WHAT WAS JULIAN?
Was he his injured legs, his blind eyes, his missing fingers?
No.
Was he his scarred head?
No.
Was he his empty gut, his grieving heart?
No, none of these things.
Was he his body?
Also no. When the breath would leave it, no one would look at his body and say it was him. They would say the body had belonged to him. It was Julian’s body, his property, but it wasn’t him. Like his house wasn’t him, or his Volvo, or his clothes.
Not his body, not his head, not his heart, not even his feelings were him. The feelings were what the thing that was him felt. They weren’t the man.
So who was it that the body belonged to?
Who was it who felt?
Who was it who mourned, who loved, who was?
Before everything else was his soul.
And what could a man give in exchange for his soul?
* * *
Not his body. Because the body was like London after the war. There wasn’t much left. The body had suffered primary, secondary, and tertiary blast injuries. It had lost half its hearing, half its sight. It needed to be patched and grafted and sewn up. It needed to be surgically renovated. Julian lost the ability to walk unaided and without pain. Most of the bones in his feet had developed hairline fractures. His body was covered head to toe in irregular Lichtenberg flowers, a sure sign of getting struck by lightning. He had scars on his face, on his back, on his arms, on his legs. His body needed intravenous antibiotics and a number of surgeries. Plastic surgery on his face to fix the scar on his cheek and above his eye. Surgery to repair the improperly set forearm, which, instead of healing straight, had hooked toward his body. Surgery for the anterior and posterior cruciate ligament tears that required a knee replacement. The surgery on his left eye that did not return his sight to him. There was light but no detail.
Tama the Maori warrior was wrong. Julian’s body could tell some story.
Too bad the storyteller was mute, on a morphine drip the first six weeks at Queen Elizabeth, and mute for weeks afterward at the Hampstead Heath convalescent home.
Franco and Ricks, his sparring buddies from the gym, visited him once when he was still in the hospital.
“Whoa, man, that was some nasty ass fight you been in,” said Franco. “Who was it with this time?”
“Junkers Ju 88 combat aircraft,” Julian said. “But not one. Thousands of them.”
They didn’t understand. They mock-sparred in front of him, jabbing into the air, wanting to know when he would come back to them.
Instead, Julian retreated to Hampstead Heath and fell into the routine of a place where silence and tranquility were designed to bring about healing. He would sit with Ava in the garden if the weather allowed, or in the common room by the windows. Like him, Ava didn’t speak. It had only been a few months since her stroke. But unlike him, she wanted to. When she first saw him, she cried. She knew he had failed, and this time for good. Her shaking hand reached for him. Often when they sat in their chairs, she held his hand.
In June, he was still at Hampstead Heath. He thought he was getting better, ready to leave maybe, but one afternoon when he was out in the garden, he fell as if cut down and couldn’t get up. An X-ray showed he had fractured his pelvis. No one could figure out why. He didn’t trip, hadn’t been pushed, hadn’t been blasted out of his seat by a sonic wave of a nearby bomb. The bone just crumbled.
“We see this injury in very old people,” the flummoxed doctor said. “Their bones disintegrate. I’ve never seen it in a young man like yourself.”
Julian wanted to tell the doc he wasn’t so young.
He received a hip replacement, like many of the old folks in the home. Painful rehab took him through August.
Now when he walked he walked with a cane.
Devi visited both Julian and Ava.
Julian didn’t speak to him. He had nothing to say.
And then, one September night, when the moon was new, he dreamed of Josephine again. The golden awning was above him, the metal table stood on the familiar sidewalk. The umbrella swung side to side in her hands. The red beret was on her head.
He screamed when he woke up. He thrashed in his bed. No, he begged. No.
But she was smiling! Smiling, strolling down the street with a spring in her step, as if everything was never better.
The devil was mocking Julian. Now he knew: ridicule is what he’d been given in exchange for his soul. Julian could hear the diabolical cackle all the way from the underworld.
After dreaming of her, he decided to leave Hampstead Heath. But he couldn’t leave without talking to Ava first.
“Ava,” he said, pulling up a chair by the window where she sat. “Look at me, please. Blink if you can hear me. I need to ask you something. Years ago in L.A., Josephine—I mean Mia—told me you couldn’t make it to our wedding because you were out of the country visiting relatives. I know that was a lie, but what she said was: you were visiting relatives in Morecambe Bay.”
Ava nodded. The stroke had ruined her speech and disabled her ability to write or spell or remember the order of words, but she could still understand. The doctors thought she might get better with time, but she wasn’t better yet.
“Is that where your family is from?”
Ava nodded.
Silently Julian watched her. “What about a pink house on Babbacombe Road in Blackpool? Do you know it?”
With a baffled frown, she shook her head.
“A woman named Abigail Delacourt lived in that house. Did you ever hear of her? Or her sister Wilma?”
Grabbing his hand, Ava tried to form words, first with her mouth and then on a legal pad. Julian couldn’t make sense of her markings. For a long while she drew nothing but manic circles.
Julian wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Who was Abigail?” he said.
Vehemently she shook her head.
“Who was Wilma?”
She nodded.
“Can you write and tell me? Who was she?”
On a fresh sheet of paper, with her weak left hand, Ava slowly scratched out a stick figure. It was an O with two criss-crossing lines underneath it, forming a t. She drew another figure and below that a third. With a pencil she kept tapping at the third stick figure, tapping so hard she made a hole in the paper.
It was a game of Pictionary between a woman who couldn’t draw and a man dense like a wood plank.
On a new sheet of paper, Ava drew the three stick figures again, this time in a vertical line, one above the other, and then a connecting line from the bottom figure to the middle and from the middle figure to the top. She tapped the top figure with her finger.
“The top one is Wilma?”
Fervently Ava nodded. She tapped the bottom stick figure and then herself on the chest.
Julian opened his mouth. “Wilma is your grandmother?”
Ava cried.
He sat stunned. “Wilma had three daughters,” he said in a disbelieving voice. “Which one was your mother?”
Ava lowered her hand below the arm of the chair.
“The youngest? Kara?”
Ava nodded.
Julian took Ava’s frail hand. “Kara was your mother? Oh, Ava. What year were you born? I can’t believe I don’t know this.”
Through headshakes and nods, he learned that the year was 1945.
“Ava, what did you know about your great aunt Abigail? She had a daughter named Maria. She was your mother’s cousin. She died five years before you were born.”
Pressing an arthritic fist deep into her heart, Ava’s eyes glistened with anguish.
“Ava,” Julian whispered, “did you name your daughter Mia after Abigail’s daughter?”
Her eyes spilling over, Ava nodded.
“How did you and your family get from Morecambe Bay to Brooklyn?” Julian asked.
Ava found the first scrap of paper she had drawn on. Holding the index finger of Julian’s maimed hand, she guided him over the series of circles, one after the other. With his pointer, she tapped on one, then the next, and the next. Julian stared at the circles, at Ava, outside into the garden. He counted the circles, but it was unnecessary. He knew the answer already.
36.
Thirty-six Fabian coins he had left with Mia in the pink house on Babbacombe Road.