by Susan Choi
“Lewis,” he heard himself saying.
“Of course. And how is your father, dear? He was such a handsome young man. So tall and so handsome! He brought me camellias once on my birthday. You see? I’m famous for remembering students. How is he?”
“I’m afraid…I’m afraid he’s passed away—”
“Oh, my goodness.”
“It was many years ago, almost ten years ago. He had a heart condition,” Mark told her, almost apologetically.
“Oh, my goodness. I’m so sorry. Are you calling about a bequest? We’re often honored by bequests from our students.”
“I was really just calling to confirm that my father attended, just…to get the facts straight.”
“Of course he attended. He was a wonderful student, like all of our students. So handsome. I remember him like yesterday. And your mother.”
“You knew my mother?”
“Just to say hello, but I remember her. Such a beauty. Like a page out of Vogue.” A note of discomfort had entered Helen’s voice, perhaps the strain of supporting the fiction that plain, stern little Ruth would have ever glanced at Vogue, let alone appeared in it, but Mark only remotely heard this. Perhaps it was the sticky public handset in his fist, or the last exhalation of the hot afternoon in the stifling phone booth, but he felt himself linked not to unknown, nostalgic Helen but to his own ghostly mother, at the same time as being aware of his distance from her. A globe’s thickness, across which his judgment could not fully reach. Was it true, as he suddenly felt—as he had always felt, but only now lingered over—that there had been the slightest tinge of a queasy uncertainty, a shifting of sands, a nervous improvisatory haste, to his childhood milieu? He’d attributed it to their vagabond lifestyle: a new nation of natives each year, sometimes even a new continent; a new shabby house long since soiled by previous tenants; a new school out of which to be thrown or to flunk. These circumstances were the cause of the feeling, of course, or were they in fact the effects? The effects of that queasy sensation, which had its cause somewhere else?
“And what was her name, dear?” the old woman, Helen, was saying. “Emily, Ellen…I’m sorry, I’m known for my memory—”
“Ruth,” Mark supplied, and then even more brusquely, “What were the dates? Can you tell me exactly the dates he attended?”
“Ruth,” the woman, Helen, was repeating forsakenly. “Was that really it? Ruth?” Now a new note of tentativeness: the long tapestry of the years coming fully unrolled, and beginning to turn into dust…
It was the younger woman, joining them on an extension, who got him the dates. “‘Lewis Gaither,’” she read into the phone. “Matriculated September 1963. Attended five semesters, through January ’66.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Helen confirmed, relieved that here at least her memory did not fail her.
“Three years before Professor Lee got his degree,” Mark heard himself saying, without adding that his father’s time as a student had also lasted, illogically and impossibly, until two months after he, Mark, had been born.
“Oh, God,” the younger woman said. “Don’t get me started on that. We’ve had reporters calling all hours for weeks. How do you think I found your dad’s file so fast? The sixties drawer has gotten quite a workout lately.”
“A terrible thing,” Helen said quietly. “And they were such good friends,” she added.
“They were?” Mark snapped. “Lee and my father?”
“Oh, yes. At least at the beginning. Isn’t it hard to believe, how two friends could turn out so different?”
He couldn’t end the call quickly enough; they were sending him a copy of his father’s transcript, but he didn’t give a damn about that anymore. He would throw it away when it came, his mother’s son to the core, because didn’t she, too, retain nothing? No documents, no photographs, nothing picturing herself as bizarrely remembered by foggy-brained Helen as head-turning and worthy of Vogue—
“Who’s Lee?” he asked as soon as she picked up. The middle of her night again, but he didn’t apologize.
A slight, perhaps entirely imagined, hesitation. “Who?” she said.
“Not Who. Lee. Don’t tell me you’ve become a late admirer of Abbott and Costello.” Of course she didn’t grasp this, and he wasn’t actually trying to be funny. He was angry, a physiological cluster of symptoms with no clear intellectual basis. Clenched jaw, clenched gut, clenched hand around the telephone handset. “Who’s Lee?” he repeated.
“I don’t know, Mark. Isn’t it the man that the FBI agents were asking about? I told you I’d never heard of that person.”
“Don’t lie to me again.”
“When have I ever lied to you, Mark?”
“You’ve always said Dad never went to grad school. Three weeks ago you said it. Now it turns out those FBI agents weren’t mixed up at all. Dad went to the U of I for almost three years, and you must have been right there with him, and me too, since he was still going there on my birthday. What’s going on here, exactly? Why’d you lie about this?”
“I don’t like your tone, Mark. I don’t like it at all. I don’t suppose you’ve been drinking.”
“If by ‘drinking’ you mean my occasional enjoyment of a bottle of beer, no, I haven’t been drinking. Answer my goddamn question.”
The line went dead.
“Oh!” he roared at the graffiti-scoured, heat-warped, sweat-steamed Plexiglas walls of the telephone booth. “So that’s worse? So I took the fucking Lord’s name in vain and that’s fucking worse?” The fucking Lord only knew what he might have said to her, his rage as powerful as it ever had been in his volcanic teenage years, if she’d answered when he called her again, the next moment, but she didn’t; she let it ring and ring and ring, and she never picked up. There was so much here not to believe: that his mother was turning her back, walking quickly away from her phone; that the phone really could keep on ringing for five minutes, six, with each shrill iteration exactly the same, with no chance of a lengthened or truncated pause, with no expressive ascent in the key, just the same harsh mechanical noise, his entreaty repulsed—and it was finally that, the monotony of it, that bludgeoned his anger to nothing, that left him bled out and unfeeling, and let him hang up.
22.
IT WAS FROM AN OLDER HIKER NAMED GENE THAT Mark had learned the art of keeping a pack always ready, inside the front door. Grab and go: he still remembered how powerfully this notion of preparedness for flight had impressed him. He’d met Gene playing pool in a bar and soon they’d been hiking together at least once a week. Despite Gene’s seniority of at least fifteen years, they’d struck up an easy sympathy rare in Mark’s life. Grab and go: until seeing Gene’s pack, Mark had never desired to emulate any person in any respect. The canteens always full. Dry food portions to last for a week. In the short time Mark knew him, Gene would often be gone, without warning, even longer than that. Mark would drop by with his own pack hike-ready some morning, or with a bottle some evening and find Gene’s door unlocked, as always, his house as always submerged beneath friendly disorder, but the opaque, knotted, soldierly pack would be gone from the hall. Gene’s truck or his motorcycle, a 1969 Triumph Bonneville to which he was devoted, would be gone from the driveway. Mark would labor to quell his hurt feelings by extracting a lesson he hoped to absorb. Later he would reflect that, though he’d scarcely known Gene, he’d admired him. For Mark, admiration had never come easy, perhaps because it had been urged on him from a too-early age. Ruth had urged him to admire his father, and his father had urged him to admire her, and although he had loved them, he had striven with increasing difficulty to guard this flame of childish adoration in the face of their exhortations. Meeting Gene, admiration had been a reflex; he had seen in the other man his idealized self, calmed with age and the self’s acceptance of the things it can’t be.
One night, when he had known Gene a couple of months, and they had been playing cards and drinking Jim Beam in Gene’s living room—an unapologetic bachelor
’s nest with sagging couch and gigantic TV and stacks of firewood in the corners, and the beloved Bonneville dominating, with Gene’s tools scattered in a sort of worshipful sunburst design all around it—Mark had gone to take a piss and found that the shower curtain in the bathroom, which he realized he had always until now seen closed, was open, exposing a tub full of bright plastic boats.
Coming out, he’d heard Gene taking a hammer to a sack of ice in the kitchen, and in obedience to an intrusive impulse almost foreign to him, he’d opened Gene’s bedroom door, which, like the shower curtain, he had always seen closed. Within was the familiar disorder of the unmarried man, laundry of unknown condition in heaps, but on the walls near the head of Gene’s bed were framed photographs, in great number, of two boys. A range of ages: three and five, perhaps; five and seven; seven and nine. Flannel shirts and blue jeans, or shirtless in swim trunks; spray of freckles; a familiar, self-confident, open expression that somehow contained a remoteness: the complete self, enthroned in its place, far in the future of—or deep in the soul of, or in both places of—each small boy.
Mark had suffered an inexplicable sense of betrayal. Hearing Gene coming out of the kitchen he’d left the room quickly, shut the cheap hollow-core door noiselessly, rejoined Gene, played a couple more hands, and then told him good night. In the months that followed, he’d never asked Gene about his children, nor had Gene mentioned them, although now, on the occasions that Mark found Gene gone, and the pack gone, and the truck, not the motorcycle, absent from the driveway, Mark sensed that Gene was off with his sons.
Later that year, in the winter, Mark learned that the boys were named Wesley and Drew. They were, at that time, ten and twelve. They lived with their mother, whose name Mark never heard. Walking into the bar where he first had met Gene, Mark was told that Gene, on his motorcycle, had been struck by an eighteen-wheeler, pulled beneath it, and killed. Gene had been on his way home from seeing his sons. Their existence was so generally known in the bar—indeed their likes, dislikes, habits, hobbies, funny sayings, all were discussed—that Mark wondered if Gene had only thought that Mark must know them, as all the town did. He wondered if Gene had not spoken of Wesley and Drew because they went without saying.
Mark had given notice on his rented room and his job that same week, had moved away from that town, and had never gone back there again.
It was also true, Mark reflected now, that he had never told Gene very much of himself. They had spoken of the lean-to on the pond, of the fish that were biting or not, of half-baked DEP regulations, of the woman still weeping alone at the end of the bar, of the blazes that hadn’t been fixed on the trail, of the people those blazes got lost, of the wasp’s gray balloon in the tree, of the cherry’s great age, of the old growth, the clear cut, the jewelweed coming in bloom.
They had spoken of those aspects of the immediate world they shared. For Mark it had been an intimacy of perfect clarity and perfect simplicity, devoid of anguished barings of the soul. And wasn’t this what he sought? The sense of having found his snug place, without having to pay in disclosures, in endless confessions and self-revelations? That was what repelled Mark from religion: all that supposedly selfless obsession with self, with self’s failings and sins and past lapses and present resolves. Mark never could bear all that speaking of self, all that cleansing of self, all that woebegone self-proffering in the hope of forgiveness. More than anything it had been the necessity that he constantly yield his self that had propelled his resistance to church, not, as his parents had wanted to think, the necessity that he believe in God. Such belief, if it could have been his, was something he would have enjoyed. He knew that he yearned for the truly great thing, the One thing. He’d yearned for it in drugs, and in gypsy crisscrossings from West Coast to East, and most happily down the trails with Gene. Perhaps it wasn’t his particular birthright; every human must have it. But Mark had gained from his parents an outsize preoccupation with that yearning and a tendency to put it ahead of all other concerns.
Perhaps he’d felt injured that Gene had not told him about Wesley and Drew because his contentment with Gene had been almost monastic. He had loved Gene not as a father or friend or sibling but as if they’d been two mendicants, a pair of Franciscans with backpacks, allied in their choice of essential aloneness, and free of all ties to the world. And yet all that time Gene had his sons.
Mark had been steadily climbing for almost two hours, as the tender coolness of early morning was swallowed by heat, and the chirr of the insects rose up into such an unvarying roar Mark soon stopped hearing it. The trees all around were the color of spring, that impossibly fresh, vibrant green that could make Mark’s chest ache, as if the leaves were too young to be out in the weather and should have been packed up in cotton at night. And yet the woods were impenetrable to his eye; the leaves were youthful, but they were full size, and when Mark gazed between the tree trunks, the leaves filled up the spaces between like a depth of chartreuse-colored water. Mark knew from his map that the trail, which was ascending the flank of a mountain, was going to level off soon in a sort of a saddle between two higher peaks, but he couldn’t make out any sign that the saddle was near.
All at once he was there, as if he’d stepped off a staircase. The ground was level beneath his feet, and he’d entered a natural clearing, with long, silken grass underfoot and the trees that marked off a perimeter mingling their boughs overhead, so that in spite of the clearing below, there was no patch of sky overhead, only sun-dappled shade. Mark’s strange sense he was underwater intensified. Somehow an expanse of old growth had survived here, so that he seemed to stand in an arcade, or a mosque, with the columnar trunks rising out of a verdant prayer rug. It took him a moment to realize that his impression of a temple wasn’t entirely fanciful metaphor. At one side of the clearing, thick segments of tree trunk about two feet across had been crudely cut into chairs, one cut crosswise to just over halfway, a second cut lengthwise to meet the first, so that a chunk was removed and the segment became a squat L, its seat not much more than a foot off the ground. There were eight of them, ranged in a circle, around the vestige of a fire pit so overgrown that it probably hadn’t been used since the previous summer.
Mark turned around, slowly, but he didn’t see any cut stump nearby. The maker of the chairs must have lugged the fat logs here from elsewhere, perhaps already cut into chairs, perhaps with a chain saw to do it on site. But as obvious a process as it was that had led to these chairs—the fat logs, the two cuts with the saw—Mark couldn’t envision it. The circle of chairs seemed ancient and ordained, as if they’d grown out of the earth on their own, or been conjured by non-human force.
He stood hesitating so long that all the exertion of the past few hours had the chance to catch up with him, and his legs became meltingly tired. He squatted, freed himself from his pack, and then, as if it might bite or collapse, gingerly sat down on one of the chairs. Once settled, he felt all the clandestine excitement of his boyhood, inventing tales of castles and broadswords and strange amulets. The other seven empty chairs seemed to quiver in expectation. The clearing had a contrary atmosphere that mingled secretiveness with exposure, so that Mark felt he’d tripped through a portal and tumbled away from the world and at the same time was sure he’d be intruded upon any moment. He’d seen no one on the trail this morning; no other car had been parked at the trailhead. But he was in the northeastern United States of America, never far from his fellow humans, no matter how he might try to sequester himself and pretend.
Although splintery, sharp-edged, and unaccommodating, the chair seemed to embrace him; he found himself falling asleep. The chirr of insects swelled and ebbed like a tide, but it might only have been his drowsiness that found a rhythm in the drone. He felt certain that something happened here, that this Stonehenge of logs must mark a site of conjunction, a seam between worlds, where the one, every four thousand years, would reach into the other….
He had fallen asleep. When he jerked awake, he felt th
e same embarrassment he might have if he’d started to snore in a movie, to the unseen but palpable displeasure of persons nearby. He couldn’t quite persuade himself he was alone here; he checked his map, shouldered his pack again, and spent several minutes probing the perimeter of the clearing for his trail, which he finally found winding off very faintly in the direction of the modest peak—thirty-eight hundred feet—where he meant to eat lunch. Perhaps he’d come back here and camp for the night. Perhaps not—he brusquely shook off the enchantment once walking again. He didn’t owe the place any additional tribute. The more distance he gained from it, the stronger his sense it was someone else’s, with no space for him, although the land was public and no one could have claimed it.
After another half hour of steady climbing, he was astonished to find himself in a froth of pristine mountain laurel. All tidy-cornered and white like so many fresh handkerchiefs sized for a wren; when Mark brought his giant’s nose close, he could see needle pricks of deep pink, each so small it seemed strange to be able to make out their color. He could not understand this return to the last weeks of spring, when the summer had already poured the woods full of chartreuse; it was at his back and a few hundred feet below him, the high heat and dense bug drone of June, and yet here he was spirited into the past, before the FBI came to his home, before his mother had hung up the phone…. His camera was locked in his van at the trailhead, three hours behind him. This fresh evidence of his lucklessness choked a groan from him, and the wild, wounded sound startled him, as did the fact that he’d started to cry, tipped forward to counter the weight of his pack, with his face in the flowers.
