They were lying down side-by-side because they were tired. Nothing more than that. The Battle of the Ardennes, First World war, was all around them. Not a sound. Just movement. Mist, fog; turretless tanks, shattered trees all around them. Some corpses left lying in the middle of no man’s land. They had been together for a space of time… it was three hours, it was six weeks, it was a month of Sundays, it was a year to remember, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times: who could measure it, there were no signposts, no town criers, no grandfather clocks, no change of seasons, who could measure it?
They had begun to talk freely. He told her again that his name was Ian Ross and she said Catherine, Catherine Molnar again. She confirmed his guess that her life had been empty. “Plain,” she said. “I was plain. I am plain. No, don’t bother to say you think I have nice cheekbones or a trim figure; it won’t change a thing. If you want plain, I’ve got it.”
He didn’t say she had nice cheekbones or a trim figure. But he didn’t think she was plain.
The Battle of the Ardennes was swirling away now.
She suggested they make love.
Ian Ross got to his feet quickly and walked away.
She watched him for a while, keeping him in sight. Then she got up, dusted off her hands though there was nothing on them, an act of memory, and followed him. Quite a long time later, after trailing him but not trying to catch up to him, she ran to match his pace and finally, gasping for breath, reached him. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“I offended you.”
“No, you didn’t. I just felt like walking.”
“Stop it, Ian. I did, I offended you.”
He stopped and spun on her. “Do you think I’m a virgin? I’m not a virgin.”
His vehemence pulled her back from the edge of boldness. “No, of course you’re not. I never thought such a thing.” Then she said, “Well… I am.”
“Sorry,” he said, because he didn’t know the right thing to say, if there was a right thing.
“Not your fault,” she said. Which was the right thing to say.
From nothing to nothing. Thirty-four years old, the properly desperate age for unmarried, unmotherhooded, unloved. Catherine Molnar, Janesville, Wisconsin. Straightening the trinkets in her jewelry box, ironing her clothes, removing and refolding the sweaters in her drawers, hanging the slacks with the slacks, skirts with the skirts, blouses with the blouses, coats with the coats, all in order in the closet, reading every word in Time and Reader’s Digest, learning seven new words every day, never using seven new words every day, mopping the floors in the three-room apartment, putting aside one full evening to pay the bills and spelling out Wisconsin completely, never the WI abbreviation on the return envelopes, listening to talk radio, calling for the correct time to set the clocks, spooning out the droppings from the kitty box, repasting photos in the album of scenes with round-faced people, pinching back the buds on the coleus, calling Aunt Beatrice every Tuesday at seven o’clock, talking brightly to the waitress in the orange and blue uniform at the chicken pie shoppe, repainting fingernails carefully so the moon on each nail is showing, heating morning water for herself alone for the cup of herbal tea, setting the table with a cloth napkin and a placemat, doing dishes, going to the office and straightening the bills of lading precisely. Thirty-four. From nothing to nothing.
They lay side-by-side but they were not tired. There was more to it than that.
“I hate men who can’t think past the pillow,” she said, touching his hair.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s just something I practiced, to say after the first time I slept with a man. I always felt there should be something original to say, instead of all the things I read in novels.”
“I think it’s a very clever phrase.” Even now, he found it hard to touch her. He lay with hands at his sides.
She changed the subject. “I was never able to get very far playing the piano. I have absolutely no give between the thumb and first finger. And that’s essential, you know. You have to have a long reach, a good spread I think they call it, to play Chopin. A tenth: that’s two notes over an octave. A full octave, a perfect octave, those are just technical terms. Octave is good enough. I don’t have that. “.
“I like piano playing,” he said, realizing how silly and dull he must sound, and frightened (very suddenly) that she would find him so, that she would leave him. Then he remembered where they were and he smiled. Where could she go? Where could he go?
“I always hated the fellows at parties who could play the piano… all the girls clustered around those people. Except these days it’s not so much piano, not too many people have pianos in their homes any more. The kids grow up and go away and nobody takes lessons and the kids don’t buy pianos. They get those electric guitars.”
“Acoustical guitars.”
“Yes, those. I don’t think it would be much better for fellows like me who don’t play, even if it’s acoustical guitars.”
They got up and walked again.
Once they discussed how they had wasted their lives, how they had sat there with hands folded as time filled space around them, swept through, was drained off, and their own “chronons” (he had told her about the lunatic; she said it sounded like Benjamin Franklin; he said the man hadn’t looked like Benjamin Franklin, but maybe, it might have been) had been leached of all potency.
Once they discussed the guillotine executions in the Paris of the Revolution, because it was keeping pace with them. Once they chased the Devonian and almost caught it. Once they were privileged to enjoy themselves in the center of an Arctic snowstorm that held around them for a measure of measureless time. Once they saw nothing for an eternity but were truly chilled—unlike the Arctic snowstorm that had had no effect on them—by the winds that blew past them. And once he turned to her and said, “I love you, Catherine.”
But when she looked at him with a gentle smile, he noticed for the first time that her eyes seemed to be getting gray and pale.
Then, not too soon after, she said she loved him, too.
But she could see mist through the flesh of his hands when he reached out to touch her face.
They walked with their arms around each other, having found each other. They said many times, and agreed it was so, that they were in love, and being together was the most important thing in that endless world of gray spaces, even if they never found their way back.
And they began to use their time together, setting small goals for each “day” upon awakening. We will walk that far; we will play word games in which you have to begin the name of a female movie star from the last letter of a male movie star’s name that I have to begin off the last letter of a female movie star; we will exchange shirt and blouse and see how it feels for a while; we will sing every camp song we can remember. They began to enjoy their time together. They began to live.
And sometimes his voice faded out and she could see him moving his lips but there was no sound.
And sometimes when the mist cleared she was invisible from the ankles down and her body moved as through thick soup.
And as they used their time, they became alien in that place where wasted time had gone to rest.
And they began to fade. As the world had leached out for Ian Ross in Scotland, and for Catherine Molnar in Wisconsin, they began to vanish from limbo. Matter could neither be created nor destroyed, but it could be disassembled and sent where it was needed for entropic balance.
He saw her pale skin become transparent.
She saw his hands as clear as glass.
And they thought: too Late. It comes too Late.
Invisible motes of their selves were drawn off and were sent away from that gray place. Were sent where needed to maintain balance. One and one and one, separated on the wind and blown to the farthest corners of the tapestry that was time and space. And could never be recalled. And could never be rejoined.
So th
ey touched, there in that vast limbo of wasted time, for the last time, and shadows existed for an instant, and then were gone; he first, leaving her behind for the merest instant of terrible loneliness and loss, and then she, without shadow, pulled apart and scattered, followed. Separation without hope of return.
Great events hushed in mist swirled past. Ptolemy crowned king of Egypt, the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest, Jesus crucified, the founding of Constantinople, the Vandals plundering Rome, the massacre of the Omayyad family, the court of the Fujiwaras in Japan, Jerusalem falling to Saladin… and on and on… great events… empty time… and the timeless population trudged past endlessly… endlessly… unaware that finally, at last, hopelessly and too late… two of their nameless order had found the way out.
In the Fourth Year of the War
Introduction
When I was a very little boy in Painesville, Ohio, a woman who lived up the street had my dog, Puddles, picked up by the dogcatcher and gassed while I was away at summer camp. I’ve never forgotten her. I think I hate her as much today, forty years after the fact, as I did the day I came back from camp and my father took me in his arms and explained that Puddles was dead. That old woman is no doubt long gone, but the hate lives on.
Each of us moves through life shadowed by childhood memories. We never forget. We are bent and shaped and changed by those ancient fears and hatreds. They are the mortal dreads that in a million small ways block us off or drive us toward our destiny.
Is it impossible to realize that those memories are merely the dead, ineffectual past; that they need not chain us?
A fine writer named Meyer Levin once wrote, “Three evils plague the writer’s world: suppression, plagiarism, and falsification.”
The first two are obvious. They are monstrous and must be fought at whatever cost, wherever they surface.
The last is more insidious. It makes writers lie in their work. Not because they want to, but because the truth is so terribly clouded by insubstantial wraiths, personal traumas, the detritus of adolescent impressions. Who among us can deny that within each adult is caged a frightened child?
This is a horror story.
There are no ghosts or slimy monsters or antichrist omens. At least none that can physically reach out and muss the hair. The horrors are the ones we create for ourselves; and they are the ones we all share.
This is also a cautionary tale, intended to say You are not alone. We all carry the past with us like the chambered nautilus; and we all must find ways to exorcise it at peril of our destiny.
The King grew vain;
Fought all his battles o’er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes,
And thrice he slew the slain.
JOHN DRYDEN, Alexander’s Feast, 1697
In the fourth year of the war with the despicable personage that had come to live in my brain, the utterly vile tenant who called himself Jerry Olander, I was ordered to kill for the first time.
It came as no surprise. It had taken Jerry Olander four years, plus or minus a couple of months, to get sufficient control over my motor responses. He had been working toward just such a program of monstrous actions, and though I never knew till the moment he ordered the hit that the form of his evil was to be murder, that was one of the few possibilities. Even though I wasn’t surprised, I was sickened, and refused. It didn’t do me any good, of course. Jerry was strong enough after four years of constant warfare within my brain; I was just weak enough, weary enough, just enough filled with battle fatigue, to put up a losing argument.
The target was to be my mother’s older brother, my Uncle Carl. Had Jerry Olander suggested the Pope, or the President of the United States, or some notorious public figure, I might have grasped a thin edge of rationality in the order. But Uncle Carl? A man in his late sixties, a retired jeweler whose wife had died of cancer fifteen years earlier, who lived quietly and inoffensively in a suburb of Chicago. Carl? Why should the unwanted roommate of my brain want to see old Uncle Carl dead?
“Don’t you want to see him dead?” Jerry replied, when I put the question to him.
“Who, Carl?” I didn’t mean to sound stupid; but I was nonplused; and sounded stupid.
Jerry laughed. I had come to know that miserable sound. In the dead of night, when I was hovering on the lip between wakefulness and whatever was strobing across the face of my bedside television set, and the abyss of thankful sleep, he would begin laughing. It was the sound I’m certain was made when the broken-handled claw hammer wrenched out the rusty spikes from Jesus’s crucified wrists.
He laughed that rusty laugh and mimicked me. “Who, Carl? Yes, Carl. Old Uncle Carl, who killed your father’s dreams. Don’t begin to tell me, don’t even begin to tell me that you’ve forgotten all that, chum.”
“Don’t call me chum.”
“Well, then, using the short form: yes, Uncle Carl.”
“You’re crazy. I can’t do it… won’t do it!”
“Oh, you’ll do it, all right. We have no problem on that score. As for my being crazy, I won’t argue the point. One would have to be a bit crazy to share a mind with you.”
“Carl never did anything to my father,” I said.
“Think about it,” Jerry said. I hated his smugness.
But I thought about it. And from the quicklime pit of forgotten memories something dead but still moving rose from corruption and dragged itself into my consciousness. A zombie recollection, a foulness from childhood, half-understood, miserable, something that intellectually I knew was a lie, yet a thing I believed true with that trapped child’s refusal to abandon the terrors of the past.
Jerry laughed. “Yeah, that’s it, chum. Remember now?”
“That isn’t true. I know it isn’t. I only thought that was the way it was… because I was a kid. I didn’t know any better.”
“Nobody’s evil, right? No black and white. Just a shitload world of grays. Right? Then how come you still believe it?” He was really gnawing at me now. I tried to send that shambling awfulness back to its quicklime grave, but it stalked through my mind, led forward by Jerry’s voice. “Look at it, chum. Consider Uncle Carl and what he did to your old man.”
The memory grew larger in my mind. I found myself unable to turn away from its rotted flesh and stinking breath, the dead eyes covered with a gray film. I found myself remembering my father…
He had managed Carl’s jewelry store during the war, when Carl had gone off to the navy. My father had been too old, had had a heart condition; so he had worked in the store instead of serving. Carl had pulled strings and wound up on the West Coast, at one of the supply terminals. And my father had worked twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day building up the clientele. He had always wanted his own store, to be in business for himself, to go to Tucson or San Francisco, a warm and wonderful place away from the snow and the biting Lake Michigan winds. But my mother had insisted that family was more important than self-realization. “Stay with family,” she had said. “Carl told you he’d make you a partner. The family always keeps its promises.”
So my father had let his dreams fade, and had stayed on with the store.
When the war was over, and Carl came home, and my father finally summoned up the courage to call in the promise, Carl had thrown him out of the store.
I never knew why, really. I was a child. Children are never told the whys of family disasters. They just happen. You wouldn’t understand, children are told; and then, in the next breath, they are told, You mustn’t hate your Uncle Carl for this, he has his reasons.
But my father had to start allover again. At the age of fifty. He rented a small apartment on the second floor in a business district close to the Loop, and he opened a jewelry shop. It was two long flights up, one steep set of stairs, a landing, and a switchback flight half as long but just as steep. And the drive from Evanston, back and forth, each day. Working far into the evening to catch the late foot traffic; on the phone with customers, trying to hustle an extra sal
e, even at night when he was home and should have been relaxing. A grinding, terrible schedule without break or release, to keep my mother and myself fed and clothed, not to lose the house.
One year. He lasted one year, almost to the week of opening the new store. And on a Sunday morning, sitting in his big chair by the old Philco radio, he had a sudden smash of a coronary thrombosis and he died. In a moment, as I watched, he went pale and his eyes popped open so I could see how blue they were, and his mouth drooped at one side, and he died. He had no last words.
The zombie memory would not free me. I saw things I never could have imagined as a child. My father’s blue eyes, with the realization in them that all the dreams had been stolen from him, that he had lived his life and it had come to nothing, that he was dead and had never made his mark, had been here and was gone, and no one would remember or care. I saw, I remembered, I cared.
My child’s memories were of hatred, and revenge. Carl.
“My father did it to himself,” I said, walking upstairs. “He allowed his dreams to die. If he’d really had the courage to break loose and go to the Coast he would have done it,” I said entering my bedroom and going to the closet. “Carl had nothing to do with it. If it hadn’t been Carl, it would have been someone else in whom my father placed his trust. I can’t hate a man for not keeping a promise twenty-five years ago,” I said, pulling down my overnight case. “This is crazy. You can’t get me to do this.” I began packing for the flight to Chicago. I heard the sound of spikes being twisted out of wormwood.
It took Carl a long time to answer the door. He had a serious arthritic condition, and it was late. Highland Park was silent and sleeping. I stood under the porch light and saw Carl’s pale, tired eyes peering at me through the open-weave curtain behind the door’s glass panes. He blinked many times, and finally seemed to recognize me. He opened the door.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he said. I put my hand against the half-opened door and pushed it slowly inward. Carl moved back and I walked in. My overnight case was still lying on the back seat of the rental compact at the curb. “Why didn’t you call me and tell me you were coming? How’s your mother?”