The last thing my mother sent me was a picture she’d taken of a cuneiform tablet in a small museum in Anatolia. At the top, a loinclothed king or god in profile, perspectiveless, the sun and moon above, and below, columns of tiny scratchings, letters, language leaping from stone. The image was badly lit. She must have stood to the side to move the glare from an overhead bulb to the margin of the tablet. I can picture her looking into the window of her phone, taking a side step, tapping the screen. She wrote, “The work’s going well, though your father still seems to think the problems in refugee camps owe to a lack of decorum and matching eating utensils. We’re sightseeing for two days. Tomorrow off to those big old slabs,” meaning the stelae at Göbekli Tepe, site of the world’s first religious temple, which they never did see. How bluely ironic that this last dashed-off email should have attached to it an image of a language grown from pictorial symbols carved on a hard slab of reality very like the headstones that serve now as their alter-presences. And cuneiform, so beautiful. From drawings in sand to sandstone to granite, Hittite and Sumerian to Semitic symbols to Greek, ox/house/camel/door became aleph, beth, gimel, daleth became alpha, beta, gamma, delta, the signs moving back and forth from yard to shelter, nature to artifice, country to settlement. In their origin alphabetical letters had the breadth to mark both the wild and the cultivated.
The NGO called me in Montreal, first with the news, then with the arrangements. I flew to Halifax to meet the so-called mortal remains, held steady through a small service, and saw them into the ground. When I looked up, suddenly orphaned, I decided to take to the skies.
In time I was living with a petite Londoner in a one-bedroom apartment in La Latina, a neighbourhood in Madrid. We sampled the city cheaply, hitting the discount hours in museums and bars, attaching ourselves to English groups on architecture tours, attending street protests, chanting in bad Spanish. On TV, soap operas confused us and soccer billionaires scored goals and then tore off in some direction as if chased by guard dogs. She worked as a copy editor for a travel magazine. For a few weeks she indulged me in language games, with imposed restrictions. No definite articles over dinner (“Please pass a pepper grinder.”), only one adjective for the weekend (“Then how would you describe me?” I asked. “You are insufficiently friended.”). No one-word utterances. Responding to any question of five words with a rhyme (“Do you like this dress?” “…The hemline’s low. I’d prefer less.”). I reasoned that the games marked us as distinct, kept us quick. Then the challenge of them became limiting, like badly fitted clothes, binding the limbs in mismeasured forms. For a time it seemed we’d never free ourselves, that we’d go mad together. We stopped having sex. And so we called off the games. It took a while to break ourselves of the habit of listening a certain way, for lapses or possibilities. We went silent, hours at a time, and, on the other side of silence, broke up.
Or that isn’t what happened. What happened was she realized she could no longer watch me sit motionless. To her I seemed to move at a great speed while reading or staring out the window at the crowds in the El Rastro flea market. She said, “You sit still the way other people run for their lives.” She thought I’d turned sitting into an act of cowardice, a way of avoiding hard truths. One day the truth was that she had fallen for her Spanish teacher and was moving in with him.
Alone, I cut all expenses. I quit smoking, lived on pasta and butter, but in the end my means ran down. As I left for good with my duffle bag, my landlord, a sad-eyed Italian Spaniard, held open the door and clasped me on the deltoid. “You are real. Real poets do not pay rent.” He’d seen me reading poetry and assumed I wrote the stuff. In truth I am only a failed poet. A failed many things. Bartender, textbook editor, doctoral student, orchestra publicist. I have no talents but reading.
I landed back in Montreal, living in a former professor’s basement. He was the closest thing to family I had left. A memory disorder had forced him into early retirement. Now his old students took turns going with him to medical appointments and grocery stores, looking after him in exchange for a basement room. Most hours of the day he was himself, lucid, funny, the Dominic Easley we all knew. But there were slips and lapses, especially in the evening, after wine. One night as we walked through the residential streets he tried to introduce me to his neighbour, a large woman out inspecting her garden. The neighbour and I understood even before Dominic that he’d lost my name, and as I said who I was, it was he who listened with the greater interest. That night in the basement I had never felt so unknown, even to myself. The feeling wasn’t loneliness but rather two emotions held together, one sadness, a simple word that simply applied, and the other something borrowed from Dominic, a distilled sense of being, of possibility, as if I had entered a state of perpetual, dreadful expectation.
Contained in that dim basement I felt something in approach. Then, out of nowhere, a stranger named August Durant sent me an e-ticket to Rome and an offer of six hundred USD a week to stay with him and conduct what he called “literary-detective work.” He stressed that he wasn’t hiring me as a sexual companion. I would put my one talent in service of solving “a mystery of dimensions unknown” even to him. I was without other prospects. Either I found paid work or I’d become accommodated to the sorry view of myself as destined for still more years of drift and small failures, trying to stay out in front of hard truths. But a detective. Hack gumshoe or houndstooth or hard-boiled? Would I be figuratively armed? Would there be a good story? Would its end be mine?
Words grow out of the world and then back into it, made of the very history they string together. An enduring one comes out of the Old English morðor, the Old Norse morð, and several related variants, meeting the line from the medieval Latin murdrum and the Anglo-French murdre. The word is there very near the origin of stories, right after first light, and now it’s all through every story, even when it doesn’t seem to belong and we imagine we don’t see it.
Durant knew me as the author of an online rant I’d gone so far as to give a title: “The Poet at the End of the World.” There had appeared on the internet a new poetry site called Three Sheets. The anonymous host posted only his or her own poems, most short, some untitled, and yet amid all the traffic noise, the page drew a surprising aggregate of readers, for a poetry site. At first these readers were other poets and academics, who within six weeks built two new sites devoted entirely to the verse of the mystery poet who for a time was called the New Anonymous, or Nanny for short, and to the enigma of his or her identity. Theories sprung up around the names and cities and historical events alluded to in the poems. Something calling itself the Group Against Three Sheets (GRATS) arose to attack Nanny for “a mockery of the provocateur spirit” and to pronounce Three Sheets “insufficiently political in its conception.” Another, the Group Against the Group Against Three Sheets (GRAGRATS), the name and acronym chosen, as its founding manifesto stated, precisely for their absurdity, considered the anonymity central to what came to be called the Project, and defended the poet’s choice to remain unnamed, and even insisted that there be no provisional designations, and so asked that people stop using “Nanny” to mean “the anonymous one” (uncapitalized), a corrective that somehow became widely adopted. (GRAGRATS) chose the symbol @ to designate the poet. The rest of us just called him or her the Poet.
One morning in the Montreal basement I’d taken a stroll past the Sheets-inspired sites, read the latest skirmishes, which usually amused me unintentionally, and came away wanting to throw stones at both sides. In any country, debates among poets are comically vicious, the stakes being so low. Though I’d intended never to add my voice to the babble, I couldn’t stop from saying what no one else would say and posting it on the Sheets Project Meta-Site of Record (SHEPMETSOR). Roughly reduced, my point was that the debates over Three Sheets were being conducted almost entirely by people with no feeling whatsoever for poetry, mostly academics and bad poets, and were these people capable of reading better, they’d see that the Poet was addressing an audience in the habit of filtering out bleatings such as theirs, and that, in fact, the most coherent theme or subtext discernible in the Poet’s work suggested not a communal, consensual, or debatable set of ideas, but rather a soul’s draw toward a single, fixed mystery.
“The mystery itself is unnamed. Is it a lost loved one? a lost god? All we find is an absence. Absence is the most present thing in the poems.” I’d fallen into a conviction and was more or less stabbing the keys. “Most of you are failing the Poet and the poems. As readers, you are thin where you should be thick, and otherwise thick through and through.”
That last line now embarrasses me. I don’t sound like myself, even myself in prose. Dominic chose not to call me on the brattiness of the tone, or the generalization I’d made about academics, though he was a better and more soulful reader than I. He read Durant’s letter of invitation, looked in on Three Sheets, and pointed out that I was entertaining a solicitation from someone unstable or at least very likely in one of the categories of thin readers that I’d attacked.
“If you need the money, though, you can always tell yourself that this Durant must concur with your reading of the Poet, and so taking his money might not be ignoble. And anyway, it’s not just money, it’s Rome!”
It was more than Rome, in the end, but in Rome it began.
The next week I handed over my room and caretaking duties to a former classmate and flew off, anticipating disaster. Dominic had gifted me a few nights in a budget residenza in Trastevere. I had been to Rome once before, with no money, and seen the sights, sipped the coffee at Tazza d’Oro, felt the black cobblestones in the soles of my feet, in my throat, under my eyelids when the last stranger home turned out the light in the room for males in a hostel near Termini Station. I’d been alone then, in my early twenties, and now eight years later was alone again. Being always in silence had left me without a means for any human gesture toward comprehension, and the traffic and murmuring tourists only sharpened for me the silence of the buildings and stones, and cast me, in some faux-Romantic sense, with the dead.
In my small room I consulted my laptop to see what was happening at Three Sheets. There had been no new posts in a week, an unusual but not unprecedented quiet. When the site went still for a time I imagined the Poet entirely unplugged, reading old books, then wandering on a farm or in village streets somewhere temperate. He/she lived in a moderate climate, I deduced, but came from an extreme one, which was why the “runt days” with their “uncentered bubble of light”—winter days, surely—seemed to her/him “a native, wet element.” Only a nonnative would feel a damp cold as “native.” Of course the Poet might have been imagining the damp, or remembering a place where she (let’s say) no longer lived, but the description had appeared in February, with a topical reference to fires then ravaging Australia (“an outback town in cinders”).
Durant’s email notes had been short, not unfriendly but neither giving anything away. Before accepting his offer I’d found him on a faculty page at a private school in California I’d never heard of, Larunda College. The page had no photo and only a brief professional biography. August Durant had studied genetics at Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and had taught at the University of Michigan for twelve years before moving to Larunda, where, it seemed, he taught very little. He was affiliated with universities in France, Holland, and England. The linked CV gave me a sense of his age—judging from when he finished his graduate work, he’d now be in his early sixties—and listed dozens of publications, the titles of which meant nothing to me except one on the American poets Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. It was odd that he’d written an academic paper on poetry, and odder still that he’d listed it among all the articles on evolutionary biology and DNA transference on his CV, where it would mean nothing to his professional standing. He must have been proud.
The CV hadn’t been updated in three years. What had he been doing recently? I used Dominic’s access to online academic searches to learn that Durant had coauthored a successful and sizeable research grant on something called “molluscan phylogeny” (I couldn’t remember what phylogeny meant and could have sworn there was a k at the end of mollusc). He’d published a single paper, back in the first months of the grant, but nothing since. A distracted program assistant at the biosciences department told me that Durant was on leave. I said I was considering an application to Larunda, and she offered that Durant’s leave was “indefinite.” He was not available to supervise research. “Is he retired?” I asked. “You can think of him that way,” she said.
Apart from his professional life, there was scant evidence to read of him. Surely he knew even less about me, yet he seemed to have great confidence that I was his man, whether or not I knew it. “You can ask me whatever you like,” he wrote. “The plane ticket would have proven to most that I’m serious. All it really proves is that I have enough money to play my hunch, and anyway, even once you realize I’m serious, you still have to decide if I’m someone you can work for.” He was right, but now that I’d used the ticket, my concern wasn’t that he’d deceived me but that he’d learn I was a less talented reader-detective than he’d imagined. There’s a degree of cowardice or fraudulence in every reader who feels the need, upon closing a book, to open his mouth.
I cleared my throat and dialled his number. The voice that answered, in English, was certainly his—I could tell somehow by the vigorous, uninterrogative “hello.” As we spoke I could picture him, strong, sharp-eyed, square. He sounded like John Huston in Chinatown. The call was brief. We arranged to meet the next afternoon on a patio bar on Piazza Campo de’ Fiori. The presumption that had led him to send me the ticket was there now too, even in his attempt to reassure me.
“Anyone my age and with my way of seeing the world is bound to be a little complicated. You’ll need confidence for this work, James. I like boldness. So tomorrow check out of your hotel and bring your bags with you. You’ll know right away you can trust me, and you’ll like me, if that matters to you, which it does. Then we’ll begin our work.”
After the call I allowed myself to admit further doubts. Not just that my talents were less than he imagined but that the enterprise was absurd. I looked up absurd on my phone. It’s from the Latin absurdus, meaning “dissonant” or “out of tune.” Couldn’t Durant hear the notes? Because he presumed to know me well from a letter I’d posted online, I decided that his judgment was suspect. He was a truster of appearances. No one is transparent, though they may evidently be mostly joyful or not, mostly good or not, and so on. There’s always more to the story. To allow myself one generalization, people who express presumed certainties to strangers are often, at some level, fools.
My doubts made me miss the Londoner, so full of purpose, clear of mind. She’d studied mathematics and told wild tales about string theory to rewrap with fine gold any loose thought I’d strung with poetical catgut. Upon learning from her that forty is the only semiperfect number in English whose letters fall alphabetically, I thought I might say it to myself in times of confusion as a sort of mantric assertion of linear clarity. But then I started seeing it everywhere—it leapt from screen texts and formed in the fragments of sound broken off from the noise of the day—so that “forty” represented for me everything from the number of horses in the last five Grand National races to the percentage of my country’s commissioned soldiers listed as casualties in the First World War to the number of light-years from Earth to the planet 55 Cancri e to the number of days and nights of rain it takes to float an ark. I retain facts pointlessly—the Londoner thought I was “on the spectrum,” I told her the internet was to blame—but now and then, as if of their own accord, the facts try to arrange themselves into meaning. These little flights of free association, these high-lateral cha-chas, as I thought of them, came unbidden like a kind of seizure, and I had no choice but to wait them out. The more duress I felt, the longer they lasted. Maybe they cleansed the carbon buildup in the brain’s exhaust system, but they contained unlikely, surprising linkings, and in their wake I experienced a sudden clarity that could last for several minutes. The clarity didn’t always feel good.
Except for a few flower stalls, the market at Campo de’ Fiori had closed for the day by the time I arrived. The rich light on the buildings was as I remembered it. Durant had told me to look for the most crowded patio at the northwest corner of the piazza, the one the tour books listed. He’d be sitting in the otherwise identical neighbouring patio, likely the sole occupant, and that was, in fact, how I found him. He spotted me first or at least was looking right at me as I approached and picked him out, a man even larger than I’d imagined, standing to greet me, with full, light-brown, combed hair—I wondered if he was one of those late-middle-aged men who are proud of their hair—wearing black plastic old-style glasses over blue-grey eyes. Striking eyes, wolfen. He would know their effect. His clothes were casual, coarse cotton. He was smiling.
“You knew me by the duffle bag,” I said, shaking his considerable hand. We sat.
“And you don’t look Italian, or walk Italian. There’s also a picture of you on the internet. You must know the one.” It was a group photo. The Londoner and I met the other six when we were detained together by Parisian police as part of a mass roundup of climate change protesters at a meeting of big oil executives. We decided to gather again in Amsterdam a month later to join an alternative energy march. That’s where the picture had been taken, before we really got to know each other, which is to say, before the Londoner and I split from the others and moved to Madrid. I never thought anymore of those temporary friends, except the Londoner. I’d chatted with her briefly one Paris afternoon and in all of ten minutes she made a marching activist of me.
Through our first shared drink the conversation with Durant had no shape. I learned in passing that the room I’d have in his nearby apartment had a great street view, that he’d been in Rome for nine weeks and planned to stay several more, that his feet were suffering from a new pair of shoes, that he hoped, when his time in the city was over, never to hear another underpowered motorcycle. I nursed a beer, he a glass of Madeira. There was something more to these preliminary exchanges than simply to put each other at ease. It was understood that we were each gauging the other, each allowing time to find what would serve as an acceptable, reproducible version of ourselves that we could then play at length. I was fully aware that, against my will, I was constructing a persona—one that would not disappoint Durant, that seemed up to the job he’d offered me, but that too seemed authentic for being slightly peculiarized, as in my unwillingness to fill all silences with speech or ask the obvious questions—and that he must have been doing the same, though I couldn’t detect anything in him but a genuine interest in me, in my carry bag, which I’d picked up in Madrid from a Moroccan, and in the city around us. That I couldn’t detect a forced interest meant that he was older and more practised at the art of false presentation, or that he was less self-aware than I hoped, and didn’t know that we are only being true to human nature to fashion outward selves far removed from whoever we are when alone in the dark.
All this travelling I’d done—Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid—what had I learned about myself, he asked. I said I was neither searching for nor escaping anything. I just wanted to know what places were like, at least while I was standing in them. I didn’t say, as I might have, that I’d been unlocated since my parents died in a car accident.
“Your posting argues that the poems at Three Sheets are all directed toward a single, fixed mystery. It suggests you see beauty in the idea of a search. You’re looking for a direction. I have one for you.”
What had I written about a search? My little online piece had tumbled off the top of my head. I’d tangled myself up in Dante, the canto about Ulysses’s last voyage from The Inferno. The old sailor gathers his men and sets off for “the world beyond the sun,” meaning the west, where the sun sets, the unknowable distant point where things end, the day, the light, life itself. Was this the direction Durant had planned for me?
“Why bring me here? Why couldn’t I work for you from Canada?”
“Because the best discoveries are sometimes made when we’re not working, when we’re relaxing, talking about life and love, and I’m paying you for those conversations, too.”
We looked out at the passersby, the rooftop gardens on the buildings across the piazza. Several young Romans sat on the base of the statue of Giordano Bruno. Harmless teenagers, smoking, playing cool, feigning boredom. The light was clean. Durant waited me out. I finally asked him how he became interested in Three Sheets and the Poet.
“I discovered the site in a sidebar. I forget what I was reading online, likely something about Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop, and a fragment of poetry popped up and caught my eye. And so I looked at the site and the more I read, the more the work got hold of me.”
“The site’s gotten hold of a whole lot of people. Does it bother you that you might be part of a virtual cult?” My ground had been marked out by the online post, but now I stood on it, chin raised. I already knew that Durant liked this image of me.
“Let’s face it, the Poet’s work is at best uneven and pretty elusive. Half of it doesn’t even make sense. My relation to him—he’s a man, let’s agree—is more personal.” He measured my expression, which I tried to keep neutral. “I know how that sounds.”
He said that I could lay claim to “the sharpest post” on SHEPMETSOR. And I had no institutional affiliations that might skew my readings, no publishers to protect, no tenure to win. As far as he could tell from his internet searches, I was a perfect co-reader, and he needed a reader. He said not his life but “the makings” of his life were, as it were, “at stake.” I wondered if he’d introduced “the sharpest post” and “stake” intentionally.
“The Poet’s work has started to feel directed at me. Either I’m lost to delusion, and you might be able to help free me of it, or there really is a connection, and you can confirm that what I’m seeing in the poems is valid.” He took me in unblinking as he spoke, never once looked away. “Of course, you wonder what I’m seeing. And of course I can’t tell you or I’ll have planted the reading in your mind. I can only ask you to tell me what you see, though even this is an interference.”
If he wanted me as a measuring instrument, then already the needle was in the red. Superstitious readers project more meanings onto pages than they find in them. It is possible to see anything in language if you look with a particular slant and intensity like the one he was now levelling at me. Whole interpretive fiefdoms are built upon professors seeing gods in their porridge.
He looked off to the square. A young, hairy-legged couple in shorts had bolted from the neighbouring patio and run out to flag down a dark-skinned man in a blue summer suit. There was surprise and delight all around.
Durant’s hand fell off his glass, as if to make a gesture, but he changed his mind and simply took hold of it again.
“You must have some questions for me,” I said.
“No. But I do ask something of you. If you’re still considering this job.” Before I realized the question had been sprung, I answered, “I am.” Why I said this I still don’t know. If anything, I was inclined at that point not to become involved in the man’s suspect enthusiasms. Maybe I was just intrigued. Or maybe I didn’t want to walk away from the money.
He said that he’d pay my first installment regardless but wouldn’t hire me until he’d seen me read. He meant this literally. He needed to physically see me read a poem and then listen to my response, without aid of commentaries or search engines, and without the time to revise.
“You mean right now?”
“Yes.”
In Dominic’s Contemporary World Poetry graduate course, he’d made the class perform spot readings and then graded our discussions. Among students and his colleagues he was quietly denounced for the practice, but it was in those sessions that I learned to focus, to find meaning and test it, to find a way of seeing and a language for saying what I saw. But sometimes I saw badly, or not at all.
Durant produced a paper from his pants pocket and unfolded it, passed it to me. I recognized the poem, “The Art of Memory.” It had appeared in the late winter on Three Sheets. It hadn’t made much sense to me at the time, and it wasn’t my kind of poem, but I performed the trick I’d learned of faking to myself a silent enthusiasm, which sometimes triggered an actual one, which made me read better. What did I see? A simple rhyme scheme. The speaker addressing an absent lover, a woman who maybe knows something of the sciences (“The world, its laws slipped / into you like light through a lens to a point / of resolve”). He remembers them standing with a guidebook in the shadow of a bronze statue, and she says, “The sun winks and we play blind.” The ending:
Who wrongs
us when the body, its own authority, is undone?
Who made the laws of art that the bronze
of the burned man should be shaped by fire?
We spent our day here burning down, drawn
to drink as if to douse the very pyre
here remembered, then to lose our calendared days,
our lined and numbered cosmos, the entire
thing. You were leaving, and left. I remain.
I read it again, then began. I said I could see why the Poet didn’t often write in fixed forms. Even this loose terza rima wasn’t handled very well. He’d chosen it presumably because the poem was partly about forms (the statue, the body, the poem), and forms breaking down, someone burned at the stake, commemorated in bronze, and the lovers’ bodies no longer answering the laws they once did. The iambic pentameter of the first tercet falters in the second. I talked of the kink in the rhyme scheme.
Durant barely nodded. He was waiting to see if I could reach beyond the undergraduate-level answer I’d offered him. I continued.
“The lover being addressed seems to love science. The speaker has a weaker eye for science, and questions art. There are a few tired conceits at work. Fire as a principle of both destruction and creation, of lovers’ passion, etcetera. There’s an ambiguity in the ‘pyre/here remembered’—is ‘here’ the statue, commemorating a death by fire, or is ‘here’ in fact the poem itself, commemorating their lost passion? The meanings coexist. And we get the full sense of that by noting the title. ‘The Art of Memory’ alludes to the art advanced by the man represented in a bronze statue in the very place he was burned at the stake. Giordano Bruno. The poem is set here, in Campo de’ Fiori.”
When I’d first read the lines, months ago, I wondered whose death? whose statue? But reading them now, the answers were clear, though about Bruno I knew only that he had devised elaborate memory systems, and that because of his heretical theories of astronomy he was publicly executed by the church.
Durant raised his glass to me but the test wasn’t yet completed.
“The lover says, ‘The sun winks and we play blind.’ It’s the line that first caught my attention in that sidebar on my screen. Have you heard the expression before?” he asked.
“No. In context—I’m guessing a bit here, the poem is obscure in places—but it might mean that truth reveals itself but we sometimes ignore it. The idea is that the lovers have had a truth revealed to them that they’ve been ignoring but that one of them is no longer going to ignore. Presumably, given the tired figures, the fire and so on, it’s that their love has lost its passion. It’s dying.”
Even when I hadn’t fully grasped the poem I felt the loss in it. After loved ones die, every last antacid ad is heartbreaking. In the first weeks after I was orphaned I couldn’t read poetry or prose. The Londoner brought me back by leading me to Three Sheets, and because so many of the poems either made no sense or were less than excellent, I deputed them to express my emotions for me in little combustions I could smother with cold, analytical words if they grew too hot. One day in that Montreal basement the fire nearly caught me (the stale fire metaphor clearly has) and it took my online rant to extinguish it.
“The poem’s autobiographical, don’t you think?” he asked.
“We can’t possibly know.”
“He’s writing about his experience. Lost passion, lost love. He was here.”
“We don’t know that. To avoid fallacies, we shouldn’t assume he’s writing about his life. Or at least not literally. It’s the safer assumption.”
“So your training tells you. Mine tells me different.”
Some echo in the comment landed me back with the Londoner in Madrid. We ate dinner at a small wooden table, our money and time running out. I’d wanted to tell her that she was the only woman who’d ever inspired me to poetry or song, inspired me to risk failing. I wanted her in words but couldn’t have her there. It was a way of saying I loved her, though of course I would never admit to speech such a worn term as love, and so I felt both love and my inability to say it either straight or slant. She put her knife down and sipped her wine, close-set eyes, soft breath of a face. Before she took up her knife again I reached across the table and grasped her hand up high, near the wrist, and squeezed it. I meant to communicate my love and protection—her life had left her in need of protection from recurrent bad luck—and she looked at my hand on hers, then up at me. She wanted me to say what it meant, this touch. But I couldn’t say a thing, and let go.
Now I sat looking at Durant’s hands. He held one in the other, pressed a thumb nervously into his palm. The certainty struck me that Durant himself was the Poet. Who else would have taken such an interest in my posted rant? If I had to guess—so easily I stepped into the same trap of biographical conjecture—I’d have said the Poet was male, yes, and at least in his fifties, given the recurrent theme of aging as a kind of decline. And a man alone, often addressing an absent “you” who seemed not at all metaphysical. And Durant himself was a genetic biologist, and so might have known a woman with a scientific eye like the lost lover in the poem. And even an anonymous poet must want to meet one live reader.
He sat up slightly higher.
“There’s a poem by Czesław Miłosz, the Pole,” he said. “He imagines this square here, and then takes us to where he’s writing the poem, Warsaw in 1943, during the first uprising. The ghetto is on fire. Outside the ghetto, couples ride in a carousel and the ashes from the fires drift to them in what he calls ‘dark kites’ and they catch them like ‘petals in midair.’ Miłosz has the authority of the survivor, of witness. The poem, as poem, stands or falls on those petals. But because he sees them with his own eyes, the charred petals are floating before us too, in the very words on the page.” I didn’t know what to say. I had no compulsion to say anything. “Whether a poem is about love or historical atrocity, and whether or not the poet was really there, it has to come from somewhere real. Warsaw, this piazza, or a coil in the heart. I know you understand this.”
I understood less as the day went on. We left the café and through the Renaissance streets I followed him, or trailed him, more precisely, his person and his meaning. He allowed anything to come to his attention, voiced every thought and half thought. He must have been very lonely for someone to talk to as he met the city, a feeling I knew from my first visit there. But always I was on guard. The café meeting had been measured and planned, performed. Was he setting me up for more lessons as he stopped and bought us gelato or as we paused before the facade of a church? “Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte.” He pointed with his cone to the terrifying winged skulls on the doorway. “The place is dedicated to the burial of the dead. It inspires mortals to pay their tithes and eat their greens.” An underlying seriousness always there in his voice or expression enabled him to joke without disarming awe, even while ice cream melted onto his hand.
“In case you’re wondering,” he said, “and you are, I’m not the Poet. And the job is still yours if you want it.” He was striding again, looking into the ancient stones passing beneath him. “Don’t decide until I show you the apartment.”
Those first days in Rome now in memory seem painted, the perspectives mastered to a mathematical exactness of light and shadow, the Della Francesca’d faces and fabrics somehow colouring even the sounds, the streets, voices speaking a language I didn’t know. A kind of dark comedy crept into the hours. Words became prime elements, reduced not to sense but the urge to sense, the need to say, the need to share in the act of saying. Or maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Sense came in fragments that combined or didn’t, somewhere between Piero and Mondrian. I felt outside of my own experience, not unpleasantly, even as I was included in company. Durant had been absent for most of my first two days in the apartment, but on the second evening he invited me to dinner. We were seven on the rooftop of the apartment building, I, Durant, and five of his acquaintances from the building. Yves was a Paris-based travel writer on sabbatical with his wife, who was Greek and was never properly introduced but seemed to have once worked as a photographer. Their friends Patrice and Anton, a gay couple, both pilots for Air France, agreed about not much except the strength of their pilots union. The only Italian, Carlo, who owned the building, was about Durant’s age. He resembled, it must be said, Mussolini, with even something of Il Duce’s ridiculous bearing, at least when he thrust forward his chin to offer up the final word on Arab uprisings, the compromised Italian press, or the quality of the Super Tuscan blend. He hosted these rooftop dinners for his tenants every second Wednesday night.
Though I’d just started work—my only instructions were to read Three Sheets “for patterns” and to “profile” the Poet, as if we were out to catch a serial killer—Durant had insisted on paying me in advance for my first two weeks. I’d been poor for months, so sitting there with four hundred euros in my pocket I felt good, trusted, valued, but also misjudged, soon to disappoint. Wanting to impress Durant, wanting to misrepresent myself impressively, made me feel younger than I was, needy and lacking in seriousness.
The talk moved between languages—Italian, English, French—until someone remembered me, who spoke no Italian and spoke French like a camp counsellor played guitar, and shifted them all back to English.
“Explain your joke,” said Anton. He was narrow-featured and tended to burst staccato into conversation and then pay no attention to whoever took up his point.
“I don’t think I can,” I said. “It wasn’t very witty. Do you have summer camps in France?”
“We have camps, yes. I thought you said ‘campos.’ A field. I thought you were insulting the farmers’ way of speaking. Or perhaps just the French. When I visit Italy I often hear these insults.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Then you did intend to insult?”
It would be more accurate to say his features were pinched.
“I’m sorry others insult you,” I said.
“You shouldn’t apologize for others. It leads to confusion and disastrous political ennui.”
Yves was asking Carlo about property for sale in Turkey. Carlo’s son would spend his summer away from university studies renovating a building in some gentrifying neighbourhood on the European side of Istanbul.
“The seller was a nervous man who inherited the address from his mother. He saw risk everywhere,” said Carlo. “The risk of Islamicists, reformists, a police state, a racist-nationalist government. Of the surrounding economies, of earthquakes. Stupidly, he told me of his fears. The price for the building was attractive.”
The word that came to mind was retrench. I wanted to go to bed but I saw Durant glancing at me, gauging. He wanted to see what he’d paid for. And now, Yves’s wife was asking me for my feelings about Canada.
I said I had complicated feelings about it. I found it a highly agreeable country, comparatively strong by most meaningful indices, education, health care, crime and penal stats, collective rights protections, and so on, though it had never resolved or acknowledged its abhorrent treatment, ongoing, of native peoples, despite which, given the general failure of nations in their treatment of native peoples, it was the very global example of multicultural success that other countries, especially the U.S., claimed to be the exceptional, exclusive, or pinnacle—pick your figure of speech—examples of. For a few moments as I spoke the others listened but then drifted into other conversations. Even the Greek woman, with the countenance of a listener, seemed somehow to be listening to her left and right. Though he wasn’t looking at me now, I sensed that only Durant was paying attention. And yet, I said, not really aware that I had these precise opinions, compared to most countries with strong educational systems and a history of at least some leisure class, Canada persisted in a cultural adolescence, with a huge, silent gulf between its artists, few as they were, and their audience, brought on primarily by a vapid cultural commentary. All of this complicated by new technologies and a fracturing of the impulse toward serious attention.
“So your experience escaped shallowness.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. It turned out she was under the impression I’d recently visited Canada.
“I’m Canadian, not American.”
“My mistake,” she said. Then she asked if I’d ever visited the United States and what were my feelings. Then she interrupted my nonanswer and asked again about Canada, its vast regions and overwhelming vistas. I brought it all around—a trick I had learned on other trips outside North America—to a few stories about encounters with bears. Suddenly the whole table listened in. The stories weren’t mine, though I put myself in them. The mother black bear following me (my former friend Derek) up a tree in which, I (he) saw too late, her cubs were lounging. The grizzly I (a guy in one of my literature classes whose name escaped me) met on a mountain path, where I (he) froze, unable to back away, until the grizzly turned around and left the way it had come, as if it had forgotten its car keys. The polar bear who walked into the bar up in Churchill, Manitoba, where I (the CBC camera crew) was thawing (their equipment) out. The stories were all implausible and true. I survived in each one. By the time I’d finished them I felt surrounded by a borrowed northern gravity.
Carlo’s son, Davide, arrived, introduced himself to all, and sat across from me. He looked like a buzz-cut soccer star, straight off a poster for the Azzurri. As if we’d been speaking for hours he told me he found Rome tame and dull. He was leaving for Istanbul the next day. He asked if I played music.
When conversing with nonnative English speakers I often have this sense of having missed a transition, and of unexpected echoes. It changes my own way of speaking. I didn’t really know how I’d occasioned the bear stories, for instance, and now I expected bears to return as a topic in some unlikely way, just as guitar playing was about to.
“I play guitar badly, like a camp counsellor.”
“In Istanbul,” Davide continued, “I busk on the great street Istiklal with my friends. We play gypsy style. We’re very good. Even the gypsies admire us. I’ll send you a link.”
In this way my email address was brought forth. On the back of his business card, I printed it like a seven-year-old practising his letters, and handed him his own card. On the front side was a badly drawn figure of a very long-clawed hammer or a very thick-stringed instrument.
I asked Davide what he was studying. He said it didn’t matter. He was going to drop out of school.
“Though I haven’t told my father.”
He said this in full voice, with his father ten feet away, talking to Durant, paying his son no attention. I wondered if Davide hoped his father would overhear him or register unconsciously what he was saying, but then it seemed he simply knew exactly how much volume he could safely get away with, in the way local taxi drivers measured small spaces at high speeds.
All at once the voices fell silent and Durant looked at me.
“James,” he asserted in a voice that made me want to deny that I was James or had ever met him, “your bear stories are amusing but they don’t really display your greater talents.” He said that they’d recently had in their number a Canadian who claimed to be a clairvoyant. She’d announced that they all had known one another in a previous life. “She called herself a seer. And here you are, another Canadian, a seer of subtexts, a maker of connections. I wonder what you’re thinking about all of us.”
Durant valued the idea that he’d been right about me.
“I’m thinking I’d like to be invited back next week and should dodge the question.”
“I wanted to ask her how a clairvoyant knows about past lives,” Patrice said. “Maybe our beloved dead have these Wednesday dinners together, too.”
“We know something about one another”—Durant was still addressing me—“but we’d like to know more about you. Tell us about your origins, your family.”
“I don’t talk about my family.” The words were immediate, sure, and yet they surprised me.
“How intriguing,” said Anton flatly. “One of you must be a monster. Was it Daddy?”
“Then what else is in your heart?” asked Durant. “By ‘heart’ I mean ‘memory,’ of course. Which poems have taken up there? Recite one.”
As I pictured myself pulling the folded euros from my pocket, rolling them tightly, stuffing them down his throat, I tried to fend off the request by reminding him I wasn’t a poet, that my connection to poetry was now professional and so to call it up socially would be to mix business and pleasure.
“I’m sure Patrice has landed many planes in heavy weather but let’s not have him land one here tonight,” I said.
It turned out that everyone at the table had in their hearts and on their tongues a little poetry, or in Davide’s case, banal song lyrics. The poems tended to be very old, things learned in school, I was told, and as they were approximately translated seemed to be full of stale, romantic imagery or clunky metaphors about the stages of life or the horrors of war. When someone forgot a word or line, the others imagined possibilities, sometimes from what were apparently well-known advertising slogans or catch lines from popular television shows. There was much laughter.
Davide sang his lines in a surprisingly good voice, uninflected with earnestness.
Then it was my turn. I had very little to offer. A few years back I had tried to memorize not whole poems but stanzas that I liked. Did I still know them?
I offered a few lines from the American poet W. S. Merwin, from a poem called “The Dreamers.”
a man who can’t read turned pages
until he came to one with his own story
it was air
and in the morning he began learning letters
starting with A is for apple
which seems wrong
he says the first letter seems wrong
They waited me out for a few seconds, expecting more. Yves declared the stanza a “paradox” but didn’t explain what he meant. Durant asked why I found it significant.
“I don’t find it significant so much as…” I almost said “beautiful and true.” “Language belongs to a lapsed world. It can’t quite reach what it grasps for.”
“And yet,” said Durant.
“And yet in this stanza language describes what it says can’t be described.”
“To what end?” Carlo asked. “Language is a problem. We all know this. Poems should be about the heart or the world, not the words in between them.”
“That is a stupid thing to say,” Davide maintained in a calm voice, without looking at his father. He glanced at me apologetically.
“Promise me, son, that you will write a song about the word pollice the next time you hit one with a hammer.”
He said this as I’ve written it, in English except for the Italian word pollice, which I assumed didn’t mean police, though that was the image I pictured, Davide hitting a policeman with a hammer, then singing about the words involved rather than the act.
For a moment father and son looked silently at each other and then Italian broke loose. They spoke rapidly, passionately, almost murderously, until Davide got to his feet and left without saying good night.
Carlo poured Durant and himself more wine.
“I’m sorry for my son. His boyhood will not end.”
The rest of us cast around for suitable comment, found none. Showing great valour, I thought, I stepped into the conversational breach.
“Merwin was unlikely to offend. Or so I thought.”
“Or so. No more bear stories, please,” said Anton.
He tended to address his drink when he said these things.
“What have you pretended to misunderstand now, Anton?” I asked. The others, even Patrice, I noted, seemed delighted.
“I’m not the pretentious one.”
Patrice explained that Anton thought I’d used the Italian word for bear, orso. He apologized for his copilot. I wondered how it was sitting with Anton, this third instance of someone apologizing for another person. Patrice explained that Anton was bitter that Air France had without warning informed their pilots that all communications to towers globally were to be in English.
“His ear for English isn’t precise. He’s worried there will be incidents.”
I pictured Anton, upon the wrong angle of incidence and some misidentified English word, flying a plane into a woods full of orsos. I was exhausted. For three days I’d been reading poems, looking for patterns, hearing echoes. The work survived into my off-hours. What I needed, in fact, was to hear banal song lyrics in a good voice without earnestness, maybe on a beach somewhere with the waves being waves.
I stood, waved, gave a little bow. I apologized to Anton for whatever misunderstanding was about to ensue, thanked everyone for their company and mindfulness of my unilingualism, and walked off, crawled through the dormer, our entry/exit point, which led into Yves and his wife’s rented apartment, which led to the hallway and stairwell and Durant’s apartment, and my hard bed, where shortly I curled up in a dark full of floating foreign syllables.
On my third day in the apartment a woman appeared. As was his habit Durant had gone out for the afternoon and I was at work in the little station he’d prepared for me, a desk with a printer in the corner of my bedroom, with a window to my left looking out at the opposing windows and flaking stucco of the rust-yellow apartment across the narrow street. For only a few minutes in the early afternoons the sun would drift between the buildings and fire them to a light I’d seen before and marvelled at, but never contemplated. In sunlight the walls became the very planes upon which, to their makers, God’s energies met those of common, untabernacled man. I had already come to love that window and the street’s thin slot of sky, and I was sitting with a stack of poems from Three Sheets, waiting for the full sun, when I heard the front door being unlocked and opened. I bent back to the lines at hand, a short poem called “July” that seemed to be telling me something I couldn’t quite hear, when a voice spoke from my bedroom doorway.
“So you’re the new me.”
I turned to find a tall young woman, maybe a little older than I. Her face was slightly tapered, fine-featured. Sunglasses propped on her head pulled her brown-blond hair back to reveal a widow’s peak that returned the eye, pleasingly, to her face.
“I’m Amanda. He didn’t tell you about me.”
“James.”
“Any breakthroughs, James?”
I was trailing the moment, aware of looking, and of her awareness of being looked at.
“A lot of leads,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone else had had the job.”
“Then you weren’t meant to know. He won’t be happy that we’ve met. I won’t tell him if you don’t.”
In their set position the edges of her mouth curled slightly upward so that her expression ran against her tone. They present all at once, the proportions of beauty, but it’s the incongruences that mark them out and steal into us. That’s not at all why Yeats was so attached to the idea that “there is no excellent beauty without strangeness,” but it’s what came to mind.
She delivered unprompted the account of how she had come into Durant’s employ. Seven months ago, just after she’d graduated with a master’s degree in something called Truth and Justice Studies, Durant emailed her with the same job offer made to me. They’d exchanged comments posted at SHEPMETSOR and he said he liked her description of the poems as “mysterious little buildings with their doors ajar.” Durant flew her to France, where he was working, and they both transferred to Rome, just before she quit the job. “We were becoming too attached.” That she said all this so freely, so fully, and so soon upon meeting, should have left me wary of her, but she seemed without guile.
She excused herself and went about watering plants while I sat staring at the doorway where she’d appeared, failing through vertigo to connect my recent life in a Montreal basement to the one I was now living, though in both all I seemed to do was read. My first impression of her hurt slightly, in that I was sure Durant must have realized upon meeting me how far short I fell of Amanda’s easy confidence, and very likely of her abilities. I am twice as present on the page as in person. If the same was true of her, then compared with mine her interpretive skills must have been of a different order of sophistication. Besides which, she had studied Truth and Justice, two nouns in that category of words I’m ashamed to utter for my lack of service to them as principles. Only the shame counted in my favour.
In a minute Amanda came in and watered some fern-looking thing beside the dresser.
“August doesn’t notice plants. If I don’t do this, they’ll die. It’s why I still have a key, our last arrangement, though I think he’s forgotten it. I doubt he knows when I’ve been by.”
“You only come by when he’s out?”
She finished watering and stood there, just beyond arm’s reach. I had not been this close to a woman paying attention to me since I was last in Europe.
“It’s easier. He’s out every afternoon. I see him sometimes for dinner. He likes to know that he hasn’t stranded me here.” She now worked in a bar that catered to Americans. In time she intended to head north to The Hague, where she had some connections, to see if she couldn’t scratch up some social justice internship for one of the tribunals. She made it sound like migrant labour. She held a dented tin watering can. “What are you working on? Can I ask?”
I told myself it would contaminate the experiment to reveal my thoughts—for this reason Durant left me alone by day—though in truth I was afraid she’d be unimpressed. I was considering the possibility that the poems were posted in an order designed from the outset rather than randomly, which would mean that, because certain details seemed to allude to current world events, elsewhere in each poem would be lines that had been preselected. Upon this idea, I was extracting the most telling words in a few poems I’d marked by the date of their first appearance on the Three Sheets site. And I’d come to one that held me in its little mystery, door ajar.
“Do you remember ‘July’?”
“Let me think. A swimming pool. And a bird. What else?”
Rather than hand it to her I pulled the poem out and slid it to the edge of the desk. She put down the can and moved one step closer. I read along with her, my eyes on the poem, my focus caught in lonely adolescence.
That summer the heat wouldn’t quit
and the water in the 1963 blue
concrete pool climbed
to 89 degrees a robin
appeared on a branch in the stairs
landing window with so many
twigs in his beak so symmetrically
held that he presented long
whiskers and a helmet of horns,
looked, in fact, like a Kurosawa
character. I am telling you
they were exactly measured
and held just so by a force
whose agency is at work again
now in this question you ask of me,
its dimensions concealed from you.
Ridiculous, really, the
accidents of likeness,
that you should want to know
the magicked secret of it all.
“Right,” she said, “ ‘the magicked secret.’ ”
“It’s beckoning us to solve a mystery. The poem’s showing us the concealed dimensions but we aren’t seeing them. Or at least I’m not.”
She was still focused on the page, but she blinked, deliberately.
“The poem is complete,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
Now she looked out the window. The rooftop shadows claiming the walls meant I’d missed the minute of perfect light. She took hold of the pot with the ferny thing and held it up in front of her.
“Let’s not name this plant.” (I couldn’t have.) “Let’s look at it. We can touch it, put it in different lights, care for it. But we don’t ask what it means.”
I was looking at her, not the plant, but she kept holding it, so I looked. It was, all in all, a plant.
“Yes,” I said. “Well, I don’t think the Poet is at quite the same level of creative power.”
She set down the pot.
“The speaker in the poem is writing about the mystery of likeness. In any given case, is the likeness of one thing to another an accident or not? He’s been asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, which means there is an answer, and yet there’s the mystery of the memory it brings on, the bird unknowingly having made a new face for itself. That’s all, it’s complete.”
“You think I should just let the poem be.”
She picked up the page and was handing it to me when the light through it revealed the notes I’d made on the back of the sheet. She turned it over. I watched her read. Date of the pool, hot summer, house with a landing, thermometer reading in Fahrenheit. So a U.S. American house. Two-storey. I picture it mid-twentieth century. Not suburban, maybe somewhere in the West. Can’t say why I think this.
“I should be going. Will you look after the plants now?”
“I’ll forget them, too. I know that much about myself. Why did you quit the job?”
Her expression shifted minutely—toward doubt?—and she looked down to the page in her hand, as if surprised to find it there, and handed it back to me.
“These poems,” she said. “The moment you touch one, turn it over, it gets ahold of you. Whether he admits it or not, that hold is why August gets up in the morning. It’s what he doesn’t know that matters to him, not the answers to puzzles. He thinks he wants to find the Poet, who he’s convinced lives in Rome—it’s why he’s out every afternoon, playing hunches, sitting in cafés, staring at the people gathering at statues—I bet he pulled that trick on you, too, didn’t he? ‘The Art of Memory’ in Campo de’ Fiori?”
“Yes.”
It was all much bigger than poetry, she said. Durant was convinced that the Poet possessed something of his, a great, specific loss.
“What are you talking about? What has he lost?”
She took the can and walked back to the living room. Watching her walk away only intensified my wish to follow her meaning. She stopped and turned and seemed to be having an argument with herself. The winning self nodded and spoke.
“ ‘The sun winks and we play blind.’ ”
“Is the poem quoting someone? Who said it?”
“He did.”
“Who did?”
“August. To his daughter. In their last conversation before she went missing. Three years ago.” She winced slightly to hear herself. She had come to the apartment to say exactly as much as she’d said, but she was betraying Durant. “Don’t tell him we’ve met. Or you can say we’ve met but that we both insisted there be no talk about the poems.”
A missing daughter. Durant had impressed upon me the seriousness of the work, but I hadn’t quite believed it connected to anything real. I stood and started toward her. She drifted away slowly so that my path pushed hers to the doorway.
“Missing how? Did she run away?”
“He gives few details and there’s nothing online. She was in her thirties. She seems to have walked out of her life and never reappeared. Private detectives found no trace. Then there’s me, and now you.”
“How did you learn all this? Is it in the poems?”
“He told me in one short, drunken conversation. I found nothing of her in the poems.”
“What about the sun winking?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a coincidence. Or maybe he thinks he coined an expression that in fact he overheard. Maybe it’s out there, circulating like an old penny.”
The words in her answer impressed themselves visually. I pictured the coin in coincidence and then saw the penny and it dropped.
“You’re not telling me everything. I need the whole story.”
Whether the whole story was Durant’s or hers, she seemed to be calculating the cost of telling it, reading numbers on some invisible meter. She offered to meet me the next afternoon in the park of the Villa Borghese. She pulled the sunglasses down over her eyes, a way of announcing her exit, or of preventing me from reading something in her face.
My life falls to its rhythms, some common to many, some mine alone. Breaking the rhythms, taking my eggs poached for once, changing the route to a job, choosing to stop loving or stop failing a loved one, I inscribe a new line in my brain. It’s the patterns that I can’t get outside, whether I recognize them or not, that define me. To see my specific self—sorrows and fears and pathologies—reflected in external reality effects a recognition. Some such moments calm me. Others do me in.
My father was a military man. He and my mother had taken early retirement in a town near the base in Nova Scotia where he’d last served. I grew up many places but this last town had become familiar and I knew it wouldn’t be lost to me as the others had, even if, and sooner than I imagined, it would come to contain the greatest loss.
One week each summer and Christmas, Montreal to Nova Scotia, back.
In every sense he was a hard man to know.
My parents were United Church Protestants. When they both turned sixty-two they moved to Turkey for a year to work for an NGO in a refugee camp near the Syrian border. The circumstances of their deaths were ambiguous. They were found sitting inside their car on a dirt road, a few kilometres past the last cotton field, where the stony desert took up, dead of blunt force trauma. I had the accident report sent to me and translated. In separate sections, it described the conditions of the vehicle and of its occupants. I read about the car but only glanced at the second section, not allowing myself to read left to right, up to down. Instead I cast my eyes over the words, registering random phrases. The white Kia outwardly showed no evidence of having hit anything. Inside, matters were different. My parents seemed to have met a very sudden stop. They were dashed on the dash, steered into the steering wheel. Neither had been wearing a seat belt, a detail underlined by hand in the original document, as if to explain their fate or to blame them for it, yet they always wore seat belts and the car’s annoying reminder bell was in working order, a signal detail, though what it signalled I didn’t know.
Normally, they were buckle-up folks, my parents. Resourceful, tough, good in crises. They strapped themselves in, lashed themselves to masts in storms. In their third week at the camp one of their colleagues was killed when his car, leading a van of police officers to a food-collection point, tripped a thousand-pound bomb placed under the road by the PKK, Kurdish separatists “agitating” for a homeland. Before the day was through they’d contacted the man’s wife, a woman in Pennsylvania they’d never met, and arranged immediate support for her, somehow collecting names and numbers of the couple’s family and friends. After which my father set out himself, on the same road, overland at the bomb crater, to organize and secure the food transport.
There were dangers everywhere. A Turkish nationalist group in the area had been implicated in the murders of Christians, some of them foreigners, and Al-Qaeda and ISIS had begun setting up thereabouts to promote their specific lunacies across the border, inside the civil war in Syria. I asked them to return to Canada but my mother said, as if she had no say in it, “Your father wants to see this through.” For him, the world was complicated but life was not. Life was an enactment of duty to principles. He regarded my central passion—literature—as an indulgence, unforgivably inward. The inwardness was a kind of selfishness, even a cowardice. When I started graduate school he was warily proud, and my quitting it confirmed his assumptions. He believed I would never have a steady job, let alone a career, and whether or not I married, would never surrender my self-indulgence to the building of a family of my own. In so many words, he said all of this, said it once, on what would become our last Christmas Eve together. With some embarrassment, some pride, I’d produced at the table a little magazine in which I’d had three poems published, a magazine of the kind read only by the other contributors, though my parents wouldn’t know that. My idea was to suggest I was making some headway in the writing world. My mother hugged me. I can still feel her bracelet pressing into my back. He looked at the poems, not seeming to actually read them, said I was just “playing a game,” and announced he had to say his piece.
I was hurt but not angry. I still don’t know if he was right. I’ve written just one poem since. That night I tried to tell him in words other than these that I agreed, that to write poetry is like playing a game, a board game, but it’s play in service of the real, a game in which the win is the defeat of the game itself. In the last move the gaming piece (imagine a stone) leaps from the board into the world, the real, the physical, a red quickness, the actual, and the game becomes a kind of miracle, rules broken and laws suspended. It’s a lesser miracle, but one connected to the greatest of them, the creation of life itself, in which inanimate material, a stone (imagine a gaming piece), is struck into consciousness and set down in the home space, the world.
“Words,” he said.
The final word was his. Though he’d worked his whole life, and lived modestly, my parents’ worth when they died was under six thousand dollars, not enough to cover their funeral and the estate lawyer. It was months before the NGO, on an audit, discovered the missing funds. Near the time of their deaths my father stole from the organization almost forty thousand lire. His defenders argued he must have been paying protection for the organization, though no one could say to whom. Other details emerged. Expensive new windows and a stack of rugs and blankets in their apartment in Gaziantep. A tight schedule of doctors’ appointments for my mother. Everything seemed telling at one moment, meaningless another. To repay the missing funds, the organization sold their car, still in good working order.
Fourteen billion years ago the universe began with form but no predictability. In time, patterns formed. Complex systems. Life. And inside it all—I hear it—howling chaos.
Durant called my cell later that afternoon to ask that I meet him for dinner in Monti, near the Santa Maria Maggiore. It was only while I was in the taxi, as the driver called out to friends along the street, as if Rome were a village, that I had enough distance from Amanda’s visit to think clearly about what I’d learned. If Durant saw allusions to his daughter in the poems, he would want to test his readings—he was a man of science, after all—but there existed no empirical measures of meaning in language or art. Had he brought in Amanda, and now me, to confirm that the poems had something to do with his daughter or to rescue him from going over a final edge?
I’ve been calling her “Durant’s daughter” but before I left for dinner I played detective and tried to hunt up her name. There was nothing online so I called Larunda and spoke to what sounded like the same program assistant I’d spoken to days earlier. I said I was from the Petros One Group, a(n invented) private insurance company, and that I had to file something on behalf of August Durant but was unable to reach him. Again I met with resistance. “I just need to finish a form,” I said. “A certain interval has passed and I need his daughter’s first name. It’s illegible on the document I have.” She said, “No chance.”
He was waiting for me at a window table, more than halfway into a bottle of red wine. The moment I sat down I sensed someone had preceded me. He received me with his usual warmth but did I detect a slight strain in his smile? Or was it that I saw him differently now? His voice was already full, but crisp—there was no suggestion that the wine had brought it forward—so maybe someone had been sharing the bottle with him. And then, yes, I noticed the stain of a red drop on the tablecloth, under the edge of my plate.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Not long. Have you had a good day, James?”
“I can’t say. There’s no way of taking my bearings.”
“Well, let’s stop working, then. Have a drink and let the mind unclench.”
Durant’s side of the conversation was wonderfully far-ranging. Tracing how exactly a comment about the wine had taken us to serial-killing lions, I found that his connections moved associatively, playfully, like my cha-chas, rather than logically. The route went more or less from the 2008 Le Cupole Rosso Toscana to its label’s colour of red like those in the frescoes in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme to cave paintings to the life of cave dwellers to the fear of cave bears to predator habits to anomalies within predator populations to serial-killing lions. By the time he took a pause we were onto a second bottle, our plates were lined with small rabbit bones, and it was time for dessert. What struck me then was the size of the man’s passions. He took a huge interest in the world but his enthusiasm was disciplined. His nature wasn’t acquisitive so much as embracing. When he held up his glass he seemed to read the properties not just of the wine’s colour but of the light that revealed it. He wanted to know life in all its registers. How else could someone who had suffered such a loss let himself be opened by poetry?
“When did you first learn of Three Sheets?” he asked.
So we hadn’t stopped working after all.
“A girl I was living with told me about it.”
“How did she come across it? Could you ask her?”
“We’re not in touch. Likely someone sent her the link.”
He nodded.
“They say it’s organic, the way information travels on the internet. But it’s not. It lacks the full range of human emotion and intent, the nuance of the conversational gambit, or the necessity to share that binds a speaker and listener. I must sound like your grandfather.”
“Studies show a decline in oral skills among young people in recent decades. And so-called social skills. Sort of what you’d expect.”
“But you have the skills, James. Where did you learn them?”
“I don’t know. I was very shy growing up. I learned to listen. Then in school I learned to converse, debate. I had a few professors who expected words on demand.”
“And so you have political skills, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’ve never thought of them as political. I try not to play angles on people.”
“And yet when you sat down here, you asked if I’d been waiting long. It wasn’t simply a polite inquiry, was it?”
It was what my mother used to call a “God-in-the-garden” moment, my thoughts rendered naked and ashamed.
“I sensed I was entering upon someone’s exit.”
“There’s your sharp intuition at work. You sensed an absence, someone missing.”
“I suppose. But it’s no concern of mine.”
“And so why ask the question? It must be that you wondered if I was meeting someone specific, someone you know. Am I right?”
“If you weren’t right then I’d think you were paranoid.”
“You’ve met those in the building. But who else do you know in Rome except me?”
“I’m not sure how well I know you. Maybe I know no one.”
“There, you see? A politician’s answer.”
He took an interest in the dessert menu and recommended the amaretto semifreddo with chocolate sauce.
“She likes you,” he said. I took a sip of water to stall the moment, as if the gesture might help me decide what to think, but the motion of my hand up and down seemed only to give away what I felt. Confusion, a tinge of guilt, anger. “She thinks you’re better suited for the job than she was.”
“There are no innocent conversations, are there? Drinks on the piazza, dinner on a rooftop, and here now, it’s one constant performance review.”
“She’s not an investment analyst. But I’ve been right to put money on you.”
“A spy, then.”
“Not a spy either. This afternoon I remembered about her watering the plants. I invited her here and sure enough she’d just met you. She says you looked at one poem together but she wouldn’t give you a reading.”
“Did she tell you which poem?”
“You doubt what I’m saying, but she wasn’t spying. We have to trust each other, James. I’m relying on complete honesty from you.”
“But you won’t tell me what I’m looking for.”
I wondered if it was hard for him not to tell me about his daughter or if the undisclosed story sheltered him, the unsayable private in the place of telling all. I was the one being duplicitous. There was nothing good about the feeling, except a kind of self-punishing guilt I didn’t understand but was used to.
“I don’t tell you out of respect for scientific method,” he said.
“A politician’s answer.”
He smiled.
“Write something up by the end of the week, just a report on what you’re seeing, even if it’s not much.”
“I have to say, August, I’m beginning to think this isn’t even about the poems.” So I was being dishonest, trying to open an angle. “It’s like I’ve been selected for training toward a job I can’t know.”
“Maybe I’m a guide of some sort.”
“Or a spymaster.”
“Spies again. I hope your other hunches won’t come from the movies. Your objective, ours, is to solve the mystery of the poems.”
He topped up my wine. I was learning his conversational habits, the way he’d counter anything that might seem a criticism of me with a kindness. But the kindness itself was often complicated, reminding me who was paying the bills, so he wanted the criticisms to stand. It was hard around Durant not to see myself as I imagined he saw me, a young man with ideas and plenty of feelings but few convictions. And not so young as to excuse the fact that I engaged with the world more fully through the mediating plane of language than I did directly, standing in the rain in an ancient city, as he’d found me the previous night when I’d gone out for a walk and gotten turned around in the streets near his apartment, and ran into him by accident (or so he said) as he was out to buy coffee. He led me back under his umbrella, talking about the patterns of Roman rain. He must have seen that even my willingness to challenge him was only a way of pretending to gravitas. We were both aware that at any moment I might be lifted by a breeze and carried away.
The next morning I began to write a profile of the Poet. In the forty-three poems so far posted at Three Sheets, he presented two personae. One of these, evident in just four poems, could not be biographically approximated. The voice was genderless, its concerns not at all personal, and in fact seemed intent on superseding the personal to play a kind of avant-garde jazz, drawing its notes mainly from pop culture, history, the languages of one arcane knowledge or another, and the sounds of pure nonsense.
The dominant voice in the other poems, I still thought, was of a likely white, likely North American male, in his late fifties or older. These poems tended to be in free verse, lyric, prose-dominated, with similar line lengths, the occasional suspended syntax, small tensions formed at line breaks, variously parsed, annotated, or end-stopped. Often the reader was wrong-footed, then rebalanced. Because of their little mysteries the poems managed to be slightly larger than they seemed, but much depended on whether or not the mysteries were earned.
On questions of poetic principles, the two voices could not easily be reconciled. The suppositions underlying them, about language, convention, the very nature of meaning, these were opposed to one another. And yet I felt sure that the poems were the work of the same (very likely) man. What they shared was the woman described, addressed, or remembered, a woman I now couldn’t help but think of as Durant’s daughter. It was possible to construct a montage of stills about her, a few dramatic scenes. Sometimes she was even quoted, as in “The Art of Memory” and in what I thought of as its sister poem, “In Cities.”
Seven cities in three years with this same
street holding light at the penned
unseen dog’s angle of howl. Turning left
out the door, then west at the fourth
corner will run you past the same
bar with the tree overhanging
the parking lot and the women’s darts league
playing for keeps on Tuesday nights.
Much of this, imagined and half-forgotten,
imagined and said and they’re serious, the darts.
They’re in the air here tonight,
where the barkeep serves the house wine in
flasks, and the parking lot is an
alley lined with mopeds,
the tree a tree, and the howl is in the
pitch of the roofs opposite just now
catching what you once asked while
looking off at them. “How many lives
can I walk away from?” Meaning
not yours, as I thought, but others’,
mine. And I had no answer for
you or the penumbral rim of lighter
red around the drop you’d spilled
on the white cloth.
I got up from my desk. I’d read the poem maybe two weeks earlier, but somehow the last lines hadn’t come to mind the previous night when I’d seen the wine stain, like a drop of blood on the restaurant linen. Because the slightly uncanny coincidence had to be meaningless, I attributed it to that suggestible mindstate we find ourselves in when travelling or reading, in which days fold on themselves upon synchronicities. Many people know the feeling, one that in the past I had tried to disarm with research. But the explanations for coincidence—probability analysts talk about anomalous statistical clusters, mathematicians predict the logical frequency for seeming miracles, psychologists speak of cognitive bias—are all inadequate. Such moments are among those we file away as interesting and inexplicable, and best not made too much of in conversation if we don’t wish to be teased by others who pretend not to know what we’re talking about. I told myself I should expect such echoes, given that I was both away from home and reading intensively, which is to say, there was a lot of the world streaming through me.
Part of that world was Amanda. I’d failed all morning not to be distracted by our planned meeting. What revelations might she have for me today? She had knowledge I wanted and a confession to offer, should she decide to tell me about her meeting with Durant. For the first time in months I looked closely at my face in the mirror, a good way of quieting my imagination and resetting expectations. I’d always hoped I’d be more attractive as I aged—my best features are character ones, the squared-off eye-nose combo, the mouth a notch too wide and disrupting the line between chin and barely pronounced cheekbones—but still in its youth the face was unremarkable and, I thought, a bad champion of my capacities.
On my way out of the building I ran into Carlo. The top buttons of his safari shirt were undone to display a jointed necklace made of some nacreous stone polished to the same reflectiveness as his bald head. He asked where I was going and offered a lift. His car was parked in a gated courtyard on the next block. The moment I saw the ’65 Aston Martin I knew it would be our topic of conversation. He asked if I recognized it. I said James Bond, and so on. We discussed Ian Fleming, his favourite author.
“People think he was just a writer,” he said. “But first he was a war hero, a man of action.”
I said that, in fact, Fleming was the hidden commander behind the Dieppe Raid that killed nine hundred Canadians in 1942. The raid was a disaster, poorly planned and supported, and the losses were viewed by some as a cover for an attempt to steal one of the German four-rotor Enigma machines used by Axis powers for passing coded messages. It turned out Carlo knew about Enigma machines, too, about the Italians’ failure to update their naval versions before World War II, and the British intelligence successes in cracking the code. He had no time for fascists, he made a point of saying. One day, he said, he’d show me a painting of Bletchley Park that hung on his office wall.
“Are you meeting someone in the park?” he asked.
If I said no he might invite himself along, but my meeting with Amanda was no business of his. I said I just wanted to take a walk to help sort my thoughts.
“Grass and trees,” he said. “Bletchley was all grass and trees. Very good for hard thinking.”
When I closed the door I thought he’d speed off like an asshole but the bright silver car just pulled away and slotted into the traffic like a cog in a rotor assembly.
The park was full of young families strolling, couples and tourists on rented bikes, older tourists on small motored trains, and possessed the distinctive Italian features of unkempt grass and foliage. What is it about city parks that their every colour and point of light return us to our moods? And yet the feeling was so familiar to me, from so many parks in so many cities, that it made me only more aware of myself and my history of moody park days, and removed me from the natural beauty itself. It said something about me that I still recalled from years earlier my visit to the Villa Borghese, and especially the Bernini sculptures, as a distinct experience that really did seem to bring me closer to the Maker, not Bernini but Whoever was at work in him, Someone Who’d mastered Nature, and now had, through intermediaries, taken on Art. Not that I would ever share such a thought, so easy to dismiss as empty or pretentious, or to ridicule in any number of ways.
I stood before the statue of Byron, our meeting spot, and looked back through the shaded path. There she was in the distance. Somehow in our short time in the apartment I’d registered her walk (I must have seen all of three full strides), and now it was her movement that marked her out among the others, straight-backed, with a sure but light unhurried step, her feet seeming to come off the ground even as they fell to it under a print skirt with blue tiger stripes. Her head was up, eyes no doubt forward, taking me in, as characteristic in my attitude, looking out in bafflement from a stillness, as she was in hers. I tried to look away but failed. As her face came clear by degrees I saw she was smiling at me, though there was something else there, some unsettling counter note, and I was further surprised that she didn’t slow but came straight to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and kissed me on the cheek.
“We’ve been found out,” she said. She spoke in the manner she strode, directly and with purpose.
“I know. He told me.”
We began walking. Her friends would expect her in thirty minutes outside the zoo. She talked more about Durant, a more precise timeline of her history with him, his way of accepting unfavourable readings—
“Where did you go to grad school?” I asked.
“Small place in Oregon.”
“Are you from Oregon?”
“Michigan.”
“How did you end up in Oregon?”
“I don’t want a speed date, James. I need to explain something to you.”
“Why don’t you email about it? We can use this time to enjoy the park together.”
“So you’d rather be told something important by email than face to face?”
That I was silent at the question only supported the possibility that I was not a serious enough man to be in her company, but she seemed to soften then and began the explanation of how she ended up in Oregon. It would be another few minutes and we’d be sitting on a bench outside the zoo entrance, watching a large, apparently ownerless shepherd-collie chasing birds, until I realized that the story was leading to the thing she had to tell me.
“I went west to go to school at Rhyce College. My undergrad degree was in political science so it took some persuading to get them to consider me for a lit degree, but I told them I wanted to write about the decline of the political novel in American literature. I made my argument to a man named Carlson Werling, in the English department, and said I wanted to study with him. The political novel was Werling’s specialty. I appealed to his interest, to his vanity, really, and he pressured to have me admitted. What he didn’t know until a few weeks after I got there was that I wasn’t interested in studying the political novel, but in studying him. Like a lot of faculty and administration at Rhyce, Werling had done work for the CIA. Before teaching he’d been in Central America at the same time my brother was. I thought it was very likely that he knew my brother, or knew of him, and he might know who murdered him.”
The shepherd-collie stopped in its tracks, as if it had been listening, and stood in profile twenty feet before us, staring into space until it forgot why, then put its nose down and trotted off. I seemed to be looking at Amanda’s knees where they appeared beneath her skirt, knowing this focus could be misinterpreted, that it was certainly no place to be looking in such a moment, and yet feeling trapped in a kind of precarious apprehension, unable to look back into the park. And now she was looking at me, I sensed, looking at her knees like a horny schoolboy. Through some intervention of grace, my face turned up to see hers, and it forgave me, without expecting of me anything like a verbal response.
“Marcus and I had different fathers, different last names. When I got close enough to Werling, and had had enough afternoons in the faculty lounge with him to ask about his time in Guatemala, he began to tell stories. At first he fell into a kind of pathetic attempt at intriguing evasion, as if he really knew too much to say anything, but when I pretended to let it drop he acquiesced to tell me he’d been contracted to ‘liaise’ between governments after the U.S. paid to set up surveillance systems abroad following 9/11. They wanted foreign governments to spy on their citizens for themselves and the U.S., exactly the story Marcus was working on. I spent the next few days making calls, connecting dots. At some point Werling must have gotten a phone call. He was in trouble. And he dropped me instantly, or rather, he had the department secretary drop him as my adviser. Another professor in the department guided me to Truth and Justice Studies and arranged for a prof over there to mentor me through a thesis. I transferred, different department, different building, and never saw Werling again. He took a leave in midterm and didn’t return until I’d graduated. I wasn’t going to get more from him, but I knew I’d looked in the right place.”
She took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I declined.
“My Italian girlfriends have me smoking,” she said. “Here they come.”
The women smiled broadly. Their clothes—one wore linen pants, the other a skirt—weren’t especially stylish but looked better just for being Roman, on Romans. We stood and Amanda introduced them as Detta, who took off her sunglasses and smiled at me, and Cinzia, who left hers on and nodded. Detta said something in Italian and laughed.
“She wants to know if you speak Italian,” said Amanda.
“I learn more by pretending not to.” This was understood to be a sporting lie, and they laughed again, and Cinzia said something and now all three laughed. I should have been enjoying the moment but was still thinking of the revelation about Amanda and her brother.
“We only tease you,” said Detta. “Not polite. We didn’t know Amanda has a boyfriend.”
“Does she?” I turned to Amanda. “I’m disappointed. Will you tell me about him?”
Now I was in confederacy with the Italians.
“Will you come with us?” asked Cinzia. The temples of her shades disappeared perfectly into the blond streaks in her dark hair. I felt overmatched even by the tortoiseshell plastic.
“He has work to do,” said Amanda. She took from her woven bag an envelope. She said Durant had given it to her shortly after they came to Rome and she told him she was leaving the job. It was his thesis on Three Sheets and the Poet. “You should read it now. Let’s meet tomorrow night, after eight.”
“Why can’t I go to the zoo? Let me go to the zoo.”
“Don’t tell August I’ve given you this.” She placed the envelope into my hand.
“I won’t. And listen.” I leaned in and whispered to her while raising my eyebrows to the other women, asking them to forgive me, and I could see that they did. “This isn’t the place to say it but I’m very sorry about your brother.”
She administered another kiss, and for a very full measure of dappled time, I watched her and her friends walk away.
Maybe for the first time in my life I sat on grass beneath a tree. What I’d just learned about Amanda was strange, having met her friends in that moment was strange, the city, the park, the place I was, strange. What wasn’t strange was the shameful ranking of my concerns. I told myself I was just understandably lonely, and so my thoughts were fixed on my chances with Amanda when they should have been aligned with her feelings, her grief and anger at her brother’s death. But because in recent months my rankings were often a mess, I found something reassuringly familiar in my hateful self. Knowing you’re superficial doesn’t make you any deeper. Were my base motives—and they were base—simply money and desire? Or was my real motive hidden beneath poverty and loneliness? Whatever was going on, I had a very serious problem with the surround. As if to demonstrate, I took out my phone and checked my email. The only message was from a “D. Scirea.” “I just found your card. I was going to send music, yes? My father is an asshole. Yours, Davide.” I opened the link and a few seconds later was staring into my little phone screen at buskers on a daytime street somewhere, presumably Istanbul. Three musicians, two guitarists and a drummer with a single drum, all wearing porkpie hats. The one who looked something like Davide as I remembered him played guitar. The phonesound was small but I could make out the gypsy jazz, as he’d called it, the instruments in tight formation. People stood around them in a half circle. At one point the camera, or phone, more likely, wandered over the heads of the crowd and turned a full three-sixty, taking in a pedestrian street locked with hundreds or thousands of people, as if it were a stadium exit after a game, though the traffic was in all directions. Just before the camera came back around to the band, I saw a phalanx of men in white helmets, holding shields, standing by. Why were there riot police in the middle of all this? What was about to happen? The clip ended before the performance had. Another meaningless fragment of random capture, broken off and drifting.
With the tiny music still in my head, I took up Durant’s letter.
Amanda,
Across the street below my window an artist has put out a tray of flattened paint tubes, a jar of turpentine, and a small painting of a woman. I walked by them earlier—the fresh smears of color on everything, the painting, the tray, the tubes themselves. Now a dog has stopped at them, sniffing at colors he doesn’t see, and yet knowing in his way things I cannot. What’s the difference in smell between two shades of blue? And here I am, no different, nose in art, thinking I see things as they are but intuiting other wonders all around, unavailable to my senses.
Even if it weren’t anyway so stale an expression, to say that the Poet’s work “speaks to me” is inadequate. It can’t describe those first moments in which I felt the poems knew me not anonymously but personally. The first line I came across led me to “The Art of Memory,” where I heard myself quoted, through my daughter. The sun blinks and we play blind. I was elated, I laughed, I recall talking out loud to myself, even a kind of singing. This went on through the evening and night until morning, by which time I’d read all the poems at Three Sheets, and as much as I could of the commentary at SHEPMETSOR and the other sites. I made pages of notes by hand. They were mostly questions. Who did she leave in the bar in Campo de’ Fiori and why? Who was the Poet? and so on. I started seeing connections in other poems, references to places she’d been in the past few years, even the general times she’d been there, and to other words and private jokes shared between us.
In “Relief” the Poet writes of a man meeting a woman, a stranger, in a café, and the disquiet he feels, the ghost of familial love there inside the romantic attraction. He’s sure they must be related and wonders who might be their common ancestor: “What coalescent event binds us?” Surely only a geneticist would have this way (“coalescent event”?) of expressing the idea. I’ve felt this precise strangeness myself. And I once explained to my daughter that the current we feel whenever we fall into attraction with someone is in fact genetic conditioning, the species trying to shuffle genes yet another way to find ever more advantageous mutations. The idea is so antiromantic that she ridiculed me about it in a running joke. I remember she remarked on the word “coalescent,” meaning “bringing together,” and she objected to the fact that things proceed in variations on an original copy. In a sense she objected to nature.
Models of understanding are ways of seeing a thing, not the thing itself, and so in some instances can be applied, with modification, to new questions. The models that suggested themselves were those I know best: those describing patterns of codes and transferences.
Over many days I began to hunt for these codes. Imagining ciphers is the stuff of madness and popular novels. But if we geneticists hadn’t gone looking for codes we wouldn’t have discovered the underlying mysteries of life, which surely bring us as close to the Great Explanation as anything these past many decades within advancing human knowledge. Some geneticists are hubristic enough to imagine that they have stolen fire from the gods. The truth is we don’t even know how to conceive of gods, let alone their places and secrets. We’re some more clever than others, but we’re all dogs of a sort, sniffing at colors we can’t see. And yet among our senses, a few have been granted by nature, others won by our pursuit of them.
I chose the two poems called “Decor” for special attention. They stand out for their titles, of course, the repetition a kind of underscoring, a way of the Poet’s insisting upon a significance. In ways I hadn’t seen yet, I thought, they must be something of a like pair. It occurred to me to focus on the title itself. Without much effort I derived from “Decor” the anagram Coder and this seemed a confirmation that at least I might be on the right path (or maybe I’d been on the verge of seeing the word “code” all along, which is why I played my hunch). But who is the Coder? (Now there’s a question for the ages!) That was simply another way of putting the question I already had in hand. Then, an adjustment. What if the anagram was in fact not Coder but R Code? This made immediate sense. Given the hours of her girlhood I spent teaching my daughter about genetics, to us the term R Code means recombinant code.
I tested various models: gene conversion, transpositional recombination, and (this seemed promising, given that I was finding all these wonders at an internet site) site-specific recombination. But the model that fit best with my premise was the simple DNA crossover in homologous recombination. Have you ever studied meiosis, Amanda? In sister pairs of chromatids aligned side by side, at a point called the chiasma, the pairs become connected and exchange a segment of DNA. Just picture two trains, one bolded, side by side in a switching yard. Each train has ten cars. The bolded cars are numbered one through ten, the others, A through J.
Suppose that the back halves are exchanged. We end up with these trains (DNA segments):
This is (very roughly) the process of DNA crossover at the chiasma.
You might know that in poetry the term “chiasmus” refers to a reflecting rhetorical device, as if a mirror has been set down in the middle of a line or stanza. The primary early source is Scripture:
The ABBA structure can be made more complex, as in ABCDDCBA, or disguised through separation, so that each letter is on a different line or so the ABCD is in one line, and DCBA in another. If the poems contain any such principle, we must then look for chiasmic phrases—sequences of words, sounds, or meanings presented in one order, then its reverse. In recombination, the code would be the same at the chiasma, but it made sense to take guidance from the poetic sense of the word. Should I find matching word sequences, I’d then transpose the line endings following each to make new lines, with new meanings. Through this method, based on a natural phenomenon within creation itself, I might find the hidden code.
All that prevented me from glazing over—scientific or technical language tends to leather my brain—were the irritatingly bolded words, the text version of Durant’s full-voiced pronouncements, and the building evidence that he’d made himself open to a kind of lunacy that brought false traces of his daughter. His need to argue for the traces was desperate and sad, and I wondered if his social manner, warm but challenging, was more than just a way to keep his workers on task. In testing me, he kept us both distracted from the possibility that he was irreparably heartbroken.
Upon a stray thought I wondered if Amanda sensed as I did that we might make a beautiful advantageous mutation together.
A breeze reached me but failed to stir the pages in my hand.
Both “Decor”s are nine stanzas of nine lines (they’re terrible, pointless poems, I think you’ll agree), which makes the fifth line of the fifth stanza the middle line of the poem. And in the middle of this line, in each poem, we find the key.
After weeks in open country I hit town with its yowling corners and hotel room phone looking as do
the plastic key fob and newspaper at the door like a movie prop. I’m one city nearer you but a call is unlikely to
save me, father of nothing now, no one I haven’t already here lost within sight of home. Lost too amid too many markers.
Everything moves toward one of two conditions. The name said or not. There’s forgetting, yes, but there is no
place without thought of itself in a wind. One of two conditions. With
And, from the second “Decor”:
How to say I met a casting director without getting your hopes up.
The traffic here is a kind of weather. How to say, Mother, he took an interest.
The part of the footman’s mute girl in prison. With no text per se my
audition was stunning and two weeks ago, okay, but still they are unlikely to
forget me, Father. Already I’ve known the one absence I’m imprisoned within is how he put it. To have trouble finding the words makes sense for a casting director and so we are alike, he and the mute. There are no true clichés in this business, he said rotely. Other parts often come open. Auditions are best done on-site. The weather here gets tied up in arteries.
Each middle line is long, eighteen syllables. Extracting the middle word sequences we arrive at
and
Now we do the train move, switching the cars at the point of chiasma and sectioning out the mirroring material to construct the new lines. After extraction and transposition they read:
save me, father. I’m imprisoned
and
forget me, Father. here lost
Was I to enter a whole new order of despair? Or were these accidents of language, products of over-reading? Because I couldn’t bear the one possibility—that my daughter was “imprisoned” or “lost”—I chose for weeks to think that I’d imposed the patterns and connections. I know that fragments of language travel on invisible vectors and reproduce as if through binary fission at incalculable rates. There are rational explanations for what would otherwise seem inexplicable coincidences of this sort within language and outside it. In fact I was researching them on the day that “August” appeared on Three Sheets and cast me into the dark certainty I’ve lived in since. Somehow, though there’d been a “June” and “July,” I hadn’t anticipated a poem whose title was my own name. I quote here only the first stanza.
You let his name slip. I made you describe him. You said a bend in a road, a single blue tie, walls covered with images of gas clouds spooling two hundred light-years high tacked up by this man who long ago walked out of the straw upon his schooling.
Coincidence does not extend this far, Amanda. Her favorite view was at the bend in the road at the crest of a hill that looked over our acreage to the sea. The blue tie was the only one I owned as she was growing up, and she laughed at me whenever I wore it. Deep space photos that I’d tacked up covered the walls of her bedroom. And it’s true, a scholarship allowed me to leave the small Nebraska farming town where I grew up.
Imagine my horror at seeing myself. But you can imagine, can’t you? I sense the poems reach you, too. I think that you feel something of my loss for seeing what I see. Your distress—it’s obvious to me—is a bitter comfort to me, I confess. If a mystery grows large enough, if there comes a point after which there’s no hope of explanation, then our troubles are vaulted to the realm of…not the metaphysical, a dated category I have never accepted…but the omniphysical, what the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss called “the one lasting presence” that might be there at the end of all inquiry, a presence not that surpasseth understanding but that surpasses current understanding and, I admit, even given the exponentially increased pace of intellectual gain, likely always will.
The disappearance of my daughter as a causal event could be brought to hand with enough evidence, but the everlasting condition of her absence will never make sense, not to me. And so, on the good days, the poems at Three Sheets can seem to understand me. Even as they wound, they can seem to be my friend.
Can you see them that way? I ask that you don’t let go, don’t abandon them out of fear for me. We can encourage each other. We have been made to matter to one another in ways no one else could comprehend.
I’m sorry that the poems have caused you the pain of empathy, but I must tell you that I’ve come to treasure our like-mindedness. There is no name for this state as it has evolved in me in recent weeks. To me, the closest name is “Amanda.”
And so the letter ended where it began, upon Amanda. Durant was like someone out of Nabokov, afflicted with a referential mania. He’d offered a plea for mercy in the guise of a pattern analysis, with circumstantial evidence, weak and incoherent. Was his daughter a character in the poems, the “you” being addressed, or was she in fact the voice of them, telling him in code that she was “imprisoned” or “lost” (and which was it?)? Maybe the details in “August” could be fitted to his past, but blue ties and deep space posters aren’t uncommon, and the other poems, objectively read, supported none of his imaginings. He had read cleverly and wrongly. It seemed obvious now that he’d wanted Amanda and me in Rome not just the better to guide our work but out of sheer lonely despair.
I tucked the letter into my pocket and sat there, the park and the city resuming around me. Above the trees the very sky seemed material. What I thought was this: my parents are dead, the Londoner is lost to me, Dominic is fading and will soon forget us both. The two people I felt closest to in that moment were Durant and Amanda, and sitting in the olive light of a stone city, I knew them hardly at all.
The rest of the afternoon was free. I wasn’t prepared to return to the apartment and risk letting Durant engage me in talk. He read me much better than he read the poems. I walked south toward Piazza di Spagna. The traffic and jostle of Roman streets require of pedestrians an alertness that should have simplified my thoughts—I’d learned too much, too suddenly—but in fact the walking opened an emotion I’d not wanted to confront. I was angry at Durant. It was small of me, I conceded, to be angry at a man carrying a great loss, but by involving Amanda and me in his troubles he had found a way to prolong his pain and make it more acute, luring us with money into what I could now think of only as a kind of sickness. But guilty anger is not a clarifying feeling. I suppose because I have a northern soul my idea of clarity opens in my mind vast landscapes, reaching to horizons and the most distant geological times, places almost untouched by human event. The true north. And so Rome, historied, cultured and culture-defining, was not likely to afford me the kind of space I needed to see these questions clearly.
Or that’s exactly wrong. The clarity of empty vastness was only an idea that didn’t hold up to scrutiny. I thought best amid clamour, especially virtual clamour.
Using a street map called up on my phone, I headed south toward the Spanish Steps, looking furtively into the faces of those I passed. How many of these people were like Durant, reconstructing their losses in the shades and surfaces of their days? How many saw in the available light ghosts they knew by name? In a big enough city, a pedestrian city, I sometimes imagine I see the same face over and again, but always a stranger’s face, though less a stranger on every encounter. A face strange yet familiar, as if from my other life in a parallel universe. The recurring face in Rome was of a dark-haired, slender man just slightly older than I, maybe in his midthirties. There he was coming down a side street or looking out from a doorway. At a table across the bar, crouched by the tire of a car near Durant’s apartment, in a gallery queue. He was usually well dressed, sometimes casually so. On every instance of seeing him I was aware of my failure to see, of having grouped a series of first glances into a type based on a general similarity and so overlooking each distinct feature. It was what everyone did, this lazy way of seeing. It was what poetry should have saved me from.
And yet there he was again entering the Japanese paper shop where I stopped to buy a small notebook and pen. He was half-turned away from me, examining a display of ornate leather blotters and fountain pens. (How could there still be a market in beautiful writing objects?) This time I really looked. Who was he? Or rather, who was this version of him? I held to my guess of his age. He couldn’t have been forty but neither did his face hold youth. He wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a mandarin collar (also called a Mao, a Nehru, or a Japanese ((was this coincidence?))). A thick watch with a metal band. No wedding ring. His shoes looked handmade, of the kind that could be cheap in a poor country but very expensive in a place like Italy. The oddest thing about him was his movement, or lack of it. He was still, even facially, as if not only assessing the pens but also intently listening to them. Whatever they communicated, he turned and left the store without even glancing farther inside.
I walked to a small church and sat for a few minutes on the steps in the shade. A young mother with two little boys walked by, laughing at something. They were good little boys, I could see, and there was a sureness in their goodness that I envied.
At random I took streets without consulting the map, and walked myself lost. Durant’s letter, the pained, skewed vision of it, was all around me now in the city itself, both an element in which I was suspended, and an endlessly complicated, unfolding event. For the first time I sensed what it must be like for Durant to believe he’d found a voice directed at him personally, a kind of singing inspired by the particular spirit of his lonely nights. Meanings, such as they were, came on delay, and so I was eight or nine strides past the entrance to a watchmaker’s shop before the recognition hit me. As I’d passed I registered a set of steps curving up into the dark and a glass case recessed into the space with watches and escapements mounted against a bright red cloth. All of this perceived in an instant, the same instant in which I saw, reflected in the glass, the familiar face. He would have to have been inside the open entrance with his back pressed to the wall. I stopped walking.
Moments later I was in the watch shop, one small room, empty but for me and a large, wattled man behind a desk with a single lens strapped onto his eye, bent over his work like Polyphemus counting sheep. He said nothing, didn’t look up. I returned to the street and looked for the man with the mandarin collar but he wasn’t to be seen. I walked back the way I’d come for two blocks, turned down a new street, narrow, in shadow. Whether I was trying to find or to lose him I couldn’t say. I was following a following, led by a fascination even as I fled it. As my eyes adjusted to the shade, I spotted him up ahead, across the street, his shirt almost the colour of the water-stained wall he walked beside. There was no one else around. I could run and catch him (it seemed he was now trying to escape), but did I really want to confront him? Just then he turned and stole a quick look over his shoulder, directly at me. I realized that the other times I’d seen the face were in fact as I’d first imagined. It was the same face, exactly, and in his eyes the stranger carried his recognition, or more than that, his knowledge of me. As he moved away again he came to a bright cross street and rounded the corner. I ran to catch up and as I took the corner he started down the Spanish Steps.
They were crowded but I saw that by keeping to the nearest side I could make ground on him. He moved along a railing, about a third of the way down, and descended past a garden, then took the main steps at an angle. As he turned sideways to squeeze past an elderly couple, he looked back and saw me, I think, and must have seen that I had a clear path to intercept him, though at no point did his pace quicken. He altered his course laterally, keeping level, and made his way just in time to allow a wedding party ascending the steps to come between us. Amid the celebrants and photographers I lost sight of him and made the error of moving into the stream rather than continuing down the side. When a way finally cleared he was gone. I descended to the street. He should have been visible in one direction or another, but he’d vanished. I returned to the steps and sat.
Surrounded by feet and languages I closed my eyes and tried to think of a northern landscape. Miles of perfect focus in a cold, dry air. On the distant horizon something took shape, like letters of an unknown alphabet, growing, nodding in rhythm. The first humans to the New World brought dogs with them across the land link. When I’d asked about his work one evening Durant showed me pictures from his California lab, including one of a skeleton of a prehistoric dog with grooves in its shoulders where it had been strapped to its work. Besides the heavy load, the dog carried tuberculosis. It was possible, Durant explained, knowing the genome for the dog from its bones, to know its snout shape and hair colour. It could be simulated exactly with the right programs, or could be cloned and so repeated on earth seventeen thousand years after it died. This strong, coughing dog. “These are the facts,” he’d said. “We can literally make the past get to its feet and look us in the eye. Or some of it.”
I called Amanda, got her voicemail, but on hearing her voice found myself unable to say anything. Whatever I was involved in, it wasn’t about the open exchange of information. I needed time to think but time in itself wouldn’t be enough. That must have been why I’d followed the stranger.
It was late afternoon, late morning in Montreal.
Upon answering, Dominic sounded weak, I thought, or uncertain. I told him it was me, but he said nothing in response, so I kept talking to give him time to come around. I reminded him that I was in Rome. Dominic loved great cities and the idea of them. Many of his stories began like old romantic novels. “Once in Jakarta…” “Once in Cairo…” The stories were never about literature but instead some intriguing person he knew there, dinner at a consulate, drinks with a despot’s most dangerous enemy. The accidental impression was that he’d lived a large, unlikely life that he could not, in fact, tell you about fully, out of duty to some unnamed political principle or silent calling. As his memory declined, the stories began to lose the outlines of sure character. They developed hesitations, small corrections, then larger ones. Some were obvious conflations he wasn’t aware of. Over time the unreliable stories came to damage the old, stable ones I’d always assumed were true. I wanted to save them for him, the real ones, and usually tried to steer him away from new tellings. But to what end? Robbed of the pleasure of telling, in time all he’d have left were verse recitations learned in childhood.
“I’m supposed to be spending my days in a room solving the mysteries of poetry. But it’s not working out that way. Things have gotten complicated.” I hoped the sound of my voice would help him locate himself but given what I was saying, I might only have been further confusing him. “How are you, Dominic?”
“I seem to be the same, but more so. What’s happening to you?”
“I’m not sure I can explain it.” I said that the Three Sheets site had induced in Durant a feeling of secret communications directed at him personally. And given the volume of commentary around Three Sheets, I wondered if the same thing wasn’t happening to other readers, who instead of admitting these feelings in public forums obsessed about the Poet. The whole thing suggested a shared madness.
Until I said it, I hadn’t known that’s what I thought.
“Then you’ve discovered something, haven’t you, James? Even if your terms are imprecise. Where are you?”
“In Rome.” Already he’d forgotten.
“Rome. Do you know the Italian writer Chiaromonte? I met him there once. He claimed that Shakespeare understood madness, but in the centuries since, we’ve eliminated it from our understanding. This hum of rationalism we’re stuck with—it forces madness to out in irrational rebellions and destruction.”
“Things were pretty destructive for the Elizabethans, too. And we hospitalize and treat the mentally ill instead of killing them. And even if I believed in such a thing as irrational understanding, I’d still have no idea how to explain this particular weird phenomenon.”
“I accept that.” He paused. Now he was all too self-aware. “Do you know your Roman pagans, James?”
“I haven’t met as many locals as I’d hoped.”
“Symmachus wrote that ‘It is not by one way alone that we can arrive at so sublime a mystery.’ He’s arguing for the proliferation of gods in Roman religion, against the gains of Christianity. It’s centuries old, this call to open up other ways of knowing.”
“I’d be happy to arrive at a mystery, as long as it took me in. But I haven’t arrived anywhere yet.”
“Be patient. We have to prepare ourselves to receive great understanding.”
“Dominic, I’m being followed.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone’s following me. I think. A man. A stranger has been following me almost since I got here.”
“Oh. Well then, you really must get to the bottom of that.”
The moment we signed off I began missing him. I pictured him staring at his wall calendar, failing to make sense of it. Even within an ordered system, things get complicated very fast. There are more possible moves in a game of chess than there are atoms in the solar system. And that’s within the squared square of a chessboard. Imagine the square of a boxing ring, the number of possible movements of feet and hands available even to just one fighter, Muhammad Ali exploring the possibilities for deforming the face of his opponent. In the so-called game of the century Bobby Fischer made a move no chess grandmaster would expect, sacrificing his queen for a long-term material advantage. The Londoner had a red T-shirt with a picture of the Queen’s face deformed as if with blobs of clay. When he was twenty-two Ali changed his name from Clay. At the time he won the game of the century, Fischer was just thirteen. His twenty-six-year-old opponent, Donald Byrne, taught English at Penn State. His specialty was Keats.
I felt someone looking at me.
The street was an ever-changing sameness. No one paid me any attention. For the few seconds of bounding thought I hadn’t been paying attention to myself and a part of me was still floating. It must have been from my imaginary, elevated position that I glimpsed the watcher. I was thinking of the chessboard squares and the rectangles on Dominic’s Gardens of Quebec wall calendar, and suddenly my focus was on the ordered lines and rows of windows in the corner building at the foot of the steps. There, in a second-floor window, a movement. A man turning away, disappearing. I hadn’t seen him fully but he’d been watching me. It was the stranger with the mandarin collar, the Follower—who else could it have been?—waiting me out. There and not. And from my first visit to Rome I knew it was not just any room. The building was the Keats-Shelley House. The presence had been looking at me from the room where Keats died. Of tuberculosis.
I ran into the building and up the stairs and stood in the foyer to the small museum, the only way in or out. A young woman waited at the admissions table, not knowing what to make of me as I stood puffing, out of breath.
“No rush,” she said. “We don’t close until six.” Her accent was British. Given where we were she assumed I spoke English. I paid the fee and went inside. In the first room were three middle-aged couples and a sleeping white dog. The apartment ran to smaller rooms, left and right. I went right, through a small library, to Keats’s little room, with the floral reliefs on the ceiling that were his last vision. It was empty. I stepped to the window, leaned over, and looked. Yes, the spot where I’d been sitting was visible. I waited for a chill to come over me, the certainty that the figure in the window had been the ghost of Keats himself. But the place was only as it seemed. There is nothing as truly dead as a museum. I looked in the other rooms but of course the Follower was gone. I walked out, past the manuscripts in the poet’s handwriting, past the glass case morbidly displaying a lock of his fine hair. What could Durant do with the DNA? Might he be able to bring two tubercular creatures back to life? And what would the young Romantic poet, only twenty-five when he died, make of such a wonder?
I told the woman at the entrance that I’d been hoping to catch up to a friend and described the man with the collar. Had she seen him? She had not, but then she’d been away from her desk for the few minutes just before I arrived. She invited me to check the guest register, in case he’d signed it upon leaving. There were about a dozen names for the day. Some had written comments, in German, Italian, most in English. Some had left email addresses to be informed of coming events. The most recent had signed his name pretty much incomprehensibly, something like “Elias Hepner Voth.” The “From” space Voth had left blank. In the “Comments” he’d written, semi-legibly, the words running together, what might have read, “In our Pantheon. Silence.” followed by an email address: “Rememberthepoet@ostia.” At a glance there was nothing strange about the entry. Keats was certainly in the pantheon of poets, and he’d praised silence for its eternity, most famously in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But the cursive was uncertain. The opening I was in an archaic hand, weighed down by the bulb of the loop. The I might, in fact, have been an O, and the long trailing skirt on the n might have contained another letter. The longer I looked, the more I thought the line read, “One hour. Pantheon. Silence. Remember the poet@ostia.” The fact that the words seemed as if they’d been written in haste only intensified my sense that they weren’t about Keats at all, but addressed to me. Once I’d accepted the second reading it came to me—I admit I felt a bit sick at the realization. Ostia was the Roman suburb where Pasolini, poet and filmmaker, was murdered in 1975, or at least where his body was found on the beach. A teen hustler was convicted but, if I remembered correctly—I wasn’t about to consult my phone to find out—the killers might have been anticommunists, or extortionists who’d stolen some rolls of his last film, the one with all the sadism.
If I was right, I’d been warned to keep quiet, pricked with a pointed allusion. “Rememberthepoet@ostia” was a death threat. But who would deliver a warning this way? I assumed the threat was empty but couldn’t hazard Amanda or Durant, or myself. Back on the street, I didn’t take my phone from my pocket in case someone was watching me as I stood there, looking the length of the Via Condotti. The city suddenly seemed as it was, not a place of tourist sites but of sight itself, millions of pairs of eyes, all with their points of view, different light shows playing in each skull. It was hard to imagine that amid all the beauty and history and grappa I could be worthy of anyone’s attention. Maybe I’d been mistaken for someone else. Maybe just as Voth’s face had at first looked to me like so many others’, my own had triggered a false recognition in him. But then why deliver the threat by conjuring a poet’s murder? Had he wanted to be spotted and hoped I’d follow or chase him? Had he staged the whole thing? If so I had played along perfectly, even positioning myself below the window in the Keats House. But why not just confront me? No, he wasn’t expecting me to come after him, but once into it had improvised beautifully. He must have needed the hour to prepare for the meeting. His game was up, after all, or at least headed that way, and by stalling he maintained an essential advantage. He knew who I was and likely where I lived, and I knew only his face.
Pasolini. Dominic had once told me to read “The Religion of My Time” but I saw nothing much in it, at least in translation. I’d seen a few of his films and forgotten them. It was the facts of his life that I remembered. Before the future antifascist was born, his father had captured the fifteen-year-old who’d attempted to assassinate Mussolini, and the kid was lynched on the spot. As a soldier in the Second World War, Pasolini was taken prisoner by the Germans but escaped disguised as a peasant. Later he lost a teaching job and his place in a regional Communist party to charges of public indecency and corrupting youth, a charge (maybe warranted) against poets from Socrates onward, and he moved with his mother to Rome. In time he became Pasolini, neorealist; proponent of “contamination,” the conjoining of the sacred and profane; atheist lover of Christ the revolutionary; defender of the proletariat, though his films spoke only to the educated elite. He kept getting hauled off to court, a true provocateur. (Like Socrates. And—why did I know this stuff?—even more like Apollinaire, another poet, novelist, dramatist, intellectual of a sort, who was born in Rome, moved to France, caused trouble, and was once accused by police of stealing the Mona Lisa ((begun in Italy, finished in France)). As Pasolini had been a soldier in the Second World War, Apollinaire was a combatant in the first. A year before Mussolini received almost exactly the same wound, an exploding shell drove shrapnel into Apollinaire’s forehead, though he survived. In that same year, 1916, he published Le poète assassiné. The Poet Assassinated.)
These goddamn cha-chas. My father thought my memory was a curse.
The Pantheon wasn’t far. There was time to walk there. I set out, in hopes that I’d misread the entry, and decided I could live a satisfactory life never knowing whom I had chased that afternoon, as long as it was a long life. I pictured this life as a clean line extending before me the length of the street and to the horizon, which I couldn’t, in fact, see, falling into the earth’s curve along a bending plane true to some mathematically sound aspect of space and gravity. It was drawing me, the clarity of this line, drawing me along the streets, down Marzio to the Obelisk of Montecitorio, with its bronze ball and spike, a sundial, which I must have seen on my first visit, though I recalled it not at all, and along to Via dei Pastini, where I took a hard right and had to imagine the line doing so as well, to the Piazza della Rotonda and the thing itself, the Pantheon. The great assertion of balance, of classical proportions, of the very shape my mind would normally assume after one of its spells. The line ran straight through the high doors.
I crossed the crowded piazza and passed through the grand portico, into the murmuring geometries of the ancient space. Of course it was full of tourists wearing knapsacks, taking pictures with cellphones, as it had been when I’d first visited, and I longed now as I had then to experience the place in silence. All was echo. The babble sharpened my unease that I was about to meet Voth, or maybe that, amid all of these people, I might miss him and have to face the threatened consequences. I looked for the shirt, the collar, the general impression his face had made. I reasoned that, to be seen, he would stand in the least crowded area of the floor. The humanity was thickest around Raphael’s tomb. I looked elsewhere, kept my eyes on those not in groups and not staring up fixed by the two panels of the dome illuminated by what seemed especially intense sunlight coming through the oculus, and for a moment I myself was unable to look away from the brilliant plate of light. From nowhere came to mind lines from the cryptic anti-Semite Ezra Pound: “But that the child/walk in peace in her basilica,/The light there almost solid.” The child was the daughter he had fathered with his lover and more or less abandoned to poverty. Pound had ended up like Bobby Fischer, raving against Jews and his president. But I could feel that the light surpassed the hate and madness, surpassed all poison. The light was sound.
Who here, if anyone, was alone and looking nowhere, or searching the crowd as I was? There were two or three dozen seated on the long wooden pews, their backs to me. At first I missed him. Then, scanning again, I realized he must be the man with his arms outstretched along the back of a bench. His shoulders pushed his shirt up into folds that obscured the collar, but this was him, surely. In one hand he held a paper or pamphlet.
Before I could approach he was standing and in motion, his back still to me as he stepped into the throng. I kept my eyes on him and began forward. He had channelled into a slow counterclockwise flow. I reckoned I could intercept him and started away upon the angle. Though still at a distance, he was almost in profile when I plowed over the little boy. I felt him against my hip and then looked down just as he bounced to the floor on his bottom. He wore short pants, brown, and an odd cloth cap that made him seem older than the five- or six-year-old he was. We were looking at each other with equal surprise when his face began to crumple into what obviously would become in moments a wail. And yet when I squatted down to him and said I was sorry, the sound of my voice seemed to stop him. Maybe he didn’t speak English and found the experience of being addressed nonsensically too interesting to eclipse. In any case, when I smiled, he assented to do so, too. It wasn’t clear to whom he belonged. I helped him to his feet and now he was looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw that he was staring up at the circle of light on the dome. “Beautiful,” I said. And he said, in some Germanic tongue, what sounded like “Gott in heaven.” Then, with no note of hurt or embarrassment, he toddled off toward Raphael and stood at the legs of a young couple who must have assumed he’d been by their side the whole time. The woman dropped her hand and felt for his head and hat absently, her eyes steady on a gesturing tour guide.
The episode had taken less than a minute but when I turned to look for Voth he had disappeared. I paused on each face but he was nowhere. I let the crowd move around me in its circles and eddies and was suddenly overcome with inspiration or light-headedness. In the second-row pew I found the paper he’d been holding. It was the information flyer from the Keats House, with the young poet’s likeness badly hand-drawn on the cover. Inside was printed Keats’s last letter, written as he was dying to his friend Charles Brown. “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.” He writes of finding it emotionally difficult to read or write. “Yet I ride the little horse,—and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life.” I pictured him in his bed, writing, dying, punning for his life.
My hip retained the sense memory where it had knocked up against the little boy. I could handle a few blind-side collisions, I reasoned. In this one I’d lost track of Voth, or whoever he was, but it was the little boy, now gone, whose absence I felt. It hit me, under that beautiful light, with something like shock.
Now and then we find ourselves in story. Events, some of them causally connected, begin to seem inevitable. Their presentation becomes distinct. Maybe a theme emerges. But because life is not literature, we drop out of the story before it ends.
The next morning I sat in my patio chair, sipping coffee, scanning the intersection of small streets for Voth. It seemed obvious from the perspective of a new day that the man hadn’t actually been following me. Suppose he was alarmed when he saw me following him and so evaded me on the Spanish Steps. Suppose it was a coincidence, hardly inexplicable, that I’d seen him in two tourist destinations on the same afternoon. The idea of his having been a significant stranger struck me now as ridiculous. Would the face keep repeating if I was looking for it? In memory, the passing faces, like the patios, all looked much the same.
My phone buzzed on the iron table. Amanda’s text: “hope you’ve read the letter. now see Streams, posted last night @ 3 Shts. Drnt just called to say the dream in the poem is his daughter’s.” Half a minute later she sent a second text: “meet me tonight at the fountain of piazza di santa maria. trastevere. 8:10.”
I called up Three Sheets and read the new poem.
Streams
One afternoon, more than a year
ago now, the physical world
opened in that familiar
astonishment for what I knew
even then would be the last time.
Growing old is not a diminishment
but a closer knowledge of streams,
then the returns
of moments now undressed.
Afterward she talked of a dream
she’d had of a city Marseille
and not Marseille. A skulking dog
she followed in a port slum street.
They always know more than they’re saying,
she said, meaning dogs, but only a
little more. She said for striking
you cannot beat
the eyes of a certain North African man.
I said I’d never been to Marseille
or North Africa. So many
places I would never see I
once assumed I would. What
I didn’t say put a vast watershed
between us and sounded like
four feet in stride
on stone and the
panting hanging panting
moving there.
Thematically the poem was clearly in the same category—older-man-feels-loss-of-power (physical/sexual) or OMFLOPPS, as I called it—though obviously not of the quality as certain sonnets of Donne and Shakespeare and many poems through the periods, including instances well-known in Eliot and the Yeats of “Sailing to Byzantium” (“That is no country for old men” and so on, “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick” and so on), but—
I was becoming the dullest of creatures.
Durant thought the dream of the dog was his daughter’s. He’d hired me for my reading, but writing up responses to the poems had induced in me the same kinds of misperceptions that afflicted him. I couldn’t even read a line in a guest book now without feeling it was directed at me. My only honourable course was to finish my report, tell him that Amanda had told me about his daughter, out of concern for him, and that I rejected his thesis, tell him of Voth and the mistake I’d made to think I’d been followed, a mistake brought on by having made myself suggestible, even a tad paranoid, and then leave the job. That would mean leaving Rome, and Amanda.
I spent the afternoon working. I gave readings of certain poems, outlined recurring themes and seeming recurring characters, then pointed out exceptions, reversals of the usual use of “I” and “you.” I laid out the various tested theses about topical lines, titles, influences and allusions, image patterns. A separate section formed on poems that simply defeated me, that I had no idea how to read. Among these were some of my favourites, maybe oddly, but they dopplered past my sense-making faculties. Because he’d featured in my recent hours, I quoted Keats, from another of his letters: “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” What I really felt, but couldn’t say, was that in writing the report I was leaving the real things out, like those thin readers I’d complained about online. The truth was that every second poem at Three Sheets, even ones I thought weren’t good, induced a pinch of heartsickness I didn’t understand but recognized physically as the sensation of pain touching belief, the raw incomprehensions of feeling that Durant sensed I valued, and for which he valued my judgment. I ended the report by saying that I saw no hard evidence of his daughter in the poems. “You asked if I’d ever heard the expression ‘The sun winks and we play blind.’ You and she once shared the line. But even what we imagine to be our most private expressions are not, in fact, exclusive to us. They’re out there, and if we really need to, we’ll find them. What we do with the finding depends on our need to believe, to believe in a thesis, a god, a truth, a longed-for possibility. I’m sorry, August, but it’s my considered opinion that the poems at Three Sheets have nothing to do with your missing daughter.”
And so it would be finished. I’d give him the report in the morning. I’d collect my fee and arrange to ship out.
I left the apartment before Durant returned and arrived thirty-five minutes early for my date, as I humoured myself to think of it. At the edge of the piazza I sat trying to put all thoughts out of mind by contemplating the real things there before me. What mattered was matter. I watched the day’s last light as it played on the stone and flesh. How had one emerged from the other? What a miracle that a human should stand up from the very mud of creation. Scientists had a term for it—abiogenesis—which I’d come across one day when looking up the word hylozoism (the idea that all matter possesses life). Maybe we’re all seeking out other matter as if to find the home from which we’ve been made lost by creation itself, all displaced—and here’s the irony built into everything—by that First Seer, Metaphor Maker, that First Poet, who said, Let there be light. And breezes, mud. And patios with white awnings, tourists with knapsacks and purses, water in half-litre carafes, the clock tower and clock reading 8:06 beneath the Madonna and Child on the campanile, greyblack cobblestones, and Amanda. Let there be Amanda. And there she was.
“I’m tired of walking,” she said. “But I’m more tired of bars. Would you object to coming to my apartment?”
“As long as you have designs on me.”
She smiled, tolerantly.
We headed uphill to a house across from what might have been a school (it might have been anything, like most buildings in Rome. Where were the hardware stores?). As she unselfconsciously led the way in a black summer dress, she said that Carlo kept offering her apartments in one or another of his buildings, but she liked her little place, and anyway found Carlo “an old creepster.” On the top floor was her single room. The walls were yellow and umber. A small upright bookshelf, full of books, marked the living area. She said she had no wine or beer, which I took as a hopeful sign that maybe she didn’t often have visitors. A love seat faced the only window and that’s where we sat, angled toward each other, glancing now and then at the early night sky.
I gave her back Durant’s letter.
“What did you think of his R Code theory?” She started right in. I could feel, or imagined I could feel, the heat from her legs.
“I think he hopes to find his daughter. The hope has made him inventive unto a little nuts. People in distress see as they need to.”
“But now the new poem. He told me he took his daughter to Marseilles when she was young and she befriended a street dog. For years the dog showed up in her dreams. Now there’s the dog in Marseilles in a dream in a poem. You can see why he finds it significant.”
“It’s just a fragment, something familiar. I could watch the nightly news and see ten fragments of my own life if I looked for them.”
“And you don’t sense anything else in the poems?”
“Well, reading them the way I’ve been asked to did toss me into a spiral yesterday. For a while I thought someone was following me.”
An expression of specific concern came over her, as if she’d been worried I might be followed. I told her about Voth, and the warning I’d decided I imagined, the threat I’d read into a line in a guest register. She looked more anguished than surprised.
“James. You need to trust me. You have to stop reading the site. Don’t visit it again. Ever.” She held her hands to her face, then threw them down and said, softly, “Ouf.”
“What aren’t you saying?”
“You’ll think I’m as inventive unto nuts as he is.” Her hair, loose, no longer pulled back by sunglasses, so the widow’s peak was gone, accented her face differently. It was as if I’d brushed grass from a stone and found an ancient goddess looking back at me. No, what an inane image. She seemed older, more deeply beautiful, less striking than she had earlier, less successfully serious, a little weary from need and intent. “Do you read science fiction?”
“No.” I’d had some luck with speculative novels but more often whenever I’d tried to read the so-called classics of the genre, I’d been unable to draw my eyes across the page. The silly made-up names, the plastic dialogue, the alternate histories and magical technologies that seem to describe where things are actually going!
“Do you know Stanisław Lem? His novel Solaris?”
“I’ve seen the movie. American, not Russian.”
With a look of self-amazement, she said that Three Sheets was something like the planet in Solaris. Anyone who tried to penetrate it began to see their own lives communicated back with terrifying veracity.
“It isn’t that readers project personal meanings onto the poems,” she said, “or not just that. It’s that the site really does seem to know them.”
I wanted to stop her from saying anything more, to protect us, but I couldn’t respond.
“It will happen to you, too.”
“I’ve been reading Three Sheets for months and haven’t caught a glimpse of my life.”
“Well, I’ve seen mine.” She looked out the window at the sky getting darker. “I see Marcus.”
If she pressed the point any further I would have a hard time, in trying to avoid saying she was delusional, not telling her that because of her brother’s death she was simply in a state of high vulnerability, like Durant, and so prone to misperceptions. It was understandable, I’d say, though of course it wasn’t, not really.
“This stranger following you, that was inevitable. Have you read the Three Sheets chat rooms lately? The talk is getting really concerning. Someone worked up a profile of the Poet, more or less like yours, that he’s middle-aged male, likely white North American, maybe living in Rome, and people began hunting through the postings. Now August has been named and there’s a theory that he’s the Poet. Your follower is probably just the first one to track him to Rome. Before long we’ll end up meeting some pretty desperate people unless we cut loose from him.”
Maybe it was her way of putting things, saying “we” instead of “you,” promoting a note of shared romance, that kept me from feeling her degree of concern. What if we were just a couple of suggestible dopes, Amanda and I, knocking around in a crazy world?
“So you’re visiting the chat rooms,” I said.
“No one comes right out and admits it, but that’s why everyone needs to talk online about Three Sheets. Each of them believes in this secret communication, but they’re afraid to say so. Instead they debate about the poems and build up profiles of the Poet.”
It was the theory I’d presented to Dominic. She drew her feet up under her, which had the effect of tilting her slightly in my direction. Her posture was exactly that of the Londoner in our pre- and postcoital talks on the rented Spanish couch. We weren’t bed loungers. We made use of our few rooms, reading at the kitchen table, having sex in the shower, watching TV shows on the couch, talking at the kitchen table, watching sex between people in a shower or in bed or on a couch on her laptop on the couch. The memory belonged to some other life.
“I can’t get free,” she said. “I’ve seen details in the poems, things about Marcus, and now I can’t stop looking for more.” She said he was killed in Guatemala City when a pallet of construction bricks fell on him from the roof of a restaurant where he had lunch every day. “Same patio, same chair. The official version is, a kid working construction, twenty. The pallet was on scaffolding. The kid claimed to be trying to secure the platform but it tilted and the pallet fell perfectly off the side. From just two storeys up. Most of the bricks weren’t even broken.” Marcus had just written her that he had evidence and the names of Guatemalan government and military figures who were using the U.S.-funded surveillance apparatus to identify and detain human rights activists, some of whom had died in custody or been found dead in the streets. “Marcus died before the list could be published. It wasn’t in his effects.”
Suddenly I was cold, sorrowful, still. She looked at my chest, as though it might offer what she needed, then up again. Out of nowhere, the way of things could come crashing down on us. We all knew this fact and worked hard to forget it. You could make millions from people’s need to forget the way of things.
“I need to stop talking for a while,” she said.
She disappeared into some isolated penetralium (great word, Keats, in a complaint about Coleridge) of her thoughts. There we sat, sometimes looking at each other. A minute passed. I didn’t move or speak or check my phone. Then I felt it coming on, a dread truth I hadn’t been willing to admit, but just in time she reached across and cupped a hand behind my neck.
The word that came to mind—nothing to be done—was penetration.
The first time I woke it was still dark. I knew instantly where I was and felt wonderful. When next I woke the sun lit everything and I lay in pristine confusion. I rolled over and there she was, head on pillow, looking at me. She smiled. Her face seemed a little fuller, her eyes somehow a different shape. She unfolded herself from the sheets and walked out of the room in the underwear she’d slept in. More even than the sex, which we hadn’t actually had, just a kind of making out, gropings and glimpsings, what felt like teenage prewar sex, then falling asleep together half-clothed, this was so far our most intimate moment. She returned with a sheet of paper and we sat on top of the covers, shoulder to shoulder. She looked down at the page—there was a poem on it—and said that it was why she couldn’t let go of Three Sheets.
The poem was “Seconding.” I remembered it from the site. To read a poem is one thing; to be directed to it, another; to be directed by a new, half-nude semi-lover, a thing of a whole different order.
A former general back home in the jungle
capital from DC where specialists made
the first breaches in the wall around
his forever silent teenage daughter
inquired about transforming the vacant
third floor of the old municipal building
into a school for children in need, not
knowing that the floor processed
cocaine. The lords kidnapped
his wordless girl, left her in a stream,
though death was not by water. And now
the general is talking. In the beginning
we killed one, he says, though which
one is debated. By the third day
and thereafter we killed without
distinction. In the end we killed our natives,
Americans, Dutch, the British,
Canadians. We killed wives and daughters,
uncles and mothers. Workers, piano teachers,
men on the road.
The Turks we killed and their enemies.
The Spartans, Persians and Prussians
and Mongols. We killed ancient mud
warriors carrying spears. Their final words
covered the earth in languages. The elephants
they rode. Their caged birds.
You have to understand we killed
them all many times over, as I will now be killed.
Words recorded by a visitor
to this country of punctuated endings,
in his blue notebook stolen from the bag
at the scene not secured by police who
didn’t ask questions.
“Marcus.”
She nodded. I reached to touch her but she shook her head. A dull longing to put my feet on the ground, a longing made all the duller by my clichéd condition to have been born into a safe class in a safe country, a good family, born lucky. By degrees, many Westerners feel the same. We are our own country, the young, dumb-lucky educated Westerners.
“Which details?”
“The jungle capital is Guatemala City. The killers. The blue notebook, which would have contained the names.”
“Not the general and his daughter?”
“He never mentioned them. But don’t tell me there’s still room for coincidence. I’ve been reading around, trying to figure it out. That’s what I’m doing with my days here, searching online, emailing contacts in Holland and Central America, trying to find the identity of the general. He might know who killed Marcus, or at least maybe I can get the same story he did.”
“With the same result.”
“Not if I don’t travel there.”
“Did you ever see this notebook?”
“He always had one with him. A blue one was in a picture he sent me the week before he was killed. But it wasn’t in his belongings they sent. I asked about it. The police claimed there was no notebook at the scene or in his room.”
“Is this the only poem about your brother?”
“Before ‘Seconding,’ every now and then there was a phrase or line that seemed sort of loaded, but they showed up in the more obscure poems and I wasn’t really sure what I was seeing. I was actually afraid to see more. It was like any day there’d be a poem called ‘When Marcus Was Killed Under a Ton of Bricks.’ And then this.”
She got up and stood by the window and lit a cigarette. She said something about the sky and I tried to make a note to myself that there’s this in life, too, there’s murder, killing upon killing, but there’s also seeing this person in this moment. If only I could see her against a window once a season, life would be easier. She stubbed out the smoke and returned to bed. Before reading the poem I’d been planning to keep some light in the hour, some hope she’d find a way for me to stay in Rome without money. Now the breathing fact of her was overwhelming. I turned and held her and when she started to cry she pushed me away and let the tears come, then go, closed on herself. At some point she raised her knees and hugged them and dropped her head to her legs in a kind of cannonball-tuck position.
I was looking at the part of her I could see, more or less at her thighs. I tried to take them in as part of my sense of her. Those thighs are Amanda. Those feet. That forearm. Amanda. So clearly all three syllables. She could never have been Mandy. Three syllables, the same vowel in each, an assonant echo inside the whole—
“Penetration,” I said.
She turned her head to me, made a sort of cautioning expression.
“Penetration. It’s hacker language. You didn’t tell anyone about the notebook, but you must have written about it. In emails to the police, you just told me. You’ve been hacked.”
We looked at each other, a distance of about eighteen inches.
She paused, then slowly nodded.
I had it, I had it.
“I have it.”
She said nothing. I kept my eyes on her, thinking it through, as she must have been. Her round belly, its single roll of skin, heaved a little.
The theory had weight. People of political interest are flagged. Their online habits fit them into a profile. False sites are seeded, sites for, whatever, eco-activists, currency traders, poetry readers, a site exactly like Three Sheets. But why? Could people be reliably manipulated through a website? Of course they could, if it was one they visited daily and it presented with some authority or inviolable mystery.
Not quite believing myself, I laid it all out for her. Her thoughts were divided, I could tell.
“Me with my Solaris effect, you with your conspiracy theory.”
“I know, I know,” I said, the theory still building in me, cumulonimbus, airy and full of violent consequence. “But still.”
She got off the bed and left the room and I realized I could never truly know what it meant to her to have solved the mechanism, if not the whole mystery itself, if that was what I’d done. The solution connected to her brother’s murder, to emotions I couldn’t know. I tried to isolate what I did feel about the possibility my own computer had been hacked. I should have felt violated, but didn’t especially. Maybe I didn’t believe my theory, or did believe it in the abstract—big data trawlers could see all—but not the actual. I had no deep secrets or pictures of inflamed privates on my laptop, but the thought of some stranger looking around in my emails new and old, between me and Dominic, me and the Londoner, seemed too unreal to anger me. To make it real, when Amanda returned I imagined a third person with us, hiding somewhere in the room. Did I want to brain them with a bottle of Peroni, or ask them to leave, or just let them listen and watch? Neither. Nor. All. I couldn’t decide. The real world contrives to be unbelievable.
We wouldn’t tell Durant just yet. We agreed to test the theory’s holding capacity, though how, we had no idea. A way forward would come to us if we stopped looking for it.
“Tell me about Michigan,” I said.
The verb surveil is young, a 1960s back-formation of surveillance, itself young, nineteenth century, though from older fragments, the French sur, meaning “over,” and veiller, meaning “watch,” from the Latin vigilare, to “keep watch.” As I noodled around online in Amanda’s bed, learning all this, these unsuspected links between, say, surveil/watch and vigil/witness, with their half-opposing connotations, I pictured Voth’s reflection, there or not, in the window of the watch shop, and felt I was skirting the labyrinth again. One of these days my cha-chas would dance me completely out of sense. Maybe they already had.
Alpha, beta, gamma…
“Detta,” she said. Somehow we were dressed and walking now, eating so-so pastries, watching the rhythms of the traffic shooting along beside the Tiber. “Her brother works in cybersecurity.”
She began to tap Detta on her cell, paused.
“Is it safe?” Holding up the phone.
Seeing it in her hand made me think again of my mother, tapping me on her cellphone when she’d sent the picture of the cuneiform tablet. After they died I dreamed of my parents, one or both, almost every night for months, and was still dreaming of them in Rome. Dreams are ours alone. Never to be spied on, stolen, and never really to be shared, even when we try. If we’re lucky something in the waking world, some artifice, roof of wet cedar shingles, sail of meringue on a passing dessert plate, poem, maybe a poem about a dream of a dog in a port slum street, will seem to have the impress of the dream, and for a short time we can set the secret inside the found shape, and imagine that we are known.
We took a trolley car north and walked to the wide mall outside the entrance to the MAXXI museum. In the courtyard was an enormous, maybe one-hundred-foot sculpture of a human skeleton on its back, all its bones present and exact except for a long, sharply pointed god’s doodle of a witch’s nose. We sat on a low wall in the sun and watched people walk around the skeleton, interested but not visibly moved. Were they thinking of mortality or thinking about the artist thinking about it? Some leaned in very close, inspecting the bones, the materials. I was re-experiencing the thought of my parents lying on their backs, struck and struck until struck dead, working backward to them getting out of the car, my father hit hard in the face, unconscious and no trouble, my mother next, the both of them dragged back into the car, and then I stopped thinking altogether, closed my eyes and listened to the day, to my breathing, and opened them on the curving, white museum building. I told Amanda the museum was audacious simply for being contemporary and in Rome. We discussed ancient capitals, how age and beauty are oppressive, and nostalgia to be feared as a bearer of troubles, losses, animosities, and gilded never-weres.
Or else they died in a car accident. I got some purchase on the idea and decided I could hang on for the day.
Detta’s brother, Pierluigi, a suave, young hypomaniac, turned out to be a lot of work. She’d told us he had a disorder, which she had trouble translating but seemed to be a kind of compulsive talking problem, which would be worse when he spoke about the internet. As he emerged from the museum and crossed toward us he looked somehow both fashionable and genuinely (as opposed to fashionably) unkempt, like an undead model, the summer-weight grey sports jacket wrinkled and unevenly faded, tie improvisationally knotted, blond hair wilted from the over-application of some product. He said hello and explained without prompting that he worked with the museum, building the database and conducting penetration tests and vulnerability assessments. It took him some time to convey this because though his English vocabulary was good, his pronunciation was god-awful, as if he’d never heard the language. Amanda addressed him in Italian, which she spoke musically but not well, it turned out, because they settled on English.
We outlined the Three Sheets phenomenon and my theory. We asked about hacking. Suddenly he became very animated and, oddly, more fluent. His hands began moving in little circles before him, slightly out of phase with each other, as he started to talk about himself. As he spoke through his lunch hour and dinner that night at Detta’s apartment (Detta helping in real time and afterward with the clarifications), and then again in an email sent in the middle of the night, when I was asleep, written in a mix of English and idiomatic Italian that I used Detta and an online site to work through, with a few interpolations of my own, I developed a composite sense of his thoughts, and a very clear one of the ways his condition presented.
“When you think of the ‘hacker,’ ” he said or wrote, “you will imagine subcultures, crooks and perverts, the geeks in the basements. But these groups overlap like it’s crazy. Political, criminal, government, black hats and the white hats, hats of other stripes and races.” Sometimes his fingers held a cigarette, the smoke sailing in little loops as he performed his hand circles. “No matter how strange we are, always there’s someone who feels like us. We can find these people online. My people are called Keyholers. The name comes from the spy satellites. We are nineteen, in Italian branch. We agree in words and thinking. In English they would call us ‘hacktivists.’ Why have I never met you, Amanda? Are you two lovers?”
She smiled and asked if we could record him on our phones. He nodded.
“Detta has mentioned you often. We were bound to meet,” she said. I put my arm around her waist, a move not native to me. Pierluigi seemed to be looking at her clavicle and nodded at it, and kept nodding for maybe twenty seconds after she asked if there was any way of finding out if our computers had been hacked.
“In Keyhole language, what we do, hacker practice, is we call ‘entering all.’ We are the sailors. We sail on virtual wind. We are”—this took many tries to arrive at—“ ‘lifted up into the god prospect.’ Like satellite cameras we can see at same time great distances and smallest movements far below. We see search trends within masses, hear music in the tap tap of the password,” he said. He talked about his special connection to the world, the hunger that develops once you realize you can know more and more. “It’s like religious, the hunger, but the faith is not being blind. It’s all right there in one grosso evidence field.”
Detta got up from the table (there were four of us, it was evening now) and began massaging his shoulders, trying to relax him, slow him down, but he stopped only to scold her jokingly, in English, for not having introduced him sooner to her North American friends. Around his sister he seemed to speak with more control but then couldn’t stop himself from accelerating. I wanted to pour cold water over his head to save him from his all-seeing vision.
“Hackers know the living and dead. We’re all the same, no clock time. We float with ghosts and angels and some of them turn and look in your face from the screen, and you know inside them. I am a secret inside a secret.”
Whenever he started into what seemed to be an answer, he lost track of the question. He never once answered a direct question about anything. I began paying more attention to Detta and Amanda. Their silent exchanges were about managing Pierluigi, Amanda nodding interrogatively at his third empty beer glass, Detta shaking her head slightly. I was worried about him, too, but admit to hoping for some signal about me. Did Detta know Amanda and I had slept together? But then I barely knew it. It was sleep, after all.
Detta put her hand on her brother’s arm and asked him again to assess our theory. Could he determine if we’d been hacked?
“Of course they are hacked. Everyone is hacked.” He explained the mechanism. There were dozens of ways into our files. Even clicking on an unsubscribe button could open the gates. “You know Troy, story of the horse. You’re all hosts for remote-access trojans. Someone controls your computer camera and microphone. They’ve installed the keylogger and tracked every password you have.”
The information seemed sound but his certainty felt unjustified and made me doubt him. I had no idea what to believe now. He began talking about hacker intuition, an ability in some hackers to predict keystrokes, words before they even formed. The Keyholers all had some version of this talent to predict.
“But then the thing. It came to us all in the same time. We all had it before anyone spoke. If you see ahead in time, even just for a tick and tock second, you also see, not so clearly, what’s longer away. It’s a vague shape but all of us have seen it and all of us are scared. I’m telling you. We’ve seen the end of time and it’s much closer than you think.”
Of course he was an apocalyptic. So many troubled minds washed up on the same shore at the end of the world. He explained that when the Keyholers understood they were all seeing the same thing, they agreed not to talk about it, not even with one another, and because it had a shape, they’d all draw what they saw. One day, on an agreed-upon minute, they all uploaded their drawings. They were the same shape.
Detta tore a page from a notebook and Pierluigi worked over it for two or three minutes with a sad intensity. When he finished he stood and left the table. Detta, Amanda, and I stood over the sketch.
“We all see it,” Pierluigi said from across the room. “It comes to us in dreams but also when awake and offline. We wonder who else outside our group has these visions.”
“But what is it?” asked Detta.
“It’s obvious,” he said and refused to say anything more.
I’d been hoping to return with Amanda to her flat but our night ended with her leaning into a cab and kissing me, briefly. I arrived home to find Durant making tea in the dark. He asked how things were “progressing on all fronts.” It seemed a veiled question about Amanda. I said I’d had a breakthrough but couldn’t tell him about it yet.
“Well, if you’ve enlisted her to help you, I’m all for it.”
Our agreement not to talk in detail about what I was finding had started to claim more conversational territory. I was tired of the circumspection.
“For a while yesterday, I thought someone was following me.” I described the episode with Voth, and confessed I was still conjuring spy scenarios. “I could have misread what was happening.”
His face gave nothing away, not even concern. A cone of lamplight from the main room cast his shadow hugely on the kitchen wall.
“I’ll get you a security escort for a few days. Carlo knows people who do that sort of thing.”
“No thanks.”
He held the ear of the teacup in one thick finger.
“It’s prehistoric, an adaptation, the sense we’re being followed. A part of us is still on a plain somewhere, moving through long grass, easily spooked. But sometimes…”
He looked like he was about to start into one of his lectures, but his expression changed. He drained his cup and set it on the counter.
“You owe me a report.”
“It’s written. But today I have a better theory.”
I saw doubt or regret pass over his face. He said we’d find a place to meet the next afternoon, wished me good night, and disappeared into his dim room, no doubt to reread “Streams” and nurse the code hypothesis that carried all he had left of hope. How could I take it from him?
In the morning I heard him leave. From my bedroom-study I looked into the narrow, quiet street and heard his steps receding on the stones. There was no one in sight, no locals or tourists, no Voth or whoever had or hadn’t been following me. Things were half-defined all around.
I opened my laptop, stared at the screensaver, the bare trunk and branches of a dead staghorn sumac tree. The Londoner had sent me the image on the day she left. She said it was the most peaceful thing she’d ever seen and she hoped I’d draw peace from it. The sumac, which I’d always found slightly disturbing, now seemed to be staring back at me one-eyed from a knot or wound below the most dramatic of its staghorns. I switched it out for one of my screensaver photos of poets’ faces. When I was in a northern mood I chose a Swede or Scot or one of my countrypeople. The southern faces ran clear to Zimbabwe’s Zimunya. The poets had little in common. I chose the first up alphabetically. A is for Ashbery. He was young, moustached. His first book of poems was Some Trees. His name sounded like a tree. Ashbery replaced sumac.
There were no new poems at Three Sheets. I checked SHEPMETSOR and followed links to letter exchanges. A woman in New Zealand was finding tide charts useful in understanding the poems. A prof in Calgary had put the site on a graduate syllabus. Someone in Leeds was arguing that “Nanny/@/The Poet” (which he refused to stop using) was a desperate and implausibly successful stab at “aura buzz” by a publishing house in its death throes, and predicted there’d soon be a great reveal and volumes for sale. A singer-songwriter in Dublin had set one of the poems to music. I clicked on the video link and made it about twelve earnest seconds into “Invert Program” before I couldn’t take any more and stopped it in midpennywhistle.
I felt a long way from recent events, from Voth and the Keyholers. Said together they sounded like a band out of a Pynchon novel. How could they even be real? But the world was such now that characters and events once thought to be broadly ironic and clearly imaginary were part of the given. They showed up in our towns, sat at our tables. We shared a weakening sense of the discordant. You caught a frequency, something you thought of as your life, and then the interferences began.
I looked at Pierluigi’s sketch. The shape was familiar but hardly unusual, rectangular, humanly designed. Within the borders, certain geometries held but things got more complex, maybe crazed. The sketch had a terrible innocence about it. Had the other Keyholers really seen this in their dreams? How could the apocalypse look so clearly machined? At the end of all things, a great bar code.
It came to me not what the drawing depicted, but what Pierluigi would think it depicted. He’d sent me and Amanda an encryption program, which I installed before writing to him. He replied immediately.
“yes! integrated circuit!”
“So how could this be a vision of the end?”
“the circuits are in everything, james. everywhere in the place and time. you have to forget your ideas of ‘end.’ ”
He was about to start firing again and so I cut off the exchange and forwarded it to Amanda and Detta.
A minute later Pierluigi sent me a version of his diagram with English labels added. Now it looked like a satellite photo of a railway switching yard or palace compound or suspected missile site. The parallel lines were apparently diodes. The things they connected, capacitors and resistors. The larger structures or open spaces were marked variously as silicon ingots and composite crystal assemblies. I returned to the unlabelled diagram and sat with it. The shape and pattern were everywhere, not just in circuit boards but in marked-up calendars, stuffed bookshelves, lines of prose or justified verse, and yet the drawing seemed particular, of something very close by.
It sat horizontal. I held it at arm’s length, raised my arms slightly. There, on Durant’s wall. It had been over my head the whole time. Since moving in I’d looked once or twice at the framed drawing or diagram or maybe print of a painting and assumed it was abstract art, slightly too busy and geometrical for my tastes. The design echoed Pierluigi’s drawing: tight, parallel, segmented lines connected by thinner crossing lines, some of them forming a well or knot (or composite crystal assembly). The dimensions were proportionally about the same. Each image had sets of horizontal rows. The wall-art version was coloured, with precise resolution, so that what looked like shading in Pierluigi’s rectangle were, in the picture, arrays of the finest lines, like hairs strung between the rows or maybe rhizomatic growths in a substrata not representable in 2-D.
With my phone I took a picture of Durant’s artwork and sent it to him with the text “Research question: What is this? Thx, J.”
Beyond being a misfit, Pierluigi was also very likely a clinical paranoid, but his vision made me test my own beliefs. I didn’t believe in reliable foreknowledge of the end of the world, beyond what any sensible person already possessed, the knowledge that it would someday end, badly. I did believe in a widespread and justified renewal of common paranoia brought on by the obvious, sorry truths, collapsing polar shelves, persistent evil, the fact that most lives were now being tracked and subject to algorithms that could predict their behaviour with a high degree of accuracy.
On this last point I believed, maybe hoped, that many people would unplug, refuse to be configured as market data, that there would be an ever-growing back-to-the-earth movement, but (not my hope now) given the scarcity of available earth to get back to, competitions would form, market logic would take hold, legal language would shift, and even some of the enlightened and peace-loving back-to-earthers would become militant in defence of their needs and unalienable rights as they viewed them. I believed in a coming chaos that could be forestalled only by even worse possibilities, nuclear or biological apocalypse, mass raining death or global natural disaster brought on by, say, a meteor of the magnitude of those that had already caused extinctions and in fact, with a glancing blow, had brought about the moon and oceans and nudged the planet off its axis, forming seasons and, in a sense, earthly time.
But did I really believe in the likelihood of these doomsday scenarios?
In a great vastness the size of my body I was alone with the question of what I believed, and so checked my email. Durant had responded.
“That thing on the wall over your desk came with the apartment but it looks very much like a synteny graph I once worked up to represent the history of the black death genome as it morphed over time into other plagues. The enterobacterium is beautiful. So is the graph. The contagions are not, of course, and they just keep coming. We’re due for a big one soon. You still want to meet? Bring Amanda if she’s free. Let’s say three in the Protestant Cemetery.”
Amanda found me at the gate on Caio Cestio. She took my hand and looked at me earnestly but didn’t kiss me or say what the look meant. Then she let go of my hand. I sensed she regretted our night together and wanted to signal as much before saying so. In emotional self-defence I tried to focus my attention away from her. We stood near three carabinieri with their peaked hats and white straps running diagonally across their chests. I couldn’t imagine why military police were guarding the entrance to a cemetery. My Rome guidebook had mentioned that, more so than the polizia, the carabinieri are the subject of popular jokes, a tradition deriving from northern snobbishness at the many southern rural men who join the force to escape poverty. I was working through some connection between the carabinieri and Pasolini when Amanda brought me back.
“I never wanted this to happen.” I thought she meant us, but she was speaking of Durant. “Our theory will crush him.”
“I think he’s pretty resilient.”
“He’s built everything on one hope. I can’t even be around him without feeling like a stand-in.”
He didn’t so much come into view as make an entrance, an effect I would have thought impossible to produce while coming down a long city street. He walked fast, as people never do around cemeteries, and sort of swept us into the grounds. We were three abreast, Durant in the middle, but I felt the way he inclined toward Amanda. I’d never seen them together. The connection was clear, a father-daughterly affection that ran both ways. He said he liked to come here because the quiet helped him think.
“I’ve just spent a few hours with colleagues at EMBL, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Monterotondo. They’re doing amazing things in marine metagenomics.” He said he hoped with his mollusc work to secure an affiliation with EMBL that would allow him to stay in Rome another year. His description of the laboratory, his friends there, the work they were doing, microbiological genetics, continued unbroken for several minutes. “I need to land a new fellowship to pay back my research team the funds from the last mollusc grant. That’s how I’ve paid you both, by the way. My life lately is one big shell game. But the world is not, is it, James?”
The question almost literally tripped me, caused a hesitation in my stride before I recovered. I didn’t understand it or why it was addressed to me, but already he’d moved on. He was talking now about yet a different set of colleagues, these ones at another Roman university, Sapienza. We’d made it deep into the cemetery along one of the paths. Durant paused for about twenty seconds and even the quiet felt commemorative, the cypress trees shouldered together like the graves in the crowded precincts of death.
What a terrible idea to meet here. We should never have agreed to it.
Now he was talking about the cemetery itself, its famous dead, its poets, including Keats and Shelley. I recounted popular versions of Shelley’s death by drowning, and the one about how, during the cremation, a friend snatched the poet’s heart from the fire and later gave it to Shelley’s wife, Mary, who kept it for thirty years in a copy of the poem “Adonais” and only later had it encased in silver.
“There are those who still believe that snatched-heart story,” said Durant. “There’s no underestimating people’s gullibility. Mary must have been in on the mythmaking. She’d have done better to focus on her novels. What a mess she made after Frankenstein.” Now he turned to me. “So what do you have to tell me?”
Seconds passed and I found I couldn’t speak. Amanda rescued me. She told him that she understood what it felt like to see a lost loved one in the poems and told him of her brother and said she’d begun to see Marcus and his death at Three Sheets. She explained how her own theory of the Solaris effect had been displaced by a new one that I’d struck upon. Durant stopped us and took her hands in his.
“I’m sorry. So sorry. I misread your distress. I should have seen that it wasn’t about me.”
She absolved him with a soft smile and I thought he was going to hug her but he just lowered his eyes. He began walking slowly now, and led us to a bench on which sat two fat pigeons that vacated it only when we stood over them. We sat, me between them.
“Your theory, James.”
As I spoke he looked at me squarely, not even glancing at Amanda. I said the theory’s improbability was part of its power. Without describing Pierluigi’s suspect authority or apocalyptic take on things, I evoked his expertise and his support for the idea that private details from Durant’s and Amanda’s lives had been extracted and used against them.
“That’s it?” He smiled slightly, as if relieved. “The government’s in our underwear drawers?”
“Maybe more than one government or corporation if your underwear’s deemed threatening. Imagine the Poet, or someone he hires, or some program, tracks discussions, flags certain people. Biographical details are gathered from the virtual debris field. New poems are written from these biographical fragments, ever more private details of these selected readers’ lives. And why? To infiltrate the minds of people posing threats. To lead the eye, misdirect their dangerous attention.”
Neither of us had moved, but he seemed closer to me now, his regard farther away.
“So you think Amanda and I were prompted into each other’s lives, the easier to control? You’re right, it’s a little far-fetched.” He turned to her. “Given what you’ve just said about your brother and your own investigations, I understand how you could be seen as a threat. But how am I?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it depends on why your daughter disappeared.” His involuntary response, to lift his head just slightly while blinking and keeping his eyes shut for a moment longer than normal, somehow suggested that he was confirming something to himself. “Was she a threat to anyone? Will you tell us about her?”
As a way of gathering himself, he clasped his hands behind his head and straightened his spine, brought his elbows together and looked from one to the other. Then he crossed his arms and stared straight ahead. He told us of a young family, an early death, a move to California, single parenthood.
“What do you think happened to your daughter?” Amanda asked.
“The truth is she disappeared on her own but then stayed that way. From the outside it looked like her choice, so I’ve been unable to get police involved, just private investigators who find nothing.”
“Did she work with secrets professionally?” I asked.
“She worked in the drug racket. So, yes. I like to think that if there were whistles to blow, she’d blow them.”
I asked if he or his daughter had ever written in emails or posted online the details he’d found in the poems—the blinking sun, the blue tie and spooling galaxies, the dream of the dog in Marseilles—but he didn’t answer. We waited for a group of teenagers to walk by, smoking, loudly talking and laughing. One of them, a skinny young guy wearing what looked like tie-dyed medical scrubs, smiled at us. A friend handed him something and the kid skipped over and asked in English if any of us had a smoke. Durant looked at the ground, as if alone, and I saw in his face the answer to my question—yes, the details had been or could well have been communicated online—as Amanda got a cigarette and lighter from her bag and gave them to the kid. He lit up and offered her a few coins he’d been holding but she smiled and shook her head, and he glanced at Durant, realizing then that he’d blundered into something, and handed back the lighter and made a little involuntary gesture, his hand with the smoke cocking slightly and his eyes flitting away. He nodded and was gone.
“Let’s walk,” she said.
Durant stood and looked back in the direction we’d come from.
“There’s a theory that Shelley was killed by government agents,” he said. “The idea is they rammed his boat and he drowned before he could publish ‘A Philosophical View of Reform,’ with its arguments for women’s rights and the formation of trade unions. It’s where he wrote that poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. And in fact, after he died, the thing wasn’t published for another hundred years.” He actually raised his finger to stress the point. “But he wasn’t murdered. He’d just had his schooner refitted and it was a bad job and the thing was made unseaworthy. A storm blew up. He drowned. No plot. No conspiracy of interests.” Whatever the truth was behind Three Sheets, he said, he didn’t believe that any “Shadowy Apparatus” could be so nuanced in its manipulations. “These people you describe know money and tradecraft, but they think hearts and minds are things to be won. It’s laughable, the idea that they’re practising mind control when they can’t control crowds in public squares. They don’t do subtle nudgings, James.”
Maybe Shelley wasn’t murdered, I thought, but over the centuries writers and poets were murdered by governments all the time. If not Shelley, then Lorca, then Mandelstam, then Neruda, Saro-Wiwa—
“I know plausibility isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “But the problem with your theory is the poetry. Slogans control people, not poems.”
And yet we were all in Rome because he’d read “The Art of Memory.” And Amanda’s search for evidence of her brother’s murder had been directed by a poem mentioning a Guatemalan general who possibly didn’t exist. What if these two, my American friends, had been led to look in the wrong places? I held to my theory but left him unchallenged. He was moving now, inviting us to walk, struggling, I thought, to find the energy he’d had when our meeting began. Whether he knew it or not, his physical self suggested we were closer to the truth, which meant his daughter wasn’t speaking to him in poems, which made it harder to believe she was alive.
We returned to the gate on Caio Cestio. Amanda gave us both a hug and left for work. We watched her leave, trotting across the avenue and walking, turning a corner, and I heard Durant take a little inhalation. I pretended not to have heard and gave him a moment by walking up to the carabinieri, three of them talking at once, and asking if they could tell me the name of the street we were on. One of them did so and then their conversation resumed and I returned to Durant.
“You have a lot in your head, James. You read well, think well. But that’s not what we’re here for, is it?” Again I’d missed something. I thought reading and thinking well were exactly what I was there for, why he’d hired me. “I’ll see you tonight at the apartment.” We came and went in each other’s days too frequently to bother with greeting or parting gestures, but now he gave my arm a brief squeeze. He walked back into the cemetery.
I stood for a while, without destination. In time I went through the gates and looked for him. I needed to ask what he’d meant in telling me the world is not a shell game, and in hinting I didn’t know why we were there. I expected to find him lost in thought, staring at a grave marker or a tree trunk, more alone than he’d been in years. But though I walked the circuit of paths, I couldn’t find him.
An hour later I was back at my desk, sitting in general uncertainty. The meeting had revealed gaps in my understanding, in my knowledge. I went online and tried to learn about what Durant had called the “mess” Mary Shelley had made after Frankenstein. He must have been referring to her later novel, The Last Man, apparently a futuristic, philosophical, gothic thing about the end of the world brought on by plagues in the twenty-first century. Critics agreed that she didn’t really have control of her material. Looking up at the framed art, the one Durant had likened to a graph of plagues, I thought of nature and art sprawling beyond their understood forms. How could we grasp radically new creations from inside our moment in time? We didn’t know our world any better than did Shelley’s twenty-first-century characters, flailing around in a sprawling plague novel.
I’d been absently scratching my shins. I rolled my pant cuffs and examined the little marks I’d raised up. A few of them had a pleasing Greek alphabetic character, lazy zetas and pis, or so I imagined. I thought the trouble was less likely bubonic than allergic, the issue of Italian fabric softener. I showered and found a pair of unlaundered jeans. The brand name was Viral.
It used to be we saw beasts in the shadows, gods in the clouds. Now we’d shaped the common mind to accommodate new visions carried, according to Pierluigi, on microchips, bringing us news of the end. But was the end there in the information carried on the card or in the chip card itself? Plague or integrated circuit? Of course the end of the world could spring as easily from the natural world as from the artificial. From the ox or the house, the camel or the door, aleph or beth, gimel or daleth, the letters in some tongue to come would bear the last word on us all.
In one of his dinner-hour holdings forth, Durant had told me of a magical microchip designed by the military of a country he couldn’t legally name. The chip could identify any virus introduced into its circuitry through a liquid solution. “Think about resistance. These soldier-scientists can use the microchip to design vaccines or treatments to ward off biological weapons and outbreaks. One kind of resistance put in service of another. How hard it is, James, to bring together usefully the biological and the mechanized. Usually they collide like a car into a tree, but this little technology might save us from a great plague.”
The comment had stayed with me but only now did it set off a cha-cha. I thought of Camus, hero of the intellectual Resistance during the war, and author of The Plague (a novel inspired partly by his struggle against tuberculosis), who was killed when his editor drove him into a tree. Some things I made studies of, and some just stayed with me in sharp detail for reasons that weren’t always clear. The car crash produced memorable ironies and coincidences. Two women passengers in the backseat were unharmed but a dog travelling with them, name of Floc, which can be translated as something like “splat,” was never seen again. Camus had a fear of cars but died in a 1956 Facel Vega, the fastest four-seater in the world (how shameful that the names of the car and the dog were in the record I read but not those of the women). Though it took two hours to extract his body from the wreckage, in Camus’s pocket was a pristine, unused train ticket to Paris, the car’s destination. Nearby, in the mud, was found the unfinished manuscript of the novel he was working on, Le premier homme, raised from the earth as its creator was returned to it, by the doctor who attended the scene, also named Camus.
Camus is sumac spelled backward.
The car crash has variously been attributed to a blown tire, faulty bearings, and—where had I read this? likely somewhere online—the KGB. I recalled that Camus had published a newspaper article criticizing the Soviet foreign minister, who didn’t much like artists and had chaired a congress that denounced Shostakovich, and warned against the dangers of jazz and rock music and the caveman orgies they incited. Camus accused the minister of ordering killings during the Hungarian uprising. The theory is that the minister, unhappy with his critic, ordered spies to doctor the tires of the Facel Vega.
Like my parents, Camus was a victim of either murder or a car accident.
I found myself searching through my files on Three Sheets, choosing the one tagged “Political” in my pointless sorting system, trying to find the poem that was floating in mind now, half-remembered. I’d read it once and never again, maybe, subconsciously, on purpose. When I found it I sat back in my chair and looked for a few seconds at the view out the window of a burnt umber wall.
Reunion
My family was randomly generated
My generation is overfamiliar with the image world
Leading members of my family imagine a world beyond the sky where we go after
Dinner went well I thought, despite a bad start
That comment about the royal accident, the tunnel and the tree
Was a sumac forking against the night sky as the courses came and
When was the last time this mode of thinking worked
In light of the image world. I know my lifelong presences
Better now as cyberfolk, wish they’d known their dead this way
The table was long and complicated, extended across zones
And tongues quoting lines from the Bible, the Koran, the minutes
Of the accident in the park. A distant cousin fell to sneezing, an Algerian
Reaction to the tree, dramatically rising up and leaving the table
As we rushed around carrying whatever was fragile came down
In sheets and inside now chills, trigger-eyed blessings fired off all
Around with real violence until you
Can’t think in here. I’m looking for my cyblings.
I mean you know what I mean.
And there it ended, like an imprint of my confusion, or a spirit waving at me from the edge of a dream. If I stared long enough at the spirit—I cannot explain this—it had my father’s face.
Though “Reunion” had been posted recently, after I moved back to Montreal, I hadn’t remembered it well. It was the kind of poem that didn’t linger past the experience of reading it. Yet now I felt called back to it, so the lines must have made a claim on me without my conscious knowledge. The scene presented a dinner party at a family reunion. The speaker thinks of absent family, some dead, some he knows distantly, and siblings he feels connected to mostly through the internet. The reunion includes Christians and Muslims and the conversation gets heated just as a storm kicks up and people rush around saving things from the table. Or something. If I believed my theory, there were details from my life here, but also a new false detail that could direct me away from an important truth. I read and reread it. A heat formed around “the minutes/Of the accident.”
On my laptop I had screenshots of the accident report in Turkish and a text of the translation. The document was titled “Kaza Tespit Tutanağı,” which translated as “Minutes of the Accident Report.” Was this a chance echo? On my first and only reading, I’d allowed myself to wonder why my parents hadn’t been wearing seat belts. Now I gave the record the full attention I hadn’t the heart for when it was sent to me. The telling line was stark in light of the poem: “Araba park halinde, motoru çalışır vaziyette bulundu.” “The car was found parked with the engine running.” If they’d died in a crash, why was the car in park?
Apocalypse. From apokalyptein (Greek), meaning apo—“from” + kalyptein “to cover, conceal.” The world had ended for me almost two years ago when I got the call from my parents’ colleague in Turkey. With the Londoner it was brought back to life. Now in Rome in my little room I felt death-haunted and electric. Things had about them a nimbus of fatal promise, possibility. I wanted to sleep with Amanda again, more than sleep. I called her and she reminded me she was at work. I told her to phone me after her shift. Almost in the same motion I tapped end call and pressed redial.
“Can’t talk I said.” There was music in the background.
“I’m taking the night off. Where should I go?”
“Your voice sounds strange,” she said.
“How did you first hear of Three Sheets?”
“Same as August. In a pop-up on my computer. How did you?”
The Londoner had shown it to me, sent it to me, kept drawing my attention to it.
“I want to be alone with you.” I needed to stop thinking. “What’s the Palatine?”
“It’s a hill with a lot of old rocks that used to be buildings.”
“What should I do?”
“Detta and Cinzia will have fun plans. I’ll have them call you.”
“Something’s got me thinking apocalyptically. I need something present, and real, and not too beautiful.”
“If you want real ugly you could always go out to Ostia and watch men in Speedos play volleyball.”
“Ostia is where Pasolini was murdered.”
“They play on little fake beaches beside the real one.”
“He was a neorealist. He conjoined the sacred and the profane.”
“You’ll get me fired here.”
“He was a champion of the common people but they weren’t his audience.”
“Your tone sounds sort of flat. What’s wrong?”
“Something is about to happen. Something really big.”
“What are you saying?”
“My parents were murdered. I’ve never told anyone. I’ve never told myself.”
She said nothing for several seconds. I heard her tell me to stay on the phone. I heard her talking to others, her manager, I guess. She asked me where I was and told me to stay there. I tried to say I was sorry, that I hadn’t known I was going to say that about my parents, but she directed me to other topics.
“Tell me more about Fellini.”
“Pasolini. He always connects in my mind with Apollinaire, another dead poet nobody reads. Do you know him?”
“No. Tell me.”
So I did.
Against instructions I left the apartment and walked up the stairs to the top floor. Yves’s wife was coming out of their place.
“James.”
“Hello. I’m sorry, I don’t think I ever learned your name.”
“Anthoula.”
“Anthoula, hi. I was hoping to find a way up to the roof that doesn’t involve going through your apartment.” I saw her look at me more closely now, my clothing, maybe for signs I was drunk or in some kind of emotional trouble. “My girlfriend’s coming to visit and I was hoping to take her up there.”
“Oh. Well, there’s no other way up.”
I asked after Yves. I was polite. I tried to concentrate on how she looked. Was it Greek? If I didn’t know her or her name, would I see her and think Greek? Mediterranean? Her face was dark and slightly masculine, handsome. She looked very specifically like herself.
“No one’s permanent here,” she said. “We all just rent from Carlo. I find him charming and brutish. What about you?”
“Carlo reminds me of some of my father’s friends. They were all military guys.”
“Brutish Canadians. I can’t imagine.” We smiled. “I’m going out but I can give you the key. Just drop it in our mailbox and I’ll pick it up when I come back.”
As if to refuse I shook my head but at the same time thanked her. I feared she wanted to talk more. I was not present to myself or to her. I was floating somewhere over a rocky plain. Feeling transparent, I patted my pocket and withdrew the cellphone, pantomimed answering it, said, “Hello, hi!” Anthoula pressed the key into my hand. There was everything despicable about my behaviour. She whispered she’d be back around eight, holding up eight fingers. I offered a foreshortened bow to thank her again, asked my nonexistent caller to wait, and kept thanking her until she waved me away. When she was in the stairwell I put the phone in my pocket and said in full voice, “That’s right. Just keep following— Yes, just follow— I don’t— There’s— Yes…No…Yes…” until I was sure she was gone.
I hadn’t really looked at the apartment as I passed through it on the night of the dinner. The main room was orderly, dull, a faint smell of coffee. Late light streamed in through high porthole windows of coloured glass, casting blue swirls on the walls. To be alone in a strange room felt nearly right. The only book to be seen sat on the little dining table. It was in French, a catalogue of photos from a gallery show of Anthoula’s work. The pictures were of electrical fields or firing neurons laid over barely visible human faces or portraits, heads and shoulders. In the figures obscured by the webbed lines the eye kept capturing faces and losing them again, like flashing memories of someone half-forgotten. The faces felt dangerous. I closed the book, opened the dormer window, stepped out. The table and chairs were in place, their legs loosely tied together with nylon rope, the whole assembly attached to a satellite dish, as if they were being held hostage. I took a chair and looked out at the city from three storeys up. Higher roofs all around, green shuttered windows, cream brick walls. Yellows and umbers were everywhere but did I detect my love for them fading? I’d needed to be alone but out of Durant’s place, outside but not in the street.
Amanda’s brother and my parents had died in accidents that weren’t accidents. But imagining the accidental as a principle removed from intention overlooks the role of design inside chance. The degree of accident isn’t the same in every crash or chance occurrence. Whatever killed my parents, their last weeks and days were shaped by thousands of intentions, their own, their agency’s, those of refugees, agitators, soldiers, rogue leaders, and all the rest. My parents had only wanted to establish a small spot of order amid chaos. I knew a version of the feeling.
My detective work, conducted to solve an unknown crime, if there’d been a crime, had pointed me toward atrocities, in Guatemala and Turkey, so distant from each other that the discovery of a link between them, if that’s what it was, promised a dark sudden knowledge. Since learning of the disappearance of Durant’s daughter I feared I’d find in the poems evidence of a murder. Now I was facing murder itself. The social constant of it, the standing condition. Murder in history, murder in nature, not in art. Never until now had I admitted that murder, the real thing, might know me personally. It had known my parents even before they died. They struggled for others against murder and neglect, starvation, hopelessness. There was murder inside their convictions, murder in their eyes and hearts. Murder is with all who, by circumstance or choice, have their feet in the real world. My parents died for the hearts of, and maybe at the hands of, desperate souls.
Pigeons wheeled through the sky. The world, ongoing, verified nothing. It wasn’t even something to look at. I felt a small breeze, felt a shiver on my thigh, and the breeze died and the shiver returned and I realized it was my phone. Amanda had said she’d call me again as soon as she arranged to have someone take her shift, but I didn’t want to talk to her or anyone now. I didn’t want to hear my own voice. Wrapped up in words, I had failed the people I most loved.
I felt at the beginning of a long period of self-recrimination and raging decline, when I might become a danger to myself. Somehow knowing what was to come, placing myself on my personal timeline, allowed me to feel need. Though I still didn’t want to hear my voice, I now needed quiet connection. I checked the phone for a message, found none, checked my email, which suddenly made me feel not at all alone, given that someone else might be reading it, too, if not now, then in the future.
The only message was from Dominic.
“I don’t know where you are—are you here in Montreal?—but you should know I have to sell the house. I need daily care, and you and the others need to live your lives. Think about books/furniture you might want.”
One by one, or two at a time, people leave. I put the phone away and stood with my hands in my pockets, looking off at the colours and planes, not seeing a thing, and this interior blankness was clarity. The paradox, that clarity can strike us into confusion at the yawning gulf between what we thought and what we’ve learned, between seeming and being, the long then and now. The powerful asymmetry of as and was, was and is. Then the pigeons shot overhead and turned, seemed to stall for a moment, and came rushing back toward me.