After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  This news stayed on the seat beside you through the day while you tried to understand. You had bifurcated and left behind a mortal residue. Your soul was a traveler from one body to another, with an inadequate memory seal. You were dead, and all this was but hallucination of the taking off.

  In the reality of city traffic, red lights, stops and starts, with real passengers and their moods, rudeness, politeness, you seemed alive and real enough yourself, but your memory was insane—or not your own. If it wasn’t yours, how did it get into your head? The question infuriated you. As you coped with customers’ travel needs, you tested your memory whenever you could, measuring its solidity, wondering what solidity was. The present was solid. The woman behind the screen door, shutting the main door in your face, was solid. The starving children in Africa were not. Your house on Long Island Sound had been solid but now you weren’t so sure. There was a difference between solidity and reality: the taxicab and the streets were solid, but your own solidity in the cab as you drove was unreal since a small deviation could crash everything into metal and glass.

  After a while you realized that the death of Stephen Trace was an invention of high officials in the Rome empire. With a special effort by David Trace to make sure the story reached you. The reason for this invention was mysterious, but before evening you figured that out too.

  You showed the paper to Bonnie. Here, you said, you don’t believe me, read this.

  But Mitch dear, she said, this doesn’t prove you were Stephen Trace, it proves you weren’t.

  What could you say? You remembered Jane Delaware wondering who they had really killed under the name of Angelo Firenze. But try telling Bonnie Stephen Trace’s death was faked. Try making her believe someone else had been killed and then named, falsely and for definite purposes, after you.

  She laughed.

  Explain it again. After death, assets freeze, rigor mortis, legal procedures. Stephen Trace died carelessly without a will, no relatives; the Rome empire has found a way to get it back.

  Sardonic Bonnie: You’re off the hook. Now you don’t have to come up with the money.

  She didn’t understand the world. Someone had died for you: some poor jerk whose anonymous death was doubtless serving a double purpose. Your two women, whatever their motives, had cooperated. You could say they killed you, for Stephen Trace could never return alive. Equally, they saved you, letting the poor hoodlum be sacrificed out of Giovanni’s Siciliani Restaurant so you could escape. A man had died. That was serious and real, leaving no reason to suppose they would choose a second surrogate if Stephen Trace refused to accept the first.

  To Bonnie you said, Why can’t you believe what I tell you? Because, she said, you’re Mitchell Grape to me, with a small chin and half balding curly yellow hair and squinting eyes, and I can’t convert you into Peter Gregory or Murry Bree or Stephen White or Stephen Trace. None of those names fits.

  You stopped telling Bonnie about your life, but she didn’t notice. Talking to herself as much as to you, she would say, it’s not normal to chop up your life like that. Mitch dear. She couldn’t imagine being you. How can you bear the losses? she would say. In her life everything that happened was precious, even the bad things. She kept albums and scrapbooks and an uninterrupted diary from the age of eight because she couldn’t bear to lose anything. Whereas you just cast things off. How can you live with yourself? she would ask.

  She decided you had escaped from a mental institution. It took hold of her, she believed it for a while, pretending she didn’t mind. With great sympathy, she played her part making life comfortable for you, with smiling and wheedling eyes, conspiratorial, on your side against the cold sane doctors and the jailer nurses. She would catch you when you were most relaxed, after sex in bed, whispering in your ear, it’s all right, there there. Dark, her head nuzzled close, her hair on your neck, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. That soft hair on your shoulder, warmth of the body close, how could anyone be sure he was not insane, that everything in life was not an illusion, the universe a dream? What you had told her was what you knew, but how could you know what you knew was true? If it was hallucination, you wouldn’t know.

  With time passing and getting used to you, she gave you more credit. A better effort to understand. She projected her imagination into the Gregory soul after the Sebastian accident. How you must have felt. She could imagine it, yes, the shame, the problem of waking up and finding this thing you had done which wouldn’t go away, stuck permanently to your conscience. The horror of not being able to escape from yourself. She was full of sympathy, except that there was always a but or a nevertheless coming while she spoke, and you waited for it. But. Time has passed, she would say, events have run their course, it’s over. You paid the price, Gregory or somebody. You have proven your capacity for shame, demonstrated you’re no villain. Sebastians have done. Florry Gates has gone on to other things. The children of Peter Gregory are growing up. No one cares what you did.

  Out of the newspapers she picked up the importance of integrating the personality. Got it from the psycho columns, the advice and medical people. Bring those conflicting parts of yourself together. Mental health, she said, when all your parts work together as one. She had something in mind. Action, maybe, radical. You wondered what it was. It made you nervous. You didn’t want to know, you were afraid to ask.

  In the corridor of a slummy apartment building with a urine smell, this happened. You were canvassing alone, and you had worked up to the top and back to the main floor by the mailboxes and were about to go out when this kid came behind you.

  Get much? he asked.

  No, you said.

  What’s it for?

  Starving children in Africa.

  I’m starving too, the kid said. You looked at him. He was big, olive skinned, he had a smile and a wool cap, his cheeks smooth and plump.

  You look pretty healthy to me.

  Fuck you. He grabbed your arm and pinned it behind your back. Another kid came out from under the stairs.

  Give it over, one said.

  It’s for the starving children in Africa.

  Give it over to the starving children in America. They took the bag out of your hand and threw your papers on the floor. Pinned you against the wall and took your wallet. Laughed.

  Dragged you into the back, through a door. You struggled, tried to break loose. They held you, pinned you, unbalanced you. Down back steps out to a frozen yard inside a fence. Kicked in a basement door into the room below, clotheslines, stick chairs, cement floor, cold.

  Knocked you to the ground, pinned you by the knees, two of them, big greenish faces looking down at you, eyes full of spite.

  Spy, one said.

  What do you mean?

  You’re a fucking spy. Poking around trying to find none of your business. Who sent you?

  Nobody sent me. I’m collecting for the Organization.

  What organization? They sent you, snoop around, sneak into our houses. You stay out of here, see?

  Give you something to remember us by. Whack him one.

  Kicked the side of the head. Kicked in the ribs.

  Cut it out, I didn’t do anything to you.

  Whack him again for that. Keep out of here. Nobody wants you around here.

  The starving children of Africa.

  Ain’t no starving children in Africa, it’s the starving children in America. It’s the starving children of America kicking the shit out of you. Don’t come around here no more, okay?

  I have no intention.

  Don’t tell no one neither. Got your name and address. Mitchell Grape. You tell anyone, we come round and kill you. Kill you dead. Got that, Mitchell Grape?

  Got it.

  You worthless, see? The world’s a hateful place, no room for you. Hateful, don’t forget.

  I won’t.

  Say it after me, The world’s a hateful place.

  The world’s a hateful place.

  You staggered back into the alley, around f
ront, Bonnie’s car, home, the doctor and pain killer and a slow easing back to normal, with deep injury inside, which gradually healed, slowly as these things so far always had, but eventually would not.

  You wanted to quit the organization, but Bonnie said it was important to stick with it like getting back on the horse to restore your confidence.

  *

  One day she said that if you were really Peter Gregory (and by now she almost believed it), you should go home and clear up your accounts. As if your whole effort since the river were a mistake. She talked on. Time to think about your life, she said. You had a wife, you had children. They meant something to you. People can’t live divided from themselves. You need to heal yourself. Close your wounds. Bring your divided selves together. A reunion.

  She was inspired, and you tried to cooperate, a little inspired too. Something was happening. A nostalgic sadness crept into her tone, elegiacal. You thought it was rhetoric, for she was always a little melodramatic, but it caught your attention just the same. You must go back to where you began. Look up Peter Gregory—that’s how she put it—tell him he’s forgiven. See his wife, tell her too, even if she is married to Louis the Lover. Don’t interfere, just let her know. And the children, you must bring them back into your scope. They’ll have some forgiving to do, but that’s what you need. You need an ordeal.

  It had not occurred to you that it was possible. The idea was exhilarating. Why not? Go clean up the woods, then return and marry Bonnie. You saw boundaries falling down between everybody, Gregory and Grape and Trace. If you could reclaim Gregory, perhaps you could also reclaim a little of Trace’s money, despite his death. A little courage, a little assertion. All that you had feared, that had driven you into the river and out, into disguises and shields, had vanished in the simple passage of time. The Sebastian case was over, paid for by Murry Bree and Stephen Trace and Mitchell Grape. Florry Gates had her life to lead. So did Linda.

  It would have been more exhilarating if she hadn’t sounded so sad and religious. How lingeringly she looked at you. You reassured her. I’ll go, you said, but I’ll be back. I’ll pay my respects, mend my fences, come right back to you. She kissed you and said nothing.

  Keeping herself to herself—you never suspected, never dreamed. You came back from your taxi rounds the very next day, just when you were most invigorated by confidence in her support for you to do this life-changing thing—you came back at that moment and found the apartment stripped. The place was bare, as if to be redecorated. Everything of hers was gone except her bathrobe forgotten on the hook of the bathroom door, and nothing belonged to you. For a second time you had returned unwarned to an emptied house, cold and terrifying. And a note.

  She had gone back to Jay. Nobody was more important to her than Jay. He wanted her back, and she had no resistance. It was fun living with you, she said. I never knew what crazy thing you’d tell me next. But I don’t know who you are, and you can’t expect me to stay when Jay wants me.

  You had a reaction. Revulsion like a storm out of the west, tearing up ground. Loathing. The city, your life in this apartment and around, hateful. Driving a cab, vile. Detest the Organization and soliciting to alleviate the world’s misery. Revulsion against Bonnie and being good, and integrating yourself. Disgust with skepticism. Revulsion against doubt and every thing that set itself up to be doubted. Hatred of every criticism and objection one person might make to anything else. You despised contempt and all kinds of dislike, whatever they were. Abhorred divisions, every separation, every distinction between one thing and another. You loathed the necessity of naming because every name made a distinction between one thing and the rest, and you hated distinctions. Your own names and all names. Hated the distance that separated places, distances you would have to travel again, as you hated the differences in time that placed one day before another and put everything that had happened out of reach. You hated the distinction between life and death and between male and female and between young and old and between good and bad. You hated the thought process that kept isolating everything by putting it into words, words that never satisfied or soothed but only stirred you up and agitated and riled you with the implication that there were other words around that could do better if you could only find them.

  All this converged into a peculiarly overwhelming hatred of this room, the blank window by your bed that looked out in daytime over housetops to mountains across water but now on a rainy night showed nothing but black. You hated it and its walls and the flimsy pictures you and Bonnie had clipped from magazines to hang on those walls.

  Then suddenly as if it were all the same, revulsion was identical to euphoria, as you realized what was open to you. I’ve got to go, you said. Where? you asked. Ah, that’s a secret. But you felt it like force, the place you had to go next, waiting for you. You’d recognize it when you got there.

  THIRTY SIX

  Mean and cold, November. The long bus ride is no fun. The fields full of dead sticks, the hills gray, night villages with premature Christmas lights, false cheer for nomads in the shortening days, lowering sun, dimming light. The bus grinds across the desert, through burned-out mountains, across bad lands and flat lands and exhausted prairies waiting for snow in the sky. The sky follows the bus, glooming down on it.

  In the early afternoon, day before Thanksgiving, Peter Gregory struggles into the bus station of the city where he used to live. Wearing a heavy plaid jacket, with a small bag of minimal belongings. The day is sunny, but the light is cold, ice at high altitudes. The bus station is at the edge of downtown, with a view of the downtown skyscrapers across the parking lots.

  All the way Peter Gregory has been trying to decide what to do when he arrives, and he still doesn’t know. This once home town of his has no center now. The apartment where he last lived, hateful to remember. The house he shared with his Gregory family, are they still there? Linda and his disinherited children, would they be happy to see him?

  He finds a telephone book in the bus station. Trembling with courage, he looks up Gregory, Peter. Not listed. Okay, the surprise would have been if it were. No Mrs. either. Nor Linda. Several Gregory, L, with wrong middle initials. It means they’ve gone. Dispersed into the United States of America, where they dissolve. Not necessarily yet, though. He tries Louis the Lover. Here’s news: Hamilton, Louis, is also missing. That’s a surprise. Louis the Lover has left town—unless he has died or taken an unlisted number. More than ever putting them out of reach. The forlorn feeling is less than the relief, such a relief he wonders, maybe he didn’t come to see them after all.

  Taxi now? Where to? Alternative destinations occur to him vaguely, none satisfactory. Skip the taxi, he’ll walk, though he’d never have walked when he lived here. Walk where? Uptown High School? Though not friendly, it’s the only sure place, decide the rest when he gets there. Uptown then.

  How long, two and a half years? What he sees shapes his memory. The city has returned to mind, but the real view changes everything slightly. More sky, that’s it. He walks into the upper downtown, past the granite courthouse, the Catholic Church, across Central Parkway, up Vine through the slum part with the old architecturally interesting but shabby buildings, clutter in the streets and broken windows. Up the long hill toward the school, passed by laboring cars and buses.

  With always the chance someone will see him and reconstruct his disappearance. Peter Gregory is ready for that, he knows what he’ll do: accept the surprise, respond to the greeting, make to the old friend or acquaintance the necessary confession, here I am, I misled you. Such a confession was not his purpose, but it was an implicit consequence of resuming his name.

  When someone finally recognizes him, it will start a chain: the first surprise, the puzzled greetings, then a campaign to spread the news. He could imagine former friends and colleagues coming in a line to shake his hand. It was possible the chain had already started. Someone already might have seen him from a car and sent word, so they’d be waiting when he got to schoo
l.

  Near the top, he comes within a block of the apartment he never thought of as home. He detours to see what the hateful old place looks like. The street answers his memory except, like the rest of the town, for the increased openness, the magnifying sky. Approaching, remembering Mrs. Gumbert the landlady, he feels old guilts gathering and hunches his shoulders to weather the abuse from Jock Hadley on his porch across the street. But Jock Hadley is dead, and Peter Gregory can’t find his house, lost in the configuration of this block, strange absence in the heart of the familiar, a gap in the gestalt. It takes a while to understand the house is truly gone, replaced by a yard with a dog kennel.

  Still he meets no one, and in a few moments he passes the edge of the university campus on the familiar route he used to take to school. Past the bookstore and the college tavern, not many people here this last day before Thanksgiving, when college students cut classes to extend their holiday. Across to the Uptown High School opposite the campus like a medieval castle, turrets and arches. All the classroom windows are lit although school is out for the day. The small groups of students around the door and on the walks are a new generation, unlikely to recognize him. Inside, his former colleagues are still at their desks, finishing up for the day and holiday, but Gregory is not going in there. If there is any sure way to begin recognition, surprise, greeting, unroll the chain, it would be to go inside and present himself, but he won’t do that. He waits for the recognition, he walks about expecting it, but he won’t force it. That’s his plan, not to force but wait and let it happen, as it surely will.

  So he walks by the main door of the High School and below what used to be his classroom windows, with lights for the gray afternoon and someone hired in his place, but no one is looking out, and he is past. Then like the crisis after another goal achieved, again the vacant feeling, What next? and recognizing his next ordeal he descends behind the school to the most familiar of abandoned residential streets on the slope, all the while again trembling with courage. He rounds the corner and looks where the street goes down to the busy avenue, and sees the house third on the right, just as if no time had passed. Heart clutching now but still driving himself, he moves on down the opposite sidewalk, looking at it. Lights upstairs. There are many possible reasons why it is not in the telephone book. She could have married someone, if not Louis the Lover someone else. She could have taken an unlisted number. There’s a car he does not recognize in the driveway. She could have bought a new car in the interim and very likely did. He stands opposite, looking up, where the house stands a few steps above the street. He imagines someone looking out at him or looking at him from somewhere else, but he sees no one. He waits, no one appears, no one comes, though the light upstairs and another in the back, in the kitchen, continue to burn. If she’s back there, as she normally would be at this time. Then he notices an infant tricycle on the front stoop, a stuffed goose, small child equipment, full of implication, inviting inference. His heart lifts and sinks. Again he must choose. To go up to the door and inquire—or expose himself. He waits, undecided. Nothing happens. He waits long enough to be afraid someone might notice and call the police. He’s waited enough, he says, turns around and goes back up to the corner, thinking with a deepening disappointment and relief what the toys prove without his having to ask. He’s tried, he says, he’s done the best he can.