The next morning, as I was packing up, I dialed the number on the card again. For a few moments I waited on the bed with the receiver of the hotel telephone propped up against my ear, listening for the ring. I closed my eyes, expecting it to cut to a dial tone at any moment. I liked the idea of leaving Durham the same way I had come. But, to my surprise I heard the line pick up, the voice of a man on the other end.
“Hello?” it said. “Who is this? Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly confused. “I’m sorry, I —”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Just don’t waste my time.”
“I mean — I’m looking for Walid Khan?”
There was a sigh on the other end. “That’s me,” said the voice. The tone of his response told me immediately that I had made a mistake. “What do you want?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I thought, somehow, it would be obvious.
Anyway, what I was about to describe felt like a million years ago.
“Um,” I began. “I was referred to you at the car wash? Someone vandalized my car, and for some reason I thought you might be able to help me? Or that I could help you? I heard you were maybe investigating?”
I heard swearing.
“Those fucking kids.”
“Excuse me?”
“Listen, I’m sorry about your car. But I have nothing to do with it. I don’t even own that place anymore. Don’t ever call me again,” said the voice. The line went dead.
* * *
Maybe I’d come to Durham to run away from Jeff, but somehow I had run toward him, too. Was it an accident that in coming to Durham I’d also come closer to Jeff Adler, Kent’s brother, the boy from the photograph whose eyes reminded me of my own? Or maybe it was Kent who reminded me of myself, Kent standing next to his brother in the photograph and looking back at photographs of them together years later. Sometimes I wished I could go back to a time before Jeff, a time before his anger and my pain, but I knew that was impossible. And maybe, confusing to me, not even something I really wanted.
Jeff Adler died in a freak accident when Kent was ten. Kent describes finding Jeff face down in a creek near their home in his long poem “Surfacing”:
eyes glossy
like a cat
drunk on milk
I tried
to say hello
In interviews he explains that he could remember who he was before the accident, but that that person didn’t feel like the same person he was afterward. Like he was forced into a new awareness of himself at too young an age.
Sometimes interviewers would press him about these details, making connections to other texts as if he was merely attempting to resonate with the past instead of describing something traumatic that had happened to him. But he seemed hostile to demonstrations of erudition over intuition or empathy. In one of his poems, “Soundings,” he explains that you “can’t stretch/your past back/only press/forward, closing your eyes.”
But that didn’t mean that he avoided the past entirely. In later years some of his poems would openly ask whether the accident was intentional, whether Jeff had committed suicide because he had seen “something too soon/before him.” He knew that to speculate on the accidental death of a thirteen-year-old boy so many years after he had passed was more about his own response than his brother’s life, but he still couldn’t help but imagine a world in which his brother was “allowed to/act,” rather than be “acted upon.”
After I checked out, I went back to the cemetery to say my final goodbye. I had planned the moment to be a grand farewell. I think I expected to be able to say goodbye to Jeff, too, my Jeff, like I could release him forever and go on without him. But I understood then that he would never leave me.
There wasn’t a poem on the surface of Adler’s stone. Maybe the rain had washed it away. Maybe Sarah had taken it down. Before I drove over I had purchased a small bag of flour and a bottle of water from a convenience store near the hotel. I mixed the two together and used them to paste up a page I had torn out of Alert, smearing the glue over both sides with my hands.
Evie of the Deepthorn
Evie pulls her horse Excalibur
both are very tired they are looking
for a place to settle underneath the grey
tines they want to slay
a dragon they have many enemies
Far away a field hand splits with his shovel
a white skull with a wormy rag
of flesh he digs a little finds vertebrae
ribs scapula humerus coccyx another white
skull missing its jaw shreds of cloth and a doll face
black from the earth Just the large two
skulls He has given up his other work curious
about who the doll belongs to That night he
barricades his door and puts a knife under
his pillow Still he is woken by sharp
voices calling from an emptiness
He dreamed of a woman moving
a forest so dark Just her eyes and the steam
rising from the horse’s mouth She was looking for
something and when he woke he was angry
and went down to the river and bathed in the stream
Then he went back to the field
seeking the doll’s owner Cut
the earth, the shovel through a girl
a young girl, splitting her
delicate spinal column
* * *
As I was driving back through town, I thought I saw Sarah on the other side of the road, walking in the same direction I had come from.
But instead of honking or waving I just kept moving, driving down the highway, out of Durham, turning right at the crossroads to get back to Toronto.