by Brock Clarke
“Oh, hey, I’m really sorry about that, Dad,” I said. He looked up when I spoke, and dropped the book off the stand and onto the floor, which was just about what that book deserved. I picked the book up, walked over to the hall, and threw it into the open front-hall closet, just to show what I thought of the book. “That guy had no right.”
“No … right,” my father repeated: repetition, I’d learned by now, was his version of normal communication, the way jokes are for some people and sign language is for others.
“It’s my fault, really,” I said. “I’m the one who told him those stories about you.”
“About … me?”
“About where you went, what you did when you left us.”
“You … did?” my father asked. Only then, as though he was on tape delay, did his eyes slowly move through the air, following the book’s trajectory. His eyes rested for a minute on the hall closet, as if trying to picture the book there among the winter coats and file cabinets and partnerless shoes he knew to be inside. “No … right,” he said again. My father looked at me in displeasure, then took an especially angry pull on his beer.
“I know,” I said, bowing my head. “I’m so sorry.”
We sat there for a while in silence, me ashamed, my father angry, waiting for our third to come and break the impasse. Because this is what it also means to be in a family: to have two of its members break the family and then wait around for a third to make it whole again.
Finally, after fifteen minutes or so (my father had a cooler of beer near the base of the exercise bike and drank two beers, but he didn’t offer me one and I didn’t blame him), my mother showed up. She wasn’t wearing exercise clothes: she was wearing green corduroy pants and a white shirt that somebody, for some reason, might call a blouse and not a shirt, and brown leather boots. She looked classy, regal, like a man without being at all manlike, like Katharine Hepburn but without the shakes or the Spencer Tracy. She looked young, too, not at all like the fifty-nine-year-old woman I knew her to be. Her face was flushed—healthy and outdoorsy in a way that made you think of a commercial for the most expensive, physician-endorsed kind of lip balm. My mother was carrying a twelve-pack of Knickerbocker: she freed one of the cans from the cardboard, threw it to me, and said, “I don’t care why you’re so gloomy, but stop.” Then she turned to my father and said, “You, too.”
“OK,” I said, and my father grunted something that also sounded affirmative. I cracked the beer, took a long drink of it, and asked, “Hey, what did you do today?” Because it occurred to me that this is what family members ask one another after a long day, and it also occurred to me that I had no idea what my mother had done the previous three days I’d been home, either.
My mother was taking a slug of her beer when I asked this, and it was weird: there was a slight pause in her drinking, a hitch in her gulp, a slight but noticeable arrest in her imbibing, before she continued her drinking, finishing the whole beer in one long swallow, as a matter of fact. “Work,” she said, and then, without looking at me, she tossed another full can of beer at me, even though I was only half-done with the first one.
“What about you, Dad?” I asked. “What did you do today?”
It was more difficult to read my father’s reaction, since he had so few of them and they were so spastic and incomprehensible to begin with. But I did notice this: my father glanced pleadingly at the television, as though asking it for help. Then he looked at his cooler, which was apparently empty, and to the cooler he said finally, “Work.” As if in reward for his giving the right answer, my mother tossed my father a beer, the way a trainer throws a seal a fish. My father amazingly caught it, too, although in doing so, he nearly capsized the bike, and I had to run over and catch him and it before they crashed to the floor.
“What about you, Sam,” my mother asked. “What did you do today?”
I didn’t know at the time whether my parents were lying or not, but I did know that it appeared as though they were, and I decided then and there as a poorly read and unschooled detective learning on the fly that the key to telling lies is to act the opposite of those who might be liars. I looked my mother square in the eye and said, “Nothing,” and then looked my father in the eye and said, “Nothing,” even though he hadn’t asked the question, which I’ll admit probably hurt my credibility some. But while I was looking them in the eye, I was also wondering if they’d read the morning paper (I’d left it on the dining room table, but it wasn’t there now), if they knew about the Bellamy House fire, if my father knew that I’d been looking through those letters and had even taken (and now lost) one, if my mother even knew about the letters at all. Who knew what—that was the operative question for all of us.
“Well,” my mother said, “we went to work and you did nothing. Another normal day.”
“Just like it used to be,” I said, thinking about when I was a kid and they would go to work, or said they did, and I did nothing, or said I did. We all drank to that, as was not true when I was a child, and drank some more, and they seemed to forget about the whole thing. My parents were very wise in their forgetting, of course, amnesia being, like a fixed mortgage, the thing that keeps your house your house. But I wasn’t wise. I didn’t forget. I got drunker and drunker, but still, the whole time I was thinking about my parents’ normal days and whether they were anything like my normal day, and I was still thinking about this as I went upstairs. I took off my watch before climbing into bed. It’s the expensive, indestructible sort of watch that tells you things—the barometric pressure, wind speed, and high tide in the second-largest city in Sri Lanka, for instance—that you don’t necessarily need to know, but two of the useful things it does tell you are the time and the day of the week. And right then, my watch was telling me the time was 11:21 p.m. and the day of the week was Saturday. It was Saturday. “It is Saturday,” I said out loud, making it official. My parents had gone to work on a Saturday, or said they had. For my father this wasn’t so strange: apparently you could edit or not edit books on whatever day you wanted, and he’d always kept irregular work hours and days. But what sort of teacher goes to work on a Saturday? The question exhausted me, and I fell asleep before I could begin to answer it. I had already looked into the Edward Bellamy House fire and now I was going to have to look into this, too. As everyone knows, once you start looking into one thing, you can’t help but start looking into others.
9
And once you start looking into others, then apparently you can’t stop others from looking into you. I learned this truth the next day when I woke up and found Thomas Coleman leaning over my bed, his face far too close to my own, as if trying to make sure I was breathing.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“What?” I said, and then, “Hey!” and so on as I scrambled out of my bed, threw on some clothes (like the first time I’d met Thomas, I was half-dressed and thought that maybe our second meeting would go better if I were fully clothed), went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and walked downstairs, Thomas following me everywhere I went until I settled at the dining room table, where my hangover potion and “Drink me” note were waiting. I sat down and did what the note told me to. Thomas was still standing; he looked more substantial than he had the first time I saw him, which had been less than a week earlier. It seemed as though he’d put on some weight; even his hair looked a little thicker and had a little wave to it now, and there was a little color to his face, and all in all he looked like a matinee idol almost all the way recovered from cancer and chemo.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Thomas asked me again.
I didn’t respond, this being one of the all-time most difficult questions to answer, especially if you’re not doing anything or think you’re not doing anything.
“You quit your job,” Thomas said, barely holding on to his patience. I could almost see it against the back of his bared teeth, struggling mightily to escape.
“That’s true,” I sai
d.
“I called up Pioneer Packaging Friday to tell them that you’d burned down the Emily Dickinson House and killed my parents, and did they know they had a murderer and an arsonist working for them, and before I could get it all out, they told me you’d already quit.” Here he paused, as if letting me catch up to his swift train of thought, which I appreciated. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked for the third time.
“I was drunk!” I told him, realizing for the first time that one of the things drink could transform was one’s bumbling. Sober, one’s bumbling was a kissing cousin to failure; but drunk, one’s bumbling could be triumphant. “I quit my job because I was drunk!” I told him. “And you were right: they didn’t know I was a murderer and an arsonist. But I quit before you could tell them! And I didn’t even do it on purpose!”
This deflated Thomas. He sighed and sat down across from me; some of the color left his face. Disappointment took its rightful place in him, evicting strength and optimism. I felt a little sad for Thomas until I remembered why we were having this conversation in my parents’ house and not my own, and what he’d told Anne Marie.
“Why did you lie about me having an affair?” I said. “Why did you tell Anne Marie I was having an affair with your wife?”
The question cheered Thomas up some. His eyes grew far away and dreamy and this disturbed me more than anything he’d done or said thus far. “She’s kind of beautiful, you know,” he said. “I can’t figure out why you would ever cheat on her.”
“I didn’t cheat on her,” I said, and nearly reached over the table to shake him out of his fiction and into our truth. He must have sensed this, because he stood up from his chair and backed a few feet away from the table. “I burned down that house and killed your parents,” I yelled. “Why didn’t you tell her that?”
“Why do you think?” Thomas asked. I could see that he was trying to be a detective, too—that is, if being a detective means making someone answer questions that you should be able to answer yourself but can’t. This didn’t make me feel any better. Did he really not know why he’d told Anne Marie one thing and not another? Did he not know what he was doing here? Was he an amateur life wrecker after all, and if so, would he do more damage as an amateur than he would if he were an expert? There was no way to ask these questions, of course, and expect an answer, and so instead I asked, “Why did you set fire to the Edward Bellamy House?”
“What?” he said. “Who?” Thomas looked genuinely baffled: his eyes retreated a little deeper into their sockets, leaving little lines in their wake, and his mouth puckered as though bewilderment were something sour. Then curiously, his face relaxed: a little, flickering smile illuminated his lips. Thomas cocked his head in the general direction of my dad’s room and said, “Is your father home?”
“No,” I said. “He’s at work.” And then, “Wait, do you know my father?”
“So long, Sam,” he said, and then turned heel and walked out the front door. I sat there for too long, making sure I fixed the details in my head before I lost them for good. Thomas had mentioned my father. But so what: after all, he knew where to find me, and so he also knew that I had a father, as so many people did and as Thomas did not. But there was that cock of the head. Was that coincidental? Was it just a tic? Or did he cock his head in the direction of my father’s room, knowing that it was in fact my father’s room? And if so, how did he know that?
I got out of my chair and ran to the front door, trying to catch Thomas before he left my life for who knows how long this time. And I might have caught him, too, if the bond analysts hadn’t been there, on my porch, blocking my way.
I CALL THEM THE bond analysts, but of course they had names. There was Morgan, as you know, and there were also two Ryans, one Tigue, and one Geoff, whom everyone called G-off. G-off was the only one whom I could keep straight, because he had dark, curly hair and looked slightly—by comparison and for lack of a better word—ethnic. The rest I could never tell apart, and looking at them now, I still couldn’t. It wasn’t especially cold out, but they were wearing duck boots and khaki pants and ribbed turtleneck sweaters, and each of them—other than G-off—had his hair combed to the side in a youthful, private-school fashion. They were all shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if they’d have liked nothing better than to have something elevated—the bumper of a classic car, maybe, or a picket fence, or a day boat’s prow railing—to prop their legs upon. Except for G-off, they kept flicking their hair out of their faces with a twitch of their necks. Since prison (and until the day before in the Book Warehouse), I hadn’t thought about them much, which of course is a talent of mine, and it seemed as if time hadn’t thought about them much, either: they looked exactly the same as they had ten years earlier. As for me, my belly was a little softer and bigger than it had been, and so, with my half-barrel chest and in right profile, I probably looked like a misshapen version of the letter B, and while I had kept most of the hair on my head, I had also added some elsewhere. The point is, the bond analysts had not aged and I had, and this was another thing I’d bumbled.
“Hello, Sam,” one of them said—it might have been Morgan. I say that because he’d always been sort of their leader, and on the porch the other four had fallen into a ragged flying V behind him, which I thought was kind of them, to distinguish Morgan as the important one in that way. Other things should organize themselves in the same way. Life, for instance. “Long time no see.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. With Thomas and his surprise visit, it had taken me a few minutes to locate my anger, but with the bond analysts and their surprise visit, I’d fallen right into it. I figured that if I kept getting surprise visits, I’d start getting angry beforehand, that the anger would in fact announce the arrival of the surprise visitor and not follow it. “You had no right.”
“What?” one of them said—maybe it was Tigue. “What did we do?”
“What did we do?” G-off said, and I remembered that one of their talents was to parrot one another to reinforce a point.
“You took my father’s story and passed it off as your own,” I said, and then pointed accusingly at what I hoped was Morgan. It was: he put his head down for a moment in shame, and while he did I got a good look at his part, which was straight and deep, like a canal cutting through the landmass of his hair.
“OK,” he said, raising his head. “I’ll admit it: that was wrong of me.”
“Very wrong,” G-off said.
“But I paid for it,” Morgan said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“As you know, I wrote the memoir and stole your father’s story,” Morgan said. “As you also might know, I was on parole when I wrote the book. Well, my parole officer read the book when it came out.”
“Lots of people read it,” Tigue said.
“It did quite well,” G-off said. “It even went into paperback.”
“Not all books do, you know,” Tigue said.
“Anyway,” Morgan said, “when the parole officer read the book, he thought I’d violated my parole by leaving the state. He wanted to put me back in prison. So I had to tell him that I’d made the whole thing up, that I hadn’t even left Massachusetts and I’d never done those things or gone to those places and that it wasn’t my story to begin with.”
“Then word got out,” Tigue said.
“The publisher found out and was pissed,” G-off said. “He demanded the advance back, plus all royalties.”
“I had to take out a loan to pay back the money,” Morgan said. “I even had to move back in with my parents for a while.”
“Hey, just like me,” I said, meaning for our common experience to cheer him up. Which, of course, it didn’t.
“It was humiliating,” Morgan said.
“But I don’t understand,” I admitted. “I don’t understand why you had to steal the story in the first place. Why didn’t you go out and do something on your own and then write a book about it?” I’d been in the Boo
k Warehouse, after all, and knew that it could be done. As far as I could tell from the memoir section, if you were a memoirist, you did something—anything—only so that you could write a book about it afterward.
“That’s why we’re here, Sam,” Morgan said. “We came here for a reason.”
“A specific reason,” Tigue said. The two Ryans hadn’t spoken yet. In the movies these guys would have been the muscle, except they were too trim and they kept their hands in their pockets instead of menacingly smacking their fists into their palms.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Tell him about Africa,” Tigue said.
“Shut up,” Morgan said, and I had the definite impression that he would have smacked Tigue upside the head if they’d been a little closer in the V. But Morgan didn’t smack Tigue upside the head. He drew himself taller, as if to make a rehearsed speech. “In the past,” he said, “men like us, men of a certain means and of a certain age, if we’d gotten bored or dissatisfied or restless, if we needed to get our blood pumping, take a big, life-affirming risk and so on, we would have gone to Africa, on safari. We would have hired native guides. We would have hunted lions or gazelles; we would have come back with some animal horns or tusks of some kind. We might even have written a book about it after we’d returned. We can’t do that anymore.”
