Liam wiped himself with a superfluity of care, for what was there to wipe, this older gent in a rest stop near Schroon Lake. He’d stopped for the hell of it, to see some light, to hear water run—light and water in the dark of night. And where is his son?
Back in the Jeep, the white stripe zipped under him like long laser salvos through his prostate, he could feel them, see them approaching one after another and feel their passage becoming a steady metronome of inner sound—my son, my son, my son, my son, my son, my son.
Where to, my son? Where from? Are you coming after me or am I coming to you? Are we both escaping? Have we escaped each other?
I am from here, Liam says aloud. And I am going home. Where are you? What are you running from? Are you running? Have we left the world?
It is fucking cold. This fucking Jeep. Norwegian cold, Ibsen cold. Cold like that toilet was cold, the ring of the seat like ice. A throne of ice. Like John Gabriel Borkman, gripped by guilt and shame and defiance and ice. Like Borkman, his own sense of power—or was it freedom?—had ruined lives. And like Borkman, he is paying, and will forever pay until he enters some purification, some absolute zero of the soul, in ice.
He turns the radio on.
Perhaps it was a backfiring truck, they are now saying. No weapon, no shell casing, no bullet has yet been found. But several people fled—caught on the cameras. A young black man bolting through; an older black man shuffling off in a porkpie hat and sunglasses; a man of indeterminate race in a long brown raincoat, perhaps concealing something, as the day was warm in Kentucky; and the burly man in a tweed sport coat hurdling a police barrier.
The FBI was poring over footage and consulting security cameras surrounding the Riverwalk. “The investigation is ongoing and we have promising leads,” says the man heading the investigation, a man who sounds like a bored southern bureaucrat.
Obama expresses no alarm and is noncommittal. “Listen folks, this is a dangerous job. As we know too well, public service is a dangerous job, for policeman, firemen—and women; our troops overseas and at home. And our politicians. It comes with the territory. I’m just sorry it spoiled a wonderful barbecue, and we’ll be back to Paducah in due course.”
It couldn’t be Johnny, reasons Liam. It couldn’t be. But Liam trusts his eyes. Johnny, for some reason, was there, across the Indiana border into Kentucky. Why’s that?
He waited for his phone to ring.
It was his wife. He’d pulled over to rest in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Warrensburg. This was the end of his cell service going north. She was cool, if not cold. “I’m going to the cabin,” he told her. “I’m working on a sequence about Borkman.”
She said she hated the play. “Too stagy.” She allowed as how she was going to work at home on the weekend and she’d arranged to have dinner with her “teacher,” a gay fitness trainer. “I need to laugh.”
Liam laughed, but he shouldn’t have. It wasn’t his cue. She hung up.
XV
LIAM’D RUN INTO A GUY AT THE TIN & LINT in Saratoga ten years ago now. It was a long night. He’d gone to the Spa to catch the races and meet a serious novelist from the region and talk about the writing life but had ended up having a long evening with locals. He thought he’d get a poem out of it at least—a friendly waitress showed him the booth where Don MacLean had written “American Pie,” on a napkin, which the proprietor stuffed into MacLean’s pocket as he was throwing the drunken guy out—when a chap sat down next to him at the corner post, where Liam was having his nightcap.
The fellow was a lush from a local paper company who’d always wanted to be a writer, but with the wife and kids etc., etc., and one thing led to another and they ended up somewhere else, and Liam let the man praise Liam’s famous father-in-law’s books and soon had the specs on a small bite of land on Lyon Mountain that Finch Pruyn Paper could excise from the deal with the Nature Conservancy, the guy would love to do it, it was a great place for a writer, he could tell, and he could make the call, and he was drunk—ten acres cleared, just a short walk up to the summit. “There’s a spur from a fire road that leads right to it—it’s a meadow. Thirty-five hundred feet. In the mornings you can walk to the summit in five minutes, see Canada. All the way. And the old man’ll like it—how old is he?”
The house was an indulgence, yes—for a mountain shack, as his wife called it. She’d been once and the father-in-law never. But Liam, for all his efforts to leave behind his small-town upbringing, had nonetheless not left it, and it took an adulthood to realize this, as well as tens of thousands of dollars spent with Dr. Barton Frankel and others—that if he had any soul, it was here, in those mountains that loomed blackly to the north as he drove the smooth ribbon of the Northway. He knew right where he was going and hardly had to steer, such was the engineering of both this road and his spirit.
As the young Joyce told Mr. Ibsen, “a higher and holier enlightenment lies—onward.”
He grabbed a Molson tallboy at the Stewart’s in Warrensburg and some supplies—milk and cereal and fruit and a carton of Marlboros, why not. A box of matches, some C batteries. A case of Saranac IPA—Saranac, his homestead town, now with a brewery named after it that was 150 miles away.
Back on the highway, where in the dark he has for decades mulled his present, his future, plotted his moves, his career, it comes to him. Should this be Johnny involved in a shot on the president, he—the father—will become famous. The world will be curious about the poet/father of such a man; about the poet/father who left this boy’s mother when the boy was three. About the poet/father of a would-be killer, the sensitive, thoughtful verse maker. The world would eagerly await his take on this tragic turn; would feast, perhaps, on the shame he must feel, his guilt; would savor his reflections in words upon the experience. Tell us what it means, Liam Brogan. You, above all people, will know.
He wished he’d brought fresh blades with him, but then considered that the grizzled look would suit the occasion, should it arise. A cabin interview, say.
He thinks of a poem he’s abandoned that, with a few tweaks, would be read as prophetic.
Liam sees a hitchhiker at the end of the entrance ramp at exit 25. It couldn’t be Henry, could it? He motors past.
He’s punished himself enough. This is his counsel. He’s punished himself physically, mentally, financially with increasing intensity over the last three decades. Johnny was his mistake—his great mistake: a child from an early marriage of passion and drugs and alcohol and dreams of rebellion. How unfair. How bourgeois. How 1970s to think that rebellion on this level was a coherent personal statement—that he was saying something. Years of therapy and reading had given him many “insights,” views into theories of what would explain away his many mistakes. One, he was trying to emulate his birth mother, who gave him up, and thereby exonerate her by matching her in his own abandonings—a way not to hate her (Dr. Lipton). Two, because of his adoption, he did not understand family and tried his best to build family in the dark, and could not be blamed for getting it wrong (Dr. Solow). Three, by being “chosen” by his adoptive parents, he understood he could always be unchosen, making all relationships contingent, and allowing him to treat family in similar terms, as something that could be tried and left. After all, he’d adapted, why couldn’t they? (Dr. Frank). Four, a mixture of all: Unable to blame or hate his mother (a woman he did not know), he did not understand the bonds of family, and thought all relationships were contingent, and this is what he tried to teach his own child, as if he were a miner consigning his own son to the same life in the mines (D. H. Lawrence). But he loved his son.
He’d have to work on that; it was hardly a sound bite.
He’d have to step on it to get ice and firewood and propane in Plattsburgh.
JOHNNY HAD ALL HIS PROBLEMS, and more. He’d bounced from woman to woman, too; he drank. He’d also done a stint in prison—bar fight, assault. Still on probation, Liam imagined, though he didn’t stay abreast of all such developments.
Loved the kid, but done him wrong. No doubt, the kid believed that. There was no rinsing it out. It was something that could, at best, be lived with, not removed like some stain. It was there, and that was one of Liam’s greatest mistakes, to think such things would fade. After being surrendered by his own birthing mother a few hours after she’d housed him for nine months, all was forgotten, expunged—it was even expunged from the public record, not to mention an infant’s memory. Sort of. “I guess that’s what we’re talking about,” Liam said to the self of him reflected back in his windshield, his glasses with dashboard rubies glinting. He swerved around some roadkill and was shocked to see his first moose standing there on the shoulder, a big rack and chest set high on the ladder of his legs. Liam pulled over, got out, and then panicked. He had a beer can open and he’d been drinking since morning, but Bullwinkle loped off across the lanes into the wooded median anyway, so Liam got back in the Jeep and roared off, his heart pounding so that a stitch beneath his left pectoral throbbed. He was sure this is how he would die one day—infarction.
There was the necessary stop in Plattsburgh and he made it. There was no need to rush; he’d forgotten—you could get propane at the twenty-four-hour Sunoco station, and ice, and packs of “camp wood.” He picked up a couple of cold ones for the forty-five minutes more he had to go.
Liam was fearless about the drinking and driving, if he wasn’t coming out of some tavern establishment. Regular citizens going to and from upstate weren’t subject to being stopped unless they were weaving or racing, and there were no troopers on the back roads anyway, so he was safe, safe to relax with a can between his legs, sipping, relaxing, spacing out the ride with thoughts of elsewhere. The final leg of it all went smoothly, and when he made it to the edge of his property in the total darkness, his headlights frighting the pines around him, all he wanted to do was dive inside, find the bed, whack it a few times, light the Coleman, see what he’d been reading last time he was here, and fade away.
A movie screening in a dark, private theater, with couches. Watching with a team of filmmakers—their film—and a few of their friends. Liam doesn’t personally know any of them. At first, he is seated next to the choreographer, who seems gay. They share a couch. As the film begins, Liam mentions to him that over there is Alan Good—a dancer he’s seen in the Merce Cunningham troupe. Oh, gushes the choreographer, Yes, he was simply brilliant in Showboat. Did you see Showboat? No, says Liam, laughing. Just the Cunningham company. I don’t think I’d go see Showboat. The choreographer leaves in a huff. Then a young Russian woman slides in next to Liam. He knows her name, somehow—Valdaya. She has large head, big green eyes, and a small body. She must be a dancer, he thinks. Valdaya is very friendly, and puts her hand on his chest expressively, very familiar. Liam thinks about cheating on his wife. Someone discreetly appears to take a drink order in a whisper. Liam doesn’t know what to have. He is distracted. Valdaya says, “I’ll have a Guinness.” Then, Liam doesn’t want to have a Guinness; it would appear to be copying her, trying to impress, ingratiate. But he genuinely loves Guinness. He says, “A Guinness.” Valdaya says to him, “‘A Guinness,’” in a low growl, imitating him, her green eyes lifted toward him over a thin grin. He wakes up.
The cabin is bright with light. There is snow in the field all around, which he’d hardly noticed when he pulled in. Perhaps it had snowed during the night. It had; there are no tracks from the car to the front porch, upon which he now stands, shivering. The sunlight reflects bright sheets off the snow and fills the windows with white light, and the two small rooms inside. He goes back in, and he can hardly see for a moment and he closes his eyes. He sees in his mind’s eye the tweed coat hanging over the back of a chair, and when he opens his eyes, it is there.
In his earlier days, Liam was part of a literary community—short-lived but real. Poets, artists, dancers, spiritual adventurers. If there was an idea holding it together, it was a belief that the imagination could transform reality. This was practiced and pursued and found in many ways—the poetry of Blake and Coleridge, the writing of Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Owen Barfield; and even the deconstructionists, who saw that reality was transformed by systems of expression, detrimentally.
To Liam, at first, it was hocus-pocus, no different from his childhood Catholicism: Your belief becomes reality. But he soon learned that the act of imagining could release to the surface realities within, which then could be incorporated into the reality without, changing it. Drugs and drink and reading did this for him; meditation; going places in his mind and coming back with something; dreams.
His father-in-law had claimed that “fiction is an epistemology, a system of knowing.” The same thing.
Liam didn’t really buy it, after a while. He put it down—his own efforts in life could not change anything or anyone, certainly not himself, or his son, or his marriages, or his career. But now he sat at the little square pine kitchen table in a chair opposite the draped tweed coat from Dublin that he’d bought for himself and given his son and seen on television the day before. Where’d that come from?
He’d wait. His son was here.
There was no need for the radio. Liam realized he already knew more than the world.
He forgot about his own little poems, his moment in the harsh limelight. This was real.
Had he conjured something out of the dark? Was he in the true realm of art and faith after all, after all his living? Was this wisdom? If his son would come, he would know. And he would wait.
There was no clock ticking, but the cabin did—it ticked as it settled and adjusted in the wind blowing off the mountain, and did so with a regularity, as if calibrated.
The morning wore on and the headache burned itself out. Liam began to feel clean. He sat at the table with his palms out before him on the comforting pine boards. With his hands flat and his haunches in the chair and wool-stockinged feet grabbing the floor, he had the sensation he was strapped into a moment in time or space—both—captaining himself atop a long sinew of incident, accident, and science that extended to the core of things, through the floor and the shallow cellar and into the anorthosite upon which this structure was built, down through miles of it to where there were only canyons of lightless magma. He shivered at the thought, but pleasantly, as if part of a universal fascia that was firing everywhere in this blessed moment fired in him.
He held this feeling, captured it with his mind like a wild raven in his hands and then set it free. It flew, but tethered to him by the very logic to which he was tethered to all. It rose above him—or he grew, elevated, through the crossbeams and latticework, the shingles and the chimney flashing and the chimney stones themselves into the network of air, the atmosphere really, past the surrounding pines, in which he could see, now below him, a raven’s nest, and then on past the cliff face, gray and wet, and to the bald summit with its two scraggly pines, wind-battered to hat racks of brown needles; and he could see the valley flowing west to Upper Chateaugay like an embroidered train, and beyond, to the St. Lawrence plain and its shimmering silver vein and out there, past that, Canada. Through the forests he could see his son trekking to him, breathing heavily, wandering, lost, looking for his coat, or his father, or something to eat or drink, laboring in a nimbus of his breath, looking for his mother, somewhere, frozen in the turf, her face peaceful, at repose; for the look of love for a grieving son she’d abandoned, he was looking.
All this, but here only an empty coat. Had hours passed? There was little light left, but what there was shot through the low window over the sink and across from Liam, above the lintel, the thin light splashed and danced a line. Words threatening to form, as they had when he was young and fooled with the psychotropics and he’d read distinctly a script in the clouds that he knew and recognized but could not recall or make plain after; here, on the lintel, a line drew out, in gold and orange, four, five, six clusters, forming and re-forming but holding a certain syntax, an orthography, six signs or words. He peered hard from many angles
of view, though he remained in place. He saw this: Fall in love. He saw Fall in love—it came clear and held—with what is. With what is held; and that was that. A cliché to be deleted, per Sonny Rollins? Oh, it held, and he thought for a pen. He had no pen and he did not want to move, but leaned across—Johnny’d have one in the coat. Indeed he did—Liam’s own Parker pen, a gift to him from—for crissakes, Christmas. Two months ago. He wrote on the deal table the phrase: Fall in love with what is. And then began to panic. What the fuck is this?
That is to say, what is?
And how to love it?
Liam recognized nothing about the space he was in; he realized that he could not say what day it was, only that it was winter. Surely, he could cipher it out, given a little thought, but he surrendered instead to the drift, and resisted sending his mind back to an identifiable date and then marching forward on a hunt for today and nail it. No, he stayed suspended, and the panic, which had gripped his diaphragm, released. He did recognize something, though, about his location in another kind of landscape. He had often in his work found himself right here—at the summit of something, or very near it, having made a certain journey, excitedly, pleasurably, with passion and commitment, as if he were running somewhere he would recognize when he reached it, always only to end up like here, lost, unable to go on or get back down or go home. Not for the first time had he written himself into an impasse—in this case, an empty two-room cabin. He’d done this sort of thing a hundred times, and here he was again, but somehow with a talisman of what he had given away, draped over a chair.
Somewhere out there was his son. He’d be back any minute; he had to be. The night was coming on—the whole day had nearly passed, and it was beginning to snow and blow. The cabin had given up ticking off its seconds and what he heard now was a long, unmistakable moan. Him.
The Business of Naming Things Page 15
