Schroder: A Novel (29 page)

I’ve been silent a long time now. Twenty-one days by my count. My voice, when I hear it in my sleep, has acquired an odd depth from disuse, a kind of virgin hoarseness. My speech strike has been an interesting experiment, bringing me just about everything except for what I’d hoped. As a tactical method, it’s been a clear failure. I’ve been deemed noncooperative, and despite my polite notes explaining my silence, I’ve been placed under protective custody and left entirely in my cell for all but an hour of solitary roaming in the gym. I haven’t seen my daughter. I haven’t heard a word. All I know is that the letter I tried to send against the advice of my lawyer to the old Pine Hills apartment was returned to me unopened, with no forwarding address. I’m left to think that all I’ve gained from my silence is this document, one I never would have written if I had allowed myself to speak. If I had spoken, I would have jawed all day long in the dayroom with the other guys. I would have sung under my breath at night. I would have made friends with the guards or found my way to the infirmary, or into one of the workshops on
child development offered to those who’ve acquired an academic interest in how they got here. Instead, I wrote.

I wrote to you, Laura. I wrote for you and because of you and with you in mind, sitting across the kitchen table in your old gray cardigan. I could not have written this document without writing it for you. I could not have written this document if I had thought you weren’t listening. But now that I’ve come to the end of it, pulling up to the present moment, I’m struck by the sudden understanding that I cannot require you to read it. Or maybe I understand that you never will. You just never will. Even if this document passes the vetting of my lawyer, even if he decides that it mitigates instead of aggravates the charges against me, it will be sent to you (at your new address) as an inert pile of papers wrapped in twine. You’ll come home one day, see it waiting for you, and you will pause. You’ll heft it off your stoop and put it on the table. Meadow will ask you what it is and you’ll say
Just some thing
. She’ll run away to change out of her school clothes and you will look out the window and sigh. That evening, after she is in bed, her hair damp from the bath, her eyeglasses stored in her sneaker, her face kissed fifty times in all the ritual places, you’ll tuck up your legs and attempt to read.

But you’ll only get so far. A page or two. It’s too much. You’ll read it later. You want less and less to do with the proceedings. Your testimony at my hearing will be brief, reluctant. You want to move on. You don’t wish me ill anymore, but you’ve also stopped caring what happens to me. Somewhere in your soul you’ve disengaged, you’ve uncoupled, you’ve let go. You’ve turned to your daughter, to encouraging her happiness and bracing yourself for her questions. In fact, it occurs to me now, the only reason you would ever read
this document is if you wanted to intercede. If you wanted to save me.

How strange to be quiet here, of all places. I have often wanted to babble just to contribute to the noise. Constant noise, constant light. And me sitting like a poet in the middle of it. It’s funny to listen to people talk when you can’t respond. People talk
so much
. Gaggingly long monologues on minor personal preferences. Verbatim recitations of pointless conversations. Uninterpreted bits of memory. Take the man in the neighboring cell. A classic recidivist, a real prison grandfather. He almost seems relieved to be back in prison just so he can talk as much as he wants. The whole unblinking day he talks. He arrived about a week after my extradition here to CCI Albany. Having been outside during the heart of my news cycle, he’s a fan of my case, and he talks about it through the vents endlessly. He says he knows the prosecuting attorney in my case, and for long hours he parses this woman’s trial record with a certain bloodless admiration, and I can’t help but listen.

“Don’t worry, Kennedy,” this man says. “You’ll be all right once they realize you’re not a monster. And you are
not
a monster. You wouldn’t even be in here if it wasn’t for your famous name. Ironic, isn’t it? If you weren’t a Kennedy, no one would have bothered with you.”

I rest the side of my head against the wall and massage my scalp with the gritty surface. I’m sitting at my metal desk. My stool is kindergarten short and dented like an old cookie sheet. I’ve got my yellow legal pad. I’ve got my dull pencil. An exquisite five minutes go by without commentary. I close my eyes and let my mind dance lightly, remembering. After a moment, I see a familiar shadow approaching, swaying back and forth against the kitchen wainscoting. Someone enters
the kitchen, his face wrapped in gauze. I open my eyes, waiting for pleasanter memories to surface. But they don’t come.

“Yeah, you’ll be all right, Kennedy. You’ll be all right.” I hear my friend lean his weight against his cell door, and I marvel at his ability to stand up for the entire day. “But what
is
all right, you know? They won’t let you near your kid. They’ll try to ship you home to Bavaria or wherever the hell.”

I sigh and get up. I lie down on the mattress and put my forearm over my eyes. My legs, the mattress, everything is swathed in the same disposable, gridded material. The sheets are real and you could call them soft.

My friend’s voice floats down to me again through the vents. “What I wonder about is this—do you miss it, Kennedy? I mean, your made-up life.”

I almost laugh. Do I? Do I miss Twelve Hills? Do I miss my made-up mother and my made-up father? Do I miss even the unsubstantiated connection to a famous family?

I had imagined it so well. It got to the point that I could
see
myself as a child, digging the sugar-fine sand outside our cape, or being read to by my favorite teacher, or walking flanked by the wide asses of my nannies. These visions were so sturdy that if I looked around in my mind, and panned the scene, it would spread itself out for me infinitely—not shallowly, infinitely—and if you had asked me what was beyond, what could be seen, well, I could tell you. To the west were the dunes. To the north, the salt marsh where I gathered sea lettuce. And there, jutting into the ocean, the inoperable lighthouse on whose philanthropic restoration committee my own mother served.

I guess I needed a life that I could revise. If I had just accepted the one life, my first life, I would have honored its
limits. I would have lived quietly, hardly even dreaming. I would have tried to convince myself that a sad and quiet life is adequate. Instead, I dreamt. I decorated entire rooms of my past with the pleasures I salvaged elsewhere. Even falling in love with you, Laura—
especially
falling in love with you, and feeling so changed… Love was my counterargument. Suddenly there were Christmas parties all over Twelve Hills, and well-loved women in silk dresses, and boys nursing crushes on other boys’ mothers, and soft rugs for the babies, and brotherhood for the men. My God, it sounds sentimental when I put it that way, but that’s what my second life did for me.

And pain. Even pain. It’s no good if it’s anonymous, monolithic, genocidal. The pain in my made-up life was boy-sized pain. And so it was
better
, because I could
stand
it. I no longer had to be a partial suicide, living only half a life, or less—allowing only the pleasant moments, mild, unthreatening—the small minority. I no longer had to be half alive. A partial suicide like my father.

My eyes shut, he walks blindly into the kitchen again, hands out, searching the air for the door of that little half-fridge that we always kept half-empty.
Vater.
I tell him to go lie down.
I’ll bring it to you
, I say.

If we could
know
, if we could be warned, we could claim all our scattered properties before death forecloses. Have I made it sound like I tried? Here’s a memory:

1994. A Sunday. I’m driving southeast in a borrowed car. It’s a Pontiac Firebird in Collector Yellow with a seriously awesome sound system, and it’s just accepted an Aerosmith tape into its deck in a way that feels distinctly sultry to me. I’m twenty-six, beating time to the song on the steering wheel. I’ve just crossed the Massachusetts border and have taken
the long route across the state via the Mohawk Trail, a road I like for the view atop Mount Greylock and for the knickknack store that sits there like a Buddhist temple buffeted by crosswinds.

I’m late. I told Dad I’d be in Dorchester days ago. He is to have cataract surgery on both eyes on Monday, and he needs my help settling some affairs. While the delay itself is forgivable—I don’t remember the reason for it—driving the scenic route along the Mohawk Trail is not. Yet I drive without hurry. I have not seen my father since the degeneration of his eyesight began, and when I arrive I will be woefully unprepared for his groping debility. I have a girlfriend—not the wife, not The One—but a much less serious girl named Angela. It’s Angela’s Firebird I’m driving. Angela was my study mate in Spanish, senior year at Mune. She tracked me for several years after graduation until I relented and went to bed with her, and at this stage we are spending a lot of time together, mostly naked. I am thinking about this—about Angela—as I descend into the Pioneer Valley, barely noticing the lurid foliage on either side of Route 91.
Come back soon
, Angela had begged that morning in bed.
Promise you’ll come back soon.

I do not love Angela. I have told her this in an effort to head off future indemnity. She says she’s OK with that. She says love is “just a word.” In my limited experience, this seems sound. I do not love Angela, but as I drive the Mohawk Trail, I do miss her. She is my main squeeze. She is my working thesis. With her, I associate all that I love about Albany, which is that I have absolutely no familial, cultural, or philosophical connection to it. I’m bound to it only by the exercise of my own free will.

The moment I enter the apartment on Savin Hill Road, Dad sits upright and says, in English, “Thank you for coming.” Although he is fully dressed, he seems to have just awoken from a long sleep. As ever, I am not prepared for his civility, how he is calm to the point of frigid, nor am I prepared for how frustrated it makes me that he still sleeps on the couch, instead of in the single bedroom I have long vacated. I feel the need for air, the need to sigh repeatedly, as well as the telltale muscular fatigue I suffer from long after I’ve finished climbing those three flights of stairs. Just moments ago, I barely survived the foyer of the building, against whose plaster I used to rest my secondhand dirt bike. Why does the foyer hurt me? Why does the memory of the dirt bike hurt me? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Sliding my key from the lock, I turn and offer Dad an encouraging smile. He stares up from the couch uncertainly. I realize I am smiling at a blind man.

“Ah,” he says, and pats the surface of the TV table. He picks up something that looks like a welding visor and places it over his glasses. He finds me through magnified eyes.

“
Now
I see you,” he says.

I walk over and clasp his shoulder, suddenly moved. “Hi, Dad. I’m here.”

“Sorry for how I look,” he says.

“What?” I say. “You look fine.”

“I cannot see.”

“Well, you can see me.”

“I can see you hardly.”

“You’re going to be
fine
.”

He gives my wrist a squeeze. “My son. You came.”

My throat constricts. That’s right—I remember now—the surgery carries a small risk of permanent blindness. He
is afraid. But instead of offering him reassurance, I feel my stomach drop, and a child’s wail begins to climb me from the inside. God no, I think. You cannot cry, you shit. If you start to cry, you will never forgive yourself. You will die of shame.
Trottel. Idiot
. Weakling. That’s when I make a deal. I say, Dear God: If you help me make it out of Dorchester without crying, I will never set foot in this place again. I will totally disappear.

The wail stops at the top of my throat and sinks back into silence.

The surgery goes well. At the end of the day, I drive Dad back to the apartment. I lead him up the steps by the elbow. The upper half of his face is bandaged by gauze. I disregard the policies of parking in the shared lot and leave the car closest to the entrance, blocking someone in. I prop Dad on the couch with some extra pillows. He asks for a beer. I go to the old half fridge, get a beer, pop off the bottle cap, and guide the misting nozzle to his mouth. We sit together as he sips, and for a moment, I almost enjoy the familiar sensation of his silence.

“Miscommunication,” Dad says, swallowing. “This is the English word.”

“What?” I ask. “What did you say?”

“We were crossed stars.”

“Who are you talking about, Dad?”

“Your
Mutter.
Your
Mutter
and I.”

I slap my knee. “You should rest.”

“But it is a simple thing to say. Miscommunication. It was to happen. We had lost the power of speaking. We became as children.” He turns his bandaged face toward mine. “I would like to explain it to you.”

“Dad. You don’t need to explain it to me,” I say. “It’s ancient history.”

“It has long confused me. Love. Opportunity. She said I was unloving. But see where we
were
. See what we lived with. The society we lived with. A false regime, another country’s puppet. Artificial.
Paranoid
. Shut. The heart needs inspiration. The heart needs opportunity—”

“Dad, please. Stop.”

“You were too
jung
to know. So I tell you now.”

“No,” I say. “
Nein
.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because. That’s why.”

“I don’t understand.”

I laugh, looking for support from the empty room. “By God, you just had surgery. Where in the hospital paperwork does it say that the patient should recount long and painful stories from the distant past? Stories that nobody—that everybody—Besides, you’re on like twelve different sedatives and I don’t trust you.”

“I want to say what happened.”