot and assemble a version of myself. I reached out to you in particular because we’d gotten along when you were my student. I hoped you would be willing to help me.”
“How could I help you?”
“I have a storage unit on Route 9, down by the malls. There are a couple of things in there, a book and—”
“Mr. Martin,” I said. “Joel.” At the sound of his name, his head jerked, as if I had slapped him. I said, “I don’t know what’s going on with you, exactly, but I wonder if maybe you need to talk to someone who could help you with all this.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “That’s why I’m—oh.” His eyes narrowed. “I get it. You think I’m delusional. Paranoid schizophrenia, right?”
“It sounds as if you’ve been under a tremendous amount of stress,” I said. “Things with your son—”
“Don’t you understand? There are no ‘things with my son.’ I don’t know where he is. As long as I’m stuck in this prison—”
“Stop. You’re in the men’s room of the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club. You are not in some kind of magic jail.”
“You have no idea,” he said. “You have no Goddamned idea. This place is a blank. It isn’t a place, properly speaking. It isn’t; do you understand? It’s the white between the letters on the page. Most of the time, it’s all I can do to keep myself coherent. And on top of that, it’s getting smaller. It may have reached its limit. Any more loss of energy, and it’s going to collapse and take me with it. I am not shitting you when I say that you are my last chance. I’m doing everything I can to hold on, but time is running out.”
A tremendous pity rose in me. I had been in here much too long. “I have to go,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I walked toward the bathroom door.
“What? Hey, hang on.” He put his hands up.
“Please get out of the way.”
“Wait—”
I was expecting Joel Martin to move to the side. If he didn’t, I had a good half a foot and probably seventy-five pounds on him. Should it prove necessary, I had no doubt I’d be able to muscle past him.
When his outstretched fingers touched me, however, there was a sound like a houseful of windows shattering. Something like a blast of air shoved me across the bathroom, into the wall. Stunned, I looked at Joel Martin. The air around him appeared to have dimmed. He seemed to have lost substance, to have flattened. As I watched, he began to crumple, as if he were made of paper and a pair of giant hands were crushing him between them. His mouth was open; he was saying, “No, oh, no no no no,” over and over again. The words sounded as if they were reaching me from across a vast gulf. He tried to reach out in my direction, but the force that was compressing the rest of him collapsed his arms against him. Eyes wide with pain, he alternated his noes with his son’s name. His shoulders gave; his legs folded up to his torso. “Wait!” he shouted, his voice further away still. “Wait! Wait!” His body bent inward, condensing itself. As his face began to crumple, he screamed, a howl of rage and frustration.
Then he was gone, and the air was full of swirling dust. Coughing, I raised my hands to my face. My eyes teared. It seemed I could hear Joel Martin screaming still, or maybe that was only the whine of the fluorescent lights. I coughed so hard, it doubled me over. The dust had triggered an asthma attack. I pulled myself up on one of the sinks and saw in the mirror a man whose scarlet face was streaked with tears and dust. For a moment, I remembered standing beside Joel Martin, the two of us vibrating with barely suppressed laughter, as we pointed at a corner of the hallway ceiling and said to one another, “What the hell is that?”
Before the dust had finished settling onto the fixtures, the floor, I fled the bathroom, half running down the dark hallway back to the ballroom. Everywhere except the dance floor, the lights had been lowered. On the dance floor, men and women wearing the disinterested expressions of funeral statuary swayed and shuffled to the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” thundering from the speakers like a demented march. Those seated in the shadows bobbed their heads in time to the beat.
Another round of coughing shook me. No one could hear it over the music. Hand covering my mouth, I stumbled to my table, where I was relieved to find Linda seated. She smiled when she saw me, but her brows lowered as I leaned over for a fresh bout of coughing. My head was spinning. I straightened, listed to the right, and Linda was there to steady me. Leaning close, she shouted, “What is it?”
I managed to say, “Asthma,” loud enough for her to hear.
She nodded, said, “Do you have an inhaler?”
I shook my head.
“Is it bad?” she said. “Do you need to go to the emergency room?”
I shook my head again.
“Do you want me to drive you home?”
I nodded.
“Okay. Let me tell everyone what’s going on.”
This Linda did, drawing concerned looks and waves from the rest of the table. I returned the waves, but kept my distance. On the way out of the tennis club, we passed a man and a woman arguing. He was severely drunk, seated on the lowest of the front steps, his tie yanked to one side, his shirt half unbuttoned. She was standing in her stocking feet, using her flat pocketbook to punctuate the points she was making. The two of them had been among the popular crowd at Fatima, not homecoming king and queen but certainly part of their court. I was grateful another round of coughing took me as Linda and I walked by them, so I could pretend I wasn’t aware they were enacting what appeared to be a fairly regular drama.
By the time Linda pulled into the parking lot in front of my apartment building, the worst of my asthma attack was over. It had prevented much conversation on the ride back, except for me to say that it had been triggered by something in the air in the men’s room. As she handed me the keys, Linda said, “Are you going to be okay by yourself? Because I can stay over if you need me to.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
“Call me if you get worse.”
“I will, but really, I’m fine. I’ll use my inhaler the second I walk in the door.”
“You’d better.”
I did. And since I knew there was no chance of me falling asleep anytime in what seemed like the next several days, I took down the bottle of Talisker from the top of the refrigerator and poured myself three fingers, whose effects I did not feel. I carried the bottle and glass into the living room, where I set them on the side table and found the TV remote. The nighttime channels were full of all manner of weird and pathetic programming, but together with the scotch, they were almost enough to keep me from dwelling on Joel Martin’s expression while his prison crushed him, on his calling his son’s name, on his final plea for a reprieve that was not granted. Eventually, I drank enough of the whiskey for it drop me into a black, empty place.
When I received the e-mail invitation to my twenty-fifth high school reunion, I’ll admit I considered responding to it. Enough time had elapsed for me to hope that my classmates and I might finally have moved beyond our differences. Instead, what I discovered, after a couple of messages to old friends found again through social media, was that there were two reunions being planned, one for the former elites of my class and the other for the rest of us. I was sufficiently disgusted by the news to delete my invitation, washing my hands of the business of high school reunions for at least another quarter-century.
My decision was influenced as well by information that came to me at almost exactly the same time via the same social media connections. One of those old friends sent me a message asking if I’d heard the news about Sean McGahern, the kid of Sinead McGahern and Mr. Martin. I replied that I hadn’t. She forwarded me a link to a story about the tragic death of the young singer-songwriter whose first album, Possession with Intent, had won him critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination. The record chronicled his life growing up as the child of a narcissistic mother, an uninterested stepfather, and a father who appeared to have vanished off the face of the Earth. (I thought about that locker on Route 9, the one I’d considered checking into but never had.) Emotional and psychological difficulties had led him to experiment first with pot, then heroin, to which he had become addicted. For a brief period of time, while he was working on his album, he seemed to have put his addiction behind him. The pressures of touring to support it, however, combined with those of producing his follow-up effort, had sent him back to heroin. He had died of an overdose; there was some question whether it was an accident or suicide.
After closing the link, I had to stand up and walk away from the computer. I had to leave my office, within the buzz of whose fluorescent light I heard another sound, high-pitched, impossibly distant: Joel Martin, screaming—still screaming—for all he had lost, all he had given away.
—For Fiona