DAVID STANDS ON THE back terrace of his brother’s new house looking out to a yard that is the size of a park, and is landscaped like one, with rocky knolls and a pond, a circular greenhouse, a stand of trucked-in twenty-year-old evergreens that must have cost five, ten thousand a pop. Danny has cheated code on the fencing by topping it with a good two and a half feet of tight-weave trellis, so that all that is visible beyond it are the upper boughs of his neighbours’ own trophy trees and the upper gables of their equally monstrous houses.
In the middle of the yard is one of those circus-sized trampolines that have become the suburban rage, Marcus hovering beside it watching Danny’s two boys show off their acrobatics. He is all angle and bone now, thin as a Holocaust survivor, and as far as David can tell without physical skills of any sort.
David glances at his watch.
“Marcus, don’t just stand there. Jump on!”
David’s mother sits straight-backed and silvern on a padded lounge chair looking as out of place as Marcus does. Not for her the villas of the north, with their deserted sidewalk-less streets, their lunar silence, far from the bustle and grind. David’s father had built a place out here in the first wave of immigrant exodus, but she had sold it within weeks of his death and moved back to the city.
She is staring out hawk-eyed at Marcus. Any minute now, David can feel it, she will start in on one of her rants.
He checks his watch again.
“For Christ’s sake, David, we’ve still got the whole afternoon.” He has had to endure the humiliation of catching a ride with her here. A court order prevents him from driving on a highway with Marcus. “Anyway, what can she do if you’re late, call the police?”
“It’s not worth the energy, Ma. Believe me.”
“Each time you give in you show you’re weak. And she takes more.”
She’s losing it, is what it is, thinks she’s the matriarch in one of those TV series about the mob or Imperial Rome.
“It’s called family law, Ma.”
Ever since the divorce a contempt has come into his mother as if this were the greatest failure for a man, to lose his woman. She was always the one who had got him when he was young, who had shared his own sense of ambition for himself. Now, every word from her has some dagger in it.
“What you never understood is she’s just like her father. There’s only one way to deal with people like that. To show strength.”
David holds his tongue.
Danny comes out of the house flourishing a tray of bruschetta. Even now, into their forties, something flinches in David whenever he lays eyes on his brother. To look at them you would never know they are twins, Danny a good six inches shorter than him and with a slightly stunted look as if his body had turned in on itself. Nearly two pounds separated them at birth. The story was that David had tried to starve Danny in the womb, like those animals that killed off their siblings to boost their own survival odds.
“Davie, you get the tour yet? Ma, did you show him around?”
“Show him what? We just got here.”
It has taken David nearly a year to get around to seeing the place. He was expecting the usual ersatz monumentalism, some big-box eyesore built to within an inch of its lot lines, festooned with arches and electrocoated in ceramic. Instead he has found something of an entirely different order. He did a double take when his mother pulled up to the place, the facade a complicated fretwork of cantilevered stone and wooden beams and two-storey windows like something out of Frank Lloyd Wright.
“This is Danny’s?”
“You’d know if you ever came out here.”
What David can’t get over is that his brother has had the vision for such a place. Before this he was living in a three-bedroom bungalow near their mother’s condo in the north of the city that was the essence of the second-generation dead end, crammed with children and memorabilia and too-heavy furnishings.
“Let me get you a beer, Davie. I’ve got a nice local label, you’re gonna like it.”
“Think I’ll pass for now.”
“What’s the big deal? It’s not like you’re driving.”
He can’t tell if Danny is mocking him or just being literal. No doubt their mother has already passed on to him some convoluted version of David’s disorder from the bare-bones one David has had to give her to explain his need for a ride.
“It’s because you sit at a desk all day instead of getting your hands dirty,” was her analysis. “Your father used to get by on five, six hours of sleep every night. Then in the day, he did what he had to.”
David’s eye keeps going back to Marcus. Always when he looks at him now he sees only deficiency, all the things about him that need fixing. Always when he is with him he feels the same impatience, that he is waiting for their time together to truly begin in some way or maybe simply for it to be over, he hardly knows which.
Jamie, the older boy, grabs hold of his little brother and makes as if to toss him on top of Marcus. Marcus flinches and Jamie pulls short at the last instant, laughing.
Asshole.
Danny is nodding at the patio tiles.
“What do you think of that stone, Davie? Ever see anything like it?”
It is all David can do not to march out and wring the boy’s neck.
“What is it, kryptonite or something?”
“It’s local marble, if you can believe it. From just north of here. Used to be big once but you have to look for it now. We bought a little quarry of it a couple of years ago. Like Carrara was for Augustus, right? I was thinking of that when I bought the place, about what you said in your book. How he changed Rome from a city of wood into one of marble. That stuck with me.”
David is taken off guard. So Danny has read one of his books. Has read the second one, several hundred copies of which David had had to toss into the recycling when he moved out of the house because he couldn’t even give them away.
He makes a show of looking at the stone, salmon coloured with streaks of grey, but can’t manage to form an opinion of it.
“You should come up there one day, I think you’d enjoy it. I picked these pieces out myself, on the spot. Don’t you love the colour?”
David’s brain feels like a sheet of glass, ready to shatter at the next word that reaches it, the next shaft of light.
“Is there a bathroom I can use?”
“There’s half a dozen of them. Take your pick.”
In the bathroom David pulls out his pill pod and downs a twenty-mig tab of Ritalin SR and a cap of fluoxetine, chasing them with a handful of water from the sink. Whenever Marcus stays over he hardly gets a minute’s sleep, so that the next day he is a basket case. The extra fluoxetine—a.k.a. Prozac, another in his growing list of repurposed zeitgeist drugs—is in the hope of quelling the shudder he keeps feeling in his brain stem that presages one of his collapses. It isn’t likely to help: the drug needs days or weeks to rewire his circuits before it kicks in, though in the usual way of these crossover brain drugs no one seems sure why it works at all.
Three years after his diagnosis his pharma regime is still stunningly hit and miss. Becker, for all the banker’s parsimoniousness he showed at the outset, has been happy to ply him with every sort of psychotropic, pushing his dosages to the upper limits with each new cocktail as if he were an expendable specimen in a rat trial. Phenethylamines and tricyclics; drugs to boost his serotonin or his dopamine or his norepinephrine; a so-called smart drug promising seventy-two hours of wakefulness at a stretch; time-released drugs with delivery systems as sophisticated as an ICBM’s. The smart drug, modafinil, had sounded promising: another fluke, stumbled on by chance, mechanism unknown, but already in wide use among pilots and soldiers, emergency doctors, academics looking for an edge. David, though, got pounding headaches on it, and nothing like the kick he got from the Ritalin. Worse, he couldn’t focus, couldn’t see the big picture. He’d spend hours redrafting a single paragraph over and over, then be unable to choose among the dozen different versions he’d come up with. Maybe it was just that he was too hooked on the Ritalin by then, though who knew anymore what was him and what was the drugs taking him over.
The Ritalin is what he has stuck with, juggling various formulations—immediate release and sustained release and extended release—with the vigilance of military deployments and cycling in substitutes on the weekends to keep down his tolerance. He might almost feel he was managing if not for the constant thrum at the back of his neck these days ready to fell him like a taser charge at the least spike of emotion. All day long he is fighting himself, pumped up on his meds but having to stifle every reaction to keep from collapsing. It isn’t just anger anymore but almost any heightened state—elation, amusement, excitement, fear. Bit by bit he is having to strip away everything that drives him, that makes him alive. Becker’s response has been merely to keep upping his Prozac, from five migs to ten to twenty to forty, though the drug seems only to have sped up the process of extinguishing the person he thinks of as himself.
He takes a seat on the toilet to give the drugs a chance to kick in. A powder room, Danny called this one, though it is probably twice the size of the den that serves as Marcus’s bedroom in the condo David now calls home. Everything is top of the line, the fixtures, the lighting, the cabinets, the faucets. The counters and floor are in a glossy space-age material of brilliant white that gives the room an otherworldly look, like a film depiction of a place in heaven or in a dream.
The realization is coming over David that his brother is rich, at a level he would never have imagined. Danny had gone into the business right out of high school, had doggedly stuck with it through the real estate crash, through all the legal troubles, through their father’s illness and death. When their father died David had figured the company was about five minutes short of receivership. Yet somehow Danny has managed to survive. Not just survive: to thrive. To grow rich. David, meanwhile, has been reduced since the divorce to a one-bedroom condo downtown that, ironically, was part of a deal he’d made to relinquish any claim in the family business when his father had made Danny a partner.
This was something David hadn’t reckoned on going into the divorce, how much it would cost him. Even though he was told by everyone who cared to offer an opinion that divorce was a fight in which there were no winners except the lawyers, still he forged ahead and committed every error, animated by what in retrospect seems to have been a kind of derangement. He wasted a lot of money up front on idiocies, taking his lawyer’s advice that he not move out of the house because it would prejudice his claim to Marcus but then paying for an office downtown to have a place away from his students to work and maxing out his credit cards on restaurant meals and dry cleaning and hotel stays. Then right from the start Julia’s father had got into the act, calling in chits from every quarter to make sure Julia was properly lawyered. Almost weekly, David was served with some new motion or disclosure order. The worst was the forensic accountant her father set on him, who made his every smallest excess seem the sign of a criminal profligacy.
If David had been smart he would have accepted from the start how outgunned he was. Instead, with each setback he dug in his heels, firing lawyers and hiring new ones, firing those and representing himself, somehow convinced at each stage that if he fought hard enough it would prove he was in the right. One by one, the judgments went against him. He was forced to move out of the house, was left on the hook for both child and spousal support, was assessed a big whack of Julia’s legal fees because of motions of his own that the court deemed frivolous. Through a couple of loopholes Julia’s lawyers even managed to get almost the entire value of his condo thrown in as common property, though he’d had it for years before the marriage, so that when the final balance sheet came in, what Julia ended up owing him for his share of the house—the house she had insisted on, on which she had indulged her every whim, that had cost him every penny he had earned from his books—had barely been enough to cover his legal bills.
The sucker punch was custody. Julia got sole, which meant final say on everything, and managed to limit his access to three weekends a month. He had gone to great lengths to fight her on that one, had brought in experts, dredged up the postpartum episode, forced Julia to go in for psychiatric testing, yet the asshole judge—the same one who had issued the injunction against his taking Marcus on the highway—completely turned the tables on him, going so far as to cite concern for the boy’s safety on account of David’s disorder. The whole system seemed rife with this sort of hypocrisy, demonizing fathers under the guise of being progressive when it was just the worst sort of mother worship, of old-style family-values conservatism. The same hypocrisy he had had to put up with his entire marriage: for all his dereliction, all his mistakes, it was Julia, from the start, who had set the boundaries, who had closed him out from what she’d claimed as her realm until it held no place for him.
Now, though, he finds it hard to connect to the self-righteousness he felt then, hard to piece together his actions in any way that makes sense. He can barely fathom how they ever got through those long nightmare months when they were both still in the house, all the work of negotiating bathrooms and breakfasts and bedtimes, school drop-offs, of murdering every emotion, every memory or image of the different people they had been to each other before this hate. Then all the while having to pretend to believe that they could make Marcus believe that all this was normal, that it was possible to pass through such devastation and come out whole.
His ass has gone numb from the toilet seat. He should have chewed the Ritalin the way he used to, though with the time-release tabs it is like mainlining, like jabbing a needle directly into his brain. Instead he has to hide from his family like a child nursing a grudge. Not that telling the truth is an option. I popped out to take my Prozac and Ritalin. He could mention as well the boxes of Viagra he has at home, Becker’s answer to Prozac’s libido death. This is what his life has come down to, this unholy zeitgeist triumvirate, three drugs whose brand names are like banners for the times. Meanwhile, just to feel alive, he has to search out ever more extreme forms of stimulation, has to drive faster, watch more violent movies, surf porn for the hope of an erection that isn’t medically induced.
“Hey Davie!” Danny calls. “You fall asleep in there or what?”
He can hear his mother’s snort of laughter.
“It’s like the time he fell asleep in that greenhouse, remember that, Danny? Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that in years! Even back then he was falling asleep. Your father gave him such a smack!”
David’s blood rises and he feels his face go slack, feels his head dip. He is like a dog on a choke chain, leaping forward, teeth bared, then slammed back, forever trying to find the still point between too little and too much. Then each time he thinks he has found it, the right pills at the right times to get through the morning slump and the afternoon one, to not keep him up at night, the right mix of stimulation and restraint that will keep him sharp, in control, on his feet, it seems to shift.
By now David knows that the problem is his sleep. Little by little, Becker has warned him, it is coming undone. Losing integrity, was his term. The evidence is there in David’s sleep graphs, the early-onset REM, the light sleep that refuses to deepen, blips that at a glance might appear mere variations but are like the fault lines in a structure that won’t hold. Every night, it seems, a labour unfolds in his head as vast as the night work of Caesar’s armies building their fortress camps as they marched. What gets built by it, what risks dilapidation with each oversight, each cut corner, is his mind. David has read by now of the role sleep plays not only in memory but in almost every mental function, from solving problems to improving his squash game; in repairing the neural wear and tear of the day; in helping to hold intact the sort of unified self that makes it possible to face the world. The more he learns, the more Becker’s vagueness about prognosis feels like a matter of discretion rather than hedging: David can do the math, the damage all this lost work will amount to as it accumulates night by night.
Whole nights go by now when David feels he hasn’t slept at all, has merely been wandering in some middle state that is less sleep than waking dream. Marcus appears beside him or Julia does, he imagines holding them or hurting them, he can’t tell which, then awakes to his sheets twisted into knots, his pillows knocked across the room. Or he finally sinks into deeper sleep, with the suddenness of a stone dropping to the bottom of a well, then finds himself at his kitchen counter on some mission he can’t reconstruct or pissing into a corner of his couch with an animal precision, just here and not here, as if it made all the difference. It has happened more than once. Confusional arousals, Becker calls them, like surfacing too quickly from a dive, though he doesn’t rule out a dozen other possibilities, each with its own taxonomy and dangers. The disorders of sleep, it turns out, are legion; one by one, as David’s sleep betrays him, they appear at his door like lost relations he has to accommodate.
Once, before the breakup, he awoke to Julia slapping at him in a daze of confusion and fear because he had struck her. The bruise on her midriff where he had hit her persisted for days.
There are those who in their sleep have sexually assaulted their own children. A man who stabbed his wife forty-four times with a kitchen knife, then rolled her into their swimming pool and went back to bed. One who drove across town to murder his in-laws. One who smashed what he thought was a dangerous animal to the floor and woke to find he had killed his own son. The strength people have in sleep is mythic, superhuman. They let nothing stand in their way, no obstacle or restraint.
Whenever Marcus stays over, David goes through the apartment after he is asleep making his special arrangements, barring the balcony door with a cut broomstick, shifting tables and chairs to block the usual passageways, setting out stacks of books, strips of masking tape, in the hope of startling himself if he wanders. So far, it has been enough to be vigilant, to be afraid. Sleeping in half-hour bursts, an hour at most; doing tests at each waking to make sure he is truly awake and not merely dreaming he is, checking a clock, for instance, since clocks tend to malfunction in dreams, or picking up a book, since books tend to read as gibberish. Staring into a mirror to make sure the person who stares back is himself. It is madness, of course, he can’t go on like this; he knows that the more he cheats sleep, the more voracious it grows. The whole time Marcus is with him he feels it massing in his head, waiting to swarm; the whole time he feels angry, indiscriminately, because he is tired and because he wants the boy and wants him gone and because it will never be enough now between them, will never be right. Angry because he is angry. Because even in affliction, even with his mind no longer his own, he cannot help simply being himself.
The sunlight hits him like an assault when he returns to the patio. His mother is still going on about the greenhouse.
“Where was it, David? It was that little park, what was it called? Some kind of botanical gardens. Your father used to love that place.”
Danny looks over at him.
“Everything okay, Davie?”
“I guess the bruschetta didn’t agree with me. I remember in Rome they used to call it toast, as if it was some kind of American fast food.”
Only now does David notice that Marcus has actually joined his cousins on the trampoline, the three boys locked arm in arm bouncing in unison, higher and higher. Jamie is whooping it up, urging the other boys on. As they reach the top of a bounce, he goes eerily silent and David feels his heart lurch, afraid of some mishap or trick. But then Jamie lets out another whoop and they land without incident, easing back on their rebounds until the three of them have collapsed on the mat in a jostling heap.
“Way to go, Marco!” Jamie says.
Marcus is grinning from ear to ear, maybe the happiest David has seen him in years.
“Looks like he’s a natural on that thing,” Danny says. “Too bad you can’t get one for the condo.”
“Yeah, I’ll put it on the balcony.”
He must have got on the minute David left the scene. This is what his son looks like without him, David thinks, just a normal kid having fun.
“It was in the east end,” his mother says, a dog with a bone, “I remember that. With a creek that went through it, you boys used to race little sticks in it. It was always the joke that you had to let David win.”
It isn’t just the lies she comes out with these days but that no matter how farfetched they are, David still ends up having to make some sort of space for them in his head. He remembers the greenhouse incident vividly but isn’t about to start scrapping with her over the details.
“Maybe it started back then,” she says, “did you ever think of that? Maybe you should have Marcus tested.”
The place is surely still out there somewhere, though it has never occurred to David to try to track it down. What his father liked about it was the market garden, a big outdoor patch where they grew herbs and vegetables and greens. He had befriended a custodian there who used to give him seedlings from the greenhouses for his garden at home, and they would talk about plants with what to David sounded like a secret language, coded and strangely intimate.
Once, on one of their visits, David got separated from the others. Or he wandered off on purpose: he couldn’t have been more than five at the time, yet already the wilfulness had grown large in him. His father was leading them along some path like the paterfamilias he was when David noticed that the door to one of the greenhouses had been left ajar. Somehow he managed to drop behind the others and slip through it. He still remembers the pleasant cushion of heat that hit him, remembers the smell, unlike any smell he could have named. There were trays of seedlings laid out on benches and at the end of them a heap of straw of the sort his father used to protect his vines in winter and to bed his fig tree, which he would tip into a trench and pad with the straw, then bury beneath a mound of earth.
All this comes back to David with utter clarity. Maybe his mind is not so far gone yet after all. But then as soon as he thinks this, his memory starts to clot. He must have lain down in the straw and fallen asleep, though all he remembers is a sense of unfurling, of respite, that seems as much a wish from the present as a memory of the past. Then opening his eyes to Danny grinning down at him, and the custodian and his mother. Waiting for some reward to take shape, for his mother to bend to take him in her arms, and instead his father wrenching him to his feet right there in front of the custodian and giving him a backhand to his head that was like a brick smashing into it. Just as his mother has claimed.
Don’t try something stupid like that again. You ruined things for everyone.
Even in his silence, his mother has won. All he can see now is that he got what he deserved.
Nelda has come out to call them for lunch. David grabs at Marcus to roughhouse him as he comes up from the yard and sees how his eyes go at once to Jamie as if seeking permission from him.
“Fun stuff out there,” David says.
“It was all right.” Already he is retreating back to his shell. But then he adds, “Can we come here again next weekend?”
“Of course we can.” Letting himself forget that he has already traded the next weekend to Julia. That the last thing he could face is another ride up here with his mother.
He puts an arm around Marcus to lead him into the house and can feel him relax a bit against him. Maybe this is all he really wants, his father’s approval. For David to be the one, for once, to bend and take him up.
They eat at a dining table that is a huge kidney-shaped slab of unpolished stone that looks as if it has arrived straight from whatever mountainside it has been carved from. Around them the ground floor stretches like the flight deck of the USS Enterprise, half walls and jutting appurtenances dividing it by a kind of gestalt into virtual rooms and the ceiling rising up in a series of intersecting planes to the two-storey atrium, whose massive windows suffuse the entire floor with light.
Nelda brings out the food. She has barely stepped out of the kitchen the whole time David has been here, a real throwback, the sort of wife men used to have to make a trip back to the old country to find. Cooks and cleans, raises the kids, does the company books. Exactly the sort David would never have gone for.
“You better tell Danny what he has to do when they get home,” his mother had said to David at the wedding. “Don’t expect Nelda to know.”
She doesn’t take a seat until everyone has been served. She gives Danny a look.
“Did you show David the house yet?”
“He got waylaid.” It is growing obvious that all of this matters to Danny a lot more than David would have guessed. “We’ll do a tour after lunch.”
Even the meal is a showpiece, with a nouvelle salad topped with gorgonzola and figs and a risotto laced with white truffle. David is sure his mother will never go for this stuff.
“I feel like I’m on the Cooking Channel,” he says, to give her an opening.
But Nelda is beaming.
“Nelda spent a few weeks last summer at one of those cooking schools in New York,” Danny says. “You can imagine the grocery bills since then.”
“New York. I’m impressed.” The last time David was in New York was well before the divorce. “I guess Danny must be eating like a king.”
“Idiot.” The word hits him like a bullet. “She didn’t do it for Danny. It’s for the restaurant.”
He has to stop himself from lashing out. It comes to him, suddenly, what he has been hearing in his mother all morning: the voice of his father.
“What are you talking about, Ma? What restaurant?”
“Danny didn’t tell you?”
“Danny’s opening a restaurant?”
“Not Danny. You think he has time for that? Me and Nelda.”
“We’ve been meaning to bring it up,” Danny says quickly. “Just a sort of hot table, really. Like in the old days. Now that the kids are getting older. It’s always been a kind of dream for Nelda.”
David’s head is spinning.
“I can’t believe this.” That, indeed, is his feeling, that none of this makes sense. “Do I even belong to this family anymore? Was anyone ever going to mention any of this?”
The whole table seems to brace itself for some inevitable escalation, for David to be David and try to bully everyone into a proper state of contrition. Except that he can’t trust his lips to form another word.
“Don’t make a big deal of this, David,” his mother says. But some of the hardness has gone from her. “You’ve had your own problems lately. It’s not like you’ve been around.”
“We bought a building in town that we’re fixing up,” Danny says. “We can drive over later if you want. I think you’re going to like it.”
Somehow they get through the meal. At least he hasn’t ruined things for Marcus by making a scene. Nelda has gone to the trouble of preparing a separate dish for the children, spaghetti and meatballs, and Marcus, for once, following his cousins’ lead, is actually eating what has been set in front of him.
“I’ll bet all his mother feeds him is hot dogs,” David’s mother says. “Look at him, skin and bones.”
Danny gives Marcus a wink.
“What’s wrong with hot dogs? You used to make them for us all the time.”
It was to spare everyone the spectacle of this sort of inanity, David always told himself, that he avoided these people the whole time he was married. Marcus, though, is lapping it all up like some orphan suddenly discovering what a family is.
The boys have cleaned their plates.
“Is it all right if we show Marcus our rooms, Uncle David?” Jamie says.
The deference sends a twitch of shame through him.
“Just don’t get him hooked on some computer game or his mother will have my hide.”
The last time he and Julia had felt anything like a family had been on an all-inclusive they had done with Marcus on the Gulf the winter before the breakup. Their hotel turned out to be a disaster, an awful shopping mall of a place on the strip that looked out to a narrow sliver of beach eroded nearly to nothing by a string of recent hurricanes. Somehow, though, they had managed to make things work. Julia scouted out a five-star place where the beach hadn’t been affected and every day they’d take a taxi there, eating their meals à la carte at the hotel restaurant and spreading the tips around so the staff turned a blind eye when they used the facilities. Marcus befriended a couple of boys his own age and David would watch him building sandcastles with them at the water’s edge and think: It isn’t too late.
Their last day they took the ferry out to a nearby island, renting a golf cart in the little town there and following the coastal road until the low-end resorts and beach houses gave way to deserted scrubland and rocky shoals. David turned onto a dirt side road looking for a turtle-breeding station that was marked on their map but they ended up instead at a narrow strip of beachfront hemmed in by a wall of matted brush.
The beach was littered with shells.
“Can we stop?” Marcus said. “Can we collect some?”
He went along collecting shells in his sand bucket while David and Julia followed behind. David reached a hand out for Julia’s and felt grateful when she didn’t resist him.
“What do you think?” he said. “Could you see living here? No more department meetings, no more theme birthday parties.”
“You’d get bored in a week. You need to be on the circuit.”
“I could do the circuit right here. Take the golf cart out for a spin every morning.”
“Right.” But she was laughing. “And leave me doing the laundry by the river with the other chicas.”
Julia spotted a speck of some sort out at sea, then another, and they tried to make out whether they were dolphins or whales. They couldn’t have spent more than a minute or two looking out, but when they turned back to the beach Marcus was nowhere in sight.
David’s stomach dropped.
“Jesus, David, where is he? Marcus!”
His mind went at once to the dangers, the water on one side, the bush on the other. Who knew what the currents were here, maybe dangerous rip tides. And then all the abduction stories you heard, what better location than this if they’d been followed?
Julia was already out in the water, thrashing through the shoals looking for who knew what. The beach fell away steeply here and in a matter of steps she was nearly up to her waist.
“For God’s sake, where could he be? Wouldn’t we have heard him if he’d gone in the water?”
David remembered the public service ads they used to run of the sound of a child drowning: perfect silence. If a current had taken him, they were lost.
“My God, David, what should we do?”
“Keep searching the water! I’ll search the shore!”
The shingle of beach stretched no more than half a dozen metres before coming up against brush. He tried to make out footprints, but the beach here was mostly shale.
It was possible they had been targeted right from the moment they’d stepped off the ferry, that someone had waited for just such a chance. He knew Julia would never recover if something had happened to him, would be ruined, they both would.
“Marcus!”
Then he saw it, a narrow path through the dense growth and, faintly, what looked like footprints. Already he was doing the calculations in his head, how much money they could raise in a hurry, who they would go to.
Something moved in the thicket of shadow ahead of him.
Marcus was crouched in a clump of ferns like an animal evading capture. A million emotions collided in David.
“For the love of Christ, Marcus! Didn’t you hear us calling you? What are you doing here?”
He seemed afraid to get up.
“What were you thinking? Answer me! Why were you hiding?”
He was shouting now, had pulled the boy up by his arm and dragged him out to the open.
“Don’t ever try something stupid like that again!”
Julia was running toward them.
“What are you doing? You’re hurting him!”
“He was just hiding there, for fuck’s sake! We’re going out of our heads and he’s just hiding there!”
“Let go of him, you’re hurting him! Did you ask him why he was hiding? Did you do that?”
All he could see was his anger, like a burning wall he had to pass through.
“Ask him what, for Christ’s sake? I could see for myself he’d done it on purpose! We’re shouting like idiots and he’s hiding there the whole time like it’s some kind of game!”
“But why would he do that? Why?”
“You tell me! Because I don’t have a fucking clue!”
“That’s right, you don’t have a clue! Whose fault is that? Whose fault?”
The day was ruined after that; the entire trip was. The family had atomized along familiar lines, a clean break. David didn’t even bother trying to find out what Julia might have managed to glean from the boy about the incident. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want the excuses, the lies. Didn’t want to have to think how differently things might have gone if he had simply taken the boy in his arms.
“Davie, you with us? We better move on that house tour if you want to have time for the visit.”
He realizes he has blanked out. Microsleeps, Becker calls these episodes, a sudden drop in his brainwaves from alpha to theta for seconds or microseconds, long enough to lose a conversational thread or crash a car.
“I think I’m going to give the restaurant a miss.”
“Not the restaurant. I meant Dad. Ma, did you tell him at least?”
“It’s not for me to tell him. It’s for him to know.”
“Come on, Ma. I wouldn’t have remembered myself if you hadn’t reminded me.”
“Don’t lie for your brother’s sake. Every year you’ve gone with me.”
David’s brain hurts. More than anything, he wants the day to be over.
“Could somebody please tell me what the fuck we’re talking about?”
“You see?” his mother says.
“It’s no big deal, Davie. We were planning to stop by the cemetery, that’s all. To pay our respects. It’s twenty years today.”
Twenty years. The number staggers him. Sometimes he still feels the man at his back as if it were yesterday.
Twenty years from now, maybe this is what David will be to his own son, just this darkness, this tumour.
“Can we get going, at least? Who knows what the traffic will be getting Marcus home.”
He must have had his reasons. Some impulse he couldn’t shake. Or maybe he had turned to see his parents walking hand in hand and it had hurt him in a way he couldn’t have named, the danger and the hope of it.
Danny puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Just a quick tour of the house, then we’ll go. Who knows when we’ll get you out here again.”
The house goes on forever, with more square footage than their whole city block had back in their old west-end neighbourhood. In the basement there is a second kitchen, a second family room, a wine cellar; an entertainment centre with a cinema-sized projection screen. The floor, of polished concrete, is lined with radiant heat.
“All geothermal,” Danny says. “Thought I’d do my bit for the environment. They had to drill halfway to China to put the pipes in but it practically puts us off the grid.”
“I guess you’ll be set when it ends, then.”
“What’s that exactly, Davie? When what ends?”
“Civilization as we know it.”
Danny doesn’t miss a beat.
“I figure that ended a long time ago, brother. Strictly the law of the jungle out there. You should know more than anyone.”
David might almost be pleased by all of this if it didn’t feel like something set against him. Right from childhood his relationship with Danny has always felt like a zero-sum game, just a certain portion allotted to them that they must forever fight to get their share of. Even when Danny got picked on in school there was always a part of David that was relieved, as if whatever Danny got, he himself was spared.
Danny takes him outside and leads him to what looks like the facade of an entirely separate residence, jutting out in a big bay from the side of the house with its own double-doored entrance and trellised courtyard. The courtyard feels utterly private and self-contained, with no sightline to the front entrance or the back patio.
“You could live here and never know there was a whole other house attached,” Danny says. “That was the idea.”
From his bated air David senses they have come to the real object of the tour. Inside, the facade’s bay has been mirrored to form a big diamond-shaped space, with a kitchen to one side and a sitting and dining area angled around it. It takes David a few seconds to figure out what is so eerie about the place: it is like a miniature of the house their father built when he moved the family out here, specially designed to fit its odd-shaped ravine lot.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll bite. Is this where you put the au pair? The mistress?”
“Come on, David. It’s for Mom.”
“You’ve got to be kidding! She’d have to be dead before she moved out here.”
Danny shifts. “I guess she didn’t say anything, then.”
“What, do you think she’s going to move up here to look after your kids? She loves it downtown! I don’t know if you actually got her to agree to this, but if she did she’s just stringing you along.”
“She’s already sold the place, Davie. It closes in a couple of months.”
David feels the hum start at the back of his neck.
“I get it now. It’s about the restaurant, isn’t it? You figured you’d get the condo money out of her so Nelda can have her little amusement.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, David.”
He turns to see that their mother has come in behind them.
“Don’t I?” Just wanting to lash out now, to do damage. “What did your condo fetch? A million? One five?”
“Don’t start this, David. You won’t like where it ends.”
“At the truth? Is that what you mean? You both made it sound like you couldn’t rub two cents together when Dad died but now look at you, with your restaurant and your monster house. I didn’t see it then, how you closed me out.”
“Closed you out?” his mother says. “You didn’t ask about the money back then, did you? You didn’t want to know. You had your scholarship or whatever, that was all that mattered. You had your condo. Why do you think I sold the house up here, really? Do you think I cared about going to museums or the theatre? Do you think I cared about shopping?”
“Ma,” Danny says. “Just stop. We don’t want to do this.”
“Tell me, David. Why do you think?”
He has made his scene after all. And so will get what he deserves.
“Because we needed the money, David, that’s why. We needed the money. Who paid for your condo, did you ever think of that? Did you think it was free, just because your father built it? You knew all the problems he’d had with that building, all the buybacks we’d had to do, but you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to know.”
She has done it again. Now this is the version of things he will have to live with, that will become the truth.
“It’s like you’ve been holding this over me just so you could throw it in my face! Why didn’t you just say something back then, for Christ’s sake? I would have signed the thing over in a heartbeat for all I fucking cared!”
“You think I wouldn’t have asked? It was only for Danny’s sake that I didn’t. He fought for you then, if you’re looking for the truth.”
Danny won’t look at him.
“That was years, ago, Ma. Why hash it out now? We just did what Dad wanted. We just did what was right.”
He didn’t want to know. All these years he has gone along thinking that he was the one who had always had the upper hand.
History has shown that whenever twins stand in line for succession, one of them has to die.
“As far as I’m concerned, Davie,” Danny says, “this conversation never happened. Let’s not let it wreck the whole day.”
They leave the kids behind with Nelda and drive to the cemetery in Danny’s SUV. The vehicle reeks of luxury, leather seats, drop-down video, in-dash GPS. David sits in back, the first time he can remember being in the back seat of a car since he was a teen.
“You still driving that fancy import?” Danny says.
The fancy import that he had had to return to the dealer when the lease expired because he couldn’t afford the buyout.
“Strictly subcompact these days. Thinking about the environment.”
“Yeah, right.”
David feels sleep coming on as soon as the car is in motion. It was how he used to put Marcus to sleep when he had colic, driving the valley parkway for hours at a stretch. Something about the movement and white noise, people said, the containment of the car, like being back in the womb. Maybe it is the same for David, the same sense of regression.
He slips a hand into his pocket and feels by shape for a tab of ten-mig immediate-release.
Danny’s eye goes to the rear-view.
“You okay back there?”
“Just wondering when the movie starts.”
“Don’t joke. Half the time Nelda and Ma sit in the back when we go out so they can catch up on their soaps or whatever. Makes me feel like the frigging chauffeur.”
They ride past houses built like Palladian villas and Disney castles, one after another, with huge fountains out front or mile-long driveways with enough interlocking brick to pave the Appian Way. Like Rome before the fall, when everything got sloppy and big, the roadways out of the city lined with the monuments of all the middlemen who’d got rich bilking the provinces. Back when their father moved them out here, this whole zone was still farmland—that was probably what drew him here, the prospect of looking out from his back garden to open country like some aging Cincinnatus. By the time he died, the cornfields beyond their ravine had already given way to the road and sewer works of another development.
This is always the first image of his father that comes to David, of him tending his garden, though it wasn’t something he himself ever showed an interest in. That was Danny’s job, to show an interest. David’s was to resist at all costs, to pile up grievances. Over stupid things, he sees now, things that hardly mattered, and yet at the time it felt like his whole being depended on this unreasoned defiance. At one point he even started imagining to himself that his father was some sort of imposter who had wormed his way among them, taking his cue from the story his mother used to tell of how they met, when she was working for an uncle’s construction company and he came looking for a job.
“I had to fake everything for him, all his papers. He didn’t have so much as a library card.”
David used to do furtive searches of his father’s bedroom drawers, his closet, his desk, looking for he didn’t know what. Some clue, some proof he didn’t belong to them. There were occasional handwritten letters from Italy but he could never decipher them; there were photographs, mostly of job sites but also older ones of people he didn’t know, their surfaces cracked, their edges oddly serrated. It took David years of looking at maps before he found one that showed the town his father’s passport listed as his birthplace, up in the lake district. Later he would figure out it wasn’t far from Salò, the town where the Germans had set up Mussolini’s puppet republic after the Italians deposed him. For years, right into adulthood, the idea persisted in David’s mind that his father had had some connection to it, on the basis of nothing, really, given that his father would have been all of seventeen by the war’s end.
The irony now is that David can hardly remember more than a handful of real confrontations between the two of them. The worst had been when he had broken into one of his father’s work sites with some of his friends and crashed a forklift into a foundation wall, ending up riding home in the back of a police car. His father hadn’t said a word, had simply pulled off his belt when the police were gone and lit into him, the whole time David thinking, Now everyone will see what he is. And yet the truth was that this kind of violence was rare in him. That was the summer of David’s trip to Italy with his mother, which might have been a twisted compensation for the beating, though it felt more like his father simply giving up on him. In the fall, Danny started joining in on their father’s hunting trips, as if the implicit partitioning of him and Danny between their parents had finally been formalized. David can still remember the blackness that used to go through him when Danny returned from those trips, the feeling he had missed out on some rite of passage, something that might have given a shape to the violence in him.
“You can just see the top of it from here, Davie, the one in fieldstone.”
David has blanked out again. They are on the bypass that skirts the old town centre, which is just visible beyond an expanse of golf course and new housing.
“Used to be an old mill, if you can believe it. We’re trying to get it back to what it was. Maybe you could swing around with Mom next weekend to have a look. Jamie was saying Marcus asked if he could come up again.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll have to see. I might have something planned.”
They go past their old neighbourhood, a stretch of modest split-levels and bungalows that from the highway looks almost bucolic now, the sterile, unbroken lawns of the old days having given way to actual landscaping and full-grown trees. Beyond it, though, instead of the open vistas, there are only more houses, and then the strip malls and fast-food drive-throughs, the stadium-sized reception halls, the big-box plazas. A place without a centre, David thinks, but then it comes to him that Danny’s mill is the centre, where all of this, all this progress, got its start. Back in its day it was probably as much of an eyesore as this sprawl is, spoiling the river and the view.
“Looks different out here now, doesn’t it?” Danny says. “I know you guys in the city look down on us but you won’t get a better espresso than here, never mind the chain stuff downtown.”
Even the cemetery looks nothing like David remembers it, hemmed in by highway now and the entrance marked by a big arching gateway. Several mausoleums in polished stone rise up near the entrance like condo buildings for the dead, with glassed-in fronts that look into double-storeyed lobbies complete with seating areas and potted plants. Beyond them is a row of family-sized crypts, each with its elaborate statuary and rusticated flourishes. At least their father had had the grace to die before this sort of excess had become the norm, his own grave in an older section where the same arched slabs stretch row after row like the cookie-cutter gravestones of war cemeteries.
Their father’s stone, in rose-coloured marble, bears a porcelain cameo of him from a few years before he died. It is a shock to David how young he looks in it, how striking, rugged and lean like a leading man from the 1950s. The headstone is a double one, their mother’s name already etched out eerily next to their father’s and beneath it her birthdate followed by a dash, as if the span of her life since his death has been merely a malingering.
Danny has dropped the back gate of the SUV and pulled out four shot glasses and a bottle of Courvoisier from a plastic bin. He pours a generous splash of the brandy into each of the glasses.
“What is this?” David says.
“Has it been that long? Come on, Davie, we always do this, every anniversary. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
“He doesn’t remember because he’s never been here,” his mother says.
“That’s not true, Ma. He always used to come.”
Danny passes the glasses around. He pours the extra one one over their father’s grave, like a priest anointing a penitent.
“To Dad,” he says, raising his own glass and knocking it back.
From out of the bin he pulls a box of Montecristos.
“Davie, drink up, you look like you’re going to bust a gut. Don’t you remember how every weekend he used to have his cognac and his stogie? No matter what was happening, he had to have his little island of me time. The cigarettes were a habit but the cigar was something else. It was an occasion. Something holy.”
None of this jives with what David remembers of their weekends. What David remembers is the air of threat hanging over the house that there would be some new incident, some provocation.
Danny holds out a cigar.
“Keep it as a souvenir if you don’t want to smoke it. It’s twenty years now, Davie. At some point you have to make your peace.”
Even his mother has lit up. The smell pulls at David, though he can’t make out where it is leading him. With cigarette smoke it is different: twenty years on and the least whiff of it is still enough to call up his father as surely as if he were standing before him.
“If he wanted to make his peace,” his mother says, “he’d have done it by now. He never cared about family, not really. If he did, he’d still have one.”
Danny goes white. “Ma, you’re not being fair.”
“I’m just saying the truth, that’s all. He is what he is.”
David turns away. He downs his cognac and sets the glass in the bin, then wanders off along the row of tombstones.
“You go too far sometimes, Ma,” he hears Danny say.
“Never mind too far. It’s the only way to make him hear. Your father knew that.”
The surrounding graves read like a street plan from the old neighbourhood in the west end, the half-familiar names, the half-familiar faces staring out from the porcelain cameos. Bouquets of flowers in various stages of decay spew out from metal urns set into the bases of the graves. David remembers his mother once railing against all the rotting flowers, seeing them as some kind of desecration. As if they could matter. As if any of this does, these rites for the dead still as steeped in unreason as the ancestor worship of the Romans, with their death masks and their house shrines and their offerings of cake and wine to appease the underworld’s demons.
David had not made it in time for his father’s last moments. There was a call one morning from Danny at the hospital saying he was close to the end, but by the time David arrived from downtown he was gone. He had visited a few days earlier and his father had still had the indestructible air of someone who might go on for months yet or years, though he was reduced by then to little more than a sack of bones.
David was left alone with him while his mother went down to eat.
“Call the nurse,” he said. It was hard to tell by then what was his old hardness and what just him conserving his breath. “I need to get out of this room.”
The nurse hooked up a tank for his oxygen and David wheeled him out to the hospital garden. The sun was out, one of the first warm days, and a forsythia bush was in full bloom and around it a bed of tulips, also yellow, so that the effect was like a child’s papier-mâché model of a sunflower or of the sun itself. David parked his father next to the flowers thinking, This is what you won’t have, hardly knowing whether he meant it in anguish or in spite.
“You finish school yet?”
David had cause to wonder afterwards if this had been his father’s stab at some sort of reconciliation, though at the time all he let himself hear was the familiar contempt.
“Not yet, Dad.” He had started his doctorate by then, but this was a level of detail he would never have gone into with his father. “A few more years still.”
His father grunted.
“Always a few more.” Pause. Breath. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I’m doing what I like, Dad. I’m doing what I want.”
“I know what you want. You want me dead.”
David felt his whole body go weak. To answer him would just be to fall into his trap.
“Take me back. I don’t want your mother to worry.”
It was their last exchange.
After his father died David left almost at once for Rome, to do research for his dissertation. He remembers that time now as if it were part of some different life he had led. The ochre-coloured walls of the university, the cavernous lecture halls, the midnight walks past the Pantheon and the Campidoglio and the Colosseum; the smell that he remembered still from childhood, of sweat and car exhaust and history. By mid-October the tourists had gone and he had the city practically to himself, wandering the Forum from morning to dusk until he had covered every inch of it, every ruined temple and state house, every heaved-up back alley, every shop. The weather had been perfect for touring, day after day the same cloudless skies, the cool mornings, the dry midday heat, the long sunsets with their light like the last gasp of the fallen world. And the whole time he had felt, for what seemed the first time in his life, utterly self-sufficient, complete, with no sense of striving beyond that of immersing himself in his work. The clearest mark of the change in him was that he hardly so much as looked at a woman his entire stay, though in his former life it had felt like his very being had depended on the ceaseless job of coupling and disengaging.
He gave barely a thought to his father. It was as if every trace of him had been stripped away with his death, as easily as that. Then one week he rented a car to visit some Roman sites in the north of the country and his second day out he passed a direction sign on the expressway listing a name that seemed to come out of a dream: his father’s hometown.
On impulse he took the exit. Soon the flatlands of the Po had given way to gloomy foothills that felt still as raw and lost to the world as they might have been when the Gauls had scrounged their living among them. He had to stop for directions at every village, each one more insular and becalmed than the last, with the same central bar with a few thatch chairs out front, the same old men who would argue and contradict and fail to come to consensus.
After hours of driving he reached the town. It was bigger than he’d expected, sitting on a slope that overlooked a river valley and spread along a series of switchbacks that tentacled out at every curve into spruce-looking residential enclaves. He passed houses in pink and yellow stucco, children in pressed uniforms, balconies where women had set out their linens to air or old people sat watching television or playing cards. There was a jewellery shop on the main strip, a shop that sold baby clothes; there were pedestrians, cars, a cenotaph, two sets of traffic lights. At the bottom of the town, a factory that made hardware for windows and doors, its parking lot packed, its loading bays bustling. A display board in the lobby window showed off its wares, beneath the motto “From our house to yours.”
The town was nothing like David had imagined it. Or rather, he hadn’t imagined it, except as a backdrop to his made-up histories, vaguely rundown and miserable and grey, not this burgher’s town practically Swiss in its air of prosperity and self-satisfaction. Yet somehow it felt more sinister in its ordinariness than the colourless place of his fantasies. He stopped at a public phone to check the directory and there they were, half a dozen listings under his own family name, he had only to drop a token into the phone and dial the numbers. He thought of showing up at some stranger’s door, of seeing his father’s face again, of having it seen in his own, and already felt steeped in lies. Felt that whatever he was after would only recede the more he sought it.
He got back in his car and drove on.
It is getting late. He can feel his guts starting to tighten at the prospect of the shouting match with Julia that his mother has made clear she will make no effort to avert. This is how she guards her place at the centre, by sowing dissension in every quarter, dividing and conquering. Who knows if she hadn’t done the same between him and his father. “Just between you and me,” she used to say, when she’d given him some special indulgence or concession. “Your father doesn’t have to know.”
Without realizing it he has wandered halfway across the cemetery.
“David, we’re waiting for you!” his mother calls out. “Then you complain you’re in a hurry!”
Riding home he can’t get the cameo of his father out of his mind, staring out from his grave so hearty and hale.
“You know what it is,” his mother says. “It’s because you weren’t there at the end. That’s why you can’t make your peace.”
“Ma, don’t,” Danny says.
“I’m just trying to help him. It has to weigh on him. Even Nelda was there, you weren’t even married yet.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ma, it wasn’t his fault. It’s not like he had a cell phone or anything back then.”
“Your father was waiting for him, you could see it. That’s why he held on. And then he couldn’t wait.”
You want me dead. What if that had been a chance his father had offered him, something to push past? What if the only real obstacle between them had been that they’d both clung to the same insoluble lump, their stupid pride?
He had slept at some girl’s place that night, which was why Danny hadn’t reached him until the morning. “A couple of hours, maybe,” was what Danny said. “It’s hard to tell.” David showered and shaved, ate his breakfast. Got stuck in traffic. The whole time in a sort of fugue state, outside of himself, pretending not to hear the voice at the back of his head telling him that if he was lucky, he’d be too late.
“Davie, don’t listen to her, it wasn’t like that. It was his time, that’s all. You came as fast as you could.”
David sits silent.
By the time they get back to Danny’s, David feels wound up like a caged animal. He hears a movie blaring from the basement, probably one he’ll end up catching grief over from Julia, and starts down to get Marcus, the unreasonableness swirling in him, looking for an outlet. All he needs now to make the day complete is to blow up at Marcus over some trifle.
A war movie is raging on the projection screen but the boys aren’t attending to it. Instead they are huddled on the floor with a furtive air around some object Jamie has apparently laid out for them.
They start at the sound of his voice and David sees what it is they are gawking at. It is so far from anything he has expected that he can’t quite process it at first. Some sort of replica or toy, he thinks, though it is so convincing-looking, right down to its dull metallic sheen, that he feels a shiver.
The boys have gone silent.
“Nice piece. Mind if I take a look?”
He takes it up from the wooden case it sits in. The instant he feels the solidity of it, he knows in his bones it is real.
He tries to keep his voice even.
“Where’d you get this thing?”
“Grandma gave it to me. She said it belonged to Grandpa.”
The shiver has become a throb. It is as if the clue he searched for his whole childhood has suddenly been handed to him.
“She gave it to you?”
“She said it wasn’t loaded or anything.”
It is not much larger than the palm of his hand. The grips on the handle are embossed with a logo done in an elaborate Gothic script, though what strikes David is the rough machining of the rest, the metal ridged and notched as if some last finishing pass has been skipped. The only markings are a tiny one above one of the grips like a silver mark and a serial number above the trigger guard.
The boys’ eyes are riveted on him, Marcus’s as much as the others’. On impulse he drops the gun’s magazine. The dulled copper heads of several bullets show in it.
The boys stare open-mouthed.
“Ma! Ma! Would you get down here please? Danny, you might want to see this!”
By the time everyone has gathered, his mother is already in full denial mode.
“You and Danny had guns when you were younger than he is! What’s the big deal?”
“Did you think to ask his parents before you gave it to him? Did you think what might have happened if he’d taken it to school to show his friends? A loaded handgun?”
Nelda flushes.
“My God, Danny. A loaded gun.”
“Who knew it was loaded, for God’s sake? I took it out on the balcony and pulled the trigger and nothing happened, so I figured it was safe. If it isn’t working, what difference does it make if it’s loaded?”
Danny has taken over. He pulls the slide back on the gun and jiggles his pinky around in the chamber, then peers into the barrel.
“What were you thinking, Ma? This isn’t something you give to a kid.”
“I just wanted him to have a keepsake, that’s all. Something of his grandfather’s.”
Danny eases the bullets out of the magazine and sets the gun back in its case.
“Sorry, son, I think we’ll have to turn this sucker in. It’s not like the old days when I used to keep my Winchester out in the garden shed.”
Somehow, in this gutless scolding, it seems their mother has prevailed again.
“Why do you have to turn it in?” she says. “It’s ours, isn’t it? Just keep it for him until he’s older.”
“It doesn’t really work that way, Ma. I mean, where did it even come from? It doesn’t even have a brand name on it. Don’t tell me he brought the thing with him from the old country.”
“You know how he was. The past was the past. He used to keep it at the top of the closet, that’s all I knew. I didn’t ask questions.”
David wonders how he could have missed it in all those years of prying. What dark theories it might have confirmed for him if he had found it.
“Why don’t you let me take it in?”
“Nah, Davie, it’s no trouble. I know people here.”
“That’s why it should be me. The word goes around someone from the tribe brought in a gun, right away all the old bullshit gets trotted out.”
“Let him take it, Danny,” Nelda says. “Just the thought of it here even one more night—”
“Fine, then. Just don’t shoot yourself with it. And Marcus, not a word to your mother about any of this or we won’t see you again till you’re twenty-one.”
David takes the bullets as well, dropping them into a jacket pocket. He can feel Marcus eyeing the gun case as they walk out to his mother’s car.
“When are you going to take it in?”
It is out of character for Marcus to break a silence like this.
“I dunno.” All David can think of is what the gun felt like in his hand. “Maybe tomorrow. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering, that’s all.”
Clearly Julia’s prohibitions against guns haven’t stopped Marcus from being fascinated with them. David, too, though he had hidden it, had been drawn to them: more than once he had snuck Danny’s Winchester or .22 out of the house to hunt groundhogs and squirrels or to shoot out the windows of an abandoned factory near their place. A couple of times, though it boggles his mind to think of it now, he had hidden himself on a hill overlooking the uptown expressway extension and taken potshots at the licence plates of passing vehicles.
In the car, he sets the gun case at his feet.
“You know, I’m thinking they’d probably let me keep the thing as long as it’s registered. It’s a family heirloom, after all.”
“Keep it for what?” his mother says. “What do you need it for? You said you’d turn it in, so turn it in.”
He shoots a complicit look at Marcus in back.
“Listen to yourself, Ma. You were the one who wanted to keep it in the family.”
He is anxious to get home so he can try to trace the gun’s origins. So he can hold it in his hands again.
He presses his feet to the case, keeping it close.
David opens his eyes to darkness, fighting to get his bearings like someone awaking to the sound of a threat. He is in his mother’s car still, alone; he has fallen asleep.
The car is parked in front of Julia’s house. Clearly his mother has taken it upon herself to come here directly instead of letting him collect his car at her place and bring Marcus down on his own. Because of the time, she’ll say; because he fell asleep.
She and Julia stand talking in the sallow light of the front veranda with what seems a grotesque complicity, as if he were some problem child they were consulting over. Marcus, meanwhile, is nowhere in sight, spirited away from him without so much as a goodbye between them. David has half a mind to waltz into the house to claim his due. His house, a part of him still thinks of it as, maybe more now than when he actually lived in it. The house he bled for.
He feels the gun case at his feet and thinks, Fuck it.
Julia actually takes his mother’s hand in both of hers when they part as if she has saved Marcus from certain death.
“Please don’t do that again,” he says when his mother returns. “Please don’t humiliate me like that in front of her.”
She doesn’t fight him. It feels like the first concession she has made to him the entire day.
They drive up to her condo in silence. His mother takes the parkway for a stretch but then cuts up through a complicated series of backstreets that she manoeuvres with practised ease. Maybe she isn’t losing it after all. The truth is that David hardly sees her enough anymore to be able to judge. That there hasn’t been any real connection between them for years, probably, since before his marriage at least. Since his father’s death, in short, though he has never admitted as much. He remembers standing in the rec room of their house after he died watching her pack things for her move and thinking that all this was dead to him now, that he wanted only to be gone, free and clear. That he didn’t want to know.
She had given him a box of photographs then from their Italy trip. For years he had carted them around with him with each move, going through them for probably the first time only when he moved into the condo after the divorce. Half of them were from a visit they’d made to her hometown in the south, of people and places he had barely any recollection of now, the rest from the couple of weeks they’d spent as tourists in Rome. Of these the bulk were from their visit to Ostia Antica, mostly close-ups of him and his mother that had surely been taken by their young guide, who appeared in none of them. His mother looked younger than he remembered her, girlish, almost, but elegant, dressed in a form-fitting sleeveless dress she had probably picked up in one of the high-end shops that flanked their hotel in Rome. It was something she had fostered in him, an appreciation for style, taking him shopping downtown at the end of every summer to pick out his clothes for the fall. “Danny doesn’t care,” she would say. “But you know what it means to look good.”
From Ostia Antica there was a shot of him and his mother at the Thermopolium, with its fresco of food and wine and still-intact bar; another of his mother laughing at the picnic lunch their guide had laid out for them in the courtyard garden beyond it. His mother had been different those weeks in Rome. The whole time of her marriage David had never once heard his father raise his voice against her, had never seen him be anything other than the gentleman, attentive, indulgent, everything that David knows he himself has never been to a woman. Yet in Rome it was as if his mother, too, was suddenly free of some shadow, some darkness.
She turns into the visitors’ lot at her building and pulls up next to the no-options hatchback David picked up used after the divorce.
“David, don’t think I don’t see it. Don’t think I don’t know how hard all this stuff has been for you.”
There is sympathy in her voice but also something deeper, more wrenching. Disappointment, perhaps. For a moment he sees the woman she was on their Italy trip, remembers the thrill of waking with her in their hotel room to the buzz of Vespas in the street, the rattle of storefront shutters. Remembers sitting in that courtyard in Ostia Antica in the tawny afternoon light, wishing they’d never go home.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Ma. I’ll manage.”
“Because you’ve done such a good job so far. I’m saying this with the best intention, David. Don’t let whatever it is you’re going through wreck your life. You’re not young enough anymore for a second chance.”
In his car he sets the gun case at the foot of the front passenger seat so he can keep an eye on it. He heads downtown, but when he reaches his cross street he doesn’t turn, unable to face the prospect of making a meal, of eating it alone. His place still has such a provisional air, like a temporary stop en route to some other, fuller life. One he has so far been unable to imagine.
He considers crossing the river to eat at one of his former haunts in the old neighbourhood but the thought only fills him with bitterness. Instead he keeps driving until he hits the lakeshore, then follows it out past the condo towers and hotels, the badlands of the old port, until he comes to the turnoff for the spit. It has been years since he was down here, though in the old days it was like a gathering place for the tribe. Maybe a hundred trucks a day came through then, from every contractor in the city, edging the spit out bit by bit into the lake with the city’s detritus. The rumours always swirling about this one who had snuck in a load of car batteries or asbestos or that one the lead-laced dirt from some old factory site; and then the other rumours, about mob hits and bodies in concrete. A couple of union men disappeared when David was a kid, guys David himself had seen speak at the local union hall when his father had taken him and Danny there, and the story had always been that they were pushing up dandelions down at the spit.
Already from the entrance gate, at the bottom of a desolate zone of industrial warehouses and empty lots, the place looks unrecognizable. What was once a moonscape of shattered concrete and jutting rebar now, in the dark, gives off the lush silhouette of a nature preserve. A chain has been drawn across the roadway to bar entry but no one has bothered to lock it. David unravels one end from its hitching post to pass his car through and reattaches it behind him. A beaten track leads him past stands of poplar and willow; walking trails lead off into darkened bush. Through his open window, a lake smell and a racket of crickets and of frogs, who bellow and moan in the dark like fiends in heat.
Somehow, out of this garbage heap, nature has reclaimed her own, only the occasional lump of concrete or brick pushing up through the roadway giving any sign of the tons of detritus and waste that lie underneath. The road winds past ponds and lagoons that glimmer in the moonlight like ancient tar pits. Something scuttles across his path but he doesn’t make out what, a shadowy mass whose eyes flash in his headlights before it melts back into the bush.
Gradually the vegetation thins and gives way to the familiar blight of old. Bulldozed earth rutted with truck tracks; staggered heaps of rubble that stretch off toward the black of the lake. He has reached the spit’s festering edge. He parks by the water, a highway of moonlight stretching out in front of him. Nearby a backhoe sits parked against a half-levelled pile of debris with a logo on the door he remembers from childhood, from one of the old-boy operations that even back then the city tended to favour.
He takes out the cigar his brother gave him and lights it, sucking the smoke right into his lungs, wanting to feel the burn of it. The smell teases at him again and then it comes back to him, the image of his father in the back yard with his cigar, though he isn’t sure if he is remembering or if his mind has merely conjured the image from scratch, is trying to give him the past he might have had if he’d been different, had cared about different things, had bothered to see them. The past he might have wanted. He has learned from his sleep books that even the waking mind is a place of merest invention, winnowing the billions of points of data the universe emits every second down to the handful of isolate bits it needs to create the dream it calls the world. All the rest, all the excess that the brain has no use for, the colours it doesn’t register, the smells and sounds, the inconceivable worldviews and extra dimensions, are like the universe’s dark matter, invisible, unknown, though the very pith and meaning of things might reside in it and every accepted truth be overthrown. David wonders sometimes if the fraying he feels at the edges of himself is this dark matter worming its way in, demanding accommodation.
He takes up the gun case and opens it on the passenger seat next to him. On his phone he does a search of the two letters, PB, that make up the logo on the grips: Pietro Beretta. Another quick search and he has located the factory, in Gardone Val Trompia. Not thirty miles from his father’s hometown, in the heart of what was once Mussolini’s puppet republic.
David’s blood is racing. It is as if the fantasies of his childhood have turned real. He keeps up his searches, trying to pin down some explanation for the gun’s crude finish. He is amazed at the gun lore available at a touch, encyclopedia sites, chat rooms, auction sites, videos, feeling the same disjunction as when he’d started surfing for porn, the sense of these alternate worlds out there in the ether in which the dangerous, the forbidden, the deviant have assumed the bland normality of stamp collecting or trading recipes. He comes across a video of a spectacled man with the look a children’s show host demonstrating a Beretta M1935. “Ever wonder what kind of handguns the Italians were making in the 1930s?” In smiling detail he explains how to load, cock and fire it, getting off eight rounds in as many seconds.
His father’s gun is a match for the M1935 except for the lack of markings and finish. Then on an auction site David finds its double: the same rough machining, the same industrial-grade serial number over the trigger guard. A great addition to any Nazi pistol collection. A write-up explains how the Germans, who commandeered the Beretta factory under the republic, ordered it to dispense with aesthetics to speed up production, the guns marked only by the seal of the special inspection unit the Germans instituted to ensure the guns still met their standards, the Quarto Ufficio Tecnico.
David, almost trembling, lifts his father’s gun from its case and holds it up to the cabin light. He squints at the tiny mark on the frame: a 4 over the letters UT.
The feeling that goes through him seems to have little to do with his old suspicions and theories, is more like a sudden sense of his father’s presence, as if, across the decades, the gun has connected David to him like a dark thread. All those years that he spent dreaming up infamies for him. Yet even if he’d had the evidence in his hands, it hardly would have mattered. It wasn’t accusation he was after but connection. Something that said to his father, We’re the same.
You want me dead. Who could have seen that in him if not someone like him?
He drops the gun’s magazine and squeezes the bullets in his pocket back into place. Loaded, the gun feels more real, more itself. Such a strange object, designed for one purpose, to kill, yet oddly compelling, maybe even more so in this state of raw incompletion.
David isn’t sure how he has reached a point where his own life has become a place he dreads returning to. His family, his shoebox apartment, his work. He is well into his fourth year of effort on his doomsday book but it has yet to coalesce, so that he has started finding every reason to avoid it, to waste his time on frivolities. Then every time he comes back to it he feels it eluding him like his memories do, his thoughts, his very life.
He pulls back the slide on the Beretta the way the video has shown him to draw a round up into the chamber. Now the hammer is cocked and the gun is ready to fire, as simply as that. His heart is pounding. He keeps expecting the throb in his brain stem, the familiar slackening, but it doesn’t come. Instead he feels a strange calm, a focus. As if he has found it, the still point between too little and too much.
He points the gun out the window and sights targets in the moonlight. A fluted column. A shard of ceramic. A metal pole.
The windshield of the backhoe.
Bang.
A blast of flame and a noise like his head exploding, the gun bucking in his hands as if to rip them apart. It takes his brain a second to realize that he is the one who has pulled the trigger.
The backhoe’s windshield looks like the Milky Way, an intricate web of tiny cracks.
Bang.
The windshield shatters.
His ears are ringing, the bones of his hands feel unhinged.
He targets the gas tank.
Bang. Then again.
There is no explosion like in the movies, only the smell of gas. He ought to go, might have been heard, but instead he takes up his cigar and sits smoking, feeling clearer than he has in months, feeling awake. The cigar slows down time like some menial but essential task, tending a garden or watching a child.
When he has smoked it down to a stub he tosses it into the dark. At the gate he replaces the chain behind him when he has passed through, no looking back.