The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  Thomas Strait was simply establishing a level playing field in the eyes of Norman, without ever overtly announcing his intention. He had that nascent gift and worldly comport of a man who could befriend a stranger in the way so few could in a world gone cold and calculated.

  His eyes flit between Norman and the emerging landscape.

  He continued. ‘In European literature, they are always in fear of becoming invisible, I mean up here, in the head. Inchoate feelings, Mr Price, that’s how I described it in a paper. My professor, she just about shit herself when she read it. The professors, they couldn’t give advice. They were trapped, and I was tending toward something of substance. I wore a stethoscope around my neck like a religious cross. It was salvation in a way. I had short-term and long-term goals.’

  They were near the apex of the road, the land in shadow and colder, though the sky was still a clear, empty blue. This might have been how the apostles talked in the quiet remembrance of Jesus, in the distillation of what was said, and why it was said, and how it would form four gospels of a varying life, but a singular message.

  Thomas said, ‘I could take your blood pressure now, Mr Price, give you a good indication of your general health and a prognosis of how you might spend the next twenty years of your life. You want me to tell you?’

  There was a question behind the question. Norman had his eyes on the dirt road.

  Thomas stopped with the tacit awareness that they had come to a point of obvious impasse. He said, ‘Why don’t you ask why we came and met you?’

  Norman answered. ‘I might first ask myself why I came.’

  Thomas acknowledged it. ‘I guess that is another way of asking it.’

  This was all new to Norman. The terrain and the essential freedom of being somewhere he had never been before, and to be in the company of Thomas Strait, a man who talked like Tom Joad, and Norman, aware that Steinbeck, on his travels, he must have happened upon these straight-talkers of distilled truths, men who understood the essence of life and knew it since birth, against all the inducement that understanding and knowledge came only from books.

  Off in the distance, Thomas pointed to a brown-bricked building fashioned in the clay of the river’s bed. It was a former Tuberculosis Hospital. Thomas explained, his voice reverently solemn. ‘We can only imagine the capacity for suffering people had in the past, when losing a child in birth, or to disease, was almost a certainty, and nothing lasted. Religion served its purpose. I see God as a way of allowing us to ask the right questions. I don’t think religion was ever about answers. That’s where modern philosophy got it wrong.’

  Thomas kept staring across at the hospital on the hill. ‘They were so scared, everybody in town. You don’t know what fear is like until it takes the form of illness or plague. Compassion dies, and fear sets in. Supplies were just loaded onto carts hoisted up to them by a mechanical pulley. Patients went up there and died for the most part.’

  They were further down along a run of fence line. In the emerging clearing, Thomas pointed to mannequins of a vintage dated to the thirties and forties. It was apparent as they got closer, each eerily lifelike, and yet of another era, the mannequins hewn with a gaunt leanness that defined a time of want and scarcity.

  They were clothed in sundry outfits, coats and dresses, in sweaters and skirts, a man not unlike Mr Feldman in a long trench coat and black unlaced shoes.

  The mannequins had come from a store long closed in downtown Saint Louis. Thomas explained it. Someone had the idea to use them as scarecrows, truckloads of them delivered out to the surrounding areas, and then, mysteriously, over time, they began aggregating at the base of the Tuberculosis Hospital, and then there were mannequins of children, gathered in among the adults, a community of dead souls. It just happened all of a sudden. It was never decided.

  Thomas Strait shrugged in staring out at the hospital. He was arrived at some point in his head. ‘To tell the truth, Mr Price, I’m looking for something sustainable. In a Composition Text at the college they had a chapter on a Business Proposal, how to apply for grants and federal dollars. What I’m proposing would be a regional educational center where we would make up a biography card for everyone who died at the hospital. They kept copious records. One of the victims, Marshall Ames, was a confidence man who was said to have inspired Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. This Ames made a livelihood aboard the great Mississippi paddle steamers when plantations were lost in the roll of a dice, and all that went with them, a holding of slaves, a wife and family made destitute.’

  They were stopped, looking at the sun falling on the distant brownstone building.

  Thomas Strait continued. ‘Aside from the bio cards, I have a script of Ames’s life and on some others. I got Kenneth reading the life of Marshall Ames for me right now.’

  Kenneth’s name was dropped without the slightest hitch of unease or qualification.

  Thomas Strait kept on talking. ‘Like I said, this would be a living history of a region, maybe actors dressed in period costume coming forward and announcing themselves, like ghosts. I see the dying in beds, and a clutch of infirm in a room under the salubrious warmth of light, just playing cards, talking after the times. I have in my head how it might all work.’

  Thomas Strait turned and looked at Norman. ‘That about how you come upon your stories, Mr Price?’

  Norman said, ‘I like the idea of ghosts, and the fluidity of decentering any one story. It would be better than a play letting people form their stories.’

  Thomas Strait smiled. ‘You see now that’s what I was thinking, like you said, a decentered story that don’t occupy any one place. I think that’s the American story, Mr Price, I really do.’

  *

  Norman was still unsure what was being asked of him, or if something was being imparted and nothing was being asked of him, but something given him, a way of seeing life that was up to then not immediate and obvious.

  Thomas got round to it slowly, how injurious it would be for Kenneth to go back to Chicago. Kenneth had a gift for drama. He had been active through high school. People said he had the looks, but sometimes one’s greatest asset could go against you. That’s what drew Kenneth to Chicago, acting.

  Norman knew the story. He had fallen on the abject spectre of Kenneth: a man with looks and little else. Kenneth had read so hopelessly for the part, coming to the awareness that nothing was going to work out career-wise, as he had anticipated.

  Norman had met Kenneth in that awakening vulnerability. There had never been real love, just an intense attraction, and maybe not even that on Kenneth’s part, and only the promise of shelter, the quiet reprieve against going home without fame or fortune.

  For Norman, there had been the salve, the presence of observing a beautiful failure, seeing the quiet injustice of God’s creation, seeing how such splendor could be sent out into the world, and that it counted for naught. It was apparent over the time they had been together, the luminescent sheen of Kenneth coming from the shower, the singular vein run along his cock, the taper of his thighs, his inherent beauty, Kenneth’s inventory of his assets – what of this plated chest and abs, all of it amounting to nothing.

  Thomas Strait was still talking. He had a way of shoring up questions unasked and offering alternatives. He knew why Norman had come down here. In the subtle persuasion of an alternative for Kenneth, Thomas made his case. They were on a dirt road, and it might have been Jesus laying out some plan of redemption and reform, some way back that wouldn’t involve miracles, because there were no more miracles anymore.

  They were again stopped and looking at sun on the distant building. Thomas pointed. In the glint of light, in the breeze, was a movement and a communion of people gathered below, or it seemed they were, in the way clay was gathered and breathed life into, so the universe gained a consciousness.

  Thomas was talking, in what were tongues of fire, but, when Norman listened, it came out as something ordinary.

  *

 
They were in Chicago by seven o’clock, in advance of Norman’s meeting with Nate Feldman. Norman emailed and accepted the invitation. He showered out at Lee-Ann’s house in a claw foot tub, a genuine antique and allegedly worth a fortune, Norman sanguine enough to understand the interchangeability of so many lives, so many convergent hopes.

  He might have put Lee-Ann’s claw foot tub on his board right alongside Joanne’s heirloom table, run the calculation of perceived value against its eventual purchase price. He was sure it would come out to pv < pp, or more likely pv ☹ pp.

  It was there again, his underlying cynicism, and yet the world got along, and people like Lee-Ann kept on living and dreaming of comforts and contingencies that weren’t worth a damn, in the empirical sense that there would be no sale of said item, and yet a delusion could be upheld, or put another way, a belief could be maintained, or a hope. That was more probably it.

  The great miracle was the reach of the Saturn with its yellow warning lights that never went out and somehow didn’t amount to anything of real consequence, so it was not the car at all, but the electronics, the warning lights that had to be simply ignored.

  Thomas Strait read the signs that mattered. He said that on the way up. He and Norman were aligned along a revelation of converging truth. Perception was one thing and reality another. They talked about the Saturn like it was a great metaphor. Thomas Strait was on that level. He could talk and not talk about something. It was a gift seeing it in its nascent form in a man like Thomas Strait. He felt in his heart, that here was a friend found when the heart had begun to close off and that it mattered again that he proceed onward through life.

  The kids, too, were in the car, alongside Lee-Ann, because people like this would have it no other way. School or the structure of life could be abandoned, if need be, if opportunity presented itself, and these were the Joads, or a variant of them. They would always survive.

  Norman was glad they had come. He felt the weight of a gathering influence of how a connection to others was essential to a greater understanding of life. As for Kenneth, he didn’t push it. What they had shared between them was passed. This was the general nature of modern relationships, or so he believed, a person, or a series of people, footholds on the edge of a moment that might be eventually navigated. He thought of the apparatus of belay ropes, the piton spikes, the contingency of a bivouac, the sheer face of life’s quest that required the nuanced read of flaws and weaknesses essential to the ascent but, equally, to the descent.

  He had sold the idea of a once-in-a-life time road trip, offering it on the spur of the moment, because he had wanted out of Mill Shoals.

  Regrettably, though, Norman could not accommodate a meeting with Mr Whiskers, not right then, or the next day, for that matter. Mr Whiskers was tied up with meetings.

  Thomas smoothed it all over. There was enough to occupy them with the swimming pool and the buffet breakfast and the pay-per-view movies and room service. Then there were the museums along the Lake Shore that they could visit.

  The room, and whatever they ordered, it was all on Norman’s credit card.

  Down in the Loop, Norman went to an ATM to withdraw money for incidentals. Thomas’s expression was one of abiding thanks as he accepted the money.

  There was a deep-dish pizza they should try and a Chicago-style hot dog. There was so much Norman might have advised them to see – a pair of beluga whales at the aquarium, circling ghosts of strange discontent, alive and without hope, these creatures that once ranged oceans.

  Norman’s head was partway in the open car door before he left. Lee-Ann was holding Sherwood. He was in her lap still, smiling, like this meant everything in the world to him, which it did at that moment, and Norman thought this was perhaps the rush of what Mr Feldman had felt on the occasion of his kindness, and that Mr Feldman had done what he could, in the damaged way his life had turned out, in the loss of his son to war, and probably so much more that Norman would never quite know or ever understand.

  Lee-Ann reached and shook Norman’s hand. She leaned so her cleavage showed. It was purposeful and intended. She smiled in so doing it. She had a sex men yearned for, and she could torment a heart for a number of years yet. It was her true essence, no matter the prevailing politics or attitudes of political correctness. She had on the same dress and flip-flops, and this city would see something so rarely seen anymore, a woman of no prospects and rising spirits intent on enjoying life.

  23.

  DOWN ON THE street below his hotel window, Nate could hear the sound of traffic. There were people everywhere. He had lost a certain perspective, an ability to see in the way one loses a sense of depth perception on the tundra. The Eskimo compensated and learned to see the world through a slit in a piece of bone. He was doing it through the split of blinds. His eyes hurt and adjusted. It was snowing.

  The projector was a heavy gunmetal grey contraption with a dead weight not found anymore in objects. It had once been the property of the Elgin Public School System. It said so on a metal tag, a projector undoubtedly used to address and educate a conflagration of life’s great conflicts in the fifties – Sex Education and the Cold War.

  Nate set the projector on a chair. A length of cord ran to a wall socket, the projector pointed to the interior of a closet wall into a maw of darkness. A light glowed, a smell of scorched dust illuminated in a scattered beam. A label cautioned the bulb had to warm and cool in the vacuum tube apparatus, its filament visible to the eye.

  Nate followed the instructions. He had the box of reels on the bed, the dates labeled. They were in chronological order. He had dates in his head, certain years. He moved them accordingly with some calculus of events running through in his head.

  It was the saddest he had been in a long time. He was aware of it. He had hoped for a sequence of mishaps, a border crossing where he was denied entry into America and turned back. That would have ended it.

  He would be lying if he said he didn’t know why he had come south again. In Grandshire, on the Internet, he had seen pictures of Norman Price, the jawline of the Feldman family. He went searching for it not long after the letter from the lawyers.

  He knew a dark secret was being revealed, one long suspected. It was still a great shock, even across the span of years, this disconnectedness to a half-brother, a relationship that could never be repaired, and yet the letter from Helen Price had arrived in the immediacy of a need, his own illness, in how this might actually work out.

  He felt a shame in having conceived the idea. His kidneys were failing. He had been poisoned as Ursula had been poisoned. How best might it be explained? Did he dare ask for a kidney?

  He was thinking, how Frank Grey Eyes might have asked. Perhaps in the apparent poetry of some grander, cosmic story, referencing a shared life source of a great headwater, the attendant tributaries of two life streams run to remote and distant regions, two waters diverged in the babble of different journeys, then rejoined in the brackish estuary of a great watershed, some opening to the sea, where all was one again.

  This was how Frank Grey Eyes might have put it, but much better in his grand and overarching theory of everything. It was hard to speak with the conviction of Frank Grey Eyes, because that was Frank Grey Eyes’ undoubted gift and truth.

  It sounded wrong appropriating what was not his understanding of life, when he didn’t believe in everything Frank Grey Eyes believed in.

  Nate checked the public records of births and deaths. It was all there on the Internet, the year and the date of Norman’s birth. Perhaps Norman already knew this secret, but Nate doubted it. This was Helen Price asserting her hold over the Feldmans.

  It was how he saw it, a cold indictment passed down. It was cruel, sending him these reels. She was asserting her influence in death. It suggested the sort of woman she was, or had been, calculating, reaching out in death to stab at him.

  Nate looked up. His head was not clear. He needed to voice what he was thinking. He made his appeal. ‘You see, Ursula, w
hat this woman has done to my mind?’ He was standing in the half-light, the curtains drawn in advance of viewing the tapes. ‘This is the trap she set for me.’

  *

  The tapes had all been recorded at the office. The ones he was interested in were taken post Norman’s birth, in a lapse of almost two months when Helen Price was not there to run the camera. It was easy establishing how Helen had filed the tapes.

  The reel rolled in static-filled black and white in contrast to what was, back then, a glorious day of brilliant light and cut shadows. His father stepped into and out of frame, a series of out-takes that had never been edited. They had simply been recorded, labeled and stored.

  There was no narrative, no purpose and, eerily, no sound. The tapes simply existed, a contrail of memory, evidence that survived the act itself, eclipsing time, this the sort of evidentiary material St Peter might be charged with reviewing in the great assessment of a life, in advancing one’s destiny toward Heaven or Hell.

  *

  There was the single sequence at a certain date. Nate fed the reel in a blurred advance and arrived at a scene. Helen Price’s gloved hand adjusted the lens. She emerged, walking away from the camera, this woman, now dead, the spread of her hips betraying what had happened and so recently. Nate held his breath. He cared little about Helen Price. She was there in the historical record. To get to his father, he had to go through her.

  Her hair was combed in a wave off her forehead. She was drawn, her eyes sunken, suggesting a period of convalescence, her lips a shade not identifiable in black and white, and yet he observed the exercising control she maintained, an influence and presence that would not be dismissed. It was communed in the quiver of her hold in the crook of his father’s arm, this the first time Helen Price had appeared alongside his father, his father suffering through it, and left holding the baby. There were sayings that literal.