The Great Perhaps (29 page)

O
N
F
RIDAY MORNING, JUST PAST SIX A.M., THE RETIREMENT
home is mostly quiet. Some of the unlucky residents are wandering the halls murmuring to themselves, while the rest of the unfortunate congregate in the recreation room to watch an assortment of morning game shows. Henry Casper slips out of his red robe, pulls on the jacket of the frayed black suit, then the pants, working the tie over the collar of his white pajamas. When he is finished dressing, he wheels himself over to the radiator in the corner of his room, and reaches one thin hand behind the dirty metal pipes. After a moment, his pale fingers find what he is searching for—a small white paper flower—the only object that seemed too important to discard. Gone are all the photos, the old letters, all of his aeronautical drawings. The rest of his memories are filed in his top bureau drawer in separate envelopes by date and year. Henry gently cups the paper flower in his hand, looking down at its intricate folds, then slips it into the inner pocket of his suit coat, deciding he will take this final memento with him to Japan. When nothing else remains, when he has finished gathering what’s left of his courage, when he is all but ready to vanish, he wheels himself across the tiny room and finds his silver radio on top of his bureau, which he carefully places in his lap. Pushing himself across the hall, he places the radio beside Mr. Bradley’s bed, nodding to the frail-looking man, whose thin eyebrows rise, acknowledging this thoughtful gift. Then Henry is off. He turns the wheelchair around, glances at his black digital watch, which now reads 6:34 a.m., and begins rolling himself as quickly as he can down the long, tiled hall. By then he has become completely invisible.

B
EFORE THE DAY NURSE
at the front desk understands what is happening, before Jeff the orderly, pushing the metal food racks through the glass doors, can turn and appreciate the velocity at which Mr. Casper is now traveling, Henry’s left wheel screams loudly as he skids to a stop near the door. This is followed by the tremendous clatter of Henry ramming himself as hard as he can against the meal trays, knocking the metal rack on its side, pre-warmed breakfasts spilling everywhere, leaving the glass security doors wide open. Without any trepidation this time, Henry wheels himself into the closest elevator, presses the
Door Close
button with a grave authority, then salutes once to the day nurse who is running around from behind the front desk. Only a few seconds later, Henry is wheeling himself rapidly through the lobby. He sees the thick-necked security guard near the front door holding the yellow telephone to his ear—the guard having just been alerted. Henry cuts left, passing unobserved down the side corridor, pulling himself through a pair of unlocked double doors, speeding past the kitchen and the laundry, where at the end of what seems like an endless hallway there is a sudden explosion of daylight.

O
NCE HE IS THROUGH
the service doors, once he has wheeled himself down the narrow alley, he is as good as gone, stopping for a moment at an unmarked corner, raising his right hand to hail a cab. The cabbie is unfamiliar with English, preferring, like Henry, the gravity of silence. Once he is safely installed in the backseat of the cab, once his wheelchair has been properly folded and shoved inside the trunk and the taxicab is in motion, the cabdriver glances in the rearview mirror, asking for a destination in a thick Eastern European accent. Henry, scrambling among the pockets of his black suit jacket, finds a small slip of paper, then hands it through the narrow slot of the divider made of bulletproof glass. The cabbie glances at it, puzzled for a second, and then nods. What Henry has drawn is a sketch he has made hundreds and hundreds of times: an uncomplicated form, one long cylinder with two wings and a raised tail—the simple, solemn shape of an airplane.

T
HE ICE IS TOO THIN TO CROSS.
I
T IS LATE SPRING
of 1630, when naval officer Jean Caspar, a third-class officer aboard a French vessel from the colonial
Compagnie des Marchands
, decides to shoot himself in the head.

Lost in search of a new trade route through the uncharted Arctic, the vessel ran aground nearly eight months ago on a fierce peninsula of ice. Now a storm cloud looms lazily above the lopsided mainmast as Jean stares up into the gray sky and howls, the sound echoing infinitely in the empty northern expanse. He treads along the ice-strewn deck, following an improvised system of ropes; the hull of the ship has been split into numerous parts, and so requires the curious to cross back and forth, from bow to stern, starboard to port, using several intertwined lines of snow-covered hemp. Following the ropes down a darkened passage, he finds himself alone in the main storeroom beneath the deck. Here a number of wooden crates have been hastily torn apart, some carrying glittering crystal tea sets, others glowing with magnificent silver serving plates, while the rest of the cases are now pyramids of warped and broken timber. The provisions themselves are long gone.

S
TOPPING ONLY ONCE
on Allumette Island to trade with the Algonquins, the officers and seamen traveled north and soon discovered that they were unprepared for the desperate climate and its terrible weather, and one by one they began to die. Jean Caspar, standing there in the vacant storeroom, is the last man alive on the vessel, a cruel joke none of the other sailors would have enjoyed. For it is Jean Caspar, with his failing liver—congenitally malformed, ineffective, responsible for Jean’s bright yellow skin tone and strange ammoniac odor—who ought to have been the first one dead; it ought to be his body that is now frozen in the makeshift mausoleum in the second storeroom.

But the first to go was Captain Louis Nicollet. Captain Nicollet had insisted on toting the crates of expensive tea sets and serving plates to swap with the Chinese and Indians, instead of stowing extra provisions. Jean Caspar did not argue with this poor decision, for he believed—in his spirit and bones—that it would be through the sole deployment of beauty—with the exchange of their superior French silver, their polished gold carafes, their spectacularly handsome jewelry—that the French would soon take command of the rest of the globe.
To be a king, one must wear a cape and gold crown
, Jean reasoned.
It must be the same the world over. In these primitive places, in these small worlds of sadness and dirt, there must be a tireless hunger for something beautiful, something beyond their miserably common lives. As soon as these lost souls learn the exquisiteness of the French language, of our poetry, song, and dance, the planet will be a much more enlightened place. Beauty, indescribable beauty, will conquer them all.

Unaccustomed to such drastic cold, however, unable to survive on such notions of pomp and beauty, the captain froze to death while setting up a croquet set on the flat isle of snow surrounding the ice-locked ship. Several other sailors soon followed, their bodies, one by one, filling the secondary storeroom.

Jean Caspar, nearly fifty years old, watched able-bodied seaman after able-bodied seaman succumb to the deadly, unfamiliar frost. The remaining officers all took sick and then died, leaving the inexperienced, cowardly Jean in charge. Instead of directing the rest of the survivors to forge ahead or to search for safer ground, terrified of both the native Inuits and the strange mountains of ice looming in the distance, Jean Caspar gave no orders, and barricaded himself within the captain’s empty quarters, where he decided to devote the rest of his time to silent prayer. There he hid, examining the captain’s collection of antique rosaries, pleading with these exquisite icons for salvation. The other shipmen, distraught, marked with the black mouths and bruised skin of scurvy, soon turned to barbarism, killing each other in a matter of days. Jean Caspar, thinking of his lovely wife Iris and his two daughters back home in Avignon, listened with terror to the howls and cries from beyond the heavy door of the captain’s cabin. Several gunshots, the sounds of flesh upon flesh, a scream for mercy—all echoed within the strange whiteness of those empty spring nights.

Within a few days, it has all grown very silent. Jean, glancing up from the tent of his folded hands, stands, pulls on his cap and decides it is in the best interests of the ship, the crew, and himself to take a look.

Quietly shifting the captain’s heavy armoire from its place in front of the door, holding the captain’s flintlock pistol in his hand, Jean Caspar follows the rope through the abandoned ship, searching for life. There is none. Two men, Baudin and Monod, lie beside one another, their necks split, blood frozen like a thousand pennies surrounding their heads.
Rich men
, Jean thinks gravely. He steps slowly over their corpses and finds Chardin with his right hand missing, having bled to death, lying near the foremast. The last, Isidore Duperrey, a bright-eyed boy of nineteen or twenty, has been stabbed several times in the chest. In his frozen grip there is a crucifix, the wooden cross split from the wretched cold. Jean places his hands against the young man’s eyes to gently lower his lids. He would like to grant him the kind of peace that he, as an inexperienced and cowardly captain, could not offer the young sailor in life, but the skin is too cold and will not give. Death and this awful clime deny the guilt-stricken officer the chance to make a final gesture of apology. It is this particular insult that forces Jean Caspar to do what he has already been planning, not yet mentioned in any of his silent prayers. Like some of his men, he will meet his end by his own hand, with the quick and surgical certainty of lead.

Fearing that the Inuits will do something savage to him when they discover his body, Jean decides to climb up the splintered mainmast, hoisting himself up to the lookout’s perch. He surveys the empty wasteland of the north once more, before he closes his eyes and asks for one final forgiveness. He puts the captain’s pistol to his right ear and fires one time.

Before the lead shot makes a decisive rearrangement to the interior cavity of Jean Caspar’s skull, the cowardly officer imagines this: a great, singularly luminous cloud, rising from the distant mist, moving with such force that it must be directed by providence. The cloud glows with a luminous silver sheen. Jean Caspar, having already pulled the trigger, the lead having not yet made its way through the quiet mass of his brain, stares at this cloud and, at once, realizes he is in the presence of some great, unknowable entity. There are a thousand questions he would like to ask it, all the puzzles that arise over the course of the life of a man, and yet, with the pistol forced against his right ear, the shot already traveling up the barrel, he knows it is too late. He does not regret the great silence, however. For as the magnificent cloud hangs above him, its contours drawing dark lines of shadow upon his face, he realizes the wondrous brilliance of so many possibilities, of so many questions never to be answered, a world of infinite probabilities, of infinite promise. Jean has the harrowing, joyous excitement of what a supplicant must feel upon first meeting God: soon his brain is filled with a new, astounding, inexpressible glow. It is exactly as he always imagined it: absolute, unadulterated beauty. And then the cloud fades, vanishing into unfurling mist, a vaporous haze. Now a second cloud forms around Jean’s head, its fog filling his mouth and ears and throat. It may be the gun smoke. In that moment, then, the lead does its appointed duty. The sound of the shot is swallowed by a gust of wind and the shifting of the ship, entrenched in the unending formations of ice. Then there is silence. Then the cloud disappears, drifting elsewhere.

O
N
F
RIDAY MORNING,
J
ONATHAN WAKES UP TO THE
sight of white sheets hanging over his head, then sighs, crawling out from under the makeshift tent. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, checks his watch, then begins to get dressed. It’s just past seven a.m.—and visiting hours at the retirement home begin promptly at eight. After that he has his afternoon class. And then a departmental meeting. Jonathan lurches into the bathroom and washes up. He stares at his face in the mirror with both disappointment and a little disgust, his beard looking like some horrible undersea growth. He opens the medicine cabinet. There, on the bottom shelf, is the orange plastic vial of pills. He looks at the label for a few seconds, twists off the white plastic top, and places a single silver pill in the palm of his hand. Today he will not flee from that which is uncomfortable or difficult. Today he is going to try his best. When he is dressed and ready, Jonathan leaves a short note for the girls on the kitchen table:
Went to visit Grandpa, class, then a Meeting at School. Eat some Breakfast, See you Tonight.
He stumbles around the house looking for his car keys, finds them, and staggers into the garage. The garage. The Volvo is still gone. He gazes at the empty gray space for a moment, then crawls into the Peugeot and starts it up. While he is backing his car into the alley, he pauses once more, still imagining the shape of his wife’s missing car, of her behind the wheel, the shape of her mouth, of her eyes, of her face, then slowly he drives off.

A
S
J
ONATHAN PULLS
the Peugeot into the parking lot of the nursing home just past eight o’clock that morning, he can see that there’s been some kind of trouble. A police cruiser is parked out front and, near the entrance, two nurses are arguing with a uniformed policeman. Jonathan tries to hurry past them, but Nurse Rhoda, her large hoop earrings dangling above her pink scrubs, stops him with a frown.

“Your father took off again,” she mutters.

Jonathan is stunned. “No.”

“Uh-huh. And he can stay gone as far as I’m concerned. We were all worried about him. We all thought he was at death’s door.”

“How long ago? When did you notice he was missing?”

“Well, he ran poor Jeff over and then he disappeared. It was about an hour ago, I guess.”

Jonathan makes quick, heartfelt apologies to Rhoda and the rest of the nurses and then runs back to his car. The Peugeot refuses to start. As the engine whines and stutters, Jonathan closes his eyes and murmurs, “Don’t do this to me, please don’t do this to me,” then tries the ignition once more. The engine finally gives, spinning dully to life, and Jonathan speeds out of the parking lot, hurtling down the boulevard as fast as he can, flying toward the expressway.

O’H
ARE
I
NTERNATIONAL
A
IRPORT
looks like a city on the moon, full of glossy metal and plastic buildings; the structures extend out in odd, cubist directions and at unusual angles. It also looks a lot like a maze. Jonathan searches for the short-term parking lot, and when he is unable to find it, he pulls up in front of one of the departure terminals, putting on his blinkers, and hurries from the vehicle. There is no way to know what airline his father might try and take. He could be at any one of the other terminals, and even running as fast as he can, it might take hours to find the right one. And by then his father might be gone. Jonathan pauses, trying to breathe. The busy passengers rush all about him pulling their baggage, signs and electronic monitors glow in his periphery, people kiss hello or goodbye, children cry.
Who are all these people and how can it be that they are all alive on this planet at the same time?
Jonathan thinks, before turning back to retrace his own steps.
Okay, where is he? Where would he be?
Jonathan turns once more and hurries up to the next available ticket agent. He smiles at the dark-haired woman, wiping a sweaty palm against his forehead.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“I’m looking for my father. I’m afraid he might be lost.”

“Do you want me to contact security?”

“I don’t know. I’d like to try and find him myself first. But maybe we should.”

“Sir? Would you like me to contact security?”

Jonathan turns, shaking his head, following his steps back outside again. He stops and looks over at his car: the windshield has already been decorated with two bright orange parking tickets.

“Okay, Dad, where are you? Where did you go?”

And just then Jonathan remembers his father’s last escape attempt: Japan. He rushes back inside, up to the same service counter, and asks the same ticket agent what’s the next flight from Chicago to Japan.

“There’s one at around noon, and another this evening.”

“Nothing before that on any other airline? Can you please check that?”

“Just a moment,” she says, typing the computer keys thoughtfully.

“There’s one leaving in half an hour from United.”

“Where’s that?”

“The International Terminal. Terminal Five.”

“Where am I?”

“Terminal Three.”

“Okay, how do I get to the International Terminal?”

“You can walk or take the tram.”

“Which way is it?”

The ticket agent smiles, then points outside, to her left. Jonathan returns the woman’s smile, shakes her hand, then flies off, his lungs on fire, his whole body trembling.

A
T THE
I
NTERNATIONAL
T
ERMINAL,
Jonathan tries to explain to one of the security guards the specifics of his father’s situation, but without a ticket he is not permitted anywhere beyond the lobby. Jonathan tries to speak with another security guard but he, too, only reiterates the simple rule: no ticket, no entrance beyond this point. In a frenzy, Jonathan hurries over to the ticket counter, checking his watch every few minutes, then purchases a one-way ticket from Chicago O’Hare ORD to Tokyo, Japan TYO for $1,827.10. He puts it on his credit card and hopes, somehow, some way, it will be refundable, knowing in his heart that it will not. Because he is traveling alone, without any baggage, with a one-way ticket, because he is sweating profusely, the security officers take him aside to search him more thoroughly, and when he has finally passed this final hurdle, Jonathan is almost completely out of breath. He glances down at his ticket, searching for the gate number, M15, then he limps toward it, trying to breathe slowly, his face sweaty, his knees weak. He feels like he might faint at any moment, the fluorescent lights swimming all around his head. “Okay, just a few more gates,” he whispers to himself. “Just three more, two more, one more, there, there,” he gasps, hurrying over to gate M15.

But he does not see his father in the crowd. Jonathan lets out a sigh and stumbles into one of the uncomfortable gray plastic chairs, dropping his face into his hands. Overhead, the electronic voices repeat dizzying information about changed flights and gates, and Jonathan, having failed, thinks he might begin to sob. By now he realizes he will not make his afternoon class. It will be the third time he has canceled this semester. When Jonathan lowers his hand from his eyes, fighting back the accumulated tears of failure after failure, he spots an old man in a wheelchair, staring out the large square window at the enormous airplanes parked just beyond the glass, the sounds of their engines a constant drone, a kind of song maybe, the old man not staring off at the airplanes themselves so much as their shapes, the ideas they suggest, dreaming of what they might somehow become.

Jonathan rises, catching a few small tears with the corner of his sleeve, then steps beside his father. He places one hand on the old man’s shoulder, startling him for a moment. As his father turns, wheeling the chair around, Jonathan sees his expression isn’t one of dismay, of disappointment, it’s a look of surprise, of sudden, pleasant joy.

“Dad? What are you doing here? You scared us half to death.”

His father frowns, then smiles, clutching his son’s hand.

“I can’t let you get on that airplane, Dad. I wish I could, I wish we could let you go, but we can’t. You know we can’t.”

His father does not stop smiling, still grasping at his son’s hand.

“Dad. Why do you keep doing this to us, Dad?”

Jonathan’s father squeezes his hand, then points at Jonathan’s heart, then at his own, suggesting something Jonathan can’t even begin to guess.

“What? What are you telling me, Dad?”

His father repeats the gesture, tapping Jonathan’s chest, then his own, pointing out the window at the open blue sky.

“What?”

He repeats the same gesture once more, very slowly.

“You want me to go with you?” Jonathan whispers.

His father nods, proud that this most secret of messages finally makes sense.

“I can’t do that, Dad. I can’t. I have the girls, and Madeline is still gone, and there’s work. I wish I could, I really do, Dad, but I can’t. Okay? Okay. Come on, let’s go see if they towed my car yet. Maybe I can find a pay phone to call the nursing home and let them know you’re all right. Okay, come on, Dad, let’s go.”

But his father doesn’t respond; he only turns to stare off at the planes taxiing back and forth outside.

“Dad. We have to go.”

His father does not make a movement or a sound.

“You’re not going to talk to me? You’re not going to answer me?”

His father refuses to look at him now, his bright eyes on the curves and lines of the mammoth airplanes outside.

“Dad, please, say something.”

But there is only silence, silence and the noise of a thousand people hurrying all around them.

“Dad. Say something. Tell me I’m an awful son, I don’t care. Just say something.”

Only silence, only the myriad human sounds of the airport.

“Dad? Dad, why do you want to make this hard for everybody? It’s hard enough…I mean, with what’s been happening in my life, I don’t know why you want to make things so difficult for me. Jesus.” Jonathan looks away and then murmurs, “Come on, Dad, let’s go.”

His father slowly frowns, staring up into his son’s face, quietly realizing the apprehension and pain he has been causing. He reaches out one emaciated hand and gently touches his son’s cheek, then mutters a single word, a single sound, and in speaking it, he hopes to say everything he has been too afraid to murmur, everything he has kept to himself—from the early silences of his long-ago childhood, to the unspoken quiet of their relationship as father and son, all of the shame, all of the loss, of having done nothing worthwhile, of having been part of something horrible, worse than criminal, something brutal and thoughtless and destructive, of having built nothing that mattered, nothing important—and then, seeing his son, he understands he is wrong. What comes out then is hard to hear, inexact, a little weak—the sound of the invention of which he is most proud.

“
Jonathan.
”

Jonathan smiles softly, feeling his father’s shrunken hand against his face. “Dad?”

“Jonathan,” his father repeats, looking up into his son’s face. “Jonathan. Jonathan.” And that is all. Father and son stare at each other for one moment longer, then the son stands, touching his sleeve to something in the corner of his eye. He steps beside his father, gently pushing the wheelchair forward, down the long tile hall, past the food court and magazine stands, out past the lines waiting before security, the word still resonating in the air, its actual meaning imprecise and unimportant now.

O
NE OF THE RAREST
of modern phenomenon then: the Peugeot has not been towed. Jonathan stares at the number of orange tickets it’s accumulated in his absence, a whopping ten altogether. He helps his father into the front seat of the car, folds up the wheelchair and slides it in the back, then turns to make sure his father has buckled himself in.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I wish I hadn’t found you. I really do. But I did. And I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t know where you were. I’m sorry, Dad, I really am.”

But his father does not seem to have heard, his grayish green eyes having gone hard, his face stern, his gaze rapt, staring at the planes taking off and landing. Finally, as they pull back onto the expressway, his father again breaks his vow and quietly whispers, “Thank you for coming to find me.”

O
N THE CAR RIDE
back to the retirement home, both Jonathan and his father are silent. His dad stares out the window at the city moving beside them, the identical-looking houses, trees, cars vanishing as quickly as they appear. Soon they are returning to Hyde Park, soon the familiar University of Chicago campus is in view, then it, too, is gone, and finally, there, in the corner of the windshield, is the bleak-looking rectangle of the South Shore Nursing Home. Jonathan pulls into the parking lot, shuts off the engine, and begins to unbuckle his seat belt. Just then, his father places a weak-looking left hand on his son’s wrist, then slips his right beneath his black suit jacket. From within the suit’s worn lining, his father retrieves a folded piece of paper, carefully placing it in his son’s hands.

“What is this?” Jonathan asks.

His father smiles for a moment, then holds a finger up to own lips and whispers, “Shhhhhh,” before turning to unbuckle the seat belt, not speaking another word.

A
FTER
J
ONATHAN HAS
finished explaining everything to the nurses, when he is done apologizing to the nursing home’s director, when his father is once again installed in the same gloomy, semiprivate room, Jonathan kisses his dad’s forehead once, then rushes off, down the elevator, across the parking lot, and back to his car. He checks his watch: he’s late again. He’ll have to hurry if he’s going to make the one o’clock faculty meeting. Surely they are expecting him to attend. There will be awkward questions and serious reprisals for his having canceled as many classes as he has. Twelve thirty-five p.m. He has just enough time to go home and change and get ready for the end.