My Father More or Less

9

If I were the central figure of my own narrative, I might have conceived some final reckoning with the three punks. It would have been a different story: gunfire, spilled blood, violent deaths, an end once and for all to the claims of rebellion. They might even kill my father, stab him with a knife or beat him over the head with a tire iron. It would make my position clearer, give me traditional cause for vengeance. The one with the purple streaks in his hair might hold a gun to my head and fire an empty chamber. When I survive it’s as if I’ve already lived one life and gone into another. I would roll over on to my side, pull out my father’s gun, come up firing. The gun makes a final statement, as they say, has the last word.

The punks have been hired by Max Kirstner, who wants the writer, L. Terman, out of his way.

Or they have been hired by Terman, at Max Kirstner’s advice, and have taken matters into their own hands, have double-crossed their employer.

The final episode would be between Max and Tom on one of the balconies at St. Paul’s Catherdral. Max would try to push Tom off but Tom would step aside, and Max, propelled by his own thrust, would fall headlong to his death.

Sometimes the teller of the story has few prerogatives of his own, is carried along by (the logic of) events. In real life, heroism is just getting through the day.

My father is in a phone box, attempting connection with the outside world. As I can’t hear him, I can only imagine his conversation. I imagine the phone ringing without respite. My father, thinking he has dialed the wrong number, hangs up, rests his head against the side of the booth. He thinks: each gesture is more pointless than the last. Or rather I am thinking it for him, imagine the language passing through his consciousness like rats in the stays of a canal. (He’s not so bad when you get to know him.) He will dial again holding the two pence piece in his other hand, holding it between thumb and forefinger of that hand. There is an answer this time and the coin is inserted in the slot. A voice appears.

Terman felt a spasm in the muscle of his left arm, a dull spasmodic pain from elbow to shoulder. He flexed his arm a few times, massaged his shoulder, trying not to call attention to his concern. If he were dying, if his heart were failing him, he intended nevertheless to finish out the day.

“What are we going to do when we leave here?” Tom asked.

“We could go to a movie if that interests you.”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” Tom said.

They walked over to the National Film Theater — they had been heading toward it all along — to see if there was anything worth seeing. It had been Terman’s recollection that The Conversation was playing, though he turned out to be mistaken. At the NFT 2, there was a 4:00 showing of something called Bright Eyes, part of a series on child stars, and at the NFT 1 (at 4:15) was Brian De Palma’s Obsession which he had seen twice before.

Tom said Obsession interested him but he didn’t want to press his father to see something he had already seen. Terman said he was curious to see how well it stood up. They got on the end of a queue that extended outside the door and wound, two and three deep, around the side of the building.

Tom said he thought the English couldn’t live without queues, that they lined up in their own homes to go to the bathroom, his voice carrying, attracting a few stares.

Terman felt the time pass as they inched forward in the disorderly queue, felt that his life would be almost over by the time they reached the window at which the leftover tickets were being sold.

“I have two together in Row A,” said the icy young woman behind the glass, “and a single in Row B. Those are the last three I have.”

“I’ll take the two in Row A,” Terman said, taking a five pound note from his wallet.

“May I see your card?” she said.

He knew his card had been missing for weeks and he made the obligatory show of searching for it in his wallet. “I can’t seem to find it,” he said, “but I promise you I have one.”

The young woman, who wore large tinted glasses, seemed impervious to human appeal, said you’re supposed to show your membership card when you purchase tickets.

Tom produced a dog-eared card, palming it so his father couldn’t read the name on it, and the tickets were issued.

“I didn’t know you had a membership,” Terman said. Tom shrugged, started to explain, ended up nodding his head.

The auditorium was already dark when they reached their seats, which were in the far left-hand corner of the first row. The movie was starting, had started, flickering images above them and to the right. An elegant, dreamlike party ends in a bizarre kidnapping. The wife and small daughter of the wealthy and sympathetic (and complacent) protagonist are held for ransom. The police are brought in, mishandle their pursuit. The kidnappers’ car runs into a gas truck and explodes. The wife and daughter are apparently killed.

It was hard to see things clearly when you were sitting right under the screen. Tom was breathing noisily as if in a crisis of anxiety. Years pass and the hero, still grieving the loss of his wife, vacations in Italy where he meets an art student who bears an extraordinary resemblance (they are both played by the same actress) to the woman he mourns. He falls for this ghostly double of his former wife, believing (at some level, one suspects) that it is the dead wife herself miraculously restored. The obsession is with restoration, with the illusion of immortality.

Tom took something out of his jacket and held it guardedly in his lap, both hands over the undefined object.

The girl has a history distinct from his own and is much too young to be the lost wife. No matter her apparent history, the resemblance is irresistible. He proposes to bring this youthful incarnation of his dead wife back to America and marry her. If he distrusts his own motives — this fixation with an image a kind of madness — he must also believe that their circumstantial meeting, like his wife’s circumstantial death, is an aspect of divine providence. Taken away arbitrarily, the woman he loves is mysteriously returned to him. Not the woman, but the image of the woman. Something is wrong, which it serves him to ignore.

His eyes on the screen, Tom transferred whatever he had in his hands to his father’s lap. It had the weight of a heavy stone, and Terman’s first conflicted impression was that Tom meant him some harm by it. His unpursued impulse was to stand up and let it fall to the floor. A glance was sufficient to identify the object as a revolver similar to the one taken from the desk in his study, and he put his program notes over it to keep it out of sight.

Using his left hand, he moved the gun (sandwiched inside the program notes) from his lap to the side pocket of his corduroy jacket.

When he looked up again at the screen his eyes burned from the proximity of the image. The presence of the gun in his pocket, its unexplained return, distracted him from the illusory action of the movie, an action that tended, despite his familiarity with it, to take him by surprise.

The mystery resolves itself through flashback. The woman who resembles the hero’s wife turns out to be his lost, presumed dead daughter. (The exposition seemed beside the point, the demystifying of a dream.) There is the reprise of a dance at the end, father and daughter whirling around and around.

When they were outside Tom said, “It was fantastic. Very strange.” The experience of the movie seemed to exhilarate him. “It doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

Terman didn’t like to talk about films immediately afterward, liked to be haunted by them for as long as possible. “It makes its own sense,” he said to no one.

They walked across a footbridge to the Charing Cross tube stop and took the Bakerloo to Oxford Circus where they changed for the Central Line. In transit between stops, Terman had the premonition that the train would never arrive at its next destination, that the shadow zone between stations was the real world stripped of illusion.

When they came up from the underground at the Holland Park station, Tom said he was hungry. Terman said that the moment Isabelle got back they would go out to a neighborhood Indian restaurant that wasn’t half bad, then he remembered that Isabelle was not expected to return. He was suddenly aware of the weight of the gun in his pocket and he put his hand on it to verify its presence.

“Did it stand up on reseeing?” Tom asked.

“There are some things I can’t get enough of,” said Terman.

On one of their daily outings, Tom broached the subject of Isabelle’s absence. “It ran its course,” Terman said. And another time: “We’re on temporary vacation from each other.”

From time to time Terman called Max to ask when the man upstairs might be expected to leave. He was told that there was no available hotel space in London during August, but that they (undefined) were trying to work out a solution acceptable to all parties. “I don’t want him here any more than you do,” Max would say in his role of embattled ally subject to forces beyond his control. “We all have our crosses to bear.” Or: “The two of you might like each other if you gave it a chance.”

Unable to sleep, Terman would hear him in the early hours of the morning, typing in his room on the third floor at seemingly incredible speeds. The man left his room once or twice a day, at least when Terman was there to observe his behavior, to stretch his legs or to go to the bathroom. He seemed to take his meals in his room, though evidence for him eating anything at all was mostly circumstantial.

Terman thought he might rediscover the physical world through Tom’s eyes — it was one of his secret justifications for sightseeing which he otherwise hated — but objects continued to evade him despite their insistent presence. He urged the visible world on his son, rushing him from place to place, hoping Tom would capture what his father missed. In his father’s company, and out of it, Tom lacked the patience to obeserve. Sights went through him like a sieve, slipped away like unacknowledged feelings. They were there to witness each other’s failure to witness.

One of the reasons he wrote fiction, he confided to Tom, was to account for exerience that otherwise eluded him.

“I know what you mean,” Tom said. “It’s like having a reminder of something you lived through.” He thought of his thefts as a manifestation of the same principle, though at this point could barely recall the compulsion to steal.

“But the reminder is in code,” Terman said, “and the code is impenetrable, so that the writing never reflects on the real life, if any, that inspired it. It invents its own experience.”

“Which is to say it offers a substitute for real experience,” Tom said. “You make it sound pretty dry.”

“What the hell is real experience?” shouted Terman, arguing not with Tom but with private voices. “Fiction just exchanges one set of imagined possibilities for another.”

Henry Berger, travelling with false passport, books two places on the next available flight to New York. He notices a small man with thick-lensedglasses watching him from behind a copy of Vogue. Berger is reading a News of the World when the announcement comes that the plane is boarding. He stands up with the others, signals to the woman who is travelling with him, dawdles, lights a cigarette, hangs back at the end of the line. Why have an operative tail him? he wonders. Is it just a precaution on their part or are they aware of the full danger he represents to them? The woman standing next to him says, Why don’t I turn in these tickets for something a little more convenient?

Though Tom made no complaint, though he was dutiful in his admiration of whatever his father set before him to admire, he thought that they were doing things backwards, that this was what they ought to have done five weeks ago when he first arrived in London. It had taken all this time to get to first things, to provisional beginnings. He couldn’t seem to remember why it had taken them so long to get started.

They were faced with a final decision, a last full day, and found themselves, brochures strewn across the parlor floor, paralyzed by a surfeit of choices. Upstairs, the fat man typed away, frightening in his decisiveness. The mot juste, several at once, Terman imagined, sprang to the page at his touch.

They replayed the same conversation they’d been having for the past two weeks, though appeared to switch roles. “You make the choice,” Terman said.

“Yeah. Well, what if you don’t like the choice I make?”

“Try me,” said Terman, who already felt severely tried. Nothing they had done together, not one of the trips they had taken, had fully satisfied his expectations.”

“I’ll give you my reasoning first, okay?” Tom said, speaking quickly as if afraid the words might escape him if he hesitated even for a moment. “Obviously, there are any number of interesting places we haven’t visited. Okay? Since we can’t go to all of them, and since I have really no basis for choice, what I’d like to do instead is go to a film in the afternoon and say goodbye to Astrid in the evening, if that’s all right with you, Dad.”

What could he make of such soft treatment from his former enemy? “Why don’t we sleep on it,” Terman said, “and make a final decision in the morning? I think, insofar as we can make out what it is, we ought to do something memorable.”

Tom looked at the movie listings in Time Out while Terman considered what his life would be like when Tom was gone. He had a book open on his lap but the words he read, or seemed to read, were only occasionally the ones that belonged to the text. He stopped himself and returned to the top of the page — the book was Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis — determined to make connection with what appeared before his eyes. The words refused his attention. Although in English, they seemed to translate themselves into an unknown foreign tongue as he took them in.

It was almost midnight and the fat man was still typing in his room. He had stopped briefly at nine, then had started again a little after ten with renewed energy. “I’d like to kill him,” Terman said. It was not what he planned to say. Tom looked up, startled. Terman laughed. “I don’t mean everything I say,” he said.

“I think you do,” said Tom.

Terman had not seen it before, though he had been the principal writer under an assumed name, and so its rare appearance at the Electric Cinema (Tom had brought the movie to his attention) seemed almost providential. “I don’t know if I can sit through it,” Terman warned him, though the idea of going with his son to see something he had once collaborated on half appealed to him. The movie was called Nightowl, which was not its original title, which was the third or fourth title of the unhappy project. According to the note in Time Out, the movie had been discovered in a Worst Films Festival in San Francisco and had subsequently achieved something of a cult following. “The bizzare closure is one of the glories of the independent American Cinema.”

The print, as it turned out, was bad, the colors faded. The theater seats were uncomfortable. A neon light flickered distractingly to the right of the screen. A handful of the small stunned audience staggererd out before the film’s notable conclusion. Certain lines that he had particularly relished in the moment of creation were missing or significantly changed. Yet the event of the film moved him as if in looking at snapshots of children, he had come across a face he could not wholly account for but with which he shared recognizably some deeply buried secrets. His eyes teared mysteriously and he kept his hand at the side of his face to protect himself from embarrassment. He thought the direction self-conscious and static, though more accomplished than he had reason to expect. By focusing endlessly on the same few characters and objects, the camera forced the viewer, if he survived, to see them without preconception. The film had three false endings before the final unexpected one where the young boarder, the title figure, moves into the wife’s bed in the guise of the husband he has just killed. “Close your eyes,” he says to her in the other’s voice before entering the bedroom. (And she does.) “I want you to remember me as I was.” Her arms reach out in expectation to the approaching shadow.

Terman didn’t ask him what he thought of it and Tom offered no response beyond an enthusiastic shaking of his head. “Yeah,” he said, an acknowledgement that they had watched this inexplicable movie together, that it was beyond them now, a part of the mutually experienced past. After the movie, he took Tom and Astrid to dinner at an overpriced seafood restaurant in Soho, then drove them both to Astrid’s house. Disappointment that he wasn’t invited in — he had been in top form throughout dinner and thought he rated more than thank you and goodnight — Terman went home alone. He didn’t go right home but stopped off at Isabelle’s apartment, parking just down the street. He sat in the car a few minutes, thinking of climbing out, entering the building, ringing the doorbell to her apartment, thinking of saying when she answered the door that he missed her terribly and wondered if they couldn’t get together again (her answer, as he imagined it, was a mute refusal), then drove away, stripped of false hope. Each moment he seemed to get closer to himself.

The little man in the thick glasses is tied up, bound and gagged, and propped up in sitting position in one of the pay toilet booths. As Henry Berger leaves the Men’s Room, he is passed by a middleaged Japanese man in a panama suit, the man glancing at him with more than casual interest. Walking briskly to another terminal, Berger boards a Pan Am flight to New York, the last passenger but one. Two attendants are getting ready to disconnect the ramp. “You’re a lucky chap, aren’t you?” one of them says to him. Someone else is coming. A moment later, the dark-haired woman he is travelling with also boards.

My father was in his study when I came in — it was like 2 AM — manuscript pages (I think that’s what they were) spread out across the floor, his gun on his desk. I stuck my head in to say I was back, and that I thought I’d stay up the night and conk out, if I could, on the flight home.

“If you really want to do it, I’ll stay up with you,” he said.

He looked burnt out and his movements seemed barely coordinated. All the desk drawers were open, loose papers in five separate piles on the floor, his waste basket flowing over. There was a stack of eight manuscript boxes alongside the desk. I watched for awhile without saying anything, trying to figure out what was going on.

“Do you think you’ll ever see her again?” he asked.

I thought he was talking about my mother at first so I didn’t understand what he meant, but he was referring to Astrid (or talking about himself and Isabelle). “You never know,” I said.

“Did you make any arrangements with her?”

“Well, we exchanged addresses if that’s what you mean. What are the boxes for, Dad?”

“Just cleaning up,” he said. “I’ll be through in a few minutes.”

There was a tapping at the outside door, which my father ignored or seemed not to notice. It refused to go away, got louder, more persistent. I won’t deny that it scared me.

“It sounds like he changed the keyboard of his typewriter,” my father said, amused by the idea. “I like this tune better than the other.”

When he heard the knocking on the door, Terman assumed the presumptuous fat man upstairs had gone out for an airing and had misplaced his key. “Don’t answer it,” Tom said. Terman was thinking the same thing, though after a few minutes he made his way to the door, not wanting to miss the opportunity for some new experience. The knocking, if that’s what it was, had stopped. Terman saw a face in the window which startled him, yet renewed his faith in the possibilities for surprise in this life. He had the impression that the face belonged to Isabelle and he unlatched the door for her in a state of painful joy. “I’m glad you’ve come back,” he said. The face belonged to Astrid, who had come to see Tom. She stood in the shadows, her manner a confusion of anger and abasement, waiting to be asked in. “Come on it,” Terman said. He held out his hand.

Tom came down — he had been standing on the stairs while his father opened the door — and he and the girl talked in the parlor in soft halting voices. “I’m sorry if I woke anyone up?” Astrid said.

Terman was in his study sitting inertly in a chair, memorizing the recent past, the door closed against other voices. Nothing would ever escape him again, he decided. He resisted sleep so was taken by it unawares, was stolen from consciousness.

At some point Tom and the girl tiptoed up the stairs to the room on the second floor Tom had recently appropriated as his own. They were holding hands, as he and Isabelle had on occasion, or so Terman imagined them. It may have been they had their arms around each other and stopped on every second or third step to kiss.

Terman was thinking, as he slept or didn’t, that someone ought to remind Tom to set the alarm on his clock.

In a hurry — he had to do it before he fell asleep — he walked in stocking feet down the long corridor to Tom’s room. He slipped into the room, set the alarm for six thirty (Tom’s flight left Heathrow at 8:20), barely glancing at the entangled couple. He imagined himself closing the door behind him as he left the room.

After his plane lands at JFK, after he and his companion (who may or may not be his wife) clear customs, Henry Berger goes into a public phone booth and dials a long distance number from memory. “I’m coming in,” he says without identifying himself. “Henry,” says the other, “where are you, boy? We’ve been expecting you posthaste.”

“I’ll be there before you know it,” Berger says. “Leave a light burning in the window for me, will you?”

“Do you want us to bring you in from the airport? Might be the most effective procedure.”

“I’d prefer making an unannounced entrance,” Berger says. “And I want the President in the room when we talk.”

“He understands that.”

After Henry Berger leaves the phone booth, he takes his companion to a taxi, a gentlemanly excess perhaps not in his best interests. “See you in a couple of days,” he says through the two inch opening in the window. He takes a cab himself to LaGuardia Airport and catches the Washington shuttle, which is already boarding as he arrives.

The story moves abruptly toward its conclusion, though I confuse in the telling beginnings and ends.

I couldn’t seem to get out of the house, kept leaving things behind or losing them. After all the false starts, we drove to the airport in a white heat, my father silent for the duration of the ride, his manner like a reprimand. I asked him if something was wrong and he said if he thought about it long enough he would probably find something. We queued up to check the larger of my two bags, getting at first on the wrong line, investing at least ten minutes in misplaced expectation. After some frantic rushing about, we were told that the departure time of my flight had been delayed forty-five minutes, and we stopped at an overcrowded cafeteria for some breakfast. We had just gotten our food to an unoccupied table when the loudspeaker announced that TWA Flight 144, which was mine, was boarding at some unintelligible gate and we were up again, rushing to no purpose. I bought some chewing gum, an International Herald Tribune, and a copy of E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey, my father choosing the book and paying the bill. A flashbulb went off. Someone took our picture or the picture of some people standing directly behind us, the lights blinding me momentarily. There was a point beyond which only passengers were allowed and we said goodbye and then embraced. “Keep in touch, Tom,” he said. I said I would do my best. There didn’t seem time for anything else.

They frisked me at the security checkout and for a dislocated moment I thought I still had my father’s pistol in my pocket and would have to answer for the theft. The frisking was only a formality — something in my manner, my style maybe, offended them — a last gesture of English hospitality. Then I was on the plane, seated at a window toward the front of the No Smoking section. Not many of the people around me looked like they were going to America and I had that moment of panic (I’ve had it before on other flights) when you think you’ve gotten on the wrong plane or that the plane you’re on has some telling defect that only you have discovered. I thought of making some excuse and getting out. There was time for that, time for everything. The plane sat for another hour and ten minutes and I thought, Well, we’re not going anywhere. The plane I’m on is committed to staying in place. I took a stick of gum and offered the pack to the woman in the business suit next to me. “It’s just what I need,” she said.

It could not be said that he hadn’t felt anything. What didn’t he feel? An obscure free-floating ache accompanied him on the return from Heathrow, the skin of his face stretched tight against the bones, his eyes, despite sunglasses, troubled by the muted English light. There were a number of things he had to do and he concentrated on the sequence of the doing, his consciousness a scratch list of notes to himself. Take in the milk. Open mail. Account his feelings. Wash the dishes in the sink and put them away. Finish packing manuscripts. Settle accounts. Make all the beds. Go to the post office. Settle accounts.

The intruder’s room, which was unlocked and temporarily unoccupied, smelled of some deodorizing substance, a sweet treacly odor with a dank subtext. Terman sat at the table the fat man presumably used as a desk and stared at his reflection which glowered back, no comradship there, narrow-eyed and hard. He made disdainful faces at the opposing face and was responded to in kind. Whatever the fat man had been working on was apparently locked away in the attaché case on the bed or had gone with him. Only a few blank sheets of bond occupied the work table. There was nothing Terman wanted from the intruder beyond the absence of his intrusion and even that prospect offered no long-lived pleasure. He went through the wastebasket and caught the name Henry Berger on a discarded sheet of manuscript. “I can’t take you with me, sweetheart,” he was saying to an unidentified woman. The woman said: “I can make a terrible enemy when left to my own devices.”

After heaving the attaché case through an open window, Terman went to his own study and completed the packing of manuscrupts he had started the evening before. A rhythm established itself, an odd metronomic music that was sometimes indistinguishable from the beat of his heart. When he was done he addressed the packages to his American agent, wrote two long overdue letters, loaded the car and drove to the post office.

He left the car where he had parked it near the post office and walked back to the house he no longer thought of as his special province. His son was gone — that registered for the first time in a while. Some weeks ago — it might have been yesterday — he had been anticipating the visit (not altogether happily, let it be admitted), and now it was over. He was whistling or the man that wore his clothes and walked in his shoes and animated his bones was whistling. His behavior seemed inexplicable even to himself.

On his walking in the door — the house was less familiar with each revisit — he remembered typing the last line of his first novel and then floating from his chair more in relief than triumph, emptied of everything, the satisfaction as sharp as a toothache in the night. The recollection came and went, taking away more than it had brought. What was done was irrevocably done. He would never know again, except as memory allowed, what it was like to complete the last line of that first book. The memory of it only made him more aware of the real thing that was lost to him. No pleasure had been so intense in his life, or so he imagined, as the completion of that first book. He fastened on the notion of loss and the arbitrariness of memory. The aging process rode roughshod over everything, leaving dust and decay in its wake.

This section of his life was done with, he told himself, as if he were referring to a piece of writing, a novel or a screenplay. It was time to move on, he thought, to find another space in which to move, the language without specific reference. He put his typewriter into its faded blue case and closed the cover.

Each succeeding move invented itself. He phoned Isabelle and caught her, as she said, on the way out. “I’ve called to say goodbye,” he said. She didn’t ask where he was going, goodbye to what? “You’re all right, are you?” she asked. He felt, he said, at the top of his game. “Goodbye, sweetheart,” he said.

“Sweetheart, is it? Yes, I’m sure. Is there anything else you wanted to say before I hang up on you. I do have to go in minute.”

The minute passed. He said goodbye a second time. She said, “Speak to you anon,” and was gone. (Later, on the way to work, or on the way home, she might wonder at the implication of his call.)

The desk was all but clear. He thought of polishing it, but settled for dusting it rigorously with an old sock. The gun, which occupied a central place, had to be moved and removed, shifted from place to place like an unwanted child. The dusting completed, he lifted the pistol from the desk and balanced it in his palm. It was loaded for use — the whole point of a gun was its function — or had he only imagined himself loading it? He checked and double checked. What he wanted to say to Isabelle was that he could still remember having cared for her, though the feeling, which ebbed a little each day, was disappearing. For a moment, he felt an extraordinary tenderness for the few remaining objects in the room: couch, desk, desk chair, manuscript boxes, false starts on balls of paper in the waste basket. He held the gun to the side of his head.

Everything was in order or — there was that alternative — the disorder was in itself complete. Still, he might have missed something, forgotten some crucial detail, left something undone thinking it done. Had he made the beds? Had he accounted his feelings at the moment he raised the pistol to his head. At the moment after that. At the one after that. At this moment? The next step, the step that followed the step before it, that step following on the heels of its predecessor, was to…. The sentence, suspended in possibility, moved inexorably toward a resolution it would never achieve.

He is sure that no one has followed him on the last lap of his journey and almost equally certain that no one knows he is in Washington, D.C. He has written nothing down, has confided in no one. The evidence, the full burden of his discovery, is lodged in his head. He hails a cab but instead of going directly to the White House, he stops off at the Phillips Museum. He calls his contact from a museum phone and says, “Expect me at exactly five minutes after one.” “I’ll leave word at the desk that you’re to be sent up on the President’s elevator,” the friend says. “What name are you using?” “Lukas Terman,” says Berger.

He goes through the museum, moving intently from painting to painting, as though he might carry with him the memory of so much extraordinary work. The camera scans the paintings, as Henry Berger might, its eye crossing the walls like a beam of light.

When he leaves the museum he gets into another cab and instructs the driver (or so we imagine) — we perceive the conversation from outside the cab, from the distance of a bystander — to take him to the White House. We follow the taxi through the streets of Washington, Berger’s eyes closing and opening, tiredness catching up.

We pick up Henry Berger as he leaves the cab and walks tentatively up the White house steps, the sun, glancing off the facade, blinding him. Among the crowd of tourists, there is no one he knows. A fat man, camera around his neck, wearing a sky blue shirt with a flame of ghastly orange flamingos across its front, seems to want to ask Berger something, steps awkwardly in his way. “Yes?” “Got the time?” asks the pilgrim. Berger, smiling, a tourist himself at this moment, lifts his left arm to glance at his watch. “Five after one,” he says, or starts to say, one hand eclipsing the other. There is a gunshot from the camera or from somewhere above and beyond the camera. A carnation of blood appears at Berger’s chest. Someone cheers or jeers. The detective’s face register’s all, amazement, the cancellation of hope, the death of passion, disillusion beyond further disillusion. The camera catches him in freeze frame as he falls backwards, the steps moving under his feet, his arms out anticipating momentary flight.

The 747 taxis down a runway, changes direction, stops and starts, trapped in indecision. And then without further announcement, just when I think we’ll never go anywhere, we tear loose from the earth, ascend with heartbreaking abruptness.

I remember this time when I was a kid of eight or nine and I was eating breakfast by myself in the kitchen (corn flakes with half-thawed frozen raspberries) and the doorbell rang and we weren’t expecting anyone and I answered (my mother out shopping, Kate playing solitaire in her room) and my father was there and he lifted me onto his shoulders and I asked him if he had come to stay and he mumbled something which I took to be yes and for that moment before I heard in echo what he actually said I had this sense that everything was all right not only that but it was going to be all right for a long time to come and until I realized that I had misheard his answer I was so glad so glad I mean I can’t even remember the feeling only that it rang in my head like a siren or a scream and I didn’t want to give it up (I was flying on his shoulders) and when it was gone it was gone.