by John Langan
"Once Ted's body has been repaired, Roger takes Ted's head in his hands. The terror and pain that have played across Ted's face throughout Roger's actions drain away, replaced first by calm, then recognition. 'Dad?' Ted says. Roger releases Ted's head and, walking around the table, snaps the chains holding his wrists and ankles as if they're plastic. He helps Ted to sit up, then off the table, steadying him as he regains his footing. When he's sure Ted isn't about to collapse, Roger looks at him directly and says, 'Son—Ted—I am sorry; I am so very sorry. This has—all of this, I fear, has been my doing—my responsibility. The fruit of my words—my curse, to call it truly. I was—I was—it isn't enough—I was angry. I'm not trying to excuse myself—there is no excuse, none at all.' Roger lowers his head and drops to his knees. 'What is there left for me to do except beg for your forgiveness? I am sorry, my boy—oh God, I am so sorry.'
"Roger doesn't know what to expect. He wouldn't be that surprised if Ted were to chain him to the table, grab a handful of needles from the floor, and return the favor. Such a prospect terrifies him. It's obvious suffering can extend far beyond the normal limits here. But he's ready to accept it as no more than his due. Ted crouches beside him. Roger tenses but keeps his eyes downcast. He's breathing heavily, trying to will himself to embrace whatever is to come. Ted leans toward him, and takes Roger into a hug, wrapping his arms around him and pressing him against his bare and bloody skin. Roger almost panics—there's a half-second where he thinks Ted is going to crush him—before he understands what's happening and returns his son's embrace.
"That was where I left them, reconciled at last. The shrink was intrigued. He was full of questions, too. Why hadn't I had Roger confront Ted as I'd seen, which is to say, imagined, him, i.e. in his mind-numbingly horrifying state? Why hadn't Ted said more? What did I think he would have said? And, most importantly, what happened next? Where did they go?
"The answer to his first question seemed obvious. If Roger had seen Ted as I had, his brain would have been fried, which would have complicated my assignment of writing a happy ending for him considerably. That was fair enough, the shrink said, but he found it interesting that I'd inserted Roger into my hallucination of the house—of course that was how he thought of it; although, he'd been quick to add, hallucinations were facts, too. In placing Roger inside my imaginary landscape, I was, the shrink said, validating my view of the situation. I didn't have an answer to that, or to his other questions. I assumed Ted hadn't spoken more than he did because a) his throat had been tortured and b) he hadn't known what to say. I mean, who would? What you'd mostly feel would be relief at not being tortured anymore, don't you think?"
"I do."
"That, and probably a boatload of anger, too. That anger would have to be affected, though—softened—by Roger releasing him—healing and releasing him. I don't know."
"What about his last question. Where did they go?"
"Someplace else," Veronica said. "He tried to get me to take it further. I guess he wanted an ending that was more definitively happy, but this was as far as I could go. I couldn't imagine what a happy afterlife—what heaven would be for the two of them. A never-ending baseball game, with all their favorite players on the field? After everything we'd been through, that kind of thing sounded juvenile. If you wanted to split hairs, I wasn't sure Roger deserved heaven. I couldn't speak about Ted, but Roger had done a number of things that were less than good, which I didn't know if even my cardboard scenario would balance. Sure, Roger might repent his actions and be forgiven, but that wouldn't mean he wouldn't have to atone for them. So to speak, he might be headed for a long stay in Purgatory. The shrink and I debated this for a long time, actually—well beyond when my session with him was supposed to be over. I had enough Catholic school to hold my own. If you're going to entertain these notions, it's important to do so with some kind of integrity, you know?
"From everything I'd experienced, however, I wasn't sure that the Catholic schema mapped the other world with any accuracy. I guess I could have pictured Roger and Ted resting in peace—asleep in the dark—but, when all was said and done, I wasn't concerned enough to settle on an image—to feel the need to settle on a further image. As long as Roger and Ted were reconciled, that was enough.
"Funny thing is, a couple of months later, I wasn't so sure that the situation I'd invented wasn't right. I can't say what triggered it, but I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened to Roger—where he'd gone. The psychiatrist had done his best to convince me that Roger had, for all intents and purposes, run away, that the parts unknown he'd headed for were most likely North Dakota, or Saskatchewan, or the Yucatan. I never bought it—even under the influence of the medications he put me on, I knew what I'd seen, heard, felt—but insisting on that seemed counterproductive, so I nodded and went along with the shrink's picture of Roger pumping gas somewhere on the Canadian border.
"Anyway, one day, Roger popped up in my thoughts, and, for the next few weeks, his fate—again—occupied my waking hours. I wasn't as frantic as I'd been the first time I dwelt on it. The question was compelling, but not painfully so. Or, it wasn't that painful. During this time, I started wondering if what I'd written in the hospital mightn't have been true. I appreciate how crazy that sounds—I realized it at the time—but consider: I had been—call it plugged in to all the weirdness at a level it's hard to describe, and while that connection had been a casualty of Ted's final conflagration, its effects might have lingered. They would almost have to have lingered. How could they not? If there were still some residue of my previous experience—if my brain had been—reshaped, say—couldn't that have led me to produce an apparently fictional piece that was more factual than I was aware? The reasoning seemed plausible enough to me, so for a time I took what I'd written as fact—or close enough. It was consoling."
"But that wasn't all," I said.
"No, there was a problem. It took a while for me to recognize, but eventually, I did."
"Let me guess. The certainty you felt about this ending wasn't any different from your feeling about the first ending. If that had been wrong—"
"Yes."
"Was that it, or were there any other endings?"
"One more," Veronica said. "This was last fall. Over the course of the summer, I'd lost faith in the second scenario—or, if you prefer, I'd come to recognize it as the fiction it had always been. There'd been no dramatic moment of revelation. The process had been more gradual, a slow-but-steady accumulation of doubt that eventually tipped the scales away from that explanation. The summer had been especially long. For the first time in years, I wasn't teaching during either of the summer sessions at the college, nor did I have any other job lined up to help distract me from the fact that Roger had been gone close to a year. I had had three hundred and sixty-five days, give or take a few, of an empty house, of unlocking the front door and knowing there was no one waiting for me, of eating meals in front of the TV in the living room, because what was the sense of sitting in the kitchen, let alone the dining room, alone, of walking from floor to floor with only Ted's photographs for company? The world went on—it had never stopped going on. Fighting went on in Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. We made threatening noises at Syria and Iran. There were times—if I'd had a match, I could have burned Belvedere House to the ground. Well, maybe not. As soon as I'd be struck by that impulse, that desire to see the house in flames, collapsing, and I'd wonder how I could bring that to pass, my firestarting would be brought up short by another thought. The house was all that was left of Roger.
"Strictly speaking, that wasn't true. There were all those books and articles, page upon page where his voice spoke as passionately and intelligently as ever. The house was a place Roger had worked on with his hands—his sweat had made it over, twice. I could slide my hand along the banister for the second-floor stairs and hear Roger telling me how the original had been broken off—all of it—during a particularly frenetic house party, and then refastened with an assortment of ta
pes, so that when he and Joanne bought the house, the banister was more danger than protection. They'd gone to all kinds of lengths to find a craftsman who could match the original, then, because they'd spent so much money doing that, Roger had insisted on the thriftiness of installing it himself. 'It's fortunate,' he'd said, 'that my father bestowed upon me such a treasure chest of obscenities, for I believe I had the opportunity to dig down to its bottom before that job was done.' He'd had an easier time with my renovations, which had been more cosmetic than structural; although he'd muttered plenty as I insisted he and his grad student cronies move this couch against that wall. Roger was part of the house, so much so that I wouldn't have been surprised to find him pacing its walls."
"Did you?"
"Meet Roger? No, never. There were times I was immensely afraid that I would. I would be reading in the library, and I'd be overcome by the certainty—not that Roger was watching me, or waiting outside the door—but that he would be, that it was only a matter of time before he returned to torment me for what I'd done to him—what I'd forced him to do. Times like these, the happy ending I'd given him fell apart and blew away like dandelion seeds. If I didn't catch myself, if I didn't insist that Roger was gone to wherever it was he'd went, and that his going there had been the only solution to the crisis he'd given birth to—if I didn't do that, I would be consumed by fear and guilt, unable to read or even watch TV, as sad—as heartsick—as I'd ever been.
"My solution to the prospect of a long summer alone in Belvedere House was to leave it as much as I could. I contacted friends I hadn't heard from or seen since undergrad—since high school, in one case—thank God for the Internet, right? The majority of them were happy to hear from me, and, when they got the Reader's Digest version of what had happened with Roger, invited me to visit them. Most of them lived in the Northeast, although one girl had relocated to Montana—but she invited me to Billings, and I drove the four-thousand-plus miles to her and back. I even flew out to my mother and her live-in boyfriend, who wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Don't get me wrong. He was a jerk, just not as big a jerk as I'd anticipated. With my husband safely out of the picture, Mom found me easier to deal with. Suffice it to say, I won't be returning there any time soon."
"What about the last ending?"
"I'm getting to that. By the time fall classes started, the ending that had struck me as so compelling now appeared so much wishful thinking. The shift was more disappointing than upsetting. It had been nice to picture Roger in a softer light. After I'd abandoned that conclusion, I wondered if it mattered whether I knew, or thought I knew, Roger's fate. Practically speaking, it didn't. He wasn't coming back to me, in the flesh or—my anxieties aside—the spirit. What was important was that he'd faced Ted.
"Regardless of what you think you believe, down on the deeper levels, things go their own way. This past January, when we had those really cold days, and the snow wore a patina of ice, so that the sunlight pooled on it in puddles and ponds of brilliance, and the house was an island in a lake of fire—on one of those days, while I was making lunch in the kitchen, I had a vision of Roger. Not in any kind of supernatural way, you understand. This picture of him came to me, that's all.
"He was in a dark place—not pitch-black, more the kind of heavy dim of a cloudy, moonless night. The landscape around him was arid, parched soil littered with rocks. Beyond about thirty feet in any direction, the dim congealed and it was difficult to distinguish anything, but it seemed—something about the image gave the impression the desert was all there was. Roger was walking, shuffling his feet to avoid smashing his toes into or tripping over the larger rocks. His head—he'd stuck his head out as far in front of him as his neck would allow, his eyes narrowed. His arms were bent, his hands out and open as if waiting to make contact with—I couldn't say what. There was no accompanying narrative, no frame of damnation or redemption—only the vision of Roger, alone in the dark. Compared to other images that had occurred to me—I'd already started reconstructing the story of our time together (I had been almost from the moment Roger disappeared), and I'd spent a good deal of time trying to get inside Roger's head, occasionally succeeding. I'd imagined him standing outside Belvedere House during the period of his nightly walks after Ted died; I'd watched him watching his time with Ted playing out on the house's windows and known with nearly absolute certainty that this was what had happened. Compared to that, this felt tentative, speculative, the kind of strange, random production your brain spits out sometimes.
"My picture of Roger wandering a vague wasteland hasn't changed. There's been no eureka moment, or even the more quiet realization that, at long last, I've found the truth. For what it's worth, the vision hasn't faded, but that could change. Tomorrow, I could decide that this ending is no more valid than any of its predecessors. No doubt, before too long I'd arrive at a fourth one.
"For the moment, however, these are your choices, irony, reconciliation, or endless solitude. There are times—I have this fantasy that, someday years from now, I'll stop for gas on my way through some little, out-of-the-way town, and the guy pumping the gas—I won't recognize him at first, because he'll look a thousand years old, his skin lined and grooved like the bark of a tree, his hair blizzard-white—yes, it'll be Roger. I'll be speechless. I'll wait till almost the last possible moment, then grab him by the arm and confront him."
"What will he say?"
"Nothing," Veronica said, and laughed. "He might recognize me, but that'll be it. When I ask him what happened? where did he go? where has he been? he'll stare at me blankly, no matter how much I shake him or how many questions I yell at him. When the manager comes out to ask me if everything's all right, he'll tell me that Roger doesn't say much of anything to anyone—that folks around these parts assume he's either had an accident or suffering from Alzheimer's. So even if I see him again, I won't learn anything, won't know what destination he went to, much less what happened to him there and how he returned. I won't know if maybe he did run away, flee what his life had become and try to start over again—if the shrink was right after all, or partially right, or whatever."
"How does the fantasy end?"
"I drive away, I guess. What would there be to stick around for?"
No answer presented itself.
Veronica stretched. "God, the sun'll be up soon. How did I let you talk me into staying up so late?"
"The demands of narrative?"
"Or a guilty conscience?"
"I didn't—"
"I know, I know," Veronica said. "For what it's worth, I appreciate your hanging in there to the bitter end. Although it's not as if you got nothing out of the experience—how long will it be until this sees print?" Before I could protest, Veronica said, "Just make sure you change the names to protect the innocent—or me, anyway."
She stood, and I followed her lead. My legs were stiff, my back sore, and I could look forward to a maximum of three hours' sleep. The demands of narrative, indeed. I assumed Veronica was heading off to bed, but she lingered, gazing out the windows at the night's fading remnants. "You know," she said, "for the longest time after Roger—left, I couldn't read his work. I'd wander into his office, which I finally cleaned up, and pull down an issue of Dickens Studies or Victorian Quarterly that contained one of his articles, and I couldn't do it. My hands would tremble, my eyes fill up with tears, and the words on the page would swirl together. At first, once everything had calmed down—once I'd calmed down—it was comforting to think that Roger's voice had been preserved in all these pages. Over time, though, my inability to read more than two sentences he'd written became a source of torment. I couldn't turn back the cover of my copy of Dickens and Patrimony, which Roger had inscribed to me after I'd taken his class, without the waterworks starting. I couldn't wait them out, either. As far as Roger was concerned, my supply of tears appeared to be endless. There were times I'd sit tracing my fingers over the pages, as if mere contact with his words would suffice.
"Eventually, though, my reac
tion tapered off, then stopped altogether. There was no magic cure—only time. Once I could read Roger's writing again, I went through all of it, some pieces three or four times. I reread Dickens and Patrimony compulsively, pen in hand, jotting down notes, comments in the margins. A few were scholarly, most weren't. They were the kind of personal remarks I might have made to Roger himself: 'nicely put'; 'you've got to be kidding'; 'do you really believe this?' Others were more intimate than that, details from our time together that seemed related to whatever topic was at hand.
"Anyway, there was this one passage, right at the end of the book, that I kept returning to. I'd marked it the very first time I'd read the book. Now, I underlined it. A little later, I highlighted it. At this point, I think the book pretty much falls open to it. Let's see if I can quote it. Who am I kidding? Of course I can quote it.
"'Dickens's work is full of insufficient and absent fathers. Of course we can read this as expressing his continuing outrage at his own father for John Dickens's failings. Yet, the matter is more complicated. For not only does Dickens's accusation turn on his father, it also turns on himself, as if he is secretly afraid that he is not as far-removed from his father's failed character as he would wish. And not only does his accusation light on the individual, it also falls on those institutions of society and government that, like a father, are supposed to provide security and order but instead default to insecurity and chaos. There is no doubt that Dickens became increasingly conservative as he aged, but that conservatism was accompanied by; indeed rooted in; a deep skepticism regarding paternal authority.
