by Sarah Smith
“But you were still alive.”
He didn’t understand that. “Why?”
“I don’t think I have good reasons for most things. I—it seemed to me that if 1 could only believe enough . . . Richard, did you think in all those years ... I know you don’t really remember what happened, but did you think that there was something that couldn’t possibly be over? I thought of that whenever I thought of you. ”
“As long as I was alive, everything could be fixed?”
“Can it, Richard?”
“I don’t know.”
“Richard,” said Gilbert, “who killed Father, if Jay didn’t? Who hurt you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Might whoever did it feel threatened?” Gilbert leaned forward. “You might be in danger.”
Reisden looked at him, innocent Gilbert in the moonlight, already preparing to find something else to be afraid of.
“Richard,” Gilbert said timidly, “there might be some way you could remember.”
General amnesia cures itself within weeks or not at all— “There’s nothing left of Richard.” Instinct and hallucination. “You should have made me tell what I knew.”
“You had been made to do enough. ” Gilbert looked out over the moonlit lawn. “There was time.”
There had been time for everything then. It was Friday, August third, twelve days until Reisden stopped being Richard, and he had only started, with no idea of what to do and a crime that had suddenly become unsolved.
Reisden breathed out smoke, breathed in night air and the smell of pines and the lake. With the match he drew a black line across the grey-painted porch boards. He would need to talk with Daugherty, Harry, Anna Fen; arrange for identification. He would need to find out what he felt. He didn’t know that at all.
“Gilbert, I want to get drunk. Will you get drunk with me?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been drunk, Richard.”
“One doesn’t need to practice.”
“Can I do it on sherry? I’ve never drunk anything but sherry.”
“You could, but I won’t let you.” The liquor was in the kitchen, since liquor didn’t form part of Gilbert’s entertainment scheme. Reisden brought out two glasses and a bottle of Scotch.
“I believe Scotch is quite strong, Richard.”
“I want to get paralyzed drunk.” On an empty stomach he certainly could, though he almost never had. “Tomorrow we decide what to do, Gilbert. Tonight we don’t think about anything.”
The Scotch was a single malt, very dark, peaty, and smooth. Millionaire’s whiskey. Gilbert took a tentative sip.
“Oh, Richard, this is not so bad.”
It was thirty-five years old. Reisden poured himself a glass and drank half of it. An injustice to the whiskey. The liquor heated him and blurred the edges of that thing in the barn. He shivered.
“Tell me about yourself, Richard.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Mr. Daugherty said you were a kind of chemist,” Gilbert prompted.
“A biochemist.” The clear distinctions between Reisden and Richard had blurred away. He was afraid of that, but it was a relief tonight to talk about Reisden and not Richard.
“What do biochemists study?”
Reisden moved his glass from his right hand to his left, held up his right hand in the moonlight, flexed the fingers. “‘This is my hand. Why does it move?’ That’s what I try to find out.”
“Why does it, Richard?”
Reisden shook his head. He moved his hand in the moonlight, switched the drink back and forth from hand to hand. “If I knew I wouldn’t be interested in it. I’m sorry, that sounds flip.”
“No, I understand.”
He bent down and picked up a handful of bits of gravel from the drive, and began throwing them back in the drive, one by one. Motion without result. Perfect futility. What moves me?
“Why did you come here, Richard?”
“Because,” he took a breath and let it out, “‘because because because,’ one must always have reasons, no? Because I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t stop thinking I was Richard and I thought I was crazy.”
Gilbert nodded.
“I don’t want to be Richard,” Reisden said. “I know who I am; it’s not Richard. I am who I have been. Gilbert, this is all acting. All pretense. Someday soon everything will change back and I won’t be Richard anymore. That’s a decision.” He sketched the gesture of a toast. “Here’s to the rational world. I wish I were there.”
He was holding the glass very tightly between two hands, so tight that he was afraid he would break it; he put it down and clasped his hands together between his knees. His fingers ached from their pressure against each other, and the webs of flesh stood out between the fingers.
“When I was very young,” Reisden said, “I found out what chemistry was. The family I lived with, the Loewensteins, had a country home outside Graz. There were a lot of cousins; we all had tutors during the summer. The chemistry tutor had just taught us how to add up molecules during a reaction. Very basic stuff.” He drank and pressed the glass against his cheekbone because his hand was shaking and he was ashamed of it. “Nothing was created or destroyed. Nothing was ever left out, nothing was unaccounted for. The tutor took us for a walk. ‘Meine Damen und Herren, the smell of the grass, that is chemistry! The grass is chemistry! The cows, and the ducks, and your own bodies, that is chemistry!’ I thought, how splendid to understand.”
How very splendid to understand.
“I wanted to be angry,” Gilbert said suddenly.
“What?”
“Richard, I wanted to be angry, but I never could. Father was so angry, I— There was never enough room for me to be angry. I wanted to do wild things, to yell and insist and look down my nose at people. I wanted to be a riverboat pilot and wear a big hat. But I was always afraid that if I let go, I would end up like Father.”
The woods came close to the other side of the gravel drive, and near to the house there was a magnificent old maple, a giant a hundred years old. Reisden unlaced his hands and pointed a finger at the trunk. “Throw your glass at that tree,” he said.
Gilbert looked at his whiskey tumbler in surprise. It was a good lead-crystal tumbler, plain and heavy, probably one of William’s.
“You wanted to get angry. Throw your glass at the tree trunk. Break the glass.”
Gilbert held the glass away from him as if it were a bomb. “I couldn’t do that, Richard.”
“Of course you can. You know how to throw.”
“But I don’t have a reason.”
“Don’t you?”
Gilbert held the glass in front of him, repelled and fascinated.
“If you don’t think you can hit the tree, throw it at this step.” The bottom step of the porch was granite, a single enormous block. “You can’t miss the step.”
“I’m not the sort of person—”
“Do it once.”
Gilbert gingerly held the glass over the bottom step, and dropped it. It exploded in a star of splinters.
“That’s not the way—” But it hadn’t mattered, after all, which way Gilbert had broken the glass. He had broken the glass. He looked down at it in a kind of horrified grimness, and looked up at Reisden.
“I hated Father, Richard.”
“Yes. I know.”
“I’m glad he’s dead and I don’t want to find out who did it. But I’m going to have to because Father’s dead and because someone killed Jay.” Gilbert’s long old mouth tightened. “I would want to forgive whoever did it, if it weren’t for you and Jay, Richard.”
He looked down into the star of glass as if it were the innards of some sacrificial beast. “Richard,” he said, and his voice tightened with pain. “I don’t want revenge, or police, or trials. But it isn’t because I’m a good or forgiving man. Revenge would make me be like Father.”
In the moonlight the glass glittered and reflected in his glasses, and he look
ed away as if he were about to be overwhelmed by what he saw. “Now you, Richard.”
“I?” Reisden said.
“Break your glass,” said Gilbert, as if it would be a betrayal if Reisden didn’t.
Reisden drained the glass, stood up, and hefted it. It should have been easy. Army men and university men broke glasses after toasts, seeing how much broken glass they could build up in the fireplace for the servants to clear away in the morning. A stupid custom; but it was easy to break a glass. One could simply drop it, like Gilbert. But to break it, and mean it, and mean the anger behind it? He stood with the empty glass in his hand.
He was dizzy with the liquor, but not carelessly drunk. He had never got drunk that way. Because one could get out of control. Because he had to hold back something, except when he had acted in plays; and then he was someone else; but he could no longer be someone else here, if he had ever been.
Then he slammed the glass down abruptly and it shattered across the granite step. “That is acting. I don’t feel angry,” he said dispassionately. “I want to go back to my lab and not to be disturbed. Not to be noticed by anyone. I have nothing left inside me. Nothing to give; nothing to say. I don’t want to be touched by another person again. I don’t want to be hurt. I want what I can comprehend. 1 want nothing. I don’t want to be close to anything or anyone. Not anyone here; not you.”
It was not what he had expected to say either. He sat down on the steps, drained, staring at the scar of glass across the step. He looked at Gilbert. Right; look at the audience. Gilbert had tears in his eyes. He made as if to touch Reisden’s arm; Reisden drew away.
“Richard,” said Gilbert. “Do you know why I said you were Richard?”
I could not be Richard. It would be impossible to live in that much pain.
“Because you didn’t want to come back here.”
He thought about that for some time. It was almost funny.
“Yes,” said Reisden. “That makes all the sense in the world.”
