A door opened and Son entered the room. When he saw his father sitting there he stiffened. “They grabbed you too,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“No,” Brother said, “I’m here of my own free will.”
“Sure you are,” Son said. “I see you already met Mr. Trip Mizoguchi. He’s a great believer in free will.”
“Trip here tells me his name is Lance Makioka,” Brother said.
At this the Japanese-American gentleman intervened. “To put this matter at rest,” he said, “here is my Langley ID. As you see, the name printed there is not a workname. It is my personal name. Agent Kyle Kagemusha.”
“And this is another gesture designed to encourage trust,” Brother said.
“Exactly.”
“Whatever,” said Son.
“I leave you two gentlemen to talk things over,” the recently renamed Agent Kyle Kagemusha said. “I’m sure you have a lot of catching up to do. Welcome to Anthill, Quix 97. We look forward to having you on board.”
* * *
—
“WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE?” Son said. “You don’t know who I am. You never knew.”
“You’re right,” Brother replied. “We’re not much of a family, are we? But there’s a thing you don’t know about parenthood. It’s mostly about showing up.”
“It’s crazy that you’re here,” Son said. “You’re in so deep, so way over your head you don’t even know how deep.”
“We both are,” Brother said.
Agent Kagemusha had been right. At first the words didn’t come, but soon enough they came in a great hot gush, like steam from a broken pipe. One of the things Son wanted to attack his father about was belonging to the great Indian diaspora. Son had gone to India to discover authenticity. Only Indians from India had any claim to being authentic. The diaspora was full of phony Indians, people who had been uprooted so long that their souls were dying of thirst, people who didn’t know what language to speak or what gods to worship, people who pathetically bought Indian art so they could hang their identity on their walls (did the lad even know, when he said this, that he was echoing Brother’s gibe about his stepfather?). People, he went on, who flew to India for two weeks over New Year’s and went to a few weddings and ate sweetmeats and danced in the neon night and felt that they had refilled their India tanks and could go back to being fakers for the other fifty weeks. He had learned the Indian term 420, which had nothing to do with smoking weed, but which meant “fraudulent” or “fraud.” Charsobeece, he said, his Hindi accent imperfect but aggressive. “You’re all charsobeeces. And, by the way, nobody likes your books.”
“If the system cannot be changed it must be destroyed,” Brother said.
On the second day, Son collapsed abruptly and wept, suddenly a very young man again, all his masks stripped away. He allowed his father to embrace him. “We were so close to doing it,” he said. “This close.”
Brother began to talk to him about Anthill, about fighting the real enemy and serving the greater good. It didn’t take long. A few days. He was a good kid. Yes, quixotic. He got the message quickly. And he didn’t want to go to jail.
When Brother said goodbye to Son, he knew it might be a long time before they met again. That was okay now. They were good. As he left he decided to ask one last question. “Oh, by the way: ‘Marcel DuChamp’?”
Son grinned. “I guess it was my way of saying, I love you, Dad.”
He turned to go, his heart full. Son called after him. “Oh, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell Mom.”
Then again the blindfold in the Escalade. On the ride back to the city Agent Kagemusha offered some final thoughts. “I want to thank you for your service,” he said. “And I also want to be frank with you. You know a great deal now, some would say too much. But we’re the good guys. We don’t arrange for people to be hit by trucks. So, we’ll be watching you. We’re in your phone, your computer, every call, every keystroke. Don’t even try to hide from us. We would take that unkindly. We are grateful for your help, and now we need you to be silent. Don’t disappoint us by talking. We hate disappointments.”
“Careless talk costs lives,” Brother said. “And it’s good to know you’re the good guys.”
“There you go,” said Agent Kagemusha. “Smart man.”
When the blindfold was removed he was outside his building again. “One last word,” he said. “I’m kind of a classic movie buff.”
“Yes, sir. I like to see old films myself.”
“So, Kagemusha. I saw that film. It means ‘shadow warrior.’ ”
Nothing from the agent, but the darkened windows of the Escalade began to rise.
“Thanks,” Brother said, “for the gesture designed to create trust.”
The restaurant beneath Sister’s Notting Hill duplex was called Sancho in honor of Ignatius Sancho, “the extraordinary Negro,” born on a slave ship in (approximately) 1729, a runaway slave who was then freed in England, a Sancho who worked for English milords but wasn’t looking to go wandering in the service of any knight: composer, playwright, polemicist, prolific writer of essay-letters to the newspapers, author of Theory of Music, greengrocer, the first person of African origin to vote in a British election, and along with Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano one of the earliest black British chroniclers of and campaigners against slavery, painted by Gainsborough, admired by Laurence Sterne, and not someone who would have been a regular consumer of the jerk chicken, ackee and saltfish, and Red Stripe lager on offer in the Jamaican-themed eatery that now bore his name (although he might have tasted African callaloo). Nor, in all probability, Sister thought, would he have approved of the pounding dance music that had begun to issue from the cellar below the restaurant, whose owners had lately decided to go for more of a club-scene vibe and to hell with all sleeping neighborhood children. After that there were drunks making out and fighting in the street until three in the morning. It was hard to imagine Ignatius Sancho as a disco devotee. This, after all, was a man who had sided with the British against the American Revolution. This was a conservative man.
The neighborhood association asked for Sister’s help. She agreed to lead the discussion, sought meetings with the restaurant’s owners, and received only platitudes in return. She offered compromise proposals, suggesting acceptable decibel levels and shorter nightclub hours. She spoke to the local council and asked it to intervene to set in place and then to police proper regulations. She pointed out that Sancho was licensed as a restaurant, not a nightclub, and was therefore in breach of its legal obligations. Only when all these avenues had been explored without satisfaction having been received did she agree, with extreme reluctance, that the restaurant and its parent company should be sued.
When the lawsuit began, the restaurant owners accused her of racism.
Social media had no memory. Today’s scandal was sufficient unto itself. Sister’s lifelong commitment to anti-racism was as if it had never been. Various people styled as community leaders were ready to denounce her, as if high-volume music played late at night was an inalienable aspect of Afro-Caribbean culture and any critique of it had to be driven by prejudice, as if nobody noticed or cared that the vast majority of the young nocturnal drinkers, makers-out, and fighters were affluent and white. Someone started a Facebook page protesting her elevation to a life peerage—she was a baroness now—and her rumored front-runner status for the soon-to-be-vacated post of Speaker of the upper house. The protest gathered 113,686 signatures on the first day. She began to receive hate mail and even threats. And of course, there were political consequences. The already fragile alliance of left and right which had come together to offer her the chance of elevation to the Woolsack, where Speakers of the House of Lords had been seated since the time of Edward III, wavered and broke. She was given to understand, in the British way, that a degree of emb
arrassment was being felt regarding the—almost certainly untrue! And so unjust!—allegations against her, and consequently some people were having second thoughts. She decided on her response more or less instantly. She called her fellow baroness and withdrew her candidacy. “Thank you for your support, Aretta, but there’s no need for anyone to be embarrassed by me. I’m not dying to sit on that sack.”
The loom of life was broken, she thought, that loom upon which we wove the fabric of our days from familiar threads. Work, friendship, health, parenthood, family, love. And yes! Community. For goodness’ sake, yes! And race, and history, and struggle, and memory. Yes to all of that. All that was at the heart of the weaving. One made the finest cloth one could with such skills as one had, accompanied by, one hoped, the humility lacked by Arachne when she challenged Athena and insulted the gods. (However, if it was true that Arachne’s tapestry, which showed how the gods had abused humans, especially Zeus with all his rapes, was superior to Athena’s, then she was all for Arachne, and vengeful Athena, spidering her opponent, didn’t come out of the story at all well.) But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world’s culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.
The law came to her rescue as it always had, as she had always trusted it to do. Within the walls of that unimportant courtroom during this extremely minor case about noise abatement, certain old values still survived. There was evidence. There were facts which were not merely the assertions of rivaling bigotries. There was truth. Let me live and die here, she thought. This is my true home. She won the case easily. The restaurant’s owners were obliged to apologize in open court for violating the terms of their license to operate, and for the defamatory innuendos about Sister. Overnight the troll army vanished, and the culture without memory, which all culture had become, instantly forgot how it had slandered an innocent woman, and moved on. The street quieted down. The late-night revelers went elsewhere to disturb other people, other sleeping children. What passed these days for ordinary life resumed. She was used to the hard knocks of litigation and told herself that these bruises, too, would fade.
It was only now, when the fog of war had lifted and the armies gone away, that she saw that the genuinely injured victims of the conflict were her husband and daughter. Godfrey Simons sat on his High Court bench and the whole world passed before him and he passed judgment and then came home and put on a long dress and drank a glass of Bandol rouge and became Jack, her Jack. But that she should have been dragged through the mud in this way had filled him with a rage that would not be assuaged.
“It’s unforgivable, Jack,” he said. “We’re going back to mob rule. The lynch mob, the stockade in which people were pelted with fruit, the public burning.”
“Now, now, Jack,” she said. “You’ll be talking about witch hunts next. There was a song they were playing the night before the case. I’m sure you could hear it in your room too. I may not have heard properly but I thought it went, ‘I fought the law, and the law won.’ Is that a song? Because that’s what happened here. The law won.”
“That isn’t all that happened. What was done to you. It’s an unforgivable thing.”
Daughter, twentysomething, a rising star in the fashion industry, with a showroom slash atelier in a nearby mews and a growing clientele of shiny, thin, much-photographed beauties waiting to be dressed, was there too and concurred. “That is a song,” she said. “But there’s no excuse for what happened to you. I’ll never forgive it either.”
“Calm down, both of you,” Sister said. “I’ll live.”
She did not renew her interest in the Lords position, although there were new efforts to persuade her, accompanied by fulsome expressions of regret which she understood were insincere and calculated, as political apologies always were. The truth was she was relieved not to have to take up this new and weighty role when there were more personal things that needed her attention. “More personal things.” Hah! She had become more British than the British. This was no time for euphemism or understatement. She had to deal with the question of her health. Of whether, in short, she would be alive for very much longer, able to take up any sort of role in anything. Of, to be blunt, the possibility, bordering on probability, of death.
She had already defeated a cancer that she wasn’t supposed to survive. When she was still relatively young and, according to others, attractive, she had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer which had already spread to the lymph nodes. In spite of the very poor prognosis for patients in her condition, she lived. The double mastectomy wasn’t the only mutilation. Treatment had also required the removal of a part of an armpit and some of her chest wall muscles, plus very debilitating chemotherapy. Even though the cure was completely successful, according to her doctors, and she was declared to be in full remission, she had assumed that after that no man would desire her and she would live alone in a sort of remission from life as well as death; that her death sentence had been commuted to a life sentence, and loneliness would be her lot, along with the guilt, commonly experienced by cancer sufferers, of having brought the illness upon herself by the choices she had made in her life. Maybe it was the Fates’ reward for the way she had discarded Sad-Faced Older Painter and, according to some unkind tongues, helped to drive him into his grave. Then she had met Jack, and he had loved her in spite of it all. There followed the multiple miracles of love, marriage, a brilliant career, and happiness. The birth of a healthy child, Daughter, was the biggest miracle. She had supposed herself sterile as a consequence of the chemotherapy, but her womb had had other ideas.
Now, no longer young, she feared that a shadow had returned. Most mornings she woke up with a sense of impending horror. Then she told herself not to be foolish, she was symptom-free, all was well. After that she told herself, if you’re so worried, go in for a full checkup. But she had been afraid to do so. The Sancho case had felt, almost, like a welcome distraction. Now that it was over, the angels on her shoulders were whispering in her ear again. You’re fine, said the left angel. Get yourself looked at, said the right. She ignored them both and went to work, came back to her neighborhood, stopped by Daughter’s showroom to look at the beauty her girl was creating and to swap the day’s stories with her, got home and had a glass of wine with Jack in his red dress, or his green or blue dress, and told herself she was living her best life. But still she felt it: the shadow in her blood.
I’m not dying, she had said. Also, I’ll live. She hoped that wasn’t dangerously overconfident, hubristic, of her. Maybe she should have crossed her fingers for luck when she defied the exterminating angel. Some nights she dreamed of Nemesis coming for her in a chariot drawn by griffins, wielding her punishing whip.
And then there was the other subject that never completely went away. Brother. The slap on the ear, the accusation, the threat. Whenever his name came up, so did the subject of his unforgivability, if indeed he was unforgivable, and slash or she unwilling to forgive. Now that Jack and Daughter were talking about other matters being unforgivable, her thoughts tended back, yet again, to her lost sibling, whom Daughter, so implacably unyielding in her fury about the way her mother had been treated, wanted Sister finally to make up with. Daughter even bought a paperback copy of his novel Reverse Rendition (cheaply, at the secondhand bookstore on Notting Hill Gate) and urged Sister to read it. “These CIA agents go to an unnamed Eastern country—maybe Pakistan?—to kidnap a man. He might be innocent or he might be the son of Osama bin Laden or some other terrorist. You don’t know until the last page. It’s so contemporary. You should totally read it.”
Being his sister felt like a sort of life se
ntence too.
* * *
—
ON THE DAY SISTER got her bad news, Daughter was trying to imagine herself as a mask. Her next runway show, she was thinking, would feature models in many different kinds of mask: animal masks including antlered deer, lionesses, roaring she-bears; Caribbean masks all feathers and sequins; hand-painted Venetian commedia dell’arte masks—Arlecchino, Pantalone, Capitan Scaramouche—men’s masks all inhabited, taken over, transformed, by the tallest, most beautiful girls she could hire. If your atelier was just off the route of the carnival, you couldn’t help having masks on your mind. Somebody brought her an old recording, VHS transferred to CD, of the National Theatre’s 1980s production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in which the whole cast wore masks throughout. Watching all four and a half hours of the trilogy showed her the truth of something she had heard said but never witnessed: the masks acted. The masks became human and were capable of expressing all the great emotions of tragedy. The masks lived. This was what she wanted to achieve in the twenty-minute length of a runway show. It was impossible, but the impossible was the only thing worth trying to do. She was drawing masks for herself. What would be the mask that she would become, the mask that would become her?
“Take a look at this,” her assistant Ornella said. This was a set of YouTube videos, the first group put up by Anonymous hacktivists, featuring men (and women?) in Guy Fawkes masks, as originally seen in the graphic novel V for Vendetta and the Wachowskis’ film of it. The second was a video by the rival group Legion, a straight-to-camera speech by a man using a voice-changer device and wearing a Don Quixote mask, vintage merch from Man of La Mancha on Broadway back in the day. “So derivative, both of them,” Daughter said. “Maybe we should try to contact them. I could make them much cooler things to wear.”
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