Charades (4 page)

5

Koenig

Some days blackness moves in on him and settles like an internal fog. Almost anything can touch off these moods: a stray comment in a restaurant, a newspaper reference, books displayed in a store. Sometimes it is sufficient to bury himself obsessively in work; at other times Rachel — his former, his first, his only wife — hides inside every equation. Then it may be necessary to draw up someone else's body like a screen, which may or may not help. If the attack is severe, he may have to telephone his daughter in Toronto.

“Is she all right?” he asks. “Should I come up?”

“I don't think that would help,” his daughter says guardedly. “She's all right.”

“Alison …”

“Yes?”

But what is there to say?

“I'd, uh, love to have you come down to Boston for a visit.”

“I know, Dad. Perhaps I will one day. Bye.”

Sometimes he has to fly up for a day or so: rent a car, drive by, keep tabs on them, reassure himself in some slight way.
The invisible guardian, the watcher.

Then back to work, what else is there?

The fracturing of chalk, mid-formula, he has long ago discovered, is a particularly effective way to break out of fog: suggestive of fission, of lunatic Einsteinian energy, of intelligence fizzing and spitting under pressure. Then to turn to the class and smile gently, wearily; to hint at the physical cost of descending from rarefied air to the foothills of explanation. He turns, he smiles. He feels faint.

Because she is there again, the hologram girl, Charade Ryan, high up in the room near the back. He hasn't seen her since that second night when they … How long ago was that? How could he have forgotten? After the chasm, the weekend in Toronto, he has not …

Her hand is raised.

Yes? he attempts to say. He nods in her direction, but then what is the question? He listens blankly as words buzz like flies. “Perhaps,” he says, “if you were to stay behind after the class …”

Because she is right about that: talk is what glues one minute to the next. Back in the apartment in Cambridge, Koenig reaches up and feels blindly along the shelf where he keeps words, and hurriedly pulls down multiple sets, double volumes, whole phrases. “Don't leave. Please. I certainly don't want you to leave. I had to go to Toronto and there wasn't time to … It certainly wasn't meant to indicate …” He relaxes, catching hold of her hand and licking her fingers one by one. “Don't stop talking.”

He must have made sense, since she sits in his chair
as usual. Though there is no way of knowing for sure, a word being an infinitely unstable element. He deals in hieroglyphs all the time, he knows how they branch unpredictably in the minds of readers, lab technicians, scientific colleagues. And he notices that she is sitting rather formally, sitting forward, ready to get dressed and leave at any time. “Perhaps you should …” — he is groping for reasons to keep her there, get her talking again — “perhaps you should elaborate, about your father you know, be more specific.”

“Well …” she says doubtfully.

“You could …” he begins, and has to clear his throat.

“Yes, I could tell you a story,” she says. “By way of explication. It's something I more or less have to do all the time, for myself. Like marking my position on a map, you understand?”

Oh yes, he understands.

“I'll call it the Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow,” she says. “Because time is definitely something I don't understand and maybe you can explain. Or even … even if you could just say to me authoritatively: Look, no one understands time. Relativity's made a cocked hat out of time, the very concept's pass
é
, the past isn't done with, it could pop up again tomorrow, the whole thing is up for grabs. Even that would help. If I could have it on the best and latest scientific authority. Just some sort of anchor, no, just a buoy or two would do.”

He watches the way she walks around his living room in her unfastened overlarge shirt. He watches the way she touches things, constantly, in passing. She is more agitated than before, she cannot keep still or silent.

He asks himself: How did we get from Building 6 to here? He is still addicted to the habit of assuming temporal chains, to ferreting out cause and effect, even when the route maps go haywire as they usually do.

After the class, there must have been a progression of events between there and here, but it is lost. Very likely it involved frantic calculations about the cleaning lady, since in moments of extremity the mind, which is a faulty and endearing mechanism, always turns to minutiae. (As she, the girl, has commented.) So it is quite possible that before they had even left the classroom (or else later, in his car? or in a cab? or had they taken the subway?) he had asked himself whether or not he had got around to leaving a key for Joanna while he was away in Toronto. And, since he is here with Charade, he must have concluded that yes, he'd contacted her. He must have concluded that since today is Joanna's day to clean, the apartment would look more or less decent.

So here he is again with the girl who is not much older than his daughter Alison, his daughter who avoids visiting him and whose reproachful eyes follow him constantly but who has left no trail of crayon drawings on his refrigerator door. Those are the work of the children of Joanna his cleaning lady, he lets her bring the kids, why not? as long as they come in his absence.

So here he is again with the girl who talks, who talks and talks, who has blue-green eyes, weird hair tamed into a long thick braid, weird name. Charade. And she is more or less young enough to be his daughter. As a matter of fact, he has a son who is only slightly younger than she. His son is a Moonie now, voyaging into the far galaxies of inner space. Lost.

Charade is pacing, pacing, touching the spines of his books on the shelves, touching the mouldings of the window frames (he approves of that; she has a taste for sensuous detail; the mouldings are old and intricate), trailing her fingers over the large soapstone carving that Rachel bought in Toronto for his birthday years and years ago. (Funny that Charade sensed Rachel's presence after all these years.
Domestic humidity
,
she said. He is fairly sure she said that.)

And all the time she is spinning a safety net of talk.

She turns to him suddenly from out of the middle of a sentence. Behind his ribs there is a sensation of pinching and kinking and he tenses, waiting to know what will be expected
of him. Apparently, to her, it is both amusing and exasperating that he has dressed again. He has no specific recollection either of taking off his clothes, nor of putting them back on, but it is most certainly not true that he has an image of himself as a
clothed
person.

He always feels alarmingly exposed.

Even now he shivers and reaches for a robe to put on over his jacket and pants. And she, noting this, pauses …

When she moves back and forth in front of him, he can hear the black nylon whisper of her thighs murmuring one to the other, a come-hither sound, full of solace. But why is she getting dressed?

“Don't go.” There is something he wants to explain. A stroke must be like this, he feels. First the massive cardiac jolt and then the muscles and nerves simply forgetting their lines; the power of speech going; the ability to walk going; the complicated sequence of picking up a comb and running it through the hair getting lost. On hospital wards, he has seen limp figures in striped pyjamas and wheelchairs watch the movement of a nurse's arm with a greedy prurient interest. Now he understands it: not craziness, just a passionate copycat envy. How to begin again? How to recover the knack of swimming smoothly from one minute to the next, to keep on fitting each new day into the puzzle the way everyone else does without thinking? Without thinking. Probably that is the crux of the matter. Talk is glue, and thought is the great and terrible solvent. Everything falls into the well of too much thinking and comes apart at the seams.

Charade pads about like a cat in her stockinged feet.

It is interesting that she has noted the presence of Rachel, of Alison, of his son,
domestic humidity
, though she has mistaken their trails. It is interesting that she has noticed the drawings in the kitchen, the drawings of his housekeeper's children, since, as a matter of fact, he stuck them on the refrigerator door himself. Pulled them out of the waste paper basket and bought the little magnets (coated with vinyl apples, bananas, watermelon slices) at the A&P, and put them there. Joanna, a widow, had laughed and then looked at him sharply. But Charade thinks Joey's green teddy bears invite analysis, and Sara's drawings are ominously neat.

“People like me,” he says suddenly, and the insight propels itself explosively from behind some interior dam, “we're like trained monkeys really. Brilliant in limited spheres. But mess up our lines, put a spoke in our wheels, and we don't know what to do.”

Charade stops, startled, in front of him.

He notices that a filament of cobweb, drifting down from the ceiling and crusted with motes of dust and light, sways back and forth across her breasts like a pendulum. And then he notices the small black spider, at first invisible against her pantyhose, climbing into view, ascending, ascending, like a mole against her midriff, her chest, her cheek, riding on the heft of some unseen pulley. Of course it means something, but all signs have become to him temporarily unreadable.

“Sorry,” Charade says, knotting the tails of her shirt together. “You're afraid you've been saddled with a nut, right?”

No, no, he shakes his head vehemently. God, where do her ideas come from? “It's just that I have no idea what to do,”
he says. “No idea.”

She sighs. “The messiness doesn't touch you scientists, does it? Everything's clean, everything runs on grooves.”

Behind her head, battalions of green teddy bears, drawn in crayon by the son of his cleaning lady, march across his refrigerator door. They all face the same direction, they are all going to the same place, full of green energy that splashes beyond the edges of their limbs. But Joanna's daughter Sara keeps all colour neatly within its boundaries, and this is ominous.

“I'm sure,” Charade is saying, “that people like me, crammed full of literature and history but more or less illiterate in science … I'm sure I might as well be mute as far as you're concerned. I'm sure I might as well be speaking Swahili.”

“No,” he says emphatically. “No, no, absolutely not. Not at all. Keep talking.”

“Well,” she says, “anyway. It's morning.”

“Weren't you going to tell me a story? The Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow, you said.”

“But it's morning. And you have a nine o'clock class.”

6

The Tale of Yesterday
and Tomorrow

When the Great Walls were being built, Charade begins, wrapping herself loosely in a sheet and huddling into the armchair in Koenig's bedroom …

And the walls are everywhere, everywhere, she says. They run down the middle of subway cars, have you noticed? I'll tell you a tale of this morning's subway:

“You still can't step into the same river twice,” says the tow-headed boy. He leans against the wall of the car which branches and flowers with graffiti. He must be all of twelve or thirteen years old, and is wedged beneath Charade's left armpit. “For day-to-day in Harvard Square,” he says, “Heraclitus is more helpful than Senator Kennedy. Anyway, that's what I'm going to argue. That you still can't step into the same river twice.”

“You can't step into the Charles River
once
,” his companion answers, “unless you want to pick up an infection. We know where Kennedy stands on Pollution Probe, and that's what counts.”

Then a station flashes into view, brakes, sucks out a hundred people, crams another hundred in. The boys in their crested school blazers have disappeared, and in their place is a woman with paperclips dangling from her ears. She nudges Charade and whispers fiercely: “Finally finally finally finally.” Charade cannot avoid seeing into the woman's bag, where two dead birds lie rigid in crumpled newsprint. A ritual? Breakfast? The woman is thin as bird bones under seamed skin. “Finally finally finally,” she whispers, eyes glittering.

Park Street station reaches in and whirls her up its funnel to the spinning streets.

“Yes?” Koenig prompts, when her silent orbit brings her back through his bedroom.

“Yes, what?”

He gestures, mildly agitated, pulling back her words from the air. “Whirls her up its funnel to the spinning streets.”

“End of my subway story. She climbed into someone else's tale.”

“You sound … different.”

“Different?”

“Yes. Your voice changes.”

“So does yours behind your lectern.”

“Yes, but …”

“I can't help it, stories have their own voices, they speak me. You want me to leave after all?”

No, no, he shakes his head vehemently. “Keep talking.”

Once upon a time, Charade says, before Copernicus, this city lay still on its pontoons between the Charles River and the Atlantic. Back then, a person could climb out of the subway and step into the same city twice; a person could journey more or less straightforwardly from birth to death, which used to be the last stop on the line; one used to be able to count on that.

Once upon a time, geography was stable. More than that — I am almost certain — there was once a time when days followed one another in orderly fashion like huge beads on a rope. You pulled your way along, hand over hand. You could stop and look behind you and say: There's the past. You could touch what was beneath your fingers, you could smell it, lick it, taste it. This is today, you could say. And you could reach forward and sense the beads stretching on and on. That is the future, you could say; the things that will arrive tomorrow, that have not yet happened, though they do exist and lie in waiting.

But probably even then — if there was a then — the beads just out of reach curled back to touch the past. Probably time has always been a necklace. Probably it has always been possible to begin the circuit at any point.

And when the Great Walls were being built — in ancient China, in Berlin, in Warsaw and Lodz, in Sydney and Brisbane, in the Punjab, in Fiji, in Toronto and New York and Boston — there were always clusters of law-abiding and curious folk who stood watching the progress of division.

And there was always a lunatic or two to shout:
Beware! Beware!
to the embarrassment of ordinary folks.

On both sides the watchers could see the indestructible present, sweet and straight as a line. Everyman — a chatty fellow — was forever waving to his neighbour across the workers and the rubble. What is this nonsense? he called, and both of them laughed.

Only yesterday, he said in awe to his little son as the wall grew higher, only yesterday we could see the apple tree in our neighbour's yard. His tree was heavy with blossoms, he always gave us a bushel of apples. Remember how you played in the rain barrels under the trees?

The little boy thought he could remember. Into his mind fell a white flock of petals, and the taste of crisp inaccessible apples became a craving on his tongue. He saw a girl in a muslin pinafore whom he chased between the rain barrels. The girl smelled of tree-sap and new mown grass and he pined for her in his dreams.

Daddy, he wept, I want to see her again, I miss her, I want the apple blossom girl.

What? his father said. What girl? I can't remember a girl. Our neighbour never had any children, it was a constant source of grief to him.

But as his son described her — the hair that fell pale and heavy to her shoulders, her little brown hands, her white pinafore — he recalled that he and his neighbour had always intended a match.

I can remember a time, he said to the grandson on his knee, when your father played in the rain barrels underneath our neighbour's trees on the other side of the wall. I can remember when your father was in love with a beautiful girl who lived on the other side. That was before the wall was built.

I don't believe you, grandpa, the child said. It's just another one of your stories. There's always been a wall.

Grandfather and father stared at each other.

Out of the mouths of babes, the father laughed. Why don't you admit it, Dad? There's always been a wall.

But … the grandfather said, bewildered. You yourself remember the girl.

Ah, that's different, the son said. That was part of my wild and reckless youth when I made dangerous forays beyond the wall. That was how I met the girl. The girl is real.

Of course the girl is real, the grandfather blustered. (He was a stubborn fellow, old and contentious.) Before the wall was built, he said, you used to play with her under the trees. Even God cannot change the past, he stormed.

No one is trying to change the past, his son placated. It's just that your memory is playing tricks. Don't you remember that first time I smuggled her across the wall? How you begged me not to get involved because of the danger?

It's true, the grandfather conceded. There was never a time when the wall was not there. But the girl was real. What became of her?

Who knows? the son sighed. She worried about her own father, she insisted on going back.

I always hoped I'd meet her father, the old man said. I always thought we'd have a lot in common. I used to picture his back yard, I used to imagine how we'd stand and chat if the wall had never been there.

I don't know, the son said. Sometimes I thought he was just an excuse she used. She must have had a father, of course, but I'm not at all sure he lived beyond the wall.

She had a vivid imagination, the old man recalled. And such an unforgettable face. You used to call her the apple blossom girl.

Yes, the son sighed. I still dream of her.

“Do you see what I mean?” Charade asks.

Of course, for me — she might have said — it's an intense and personal issue, with my father's past and present being such elusive constructions.

But many other examples could be adduced.

In Toronto — not a city that rides high in the Book of the World's Awareness — a certain Zundel snapped his fingers and made the 1940s disappear. He coughed brimstone and a staggering amount of documentation wisped away like smoke from an oven: eyewitness accounts, photographs, videotapes of the bodies going under the bulldozers.

“Of course, you know about this, Koenig,” she sighs. “You know all about the trial in Toronto. And in Europe there are academics who solemnly delineate a mass hallucination. There is proof that the Second World War was a hoax.

“And so Verity Ashkenazy and Nicholas Truman,” she says, “both were and weren't. That's my honest opinion.”

“Perhaps,” Koenig says, “if you could start at the beginning.”

But Charade sees the approach of morning and falls silent.