The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  She heard herself shout it inside her head.

  *

  Helen felt the dull ache of her insides. Shouldn’t she turn now and head toward Dr Marchant, face the coming realities? And yet she didn’t, circling again her former life, passing the burnished brass revolving door of her old office building, casting back to a time before Mr Feldman’s suicide, re-aligning life again, finding her way to earlier memories.

  She tried to find that essential old happiness, to inhabit an early freedom as a newly liberated woman of the late sixties. She had such fond memories, rising in the morning in a hustle to get Norman to the school bus on time, leaving the utilitarian suburb of a modest house in a car financed on affordable down payments for the throng on the commuter train platform. She remembered it all with absolute clarity, parking her car amidst the gleam of other new cars, proceeding in the push of life, venturing toward the stenciled ceiling and frescos beyond the revolving door of her office building.

  Even now, she could see in her mind’s eye the gold-leafed topaz and onyx tiffany mosaic in the building’s lobby, the entire pageant of Midwestern history captured in a series of stylized mosaics, the collective first landings rendered in a two-dimensional flatness suggesting an uncomplicated arrangement of bringing a Christian God to the natives – a sharing of gifts between frocked French missionaries, Bibles in hand, with olive-skinned natives in ceremonial headdress offering a peace pipe at some appointed canoe portage.

  No matter the real history. She could almost hear Norman in her head shouting, and she wanted to scream back at him, for who now didn’t know the true history!

  ‘Yes, Norman, the ravages of smallpox and measles, the internment of natives and the Trail of Tears... I know... I know... you are so damned right...’

  And yet in the mosaics’ audacious simplicity, set before the people as artifact, it had served as a stylized myth of life as a system of exchanges, of deals, where the only underlying principle was the decorum and manner of how one negotiated.

  It was in these early first landings, these ceremonial exchanges, that the glory of a new world was founded – from a humble barter of animal pelts to the glorious reach of skyscrapers in a span of mere centuries.

  No single history could account for such progress. It was all too vastly complicated, and yet so manifestly real and literal, the inner chamber of the lobby a crypt holding the sacred transactional truth of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. It had all come together so beautifully once-upon-a-time, the perfect inning, the improbable no-hitter of American dominance, and all of it coinciding with her youth.

  *

  Helen turned east on Jackson toward the lake in the evening traffic, intent now on what needed to be done. Snow had threatened all afternoon. It fell now in drifting flakes of a snow globe. This was the contained reality of her life, or how it had once been. It had passed.

  In retirement, for the better part of a decade, she had huddled in a housecoat in her basement inhabiting a remote history of distant lives and times, re-enactments on the Discovery Channel – entire eras and civilizations compressed into hour shows – the Crusades and the Dark Ages, the spectre of plague and famine, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and on through the plundering conquests of the Norse, Vikings, and Vandals, all of it a tumbling distraction of dates and events. This had been the sarcophagus of her hours, days, weeks, and years.

  She thought of Cancer as blithely unaware of her absence; Cancer, taking in a mid-morning Western before getting up to torment her in the toilet in late-morning agony, the cloud of blood in the bowl after she went. She imagined Cancer, slovenly, up-to-date. A reaper in a college hoodie and sweatpants, shuffling out of the den; Cancer standing in the grey light leading up to the first floor; Cancer whining for her, in the way Norman had over the years. It sent a shudder through her.

  *

  It was tempting just to close her eyes, to end it here. She circled the block of her former life. It was all there, arrested and contained, so like she remembered it. She wanted to pull over, park her miserable Toyota import, go stand again in the mosaic lobby and feel the overpowering reassurance of her own existence.

  She passed the gleam of her office building once more. Why had she come down here? When she got the news of her illness, her first thought had landed on Mr Feldman, that she might yet meet him again on the other side of life.

  What did such thoughts say about her? Had Norman been right in his accusations? Such questions, and in the lateness of life! No! She wouldn’t answer them! She would not.

  She sniffled. She wanted to go deeper, find that place within herself where it all still existed, the time before her illness, before that godforsaken 9/11, before the accumulation of joys and regrets that had somehow, quietly, rubbed out her significance.

  It was decided. The choice had always been hers. She felt a control she had not felt in a long time. Yes, that most surely was it, why she had come here one last time: to reclaim the feelings of those years of comfort in what had been back then, the incalculability of life in an emerging modern world of options, where she had continued to work after marriage, and even after Norman’s birth, the surrogate infrastructure of daycare overseen by attentive professionals in child psychology, all vastly more equipped to nurture growth than any mother sequestered with a child and a TV in the doldrums of the mid-afternoon soaps.

  How forward-looking it had all seemed. How liberating! The delegation of tasks per one’s merits, one’s interests, the uncompromising vision that everyone could have everything one needed, or at least the opportunity to seek it. And now it was gone.

  Helen felt her eyes tear, intent on what needed to be done. On the seat beside her lay a letter from the State Attorney’s Office, a subpoena requiring her testimony in a case she had thought long closed, now reopened, alleging Walter’s criminal obstruction of justice in perjuring himself by providing an alibi for two officers accused of executing two gangland dealers who had been set to testify against members of Chicago’s South Side vice unit.

  She was sobbing, her thoughts settled on Norman, on his Angry Man show, on the quiet indictment of a fiction that might yet be appraised as fact, as evidence. What would he say about her and about Walter, about their lives? Helen ran the back of her hand under her nose, tasting her own tears, drifting in the blurred flow of traffic against the falling snow. The subpoena was already a week old. It had been served to her door, which she had obstinately refused to open despite the persistence of the serving officer. She had not yet formally acknowledged its receipt, not even against the stiff formality of the follow up messages left on her answering machine.

  She thought again of the hours running up to Walter’s departure earlier that morning and what a court would demand of her again, a reinvestigation into monies she had allegedly laundered for Walter in the grim years of a greater city corruption. It was come upon them again, the entanglement of her secrets with Walter’s, what had not yet, and might now, be discovered. She had survived it once, just barely. She couldn’t do it a second time.

  She looked through a blur of tears, seeing again her own effigy seated by the small telephone table picked out so far back at the beginning of her marriage, listening to and then erasing each call from an attorney, then hearing the call from Dr Marchant’s office, the polite insistence of the voice asking her to come down on a Friday and in the late afternoon for a consultation. How was such a coincidence possible, such an alignment of Fates, this convergent sense of an ending?

  No, Helen Price was not a religious woman, yet something was being asked of her, some grave and purposeful decision. She reached for her pills beside the subpoena. In opening the bottle, she tipped her head back, feeling the reflexive gag of self-preservation. She managed swallowing them, their effect almost immediate in the sudden euphoria of knowing how it would now end.

  In the long corridor of her funneling exit, in the falling snow, she headed south on Columbia. Driving parallel to a desolate Grant Park, she was start
led by the wail of a police siren, a sound hard to pinpoint against the tumbling end-over-end effect of the pills.

  In her rearview mirror, she caught sight of something she could no longer face and, closing her eyes, felt the disembodied sponginess of the accelerator pedal beneath her foot. Beyond the broad six-lane stretch of Lake Shore Drive, she imagined the cradling grey of Lake Michigan like a vast subconscious stirring.

  PART I

  The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

  —DANTE ALIGHIERI

  1.

  NOBODY JUMPED TO their death in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 as they had in the Crash of 1929, and though the losses were equal, there was no run on banks or the chaotic dissolution of so many lives.

  The crisis was more a correction, the lightweights on the morning shows, educating the ignorant about the volatility of the bond, securities and derivatives markets, while down on Times Square, outside the glass enclosure of the TODAY show, the faithful held up signs that said, ‘We Luv U Al!’ or ‘We Luv the Big Apple!’

  In their so doing, it confirmed an undeniable truth for Norman Price: that whatever the outcome of the crisis, life would go on. There would be no revolution.

  In truth, for anybody who gave a shit, it was difficult deciding what had happened and who was at fault. Sometimes too much freedom, too much democracy, too much choice, too much talk could – and did – achieve nothing.

  For Norman Price, in the midst of his own crisis, the financial crisis was a distraction signifying there were no longer any essential truths, no longer a beginning, middle, or end to events; a realization that eclipsed, among other things, the passing of his parents. It spared him mourning them, or otherwise trying to understand the events surrounding their deaths. Their motivations were as convoluted as any accounts related to the financial crisis.

  Initial eyewitness accounts suggested that Helen Price, in hearing a siren, had hit the accelerator instead of the brake. It was a reasonable explanation. Helen Price was old and ill. She had been on her way to a doctor’s appointment. There were, however, other circumstances that told a different story. The officer driving the unmarked police car had been Walter Price. He had witnessed the incident, and yet he had neither assisted at the scene, nor called 911. He had simply driven away.

  There was much made by the police of what was known and when it was known, given how in the early hours of the morning, Walter Price had been granted unrestricted access to a comatose Helen Price at Cook County Hospital, where he had ended her life before taking his own with a single bullet to the head.

  Allegations of racketeering, extortion and money laundering surfaced. Just days before, Helen Price had been served a subpoena in a reconvened grand jury stemming from an investigation into systemic extortion by the South Side police. It was an old story of city corruption, the twists in the story, Walter and Helen’s age, and the fact that Helen had been suffocated. It signaled how brutally unforgiving the system had been, and so, too, underscored the culpability of the police who had allowed Walter unsupervised access to Helen.

  Norman stood apart from it now. Walter and Helen’s respective wills served as eventual directives. He hadn’t participated in their funerals. Helen was cremated. Walter detailed a similar wish. Norman had uncovered it in a grim correspondence of legal documents that eventually found their way into his life. He inherited his parents’ collective possessions, the house, and associated bonds and stocks.

  *

  Norman looked up. Beyond his window, snow fell. It was not yet seven in the morning. He had been writing for almost two hours, or trying to. He lived for this feeling of accomplishment, sifting through the silt of an awakening subconscious, unlocking life in a word or line. He believed mystery and understanding lay at liminal thresholds of awareness in the way ascetics prayed and believed there could be communion with a greater power.

  What mattered now was that he was at his desk again.

  In the interim since his parents’ passing, life had changed. Not least his jettisoning of his philandering partner, Kenneth, who had been carrying on a long-term relationship with an investment financier, Daniel Einhorn, whom Norman had introduced to Kenneth during discussions concerning Einhorn potentially financing an off-Broadway run of one of Norman’s plays that was eventually never financed. There had been, in the not-too-distant past, heady days of a potential breakthrough and rising fortunes, when the climate of investment largesse had funneled down into the Arts with gallery openings and a burgeoning interest in theater. That was over now.

  Much had changed. If the decision to dump Kenneth dovetailed with his parents’ death, which it had, it was coincidence, or so he believed. You moved through stages of existence. What you endured at one point, what sustained you, suddenly couldn’t. It was how he might have described his father’s life, his mother’s, his, too, and the life of the city.

  *

  Today, Norman was aware of a Chinese language CD playing in an indecipherable babble in his daughter, Grace’s room. He had adopted her three years previous from China, claiming her against the eventualities, that whatever happened in his life, she might be there to establish a normalcy and continuance in his own life. He had retained custody of her after the breakup with Kenneth.

  He felt that continuance, but so, too, the burden of her influence in hearing the Chinese CD. Yes, he could have tried to learn Chinese, but he had decided against it. The linguistic distance ensured his influence would be as unobtrusive as possible. What Grace brought of herself would remain intact. Principled ideas of autonomy, justice, and sovereign independence were important to Norman Price.

  Norman stared at the sliver of a hallway mirror, Grace, reflected in the image of another mirror, lost in a sort of repeating Escher effect. She was earnestly arranging her Barbies in a bleak tribunal outside a Victorian dollhouse guarded by a porcelain pair of salt-and-pepper shaker Scotty dogs. If Norman had one pressing regret, it was how Grace had changed since the adoption. He consciously connected a coldness settling over her to a latent survival instinct that she must have perfected in response to the way institutions, such as the one she had been rescued from, functioned, on the absolute uniformity and anonymity of those it housed.

  Or perhaps he was overthinking it. Maybe it was his sense of guilt, his aloneness and disconnectedness from life when he was writing. Or maybe all Chinese were like this, the billion faces so absolutely the same, or apparently so from Norman’s perspective, if he could submit to such an idea without racist intent – it was hard deciding.

  *

  In truth, losing Kenneth was a burden lifted, a feeling that eclipsed most everything else going on around him, a self-imposed austerity measure like how it felt to cut up your credit cards, as attested to by the honest folk who talked on the conservative radio stations about assumed personal responsibility as a quasi-religious atonement for wrongful purchases, and how there was nothing wrong with America or capitalism. It was the people who needed to atone and make amends.

  There was a new beginning. He felt it everywhere, in the sweep of change, in the simple pronouncement of ‘Yes we can!’

  As evidence, he had ventured out into the cold dark of a Chicago night in early November, holding Grace’s hand as the throng pressed down on Grant Park, to experience the rousing sense of history being made, John McCain, distinguished and decorated former prisoner-of-war, unable to overcome the rainbow coalition of minorities unsettled by the lies which had led to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the collapse of the economy.

  Norman consigned his parents’ deaths with McCain’s defeat, with the passing of an era, with a generation that had served and died for the American cause. It was not that Norman didn’t care, or that the nation wasn’t thankful or respectful. It was just that certain types, certain histories, mattered less in the emerging narrative. In defeat, McCain, like Norman’s parents in dying, quietly surrendered the past to the present.
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  *

  Norman saved his file for the day. At times it was enough for a writer to show up. Turning, he watched in the hallway mirror his live-in nanny’s blue-grey Weimaraner, Randolph, stir and go toward the bathroom. This was part of what he was calling The New Existence. Norman listened to the faint lapping sound of the dog’s tongue drinking from the toilet bowl.

  Joanne Hoffmann, Grace’s nanny and Randolph’s owner, was also up and performing a series of contorted Yoga holds in his living room, her flannel pajama bottoms riding low on the spread of her pelvis. Beside her was a tent-like structure – sheets draped over a table in the living room – a conceit that still persisted from when Joanne had first moved in. In observing it, there was the resurrection of a routine, a filling in of life in the vacuum of what had come before. He was not fully reconciled with what it all meant, but it was part of The New Existence.

  Norman had hired Joanne on New Year’s Day, Joanne, his neighbor, fallen on hard times. Her long-term partner had dumped her. Norman had learned the disconsolate details on New Year’s Eve in the apartment hallway as Joanne was coming out to walk her dog.

  She’d mentioned her separation with an oblique apology related to the fights that had raged in the final weeks before her break-up. Fights Norman ‘must undoubtedly have overheard’. He hadn’t, but he had felt obliged to pretend he had, to respect the implosion of what he learned had been a long-term relationship.

  He learned it all in one long sentence, how management had been disinclined to extend her lease, her credit shot. She wasn’t working. She confided she was considering returning home for good, but there was a family complication. She stopped abruptly. She had a dresser and an antique table, family heirlooms, on Craigslist, priced to sell. She asked if Norman might be interested. She could show him after Randolph was let out.

  At midnight they rang in the New Year together, Joanne, in the minutes before, removing cellophane from a tray of cheeses, crackers and dips Norman had bought in the eleventh hour of the dying year. He dusted off two champagne flutes, opened a bottle of champagne, so it was done just in time, the clink of glasses after the ball dropped at Times Square, each counting down the seconds, each standing at a distance, watching the television, whereafter, Joanne produced a joint from the turned-up cuff of her cardigan. She grew her weed on a windowsill in a makeshift window box greenhouse.