Munich Airport (14 page)

Otis had a long dress in his arms, and he was holding it high. He examined it and decided he liked it, and he put it in a pile behind him. The mound of clothes behind him was bigger than the one in front of him. I also saw that he had taken all her jewelry. It was in a small mound by his feet. Hold on with that stuff, I said. He stopped and put his hands on his knees. I said, I just want to make sure there's nothing that belongs to our mother. He reacted in a way I hadn't expected, which was to ignore me and continue, and I reacted to him in a way I didn't expect, which was to do nothing at all, to simply pretend I hadn't spoken. I went back to reading. Otis kept separating out the things he wanted. I was building up the courage to demand that he stop—but that meant preparing for the possibility that I would have to physically stop him, and I hadn't had a physical confrontation since I was a teenager. Then Otis stood. He held another dress up by its hanger. It was a dark spring green. It, too, seemed from the fifties. Otis said, This is the dress she got married in. Married? I said. He said, It was a fake marriage, he was gay. Oh, I said. But it was a nice day, we had a big party, said Otis, and Miriam was really happy. I felt a little disarmed by the fact he had said something affectionate about Miriam, and I asked, Have you asked him to meet us for drinks? Otis said, I think he moved to Boston about ten years ago, or Portland. I said it would have been nice to have the husband around for a drink, even a fake husband.

I thought he was going to give me the dress. I nearly put my arms out to receive it. But he turned as if to place the dress in the pile of clothes behind him and I said, Hey, wait. He stopped. Do you think we could have that? I asked.

Have what?

Obviously the dress.

He said, If I hadn't told you what it was, you wouldn't care. But you did tell me, I said, why did you tell me? He held it out and up in front of me and said, What are you going to do with it? I was about to say we could bury it with her, then I remembered the wedding wasn't real, and I had no answer, except to say something sentimental, and for many reasons saying something sentimental about wanting to save that dress was unthinkable. I said, Listen, I have to go, I need to lock up.

Right now?

Right this minute, sorry.

Otis was reluctant to go, he moved directly in between me and the things he'd set aside behind him, so I said, Take whatever you can grab now and I'll let you know when I'm coming back so you can get the rest. He didn't believe me so I said, Take the dress now if you want, take anything you can carry out of here. I moved away and gave him a little bit of space. He didn't have a bag with him, so I went and got a bag of my own and handed it to him, and when I handed it to him I looked down at his stack of books, fifty at least, and all of which were nice hardbacks, and saw my father's book. I said, That's my dad's book. He said nothing. Now that I knew that Miriam had made notes in her books, I bent down to reach for it. Otis bent down, too, as though to stop me. I stood up and said, You cannot have that book, Otis, I'm sorry. He said, I was just going to get it for you. He picked it up and opened it and a yellow page of tablet paper came out. He gave me the book but he held on to the piece of paper. Give me the piece of paper, I said. He was reading it. I said, Give me the piece of paper, Otis. I didn't want him to read it, I didn't want him to touch it. So I grabbed it and yanked it from him, and it ripped in half. He immediately gave me back the other half, and gave me a look that said the violence hadn't been necessary. Sorry, I said. He stood and waited for me to look at the piece of paper, but I wouldn't look at it, not while he was in the room. He grabbed some books and some clothes but for some reason he left the jewelry, and I suspected it was because he thought I might confront him over that, too. Anyway, he left. I walked over to the table and placed the two pieces of paper back together again. It was the first page of a letter written by my father to Miriam. I'd never received a letter from him, but that was because, I assumed, we spoke on the telephone, and I visited. I remembered I had seen some Scotch tape around, I went to get it, I came back and taped the letter up. I taped it so thoroughly that it looked laminated. I folded it up and put it in my back pocket. I got the book and went through it, to see if there were any other pages of the letter in it, but there weren't. And there weren't any notes in the margins, either. I closed the book and put it in a bag. It was a big hardback, a thousand pages long, and on the back flap it had a photo of my father that was outdated even at the time. The picture is of a man my age now. It's fuzzy, he's wearing a suit, his hair is brown, and he's standing in front of the sea. It's clearly not a professional photo, he just found a photo of himself he liked and used it. My mother had been alive when the photo was taken.

I didn't take anything with me but the book and the letter. I had a feeling that he'd want to know immediately about this, about the fact that she'd kept the book all these years, and I was excited about being able to hand it to him. I felt as though my time here, from his point of view, would finally be justified. But then I did something that completely contradicted this excitement. I brought the book downstairs and put it in the basket on the front of my bicycle. It was still wet, still chilly. The roads and sidewalks were full of puddles. The roadsides were muddy. When I felt I had got far enough away from Miriam's apartment—I guess I was about halfway between her part of town and ours—I got off my bike, found a spot of wintery, wet muck, and threw the book into it. Then I got back on the bike and rode to our hotel. I walked in and the lady at reception informed me that I'd checked out. I've checked out? I asked. That's right, she said. Am I leaving town? I asked. She didn't have an answer, so I telephoned Trish and she told me the woman was supposed to give me a message saying that my father had had my things moved—later I would learn that it had been done by an embassy intern—to a new place, an apartment he'd rented. So I went straight there. It was the penthouse apartment of a building of luxury, boutique rental apartments. The penthouse had a rooftop terrace that was a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide. You could see everything from it. Every inch of horizon. We had three bedrooms and four flat-screen televisions. Though I didn't know it yet, we were going to rent a car in two days and get away, but we would keep the apartment, we would just leave it empty and return to it.

I don't have the letter anymore. I don't remember when or how I lost it. I folded it up and carried it around with me everywhere, for a few days. If I had a quiet moment, I pulled it out and read it. Then one morning it wasn't there. I checked under the driver's seat of our rental car. I checked the room I slept in. I checked all my pockets. I even checked the trash can on the street, where I had thrown away some fast food the previous night. But it was gone. I thought, for a moment, that my father might have found it, but if he had, I'd have known, he'd have asked me immediately about it.

My father's letter had been written in black fountain-pen ink on yellow lined paper. He'd obviously wanted her to have the book, and he must have felt he ought to send it himself, and if he were going to do so, he'd have to write a letter to go with it. Or, just as plausibly, he'd been wanting to send Miriam a thoughtful letter since she left, and the book just gave him an opportunity to be in touch. I considered the remote possibility that he had finished his book for this reason only. His letter began with a few lines about hoping that she is well and that she'll find enclosed the book he'd been working on for years, which turned out to be a little redundant now that a similar book on the same subject had come out. At the time he wrote the letter, I had just been there to visit him, because even though he'd made nothing of it, I thought it would be nice to visit him around the time of publication, point out the good reviews and shield him from the negative ones. He writes, Your brother was here to see the book off and protect me from depression, I guess, but now he's gone and the house is very quiet again except for the television, which I have no interest in apart from checking the weather and watching a little bit of golf. And I walk around wondering why I'm not back at work. I live in one room of the house, and I sleep in another. I walk through the other rooms to make sure everything is as it was. I took the semester off and used the book as an excuse, but I find that I'm terribly sad to be here without you in some proximity, without seeing you from time to time. I've missed you profoundly these last years and am beginning to wonder if I'll see you again, or if you've simply decided to leave us, in which case it's like a whole new death for me to come to terms with, but it is much more difficult to bear, not only because I know you're alive in some other place, but that I fear that resentment for me has sent you there. I can see that my great failings in life were with my mother, your mother, and you, and I don't know how to account for the expectations of you all that I allowed myself to have. I seem to have sent them to death here and I understand why you might have wanted to escape that. I respect your silence and your distance but I also hope it doesn't last forever. I wonder if you have everything you need in your apartment. I wonder if you could use a washing machine or a new refrigerator. I wonder if you have proper heating, and I'd be happy to get you some heaters. If it adds to your electricity bill, I'm happy to contribute there, too. I wonder if you've found someone there, a companion. I hope you'd contact your brother for help if you wouldn't contact me.

I make my way across the terminal. It takes a long time, but at last I find them, Trish and my father, sitting side by side in soft red chairs, surrounded by the historical exhibit Trish mentioned in her text message. Flights are departing regularly now, but there have also been a lot of cancellations, and people are trying to get on new flights, and this has created a specific kind of mayhem that is equal parts confusion, joy, resentment, rage, incredulity, and Schadenfreude. I'm starting to feel tiny panic attacks. I'm starting to feel that I simply cannot wait any longer. I am starting to feel that waiting is impossible, that it could cause death. I have bought myself and my father a handful of magazines—news and science and so forth—but I am too fatigued, too distracted by fatigue and hunger and nausea, to read. I don't feel up to conversation, either. I have a lot of music on my phone, and somewhere I have headphones, but I can't think of anything I want to listen to. I could not possibly work, or even think about work. My father looks like he could wait awhile longer—he looks like somebody who is starting to not want to leave. There are several red chairs around them. The chairs are situated in pairs, and some pairs are back-to-back, and some are side-to-side. Trish is talking. My father has his arms crossed and his head down, and he nods every now and again, as he does when he is, or when he wants you to think he is, listening. The space they have found is a large oval surrounded by high glass walls and a glass ceiling. At the very center are the chairs, the arrangement of which seems to want to replicate the irregularity of real contemplation—so that travelers, I guess, can properly think about whatever is being exhibited. Around the chairs is the oval arrangement of panels, very much like, or exactly like, the obelisks that contain advertisements throughout the rest of the terminal. From somewhere, classical music is playing. Beyond the space is the tunnel to the gates that many of the US and other long-haul flights depart from. There aren't many facilities beyond the tunnel. Once the gate is announced, I presume we'll go, we'll wait the last hour or two at the gate, we'll never see this part of Munich Airport again.

I stop in front of Trish and my father. They barely look up. Maybe they saw me coming. I've interrupted them, and I cause a prolonged and uncomfortable silence, until my father finally says, My God, you're wearing sunglasses. While he says this, he has to hold his hand above his eyes to shade them from the light, and squint. I ran into an old acquaintance from London, I say.

You feeling better? my father asks.

A bit, I say.

Who was the acquaintance?

A sort of ex-husband of a woman who was friends with my ex, I say.

Complicated, says my father.

My father does not look well, now that I see him close up. He is perspiring, and he has no color at all. Trish looks tired. My father is slightly swallowed by his chair, but Trish commands hers.

You took a long time to get here, my father says.

It's turned crazy, I say. You don't want to go where I came from.

Did you eat? asks Trish.

I had a little something. Am I still green?

A little, she says.

I look at my father and say, You don't look great, either, have you eaten?

I think I have to go to the bathroom, he says.

He tries to get up. My legs, he says. Trish stands and reaches out to him. I say, I've got him.

I've got him, she says. She takes his hand in one hand. He grasps her shoulder, and she steadies his arm. My legs, he says, I can hardly move them. You need to eat something, she says. Maybe, he says. Come on, she says. I can take him, I say. Could you watch my bag? she says. I sit in the seat my father has been occupying. Trish's bag occupies the seat next to me. I can walk now, says my father. Trish lets him go, but when he wobbles a little bit, she gently takes his elbow in her hand and escorts him away. They move at a slow pace, a very slow pace, a shuffle, and my father is unusually stiff. I think I know what the stiffness is about, but I do not want to think about it, I don't have the constitution for it. But trying not to think about it becomes a kind of metaphor for what it actually, most likely, is, and I suddenly grow hot, I am boiling. The light turns sickly. I start to shake. My mouth starts to water. A sickness that feels a little like nostalgia sets in. Then I begin to see the words I am thinking, individual words, and they become repulsive. A word like blue becomes repulsive. A word like airport. Their existence is depressing. I think about listening to music—surely music is the escape, but the sheer amount of new words I would have to think in order to find my headphones is too daunting, and anyway music has its own constraints, and then I realize how many words it has taken to think all that I have just been thinking. I try to count down from five, out loud, like they tell women giving birth to do. But out loud the words are even more repulsive. Then it occurs to me that I am totally contained, that I am right now utterly contained in a medium of symbols with functions or malfunctions, and no amount of rhetorical hyperactivity or adornment will release me, and there is also no language only I can understand—there is no privacy in which to hide. Now I am going to throw up. Once the mouth starts watering, really that's it. It's inevitable. A sense of peace accompanies the surrender. I throw the magazines out of the bag and stick my face in it and vomit. The bread comes up. Then I retch about ten times, but nothing comes out. Then I sip from a bottle of water, gargle, and spit the water into the bag. Then I tie the bag up. People have turned to stare at me. They wait until they are satisfied I'm finished, and turn back around. I can vomit very quietly, and be still. Poor Dad, I think, because I am past the pain now, and I feel wonderful. I feel like I could float. I feel like I've been swimming outdoors. There is something strange about the pain you go through from not eating, a pain that is everywhere in your body, so that when you pass through it, life feels unreal for a moment. Trish and my father have almost reached the restroom. My father is walking on his own. Trish watches him enter, waits for a moment, and begins to head back to me. She gives me an understated thumbs-up.