And Sometimes I Wonder About You

13

I pressed the button to release the lock eleven floors below, then opened the front door and went out into the hall. Standing there, I watched the digital number plate that the landlord had installed over the elevator doors on every floor. I preferred it when there was a pewter arrow that swung in an arc, pointing to copper numbers beaten into a black iron half-circle that had flames coming from it like it was a sun and the elevator car was some kind of spaceship.

The display was counting backward, 8, 7, 6, 5...

Trot. That’s what he called me when I was a boy; Leonid Trotter McGill. He had given both Nikita, my brother, and me Russian names in honor of the Revolution he harbored in his heart.

“I’m leavin’ your slave name McGill,” he often said, “because it’s slaves that riot and revolt. When you boys come to the end and the slave master has been overthrown, then you can choose names that will usher in the new world.”

The display had an emerald 1 glistening in its blackness.

“It’s only men with blood on their hands can claim the end of history,” Tolstoy, my father, would say. “That’s because the capitalists and their lackeys have blood from the soles of their feet all the way up to their ankles. They walk on the workers’ blood, stride through it like hyenas after slaughterin’ a whole flock’a sheep.”

Whenever my father talked about the workers I got a little confused. Of the four of us only my mother had a job. Was it my mother’s blood that the hyenas strode through?

The display made it to 3 and then stopped. I felt like I did when I was a boy waiting for the clock to tell me when my father was coming home.

“You’re a good boy, Trot,” my father said one afternoon shortly before he went away forever. “But you’re a little soft. You don’t understand that the police and the army and the government are your enemies. The school and the corner store, the tax collector and even the traffic lights are dead set against you. You will have to fight every day of your life against these enemies. They’ll probably kill you but your brothers in arms will walk over your body to take the world. That’s how tough you gotta be.”

I remember wondering what the difference was between the capitalists walking in my blood and the revolutionaries walking on my body.

The elevator doors came open and a slender black man in a long black trench coat came out. He was an old man balding on top, and then some, like me. When he saw me he smiled and tilted his shoulders forward to get his feet moving in my direction.

I honestly wondered who this man was. The father I remembered was a giant with fists the size of cantaloupes and teeth that could bite through iron nails. Tolstoy had wild hair and eyes that often seemed to be electric with their intensity.

“Trot?” the old man said when he was just a few steps away.

“Yes?”

“Don’t you recognize me, son?”

Even his voice was nothing like the man I had known. When Tolstoy spoke it was almost always in the tone and timbre of a rabble-rousing political speech. This man’s tones were soft and palliative, like a doctor with bad news.

“Dad?”

He walked right up and put his arms around me, murmuring, “Trot, Trot.”

“Dad, is that you?”

He took a step back and looked into my eyes. His smile was sad but resolved, knowing and somehow wishing he didn’t know.

I still did not recognize him. He was a good-looking man, pretty far up in his seventies. But he was not the father I remembered — not at all. I tried to think of why someone would want to impersonate my long-dead father. What possible profit could anyone make from such a scam?

“Leonid,” he said in a solid tone that was somewhat reminiscent of the father I knew.

He reached in a pocket and came out with a small square piece of stiff paper; this he handed to me. It was a worn Kodak snapshot, from the early days of color. It was a picture of Nikita and me, my mother, and my father posing at a studio on the Lower East Side. The man in the picture was my father and he was also the man standing at my door.

“Can I come in, son?”

Ushering the stranger in, I took his coat and hung it on a cherrywood rack in my office. I brought him down to the dining room and poured him a cognac. He wore black slacks and a gray shirt. Taller than I but not nearly the height of the father I remembered, he was thin, his movements fluid for a man his age. There had only been the slightest limp to his gait. His dark skin and slender grace would have marked him as Twill’s grandfather if I didn’t know for a fact that Twill was the son of an African man that Katrina had a dalliance with.

“How are you, Trot?” the man calling himself my father asked after his second sip of brandy.

“I can only tell it’s you by lookin’ at this picture,” I said.

“Memory is more like art than fact,” he said.

“Are you Tolstoy McGill or William Williams?” I asked.

The question seemed to hurt him. He put down the glass and looked at his upturned hands. They were very large hands; the kind of paws you would expect on a man who was a sharecropper in his youth. The muscle had softened but it was still there.

“Tell me what happened,” I said. The hands had convinced me. This was my father. With this certainty returned all the antipathy I felt.

“When?” he asked.

“When you left me and Nicky to fend for ourselves and our mother to die.”

“I thought that maybe you could tell me a little about yourself first,” he said softly. “That other stuff is so painful.”

“That’s all I’m interested in, man. I watched my mother die praying for you.”

The sadness in his face almost dissuaded me. Almost.

When he realized that I would not back down he said, “I was wrong, Trot. Wrong about everything I thought to be true. I believed in the Revolution but I didn’t know then that it was just a means to an end for people who couldn’t even imagine the great socialist state. I was wrong about your mother being the good party member’s wife who could survive the pain of loss and raise his children to be soldiers. Everything and everyone I believed in either betrayed me or was destroyed.”

“If you knew all that, then why didn’t you come back?”

“I fought for three years throughout Central and South America,” he said, his eyes pointed up toward the ceiling. “I was wounded in Chile. Then I was captured and imprisoned for eight years; sometimes by dictators and then by the U.S. government men. I was under a death sentence most’a that time. Then finally one day me and some other prisoners were bein’ moved in a caravan and there was a mortar attack. I was wounded but got away. Your mother had already been dead for years, and you and Nikita was grown men.

“A man named Cavalas found me and hid me in a cave in Uruguay. When I was better I moved back to Chile. I spoke the language and pretended that I came from Cuba by boat. I was a wanted man, a terrorist. At night I read and reread Marx and Lenin and Mao. And one day it hit me — the perfection imagined by socialist theory was impossible for human beings to attain. The philosophy was right but we were poor vessels for it.”

“My mother is dead and you’re blaming the misinterpretation of philosophy?”

“I was wrong.”

“You’re a motherfuckin’ bastard.”

“I’m still your father,” he said with an inkling of the old rebel.

“Not since the day you left Mom to die and me and Nikita to make our way in the streets. Now I’m trying to make up for all the hurt I’ve caused bein’ mad at you, and Nicky is in prison.”

I was ashamed of my self-pity. Here I was holding my father responsible for his crimes and mine, too.

“Nikita’s not in prison.”

“I talked to him there last year,” I said.

“A lot can happen in a year.”

For some reason I didn’t want to hear any more about my brother right then. I had reached my limit since coming back on the train from Philly. Between Marella, Twill, Mardi, Aura, and now my father, I didn’t want to take in another thing.

And so, of course, the phones rang; the house number and my cell phone, too. This wasn’t a regular ring, the kind with another person on the other end of the line. This bell, from both devices, was a fast triple-ring; a mechanical call set off by a specific set of circumstances.

I picked up the receiver of the house phone and a prerecorded pastiche of voices said, “Mr. Leonid McGill... the security system in your office in... the Tesla Building... has been breached. The proper authorities have been notified. Do not attempt to go there yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said, suddenly as calm as Buddha. “Somebody’s breaking into my office.”

“In the Tesla Building?”

“Right.”

“I’ll come with you, son.”

Just those five words almost brought me to tears.