The Business of Naming Things (21 page)

The different voices, different tenses even, have their appropriate moments and applications. Liam's work—his career, for better or worse—consisted of a series of weakly related pieces, poems and stories and memoir essays, composed over a thirty-year period, each apt enough for the time and its modest ambitions. But as to a larger work—his capstone, as he would have it—
that
called for something more sustained in execution and broader and deeper in ambition, and he could not settle on a person, much less a place or a thing.

Then he seemed to have it, somewhere up the Taconic. Somewhere up the Taconic, rolling through the tight corners and rock-shaded glens, he'd begun to fade. He'd managed to establish a deal with the kid—one hundred dollars Liam gave him, right there, on the dashboard, yours, to drive him north; he'd established that the kid could drive and was decent company—though he was quiet, the kid had told a sweet, economical story about the trumpeter called Brownie, who was the sweetest man with a “buttery” tone and he didn't do drugs or drink and was a math whiz and was killed in a car wreck at night in Pennsylvania, and the kid, the kid said, would drive careful and slow. Is that okay? Because if it isn't, I can't take your money.

And by then, Liam is in a dreamland raked by the shadows of bare trees in a space and day emptied of color or perhaps drained of it as when you are about to pass out, all the familiar objects around you turning slowly and evenly white and then there is a filling up; the air around things fills with a pale tea. The car sounds rock him as a child is rocked in days of old in the back-seats of deep-seated sedans, the growl of the engine jiggling your diaphragm pleasantly and your world takes place in a black boxy shape of space in the foot well behind your mother's seat.

Liam saw what he should do, and it was a confusing thing, complex and simple—give everything all you have all at once. That is, it was the road that would save him (now that he had a driver!), the road swerving through familiar towns and stretches, allowing him to move nowhere while traveling, to think of his wife and what to do, his son and the trouble he's in, his own work, how to fashion it all as his own; this boy here; the blues, the blues as art form, and why not: a buttery tone.

XIV

L
IAM ACTUALLY KNEW A LOT
about Brownie, or Clifford Brown, the brilliant young trumpeter out of Wilmington, then Philly, whose inventive playing and spectacular technique—and that round, warm tone—caught the attention of Gillespie early, and then Max Roach, who formed a band partnership with then twenty-two-year-old Brown. He was the present and future of jazz till Bud Powell's brother's wife ran the car off the road at night in rural Pennsylvania, killing Brownie, Richie Powell, and herself, ending something, making Brownie part of jazz's past. It was a loss that shook a lot of players—like Scott LaFaro's death in a car wreck would clobber Bill Evans five years later. Liam had seen the play in New York that won a Tony and featured the main characters sitting around in the last scene listening to a Clifford Brown solo played at a jam session—a five-minute marvel of all that Brownie brought to the art of the horn. He'd always thought that, after the tape picks up Brownie thanking the crowd, and saying he has to go, it's such a hot night, and, well, good-bye, that he'd gone out and got killed that night; the kid corrected him.

That's what people say 'cause it seems true, but it's not. They want it to be true. Weird. When it's not. What it is is the last sound we have out of Clifford—it's hot, he says. And then you know we don't hear anything again. But it was a couple of weeks before the car wreck.

Liam made a mental note—Get the Clifford Brown biography—just as he drifted off toward sleep near Jackson Corners. Outside his window, the grass was long and brown and worn. And the kid was wrong.

L
IAM GOT TIRED OF THE KID
. He did. Things wore off, he got sober, and here was Kingston. He'd had enough. He gave Henry fare for the bus to Montreal, and begged off their deal. He doubled it, for food and whatnot. Now, Liam needed a room and some rest. He'd try the Skyway, he told the boy, who seemed concerned for Liam's well-being. The motel sat high off the Thruway, with a big sign, which they'd seen coming off the ramp, kind of a throwback to the time of motoring vacations—
AIR CONDITIONED
/
COLOR TV
.

But when Liam had said his good-byes at the little Trailways stop—he loved this kid, really, but where was the room to love another kid?—he pulled the Jeep back onto 87 North, and, with darkness sifting in, he felt free. He hooked his iPod into the sound system and found some Clifford Brown–Max Roach stuff, and tooled to the north.

These mile markers he had clicked off a thousand times—okay, perhaps a hundred, a handful of hundreds, but then he began to wonder: Could it be a thousand? No.

But it pleased him, as Clifford walked his kind of bright delicacy up and down the scales, that he'd established a beachhead for himself—what was he talking about, a beachhead! A mountain aerie, a retreat, rather, which he had never needed like he needed it now. Perhaps that was his plan. He'd go to the cabin. Yes, of course. He wasn't just driving aimlessly, was he?

His BlackBerry buzzed and he knew it was his wife. I'm gone, dear.

But he checked near Saugerties and it was an unrecognizable number and no message, so he pulled off to take a piss.

XIV

L
IAM LOOKED NOT WITHIN HIMSELF
but beneath—seated on the rest-stop toilet. His head down between his knees, he
could see himself, his sad, sorry self, the essence of him—the he that had created his boy—his half of him—right there, the inverted turret, old, turtled or tortoised, a sad hide, hanging abjectly, in the dimness, waiting for water to come, looking down at the bowl, one blind eye: nothing.

He winced in the moment sometime after admiring his own thoughts and how they rolled themselves in language—for the length of one self-regarding glimpse at what he had just thought, he did admire his “inverted turret, old, turtled or tortoised, a sad hide”—the prosody of it, if you will. The inner rhymes, the assonance he'd once prided himself on—assonance mixed with alliteration—his specialty! But this gave way like an instant hangover to a recognition of cliché—musical, prosaic cliché—merely doing what a habitual blank-verse mind will do given English. He thought of an interview with Sonny Rollins in which Sonny recoiled at a playback of one of his famous improvised solos, shaking his head: Gotta delete the clichés, he said.

Liam wiped himself with a superfluity of care, for what was there to wipe, this older gent in a rest stop near Schroon Lake. He'd stopped for the hell of it, to see some light, to hear water run—light and water in the dark of night. And where is his son?

Back in the Jeep, the white stripe zipped under him like long laser salvos through his prostate, he could feel them, see them approaching one after another and feel their passage becoming a steady metronome of inner sound—my son, my son, my son, my son, my son, my son.

Where to, my son? Where from? Are you coming after me or am I coming to you? Are we both escaping? Have we escaped each other?

I am from here, Liam says aloud. And I am going home.
Where are you? What are you running from? Are you running? Have we left the world?

It is fucking cold. This fucking Jeep. Norwegian cold, Ibsen cold. Cold like that toilet was cold, the ring of the seat like ice. A throne of ice. Like John Gabriel Borkman, gripped by guilt and shame and defiance and ice. Like Borkman, his own sense of power—or was it freedom?—had ruined lives. And like Borkman, he is paying, and will forever pay until he enters some purification, some absolute zero of the soul, in ice.

He turns the radio on.

Perhaps it was a backfiring truck, they are now saying. No weapon, no shell casing, no bullet has yet been found. But several people fled—caught on the cameras. A young black man bolting through; an older black man shuffling off in a porkpie hat and sunglasses; a man of indeterminate race in a long brown raincoat, perhaps concealing something, as the day was warm in Kentucky; and the burly man in a tweed sport coat hurdling a police barrier.

The FBI was poring over footage and consulting security cameras surrounding the Riverwalk. “The investigation is ongoing and we have promising leads,” says the man heading the investigation, a man who sounds like a bored southern bureaucrat.

Obama expresses no alarm and is noncommittal. “Listen folks, this is a dangerous job. As we know too well, public service is a dangerous job, for policeman, firemen—and women; our troops overseas and at home. And our politicians. It comes with the territory. I'm just sorry it spoiled a wonderful barbecue, and we'll be back to Paducah in due course.”

It couldn't be Johnny, reasons Liam. It couldn't be. But
Liam trusts his eyes. Johnny, for some reason, was there, across the Indiana border into Kentucky. Why's that?

He waited for his phone to ring.

It was his wife. He'd pulled over to rest in the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot in Warrensburg. This was the end of his cell service going north. She was cool, if not cold. “I'm going to the cabin,” he told her. “I'm working on a sequence about Borkman.”

She said she hated the play. “Too stagy.” She allowed as how she was going to work at home on the weekend and she'd arranged to have dinner with her “teacher,” a gay fitness trainer. “I need to laugh.”

Liam laughed, but he shouldn't have. It wasn't his cue. She hung up.

XV

L
IAM
'
D RUN INTO A GUY AT THE
T
IN &
L
INT
in Saratoga ten years ago now. It was a long night. He'd gone to the Spa to catch the races and meet a serious novelist from the region and talk about the writing life but had ended up having a long evening with locals. He thought he'd get a poem out of it at least—a friendly waitress showed him the booth where Don MacLean had written “American Pie,” on a napkin, which the proprietor stuffed into MacLean's pocket as he was throwing the drunken guy out—when a chap sat down next to him at the corner post, where Liam was having his nightcap.

The fellow was a lush from a local paper company who'd always wanted to be a writer, but with the wife and kids etc., etc., and one thing led to another and they ended up somewhere else, and Liam let the man praise Liam's famous father-in-law's books and soon had the specs on a small bite of land on Lyon Mountain that Finch Pruyn Paper could
excise from the deal with the Nature Conservancy, the guy would love to do it, it was a great place for a writer, he could tell, and he could make the call, and he was drunk—ten acres cleared, just a short walk up to the summit. “There's a spur from a fire road that leads right to it—it's a meadow. Thirty-five hundred feet. In the mornings you can walk to the summit in five minutes, see Canada. All the way. And the old man'll like it—how old is he?”

The house was an indulgence, yes—for a mountain shack, as his wife called it. She'd been once and the father-in-law never. But Liam, for all his efforts to leave behind his small-town upbringing, had nonetheless not left it, and it took an adulthood to realize this, as well as tens of thousands of dollars spent with Dr. Barton Frankel and others—that if he had any soul, it was here, in those mountains that loomed blackly to the north as he drove the smooth ribbon of the Northway. He knew right where he was going and hardly had to steer, such was the engineering of both this road and his spirit.

As the young Joyce told Mr. Ibsen, “a higher and holier enlightenment lies—onward.”

He grabbed a Molson tallboy at the Stewart's in Warrensburg and some supplies—milk and cereal and fruit and a carton of Marlboros, why not. A box of matches, some C batteries. A case of Saranac IPA—Saranac, his homestead town, now with a brewery named after it that was 150 miles away.

Back on the highway, where in the dark he has for decades mulled his present, his future, plotted his moves, his career, it comes to him. Should this be Johnny involved in a shot on the president, he—the father—will become famous. The world will be curious about the poet/father of such a man; about the poet/father who left this boy's mother when the boy was three. About the poet/father of a would-be killer, the
sensitive, thoughtful verse maker. The world would eagerly await his take on this tragic turn; would feast, perhaps, on the shame he must feel, his guilt; would savor his reflections in words upon the experience. Tell us what it means, Liam Brogan. You, above all people, will know.

He wished he'd brought fresh blades with him, but then considered that the grizzled look would suit the occasion, should it arise. A cabin interview, say.

He thinks of a poem he's abandoned that, with a few tweaks, would be read as prophetic.

Liam sees a hitchhiker at the end of the entrance ramp at exit 25. It couldn't be Henry, could it? He motors past.

He's punished himself enough. This is his counsel. He's punished himself physically, mentally, financially with increasing intensity over the last three decades. Johnny was his mistake—his great mistake: a child from an early marriage of passion and drugs and alcohol and dreams of rebellion. How unfair. How bourgeois. How 1970s to think that rebellion on this level was a coherent personal statement—that he was saying something. Years of therapy and reading had given him many “insights,” views into theories of what would explain away his many mistakes. One, he was trying to emulate his birth mother, who gave him up, and thereby exonerate her by matching her in his own abandonings—a way not to hate her (Dr. Lipton). Two, because of his adoption, he did not understand family and tried his best to build family in the dark, and could not be blamed for getting it wrong (Dr. Solow). Three, by being “chosen” by his adoptive parents, he understood he could always be unchosen, making all relationships contingent, and allowing him to treat family in similar terms, as something that could be tried and left. After all, he'd adapted, why couldn't they? (Dr. Frank). Four, a
mixture of all: Unable to blame or hate his mother (a woman he did not know), he did not understand the bonds of family, and thought all relationships were contingent, and this is what he tried to teach his own child, as if he were a miner consigning his own son to the same life in the mines (D. H. Lawrence). But he loved his son.