The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  If Ackerman wasn’t sketching his house, or describing the many faces of madness in the hospital wards of Bedford Stuyvesant, he could usually be found sitting out on a rock by the sea, looking off as if waiting for something to arrive, waiting to serve some purpose. “Go over there, Ian,” my mother told me, “and tell Dr. Ackerman I sent you to help clean up some of Kirk’s old things or do any repairs he has. He doesn’t look like he knows much about fixing things. Probably spent all his time trying to put sick people straight. Sometimes, I think, if you spend all your time learning to splint bones, defeat disease and mend spirits, you don’t have any mind energy left to know how to hammer and saw.”

  So I went over to do whatever Ackerman wanted of me, a little worried about the strange refugee who seemed much odder to me right then than all the Hants Bucklers in the world. But I missed my father and also needed man talk of some sort even if it was not about the politics of the republic. Perhaps there was a chance that he’d teach me to resurrect animals.

  It was a cloudy, turbulent day shot full of a thousand hues of sea grey that only an island dweller would care to delineate. Ever since the hurricane that brought my sister into the world, I had become a lover and connoisseur of bad weather. After all, the hurricane had tried and tested my childish manhood. The wind was gusting today. It was nothing like the great storm itself, but it filled me with a magnificent sense of being alive. I found Ackerman sitting alone on his favoured rock looking off into space. “So far I can’t see the purpose of being here,” he said to me. He seemed very unhappy about something.

  From the shoreline, I picked up a small, water-smoothed bit of slate about the size of a fifty-cent piece. “Watch this,” I said. And I skipped it out across the bumpy water until the sea swallowed it. Ackerman tried but failed with three smooth stones. I skipped another six rocks perfectly despite the chop, for I knew how to place a stone lightly upon the water so it would not catch an edge and drown prematurely. My stones skipped like the feet of a ducks landing on water and then took wing again and again before gravity gathered the strength to undo my skill. Ackerman watched intently now as I showed him how it was done. After a few failed attempts, his stone skipped five quick hops before going under. “I guess I came here for a purpose after all,” he said.

  I smiled.

  “Ian, I’m going to tell you something and you are going to have to keep it a secret. Can you do that?”

  I said nothing, picked up two smoothed flat stones and held them tight in my hand.

  “It doesn’t matter. I need confession and you’ll have to do because you are, I believe, a lot like me but don’t know it yet.”

  Was I about to hear that he was a murderer or that he was in love with my mother or what exactly was it?

  “I’m a liar, Ian. One of the world’s great liars. I’m not a doctor.”

  “But I saw what you did for the dog.”

  “Oh, that was real enough, yes. In fact, my skills equal that of a doctor and much more. But I didn’t leave the hospital on my own. They threw me out and would have had me arrested if I did not promise to leave the country.”

  “How come?” I asked. These revelations so far did not seem so bad. Some people tell the truth, others stretch it. Each man has his own way.

  “I practised medicine but never studied formally. I was born with a skill to learn a thing very quickly and become like others around me. I’m a sort of chameleon of both personality and knowledge with a photographic memory. I wanted to help people. So first I forged some documents and worked as a social worker. But that was hopeless. I could do very little there to really help people. So I went into medicine. In a month and a half I worked my way up from an orderly to a nurse’s assistant to a doctor working in an emergency room. I had to change hospitals each time, though. That’s how I ended up in Bed-Sty. They needed a doctor and I was their man — until they checked up on my background.”

  “What happened? Did you accidentally kill somebody or something?” I asked warily. Perhaps this was why I had felt funny about Ackerman. There was something wrong. something big.

  “No. In fact, no one could come up with a single thing I did wrong. I had read medical encyclopedias, anatomy text-books, studied the functions of the brain and the nervous system and watched other professionals around me. I helped many people — not the suicides I spoke of because no one seemed to be able to help them — but the others, the homeless women beat up on the street, the innocent mugging victim knifed in the trachea for a pocket full of change, the victims of car accidents and train derailments, the children with terrible head injuries. I helped them all.”

  “Then why did they kick you out?”

  “Because I was a liar, I suppose, and that turned out to be a crime that offset all my good deeds.”

  I studied on this a while, realizing how different we were here on the island. We tended to judge by what a man did, not by what he said he was or where he’d come from. Ackerman, so far, was judged on having saved the life of a dog. That was a good calling card for Whalebone. Aside from appearing to be a bit moody and idle, I could still find nothing really wrong with him, despite his revelation, and I doubted that anyone else on the island did as well. “So the past is the past,” I said.

  “And the present? “

  “Is the present,” I said.

  “I came here, to this isolated place hoping that I would, as they say, find myself. No more lies. But it’s too late for that. Already I’ve called myself a doctor.”

  “But you are.” All my doubts about Ackerman had vanished. I liked him, liar or no.

  “But it’s not enough. Now I find I can’t give up being the doctor I had become. I need to help people or I’ll go crazy and die.”

  Ackerman was looking at the harpoon gun that blew Kirk to kingdom come. I suddenly realized what a big burden Dr. Bentley Ackerman had placed on my shoulders. He was suddenly the victim and I was the doctor. He needed healing.

  14

  One miracle is never enough,” my mother said, as I helped her wash dishes that night. “Once a man has tasted victory over death, he can’t wait to do it again.”

  “It wasn’t a miracle,” I said. “He was a doctor. He was giving Enrico Fermi mouth to mouth resuscitation.”

  My mother wrung soapy suds from between her fingers and gave me a look. “Not all things are as they appear to be.”

  This I knew was true. But my mother was correct in assuming that Doc Bentley needed something more than his present existence or he would shrivel up and die. The dog was not enough. And despite the fact that he was a liar of great magnitude and had made me a conspirator in his lies, I knew it was my job as a kind of muddled patron saint of the new refugees to help out.

  Weeks passed and nothing presented itself. Not even a wounded gull, a bad case of head lice or a bad back. I thought about asking Ben Ackerman for something to help me with Gwendolyn. Mr. Tongue-tied I was, yet with so much to say. Gwen was patient and sensitive but much smarter than me and more worldly. I had asked her to teach me what she had learned in the United States schools. There were state capitals and state flowers and state slogans, all with little tests she’d give me at odd and unexpected moments.

  “Live Free or Die,” she’d say. “Quickly. You only have thirty seconds.”

  I’d stammer a bit, indecisive between Rhode Island and New Hampshire, eventually picking Rhode Island and getting clunked on the shoulder by Gwen. American presidents, how-ever, for some reason gave me no trouble. Washington, Jefferson, John Q. Adams and so on.

  “Tell me something about Canada,” she finally said one day as we made our regular circuit around the perimeter of Whale-bone Island in our own soon-to-fade republic of childhood.

  “It’s a very a large country,” I told her, “larger than the United States and the only country larger is Russia.”

  This seemed to hurt her feelings. I would learn later that Americans were like that. To discover that anything is larger or better than something Ame
rican is an insult of the deepest kind.

  “The Russians wanted my father,” she confessed to me. “But don’t tell a living soul this. We were on our way here, staying at a motel in Concord, New Hampshire.”

  “Live Free or Die!” I interjected, trying to astound her with my memory retention.

  “They came into the motel room in the middle of the night. It was very dark and they had flashlights. A woman and two men. One of the men, who spoke like he wasn’t a Russian at all but maybe an announcer at a baseball game, dropped a bag of something on the bed. ‘One million dollars,’ he said. ‘And in Soviet Union, Mr. Tennessee, we will allow you to make any size bomb you want. We don’t stifle creativity like they do in America.’ I never saw if they had guns or anything. My father, his voice rising up out of the dark, said that he couldn’t take their money. ‘But why?’ the man asked. ‘It’s good American money earned the American way. In other words, we stole it.’”

  ‘”Your money’s no good here,’ my dad said. ‘I can’t let my kid grow up a communist.’ There was a moment of silence. Later, my mother would say she expected to be shot dead right there in her bed. She expected to see front page pictures in newspapers of her and my father lying in a pool of blood, her in her delicate pink nightie, as pretty and as dead as Marilyn Monroe had ever been. But they didn’t shoot. They picked up their American money, turned off their flashlights and slipped quietly out the door as if they had never been there, as if it had all been a dream. I didn’t hear any car so I guess they just ran off somewhere to their hiding camp way up in the beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was scary but exciting. They never came back.”

  “I think that it probably gets cold a lot in Russia like it does here,” I said, trying to keep up my end of the conversation.

  “My father says he still knows too many secrets about the bomb and he wishes he could just give those secrets back to somebody but…“

  “But you can’t give back secrets,” I said. “I know.”

  “After they left and I heard my father kissing my mother — she is the noisiest kisser you ever want to hear — I interrupted them and asked my father what it would be like to live in Russia. ‘It would be just awful,’ he said. ‘The state owns everything.’ After that we went to see my grandfather, my mom’s dad, in Massachussetts. I had only met my grandfather twice the whole time I was growing up because we were out in the desert and he was back east. My grandmother had died before I was born. Now here we were at his doorstep arid he wouldn’t let us even in the house. He said my father was a traitor, that the FBI had been to see him and convinced him that his sonin-law had already ‘gone over to the other side.’ My mother tried to reason with him, but he had already shut us off.”

  I was wondering why Gwen was telling me all this now, why it had never come out before, and then I realized that it meant a whole new level of trust between us. “Did he ever talk to you again?”

  “He’s in a nursing home now in New York. Both my father and mother are afraid to go back to the States. They’re afraid that my father could be arrested for leaving the country with all his secrets. My mom knows too much, too. They talked about everything. But she misses her father. He never answers her letters any more and when she phones the nursing home, they just tell her he isn’t well enough to come to the phone. Once we moved here, she stopped phoning and she was afraid to write and give our new address for fear there would be Russians — or Americans — who would find out.”

  Bernie and Jack were such healthy, vital, strapping folks that I had no clear image of a faltering, dying grandfather, but I could see that this was a different story. In fact, everything was different about the Tennessee Ernie Phillips family. I could see that Americans carved out problems for themselves of gigantic proportions. While most of us might worry about a little scab on this year’s blue potato crop or whether the her-ring will be good, Americans seemed to be all caught up in problems of such huge proportions that they concerned spies and bombs big enough to split the planet and stubborn grand-pops to boot.

  “I want to show you my parents’ bedroom,” Gwen told me at last. “I’m really worried.”

  Enrico Fermi yapped loudly as we arrived at Gwen’s house. Tennessee Ernie Phillips was out tuning up their two-tone Ford. He had a screwdriver between his teeth and his fingers down in the throat of the carburettor. Mrs. Phillips was sitting inside the car, at the wheel, letting it idle as her husband fiddled with the choke. The radio was on a station with Andy Williams singing “Moon River” and every few seconds the music was punctuated by Tennessee’s instruction to his wife, to “give her a little more gas,” or “ease up on the throttle, I think it’s too lean.” Mildred Phillips looked decidedly mo-rose. She held a handkerchief to her nose, and I think she had been crying.

  “She’s been like that for two weeks now,” Gwen said with a sigh.

  Gwen led me into their house and to her parents’ bedroom. Had I been older and more sophisticated I might have thought she was up to something wonderfully romantic, but it was nothing like that. “Look,” she said, pointing to one wall that was full of newspaper and magazine clippings of the deaths of famous American movie stars. Marilyn Monroe, dead. Jane Mansfield, dead. Marlene Griffiths, after a private plane crash, dead. The wall was filled with beautiful dead women.

  “She’s trying to tell us something,” Gwen said and suddenly I realized that another secret had been revealed and it scared me to my toes.

  Gwen opened the drawer to her mother’s bureau and set out an envelope from the Broadview Nursing Home. She slipped out a photograph from it. It was an old, maybe sixtyfiveish guy with rimless glasses and a bald head. He was smiling. “That’s the last photograph she ever got from him. She used to look at it all the time and it made her cry. Now she’s stopped looking at it, but she still cries.”

  I was holding onto the smiling grandfather and looking into his eyes when Gwen let out a sigh. She put her hand on my shoulder, leaned on me and began to sob softly. “I miss him too, although I don’t think I ever knew him.”

  I felt her despair claw right down deep through my shoulder blade and find its way into my heart. It was one of those moments when something in me, something smarter, more courageous, more daring, more illogical than anything that could have been me bubbled to the surface. I put my arm around her and felt her forehead against my neck.

  “I need to keep this,” I said, putting the photo in my shirt pocket.

  “I don’t understand,” Gwen said, looking at the teardrops that had fallen onto my shirt and rubbing the wet spot.

  “Trust me,” I said.

  “I trust you,” she said and, looking up, kissed me so softly on the mouth that I wasn’t sure our lips had even touched. All I knew was that I had died and gone on to some other place beyond the Republic of Nothing. And I knew precisely what I had to do.

  15

  “Family is important above all things,” my mother said to me as I walked in the door. “I’m going to ask your father to come home from Halifax. It isn’t right.”

  She was feeling lonely again. There was a way she had of tilting her head upward with eyes only half-focused on a far corner of the room. I never knew what to say to her. I wanted to help but didn’t know how. Fourteen is not an easy age for a boy to comfort his mother. Not knowing what else to do, I showed her the picture of Gwen’s grandfather.

  “He has a nice smile,” she said. “Who is it?”

  “Mrs. Phillips’ father. She misses him very much. The woman is lonely and — what’s the word? — distressed.”

  “Depressed. She’s very depressed. I was walking by there last week. She didn’t even see me, but I could see that she walked as if a someone had put a great weight on her shoulders. She is very depressed. You are a sensitive boy.” My mother brought her eyes back down from looking at the moulding in the corner and fixed me solidly with a stare.

  “We can’t bring your father back from Halifax, right now. I know that. No one can
shift the direction oJ: the wind in your father’s sails. He has to do that himself and that will take time. You can’t help me, Ian. But you must help those people. They have been driven from their homes and the woman feels loneliness for her father. You must help.”

  I would probably be exaggerating if I said to you that my mother could read minds. She wasn’t like that. She had a different sort of psychic ability more subtle than that. She could not read my actual thoughts but instead tap the deeper under-current of intention and emotion and filter my own crazy jumble of ideas in such a way that it would clarify and make perfect sense. Certainly I had already decided to help Gwen. How could I do otherwise? My old infatuation, my friendship, and now a kind of yearning love had just burst into something much more powerful, a force that swept over me like a giant hurricane wave and was driving me onward in the only direction it could.

  “I will,” I told my mother. “Thanks.” I was out the door running because I was a great runner. Why walk if you can run when the world is spinning like a dizzy dancer and all you know is that you are at the centre of things, about to make something happen? That was why you were put in the world, why your mother gave birth to you. You were no longer a little boy, tagging along and trying to make sense of events about you, trying to catch up to life. You were something else now, someone older and filled with a sense of purpose and just given a key by your mother that would unlock the door to… what, exactly? I was about to find out.