The Illusion of Separateness

by Simon Van Booy

  In the morning, he swam in the pool with his dogs, then sat at the kitchen table drawing curved lines. Then he joined those lines and made shapes. The shapes together made words and formed the contents of a letter, which began:

  Dear Mr. Hugo,

  You may not remember, but you once saved a child . . .

  He drank coffee and read the letter over and over until he knew it by heart.

  Then he went outside and sat by the pool.

  One of his dogs trotted out and settled at his feet.

  He thought of the canal, the piles of litter, the old furniture softened by rain, the weeds in summer, the black water upon which barges once entered and left the city. He saw trucks reversing into the loading bays behind the supermarket. He heard the balcony door slide open and felt the aluminum handle, cold in winter. He remembered his old bedroom in Manchester, the racing-­car pajamas, the squeaky slippers he wore until his toes poked through, his mother’s low voice and the lullabies that sailed him off to sleep. Jumping on the bed. Playing cars on the rug. Deciding which teddy to get him through the night.

  He stood over the small boy and touched his hair. But the boy did not move—­could not feel that he was being remembered.

  Danny sat on the bed and traced the outline of cartoon shapes on the duvet. He stared at the plain sleeping face and felt the churn of dreams within.

  And then Danny felt a sensation he had never before known, an intense pity that relieved him of an incredible weight. And the boy he reached for in the half dark, the head he touched was not his—­but the soft, wispy hair of his sleeping father, as a child, alone, suffering, desperate, and afraid.

  AMELIA

  EAST SUSSEX, ENGLAND,

  2010

  I.

  MOM MADE SURE Philip was home before she came over to break the news about Grandpa John. Dad was there too, and Dave came later with flowers.

  We don’t know exactly the moment, but I talked to him the day before and he sounded fine. We spoke for a long time about the new show that was opening with American photographs lost in Europe during World War II.

  I told Grandpa John how my job was to make the exhibition accessible to the blind. He wanted to know more, so I explained how one of the photographs was described to me as a young American woman posing on a wall at Coney Island, wearing a dress from Lord & Taylor. I would then find a similar vintage dress for the visitors to feel and smell while explaining to them how the photograph was sent in by Hayley and Sébastien Dazin of St. Pierre, France, after they found it as children in the wreckage of an American B-­24 bomber in the woods behind their farm. I told Grandpa John about that photo because he flew in a B-­24. I explained how I was going to use the model of the B-­24 I had in my room—­and boast about how it was the plane that my own grandfather had flown in.

  I told him that the museum director loved the name I came up with for the exhibition, and how one of the interns told me she saw a MoMA ad on the side of a New York City bus with the show’s name, THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS, in huge letters. I told Grandpa John all this, and he listened and told me how proud he was. I had no idea that it was the last time we would ever speak.

  Philip met Grandpa John only once at our wedding in Southampton. They sat talking about the kinds of fish his parents served at the diner growing up.

  He wanted to hear Philip’s story about how we met, and then couldn’t believe it because Harriet proposed to him in Montauk near where Philip’s boat docks. That’s one of the things I loved about Grandpa John—­he was always asking questions and trying to make connections.

  Philip and I flew to England the day after my parents. Dad picked us up at Heathrow Airport and then drove us to Grandpa John’s estate in East Sussex. I was fine on the flight, but when I walked through the front door and could actually smell the house, I realized Grandpa John had died and we were there to bury his body next to Grandma’s.

  Dad and Philip went grocery shopping in the afternoon, while Mom and I went through Grandpa’s things. She put them in my hands and described them to me. Mom was surprised when I told her to sell the house. It’s what she wanted, too, but thought I would have been more upset. Deep down I knew that keeping the house would have become my way of trying to keep Grandpa alive.

  “And once it’s sold,” I said, “give the money away—­because we’re happy as we are, and it’s what Grandpa would have wanted.”

  “We’re talking about millions of pounds, Amelia,” Mom said, but I could tell that part of her agreed.

  Then we both cried and held each other. It was a nice moment and helped us prepare for the next few days.

  The next day, Philip was exploring and came across Grandpa’s old Rolls-­Royce, which he used to drive into the village every day for a newspaper and a loaf of bread. It was the only place Grandma had allowed him to smoke cigars. Philip said it needed engine work, but that it was otherwise immaculate. I told Philip that he could have it, but then later on in bed, he said he didn’t want it, and I realized how lucky I am to have someone who knows me so well.

  A ­couple of days before the ser­vice, Mom took me to her old school. It had closed down and the gates were locked, but we sneaked in. She took me to the place where she used to smoke with the sixth-­form girls. Then she drove me to the park where Grandpa took her every Sunday to play on the swings.

  Grandpa’s nurse discovered him. She said he was on the side of the bed Mrs. Bray used to sleep on.

  Mom and I stood in his bedroom next to the bed. Then Mom said, “Oh my God,” and told me how on the bedside table were Grandma’s books, her reading glasses, her silver pen, and an empty teacup.

  “In his mind, they were still living together,” she said.

  And I thought how if Philip died, I wouldn’t move his things either.

  Over dinner, Mom said it was a miracle Grandpa made it through the war. That he was in a bad way for a long time. Philip asked what happened to him. Mom said that nobody knew the details, but that after being discovered on a battlefield in France, he spent months in a coma at a military hospital. Dad was ripping up newspapers to light a fire and stopped to listen.

  Canadian soldiers found him at first light.

  Dawn was cool, and the grass wet with night’s retreat. He wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform, and walking aimlessly through a field of dead enemy soldiers. When Canadian commandos called out and aimed their rifles, he simply fell over.

  They didn’t know what to do because he could not be identified. It’s lucky that the chief medic considered it his duty to save the young man presented like a gift from His unseen hand. After the war, Grandpa and the medic kept in touch. Dr. Mohammed went on to become a renowned heart surgeon, and his dream of building a children’s cardiac center in Toronto was eventually realized through an anonymous donor in England.

  The flames crackled as we drank wine and laughed about things Grandpa used to say. A few times, I left the room to cry.

  Mom got drunk and had to be carried up to bed.

  Philip and I stayed downstairs in each other’s arms. I could feel the heat on my face like Grandpa watching.

  JOHN

  FRANCE,

  1944

  I.

  WHEN JOHN WAS about seven years old, he killed a bird.

  There was a park near the diner on Long Island, and he used to go there with the other boys to run, shout, and play games. One day someone had a slingshot, and they all took turns firing. When it was John’s turn to try, he found a small round stone, then placed it in the slingshot the way the others had shown him. He closed one eye and took aim at some distant birds in a tree. Nobody could believe it when, from high up in the branches of an old elm, a small body fell to earth.

  The other boys patted John on the back and crowded around the lump.

  Over dinner that night, John threw up on his plate. As his mother cleaned him
off in the bathroom, she noticed his eyes were red from crying. They sat on the couch. John could hardly get the words out.

  His father stood quietly and fetched their coats.

  He held his hand on the way to the park but they didn’t speak. It was cold. ­People walked their dogs and smoked cigarettes. An old ­couple out strolling said good evening with a smile. The ease of their lives stung sharply.

  When they arrived at the park, it was still on the concrete with its legs in the air. They dug at the base of the tree with stones, then John placed the animal in with both hands, and filled the hole.

  After several hours, John removed the gun from the enemy soldier’s mouth, and rolled off him.

  They both had some food, which they shared into a small meal.

  Then, without a single word, they stood up and walked away in opposite directions.

  John wandered the countryside in a haze for seve­ral hours.

  Night came again, and the fields around were soon flooded with Allied soldiers. Summer came that night too, and the sky was empty and cool. The stars were crisp, and the planets spun on threads.

  It had all been imagined somehow. Harriet, the diner, his sketchbooks, Sunday—­not only in name but in feeling. John knew his life had value, because he would die with someone to live for.

  He reached for the photograph of Harriet, the one he took at Coney Island. He searched every pocket of his wet, torn clothes, with his eyes barely open, and his body burning hot. But then he remembered taking off from RAF Harrington, and the impact he thought was death, and the smoke, and the freezing descent. Paul and the sticky dolls, the smallest cross, the silent barber and his journey through fields in darkness. His best friend, Leo Arlin, from Brooklyn, the Glen Miller Orchestra, his parents’ faces, Lord & Taylor, Harriet proposing to him in Montauk, snowfall, the sound of cars passing his bedroom window at night. Bare feet. Coney Island in summer.

  He could see his wife so clearly now—­hear her laugh, even. It was really a fine afternoon. The subway cars were full of soldiers. Harriet had to sit on his lap. The weight of her body on his legs was like paradise, and he promised her, in that last great surge of youth, ­that he would not die unless they were together—­even if a picture was the best he could do.

  She said that one day they would be very old, that the world would be a different place, but it would always be their world, and that the time apart now would be a nightmare from which they would recover—­desperation buried under years of happiness.

  He groped again for the photograph of his wife, because without it, he could not go on.

  AMELIA

  EAST SUSSEX, ENGLAND,

  2010

  I.

  GRANDPA’S NURSE SAID he had been acting strangely for a few days, giving her things, asking if she was happy. She said he made her promise to water his plants and feed the hedgehogs that come to the back door at night if anything happened to him.

  Mom thinks he knew.

  The night before the ser­vice I couldn’t sleep. Philip tried to stay up with me but fell asleep in his clothes.

  In the morning, we went downstairs and made coffee. I didn’t say anything, so Philip took me outside for a walk. It was cold and the grass was wet. He led me into a field. The ground was soft, but I could hear something coming toward us and sensed danger. When I asked Philip what it was, he said cows were following at a distance.

  When we got back to the house, I felt empty and couldn’t stop crying. In the end I didn’t know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.

  A week later on the flight home, there was severe turbulence. A few ­people screamed, so the pilot came out to reassure us—­which Philip thought was funny.

  I thought of Grandpa John parachuting into enemy territory from the fireball of his burning plane. And then all that time in France and then in hospital, not knowing if he was even going to live, not knowing if he would see my grandmother again. Philip said that if he hadn’t survived, I wouldn’t have been born.

  I went to sleep thinking about it. I wondered who would live in our house now if I hadn’t been born? I wondered who would have my seat on the bus every day into the city, who would sit next to Philip in his truck on long drives?

  One day Philip and I will be old—­and this flight home to New York will be a silent flickering, something half imagined. Grandpa John will have been dead for many years.

  After Philip and I die, there will be no one left to remember Grandpa John and then no one left to remember us. None of this will have happened, except that it’s happening right now.

  There will be no Amelia, yet here I am.

  I wonder how our bodies will change as we get old. I wonder how we’ll feel about things that haven’t happened to us yet.

  When we get back to our cottage in Sag Harbor, I’m going to invite all our friends to a summer party, and I’m going to laugh, and put my arms around them. And then I’m going to lead Philip up to bed by the hand, finding the candles by heat, and blowing them out one by one, as we, one day, will be vanquished with a last puff and then nothing at all—­nothing but the fragrance of our lives in the world, as on a hand that once held flowers.

  MR. HUGO

  FRANCE,

  1944

  I.

  WHEN A HEAVY WEIGHT suddenly rolled on top of A, panic tore through his body, separating muscle from thought. Then a gun rammed into his mouth. The top of his throat is bleeding. The attacker has clenched teeth. His eyes are wild and bloodshot. Gasping with fear, A is unable to breathe. The barrel digs into his flesh. The taste of blood like old keys.

  The other soldiers in his unit had been dead since yesterday afternoon, spread out across the field, dismembered by strafing. They had marched all day with nothing to eat. Then the steady drone of aircraft. A was the only one not running. He anticipated a quick but painful end with brief awareness of shredding. But as the Spitfire pilot dived upon them and they scattered like a flock of clumsy, wingless pigeons, irony tripped A backward into a tank track, where he remained unconscious long enough for exhaustion to swallow his trembling young frame.

  After a period of searing pain, the gun in A’s mouth stopped pushing, but remained beyond his teeth. A touched the barrel with his tongue. He wondered if there were any bullets left in the chamber or if his attacker was too injured to fire.

  Eventually, A’s thoughts drifted to more remote regions. His mother seemed close, even though he had no memory of her face or her voice, ­or of ever being touched by her hands.

  He remembered something from one of her books. He had found a box of them in the attic.

  If it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.

  He was thinking of his mother and her books, and the feel of their pages on his small fingers when the man finally removed the gun from his mouth. A did not move his body. His trousers were soaked with urine, and his lips and mouth cracked with dried blood.

  When the man rolled off and slumped down beside him, A reached slowly for his own gun, which he set in the mud beside the other weapon.

  He wondered if his attacker was dead. His eyes had closed and he was not moving. He must have been some local Résistant, for he was not in any uniform. Perhaps a farmer driven by the rage of loss.

  A touched the man’s cheek with the back of his hand. Then he foraged in his pocket and unwrapped a caramel he had been saving. He pushed it through the man’s lips. The eyes did not open, but the jaw turned slowly. His face and neck were like wet sand.

  After a few painful chews, the man sat up, but didn’t seem to know where he was. A watched as he reached into his pocket and pulled out some dried meat and a bread roll. He dipped the roll in a puddle and broke it in two pieces.

  When they finished eating, both men stood up and walked away in opposite directions.


  Despite the state of his lips and gums, A stopped from time to time, to pick a blade of grass and balance it in his mouth, the way he used to as a boy.

  When he first joined the Hitler Youth, he was presented with a dagger. His father kept taking it down off the mantelpiece to look. He participated in all the programs because it’s what the other boys were doing, and it was nice being in the woods, away from his father, and away from the house. He got through heavy days of training, because the nights were long and full of luxury. Sometimes he lit a candle and read a book.

  During one of these weekends, a cabin monitor found a volume of poetry in his pillowcase and reported it. A explained to the chief that his mother had died when he was very young, and in the attic while searching for a compass, he discovered a chest of her things. The book was returned to him, but the other boys turned against him after that. One told him that young men should lift weights and wrestle.

  One afternoon when his father was out, A found another book. It was a slim volume with sentences that flowed from his mouth like warm water.

  A slept under a tree the first night. It was humid and the sky was overcast. In the morning he opened his eyes and lay without moving. There were birds everywhere. He need only be killed and it would be over.

  He might even see his mother. But how would he explain the things he had let himself do?

  He bent back thorny branches to find berries growing in the hedgerows.

  He measured distance by his position to the sun.

  For two days he walked in circles, then hunger compelled him east, where he imagined other Nazi divisions were digging in. He would be fed and looked after. There would have to be a report. At first he would not be without blame, not without suspicion. Then a fresh uniform and a place to sleep.