The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  “See you around,” he said, and turned and walked to the elevators.

  The question that always seemed most vivid was: How much can you remember of anything? And then the harder question always snuck in, too: Of that which you do remember, how much of it is true? These memories, nicely edited and cropped to form by time and our wily minds, do come to look so tidy. Now that the image has been neatly assembled and the lighting adjusted, how are we supposed to embrace this Photo-shopped ghost? Eventually, even the most enthusiastic owner has to be suspicious of its provenance.

  Cristina’s emergent jowls had transfixed him for months, but now he found them scrubbed from his image of her face. Or worse—at other times—they were all he could see. She was vanishing, supplanted by an assembly of gauzy ideas of Cristina. Eventually, you can’t even live in the past anymore, because there’s nothing left.

  After Leonora lost her leg, she wouldn’t let them fit her for a prosthesis. For almost two years, she insisted on using crutches, not because she loved being teased or having limited mobility or drawing attention to her loss, but—Vincenzo and Cristina came to believe—because the idea of her functioning well was such an affront to her new understanding of her life. During that first year, she was so terrified of becoming whole again, or being mistaken for whole, that she’d have nightmares about feeling the toes on her right foot again, about her leg returning. Eventually, the dreams went away, and she put her artificial leg on. In a few years, she was even talking about it with people, making jokes about it. The gap became part of her.

  And what about that, as a deeper compartment in the slowing, draining bank of a person’s being: the attrition of memory. Cristina’s smell, once so distinctive, was the concept of a smell. The memory of a memory. Here he found gleaming rafts of nostalgia, wishful thinking bobbing, commingling with tattered slabs of honest memory. Here were abstractions whittled into “facts” by the currents. Like, for example, Cristina’s much-ballyhooed intelligence, which he and Leonora had begun to celebrate as if ambitious scholarly sojourns were Cristina’s raison d’être. But she wasn’t a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, she was a marketing manager, she was in charge of event planning. Still, every church needs its myths, its miracles, and what else is there to do with such a colossal vacuum, but set about beatifying the spirit? What else is there, but to map her way up the hill to heaven?

  Later that night, Vincenzo sat on his bed and waited, expecting something. A visit from the doppelgänger, or Ben, or Walter, or Lenka—a phone call from someone, a moment of clarity, a vision, a cathartic jag, but nothing happened. The air teemed with potential violence and yet calm ruled. The hotel room was still. The television dark. Below, he could hear cars honking and people talking in the street, the barely muted roar of the masses, but that didn’t concern him. In the closet, his shirts hung on their hangers, neatly pressed. Beside his bed, the shoes, in their shoetrees, awaited his feet. The two books on his bedside table awaited his reading. The suitcase lay on the ground, gaping at the ceiling, awaiting his need to go somewhere. Nothing moved.

  16

  FINAL DISPATCHES FROM THE OUTER EDGE OF LIMBO

  A month passed.

  There had, not surprisingly, been no word from Colin and nothing from Tellus. Ben had not contacted him either. Whomever Ben had represented, they weren’t interested anymore. No one was interested. There’d been no word from Lenka. Nothing from Walter except one short e-mail, a week later: Sorry about the argument. But, just so we’re clear, it was your fault.

  Vincenzo replied: :-)

  Hamilton had not reached out, not since their e-mail exchange. Even Leonora hadn’t written. The deluge of e-mails from reporters had stopped altogether. Instead, he woke to messages about elongating his penis and unbelievable deals on airfare to Iceland.

  Only Jonathan Paris, of all people, contacted him to ask how it went in Bolivia. Had Jonathan really not read about it? Had he not seen the footage on the Internet? It had been reposted on the Huffington Post and, if it had not gone viral, it had certainly torpedoed whatever claim to sanity Vincenzo had before. Yes, perhaps Jonathan, who was not like other people his age, had not seen it.

  Vincenzo wrote: It went as planned. Hope to see you again when I’m next in NY.

  But, in fact, he was already in New York. He’d been in New York for three weeks.

  He ate dinner at the far end of the bar in the top-floor restaurant at the W Hotel. There were two bartenders who worked the night shift: Trent, an aspiring graphic designer who was chillingly—exhaustingly—ambitious, and Rachel, who “made paintings,” as she put it, in a linguistic contrivance that he hadn’t encountered before. Rachel reminded him of Leonora minus the politics, and maybe minus the problem of real and unrecoverable loss, minus that fury. But maybe Rachel was just sanitizing herself for her customers’ benefit—maybe the paintings she made were Marxist drivel? He’d asked about her father once, a few days prior, and the question had compelled her to say that her father was dead. With this, unfortunately, he saw that this was probably why she reminded him of Leonora—she wasn’t missing the loss at all.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d said.

  She shrugged and shook her head, because what else was there to say?

  Then, as usual, he drove right past his misgivings, he couldn’t help himself, there’d be no scab left unpicked—one way or another, he’d worry the wound until it bled freely again. “How did he die?”

  She drew a sharp breath and he could see how much she wished he hadn’t asked that. Then, after exhaling, she said, “He killed himself,” and presented a tight-lipped smile, bug-eyed—as if shocked by the news herself. As if she wanted to put together a joke to help Vincenzo through the information, but no joke would help. It was a familiar expression—it was the face of maturing but fixed, intractable sorrow.

  He knew some things he could say, but those things would just mend the awkwardness on top, so he didn’t speak.

  Another night, he met a talkative drunk man who was a screenwriter and had been flown to New York to meet with some producers who were hiring him to adapt a novel. He talked, tediously, about the details of his work, and then, maybe sensing that the conversation had been lopsided, the man—porcine, with a rake of bushy black hair across his head, Vincenzo had already forgotten his name—asked about him. Specifically, he said, “What about you?”

  Vincenzo shrugged and gestured at the space around them vaguely.

  “What are you doing here?” the man pressed.

  “I like this hotel.”

  “That’s it? You’re staying here because you like the hotel?”

  Vincenzo nodded, then said, “I don’t know.”

  “What, do you have amnesia?”

  Vincenzo laughed a bit too loud and shook his head. “I wish.”

  “You wish?” the screenwriter said, clearly pleased by the unexpectedness of the phrase.

  “I used to be an economist,” Vincenzo said.

  “When?”

  “Recently. Now, I’m between things.”

  “My brother is an accountant, and he insists that . . .” And he went on like that for another ten minutes, just talking about his brother, who was an inept tax accountant. What he said was amusing, but beside the point. Then he asked, “Where do you live?”

  Vincenzo had already put his house in Bethesda up for sale. He had put his house in Italy up for sale, too. He’d sold his car back to the dealer. Movers were shuttling his things into a storage unit in Gaithersburg, where they would likely remain, he sensed, for the rest of his life. “It’s hard to answer that question,” he said. “I’m between places.”

  The man laughed loudly, and then started talking again.

  Looking around, Vincenzo saw the same people—mostly middle-aged men—were there, mostly eating alone. Some were in pairs, coupled with a woman or a man, but not many. Many wore suits, but had removed their ties. Vincenzo was in his mustard corduroys and a burgundy sweater, a white T-shirt underne
ath. He had the beginnings of a beard. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while and didn’t anticipate getting one for another month, or two, or more.

  And although he had been working on this—on this pulverizing—for only a couple of months, he could see now that the work was mostly done. Wrecking was always easier than construction. There were chunks left, but they wouldn’t last long at this rate. It had not seemed like a strategy at first, but of course that was its true cunning. Piloted by intuition, yes, it was a strategy nonetheless.

  Now, when he was at a loss to summarize himself—or to describe any aspect of himself, even to enunciate his place of residence—he could see the true end of the mayhem he’d been pursuing. There would not be angels spreading their majestic wings at the conclusion. There had been only this—the space left between where he’d been and where he would emerge again. What he’d had to work with was too badly damaged to be salvaged. He’d had what, in the parlance of insurance adjusters, was referred to as a total loss—a designation often viewed as a blessing, counterintuitively, by people ready to wipe clean and start over.

  The next afternoon, at the diner where Leonora worked, he ordered coffee.

  The waitress—another tattooed young lady, about the same age as Leonora, but plump and freckled with wild red hair—brought it to him. He resisted the urge to ask if Leonora would be there soon. Five minutes later, when the waitress next passed him, he flagged her down and asked if Leonora would be working there later. She said no, Leonora had the day off.

  The day off? The concept drifted around his mind, opening spaces for itself. What might she do on a day off? Did she and Sam walk Central Park, or meet friends somewhere? He tried to picture it and could see nothing at all. It was beyond the range of his imagination. So he decided he would stay in New York for the foreseeable future. That was step one of his new life.

  When the young waitress came back, she said, “How do you know Leo?” Her lower lip was pierced twice, once on either side.

  “She’s—” he said and then shrugged, thinking better of it. Why make it more difficult than it needed to be? “I’m a friend of the family,” he said.

  The woman nodded. She was suspicious, he could see, and he was pleased that she felt protective of Leonora, too. “You know, you kind of look like her,” she said.

  Aware that the ruse was probably up, he said, “Yes, I’m actually her father.”

  She chuckled, shook her head. “Why’d you lie? That’s pretty weird. You didn’t want to embarrass her?”

  “Yes, I didn’t want to embarrass her,” he said.

  She laughed, and he liked her, liked the intelligence in her manner. She planted a hand on her hip. “She didn’t tell me you were in town.”

  “It’s a surprise,” he said.

  She smiled coquettishly, winked at him. “I promise I won’t tell her.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and picked up his coffee, had a sip, grateful for that. He still had time. He had no idea how much time he had. But he had time.

  When he entered the gallery in Chinatown, there appeared to be no one there. After a minute, a pasty middle-aged woman, scrawny and haunted, emerged. She wore noisy clogs, maroon-colored; they pounded the floorboards. Her hair, a nest of curls mounded extravagantly on top of her head, was a compellingly unnatural coppery hue. The hair seemed to ignite under the halogens, so that she looked ethereal, some luminous city-dwelling sprite, or ghoul.

  “Can I help you?” she said. Her skin was moist, ashen.

  “Is Gillian Tilman’s video—do you have her—um—her art here? It’s a video,” he said.

  Gillian Tilman was Colin’s girlfriend, the video artist. Though Vincenzo had never met her, had never seen any video art at all, to the best of his knowledge, he had wanted to know what she did ever since Colin had described it to him, over lunch in that room on top of the Lehman Brothers building. What Colin did, when it was all said and done, would have probably been the optimal choice for Vincenzo. Vincenzo desperately wanted to see what such a life looked like up close. What else was there, to be with someone like Cynthia? Himself, as a woman—more or less. No, he’d had enough of himself.

  The gallery owner sat him down in a small room in the back. There were several simple wooden seats, black curtains boxing him in, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall. She closed the curtain behind her and he sat in the darkness as the large screen awakened.

  In the video, a blond and freckled young pixie of a girl, with an aquiline face and a bunched-up mouth, large eyes, licked her lips and had a sip of wine. She readied herself, staring nervously at the camera. A clock in the corner ticked away the time. It was mostly dark in the room and someone could be heard snoring, no doubt Colin. She scratched her forehead, had another sip of wine. She started to appear amused and her mirth grew until she had to stifle a laugh. And all the while she was staring straight out of the screen at Vincenzo, who sat alone in the darkness. Then this elfin little girl had another sip of wine and began to speak:

  “Today, I sat here and listened to this car outside and it sounded awful. The engine, I mean. Like, it sounded like it was revving itself to death. You could smell it, even up here. And I gotta say, I loved it. Like, I mean—I really loved it. Who was doing that? And, while we’re at it”— she stopped to inhale sharply and he saw her expression change subtly, but completely—“I know that there had been another life that I could have had and I don’t know whether it would have been better, but I think I would have liked that one, too. Just a couple more turns to the left, or a couple more to the right, and I would have a different life right now.”

  She had a sip of wine, lit a cigarette. During the pause, the snoring behind her grew louder. A backdrop of digitally animated stars appeared in the darkness of that room and commenced twinkling and turning, moving slowly across the screen, spinning gradually.

  She sighed. She looked exhausted, ready to cry.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t care anymore. The car . . . this here, too . . . and you . . . it was . . .” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have done this, either.” Then she glanced at the camera and whispered hoarsely: “This was a terrible idea.”

  But instead of turning it off, she lingered. She sat there for a minute, face scrunched up, staring at nothing. Eventually, she looked back at the camera and said, “I guess that’s everything.”

  The clock in the corner said that the video had been playing for three minutes. Vincenzo reached out and picked up his overcoat, but the camera stayed on her, so he paused, in case there was more. The video kept going. He laid his coat across his lap.

  The fake stars continued to twinkle behind her in the bedroom as she sat, smoking cigarette after cigarette, in silence, for the next hour.

  When the clock in the corner read 1:04:55, she stubbed out another cigarette and glanced at the camera, and said, “Thanks for sticking around.”

  Then she reached out, behind the camera, toward the off switch, and he knew that the video was about to end and, in a matter of seconds, the gallery owner would pull open the curtain and ask him if he was still awake, so he tried to dig into the moment as deeply as he could, he tried to stretch it out, to hide, here, on this side of the line, but the video was already over, and he could already hear those clogs on the floor, and he knew it was, all of it, all of it was already over.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My gratitude to 4Culture, Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Corporation of Yaddo, and Seattle Arts and Lectures for their support. Also, especially, the Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s writing center, which has given me a second home.

  This book would not exist without the support of Jennifer Mountford, who has been my first and best reader for many years.

  For advice on technical matters, much gratitude to David Beach, Darren Floyd, Andrea Corcoran, and my sister, Helen. For years, David Shields has been an insightful reader and an invaluable advisor.

  My agent, Ayesha Pande, is t
he most passionate and wise partner a writer could hope for. Likewise, Tony Perez and the wonderful people at Tin House have welcomed me enthusiastically.

  Finally, this book owes a substantial debt to the lives and memories of a number of loved ones whom I have outlived; to these extraordinary people—my mother, my grandparents, Farah, Patrick, Eleanor—thank you.

  Photo: © SARAH SAMUDRE

  PETER MOUNTFORD’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, won the 2012 Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Best New American Voices 2008, Granta, Slate, Boston Review, Salon, and Conjunctions. Born in Washington, DC, he currently lives in Seattle, where he teaches at the Richard Hugo House.