by Jack Livings
A place you spend your whole life becomes a memory vault, its walls hung with images encased in ice. At the front door I loop a finger around a coat hook and give it a tug. It’s seated as firmly as ever, as indestructible as the Apelles itself, for it is the Apelles itself, just as the faucets and floorboards are, each fixture as eternal as stone, each one laden with the past, and I feel as though I’m pulling them all along behind me, every last scrap of wallpaper, every sink and window. I wonder, as I have so many times, if Lazlo Brunn, time traveler in the great beyond, has ever spent one of his thousand-year seconds here, brushing his fingers over the coat hooks, passing through the door of his old apartment to sit with Turk, however briefly, a life being such a brief thing, quicker than a thought to the old doctor. Or would he have been wiser than that, too aware of the dangers of a place so freighted with the past, the near impossibility of escape?
The familiar heft of the front door, the solid whoosh-click of oak and steel, the sonic death of the carpeted hall to the elevator, the cool, almost imperceptible resistance of the call button. The elevator arrives empty and I press , and for old times’ sake I release a bloody scream into my balled-up cardigan from around 12 to 2. In the lobby I nod to Peter and divert past the brassy grid of the mailboxes to the service elevator, press, board, and down I go. Past the storage cages, into the boiler room, unlock steel door, close and lock steel door, down the stairs, ever downward, more steel opening, slamming shut behind me. No one waxes poetic about a basement. Beyond the cellar door lies the realm of rot and fear. If you’re lucky, the domicile of your enemies. A pit, home to mold and decay, host to sewer, worm, and root.
Another short flight of stairs, another steel door, the handle cold, two locks and a keypad. It opens directly into my office. No diploma on the wall, but two of my mother’s canvases keep watch over each other from opposite sides of the room. There’s nothing here you wouldn’t expect to find on the C-suite wing at any moderately sized producer of exportable plastic componentry. No windows, of course, but tuned lighting does a passable imitation of Central Park on a clear fall day.
The Nutcracker soldier I lifted from the Vornados’ house all those years ago occupies a position of honor on my desk, a four-drawer fiddleback number that belonged to Turk. Beneath the paintings, which are unobtrusive color studies, interesting but not distracting, there are marble-top work surfaces. A pair of sofas face each other in the middle of the room, White House style, for client meetings. When I bought out Turk and became the sole proprietor, I only made one upgrade: the floor. I had the oak planks ripped up and the concrete jackhammered, which dropped the surface six inches. One industrial iron step, diamond plate, brings you down from the main office.
In 2001, there were two earthquakes in Manhattan, one in January, one in October, and though initially I assigned them no meaning, over the years I began to think of them as bookends to that day in September, a pair of memorial shrugs of the mantel, neither of which moved the needles at the Columbia Earth Institute more than the towers’ collapse, as though out of respect, and I confess that by the time I took over from Turk I felt a strange affection for the bedrock beneath our streets, and wanted to be as close to the schist as possible.
Thus my office floor is the roof of the Hartland Formation, its gray burr ground smooth and buffed to a dull sheen. Most people wouldn’t notice a floor, and if they do I assume they see concrete. I’ve been generous with the rugs, low-pile, natural hues, and you would really have to be on your geologic game to recognize that you’re standing on Cambrian schist, an ancient layer in the St. Nicholas thrust zone, just west of Cameron’s Line. When you stand in my office, you stand on the earth’s crust. It’s a beautiful volcanic rock studded with garnet and flecks of quartz that wink in the light. Copious deposits of magnetite.
Tanawat’s office is on the other side of the lobby, the decor decidedly unchanged since Turk brought him on as chief of operations back in the ’90s, Tanawat being an archconservative when it comes to the preservation of his own personal history. He maintains, for instance, a full arsenal of functioning bongs dating back to his years at Columbia. He also has a shelf heaving with family photo albums. It is because of him that I have no concern about the company’s ability to provide our clients the same level of service as ever, whether I’m here or not. By all rights, the company should be his, anyway. He’s the one who manages relationships with the vendors, keeps abreast of the latest trends in tech and fantasy, and ensures that the clients get exactly what they need, even if that’s not what they want. He tends to spend as much of the winter as possible on the West Coast, so I haven’t seen much of him lately, but he’ll know what to do.
I feel as if a hundred pilgrims who had set off decades ago, each from a different corner of the globe, are approaching their final destination. There is a cohesive presence, a warmth in the air. Surely I was part of the blueprint from the start, a structural element drawn in by William Push, a truss at the apex of a larger idea. My preparation long predates my knowledge of it, that’s for sure. What more could I have asked for: A father who taught me to mistrust probabilities in favor of coincidences. A mother skilled in the interpretation of signs and symbols. From Vik I learned the secrets of dispersion. From Turk, an understanding of the methods of complication. From Lazlo I received the mechanism for transformation.
And from Albert, who rather than surrender his guilt transformed me into his surrogate, Albert, who devised a mysticism all his own, who, like Lazlo, managed to outsmart mortality itself, the master complication, who escaped by engineering his own expulsion, shedding his own skin and putting on mine, I received the final dose of knowledge. Sometimes a suicide is not meant to be an end to suffering but its extension. And while I do not intend to suffer any longer, I do intend to extend myself infinitely.
I had lost myself in my father’s and Albert’s and Vik’s murky recollections, but now I am found. And though I understand that my life has already been written, all of it preordained, I confess to some trepidation about what lies ahead. It has become difficult to keep myself separate from the world. I’ve got real issues with the observable universe right now due to this marriage of the minds, and I suspect this would be only the beginning, like the striated mixing of paint, eddies of Albert swirling into eddies of my father, Vik bleeding into Hazel, blending at the edges, distinction vanishing. Maybe my father was protecting me from this very thing with his fictional version of Hazel. Maybe I’ve done this to myself. It doesn’t matter now. I know what’s coming if I stick around. I know it like I know foot is foot and hand is hand. Soon enough, foot will be paper clip and hand will be soup and I’ll be lost to myself. Before that happens, I must evacuate this body. This is ancient business, it’s witches and cauldrons on the heath. I finally have my chance to invite the seraphim of amnesia to settle on the crown of my skull, to chant, Forget, Forget, Forget, do its egg scramble number down in the brainpan, the old Moniz mash, the leucotome twist, one-two, look, I’m a roux.
I have rewritten myself and now I must focus on the solid forms before me, on the proper preparation of the tools that will aid me on my passage, the consecrated elements.
Headphones, quartz, copper, and electricity. The quarter-inch tapes are spooled, Urdu on the right, German on the left. I have cross-wired the dual decks exactly as Lazlo wired his, not out of sentimentality but because I wouldn’t dare try to outsmart this mystical communion I am undertaking. I’m not so arrogant as to think that there could be a better way to do this, some modern, digital substitute. There is only one way to be sure it works, and that is the old way. I have procured a pair of Koss SP/3s, the same headphones Lazlo used, because where understanding ends, myth begins. How else do we recognize the horizon line of the sacred if not by our inability to comprehend? A lifetime of devotion to auditory hermeneutics would not begin to demystify the inner workings of the spiritual-mechanical elision I’m about to undertake.
To Lazlo’s machine I have added a conduit, one that wil
l transport me into the Apelles herself, and from there I will make my way into the magnetite beneath my feet, into geologic time, into the world of the subatomic. I stand at the edge of a cliff, a diver peering down at the flashing water so far below. I have constructed a sturdy platform, but the execution of the dive is up to me.
A bomb vest is but a means to achieve divine elevation. The same for the knife drawn across the neck of the sacrificial lamb. The rocks hurled at the martyr. Tools. I have been wondering if the men who killed my husband were properly prepared. An airplane’s aluminum fuselage is no more divine than a horse cart unless the pilot has prepared himself for the metamorphosis. Did they transform?
I will seek out the remnants of Mohamed Atta. I will seek out the remnants of my husband. For I have prepared properly. Of that much I’m sure. I have been preparing for so long! What is a complication but a preparation for its end? Once I am free, I will create infinite complications within my complication. Surely I am already free. Surely I will never be free. I am everywhere and nowhere. Permutations upon permutations for three hundred sixty generations. Blood and bone, iron and steel, disease and cure, atoms enjoined and split asunder.
I am ready.
Soon I will exist outside the boundaries of what my father wrote, outside of Albert, Vik, this building, my life.
I will follow the path of Lazlo Brunn. I will don the headphones and press the keys. I will listen, and once I have slowed myself sufficiently, I will close my mouth around the strand of heavy-gauge copper wire, thick as a thumb, that is poised on the wooden stand like a cobra before me, and I will inject myself into the Apelles via the heavy current converter I have affixed to her electrical conduits, having secured the connection with the hex nut my father gifted me, and my being will be transformed into a flowing stream, all sense and sensibility erased, all memories flayed to shreds, cohesion rent asunder, and I’ll pass into her foundation, and from there into the Hartland schist.
Yes, my body will smolder and die, but don’t mistake this for suicide. It’s simple sabotage, a pinprick to the foot of an elephant. A pinprick, but I am one of many. I will exist, reconstituted on the same plane as Vik, reduced, reformed, a free radical passing through stone and air, burrowing in, reconstituting in a leaf, superheated at the core of the earth, a part of everything living, dead, fired like a shot out of the sliver of existence we call humanity into the wilderness of natural time. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. But, of course, I didn’t have to think of anything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the gifts of time and space to work, and for bringing me into contact with extraordinary artists and scholars, thank you to the American Academy in Rome, and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for awarding me the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize for Literature. My deepest thanks also to PEN America and the family of Robert Bingham for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and for the financial support attached to the prize.
My thanks to Lee and Cynthia Vance, and to Carol Paik and Daniel Slifkin, who have over the years repeatedly lent Jennie and me quiet places to write. And my love and thanks to Larry and Mary Yabroff, whose dining room table is its own writer’s retreat.
Thank you, Jason Siebenmorgen and Christoph Meinrenken, for friendship and generosity beyond compare.
Dr. Ukichiro Nakaya’s snow crystal classification system was a constant companion as I wrote, as was the snowflake photography of Wilson Bentley. The work of Dr. Charles Merguerian, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Hofstra University, on subterranean Manhattan was invaluable in creating the world under Hazel’s feet.
Of the many helpful documents and books I consulted, several proved to be indispensable: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Disaster Survey Report 78-1, which was key in building the novel’s chronology and was a fascinating account of the meteorological science behind the storm itself; the SOE Secret Operations Manual; the Field Manuals of the Office of Strategic Services, especially No. 3, which describes the methods of simple sabotage; The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945, by David S. Wyman; and Herr Krupp’s Berthawerk, by Theodore H. Lehman, essential for its descriptions of imprisonment at Fünfteichen and of labor at the munitions foundry.
I am grateful to the supporters and staff of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive Online and to the British Library Sound Archive’s National Life Stories / Living Memory of the Jewish Community project, both of which provide free online access to their many interviews with Holocaust survivors.
For your intelligence and infinite patience, thank you to everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with a hand in the publication of this book, especially Gretchen Achilles, Rodrigo Corral, Hannah Goodwin, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Alexis Nowicki, and Stephen Weil.
Thank you to Sean McDonald for wading through multiple drafts and thousands of pages, and for fielding endless questions with grace and generosity. Thank you to Antoine Wilson, whose friendship and enthusiasm have forestalled countless crises of the spirit. And thank you to Anna Stein for always answering, always humoring, always looking forward.
To my children, who are, in ways mysterious and undeniable, at the center of everything I write, and to Jennie, who is in every sentence, every word, my love.
ALSO BY JACK LIVINGS
The Dog: Stories
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Livings is the author of the short story collection The Dog, which was awarded the 2015 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Rome Prize for Literature. He lives in New York City with his family. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part III
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part IV
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgments
Also by Jack Livings
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Copyright © 2021 by Jack Livings
All rights reserved
First edition, 2021
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-71002-6
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