Shadow Man: A Novel (13 page)

He went to the same pub every day after his painting was done. He’d wash his face, clean his brush in the sink, comb his hair, and drink one beer alone before going home to his wife. “I won’t get to all the names before I die,” he said. “Isn’t that something?”

The lady says, “I liked that man the best, James. Of all the interviews we did over all those years, I liked that little man from Dusseldorf the best.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I know, but you were there, whether you remember or not.”

“It’s cold.”

“Should we go?”

“Let’s sit a little longer. I’m cold but I like it here.”

“This used to be one of your favorite places. Right here on this bench.”

“I can imagine. I do like it here. It makes me think of Kurt and Vera and the man from Marrakesh.”

Eva called. She’s going to keep James at the Jersey Shore another day. There was a brief moment when he came back and remembered her. Eva says there must be some way to hold that, to keep it centered, like the air bubble in a mason’s level. I think not. That flash of memory is incandescent, but not sustainable. I have heard enough doctors, read enough charts, changed enough diapers of confused men who can’t remember where or how to shit. James is headed there, maybe not for a while, but that is his slope. I like to think of miracles, though. Maybe. Perhaps. I’d like James to know me, not just as the woman in white, but as his half sister, the daughter of Kurt and Vera. Will I ever tell him? I don’t know. He wouldn’t remember for more than a fleeting moment, anyway.

I was conceived in Virginia Beach. This is what Vera told me in her letter. She said she felt the moment it happened. The moon luring the tide, the waves distant. It’s a pretty way to be made. “A glorious conception,” she wrote. The letter came to me quite unexpectedly. The way things do, like hurricanes, wars, and tsunamis that whirl in out of nowhere and make us rebuild. The letter was yellow and worn. I unfolded it, pressed my face against its pages, and breathed in Vera, but there was no scent of her, only old air and old paper and the cursive strokes of her desperate life. I was working as a nurse in Boston at the time — strange fate that I should have chosen the profession my half brother so needs. I had no husband, no children. I was dating a botanist. We took excursions into gardens and forests and graveyards. He could identify the mosses growing in tiny blooms on the tombstones of those who
fought in the Revolution. His name was Jacob Myerson. We still see each other occasionally, but now that I’ve moved to Philadelphia to be near James, not as often. Jacob doesn’t know about James. I told him I left Boston for a more challenging job. He believed me. When Jacob visits we walk the trails along the river and with an envelope and tweezers, he collects vegetation. Like me, he is meticulous; we have intense conversations about pollination, rain forests, savannas, and how trees store carbon dioxide deep in their cores. He fears the world is slowly dying. I tell him about hearts and veins and minds. We go to movies — mostly documentaries in foreign languages — and walk along South Street, window-shopping and listening to music rolling from doorways into the night. We eat pizza and drink cream soda along the water, and in the distance I see the gray hulks of old navy ships and their big white numbers, their strung lights pretty as stars. We return to my place with a bottle of wine and have sex; afterward, while Jacob sleeps, I trace the muscles of his body and think of the shore and the way waves crash against the pier and what it would have been like to have been born Chinese or Iranian. On Sunday mornings, Jacob rises early, leaves a pressed flower near the coffeemaker, and disappears out the door to the train that will carry him home to Boston. It’s a nice arrangement, shy of fulfilling, but then again not overbearing. I go jogging on those mornings. I am swift and lithe, always have been, even at this age when the knees need more coaxing than they once did. Through the peal of church bells, I run across Rittenhouse Square, past cut flowers, jars of apple butter, and bundles of newspapers; I glide through colonial streets, beyond men selling black felt triangle hats and Ben Franklin spectacles; I slip through history, breathing in oil and distant ocean, turning through alleys the sun has yet to reach; I push on, sweat on my brow, my legs rhythmic as pistons; I run with no music in my ears except the sound of my footsteps against the waking city; I whisk past the gleam and smoke of diners to the quiet warehouses on the
outskirts; I think of Vera and Kurt, young and alive, falling in love, spirits and ghosts denied me; I run until I weep. I let the tears fall. It feels good to let them fall. I am my own mystery, an incomplete daughter, an unknown sister. After a few minutes, I turn, look back over the miles I have come, and begin the journey home.

James was easy to find. I typed his name in Google. It was like a research project on a plant, a name, a being I never knew existed, but was related to, growing out there in the world. There were seventy-three pages of hits on James. He was a journalist, but then, suddenly, he vanished. I called his old paper and tracked him to this nursing-home/convalescent-center/rehab-facility/or-any-other-name-that-makes-you-feel-comfortable-about-a-place-that-cares-for-those-losing-their-marbles.

James looks just like my father, Kurt. Vera left me a picture of her and Kurt; it’s black and white and was taken, I think, in one of those booths with a sliding curtain that are so popular at catching moments that don’t last beyond the beach. James doesn’t know me, but he is blood. The microscopic cells coursing through him are similar in patterns to mine. I think you need to know the person who is your blood. I never had that, and it’s funny, ironic, I guess, that the only person connected to me by molecular structures is a man who doesn’t know who I am from one day to the next.

I crave the memory he is losing.

I love it when he talks about my parents during that summer at the beach. But James’s stories don’t go all the way to the end when things turned nasty. And even hearing them, beautiful as they are, they are not flesh and bone; they cannot be caressed, whispered to; they cannot give a daughter, a sister, the touch, the warmth she needs. But they are all I have, words and words and words, stored and living in my mind.

What is in me? So many intricacies I do not know. Am I bound for a void like James? Or confusion like my mother? Was she
confused? Or did she just see things others couldn’t? There are too many spaces between the lines, and perhaps something is hiding in me, a deformity of spirit or an odd permutation of cell. A voice yet unheard.

The sky outside James’s window fills with strands of blowing ash, thousands, maybe millions of them, twirling and swimming like slender black fish out of a sea of smoke rising from a fire at the city’s edge. A landfill? A refinery? The fire glows and mixes with the dusk. I watch. The smoke fattens; the ash shifts with the wind, toward James’s window, then away, then back again.

Kurt and I went back into my room. Vera was still sleeping, her macramé purse, the one with the gun in it, lay beside her on the bed. Kurt went to the mirror and studied himself. He rubbed his hands under his eyes and through his hair.

“I found a gray one the other day, Jim. On my temple like a silver thread. The sunlight caught it when I was shaving. At first I thought it was paint from the shipyard.”

I stepped to the mirror.

“Where?”

“I yanked it out.”

“It’ll come back.”

“Nah, I got the root and all.”

“It’s pigment. We learned it in biology class. Your body’s losing its color. Sister Hanrahan says the body’s more complicated than the universe.”

“When’d you get so smart?”

I shrugged. “Simple biology.”

Even though we were whispering, Vera stirred. She rolled over, curling around her purse, drooling like a child, at peace.

“Should we wake her?”

“Let her sleep a little more. I don’t think she’s slept much in days. Let’s go for a swim. I’ll write her a note.”

“What about the gun?”

“I told you I took the bullets out.”

“What if she wakes and sees the man from Marrakesh.”

“She doesn’t usually see him in the mornings. C’mon let’s swim.”

The beach was quiet. It was too early for day-trippers. Kurt sprinted toward the water and dove, a spear cutting through a wave and rising beyond. He stood and shook the water out of his hair and dove again. I followed. The ocean was cold, sharp, stinging my sunburn. Kurt jumped on me; he wrestled and lifted me and threw me into a wave, and when I surfaced he did it again, and he kept laughing.

“When you were small I could throw you a mile.”

Another wave came and knocked us both down. The undertow pulled at my calves.

“Let’s get past these waves to deeper water.”

Kurt didn’t swim like he played tennis. On the tennis court, he was compact, quick, precise; every movement a burst. But in the water, he seemed big and languid, moving with a long crawl through the currents like a steamship. We were about seventy yards offshore, at the place where the water gathers just before it rises and rolls toward land. It was peaceful out there. My body lifted and dipped and I felt as if I were on a slow-motion roller coaster, a bobbing speck in what the Indians in this area once called “the Great Water.” The Indians were gone but there was a brochure in the hotel lobby advertising Indian tours and an Indian museum. The Indians pictured in the brochure didn’t look like Indians, though. Their skin was the orangey color of an indoor tan and their wigs and suede clothes looked as if pulled from a Halloween box; they seemed like dressed-up car salesman and undertakers standing around a tepee and a fake fire.

The water rose; I ascended. I was glad to be out here alone with Kurt. All sounds gone except our breaths, our words, our hands treading water, the currents below us running like icy slivers around my ankles.

“I wonder what we look like to a fish.”

“Weird.”

“Sometimes at the shipyard a school of fish swims in. I think they
get lost and take a wrong turn where the ocean meets the river. They come up along the ships. You can see they’re panicked and want to escape to the sea. Their white bellies flash in the rusty water. They splash and suddenly it all goes silent and the water calms and you can see them skimming beneath the surface heading back to the wide water as if one of them had found the way and was leading the others. They look like a dark cloud of bees, moving fast through the jetty.

“You tired, Jim?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Changes your perspective.”

“I’m going to have to take that dictionary away from you. Pigment. Perspective. You must have worked your way up to the P’s.”

“I jump around so it’s more interesting.”

Kurt stopped treading water and floated on his back. I did the same. My ears immersed, I heard only the pulse of the depths, but every now and then, when I’d lift with a gathering wave, my ears broke the surface and I’d hear, for a split second, the cry of a seagull or a kid shrieking on the beach. When my ears went back under, the moan of the deep returned with the sound of my beating heart. I heard my body from the inside, a fleshy machine doing its work, like a car hood sprung open in an alley garage, belts and pistons humming like music.

I thought about Alice, the girl at the front desk with cinnamon lip gloss and halter tops. She kissed me softly the other night. I liked that; there was no rush and I heard her breathe and I listened to the breeze on the balcony and a muted scream from the
Creature from the Black Lagoon
on the TV. What would happen to Alice? Would she become queen of the Crab Festival like her Baptist daddy wanted? Or maybe she’d just get old and fill out the hotel ledger
page after page, year after year, smiling to vacationers and handing keys to her splay-footed uncle, the ancient, slumped bellboy with the stained jacket. How many other boys and men would she kiss? How many halter tops did she own? How many girls would I kiss? Would I learn all the words there were to know?

I felt like a slip of paper floating beneath the sun, my body bending and rippling with the water. What if I drifted out to sea like Kurt’s fish racing beyond the jetty, past freighters and sharks to a new beach in another part of the world? I was weightless, my body like a jellyfish left to the ocean’s whim. I felt out of my skin, my skin had become the cool water.

My thoughts ran. I liked John Lennon better than Paul McCartney, but Paul had a better voice for harmony; John’s was more wiry, built less for unison than for wit; others would disagree, believing that John and Paul were as harmonic as Simon and Garfunkel. Could I love a girl forever? Kurt would have loved Mom that long. The universe was ever expanding, unfolding in gases, black holes, and constellations. I loved looking through the telescope Nut Johnson kept on his roof in Philly. We’d go up on winter nights; the sky hard and black as an eight ball, and through our little clouds of breath we’d see pricks of light, swirls of white, and, if we were lucky, comets shooting like ice balls fired from cannons. We’d aim at Mrs. Romano’s bedroom window and study her silhouette in the pulled shade, the telescope sharpening her features so that as she undressed, and if she were turned to the side, you could see her hair tumble out of the tight bun she wore; you could see her nipples rise. Nut called her nipples splendid. On some nights, Mr. Romano would come into the room and the light would go off and the shade would go blank and Nut and I would look at each other and smile, and Nut would say, “I’d love to be Mr. Romano.” We’d zero in on Fr. Heaney’s rectory window. He’d be reading a mystery novel under the lamplight near the coffee table. He’d get up and open the door and let in
a parishioner who would sit in a high-back chair with news from the night: a death, a troubled child, an illness, a moved-out husband, missing money. Fr. Heaney would lean toward them, hovering like a statue, still, listening, the way he did in the confessional when his face was half hidden by the scrim of purple cloth. One time, Joey DePallo came in with a gun and handed it to Fr. Heaney. He knelt and Father made a sign of the cross on Joey’s forehead — the way he did at baptism and confirmation — and picked up the phone. Two police cars arrived minutes later and Joey went away in handcuffs. A few church ladies would come in just to talk, leaving Bundt cakes and brownies on Father’s desk. Nut and I never heard what anyone said. But you can know things without hearing, and in the narrow periphery of Nut’s telescope you could see that language was more than words.