France, 1970
81. THERE IS A retired orderly who believes it’s still wartime. The deranged man runs up to happy tourists sitting at wicker tables on the sidewalk and, as they pour their melted chocolate into milk, warns them that German bombs could drop down at any moment, that it’s time to hide in the basement shelter underground. As he comes and goes from gigs and every time he returns to his apartment window, Liam finds that the man’s panic is ever fresh, never dissipating. A terror familiar in its endurance, in its relentlessness. Liam relates: he killed a man in America over a year ago, and he is surprised that he has yet to recover.
Life has gone on. Gigs mostly in Paris, teaching guitar privately for kids in the city. Breaking ties with Mansour has been healthy for him. He has committed to keeping his distance: changing his number, storing photographs, finding new venues. But he still sometimes wonders what they could have done together. What they would have done if they had never gone to New York. Or maybe just if that one night with Keifer had never happened.
Last year, the details of the aftermath were relayed in a phone call to his Paris apartment from his uncle in Bay Ridge: the man he shot (the stepson of the incumbent local councilman; a boy born good, only turning wayward at nineteen after an undetected tick bite was left to fester for too long) died within twelve hours of arriving at a Brooklyn hospital. Liam’s aunt brought the grieving family lilies in a jar from her backyard, returning every other week to replace the dead lilies with fresh ones. She washed the mourning mother’s hair while pretending not to know who truly murdered her son. I’m tired of lying for you … The phone was taken from the aunt by the uncle as she broke into sobs.
Liam’s uncle said that he can hear in Liam’s voice that he’s not doing well. He suggests, then pleads, the antidote to what he’s certain is troubling him, to what’s always troubled him: I know that you two are like brothers. But you gotta forget him. Please, son. Please. And then there is silence as Liam puts the landlady’s phone back on the hook and walks up the three flights to his apartment, where he still, sometimes, keeps off all the lights.