The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  Stars blistered the sky and the unknown dead stayed unknown dead. The moon was older. Henry had run out of steam. Max thought of his father translating the pain of his life into history and self-righteousness.

  “Max, it was just you, what you were. If you had been born Russian, somewhere down the line you would have become one of our guys.”

  There would be no end to it, so Max let it go. The sea washed in and around their old unresolved differences and the huge night quietly called time. Both men were shaking. Moonlight jigged a path down the waves.

  “One thing more.’ said Henry. Max sighed, and wearily braced himself for the final jab. “I want to offer you a book deal.”

  Timmy opened the door to Max’s house and waded lightly through draughts of moonlight. He listened for her breathing and any tell tale sounds of drunkenness, then let his nose lead him through the air streams and smells in the house. Old wood, musty cushions and flowers crowded his nasal passages to the bedroom, where she lay as a sculpture of bedclothes in the shadows. The nose hovered then dipped towards the mouth and settled in the quiet exhalations. There was no smell of alcohol. He could have shouted for joy. Maybe there was trouble storing up for the future, but she had got through this day without necking a bottle. He stared at her, safe in her father’s house, and felt grateful. In the corner of his eye he caught the lights on the magnolia going out.

  Shota had left them with a candle, floating Henry’s face and the leaf clusters above them in a faint gloss of light. Behind him, Max could see the silhouette of the hill where Gia’s house stood edged against the sky. The girls had cleared away most of the wedding feast, and Shota himself wandered about looking for empty glasses that had found their way into odd places.

  “I had sent out a sackful of applications,” continued Henry, “and received sweet Fanny Adams. ‘Don’t touch this man’ seemed to be the word – because of you Max, because of you, no doubt about it; but then Phil called me in because of you. He was a senior manager. He only called me in because he was at Harvard with you and curious about you and I was curious about what he knew about you at college. I was still chewed up bad.”

  The night was weary; the only energy was from Henry’s voice ricocheting among the cicada and sea hisses like a stone. It was so loud in its full frontal American way that Max was sure everyone would hear.

  “Usual stuff Phil says, nothing about you back then that made you think that one-day etc. Regular guy. You, that is. Hated your father. Good student. Kept yourself to yourself, but would occasionally open a bottle and become Grouch Marx. So, that was my start in publishing. You got me fired and you got me hired. I don’t know whether to love you or loathe you.”

  “Still the same firm?”

  “Gold watch case. The young ones are disappointed I’m alive each morning. My share holding is too small to guide policy but significant enough to keep my desk.”

  “Business okay?”

  “I built it up man, I built it. I had two Pulitzers and a National Book Prize. How about that for a failed CIA badass? I’m digging out new authors from trailer parks and finishing schools, good people, real, original talents. Then we sell part to a media company and now we do self-enhancement books and how to become a millionaire through affirmation? Short books so our reader’s lips don’t tire. I’m about to launch a big deal on Feng Shui for pets written by an actress who was murdered in Colombo.”

  Shota had left half a bottle of his favourite Scotch for the American guest and a Scots mist settled on Henry’s brain while Max remained crystal clear over his squeezed blood oranges, an unfamiliar but useful place from where maximum information could be extracted while revealing nothing. Now Henry was in full gallop over his life. Disjointed memories lunged about in the whisky fog.

  “When they opened the KGB files? Whoah, yeah – it was a real shock to discover who, Jesus! Peter! Jesus, yeah, stopped me right in my tracks, stopped me dead, even though it’s you know, decades. It makes you feel... contaminated, even though you’re… The world’s changed, you know. Nobody has any idea today, there are no ideas anymore. Look at Timmy, God bless him – lovely guy, good man but… still, where was I…?”

  “Contaminated.”

  “Contaminated. Yeah. How could you have been so, you know…? Peter. Like someone I often went to for advice. Not just about the job. You know, a war hero and a real pillar, a solid guy we thought, but…”

  “I didn’t know till quite late either.”

  “Really? No shit.”

  Max’s impression of Henry was of a man tearing through rooms where the light was never on for him. He picked up the references to unhappy children who never phoned; of ex-wives and lovers who had no time for him, and remembered that even in his youth Henry had problems with his wife. He had seemed so accomplished in every other field that this weakness was strange and unreal. Earlier, Henry had poured out his misgivings about the two-year relationship with a Christian fundamentalist that he had just severed, and it saddened Max to think that a spectacular youth he remembered so well had been boiled down by time to a bad ending with a Jesus freak. It took him momentarily back to that age when they all had such excitement about life.

  “You know – I mean everything we did, me and Mabel – had to be filtered through Jesus and the Twelve Apostles, with His approval or… I’d say ‘Come on, let’s just do this thing. Give the guy a break, give him the afternoon off’. But no. On her knees. Then I said if Jesus ever came back, your kind of Christian would make him blow chunks. That finished it. I think these people are actually insane. Nevertheless, you know it’s… companionship, it wasn’t all… And she was just another lost soul looking for safe harbour but…”

  A face appeared beyond Henry, near Masha’s house, a neutral expression, half seen peering at them, ascertaining what was going on above the candle and under the dark magnolia. Max froze. The guns were in his case in Shota’s spare room. The face was a dimness in shadows, as if seen through a palimpsest, barely discernible, but definitely there. It vanished as eerily as it appeared and left Max in an even worse state. The T-shirted men had disappeared after Shorena’s sexy interrogation. But he had seen them once more, looking back from the beach. Then they were gone again, appearing and disappearing around the bay and in some despondent inner landscape of his till he could no longer tell which was real and which was imagined. They had waited all day and now their time had come. From somewhere in the darkness he heard Shota dropping bottles and glasses into a crate.

  Henry was wittering on, unconcerned, ignorant of Max’s deadly drama, buoyed up on a gas of whisky wisdom. “Initially I was looking for perfection I suppose, you know, and then as I got a little older and wiser I tried to moderate. But that didn’t work. Even the adequate seemed beyond me, you know, peering into goldfish bowls of dull marriages wondering how the hell they got it that good.” Henry laughed at himself then finally caught Max’s fraught face, flickering against the sea. “Are you okay, Max? You look a little peaky.”

  “Oh, just tired.” Shota emerged from the shadows with his crate of empty bottles and glasses.

  “I think Shota wants to pack up. Maybe we should retire. It’s been quite a day.”

  “Hey, Shota,’ said Henry. “You are the feast master of all times. This has been superb.”

  Shota put the crate down on the table so Henry could give him the drunk’s long handshake, “Everything you have done has been beyond the call of duty.”

  Shota responded with a few Georgian smiles, but Max was caught by another movement by Masha’s, a different texture of darkness shifting quickly, and asked Shota in Georgian if he had seen anyone and watched the fear arch Shota like a nerve gas. Gia’s death gave body to the fanciful and the hysterical.

  “Nothing. I saw nothing. But I wasn’t looking. Maybe we should get rid of Henry.”

  “Henry we should get some
sleep. We’re going sailing tomorrow. Shota has a boat that may not sink.”

  “Sailing! Great!”

  “There are lots of places round the coast where we can go snorkelling.”

  “Still swimming?”

  “Oh yes, still swim..”

  “Lucy’s the swimmer you know. She’s got it. Never used it but Peg? You won’t get her near the water – won’t even put a toe in now. I think it’s psychological.”

  “Well let’s see what happens tomorrow. You can find your way back?” Max gave him the candle in the jar and Henry stood, stumbled and found his balance. “Jesus, I am shit-faced. See you, Shota. See you, Max. This has been, this has been you know, really… Strange and, you know… weird and… words cannot.. Yeah! Phew, yeah! Start writing.”

  “I will.”

  And Shota and Max scuttled indoors and from a dark room watched the candle’s flame and Henry’s bulky silhouette make their jagged way back towards Masha’s, deviating, correcting then finally disappearing behind Masha’s door.

  Nothing moved but the sea. They strained their eyes at absolute darkness.

  “It’s irrational, it’s irrational, it’s ridiculous. My mind is torturing me.”

  “Probably,” said Shota but Max could see the anxiety. “I hope Henry can make it up to that gallery bed in his condition.”

  When Henry finally got up to his gallery bed, he wanted dreams of Oprah and the NYT Bestseller List. Max would be prone to a pretentiousness of expression, like all first-time writers; he would have to sit on him and excise the indulgence. He began to wonder about movie spin-offs. “Bill Pullman as Max Agnew. I like him. Or is it Paxton? HBO series? No Henry, slow down. A book, start with just a book.” After all the watersheds of the twentieth century, they were a team again and that was a strange symmetry to ponder. But there might be money in it. “Maxie, give me something to give those twenties shit-heads at the office the finger as I say goodbye.” Above him the boughs of the old bougainvillea gripped Masha’s glass roof like giant talons. “Max,” he said to the Big Dipper, “Keep it sexy.”

  Arnold paused in his reading. Beside him Peg dreamed of the Scottsdale Mall. He placed his foot against her calf and applied pressure till she shifted and stopped snoring. In the other bedroom Masha was crying. He snapped off his battery book light. Masha’s sobs curled through the darkness. Hers was a sad house in an alien world through whose history struggle ran like an unbroken vein. He thought of his own ostentatious house in the Biltmores, of over designed rooms filled with nothing. There had been sadness there too. What were the lessons of sadness? He didn’t know. Perhaps there were none. He switched his book light back on and continued reading.

  Timmy woke once and wondered where he was, saw her shape, heard her breathing. Trees rolled up a hill beyond the window. Silver trees. Stars spat across a strip of indigo. A blinking light passing. Asleep up there. Georgian girls with beautiful eyes. Shorena, how he would like to… He drew cartoons. With Masha. Then she disappeared. Why? Lucy. Still sober...

  Max’s eyes scanned every shadow, every edge of light, his ears picked up every sound. Is this irrational? Is it real? Is it me? In his adopted country, death could be the price of a simple mistake. Like being honest, being a good citizen. Mistakes. He should have thought, but he was carried away by grief. Now his grief cursed him.

  On my daughter’s wedding day, I stand beneath a tree with guns. He looked over the village. They would talk about it for years. His house glowed in the moonlight. They were in there together. God bless them. Yes, if there is a god, and I’m certain there’s not, then bless them. Anyway.

  What he did over Gia was right, even if it condemned him to behave like a third-rate character in a gangster B movie. And what he had done today was right. It may not have been perfect, nor executed brilliantly, but it was right. He began to relax and be absorbed by the bay, the sounds and the movement of the waves, the moonlight, and a certain, indistinct ease with himself. The earth seems innocent tonight, all tucked away in the nursery. On other nights it bristles with terror. What changes it, he wonders. Is it to some degree a choice? Or have we no control?

  On the other side of the bay, pinprick headlights switched on. His hands tightened on the guns. The lights moved under black cliffs, picking out trees, shacks, boulders, then, as the car took the bend they swept across his little house, then turned. He watched the rear lights climb the hill away from the village, the brake lights flash on and off as they avoided the cracks and potholes. He saw the main beam pick out the summit and send an incandescence of light into the sky. Then the beam tilted and disappeared over the crest and left the rear lights hovering like ruby fireflies for a moment. They bounced violently through one last hole and were gone.

  Darkness, peace, silence. Nothing but the noise in his own head. He had survived. They had come storming back: the nutty ex-wife, the energetic ex-brother-in-law, led a by an unknown daughter. Back in the family. He had a strange sense that he had never really been away. Or had been on a trip.

  He looked around the bay and was aware of a new feeling; a set of different navigational coordinates, of seeing the familiar landscape in a fresh way.

  Something had been offered, something new, an opportunity had come out of the frightening mess. You never knew what life had in store for you. The oddest things in the oddest places. He had been in such a state about it all. But there was another day to get through tomorrow. Don’t count your chickens Max. God knows what that might bring. Those bastards might be back. Stay alert, eyes out for your stalker.

  In one day Masha had become a background figure. And he felt fine about it. Absolutely fine.

  Ending. That was what the strange feeling was. Not death. A sense of ending.

  Next morning

  The bottle’s label was yellow and nothing on it made sense to her but it was alcohol, what kind and what taste was of no relevance – the effect was the same in all languages. She replaced the cleaning fluids carefully and silently, and peeped back into the bedroom to make sure Timmy was still sleeping off his wedding. The air barely moved through his lungs, he was deep in the well.

  She had been woken to drink. Her body clock knew this was the heart of the night when the sleeper is at depth. Some days she woke relieved she had not gone to bed drunk; some days she woke wanting a drink; every morning she woke to the thought of a drink one way or the other. The previous night had defeated the bottle; at the last second she had tacked away through the same mystery that sometimes drove her to it, switching and steering her in opposite directions. But sometime in the night, the message had changed and woken her.

  In the garden she pulled her gown about her, catching the perfumes of unknown plants and trees, and letting herself blend into the place and the early dawn. A cadence of dying summer chilled her. Light began to settle on trees and the landscape took shape. Everything was still.

  The bottle label looked as if it had been designed in the days when the Czar ignored the death he was sowing for his careless family. St George proudly strutted his stuff through a foliage of Cyrillic. She slipped into the trees, away from the house. Only a couple of sips, just to bring that ease, that relief, and she could cope with the mad farce she was in. Then a swim, a vigorous one, get the breathing going hard, get it out of the system. By the time she returned to bed, any trace of booze would be washed away in the salt tang of the sea.

  The bottle would be secreted in the woods so it could be returned to during the day.

  Mist limply lay on treetops. She felt the damp settle on her, the silence stand back in contempt, as her fingernail pushed under the seal on the bottle-cap and teased up the end. Something caught her eye in the bottom corners of the label. The patterns around the edges moved down to a simple shape in the corner, a long, elegant movement, like an ancient un-drawn bow or a long flower leaf curling to its tip, a classic shape but one
that disturbed her and at first she didn’t know why. Then it dawned on her that this was the subtle shape that recurred in Gia’s furniture, quietly moving through it like a motif, almost ghost like, sometimes more of a suggestion, but an unmistakeable presence. It was wound in the table in her father’s living room, in the altar in the church and the chest of drawers snug in her bedroom in Santa Monica. Perhaps it was a classic Georgian motif; she had no idea, and strained to remember if she had ever been aware of it in Tbilisi.

  Gia seemed everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps she was reading too much into it, but she had sensed him in the background, underscoring the warmth of the locals with grief and shock. They talked freely about him, like old people who volunteer details of their operation or medical problem unasked, and in their descriptions he embraced everything from village wide boy to sensitive artist. But they all laughed around his Casanova complex, as one charming old lady had put it.

  Lucy looked round at her father’s house through the wood. Gia had been in there many times, had eaten, argued with Max, no doubt, perhaps even had a sip of this kind of liquor. Or removed it to stop Max getting drunk again. Lives come and go and leave no mark but in the imagination of the survivors; the dead are handed on like puzzles. She felt his eyes on her, watching an alcoholic in a wood before anyone woke, with a bottle in her hand.

  She had been plagued by a sense of loss all her life which she could hang on the peg of her father’s departure, but she knew Gia was like that too; she could recognise it in others instantly, that inexhaustible capacity to feel absence, that nothing is quite enough, that you’ve come in the wrong door. In some loopy way he had probably died for it. His furniture was the best of him; the perfection that he lacked. He carried the gift around in him like a benign virus. All the mess was gone now; what was left was the gift.