The Followed Man
Authors: Thomas Williams
THE
FOLLOWED MAN
“Reality
isn't unoriginal, it's just unknown.”
—
Alberto Giacometti
THOMAS WILLIAMS
CEREMONY OF
LOVE
TOWN BURNING
THE NIGHT OF
TREES
A HIGH NEW
HOUSE
WHIPPLE'S
CASTLE
THE HAIR OF
HAROLD ROUX
TSUGA'S
CHILDREN
THE FOLLOWED
MAN
THE
FOLLOWED MAN
Thomas
Williams
Dzanc
Books
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1978
Thomas Williams
All rights reserved,
except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part
of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written
permission from the publisher.
Published 2015 by Dzanc
Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print
Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13:
978-1-938103-50-6
Cover by Awarding Book
Covers
The characters and
events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons,
living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
For Liz
1.
Luke Carr stood at a window of
his tenth-floor room in the Biltmore. Below him fell the vast
vertical walls of a courtyard, the brown brick walls of the old hotel
cut by dark windows, hundreds of windows similar to his own,
descending many stories to a formal roof garden that was
probably the roof of the mezzanine, though the interior turns of
hall, and an elevator as large as a room that seemed to have turned
as it rose, had confused his sense of direction. The roof garden
below was an ashed-out, moon-dust gray, its stone benches, cement
planters and tiled avenues all empty except for the gathering
acidic fallout of the city's air. Perhaps, decades ago, parties had
been held down there among green plantings, women in light dresses
dancing with young men.
Across amber space, beyond an
avenue he couldn't see, the dome of Grand Central Station, carved
stone, dark yet generous in its elegance, ancient in time and
attitude, formed the other side of this dim old canyon of Manhattan.
An occasional taxi horn rose from the hidden avenue, a sharp
nostalgic accent from a distant, muted, busy roar. Because of his
skewed orientation (what avenue or street was hidden there?) time
itself might have been turned or lost; it might have been thirty
years ago and Luke a child excited by the dignified immensities of
the great city.
But it was not thirty years ago,
and now a man who could make none of the claims of a child stood with
the old-fashioned hotel room behind him, itself as hollow and dim as
the distant past. On the glass-topped bureau stood a bottle of
bourbon. On the luggage bench, opened like jaws, was his
suitcase; next to the bottle of bourbon lay his thin leather
briefcase, and within the briefcase were the oddments of his
profession—newspaper and magazine clippings, mostly
photocopies, a short biographical précis of one of his subjects
prepared for him by the editorial assistants of
Gentleman,
the magazine whose assignment he had taken, a magazine whose
name, assumed forty years before, was inappropriate to its
sophisticated, generally irreverent current attitudes.
The hotel room, this dusted but
dusty enclosure nominally his, protected him from other eyes and at
the same time bared him to his own expectations of himself. He was
alone, a condition he had once desired.
It was six o'clock of a June
evening; a half hour ago he'd got off the airport bus at its stop
across from Grand Central and walked to the hotel. It was a time of
financial depression and the hotel was nearly empty. The old porters,
standing silently in the lobby near the famous clock, had formed in
groups which seemed to have some sort of ranking order, their
uniforms shining with a dull patina similar in tone to that of
their elderly faces.
Now he was alone amid the hum
and drone of the city. He would go down and eat somewhere and then he
would come back and try to read those parts of a book on skyscraper
construction that dealt with the reinforcing and pouring of concrete
floors. Tomorrow, after reporting to
Gentleman
and
meeting the photographer, he would begin his interviews. A month
ago the freshly poured fourth floor of a building that was to be
fifty-seven stories high had collapsed, killing seventeen men,
including a derrick operator whose load of steel I beams jerked
loose from their cable and fell forty stories to the unprotected
street where they killed three more people, squashing a taxicab and
two private automobiles.
Tomorrow he would begin to
interview, and the photographer to photograph, people involved in
death, in all that breaking and crushing. He would listen to their
guilt, their sorrow, see again how all of it would begin to change
because of what he might bring into their lives. Their pictures,
their words, their names in
Gentleman;
on that doubtful
rubric, the only one offered them, they would hang their vanity. And
hang themselves if he would let them.
There was no one in the world to
tell him, or to imply to him by dependency or close relationship,
what he ought to do. It was three minutes after six, the air that
moved into the quiet canyon below him balmy but not hot. He turned
away from the windows and went into the bathroom, its hexagonal floor
tiles gritty under his shoes. The bowl and fittings were large, worn,
white, the tub massive; the faucets, worn through chrome to the
brass, dripped slowly and silently into deltas of sienna stain. In
the mirror his face looked to him a tired thirty-five, though that
buffeted instrument with all its sensory openings had perceived
the world for longer than that. He washed his bland, unmemorable
face, decided he didn't have to shave, and combed his brownish
hair. It was twelve minutes after six.
The phone rang, as he had
expected it to do about now. On his way to it he stopped at the
closet and took a small spiral notebook and a pen from his jacket.
"Hello, Luke?" It was
the Tennessee voice of Martin Troup, the editor in chief of
Gentleman.
Martin sounded worried, tentative, the question
broader than the words.
"Hello, Martin," Luke
said.
"How you doin', Luke?"
"Pretty good."
Martin was silent for a moment.
Then he said, "You get the stuff Annie sent you—the
clippings and all?"
"Yeah, I got 'em."
"I don't know how to say
how sorry I am about what happened to your family. I didn't know when
I called you."
"It's all right. What time
should I show up tomorrow?"
"Around ten all right?"
"Sure. I'll see you then."
"Okay. Say, you doing
anything tonight? You want to come for supper?"
"No, thanks, Martin, but
thanks, anyway. I'm going to read that book you sent and go to bed
early."
"Okay," Martin said.
"Take it easy, now. See you tomorrow."
Luke put down the phone and lay
back on the bed. He felt like a ghost. He was the one who always
returned, bringing alone with him the memories of those who would
never return. He still belonged to another world. Still, after
six months, he could not manage to think of himself as a single
unit. After having a wife and children for nineteen years he did not
have a wife and children, because they were dead.
The thought was like a choke,
his mind suddenly blocked and spasmic. In strobic flashes he saw the
fair faces, in sunlight, of his son and daughter, framed sometimes by
darkness and sometimes by a gray absence of vision. His wife's turns,
angles, hollows of body moved toward him only to fade, only the pale
face left as he tried to determine what her expression meant. These
visions came from his own mind and memory, yet they were so powerful
and uncontrollable they seemed to bear messages from outside. It had
been six months and he could not look at any of their photographs.
The magnitude of his response to their deaths seemed strange to him;
it was nothing he could have foreseen. There were husbands and
fathers who were far more deeply involved with their families than he
had ever been, though he had been responsible enough. It had
hardly bothered him, while they were alive and seemed permanent, that
he was always a little detached, a little cool. Perhaps he
hadn't been. He didn't think they'd thought him cool.
He hadn't flown with them to his
wife's mother's funeral because, he'd said, he had to work. But
he had chosen not to go and the two-engine prop-jet had crashed into
a low, wooded hill and he was alone in places so deep he'd never even
considered them before. He didn't want to name his children or his
wife, to think of the strange solidity of their names, common names:
John Wilson Carr, Grace Lois Carr, Helen Sarah (Benton) Carr.
He had buried his family in
Ohio, in the Benton family plot. He and Helen had never thought of
having a plot; it wasn't the kind of thing they'd ever considered—a
place to put their dead.
Then, after he had returned to
Wellesley and the empty house, his uncle, Shem Carr, died alone in
New Hampshire at the age of eighty-three, a death more mete, more
timely, one that could be pondered without a sudden loss of breath.
When Martin Troup had called
last week he had been half-asleep in his clothes on the living room
couch. That voice from the functioning world had made him look around
and even begin to smell the funk around him. Without Helen's care the
house had seemed to wilt and rot. And then Martin spoke of death,
more death, and how we are so busily and aggressively formulating and
building traps for ourselves. This time twenty people in a second or
two. It was death that had paralyzed him and so, recognizing his
desperation, he had agreed to go where death was, to the abomination
itself, and see if he could face it again.
He got up and took from his
briefcase the book,
Ferroconcrete Construction.
The
coefficients of the thermal expansion of steel and concrete are
nearly the same, therefore the tensile strength of one and the
non-compressibility of the other combine with tremendous
strength. After the concrete sets, that is—a continuing process
depending upon many factors, such as heat, moisture content, air
content, quality of mix, etc. One summer while he was in college,
Luke had worked for a shady contractor and when the owner of the
house whose foundation they were pouring came by, the word was
whispered, "If he asks, tell him it's five to one." The
mixture of gravel and sand to cement was more like ten to one. But
maybe it was not that kind of greed that had caused the skyscraper's
floor to collapse and kill. Haste, error, who knew? It was not his
job to find out why it had happened, but to report its effects and
perhaps to comment upon what Martin Troup had once called New York
City's "edifice complex." Everywhere the old was being
violently torn down and the new and shoddy as violently thrown
up. Those sterile, inefficient glass and metal verticalities.
He put
Ferroconcrete
Construction
down and went to his briefcase, where he found
two letters. The first was postmarked Leah, New Hampshire, March
3—three months ago. It was written in pencil on lined tablet
paper.
Dear Luke, well the snow was just to heavy last month and now I live
in the kitchen but a bunch of God damned busybodies want to burn this
place and send me to the county farm. It does not leak much except in
the pantry but what God damned business is it of theres. If you would
come and tell them I think they would haul off. I am not leaving here
standing up and that is God's own God damned truth.
Sincerely yours
Your Uncle
Shem G. Carr
And Shem hadn't left there
alive. While Luke was in mourning, or whatever his inactive state
might have been called, Shem had died in the kitchen of the old
farmhouse, evidently the only room left that kept out most of the
snow-melt and rain. Phyllis Bateman, the town clerk, had called to
tell him the news. She had his address because he had paid the taxes
on the old place for years. Shem had a World War I pension and some
social security because of the time during the Second World War
when he had worked in the woolen mill. It was enough to keep him, but
he wasn't good at paying taxes, or for anything that wasn't directly
tangible, so Luke had taken care of that—a matter of four
hundred dollars a year on the hundred and sixty acres. The barns
and sheds had all fallen in, the fields had grown up in poplar,
birch, cherry, maple, ash and softwoods. And now the rocky hill farm
was his. He hadn't seen the place in years, hadn't gone to Shem's
funeral, which was conducted by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He had
sent them a check to help pay for it.
