None of this Ever Really Happened

by Peter Ferry

  "I don't have a read on age, but there's something—"

  "What?"

  "I don't know. There's something recognizable about the person."

  "Dark or fair?"

  "Hard to say. Dark, I think."

  "Can you get an emotional read?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "How would you describe this parting?" Gene asked. "Is it amicable? Did she slam on the brakes and order him out? Does he lean over to say good-bye?"

  "Hurried is all. He must have heard me screech my brakes. It's like 'Gotta go. See ya.'"

  "Where's he go?" he asked.

  "Don't know. I have no sense of that."

  "Do you see the black car in your rearview mirror once you pass it?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Go back to Sunset Foods and come back down Green Bay. Could you have been aware of the car before you nearly hit it?"

  "I don't think so."

  "How about after you pass it? What then?"

  "Well, I have one of those talks you have with yourself sometimes. I say, 'Listen, asshole, what the hell is wrong with you? It's Christmastime. It's Friday night. You're going out to dinner, secretly you like Don's bad jokes, and you just missed having an accident, so lighten up, for God's sake.'"

  "And do you?"

  "I do. I cut over to Sheridan Road in Hubbard Woods even though it's a little slower and take the scenic route. I switch from NPR to Christmas music. I start singing Christmas carols. And I'm still doing that when she comes up behind me with her brights on."

  "Back to the car you almost hit, did you see the face of the person who got out?" he asked.

  "Not really."

  "Hear his voice?"

  "No, no. I don't know what it is . . . something . . . something . . ."

  "You're tired, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Let's stop for now. Keep your eyes closed."

  "Okay."

  "I'm going to count from ten to zero. With each number, you'll emerge a bit more from hypnosis until we get to zero. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  Afterward, we just sat there for quite a while. I was tired. I closed my eyes again for a long moment, and when I opened them, Gene was smiling at me. "You found it," he said. "You found the pebble in your shoe. I was pretty sure it was there."

  "Were you?"

  "Yeah. You don't seem nuts enough to be nuts."

  "How very clinical."

  "You like that?"

  "I do." We talked about why I hadn't made the connection before. Gene thought that I'd been traumatized by the accident and maybe even suffered mild shock. He didn't think it surprising. "What you saw was momentous," he said. "What happened before it was insignificant by comparison. I imagine you just forgot it. Your conscious mind filled up with the facts and the feelings of the accident, and there wasn't room for anything else. Also, there was some time between the two incidents and, maybe more important, some changes. You changed routes; you changed moods. Maybe you just didn't connect the two cars."

  "Now that I have, what can I do about it?" I asked.

  "I'm not sure. Maybe nothing. I'd sit on it a day or two and see if your anxiety level goes down. If it does, then maybe you've done enough just to make the connection."

  "If it doesn't?"

  "If I were you, I'd wait a while. I think you'll know what to do when the time is right."

  As it happened, my anxiety level did not decrease. In fact, it increased, but it was not the same, dull, troubled, aimless nervousness I'd felt before. Now it was keen and focused. Who was the guy in the car? What was he doing there? Why did he get out? Why did he allow Lisa Kim to drive away to her death? And what was there about him that was faintly familiar? I sat around for the two days Gene recommended and then picked up the telephone. If I was going to answer my questions, I'd have to learn more about Lisa Kim. Tanya had said that Rosalie Belcher Svigos was Lisa's best friend, so I called her at the Chicago hospital where she was doing her residency.

  At first it didn't seem as if I would learn much from Dr. Rosalie Svigos. She didn't shake my hand or let me buy her a blueberry muffin or decaf coffee in the hospital cafeteria. In fact she was so cool, I wasn't sure why she'd agreed to meet me at all, yet she had. She was a big, pretty woman with such a don't-bullshit-me quality about her that I had to remind myself that she was only a year older than Lisa. She sat there in the noisy cafeteria and watched me suspiciously as I fairly babbled. But she did sit and watch me even though I was telling her hardly anything; I was dissembling although I hadn't intended to—there was something in her demeanor that made the whole last-guy-to-see-her-alive story sound fanciful and unlikely.

  She interrupted me in mid-sentence. She asked who I was. A reporter? An investigator? "Did Lisa's father hire you? Or was it the insurance company?" Confronted, I told her the whole improbable tale, and I could tell she found it improbable. I could also tell that she wasn't about to give up anything on her friend, that she was there to protect Lisa. But from whom? A bumbling high school English teacher with a bad conscience? Still, she sat, and there had to be a reason for that especially after she found out I was no threat to Lisa, but when I asked for information, she gave me the party line: Lisa was a brilliant actor. Like any true artist, she challenged people, made them think about the line between reality and illusion, the nature of artifice, everything they believed. She was an intuitive actor who was always practicing her craft. She was a minimalist who never appeared to be acting. She was a genius who had little time for fools, who didn't mind being misunderstood or making enemies.

  "Did that cause problems with her career?" I asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Is that why they dropped her from Gangbusters before they took it to New York?"

  "They begged her to go to New York," Rosalie said. "She was the one who said no."

  "Why in the world would she do that? Wasn't it, like, her big break?"

  "Big breaks only matter if you are looking for one. She was looking for a character. When Gangbusters opened in the back of a bar on Lincoln Avenue, she had a minor role. In the next two years, they rewrote the whole thing around Lucy Fantisimo. She became the lead. Her character took over the play. That was all Lisa. By the time they were ready to go to New York, the thing had been compromised to death, bastardized. One thing about Lisa, she was not a compromiser. She was an absolutist. She said no. She was bored with the part. She'd given everything to and gotten everything out of Gangbusters that she could. She'd moved on."

  "Pardon me, but moved on to what? Waiting tables?"

  "Let me tell you something," Rosalie bristled. "Lisa Kim could find more dramatic possibilities in a four-hour shift than some actors find in a career. But no, she was not just waiting tables. She did an experimental film that was remarkable, she did an Off-Off-play that was interesting, and she wrote a play that Bruce Kaplan is thinking of producing in the spring. Plus, she'd been cast in a big-time independent film called Dream Car that was shot in New York last spring. I think it's going to be huge. I think Lisa was about to get a lot of recognition."

  Unlike many doctors I've known who are well trained but poorly educated, Rosalie Svigos had ideas, and I knew that I'd found someone who could help me. But now she'd said her piece, and she was looking at her watch. I needed to act quickly. I said, "A few minutes before the accident, I saw a man get out of Lisa's car. Do you know who that might have been?"

  Now she was looking at me again, and sharply. "What did he look like?" she asked.

  "It was dark. My impression of him was that he was tall, thin, and dark haired."

  "Where was this?"

  "On Green Bay Road in Glencoe."

  "Glencoe?" she said to herself. I took another shot. "At the time of the accident, Lisa was high on heroin."

  "My God," she said, "where'd you get that?"

  "There was a private autopsy."

  "Do you know what heroin does to you? It makes you nod. It makes the world go away. I
t makes you feel nothing. That was the last thing in the world that Lisa Kim would have wanted. She wanted to feel everything. She was the most alive person I ever met. Now if you told me cocaine—something that would heighten sensation—I might believe you, but . . . Lisa did not use heroin."

  Rosalie got up to go. I couldn't think of a way to keep her. To my surprise, she fished a business card out of the pocket of her lab coat and put it on the table. "If you find out who the man in the car was, I'd like to know." She hesitated, then spoke again. "You don't find heroin in an autopsy," she said. "You find opiates—the stuff heroin comes from—but morphine comes from it, too, and codeine that's in some cough medicines and in Tylenol 3. She could have taken Tylenol 3 for a toothache and tested positive or eaten a poppy-seed bagel. Lisa was not using heroin."

  I could have run Lydia over the next day, and not even seen her. I know I had things on my mind, but I should have seen her, anyway. It happened like this: I was driving and thinking. I knew that I knew something about the man who got out of Lisa Kim's car that night, but I did not know what it was. Something. Could I have met him? Could I have recognized him? I turned off the radio and let my mind drain. I was driving. I needed to move in order to think. I had called Lydia to ask if I could come by for some things. It was time that we had some contact anyway, although actually I had hoped she wouldn't be home; I thought the call might be enough. Besides, I was really just looking for an excuse to be in motion.

  Lydia was just leaving for a run, and I wondered momentarily if her stretching exercises against her car, her expensive New Balance running shoes and her Lycra outfit were meant for me. I had always been the one who exercised, and she had often teased me about being vain. We exchanged a few self-consciously pleasant words like neighbors meeting in the supermarket; then she took off and I went upstairs. I poked around. I had forgotten what I had come for. I was thinking of that night, trying to re-create it once again as I had with Gene, but this time, slow it down one more click. I wanted to capture a detail I had so far missed. Some detail. Any detail.

  Absently I stacked some books and CDs, then put them in a plastic bag. In my mind I was back in the school. I was locking my classroom. What exactly did I say to Thompson? I realized that I was closing a door right now, but it was the apartment door. I realized that I was in a parallel situation at the moment; I was going down a flight of stairs. I was getting into my car. Perhaps I could physically re-create what happened. Did I turn on the radio immediately? Did I leave it off? I pulled through the alley and stopped at the next street. I sat there idling; what had I been wrestling with that night? Something. What in the world could it have been? I had my foot on the brake; I checked my rearview mirror. Remember. Remember. What had it been? Now there was someone in front of my car. Someone was bobbing up and down. She slapped my hood with the palm of her hand. "Hey!" she yelled. It was Lydia. She was running in place. I hadn't even seen her; how long had she been there? She came to my window.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah."

  "What are you doing? I couldn't get your attention."

  "I was thinking. I was just thinking."

  She slapped the hood again, waved, and ran off. I watched her go. I hadn't seen her there. She'd been right in front of me, and I hadn't seen her. I remembered then that there had been a time in my life when all I wanted to do was look at her.

  When Lydia had gone away that time early on for three and a half weeks with another guy, I hadn't missed her at first, and then I had, and then I had terribly. I lay awake in bed wondering who she was fucking and how and when (right now?) and where; I imagined it was a wry, long-legged copywriter with tousled hair she'd once introduced me to at a party. I tried not to call her at her office, and when I finally did, our conversation was brief; she was busy, distracted, dismissive, self-protective in her "none of your damn business" mode. When she had finally come home, weary and wistful, I was in love with her, or thought I was. At the very least, I wanted her in a way that I had not before someone else wanted her. It was the strongest feeling that I'd ever had for a woman, and so I called it love, and perhaps it was. I needed to remember that.

  I went back to Carolyn's place and lay on my back on the floor with my palms to the ground. My anxiety, which seemed to bloom full after any contact with Lydia, was manifesting itself in two ways: as something akin to vertigo and as a form of agoraphobia. I was scared of my own height; I felt too tall and conspicuous, though I am not very tall. I wanted to be shorter, lower, smaller, flatter. I also wanted to be alone. In crowded places I felt panic. Grocery stores with their fluorescent lights were particularly bad. One day I left a full grocery cart in the middle of an aisle and fled. The noise in restaurants sometimes got inside my head. Twice I'd had to make lame excuses and go out to my car to lie down across the backseat for a while. Sometimes I held onto the table or chair with both hands. I was afraid that I might just slowly topple over or slide under the table. Another antidote to all this madness was movement. Like a shark, if I kept moving, I could feed and breathe and stay just ahead of my demons.

  For a couple of days after seeing Lydia, I avoided human contact, slept on the floor, and rode my bike. Gene told me to wait, so I waited. The first day was muggy and misty, and I rode slowly north along the lakeshore, picked up the North Shore bike path in Lake Forest heading west, turned north on the Des Plaines River bike path, and ended up in Libertyville at an old barroom called The Firkin that has good food and great beers on tap. I ate a salmon sandwich, drank two cold glasses of Hoegarden and read some of Eric Hanson's Motoring with Mohammed. When I started back, the sun had burned the mist away, so I found a bright, grassy spot beside the river, intertwined my legs with my bike, and slept on my back for an hour before riding back to the city. Then I sat on the deck with Art, Cooper, and my book, and read until dark.

  The second day I rode the lakeshore south to Hyde Park. A front had passed through in the night, and the pavement and grass were wet with the showers it had brought; the air was cool and clear. I stopped often to look at the city and the lake, to watch boats coming and going, a basketball game, the dogs at the dog beach, and the black, Puerto Rican, and Vietnamese fishermen along the rocks and harbors. I spent an hour in the 57th Street Bookstore, and bought Jochen Hemmleb's Ghosts of Everest about the search for Mallory and Irvine, bought a falafel and a big iced tea on 55th Street, and rode down to the lake to eat. That evening I took some cold beers and sat outside at Penny's Noodles to eat Thai food and finish reading the Hanson book.

  The third day I had a phone message from my mother, who had moved to the cottage for the summer. She said that there had been a rain and the gutters had overflowed; they needed cleaning. Could I take a day or two to come up, clean them out, and spend a little time? I was happy to do so. She is a reader and napper who was unlikely to intrude on my solitude. Besides, I'd been wanting to take a ride on the Kal-Haven bike trail that runs on an old railway right of way along the Black River. I put my bike and Cooper in the back of my station wagon and Art in the front, where he leaned against the door and looked out the window like a teenager. I listened to an audiotape of Joyce's "The Dead," and I thought how pure an example it is of Keats's line, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Sad truth. The sad truth good men have to face about themselves. "Would I?" I wondered. "Have I? Am I even a good man?" I listened to the last paragraph again. It was training, I thought, for writing Molly Bloom's monologue. I love the way Joyce turns words back on themselves: Snow "was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves."

  In 1900 it took a day to get to southern Michigan from Chicago by steamer. In 1924, when my grandfather first made the trip, it took eight hours by car, and then you often had to walk over the last few dunes carrying your bags so the cars could climb them without getting stuck. Today it's two hours from the Loop by superhighway, but then, when I'm falling asleep
at night on our porch, I can hear the trucks on that highway and sometimes I can see the lights of the nuclear-power plant across the dunes to the north of us and even hear the steam rising from the cooling towers. You can get there easier today, but it's not quite as far away. Life is as full of reversals as Joyce's syntax, I thought to myself. Once the world was wild except for pockets of civilization. Now the world is crisscrossed by highways, contrails, and microwaves, except for a few preserved pockets of wilderness like Quetico. Going there is fabricated adventure, postmodern and artificial just like the adventurers of today, rich people who climb mountains and sail balloons around the world unnecessarily. But if this old cottage in the woods was also an illusion, it was one I valued. I stood on the roof, my hands in wet work gloves, and I could see only woods and water all around and beneath me all the way to the horizon.

  I like cleaning gutters because it is a dirty, easy job. The dirty part lets you feel accomplished. The easy part leaves time for the beach. I took my chair and umbrella there and read much of the afternoon. The water was cool and cleansing, and I shampooed my hair in it. Cooper lay panting in the wet sand, and Art played with a long stick, asking everyone who passed to throw it for him. My mother had made a beef stew with carrots and leeks and we ate it on the porch with French bread and red wine. I went to bed early listening to the calls of night birds.

  When I got up at dawn, my face felt grubby, and I realized that I hadn't shaved in a while. I took a few minutes to do so, and there he was in the photograph of Lisa's parents clipped from the paper and still taped to the mirror. He was the other man; he was the man at their table. It was the way he was rising and turning simultaneously, just as he rose and turned, stepping out of Lisa's car that rainy, December night. It was the angle of his back, his posture, the way he held his head. It was he. "I'll be damned," I said out loud.

  I did not run back into the city as I was inclined to do at first. I took my bike ride, although I admit to being distracted and now remember the trail as little more than a long green tunnel. It could not be a coincidence. He must have known them. He must have known her. Perhaps he was another doctor. If so, his apparent neglect or indifference was even more troubling. But could I be sure? Was I certain or was I desperate? I stopped my bike, straddled it, dug the photo out of my pocket, and unfolded it. I was certain. On some essential, visceral level, I was absolutely certain.