The World of the End

by Ofir Touché Gafla

  Then she told him about the meeting. The one that took place far from Shakespeare’s hometown.

  Three months after adopting the child, she brought him in for an interview in Aliastown 1996—a common practice put in place in order to assess the child’s satisfaction with his or her legal guardian. After passing the evaluation, Catherine decided to treat her grandson to a spur-of-the-moment trip to March 2000 to visit one of his best friends from their “greenhouse” days, a child who was also being raised by his grandmother. The kids played for hours while the grandmothers chatted, till Catherine peeked at her godget and said it was time to go. Henri’s protestations got him another hour of play with his redheaded alias friend. When they left, Catherine promised they would come back again soon.

  On their way to the multi-wheel that would take them home, they passed a long line of people waiting for the Vie-deo machine, and the curious child lagged, looking them over as his grandmother urged him to carry on. Catherine took his hand and marched quickly in the direction of the multi stop, when all of a sudden the child turned his head, released his grip without any warning, and sprinted madly toward the line, disregarding her calls, and, like a creature in a trance, galloped toward the only woman who didn’t notice him and fell upon her heedlessly, clinging to her leg with devout longing. The woman was so startled by the intensity of the surprise attack, that for the first few seconds she merely stared at the child without opening her mouth to speak. Catherine was far more shaken when she recognized the genetic attraction her grandchild had experienced when she first met him. Only the child, who didn’t understand a thing, showed no signs of alarm, emitting a long cry of admiration that brought bashful smiles to the agitated faces of those waiting in line. The woman looked around helplessly, trying, in vain, to delicately pry the child away. The boy wrapped both his hands around her leg and pressed his smiling face to her side. Catherine was sure she was headed toward another heart attack, more severe than the one that sent her to the Other World, when she asked Henri to behave like a good boy and tried to get him to relinquish his grip on her astonished daughter’s leg.

  Then their eyes met. The ignorant daughter and the knowing mother. Catherine couldn’t control the urge to caress her daughter’s cheek, and when her trembling fingers almost touched her daughter’s face, Marian withdrew and pushed the child away with all her might, finally free of the passionate touches of the two strangers who looked at her with open wonder. Feeling cornered by their stares, Marian left her place in line and began walking away, not daring to turn back and face the strange pair’s inscrutable demands. Only once Catherine regained her composure and called her daughter by name three times did she slow to a halt. The two trotted toward her, the grandmother trying to quell the child’s ardor with her tenacious grip and the grandson doing his best to wiggle free, not understanding why she insisted on denying him this inexplicable pleasure, as Marian fixed them with the frightened stare of a woman on the run.

  The silence could have gone on for hours had Catherine not shaken her hand and identified herself. “Hello, Marian. I’m Catherine Dumas, your mother, and this is Henri, your son.”

  Ben believed Catherine when she said that Marian burst out laughing a few seconds after the dramatic announcement, certain that he wouldn’t have acted any differently had he been in her shoes. Marian asked the woman what weird soap opera she’d stepped out of, and when Catherine repeated her earlier statement, this time in a more forceful voice, her daughter said she was “demented” and asked that she stop bothering her. Catherine maintained her composure, pointed at the long line in front of the Vie-deo machine, and said in an even tone, “I guess we barged in on you just as you were about to take out the tapes of your life. I’m sorry. Go back to your spot on line. We won’t bother you anymore. Just do the two … the three of us a favor and watch the first tape, the one that begins with your birth. Remember my face. Imprint it on your mind. And if you want, call me.”

  Marian did not voice any resistance when her mother took her godget and pressed her thumbprint into its memory. Catherine looked her full in the face and in a crushed voice added, “Please, don’t disappear. I lost you once already…”

  * * *

  Ben noted, “Were it not for Henri you could have passed her right by on the street without knowing she was your daughter.”

  Catherine shook her head vigorously, every muscle in her face revolting against his comment. “Absolutely not. As I said, there’s no way I would have let her go a second time.”

  “But how would you have known…?” He fell silent at the sight of her burning turquoise irises. Now and again she sipped from the tall glass of water on the edge of the table, unfurling for him the story of the young theology student in the sixties in Paris, just a few years before the uprising, in which she did not take part on account of the disastrous turn life had handed her. Robert. Her heinous roommate. The failed actor who cut and pasted freely from the truth, threading a false string through its entire length. Like the fact that he never made it on time to auditions because he used to party till the wee hours and that, when he did make it, he was always ushered out the door unceremoniously on account of his poor skills. Like the fact that he used to drink himself into a stupor and then crawl to her room and beg until she’d prod him away from the door with a broomstick and swear she’d rent elsewhere if he did not leave. Like the fact that when they met, he swore up and down that he loved men, convincing her to move in with him, taking advantage of the innocence of the young woman who had run away from her drunken father’s house. Like the fact that one time, when she was cramming for a final, she forgot the key to her room outside the door and only remembered it late at night, unaware that the charming scoundrel had already seized the opportunity and made a copy for himself. Like the fact that, several days later, Robert came home one evening drunk as a sailor and decided it was high time to demand his due, broke into her room while she was in the shower, and hid behind her drapes, pouncing on her like a man possessed not long after she’d fallen asleep. By the time she woke up and managed to get her bearings, it was too late. Like the fact that she carried the results of the brutal rape in her womb for nine awful months, during the course of which she lost her job caring for an old sickly priest, no longer able to hide her pregnancy. Robert was sent to jail, and she swore never to reveal to him what he had done. He had no knowledge whatsoever of the twins she bore in the late days of her final innocent spring. The girl who was vehemently opposed to abortions was not examined once during her gestation period and was accordingly shocked when she found herself lying on the delivery room bed, sweaty and in pain, listening to the midwife tell her with a wink and a whisper, “We’ve got another one on the way out.…” Her initial shock turned to a muffled shriek when one of the nurses put the twins in her arms and she noticed the tiny mark on her firstborn’s chest, the unmistakable perfect star, the badge of dishonor Robert had bequeathed to his daughter.

  Catherine knew she would not be able to shoulder the financial burden of raising two daughters and so, during the first month of the girls’ lives, she sold all she had, hoping to make the impossible happen, praying day and night for divine intervention in her predicament. The miracle refused to materialize, and when she went to see her only kin, her fanatical father chased her off his property, calling her a whore.

  Catherine poured herself a fresh glass of water, gulped it down thirstily, and continued, this time at a quicker pace. She grew impatient when telling of the hardest decision of her life—separating the twins so that she could raise one of them. As soon as she had decided to give one of the girls up, she knew she would keep the one bearing the telltale mark as an act of self-flagellation. Each time she looked at the mark she would be reminded of her terrible deed. The lump sum of money she received went toward ensuring some financial security for the “marked” one. The random meeting in the park with the strange man who answered to the name Arthur was, as far as she was concerned, a sign from above, and she
insisted on one single rule—that the adopting parents not change the child’s name, even though the transparent nature of her own deceit was readily apparent to her: If both babies answered to the same name and were outwardly identical, perhaps then, with time, she would come to believe she had birthed but a single child. Deep in her heart, she hoped the two sisters would never meet, and cried for weeks on end after the deal was done. And maybe her insistence was merely the result of her desire to leave her small mark on the two-month-old baby girl who was taken from her in the middle of a glorious, sun-dappled day. Six months later she found a job and took the baby along to the apartments she cleaned sixteen hours a day, but by eighteen months she enrolled her in day care, preferring to keep the glowing baby out of the filthy apartments. When one of the apartment owners grew overly interested in her, she knew she had no choice, that she’d never let history repeat itself, and so, in a back alley deal, she acquired a gun, disgusted by the thought that she carried a weapon in her bag and, doubly so, by the reason she was forced to carry it. Over the years she vigorously rebuffed the advances of many men who were not indifferent to her beauty and, to her dying day, she kept herself apart from them.

  When her daughter asked about her father, her mother said he had died many years before, nipping in the bud any talk of her private nightmare. She spent her best years raising the sole ray of light in her life, who grew up to be a blinding sun—Marian surpassed all expectations: an exemplary daughter, a brilliant student, a journalist, and an independent woman. With the loving daughter’s encouragement, the proud mother went back to school in her mid-forties, stooped yet curious and determined to complete what she had started years ago, refusing to allow life to foil her plans again. Upon receiving her masters, seven years later, the dean of the department called her to his office and said he had read her thesis, “The Individual’s Relationship with God: The Most Perilous Love Story Of All,” and that he had found it fascinating. He suggested that she expand it into a book, so that she would be able to continue what she had begun with her modest work—telling the life story of a simple person, from the perspective of God. At first she was startled by the pretentious smell wafting off such a vexing undertaking, but after further consideration and with the help of the old professor she came to the conclusion that as a believer she could not afford to pass up the opportunity to examine her life from the divine perspective.

  Three years later, when her daughter informed her that she intended to surgically remove the birthmark on her chest, Catherine asked to accompany her, eager to witness her daughter “change” into the daughter she’d never known and to pretend that she was meeting her for the first time, pushing from her mind the stupid fear that without the birthmark her daughter would lose her identity as the Marian she had known and loved. The last man she ever dreamed of seeing in the small clinic was the one who dominated her mind ever since she had helped wheel her daughter into the OR. And when he opened the door, without thinking of who might be behind it, she lost the power of clear thought. His eyes filled with wonder as his lips stretched into a smile. The repulsive grin pushed her hand into her bag. She drew the gun, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. Robotically. With no feeling whatsoever. Afterwards, when her stunned daughter questioned her motives, she told her a half truth. Sometimes that’s enough. Only her cellmate, dear Sandrine, knew the whole truth, and on her deathbed, Catherine made her swear she would find her lost daughter and bring the two sisters together. When Ben asked her why she waited till her final moments to reveal her secret, she shrugged and looked at the floor gloomily, and when he asked about the book, she managed a partial smile and said, “Forget that, it’s just meaningless nonsense.”

  The unavoidable conclusion. The Charlatan who met the Mad Hop is in love with a different Marian, the one who’s living unperturbed in a faraway world. Ben couldn’t comprehend the notion of two Marians. One of them was a world in and of itself, and now he discovered there was a second, an assuredly fascinating alternative. He toyed with the idea of a different Marian, her expressions foreign, her personality different, the Marian he never met, and perhaps he was mistaken and the similarity between the two was far greater than he suspected.

  “I’m guessing that at some point you heard from her … my Marian…”

  “Yes. A month after the incident at the Vie-deo machine. She wanted to meet. In her hometown. 1616. I didn’t need to mull it over. I took the little one and set out. She lived six blocks from here, on King Lear Boulevard.”

  “Lived?” he asked with mounting fright, feeling the nausea creep back into his belly. “In other words, she left that apartment, too? Moved somewhere else?”

  “Marian left her apartment two months ago. You must understand, Ben, things have happened … in effect, I was the one who convinced her to leave … there was no other choice.…”

  “What are you talking about? Why did you convince her to leave?”

  For the first time since the beginning of their conversation, tears pooled in her eyes and the stoic façade she tried to maintain between herself and the events that had shaped her death dissolved fast. Her steady voice lost its clarity, and the clenching feeling that crept into her throat truncated some of her words. “You can surely imagine how difficult it was for her to meet her mother and son … she had watched the first tape … she recognized me … and maybe it was the shock that prevented her from noticing the likeness between Henri and his father, back then, by the Vie-deo machine.… It was not an easy meeting … not easy at all … I wanted to embrace her, to touch her, to make her understand that I’m here forever, but I didn’t dare … she was distant … cold … I don’t blame her, I know … but she hardly showed any warmth even toward the kid … again, I thought it had to do with the shock … she shook his hand and smiled a bit, but nothing more than that, as though she were on guard … even a month later, when I let her know we were moving there, in other words, here, to 1616, in order to be close to her, she reacted strangely.… I thought she’d be happy … after all, from what I’d gathered we were the only family members she’d met … and you know how hard it is to find alternate apartments in the Other World … but Marian didn’t seem excited in the least … she mumbled something like ‘welcome’ and went back to her affairs … I tried to gain her trust by any means … I was willing to do anything for her to forgive me, and in fact we began to meet more often, but only later did I realize that I don’t really interest her … nor does Henri.…”

  “The child didn’t interest her?” Ben asked in wonder.

  “You, Ben, you were all that interested her. Even Shakespeare lost most of his appeal when she wasn’t chosen to be part of the casting team for his new play. And that was in the beginning. Before we really got to know each other.”

  “But you said that she said that he has my eyes … that didn’t…?”

  “To the contrary, Ben, to the contrary. The few times she looked him in the eye she shivered and burst out crying. She said it was too much, that she simply couldn’t deal with those eyes. When I asked if she’d like to watch the child for a day or two, she looked at me like I was out of my mind.… Later on, we’d come by her place once a week in order to get her out of the apartment, but it was impossible … she preferred to stay indoors and watch the tapes.… Sometimes I joined her and watched some snippets of your life together … I thought I’d get to know her better that way, but she made it very clear that my presence only bothered her. I wasn’t upset with her, but I admit it was rather hard to understand her … up until that terrible afternoon two months ago…”

  “What happened two months ago?”

  “Henri did something a little bit…”

  The doorbell rang twice. Catherine leapt out of her chair, ran to the door, and opened it with a giggle. The woman on the other side of the door wrapped her in a tight hug and the two swayed back and forth, laughing, crying, and laughing again. Catherine took her friend’s hand and introduced her. “Ben, I’d like you to meet Sandrine M
ontesquieu, the friend I was telling you about.…”

  Sandrine came over to him and shook his hand warmly, exchanging amused glances with her beaming friend. Ben was astounded by the sudden swing in Catherine’s mood, as though new life were breathed into her as soon as the visitor arrived. He assumed that the two must share something so significant that it dwarfed all he had heard up until now. The two of them sat on the couch and held hands, blabbing away, as though all of the world’s sorrow had been muted, as though the room were their old cell, as though they weren’t sitting opposite an appalled son-in-law waiting for the most important response of all. But it was slow in coming. For many a minute he sat there and listened as they relived the old days together, speaking in their own indecipherable code, bringing up pearls from the ocean of grief the two of them had crossed, oblivious to their surroundings. Ben was envious of their remarkable ability to shut him out, and it brought to mind all the times he had done much the same with his wife, until they were brought back to the here and now with a barbed remark.

  “I know you have a lot to talk about … and I don’t want to disturb you, if you could just, please, give me the address…,” he stammered.

  Catherine looked at him with a silly grin and apologized. “I am so sorry. I totally forgot myself there for a moment. I’d offer to invite you for dinner…”

  “That’s alright. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other soon enough.”

  “I’m sure we will,” she said, ripping the corner off a newspaper he hadn’t noticed. She jotted down a few words, handed him the note, and whispered, “Be patient, please. And I beg you, do not give up. You’ve come this far, you can’t lose hope.”