The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  Back in the living room, Norman talked about Grace’s adoption, the trip to China, ending with the eventual undoing of his relationship with Kenneth and Grace’s delay in speaking. Joanne, in turn, talked about her ex-partner. They toasted with an understanding of their own shortfalls and an emphasis on their partner’s failings. It was good to talk.

  It helped that Norman had tangentially known Peter Coffey, a pedantic, long-standing post-doc, who, as Joanne explained, after a dissolute eternity as adjunct faculty, had finally gained a tenure track position at a small community college in Oklahoma. At the time of his departure, he was already dating a former student. He took the girlfriend with him, not her. Joanne described Coffey as a second-rate poet, and, truth be told, a poet with a small penis, but then wasn’t that what was behind most bad poetry?

  Under the influence of liberally poured wine and pot, Norman learned that Joanne could become truculent. She had a way of scrunching her nose when she got mad, absentmindedly rimming her wine glass in a circular motion, her eyes glossing with a deepening hurt.

  *

  Norman turned to his computer again. He pulled up the website for the realty agency he had contracted to offload his parents’ house. He had not gone out to the house. He simply wanted it gone. He stared at the low-res feed of his childhood home on the realty’s Virtual Walk-Thru. A grainy fisheye sweep of a wavering feed stalled in the hallway. To go any further required an email address. It said so in a pop-up window. Then another pop-up offered financing options – three- and five-year arms, balloons, variable and fixed rates, a flashing banner indicating Bad Credit Isn’t a Problem, a legacy banner, pre-financial meltdown. There were, of course, no such loans anymore.

  Another flashing pop-up offered a trial membership in FreeCreditScore.com, the pop-ups reminiscent of garish billboard signs he had seen on a trip taken in his early adolescence with his parents along Route 66. At the time, the roadside motels were already diminished in the way Hitchcock had prophetically anticipated, so that, much later, Norman, in looking back on it, would understand that Psycho’s deceptive genius was not the shock of Janet Leigh’s shower scene murder, but something further reaching, more innominate – the death of the American love affair with the car and the open road, and, with it, a certain aimless, transient freedom that had allowed snake oil salesmen to pitch their wares town-to-town in the shadowy in-between of promise and despair.

  There were, among the greats, many ways to tell a story. Truth had to be played like a good poker hand, concealed until the end, though what he feared most was that freedom and understanding had been eclipsed, so there was only sensationalism and no substance anymore. Maybe that was just the lament of the pedantic, the contrarian, the literalist, the fate of the Chicken Littles of the world.

  In staring at the jittery images, in inhabiting what had been his former life, Norman was reminded of the opening scenes of Titanic, the modern submersible sending back a grey feed of pictures from beneath the Atlantic to the aged heroine. That was the genius of Art, its power to encapsulate, in the case of Titanic, to apprehend the great folly of human hubris that had so defined the age – the push across the Atlantic at breakneck speed for the record, icebergs-be-damned, along with all on board – the film’s essential allure, everyone on board living the last days of their lives and not realizing it, while everybody watching did.

  On this morning, Norman felt the inherent stirring of a re-energizing intellect. He was wandering into a creative and searching space, the unmoored flotsam of events washing up in the scud of the subconscious. He was building, from what remained, some kind of raft, something that would sustain and carry him forward, liberate and connect him again to his craft. He liked the double meaning of the word craft, how the right words could be carried in a riptide of understanding, a process that required not so much strength as patience to assess and reconfigure life, so one could stare back toward the coastline of the inhabited world, then make for shore once more.

  Norman stared at the images of his former life. Neither Helen nor Walter existed anymore. They had been incinerated. Tightness gripped his chest, a register of emotion he was not aware he still possessed.

  He pulled up the Internet memorial site to affirm Helen had ever existed. Not a single person had signed her virtual memorial book. A question mark placeholder showed where a picture should have been uploaded and never was. An American flag wavered like a flag plangently planted on the moon, suggesting that the afterlife was somehow the province of an American holding.

  And yet, it somehow fit with a certain understanding that Helen had of the American experience – its striving greatness and sense of possibility pursued and then abandoned in the lunar grey of a destination reached and then forgotten – so he understood, the journey had been the point, and not the landing, not the conquest. It was the story of the moon and so much of everything else in life.

  Norman was suddenly glad now for the Internet, for the impersonal expediency of how all matters of life and death could now be so negotiated in a disconnectedness of connectedness. All a real funeral would have revealed was that there had been nobody in his mother’s life for a very long time.

  Helen had opted for an insignificant departure, a literal dropping off the earth into the depths of the great lake, seeking the fathoms of her own grave, taking with her the argosy of her dreams, the air pocket of her retirement, ending in the literal rising of a water line in the cab of her car. It fit her temperament, the attempted, self-contained death, the tight circle of her own thoughts and ideas, her immense capacity to withhold opinions, to stay in the orbit of her own existence.

  For a moment, his thoughts settled once more with the Titanic, on the sullen passing of life in the cold reaches of the North Atlantic far from shore. He hadn’t watched Titanic in a long time.

  In the falling snow, he thought, why not seal off the outside world for a lost day of tragic remembrance? Why not submit to this quiet reprieve, rerun history in the wavering stills, the opening sequence draped in the raiment of the dirge of Uilleann pipes against the siren’s lament of Celine Dion?

  He was, he felt, the Rose Dewitt of a lesser tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless. Maybe he could dive as the submersible did, dredge back a history long sunken. Yes, maybe that is what he would do.

  2.

  TO NATE FELDMAN, Helen Price was always just The Other Woman, so he didn’t immediately recall her name when he first read it in a letter sent to him by a law firm out of Chicago.

  *

  Nate snaked along a logging road against a pale luminescence of banked snow and out along a rut of iced road. His bladder ached from the grind of the snow-chained tires. He was at the age when the signs of mortality announced themselves. He edged toward the glow of Iroquois Falls, the world encased in a domed dark that in late January held past nine thirty.

  A storm was forecast. Nate had the radio tuned to the Canadian weather service. The barometric pressure was dropping fast, but he had errands to run and just this window of opportunity. He didn’t meet a single car on the road. His eyes focused on the funneling cone of his headlights, old growth pines running sentinel along either side of the road. There were times when he felt like the last human alive, as if only he had survived a great cataclysm, which, in a way, he had.

  The town was all but deserted, though there were lights on at various establishments. He shuffled through the mail in the cold vestibule of the post office. What struck him first was the airmail blue of the envelope. He felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, so he had to lean for support against the burnished patina brass of the PO boxes.

  He fingered the waxy weightlessness of the envelope, recalling a time when weight mattered, when the envelope itself was the medium on which one wrote, and when it was done, the letter written, the folding origami, making it an envelope again, the tongue running along the sweet bordering glue.

  He felt the stab of memory. His father had sent him letters to this same PO box with the affectation of
par avion, letters asking after his health, but more pointedly after Nate’s wife and newborn child, though their names were never mentioned under the presumption that all letters were opened by the United States government.

  Back in the pickup, Nate let the vents pour a dry heat over his hands. He ran his thumb along the crinkled give of the envelope. It was upon him, all that he had left behind.

  He recalled the first summer of his escape, the encroach of wildfire, the sky a sanguine blood orange, the thunderous stampede of wildlife in a pitiless retreat toward rivers in a natural divide of a fire line, and then the soot and ash, the torrents of rain that darkened the midsummer as though it had all been delivered unto him alone.

  He had endured those first months with a moral indecisiveness so it was hard to find the measure of who he was. He braced against the knifing advance of autumnal days he knew would come, and did. Inside his cabin, he had penned letters against the throw of shifting firelight, grappling not with the immediacy of what was happening, but seeking a grander assessment of life, writing with the instinctive understanding that what he set down would be read again and again, not for the hard and fast facts, but as an epistolary of a life lived.

  A shudder ran through him. Guilt dogged him. He struggled for the right metaphor. How best to describe it, this past? An old scar in the boggy tenderness of flesh never made quite right; his history an escape that would outlast the conflict in Vietnam, the pull-out from Saigon, the receding proxy of Cold War conflicts fought in far off jungles.

  Maybe that was why he had felt such swelling euphoria on first seeing the Twin Towers come down – not for the loss of life. He was philosophically against death, but he aligned with the literal act of aggression. War had come to American shores, so it wouldn’t be a case anymore of shipping young men overseas, for the fight would be fought on American soil. It turned out not to have been the case.

  *

  Nate didn’t open the letter right away. He was past the insistent pressure of youth. He would wait, though he felt a thumping in his chest as he went about his business. He exited the pickup under the bowl of a streetlight. The wind took the door. The hinges creaked and strained. He pushed the door shut with both hands. A dusting of snow blew around his face. Storm was in the air.

  In the warm store, he picked up his supplies: coffee, evaporated milk, an assortment of meats, three bags of flour, rice, beans, a kilo of sugar, an allotment of canned goods. He had emailed his order ahead. The goods were sitting in a crate with his name stapled to the slatted wood. It could have been the nineteenth century.

  He checked the contents against his list. The proprietor, Pierre Arouet, came out but neither of them spoke. The store bell trembled on a coil spring. There were highlights of the previous night’s game between the Oilers and Canadiens on a big screen TV in the background. Roars filled the silence. This was how wars were settled, in the contained rink of Canadian ice, the rapacious frack of the gas boom western province pitted against the militant Québécois Francophiles, and yet Canada held.

  He used a bathroom off to the side of the general store. He went in dribs and drabs. Blood in his urine clouded the bowl. He should see a doctor, but knew he wouldn’t.

  Above him, a spider held a corner in the web of its own spun universe.

  *

  On the way out of town, Nate looked again at the letter. He set it beside him like a passenger come a long way. He would address the matter at home.

  Ahead, snow fell in a soft, swirling veil that took on the opaque blue-grey of a bruise, the northern facing hills cast in deep cavernous shadow, the western sides a pale, butter yellow that had long since sent animals toward the instinctive drowse of hibernation.

  He felt the same, drugged effect in the shunt of blood toward the vital organs. His hands and feet were always cold in a way they had not been years before. Maybe it was his age? He was undecided. He yawned into the back of his hand.

  What he liked to watch on the television in his aloneness, in the deep freeze of winter, in the satellite beam of new choices, was reruns of Hawaii Five-0 – the azure sea and palm fronds, the scooping dig of island natives in the break of waves in their long canoes, and, of course, the immaculately dressed Jack Lord, the signature turn of his head at the show’s beginning. Jack Lord, a colonial viceroy, a man Nate connected with the calm, judicious equanimity of his own father.

  How strange, the insistent drag of history, a show that could find him here alone and could breathe life into events connected to shots of his father in his time out on Midway Island in advance of the attack on Japan.

  *

  Nate opened the letter at the kitchen table. Helen Price had been known as The Other Woman, and before that as The Coat-check Girl, a title his mother had settled on in the early days.

  There was a brief description of some film reels, recordings that had belonged to his father and that had come into the possession of Helen Price who had subsequently bequeathed them to Nate. In view of the reels’ age and fragility, the law office was seeking advice on how they should be sent.

  Nate looked up into the gauze of falling snow, the world gone flat and two-dimensional. The letter was still in his hand. He looked down at it. His eyes adjusted to the glob of floating light and found their focus.

  There was no indication of the content of the reels, or of how many there were, though what was significant, what could not be discounted, was that the reels had been kept all these years, and bequeathed, not through the execution of his father’s will, but through his father’s mistress, Helen Price.

  Nate searched for a sweater in a cedar chest he had built with his own hands. The piney tang of it dropped to the depth of his soul. Wood shavings curled amidst the folded wool sweaters, socks, and hats, all hand-knit. He had become fastidious in his solitude, in the quiet arrangement of everything. He stood in the room, as if everything had been awaiting his presence before it took on the approximation of existence.

  He was a clockmaker, moving the hands of his own existence. Or he was a drowned man in a well, staring up through clear water. It was life seen through the wrong end of a telescope, small and isolated, and just beyond comprehension. He hugged himself, his throat tightening as he stared at sunlight streaming in an angled light on an empty mattress. A shiver ran through him. He leaned toward the frame of the window, wincing against the snow’s incandescent shock.

  *

  On the Internet in his study, he searched for Helen Price. He found a brief mention of her accident, then a series of articles related to her death at the hands of her husband in an apparent murder-suicide. Walter Price had been involved in a systemic, long and protracted extortion scandal. At the end of Helen Price’s obituary, there was mention of a surviving son, Norman Price, an established playwright in Chicago’s theater.

  Nate went out toward the kitchen. He was still absently holding the letter. When he noticed, he balled it in his fist. He was not obliged to answer. He was angry and sad in the same instance. He had been discovered and sought out.

  He looked at the date at the top of the letter, the postmark two weeks old already. He could ignore it, or simply write and refuse delivery. He could instruct that the film reels be destroyed. It was his prerogative. He muttered a catalogue of excuses of why he should not respond. The tapes meant little to him.

  It mattered little what his father might now say. His correspondence with him had declined when the threat of the Vietnam War had receded and ended. A congressional act was passed that had eventually dropped federal indictments against those who had dodged the draft so Nate had been free to leave his place of hiding, to return to America, but he hadn’t. He felt he had somehow lost the right to call himself an American. It hadn’t mattered when survival was everything. But it mattered later, when it was over. His father had simply stopped writing to him, and Nate, in quiet deference, had quietly and dutifully receded.

  3.

  IT WAS MID-FEBRUARY already, in the first year of The New Existe
nce. Joanne’s makeshift tent was still there in the living room. Norman had silently anointed her ‘The Refugee of Suburbia’.

  Norman had offered to foot the bill for a futon to end Joanne’s encampment. She had declined the offer. She preferred her improvised tent, what she called ‘the monastic aesthetic of the hardwood floor’, when the issue was that her heirloom table had not sold on Craigslist, when it was, in her words, ‘a real steal’.

  She was suffering from unreal expectations, or that was how Norman saw it. He wasn’t an economist, but he liked working with logic problems, and under the terms of The New Existence he had begun to take an active interest in the table. He saw it as part of an experiment to show how life was actually lived – the rise and dash of expectations, rational or irrational, because expectation figured in how markets worked. It had become one of his projects.

  In the case of Joanne’s table, he wanted to work out the difference between how she saw the table and how he saw it, as a pile of shit!

  He had devised a formula. The heirloom table signified as (x) with its value based on two factors: the table’s perceived valuation (pv), what x was allegedly worth, and the purchase price (pp), what someone actually paid for x.

  Denoted mathematically, in most cases pv ≠ pp. He had the table drawn on a white board with intersecting lines connected to various formulas. The table (x) could work out as pv ≠ pp, pv < pp, pv > pp. No transaction he denoted as pv ☹ pp.

  It was the sort of passive aggressive formulation of life that Norman thrived on.