Here & There (23 page)

His mother, Emily Hahn, third-generation German and Irish, was raised in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Emily was an actress who, along with her husband, founded the MiST (short for MultImedia Synthetic Theater) Company that briefly collaborated with The Public Theater. Early on in her career, she had done some work as a model and even acted in several national commercials. Once she found Kaleb, however, she let those pursuits drop away. In fact, even in the theater, Emily primarily worked only with her then future husband. The impulse was shared and explained by fellow actor Marc Cohn, “It’s something about the way he focuses on you, finds your insecurities and then teaches you to exploit them . . . Obviously we all love the vivacity of working in live theater, but with Kaleb, it wasn’t just live, it was alive and guzzling adrenaline. After working with him, other projects somehow felt flat, two-dimensional; like you were performing in black and white. We all felt that way. Emily just refused to settle.”
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If Kaleb was Kerek’s gateway to the world, Emily was his portal into the imagination. Together they would lie on the grass during the day, anthropomorphizing the insects they counted, making up stories about their lives. They’d stare at wall mirrors and try to catch their reflections getting lazy. At night she’d read fantastical stories aloud to him, or sometimes even make them up. However, as Emily’s
sister, Abi, noted, “Sure, they were happy as two clams in a pod. Still, you couldn’t help but feel, every now and then, it was less about being a mother to Kerek and more about performing the role of the perfect mother for Kaleb.”

Reidier’s early childhood was bucolic. By the time he was born, his parents had relocated from New York City to Williamstown, Massachusetts. Kaleb had been offered a position to help run the Williamstown Theater Festival. He and Emily also expressed to friends how once they found out they were pregnant, they were suddenly overcome by Norman Rockwell–esque dreams of raising their child climbing old oaks and launching off of rope swings.

These were their public reasons.

Their private rationale was much less idyllic. Earlier that very same year, Kaleb had been diagnosed with cancer. A tumor was growing in his brain and applying bilateral pressure to the motor cortex area that controlled his legs. As the tumor grew, Kaleb became less and less ambulatory, until ultimately he became paraplegic.
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Moving to Williamstown provided the couple with a calmer and easier environment to physically navigate, and it put them much closer to Dr. Peter Black, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General and aggressive trailblazer in experimental techniques.

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How did she do it? Honestly, how could she stay so clinical getting all this down? All of her sporadic interjections, comments about process, volleys sent at the Department for its withholdingness, and not one sentence, not one phrase or even just a goddamn ellipsis about my father?

Guess we all have our defense mechanisms. But I mean, Christ, there’s no way she couldn’t have been channeling memories of him. It’s too close. Too much of an echo; sure it’s been drawn out, disfigured and Dopplerized, but the origins still match up. Devoted wife and mother, young boy, and a man being eaten alive from the inside.

In our case, though, it was much quicker. A few months only. No time to consider. No thought to shield. No opportunity for distance, separation, and sanctuary. She was a therapist after all. Death was a part of life after all.

So there I was, sitting by her side, sniffing in the antiseptic hospital smells that have the faintest odor of stale talcum powder and lye. Watching plastic-tinted tubes pump sun-sensitive poison into his circulatory system as his body desiccated before our very eyes. And yet, no mention of any of that. Or the aftermath of absence, in all its therapeutic glory. Separated by several city blocks, she and I sat in different therapists’ offices, making sure to cope correctly. No mention of that at all. Not even my accident.

Why Reidier? Why me? Why am I tucked away in this shitty carriage house, with no insulation, unpacking a briefcase full of empty words?

Obviously it’s Toby’s fault. Drink addled and angling as always, he blurts out the brilliant idea to transform my mom’s absence into a loft in SoHo.

I mean, yeah, it’s never that simple. I’m sure it somehow plays right into my own issues: control, intimacy, self-worth, honesty, you name it. Still, Toby’s a convincing guy, and he always sees the angle. No joke, when we were still adolescent prep-school kids, he saw the market opportunity for selling candy and single pages ripped out of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
. He made a killing and knew how to keep his customers quiet.

Toby has a sixth sense for seeking out someone’s insecurities. He always jokes about how he likes to “find someone’s weak spot and then jump up and down on it.” It’s kind of fascinating, almost hypnotic to watch. It’s what makes him such a good litigator.

It’s only terrifying when you take a step back and think about it. Which I rarely do. I just let my own sixth sense of self-preservation guide me, which might be why I’ve stayed friends with him so long. I feel safe as long as he’s on my team. I don’t know, our friendship goes back too far to open up to any type of analytical etymology. He made me laugh and as we grew up and his tongue sharpened, I was just glad as all hell that I wasn’t at the business end of it.

His sense for weak spots lets him see the angels. And it’s those angles that work magic on bouncers, party promoters, women, you name it. (And before you start going back and double-checking and getting all proud of yourself, yes I’m fully aware of the angels/angles mix-up at the beginning of this paragraph. I thought about changing it, but somehow it seems to work.)

I think this is the part about my personality that draws Toby to me. My yarn-spinning instincts. Knowing how to take the truth, take a moment, and just bend it a little to make a better story. Kindred spirits, him and me, who can go on ad nauseum about the crucial differences between legal and ethical, and justify each other’s shortcomings with
semantic distractions. We blur the lines for each other, always moving the benchmark when the other one isn’t looking.

It’s almost a sport, really. How close can we get to shining a light on the God’s honest truth, but bend it through a prism of savoir faire?

“So there he is,” I tell whichever group of girls have grown bored with the posse of frat boys turned investment bankers chasing them. “About to start his closing argument for his first murder trial. He doesn’t even look at his notes. Nope, he just launches in apologizing to the jury. Saying he’s sorry that he, the DA, and the system have wasted their time with this murder trial.”

Out of the corner of my eye I catch Toby assuming a humble smile as he listens. “He charges ahead with his closing, announcing, ‘The fact is, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there hasn’t been a murder at all. How could there have been one, when the man my client is accused of murdering is about to walk through that door right now.’

“And then he points at the door. No shit. And every head in the jury snaps toward the door in expectation.

“As they wait for this miraculous entrance, Toby calmly states, ‘And that, ladies and gentlemen, is reasonable doubt.’”

That’s about the time that Toby’ll chime in, “And he would’ve gotten off too, except that the judge noticed how in spite of everybody else looking toward the door, my client did not.”

Then he’ll casually toss something out there like, “But if you want to hear a story, have Danny there pull up the right side of his shirt and show you his poor man’s version of the stigmata, and don’t let him con you into thinking it’s just a birthmark.”

But maybe I’m just kidding myself about the whole kindred-spirit bullshit. Maybe it’s just he’s comfortable with me. He feels safe because we grew up together, and he knows how to mine my weak spots. How to turn my missing mom malaise into a swank loft in SoHo for us to entertain in after hours.

Joke’s on him, though, instead of a loft in SoHo, he ended up having to fish me out of a porous carriage house in the ass bottom of Hell’s Kitchen.

Maybe he was just trying to do what we do, find the silver lining in an otherwise mediocre and saddening world. He didn’t know how to bring my mom back any more than I did.

It’s been over four and a half months now. Twenty weeks since Toby and I sailed down the New Jersey Turnpike, across the Delaware, underneath the Baltimore Harbor, and into the District, where I found the key to my mother’s secret, hidden away in my father’s art asylum.

So far, I’ve spent thousands of dollars on rent, $54.99 on a space heater, and I don’t know how much on legal pads, highlighters, and click pens. I’ve found some elliptical references to Eve Tassat and her work on the Internet, and even less on Reidier. I’ve checked out about a dozen books on quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation and can’t make sense of any of it. Oh, and I’ve befriended a Jewish transvestite performer, Vitzi Vannu, who lives in the front building and performs down the street at this drag club called Escuelita.

My institutional pursuits have proved equally unfruitful. No one at the Defense Department will take my phone calls or respond to my e-mails. It might be because I only call them from public telephones or e-mail them with fabricated addresses, assuming numerous different fictional identities from Clint Hoffstater, the Columbia Visiting Professor of Physics, to Aldin Whitehouse, the psychologist and founder of the Southwest Conference on Advancements of Art Therapy (and former colleague of Hilary Kahn). I don’t know.

I also struck out on an appeal to Providence. Out of the three local-news stations there, only WJAR still had any footage from the day
The Reidier Test
went awry. A useless and utterly uninformative collection of clips of Dylan Secco getting a closer look at the dead fish washing up on the shore or standing on the Newport Bridge wistfully looking over his shoulder at Gould’s Island almost a mile away. Twenty-four-hour news coverage, and all I can get my hands on are shots of benchmarks of how high some of the waves splashed after the explosion.

The funny thing is, it’s not until I’m sitting here, writing this, that I realize how obsessed I’ve become. How pathological is my need to find out. As long as I keep moving, then my dance with doubt won’t end in disappointment. Really I’m just trying to fight off the fact that the God’s honest truth of what happened is she really did just up and leave, molted and left all of her desiccated, withered, useless, old self behind . . . including me.

With periodic treatments, Kaleb’s deterioration was slowed. As a result, Reidier did get to enjoy an almost picture-perfect, Norman Rockwell–esque upbringing for the first seven years of his life. He made snowmen in the winter, built forts in the spring, caught frogs in the summer, and jumped into colorful leaf piles in the fall. Furthermore, being in a university town, Reidier had opportunities to participate in after school science programs that opened his eyes to the world around him.

It was all but perfect, except when his parents left for the occasional trip to Boston. At first, family friends (an actor who needed a respite from New York, or a Williams professor they had befriended) would come stay with young Kerek, while they were at Mass General.

Early on, according to Abi, Reidier’s parents decided a cancer ward was no place for a small child. They tried to insulate him from as much of it as possible. The two barely used the C-word, never discussed the gravity of the situation, and referred to the hospital trips as matinees. But they were powerless to stop the encroaching inevitability, like the uninvited guest in Prince Prospero’s Palace.
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Once again my mother was referring to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

By the time Kerek was five, Kaleb was walking with a limp; within a year, Kaleb was growing lame; and by Kerek’s seventh birthday, Kaleb was all but paralyzed from the waist down.

The family had no choice. Kaleb had to stay close to Mass General for more aggressive treatments and more intensive care. Refusing to “unsettle” their son’s childhood with the aromas of a chemo ward, they instead had Emily’s father come stay with Kerek. Emily and her father had a strained relationship at best, but he was the only surviving grandparent and the only person they could impose upon indefinitely.

Luckily, the grandfather and the boy got on well together. A retired contractor, Emily’s father found the boy’s curiosity and boundless innovation a delight. The two spent many afternoons together working on projects, constructing this machine or that model. They made birdhouses, ant farms, and windmills in the first month, but as Kerek’s grandfather came to understand the extent of his grandson’s gifts, they moved on to motorcycle engines, radios, walkie-talkies, and the like. In fact, together they built a small-scale solar array that the college ultimately used as a model for solarizing its Library Shelving Facility.

At first, Emily and Kaleb would make the five-hour drive back home every weekend, but soon it turned into every other weekend, then just Emily every other weekend, then once a month, until eventually it was every six weeks or so. While Kerek’s grandfather had no problem stimulating the child’s mind during the day, he was at a complete loss for how to soothe the boy’s heart at night. Kerek longed for his parents. Every night he would cry on the phone to his mother, begging her to come home or come get him. Every night she would promise to come home as soon as she could.

If Eve’s short story, “In the Gloaming,” is to be taken as more fact than fiction, then one of the few consistencies Reidier could count on was his and his mother’s bedtime ritual.
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