As I headed toward Eighth Avenue I tried calling Mark Ahearn about lunch, but my cellphone only hammered out a rapid-fire beep. Please don’t ask me how this can be true: I traveled through the busy lobby and walked for half a long block on a crowded Manhattan street and then boarded the World Trade Center subway completely unaware that I was participating in a citywide disaster, and moving toward its center.
The World Trade Center station came a few stops south of Twenty-Third Street, but we didn’t get there. After Christopher Street the train halted in the tunnel and waited, humming. It gave a screech, lurched backward slightly, and stopped again. Somehow the general news had infiltrated the sealed subterranean environment that something historically enormous was happening very nearby, and it got quiet in our compartment, and almost everybody entered into a small, desperate battle with a worthless cellphone. The train moved forward and gained speed, but began braking long before Houston Street, the next station, where it halted with several rear cars sticking out behind into the tunnel. For a tense minute, whoever spoke only whispered. Then came a shout—“Tell us what’s going on!” and others raised the same cry until we heard the conductor’s PA saying something about the tracks, the tracks…“Due to the catastrophe, this train will not go farther. Please exit out the forward cars onto the platform. Do not go onto the tracks.” We were all on our feet, maneuvering selfishly, angling for the doors. But the doors didn’t open. The engine stopped. “Open the doors! Open the doors!” The engine started. A man shouted, “Just everybody stand still!” People from the car behind had pried their way into ours, and somebody almost went down. A woman said, “Stop that, you fool!” A man in front of me pushed a teenage boy beside him. With the meat of his fist he began beating the back of the boy’s head. And I jumped into the fray, didn’t you, Harrington, like a monkey, yes you did, and got yourself an elbow in the eye. The doors to the compartment flew open and people clambered out onto the station’s platform, where a dreadlocked man in a crimson athletic suit jumped up and down on a bench as if it were a trampoline, screaming “God, see what we’re doing to each other down here.” When I came up into the street, dizzy and one-eyed, I couldn’t get my bearings. I saw only one tower standing to the south, and that one ringed with fire. I asked a man nearby—“Where are we? I can’t see the other tower.” He said, “It fell,” and I said, “No it didn’t.” He didn’t argue. We stood in the middle of the street with thousands of other people, all of us motionless, like a frozen parade, all silent. I began to believe the man. We watched the flames spreading through the building’s upper stories over the course of about twenty minutes, and then the eighteen-hundred-foot structure seemed to curtsy and dip left, and then it went down.
I turned around and looked at the people behind me. I saw shocked laughter, weeping, horror, bewilderment. The young man next to me bawled at the top of his lungs. I was afraid to ask him if he had a loved one in the buildings—afraid to talk to him at all, but he raised his agonized, Christly face to me and suddenly laughed, saying, “Buddy, you are working on one heck of a black eye.” We stood far from the buildings—at least a mile, I’d say—far enough that we didn’t feel the ground shake, and we heard nothing but sirens, and official-sounding voices screaming, “Get out of the street! Stay out of the street!” and others too—“They’re attacking the Capitol!—the Pentagon!—the White House!”
Cop cars and ambulances heaped with dust and chunks of concrete came at us out of the south. I started walking that direction, I don’t know why, but I soon realized I was the only person heading downtown, and then the tide of panic pressing toward me was too heavy to go against, and I turned around and let it take me north.
I’d forgotten about my date with Mark, and years later he assured me he’d forgotten it too.
I wondered if Mark Ahearn wasn’t making his debut as a public fanatic when he interrupted a reading of his work with the opening bars to “Love Me,” a number from Elvis’s self-titled 1956 album—
Treat me like a fool,
Treat me mean and cruel,
But love me…
—to the mystified delight of the audience at the National Book Awards ceremony. Dreams He Eats didn’t win, but they made him read from it anyway.
The following January 8—now 2002—my phone buzzed quite early. I guessed it was Mark, because it was Elvis’s sixty-seventh birthday, but too early on Elvis’s sixty-seventh birthday for anything approaching civilized exchange, so I let it go to voice mail, and an hour later I picked up this message:
“I’m calling from the motel. I’m in Tupelo, Kev. I just came from the graveyard, just walked through the door. I’m getting dirt all over the phone”—noises, fumbling, wiping—“I opened the coffin, Kev. There’s a little corpse in there, and I looked into its face.”
I left a voice mail in exchange. I didn’t hear back, and kept calling. After a couple of weeks Mark poked his head out of hiding and we talked, but only on the phone. He refused to acknowledge his first message to me—“I just came from the graveyard,” et cetera. Cagey, mysterious, legal—“Don’t forget my friends Estes and Franks. They’re my friends too, the same as you, and I’m heeding their advice to shut up.” I devised a question he could answer without incriminating himself: “Are you satisfied, these days, as to the contents of Jesse Presley’s grave?” He said yes; he believed the grave covered a coffin, and the coffin held a baby. Then he went farther, too far: “All right, goddamn it, sure, I dug it up. It’s a deep, dark crime, and it’s on my soul. But you’ve read the doctor’s report, the account in his journal. What else could I do? The doctor left me no choice.” He broke the connection.
Since the night of 9/11, I hadn’t given a thought to Mark’s eighty-five-hundred-dollar piece of paper, but I knew where to find it. In my bathrobe and long johns and unlaced boots, I stumbled through dirty snow out to my garage, a wooden shed attached to the farmhouse I rented there in Illinois. In my car I found my travel bag, and in a pocket in the bag, like trash, like lint, the powering motive for Mark’s spiritual felony.
You step into that kind of January, the midwestern kind, in the last light around 5 p.m., a faded, frozen pink light originating along the horizon, and you don’t get warm again soon. In the house I turned up the heat and placed a dining chair over the floor grate. I sat down, tore away the cover letter, and read:
Jan. 8, 1935
Jessie [sic] Garon Presley b. 4:00 AM dec’d. ?
Evis [sic] Aaron Presley b. 4:35 AM
Summoned by telephone to Presley residence N. Saltillo Rd. by a neighbor Mrs. A. Thompson, who said she heard the screams of the birthing.
Arrived 4:15 AM, and a midwife who opened door to me said, I will bury the boy born dead, and went immediately into the night with a stillbirth bundled in a pillowcase.
Found mother Gladys Presley abed, father Vernon Presley in kitchen. The young husband appeared drunk. His only words to me were these—“We never called on you to come, Sir.”
I want to note the way of their behaving in the circumstance, as follows: There was no joy at the birth of the live one. No sorrow at the death of the first-born. As soon as the second boy came forth without complication, mother asked me to leave. When I referred to $15 fee, the husband repeated he did not call me, the neighbor called me.
I felt most uneasy and none of this set right with me, foremost, the midwife’s departure with the stillborn. I said I could not file a death certificate. They said it would be filed. Citing the law, I demanded the midwife’s particulars and was given the name Sarah Jane Restell.
First making sure of the newborn’s vitals, I ended this visit.
Yes. Mark plundered an infant’s grave. If he’d told me in advance, if he’d asked me to come along, to abet him, serve as his accomplice, would I have agreed? Instantly. Gratefully. I discount his theory, but I value the obsession. And I commend his nerve. Old southern graveyards harbor an unwholesome power comparable to that of nuclear disaster sites. My mother’s people cam
e, as I think I’ve indicated, from the Carolinas; everybody down there knows that the graves at night tremble underfoot, if anyone were crazy or curious enough to walk on them under a waning crescent moon, and this is what Marcus Ahearn was doing that night in the Priceville Cemetery outside Tupelo with a shrouded flashlight, manhandling the graves, looking for a metal marker numbered “867” buried beneath the winter grass. Besides the flashlight he carried a pick and a spade, wore work gloves and work boots and Carhartt overalls, all newly purchased at Tupelo’s Sears outlet, that much I eventually learned. And Mark knew how to dig in the dirt—his old job as a landscaper—descending a little better than two feet per hour; if he started at midnight, he was brushing the rot from the coffin by 3 a.m. And soon after that was staring into the face, if face there remained, of a sixty-seven-year-old baby.
Mark remained coy about the details. I presume he replaced the coffin in its hole and covered it up again. Ersatz corpses, ersatz documents, false trails, furious complications. I waited to see how he’d make sense of it all. I waited for years.
My father died. Mark’s mother died. My mother died. Mark’s father died. As soon as he was orphaned, Mark dove deep into women: six years, three marriages. And me? No. I won’t marry again. Pity me—I’m still in love with Anne.
In recent years my contact with Mark, though infrequent, has been warm, and nothing forces us to stay in touch. We’ll always be friends. But it has to be said that Mark and I have gone our separate ways.
Another fact: Mark’s last book was Dreams He Eats in 2001, fifteen years ago.
Six years ago, in the springtime, I traveled to Portland University to give a talk on the Black Mountain poets. Nobody came. At the appointed hour a student led me from the English Department offices to a chemistry auditorium and left me to myself, and in five more minutes a fast-moving, bow-tied Lecturer in English wheeled in a cart bearing canapés and coffee and juice, introduced me to the microphone, handed me a check for a few hundred dollars, and explained to me in a delighted whisper in the silent, empty auditorium that the person in charge of the speakers’ program, a Ms. Charlene Kennedy, had experienced a personal, psychological breakdown of a possibly romantic nature and run away to Portugal, leaving the program’s affairs a ball of confusion, particularly as regarded our little visit—my visit, here and now—for which no publicity had been arranged. That I waited here with a microphone, a podium, and snacks for eighty people was a deeply buried secret. After presenting me with my fee, my host shook my hand and assured me nobody expected me to hang around and pretend to earn it, and apologized for the additional circumstance that he, himself, had to leave immediately for a departmental get-together. Ms. Charlene Kennedy, wherever you are, I wave my middle finger at you. It makes for kind of a funny story now, but at the time I felt stupid and unlucky.
But Mark Ahearn turned up.
His hair was long and tangled, he was unshaven, he wore a big sweater, his shoes were old. I took in these impressions as he made his way toward me without pausing but with the air, absolutely, of somebody who thought he’d found the wrong room, rotating slowly even as he stepped along, reconnoitering, searching for anybody else, I supposed.
“There’s nobody else,” I told him.
He took me in his embrace. Loudly and somewhat wetly he kissed my cheek. He’d aged. Gray-headed, wrinkles deep as scars on his cheeks. The whites of his eyes were red, the irises blue, the whole effect was purple. I’d heard rumors he had bouts of—something. Drink, or powders, or accelerated mania and depression…Marcus Ahearn hadn’t produced a book in the last nine years.
All the same, his eyes held humor and fire. “I haven’t seen you since the death of the Twins.”
“What twins? Oh, yes, oh—you mean the Twin Towers.” Twin Towers, twin Presleys, twin Ahearns. The pairings of these pairs must have beaten on his thoughts with considerable intensity. It hadn’t even occurred to me.
Mark and I sat side by side on the apron of the stage, feet dangling, and tried the sandwich triangles. Along the wall to our left, a chart depicting the Periodic Table. On the right, just outside a high run of windows, masses of evergreens tinted by the sunset. Behind us a pair of comfortable chairs flanked the podium, waiting for an on-stage interview, a part of the day’s agenda I hadn’t known about. Mark now revealed himself to be my moderator, or partner, for this discussion. (Had Ms. Charlene Kennedy completed her tasks, this information would have reached me.) Mark taught at the U of Oregon in Eugene, two hours’ drive from Portland, and he’d been there for years. “Since I stopped publishing, they think I’m one of them. They’re trying to give me tenure. But it’s hard, Kev. They want you to act like you want it.”
I wanted tenure at my midwestern college. That was the height and the depth of me. However—“Mark.”
“Kev.”
“The Elvis thing…Have you ever mentioned it to anybody else?”
“No.”
“Your wives?”
“Oh, no. Even by the time Miss Huntley came along, that phase was already over. She was the first wife.”
“That phase.”
“The whole Elvis conspiracy phase. It was deep, Kev, but it wasn’t endless.”
“I’m the only one who knew.”
“In all this time. Yes.”
“Why make me your confessor?”
I’m sure I saw the truth coming, the truth was there in his face, and then I’m sure it went away—untold—and his face told this lie instead:
“Why you? Because you understand what it is to be moved by Elvis Presley. I know that’s a stupid-sounding thing to say. But you understand, and that’s a fact I’m sure of. And there’s something else: You’re frail, Kev, you have this quality—as if your childhood terrors aren’t done with you.”
“That sounds like the thing you wish was the reason—but it isn’t. You’re covering up.”
“What am I covering up?”
“Mark, I’m your closest reader on this earth. I know when you’re lying and when you’re telling the truth. You almost always tell the truth.”
Silence. He set aside his triangular sandwich, working his lips as if tasting the thing he wasn’t saying. He looked at the wall running left of us, studying the display of the Periodic Table, the elemental categories of material existence and the symbols for them, not moving his eyes, I noticed, although if he had a particular element in focus, I couldn’t tell which one, and I thought, For goodness’ sake. He’s stuck for words.
“I wanted Lance’s epitaph to say, ‘The gods worshipped him.’ My parents said it would shock.”
“And what is his epitaph?”
“We never chose one. Not for his twin either. Did I tell you my brothers are buried side by side? Five feet and eighteen years apart.”
“No epitaphs.”
“Just the name of each. Lancaster Smith Ahearn…”
“And the other?”
“Somers Garfield.”
I think I displayed my shock in an exaggerated way, eyes and mouth widening to swallow the rest of my face while I jumped straight up into the air, like a street mime.
Mark laughed. “You recognize the name! How come you never asked me, ‘What’s this between your old Professor Harrington and Somers Garfield?’ Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to ask that question?”
As coldly as I could, I said, “Screw the question, Mark. What is the answer?”
“Kevin Peter Harrington: You are the reincarnation of Somers Garfield Ahearn, my brother’s stillborn twin.”
“I’m your brother.”
“Somers was born and died on July thirteenth, 1949. You came into the world one week later, am I right? July twenty, 1949?”
An automatic laugh and a ten-pound lump in the stomach, that’s how I’d expect to respond to this presumptuous loony assault on my spiritual person. But, no, in this case I felt charmed. Marcus Ahearn and I, named brothers by the planets themselves and the stellar influences—whoever decides these things
. I felt liberated by this crazy, silly little scene in the empty auditorium with the Periodic Table to the side. I noticed many elements I’d never heard of—brand new elements, and I felt one myself, flashing forth from the quantum soup, sprung from uncertainty itself. “I’m your brother.” I believe it to this day.
When he was my student, I told Marcus Ahearn he wrote wonderfully. He said it wasn’t the most important thing he did.