City on Fire (87 page)

He disappeared behind a farther wall or partition, and when he came back it was with a box, the kind reams of paper come in. On the lid, someone had written Evidence III in black Sharpie, and I felt the same drop in my stomach I’d felt looking at Uncle William’s brushwork. “This is what your uncle was working on from October of 2001 up to the end. There was a note on the box. I believe he wanted what is inside made public in some form or another. He meant it to be his legacy.” The box, when I lifted it from the marble surface between us, was heavy. I couldn’t tell how old the packing tape was, or if it had been disturbed.

“So why not go ahead and mount this, too? You’ve got a whole gallery here.”

“For one thing, William—may I call you William?—Evidence III remains unfinished. For another, it is not the kind of material you mount. It is documentary in nature. Or perhaps conceptual. Which means, technically, it belongs with that part of the estate arrogated neither to Ms. Boone nor to myself.”

“I guess I’ll take it back to my mom, then.”

“Ah, but that is the wrinkle, William. This note I spoke of—it stipulated, in quite certain terms, that the box and decisions about its contents were to pass to you.”

I landed in L.A. the following afternoon having gained three hours in the air, and arrived home before Julia returned from work, or my daughter from school. From the cab at curbside, our house looked both exactly as I’d left it and wholly altered. Before I could think what I was doing, I left my suitcases by the front door and lugged the box out to the pool house, where I tucked it among the bric-a-brac one accumulates over many years in a place. My daughter asked about my trip at dinner that night, but I would give her only the outlines. When it came to my family in New York, I only ever gave the outlines. Except later, after I’d fallen asleep, I found myself back there once more, on nightmare city streets, empty as if some plague or catastrophe had struck. And the next night, and the next, for months.

This time, the dream was connected with the box, somehow. It almost felt like it had been all along. I would go out to the pool house sometimes when everyone else was asleep, to put off going to bed myself, and I would turn on the light and look at it. Evidence III. I thought about taking the tape back off and actually diving into it, this gift or curse meant to draw me back to that time we’d all worked so hard to escape. I thought about drinking. I thought about throwing the whole damn thing into the pool. But eventually, always, I went back into the house, because frankly, it was easier to face the dream.

And then a week ago, after a night when I woke weeping with terror, when I had to tiptoe downstairs to cry in the laundry room with the dryer on to cover the sound, I fell back asleep some time after sunrise, and Julia turned off my alarm. When I got up, there was no comforting getting-ready-for-school noise, just the drip of rain hitting the sill, and the light was all wrong. I came downstairs to find her tacking up a blue nylon flag with a dove on it in the breakfast nook’s bay window. I dimly recalled, through the plaque of nightmare goo still clinging to my brain, a conversation about a meeting of peace activists from her church. Also that the country was going to war again. “I called you in sick,” she said.

“Why’d you do that?”

“Because you’re sick, honey.”

We sat down at the counter and ate lunch together. When was the last time we did this? I’d been in law school. She must have been pregnant. I swallowed a mouthful of sandwich. I apologized for any noise I might have made in the night. I told her the nightmares were back. A minute passed. “You’re going to say I should try therapy,” I said.

“I don’t see what you have against therapy.”

I don’t have anything against therapy, by the way; it’s great for other people. It’s just that, personally, I see the enterprise as proceeding from the same premises that cause the problems it seeks to treat. For you guys, what I am, fundamentally, is a closed system, a container of ego and id and biological imperatives. That I’m not may be a fiction, but if I can’t imagine a reference point larger than myself, morally speaking, then what’s the use? That flag in the window—is that, too, just ego and identity and self? “Call it a block I have.”

“You think talking to a professional will make you vulnerable.”

“Is that the sort of powerful insight I should be prepared for in therapy?”

“Stop it. Stop it. The whole point is just to free you to talk, Will. You’re so afraid someone’s going to tell you there’s something permanently wrong with you, you know, but all it is is someone asking questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like, who exactly are you in this dream of yours? Are you still a kid?”

To be honest, thinking about it made me uncomfortable. Light from the pool stuttered across the ceiling of our kitchen. “I told you already. This is later. When I’m in junior high.”

“And what’s the distinction, as you understand it?”

“As I understand what?”

“Between a kid and a junior-high-schooler. Most people count the latter as a child.”

“Not where I grew up, they don’t.” And somehow I was telling her a thing I didn’t even realize I remembered: how back in ’77, in the middle of the big blackout, when I was twelve and Cate was six, my father had left us alone on the streets of Manhattan.

“Jesus Christ. Your father—”

“No, this was just one of those things, you know? A miscommunication about who was supposed to pick us up from day camp. But it still stands as the longest night of my life. From that point on, I knew I’d be fending for myself.”

“I can’t believe you never told me this.”

“Why?”

“You were abandoned, Will. You were obviously terrified. Sound familiar?”

“I guess it does sound like the dream,” I admitted. “But what I was feeling just now, dredging all this up? Was the opposite of what I feel when I’m having it. Like, there was a moment back there, right around the time of the blackout, when everything seemed on the edge of becoming something else. And now I can’t imagine a life besides this one.”

“Maybe behind the veils is a mirror. Maybe you’re scared you’ll look and see your father.”

I knew then that I’d said too much. That I’d hurt her. “That’s not what I meant, Julia. I don’t know what I meant. I love you. I love Agnes. I love having, you know, a patch of grass out back and good avocados year-round. It’s just where the limits are that scares me. I’m almost forty.”

“Well, I’m scared too,” she said. “Because I love you, Will, but I don’t know how much more of this either of us can take. Whatever else is back there, you’ve got to face it.”

And so here I am, attaching page upon page, seemingly unable to stop. I’ve started to feel like I’m stuck now inside the dream. Or like I’m losing my mind. I keep thinking, while driving, while cooking, while in the office preparing briefs, about a veiled city, hiding something. And I keep returning to the night of the blackout, and the question of just what changed there, in the dark.

And then there’s the last thing Bruno Augenblick showed me before I left the gallery that night. He’d insisted on calling a car to take me back to my hotel, given the heft of Evidence III, and out of some obscure Continental courtesy had followed me to the street. It was cooler there. We waited in the autumn dusk, listening to car horns sail up the building faces, watching headlights knife by over on the avenue, while behind us, inside, the little show went on. And finally, just to say something, I told him there were still things I didn’t get. Like the title: “Evidence” of what? “And then, if those white signs on the wall in there are Evidence I, and this box is Evidence III, what happened to Evidence II?” At this, he smiled his clinical smile, light but no heat, and gestured at something down the block. At first I couldn’t tell what was being indicated, but then I saw it: what hung from the stop-sign pole at the corner was not a stop sign, but a canvas, imperfectly octagonal and only approximately red. I moved closer. Just above and to the right of the “O” was a blue halo of sun, and most of the lower left portion was dappled with leaf-shadow. What I mean is, what at first seemed to be an ordinary stop sign was really a painting. To look at it straight on, by twilight, was to see it from below, by day. Impressionism, I guess, is the word. You could see the brushstrokes, the hand of the artist, the dead man who’d signed it: Billy III. A fissure seemed to have opened in objective space, or subjective space, or in some third space altogether, and for a second, as I stood there looking, this factitious quality spread to take in the elevator-shaft warning on the building across the street—likewise fake, or real—and the orange construction placard by a subway entrance farther off. My uncle hadn’t wanted to white out the city; he’d wanted to reimagine it. To exchange the inside of his head with what was beyond. Who knew, in fact, how many more pieces of Evidence II I’d passed on my way down here without noticing? Who could be certain, this far from the altered skyline, that he hadn’t tucked skyscrapers of cardboard in among the ones made of steel? Who knew which city I was even in? It was 2003. It was 1974. It was 1961. I wanted to ask Augenblick about the scale of all this, how far Evidence II extended, but when I turned around, he was gone.

THE DEMON BROTHER

[ JULY 12–13, 1977 ]

The imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams …

—WALTER BENJAMIN

The Arcades Project

71

THE DAY CAMP REGAN HAD CHOSEN was all the way up on East Eighty-Second Street. This was in the winter, when slots were filling up fast, and it had seemed important that the kids have some sense of continuity with the old neighborhoods. What it had not been, especially, was logical. She wasn’t thinking about forty minutes on the train to drop them off and then fifteen back down to the Hamilton-Sweeney Building for work. When she was Will’s age, she’d ridden the subway alone, but nowadays you might as well have set your kids up with a drug habit and a loaded gun. If they weren’t bathed, dressed, and breakfasted by ten to eight, the better part of valor was just to put them in a cab. Currently, it was 8:23 a.m., July 13, two days into a heat wave. She watched Will work to isolate a Cheerio on the end of his spoon. “Do you think you could speed it up, honey, possibly?”

He made a cherubic trumpet of his mouth, sucked the Cheerio down. What rankled was the shrug that followed. Their connection had once been clairvoyant; he would materialize beside her without her having heard his approach, as if he could sense the pressure building within and had no other means to ease it. Indeed, she suspected it was the weird way he saw through you that made Keith want to pack him off to boarding school. But she hadn’t even been able to let Will go to sleepaway camp, and now he seemed to be punishing her for it. In the twenty-four hours before a custody visit, he resented even her gentlest suggestion. He would prefer not to, the shrug seemed to say.

Then Cate came kiting in from the bathroom, which in the new apartment, through some architectural oversight, abutted the kitchen. “Can I have some Cheerios?”

“You had eggs, honey, not fifteen minutes ago. Did you light a match?”

She nodded, and Regan decided to withhold comment on her mismatched socks and on the nest of hair that appeared to have been sucked through a cotton gin. “Go get your bag, sweetie.” No doubt the camp counselors would look at her and think, Negligent parent, but that was fine, it was all a penance, besides which, there was no time. In sixty-four minutes, Andrew West would be in her office to run back over the statement they’d drafted. At 1:30, they would ride the elevator to the newly renovated press room on the fortieth floor to tell the assembled microphones that, to the charges of tax fraud and insider trading, her father would enter a plea of not guilty. The U.S. Attorney was apparently hours away from finalizing an immunity deal with a second informant anyway, and once that happened, Daddy’s chance at a plea bargain would expire, along with the symbolic power of refusing it.

Everything that was going to happen would happen today.

Sixty-three minutes.

She forced herself not to say anything, knowing that if she did Will would downshift even further, to a gear somewhere between deliberate and geologic. She tried to reopen their connection. Come on, honey. Of course, given that he was a male, frustration was just another way of loving him. The foxed neck of his tee-shirt. The freckled bridge of his slightly upturned nose. His long hair, his probably unwashed hair, falling artlessly in his eyes.

“William Hamilton-Sweeney Lamplighter, you have exactly ten seconds to finish your breakfast.”

“Can’t.”

“Excuse me?”

He put his hands up, as if to show he was unarmed. “I’m full.”

“Then andiamo, already.” She pretended not to see the way he left the bowl out for her to clean up later.

They were at the door, Regan one sleeve into her suit jacket, when she noticed something was missing. “Where’s the overnight bag, Will?”

“Oops.”

“You didn’t pack?”

“You didn’t remind me.”

“I didn’t remind you to put on pants, either, but you managed to get it done.”

Again, the shrug, which had acquired italics in her mind. Her watch said 8:34, and she felt that if she said another word to him, he would know he’d won. She knelt and buttoned her daughter’s polo shirt. Time was, it had been Cate dragging her feet and Will who was dutiful. “Honey, tell me your father keeps a change of clothes for you guys.”

Cate smiled and twisted away. At some point, she’d lost a tooth. “We have TVs in our rooms now.”

“It’s true,” Will said. “He lets us watch whatever we want.”

“God damn it, Will, you can do this or I’ll do it myself, and I will pick clothes that make you regret it. Don’t make me count to three.” It never crossed her mind that maybe it wasn’t her he was resisting. That maybe, secretly, he really didn’t want to go.

WHAT TO DO WITH CHILDREN IN SUMMER was a question to which she’d never given much thought, prior to this annus horribilis. Even working full-time for the firm, she got paid leave, and the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day was supposed to stretch into a succession of long weekends at Lake Winnipesaukee with her kids and husband splashing in the water, days passing leisurely as sailboats beyond the blue cordon of buoys.