by Jack Livings
That each of the perpetrators could die only once was, for Albert, a powerful argument against a natural state of justice. How many times would each member of the executive board of the corporation need to die to make up for the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands of people? How weak the mechanism for exacting revenge we have been granted, and how unimaginative our solutions, he’d said to Cecelia, who took a more measured approach: Punishment was imperfect because it required concessions to the humanity of the punishers. Of course there was no natural state of justice—justice was a human creation, and relied entirely on human behavior to define its parameters and enforce its boundaries. To think otherwise was naïve. Were it in her power to dole out torture, to do so would erase her own humanity, turn her into a monstrosity, and pervert the very rights she’d sworn to protect.
Albert interviewed a number of witnesses, including Jewish survivors of camps at Fünfteichen and Markstädt, which had supplied the bulk of the labor to the armament factories in Poland. Among the stories he recorded: a Polish Jew, Janusz Stern, assigned to work at a Krupp factory and beaten to death on the factory floor for laughing at a joke. Albert crisscrossed southeastern Poland searching for an electrician’s apprentice, the lone surviving non-German eyewitness, but in the end could only determine that he’d disappeared near the Russian front.
* * *
Albert worked two years on the case. Krupp’s sentence: twelve years and forfeiture of property. Not even three years later, General John McCloy ordered that Krupp was to be freed from Landsberg, his property restored. The only thing worse than a Nazi was a communist, and Stalin’s shadow was creeping across the continent. The U.S. needed a strong, industrialized Germany between the Reds and the free people of Western Europe. Cecelia Goetz was right. Justice is a concession to the humanity of the punishers. If we were made to atone for the sins of our fathers, there’d be no one left.
I understand now that my father was trying to atone. He might not have burned and broken his body, but his illogical fears, the terrors that controlled his movements through the world, were punishments, daily reminders of his sin. His books were shrines to the death of Janusz Stern. Every crooked word he wrote was an act of remembrance. Every malformed character, every faulty structure, every looping metafictional roller coaster. For decades he failed to write a single word of truth, and that was his lasting memorial to what he’d witnessed in that Krupp factory. The book he hated most, the one he always said was the biggest lie of all, the one that made him famous, made him wealthy, and forced him to create yet another version of himself in order to deal with the praise, Slingshot, was the story of a Jewish teacher who escaped the Nazis, set in Poland in 1944. All those years he was writing negatives, reverse images. The more he lied, the more books he sold. A person could be forgiven for thinking that the whole world is inside out.
29.
The air had frozen and cracked open so that it could spontaneously generate snow without need of the clunky cloud-based apparatus, a spectacular advance in meteorological destruction, a full-bore whitewash, wall-to-wall cotton sludge, a ubiquitous visual plane that induced in my father an acute claustrophobia because he couldn’t—yes, it was true—see his hand in front of his face. Whiteout conditions! he thought (he couldn’t help himself from naming everything, however banal; he was sure that even as he drew his final breath he would be cataloguing the room, Table, Chair, Wife, Window, and his dying words would be something profound like Ceiling Fan) and went on to consider that on the ice caps this was how explorers died, lashed together by a length of rope, sausage links snaking blindly around in wobbly parabolas, spirograph patterns, tangled knots that enfolded the fools in their open-air tomb, though it was easier to recover the corpses when the thaw arrived several months later …
He wasn’t going to die. He knew that. Didn’t he? The streets at that moment safer than they’d been in years, and he was never more than thirty feet from the door of a building, though the physical insistence of the storm was extraordinary, fire-hose-level insistent. Since his last step he’d been suffocated, encased in Styrofoam, buried alive, disinterred, drawn and quartered, plunged whole into an icy lake, battered by shovels, whipped and spun and trampled and given a righteous slap on the ass to get the lungs fired up again, and when he ventured forth another tenuous step into the void, perhaps following John in a northernward direction, perhaps charting his own new trail west to the Hudson, matters of velocity and heading having been delegated to the murky realm of telepathy and Tarot, cardinal points having become remnants of a lost age, he had the sense that he very well could be stepping off a cliff. On the upside, he was pretty sure that the mental patient chasing them wouldn’t be faring any better.
Well, he was mostly right about that. The counterman from the Cosmic, who, with all the precision of an inadequately tranquilized rhino, had come weaving across the hospital lobby at John, plowing into chairs, flattening a revolving wire stand of reproductive health brochures, his bruised brain a tangle of sparking wires that resolved into carbonized, half-formed curses, many of which, if salvaged, might have proved innovative, even poetic, packed as his quiver was with a broad spectrum of linguistic twists and cultural biases, and had, bummer for him, caught the attentions of the off-duty cop, Mr. Mustache, Officer Kissler when on the beat, not just another stick of lobby furniture to be trashed by our mercury-tongued counterman as he prepared to sing his polyphonic aria of profanities, which had begun with the aforementioned silently intoned Motherfucker but that, afterburners alight, would soon enough soar to the perilous heights from which the terminator becomes a haw closing over the land and sea, exposing in the wake of the shadow’s blade all the voices of all the peoples, amplified by the shimmering black glass of the sky, an anthem of curses and blasphemies rising from the surface, funneled through the raw red throat of this prophet, humble diner employee, head wound victim, who had only just formed the word Horse in his cottony mouth when Officer K. stuck out one Bates steel-toe three-quarter patrol boot and brought him down hard. A knee in his spine, left arm in wrench-lock hold, the counterman wriggled and tried to throw the bastard off, but the officer gave a little tug and his shoulder socket became a fiery ring and he cut that shit out but fast.
John and my father, having fled before the takedown, had plunged into the storm like a couple of foxes diving for lemmings and didn’t know they’d been saved, so their antagonist existed at that moment in the pseudo-quantum state of lying in forced prone restraint position on the filthy linoleum back at Roosevelt while simultaneously pursuing the two of them in the snow, if only in their imaginations—though their shared belief that at any moment a pair of iron hands would pincer their shoulders and they’d be in short order eating their own teeth must count as a shade of reality in which the counterman’s existence was as real as the genuine article’s. My father would have something to say about the third and fourth state of the counterman’s existence, the one here, in these pages, and the one there, in his pages, but if you really want to play around in the garden of meta, try The Horseshoe Crab or his first one, El El Narrows. (It’s 1968, Mexico, and el-el protagonist tartamudo, Duo—the el el additionally a play on the of Longshore Laredo, the U.S. company pouring funds into the Dirty War—hamstrung by his tripping tongue, has ceased talking and is instead writing a bildungsroman, protagonist of which is a character named Duo. Halfway through El El Narrows [coincidentally, also the title of Duo’s novel], writer Duo is shot by a soldier on a dark street, in a neighborhood colloquially known as Los Estrechos, the Narrows. In the closing pages, which come quite early, we learn that it was Duo’s own brother, Salmar, who pulled the trigger. Duo’s novel is left unfinished, another unfertilized egg destined for the frying pan. I digress, but you get a sense of what I’m dealing with.)
My father had lost sight of the younger, swifter companion as soon as they’d hit the open air, and he’d trudged dutifully down the hospital’s arcing driveway and into the street, where it seemed possible t
hat the snow might be shallower. He’d turned right, to what he felt assured was the north, and had been staggering blindly, with every step expecting said cliff, when a dark form appeared at his elbow. In his fright, he pitched face-first into the snow, his shoes carving channels, and he flopped around in the powder, his sweater failing to forestall the avalanche up his torso while his pants committed the same act of betrayal on his nethers.
Oh mother of Christ, he shouted around a mouthful of snow, and rolled onto his back, where at least he might be able to fend off the attack with some sort of pawing/kicking action, and it was from that position that he made out a familiar beard, a hat, and an extended glove, which grabbed his hand and hoisted him up. It was John, of course, who’d been right there all along.
You’re going the wrong way, John yelled through his scarf.
Yes! my father shouted back. Am I?
John possessed a couple of preternatural physical talents, one of which was an instinctual connection to the earth’s magnetic fields, which granted him an ability to navigate perfectly under any circumstances (the other was hawk-like eyesight; on a planar stretch of Nevada highway, he could read a billboard at two and a half miles), and his gut told him thataway to the Apelles. I wonder now if John, like a chess piece, was capable only of certain proscribed movements that night; if perhaps his directional gift was nothing more than an expiration date. Looking into the past, aren’t we all chess pieces? Why shouldn’t the same hold true when we look into the future?
Together they trudged northward, and after a couple of blocks unmolested by the counterman, they assumed he had surrendered to the blizzard. My father arrived back at the Apelles around 2:00 a.m. John, who made a detour, arrived around 3:00 a.m.
* * *
The timeline is what allows me to see clearly through the aged panes of wobbled glass, straight through to that night. Sure, temporal triangulation is an analgesic, a distraction from this ragged sack of retrospection I’m dragging along the concrete behind me. But the precise timing, everyone’s movements that night executed as if according to an exquisite plan—we were even then a complication, each one of us a gear locked in rotation with all the rest, marching forward in conjunction, pausing, marching forward, pausing, none of us any more or less culpable than any other. Just a grand machine executing a design.
30.
Do you remember Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1913, caused a real ruckus at the Armory Show? It was one of my mother’s favorites. It is one of my favorites because of Duchamp’s precise expression of superposition, of the possibility of multiple physical states occupying the same position at the same time—the nude not at the top and bottom of the staircase simultaneously but possibly in either place, or somewhere in between—it fills me with hope. The nude is both everywhere and nowhere. I’ve come to understand that if my perception could be altered, I might be able to see exactly where she is, which is to say: everywhere. Perhaps then I might be able to see where I am. A fundamental truth of my life, probably obvious to you by now, is that I have never been able to determine my own position.
I have, however, finally discovered a solution to that fundamental problem, and to Albert’s fundamental problem, and to the fundamental problem at the root of humanity’s grossest failings, which is that we exist only now, in this very moment, and while we are capable of remembering the past, we cannot physically be in the past because we cannot be in more than one place at a time, or time at one place.
My solution is hardly an innovation. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, the lab at Camp Hero was conducting experiments to combat the same tragic problem. Turns out that the conspiracy theorists had the right idea, but the wrong mechanism. Military researchers weren’t strapping crusty old Montauk lobstermen into rocket planes and launching them into wormholes. All they were doing was selling them weed with extra ingredients. What could be more natural, and what better cover for a perception-altering experiment? After you toked up and the military-grade sedatives kicked in, agents would enter your residence, strap you and your buddies to gurneys, transport you to the base, and the lab coats would run their tests. After a long, weird night you’d be deposited in a thicket out at Culloden Point, where you’d awaken in the dawn light and shrug it off as the perfectly normal conclusion to a Tuesday night at Doug’s house.
Long-term effects became apparent years later. Test subjects saw all manner of spooks, specters, blurry ghosts zipping around at the periphery, and some began trading stories about abductions, wild visions of leather straps and filmstrips run at high speed. Sal Fumoso, proprietor of Cinema West and a son of Montauk, claimed to have been one of the abductees.
Lazlo Brunn’s desk at the Apelles had faced east; when he ran his tape deck experiments, I have no doubt that his inner eye projected beyond the river, past Brookhaven National Laboratory, all the way out to the dark fingertip of Montauk. His binaural research was done under contract to the lab at Camp Hero. Maybe Krupp money was deep behind the Army’s research. Surely, given the decades that had passed since Lazlo and Magda’s escape to the United States, word would have gotten back to his relatives. Maybe it did and maybe they didn’t care. Bygones. Maybe Krupp had nothing to do with the robbery of his decks and tapes. War at the heart of it all, though. Destruction, domination, pulverization.
31.
Ghosts? Blips on the scope, a weak glow as the green wiper swished by trailing its veil of excited electrons? Symbols, the imaginings of a long-dead futurist, a dream they were sharing, an acid trip? Were they even out there or was it just a superior hallucination courtesy of the ministry of snow and ice? There was nothing to see, everything to see, it was prisoner’s cinema, frothing forms that coalesced and evaporated, and my father was awaiting the famed Third Man, who would any second appear to guide them home through the knee-deep soufflé when he walked right into the back of John (fuck, the hell, ow!), who’d stopped dead in his tracks because while my father’s mental radiator popped its cap back there at the hospital, John’s motor had a copious snort of sweet green ethylene glycol pulsing through its hoses, maintaining chambré, and despite the gravity of dread, his dead son hair shirt, and despite the hairline fracture in his third metacarpal due to his spill at the Cosmic (cutely: scrapper’s fracture, well-known to ER docs working third-shift Saturdays), which manifested a dull, full-paw throb punctuated with exciting, unpredictable doses of electrocution-level zaps that ran clear to his collarbone and, despite the knowledge that his father was out here, somewhere, possibly entombed in a mound he’d already tromped over, despite those distractions—wait, no, it was because of them, in fact—his young brain had been purring along like a dream, operating at max efficiency, and he had had a moment of insight, a flash, an eclipse, a black pupil in a fiery iris, a sense of absolute clarity at the edge of the snowy hyperspace tunnel hurtling past him, and he’d run smack into his own bloody realization (oof, hey!) that he should turn around and go back to the hospital.
He had to pull away his scarf and put his lips very close to my father’s ear to communicate his intention, the snow adhering to a hard-line horizontalist platform, pegging each word like a dart and whisking it southward, and by the time he’d finished explaining, his declarations had carried deep into the theater district; a few unlucky syllables caught by downdrafts were dashed against the drifts and lost forever, but some were cross-winded to the river, snagged on looping updrafts and corkscrewed into the convulsive digestive tract hovering over the city, pummeled and twisted through the inner workings of the cumulonimbus before being funneled into the inverted colon of frigid air rising toward the nailhead moon like a fistful of confetti, and ejected into the constellate sky to wander the aether for eternity, dodging cherubim and decommissioned telsats.
Thus, he repeated himself until my father got the gist and had to decide, then, whether to follow hoary Ahab or to carry on in a homebound direction. Didn’t take a heartbeat. He patted John on the shoulder, wished him godspeed, and pushed on home. Always a
moment of terrible import in the historical record, two intrepid explorers agreeing to divide, exercising free will, the wages of such shortsightedness their inevitable demise. But wait. A juke, sidestep: not everyone’s demise, only Albert Caldwell’s, John’s, and mine.
Vik had by this time already led Albert back to the Apelles. The elder Caldwell had abandoned the stolen taxi in Riverside Park after punching a hole in an unseen iron fence on Riverside Drive and smashing through a bench before shushing downhill toward the water. He might have slid all the way into the Hudson if he hadn’t run into a gargantuan drift that ate the car and forced him to exit via the window. He’d gone the rest of the way on foot, and had been working south along the railing at the river’s edge, stopping to peer down at the Hudson every few feet, seeking a spot where he might throw himself in, because the river wore a skirt of ice thirty feet wide, and Albert, not thinking clearly, barely thinking at all, in fact, operating in a hallucinatory state brought on by exhaustion, alcohol, and incipient hypothermia, had decided he might as well jump down onto the ice, a twenty-foot drop, and from there proceed to the water’s edge, when he came into Vik’s sight line.
