On no few occasions, they ended their days on the rooftop, where they sat with their feet dangling over the ledge, sharing a half-smoked cigarette, fiddling with a cheap radio kit. Sometimes, with the air of failed detectives, they recounted the events of the day and the search for Maxwell’s father. Other times Benjamin talked nonstop about the people who lived in his neighborhood, which he had nicknamed the Isle of Pale (after the now defunct Pale of Settlement in the also now defunct Russian Empire). He told Maxwell about the rabbi who ran a counterfeit synagogue, the young woman from a shtetl outside Kiev who had once walked from Kiev to Istanbul and who now never left her apartment building but could still be found every winter night, like a sleepwalker, on the rooftop across the street bundled in a black cloak playing a violin, the alderman who once walked the streets with the infamous anarchists Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman, the Orthodox grocer whose favorite thing to say in English was moderation in all things, including moderation, in short, about all those Jews for whom, according to Benjamin’s father, a paradox was everything.
Once, as even further illustration, Benjamin told Maxwell a joke that his father had told him. A poor man from Kaunas beseeched God every week for charity. Every week God listened to the man’s tales of woe and doled out gifts that, little by little, improved the man’s condition. One day, God, who was really quite busy during those troubled years, appeared and said to him, “Listen, you know I will continue to help you every week. You don’t have to convince me anymore. A little less cringing, a little less moaning, and we would both be happier.”
To which, matter-of-factly, the poor man said, “My good YHWH, I don’t teach you how to be a god, so please don’t teach me how to be a human.”
Maxwell enjoyed listening to Benjamin’s stories and, speaking truthfully, one might call him Maxwell’s first friend. Each day, it became a little harder for him leave the city and Maxwell spent more and more time with Benjamin, whether searching for his father in the huge market and its surrounding neighborhoods or smoking and talking on the rooftop overlooking the Isle of Pale.
* * *
Chance or fate or the old mad pirate’s Caribbean devil had it that Benjamin too was the first and only person Maxwell ever told about A Model Earth. One August day, while Maxwell was looking through Benjamin’s back issues of Amazing Stories and Weird Tales in the rooftop shed, he discovered the opening chapter of his mother’s novel Lost City in the June 1929, Vol. 13, No. 1 issue of Weird Tales. At first, since he hadn’t known anything about the excerpt, which was titled “The Dominicana,” he was taken by surprise, and since Benjamin was working that day at the delicatessen, he had no one with whom to share his surprise. Instead, he read the excerpt of his mother’s novel three times. Each time he wept.
Later, when Benjamin returned, he told him:
“My mother wrote this.”
Benjamin took the issue and read the name of the author. “Adana Moreau is your mother?” he said with astonishment. Then, after a long pause, he added, “What a huge goddamn coincidence.”
To which Maxwell replied that there were no such things as coincidences and that rare things like this happened in the universe all the time.
“What rare things?” said Benjamin, even more perplexed.
As dusk fell and they shared a cigarette, they tried to decide which rare things could be mistaken for coincidences or vice versa and were unable to agree. Later that night, Benjamin told Maxwell that the only thing to do at that point was for him to read Lost City. Maxwell agreed that this was the best solution and he lent Benjamin the copy he had brought with him from New Orleans.
The next morning, at the kitchen table, Benjamin told Maxwell that he hadn’t slept all night (or maybe he had slept a little and dreamed that he hadn’t, he couldn’t remember). He said it really didn’t matter if coincidences existed or not because Lost City was a great science fiction story. He stressed the word great. Maxwell said he didn’t know the difference between a great science fiction story or just a good one or even a terrible one. Benjamin said the difference lay in possibility, in the possibility of the story and the possibility of the language in which the story was told. Immediately he began to cite examples. He talked about Mary Shelley and H. P. Lovecraft, he talked about Yevgeny Zamyatin and E. E. “Doc” Smith, he raved about Aldous Huxley. He said he had read all those authors and that Adana Moreau was their equal or maybe, in some ways, she was even better. Then, naturally, he asked Maxwell if his mother had written anything else.
“Yes,” he said tentatively, “she wrote a sequel called A Model Earth, but she destroyed it in a fire just before she died.”
“Did you read it?” asked Benjamin.
“I did.”
“Can you tell me about it?” he asked with some hesitation. For a few seconds Maxwell said nothing and only studied his face. Then he nodded.
As they wandered the market that day, which was plunged in frenetic late-summer activity, Maxwell told Benjamin the plot of A Model Earth from start to finish. What little he couldn’t remember he made up. When he was finished, Benjamin started pacing the already overcrowded sidewalk in excitement.
“Is it good?” asked Maxwell over the din of the market.
Benjamin stopped dead in his tracks, looked Maxwell in the eyes, where he was certain there were still a few traces of A Model Earth to be told, and said, “You know the answer to that already, Joe. It’s better than good and you need to write it all down again. You have to finish the story.”
Maxwell thought about it for a moment and then shook his head.
“You have to understand. It’s still possible to get it all down. It has to exist again. Others need to read it.”
Just then, Maxwell saw his mother sitting at the kitchen table with a typewriter, her long coffee-colored hair forming the swirl of an Arabic numeral on her back as she bent her head down, her gaze fixed on the manuscript, typing to a rhythmic beat that matched his own heart, a small heart beating in the chaos of her final days.
“I can’t,” he said.
* * *
For several nights, Maxwell had terrible dreams in which time was reversed and his father was his son, and his grandfather was his grandson, and great-grandfather was his great-grandson, and so forth, through the entire line of his African pirate dynasty, until the end was the beginning.
Sometimes, to calm himself after he woke, he drew geometry problems from memory on a small notebook until he could fall back asleep. Other times, he woke shaking and was overcome by the irresistible urge to go outside and walk.
After another week with no leads, Saul pointed the boys to an article in the Daily Illustrated Times that he thought could help. The article was about a mother, who, in 1919, had gone to Paris in search of her son. He had joined the Allied troops in 1914, but disappeared shortly thereafter. The woman didn’t find her son. However, years later, while living in an apartment near the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris, a soldier-turned-grocer who resembled her son, who had nearly the same high forehead and burning cobalt blue eyes, brought her a bag of vegetables. He had fought in the Austro-Hungarian ranks and had lost his mother during a British tank assault. In some ways, the woman he saw resembled his deceased mother. She had the same dark hazel hair and nearly the same laugh, high-pitched and tender, a laugh that could be heard through the wheat fields of his small village as a child. Upon seeing the soldier, she laughed and called him son in French. Upon hearing the woman’s laugh, the soldier called her mother in Hungarian, and entered the apartment, which suddenly felt as familiar to him as the fiery green waters of the Danube.
“But how can this help us, tateh?” said Benjamin when his father was finished. “The people in this story are delusional.”
“It has nothing to do with delusion, Benjaminas,” said his father, “it has to do with forgetting, and then remembering.”
“Like an amnesiac? Still, this does not help us,
tateh,” said Benjamin.
“Yes, it does,” his father said. “After I read the article, I went to the offices of the Daily Illustrated Times and convinced the reporter, a man who is clearly interested in missing people, to help us look for Maxwell’s father.”
“How did you convince him?” asked Maxwell.
“I told him your father is a pirate,” he said with a smile.
* * *
A few days later, they met the reporter, a skinny man with red hair and a long jawline like a Moai stone statue, in a busy diner on South Canal. To start, the reporter, who was somewhat skeptical throughout the interview, asked Maxwell when he had arrived to Chicago. He replied that it had been on July 5th or July 6th or maybe even July 7th. He didn’t know for certain because he had been trapped in a boxcar.
“A bullman?” asked the reporter.
Maxwell nodded.
“What a piece of shit,” said the reporter, and Saul and Benjamin nodded solemnly in agreement.
“That’s what the other bullman who let me out said, too.”
The reporter (who chose not to write any of this down) laughed. Then he took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Maxwell, who nodded as a way of saying thank you, and stuck it behind his ear for later. After this the reporter suddenly turned more serious and began to write down the information Maxwell gave him: date and place of birth, names of parents and where they had met, description and profession of his missing father, names of any surviving family members or friends who had known his father, why and how he had come to Chicago, address of where he was staying (which would not be published, the reporter reminded him, and which Saul then offered freely), etc. When he was finished with his questions, the reporter told Maxwell that he would see what he could do help to him find his father, but he couldn’t make any promises. Then they shook hands and the reporter left the diner, in a hurry.
* * *
Afterward, Saul, who had been saving for some time for just such an event, took the boys to the Century of Progress World’s Fair, which, according to a young, eager attendant at the front gates, was a brief city sprung out of the prairie and flung into the dust of the not-too-distant future. They visited the Maya Temple, the Crystal Maze, and the House of Tomorrow. The fair center was more carnivalesque, with Ripley’s Believe It or Not, The Temple of Mystery (where, to the boys’ astonishment, a magician named Carter the Great sawed a woman in half, then hung himself), replicas of foreign villages, and the Streets of Paris, where young men loitered, gangster types with missing teeth straight out of a crime novel. Farther north there were public spaces cloistered along the shores of a large blue lagoon, above which, at some two hundred feet, ran the suspended cables and rocket cars of the Sky Ride. The aquarium and the museum were there, too. In front of the Hall of Science there was a fountain with moving robots, where they stood for some time in the sweltering heat, drinking cold milkshakes and immersed in a sweeping debate about whether robots would one day become human-like, if, like Frankenstein’s monster, they would reminisce and feel hunger and suffer or, at the very least, take on the dim sensations of suffering.
The Hall of Science featured a stratosphere gondola, a deep-sea submersible, and a chemistry exhibit, in which a scientist calmly explained that the secrets of the atom would one day reveal themselves to contain the power to destroy the world.
At some point, they wandered into a large black dome, where an astronomer from Harvard University, a small woman with tight black curls and a red Pashmina shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders, introduced herself and then talked about the proliferation of instants that followed the birth of the universe some billions of years earlier from a primeval atom, the Cosmic Egg, and led inevitably or accidentally (scientists still had no idea) to them being in that room listening to her. Then she flipped a switch and the black dome was flooded with galaxies and nebulas. She explained that the Earth spun around once every twenty-four hours, the moon orbited the Earth every twenty-seven days, the Earth orbited the sun in one terrestrial year, and the sun orbited the center of the Milky Way galaxy once every 230 million years, which was a galactic year and which meant that the last time the sun was in its current position, the dinosaurs ruled the Earth. In turn, the Milky Way, according to Edwin Hubble, was hurtling through space and time in an expanding universe bursting with billions of still other galaxies.
“With repetition,” she said and spread her arms, encompassing the darkness, the dust, and the burning stars, “even the extraordinary becomes ordinary.”
Later, before dusk, they rode the Sky Ride. From the vantage point of their rocket car, the city, like all American cities, was endless. To the east was a vast lake that had once been a glacier, a sea, thought Maxwell in awe, that was not a sea.
Afterward, they ordered hamburgers, French fries, and Coca-Colas in a restaurant overlooking the blue lagoon. They watched the Arcturus ceremony, a light and water show. When the food arrived, they talked about all the things they had seen that day and shared the French fries from the center of the table, like a family.
* * *
On August 27th, an article with the headline “Son of the Last Pirate of the New World” appeared on page six of the Daily Illustrated Times. In the article, the reporter, in a rather tabloid-like fashion, first described his meeting with a half Negro, half Dominican boy who had arrived to Chicago from New Orleans to look for his father, the Last Pirate of the New World. Then, switching tones, the article gave a highly detailed history of pirating in the Americas, starting with the Spanish Empire in the late 1500s and the French pirates and privateers who plundered Spanish and Portuguese treasure ships and colonial ports, including Brazilian ports on the Atlantic Ocean exporting gold and Spanish Caribbean ports in the seas of the Antilles trading in African slaves. Then, moving through the centuries, the article observed the lives of the pirate and privateer brothers Jean and Pierre Lafitte, who by 1811 had, along with freemen and escaped slaves, established a self-styled and independent black market kingdom called Barataria—named, of course, after the fictional territory governed by Sancho Panza in Don Quixote—on a bay near New Orleans. Then, in a somewhat surprising turn, the article implicated US Navy and Marine officers in purchasing black market arms and alcohol from Barataria descendants, then still living near New Orleans, during the occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924). Those same descendants, the article continued, who truly could be considered the last pirates in a lineage spanning some four hundred years, also supplied crime organizations and speakeasies throughout the South with alcohol. All these events, combined with the northward migration patterns of Southern Negroes since the start of the Great Depression, meant that there could conceivably be pirates and the children of pirates living in the city. The long and terrible arms of the French and Spanish Empires, the reporter concluded, reached even into the heart of modern-day Chicago.
Lastly, almost as an afterthought, the article contained a telephone number for the journalist and an illustration of the Last Pirate of the New World (as described by his son) in case anybody reading knew his whereabouts.
* * *
In September, at the explicit urging of his father, Benjamin returned to the school at the neighborhood synagogue, even though he was convinced that, like the Martian heat-ray in War of the Worlds, it would only end up liquefying his mind. Since the synagogue and the neighborhood public school wouldn’t accept Maxwell, he spent most of his days alone in the kitchen reading a book on astronomy.
Occasionally, he was happy in that apartment. Other times, he leaned against the kitchen window and closed his eyes, determined to conjure up his home on Melpomene Avenue, or rather, his home on Melpomene Avenue in a parallel universe, one that wasn’t empty and diminished, one where there was a bed, a black typewriter, and a kitchen table around which at that moment sat the old mad pirate, his father, and his mother.
Some days, especially when the weather was ple
asant, he took long walks through the neighborhood, walks that invariably ended with three or four of the older neighborhood boys following him for a few blocks, sometimes silently, crisscrossing the street when he crisscrossed the street, and other times calling out to Maxwell in words that made no sense to him, maybe in Yiddish or Russian, in any case, words that sounded like the constant dripping of a rusted steel faucet and that struck him, finally, as threatening.
Still, one late September morning he decided to walk to the Daily Illustrated Times building. A young, busy secretary in dark glasses pointed out the reporter who had written the article about him. The reporter was sitting at a desk in the center of a very long, narrow room, where others sat typing.
There was a brief pause before the reporter finished typing and looked up. The reporter asked Maxwell how he was doing and Maxwell asked if he’d heard any news about his father.
“I did have one call,” he said, finally, “an old, senile Mexican woman who told me about how her husband, a Mayan from Bacalar, had been killed by pirates hired by Yucatecos.”
“So, nothing,” said Maxwell.
“Nothing,” said the reporter, “I’m sorry, son. But I’ll keep my ear to the ground. He’s bound to turn up.”
Maxwell suspected that the reporter’s words were true. And yet, later that night, as he sat alone on the ledge of the rooftop, smoking a cigarette and watching the flecks of stars just above the vaporous lights of the city, he couldn’t help but think that they were not the entire truth.
* * *
Maxwell never told Saul or Benjamin about the older neighborhood boys who followed him, but, as it turned out, he didn’t have to. Around this time, on a cool, windy October day, as Maxwell was leaning against the kitchen window, he saw two of the boys and two men approach Saul on the sidewalk. Both older boys wore skullcaps. They looked tired and thin and twitchy. One of the men wore a faded gray button-down coat and leaned on a baseball bat like a cane. Maxwell immediately recognized the taller one as the man Benjamin had said was his rabbi.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 21
