The Kingdom of Ohio (35 page)

“Are you ready?” he asks.

“I am,” she says, pressing herself against him.

He draws a breath and strikes the match, touching it to the fuse. As the cloth begins to smolder they regard each other in the brief, flickering brightness.

The rumble of falling rock.

And a moment later, the world explodes in fire and light.

THE RETURN

SUMMER IS IN ITS LAST DYING PAINS WHEN THE AIRPLANE TOUCHES down at my destination. After retrieving my luggage I stand in line at the taxi stand, sweating in the humid air beneath a low belly of gray clouds that hangs overhead, pregnant with the threat of thunderstorms. Finally I clamber into a foul-smelling yellow minivan and give the driver directions to my hotel, then collapse against the sticky vinyl of the seat, exhausted, to watch the smokestacks and weed-filled parking lots pass outside.

The hotel is a tall cinder-block cube, nearly identical to the buildings on either side. When I check in, using my new passport, my room is similarly featureless: the white-walled space, the molded plastic ashtray on the bedside table, the dingy telephone and the blank face of the television, all feel interchangeable with thousands of other rooms in dozens of other cities. Lying on the stained sheets and trying to ignore the shooting pains in my chest, I stare up at the ceiling and think of how, in this place, I could be anyone, anywhere.

Strange how it's only the most intangible of things, the battered sheaf of my memories, that sets me apart from all the previous occupants of this room.

Closing my eyes, I remember the terror and dislocation that I'd felt during those first days, after waking to find myself on a beach I had never seen before, wet with the surf of a foreign ocean. Then, looking around the dark shore, lit in the distance by the glimmer of countless electric lights, I was struck by the thought that I had died and wandered into some strange heaven.

It was only after a stranger told me that the ocean was called the Pacific, and that the year was 1954, that I began to guess what might have happened. How the blast in the subway tunnels must have transported me, in the same way it had hurled you from the Ohio of your childhood into the New York where we'd met. Either that, or I had simply lost my mind.

The first thing I did, of course, was start looking for you. Sleeping on park benches, bewildered and struggling to comprehend my surroundings—the buzzing helicopters and gleaming superhighways—I searched for you. At any moment, I expected, I'd find you waiting for me. Together, I told myself, we would make sense of what had happened and set things right, or simply begin a new life together. It was nearly a year before the social workers found me living as a vagrant and began their project of rehabilitation, and before I admitted to myself that you weren't going to appear around the next corner.

I found a job washing dishes at a restaurant (the only place that would hire me without proper papers—since, as far as the state was concerned, I was dead) and took a room in a boardinghouse. I spent my mornings before work reading the newspapers and trying to understand the new world in which I found myself. And as soon as I could afford the ticket, I boarded a cross-country bus for New York.

I lived there for eight months, working odd jobs and walking and rewalking the streets we had passed down together. The Morgan mansion was a museum now, I discovered, and the tenement where Paolo lived had been demolished decades ago, replaced by a row of smart townhouses. Everyone I had known was dead or disappeared. And again, you were nowhere to be found. Finally, I rode the bus back to California—which wasn't home but where, at least, my heart didn't break at the sight of every half-remembered boulevard and building.

Two years later, I visited Toledo. Amid the factories and slums, I searched for some hint of the kingdom you once told me about. Picturing you there as a little girl, in scattered places—while looking up at the old oak trees in a park or the crumbling façade of a warehouse near the lake—I sometimes imagined that I felt a flicker of the history you had described. But nowhere did I find any hint of your living presence.

Now, lying on the hotel bed, I remember this: standing beside an empty factory in Ohio, amid the fast-food litter and used condoms, looking out at the blue surface of Lake Erie. Imagining that once, maybe, you had stood in this same spot, contemplating the same horizon . . .

 

 

When I wake up on the morning after my arrival in New York, I discover that I've mistakenly taken someone else's luggage from the airport. Enormous brassieres and jogging clothes fill the space where my folded shirt and trousers should be. Pulling on the gray suit that I'd worn the day before, and borrowing a (hopefully) clean pair of athletic socks from the suitcase, I stop at the deli next door to the hotel for a cup of coffee before starting through the clamor of the streets.

It's been more than twenty years now since the last time I was in New York, and at first the experience is overwhelming. It's not just the traffic, or the noise, or the endless towers of glass and steel (in fact, all of these things are far less chaotic than the Manhattan I remember, although hugely magnified in scale)—instead, it's simply the way that everything here is so
fast
. As I walk down Broadway, leaning on my cane, stylish young men and women jostle past on either side, making me feel like I'm moving through another, slower world that is superimposed over my present surroundings: an indistinct metropolis of memory, its landmarks the settings that once framed our time together and your face.

It takes me until early afternoon to make my way through the maelstrom of Times Square and past the sleek boutiques of SoHo (where Tesla's laboratory stood until it burned down in 1904), to Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan. There, finally, I let myself collapse onto a bench, trying to ignore the unsteady hammering of my heart and the ache in my hips.

Relatively speaking, it's quiet here. Along the margins of the park vendors sell postcards and T-shirts to the strolling crowd of tourists. A breeze kicks up small, choppy waves on the surface of the bay. The clouds have cleared overnight and the sky is a high, pale blue overhead. In the distance I can make out the warehouses of Brooklyn and, farther out yet, a lonely weather-battered woman, her arm raised in a gesture of defiance and hope, silhouetted against the horizon of the Atlantic.

The expanse of water, the shabby trees and park grass, the white noise of the city. A few hopeful pigeons gather briefly around me, then disperse as they realize no crumbs are forthcoming.

I close my eyes, hoping for some kind of clarity.

 

 

During my years in Los Angeles, in your absence, our time together became more and more like a dream. Even while your memory haunted me, and while I continued to scan the sidewalks for your face, I started to believe that maybe I had invented the whole thing and simply convinced myself it was real.

Searching for some kind of certainty, I became a student of the past. I enrolled in community college courses and started to read obsessively: most of all I read Byron and Dante, the poets you had loved, and history books. I spent my nights after work hunched over library texts, slowly making sense of the last six decades and hoping to find clues about what happened to the world I remembered—and (most of all) about what happened to you.

Some of the answers were easy to find. I learned how Morgan died like a king, lonely and surrounded by admirers, while Tesla's last days were spent hungry and penniless in a fleabag hotel room. Absence itself provided other hints: the terrifying repercussions of time travel, which you had feared so much, were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the forward march of history continued just as inevitably (and perhaps more horribly, with the two World Wars, Vietnam, and the rest) as ever before. So in this sense, at least, it seemed that we had succeeded (at least, if I hadn't made the whole thing up). But despite my efforts, the crucial things—the facts of your life, and of our time together—eluded me.

Oh, I found a few scattered bits of evidence: the details about a young man named Peter Force, who was born on the frontier and moved to New York, emerged after months of searching, even if I had no way of proving their connection to my present self. In occasional brief footnotes I'd find some mention of the Toledo family and the Kingdom of Ohio, references to books long out of print, or dry asides based on rumors and hearsay. But beyond this, either the records didn't exist—or in the vastness of all the words ever written, the traces of our passage were too insignificant for me to see.

Gradually, after each year of failure, the moments I remembered started to seem like a kind of fairy tale: an imperfectly recalled story that still shaped my days, but which I couldn't really believe. And eventually, between the demands of the world, the arguments of common sense, and the weight of uncertainty, I decided that the only thing I could do was to try to forget.

So I tried. By that time I had a new identity, a regular job, and an apartment of my own. I bought a pair of acid-washed jeans and a denim jacket (this was in the 1980s), signed up for a dating service, and started listening to popular music—Michael Jackson, Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News.

It didn't work. Despite my efforts, this newly invented version of myself felt like an awkward disguise. Most of the time I managed to hide my sense of unease, and the women I met for dinner and a movie seemed unaware that it was just a façade. But it was a futile attempt. Some part of me understood this from the beginning—in the same way that, remembering your face, I knew that I would not fall in love, in that way, again.

And in the end, I gave up trying to find a home in the present. (Except, that's not quite right: what I really mean is that I gave up trying to imagine a place for myself in the future. After all, if we strive in the present it's for the sake of some landscape we yearn to someday reach, a destination I could no longer imagine.) That was when I opened the antiques store, which I intended to be my refuge from the world. I reduced my existence to the morning bus ride to work and the evening ride home, the television, and the microwave. Occasional customers and trips to the grocery store. Sitting in the park and watching the sun sink over the Pacific Ocean. A modest life, fenced with careful oblivion.

Until one day, I found your photograph—the picture Paolo had taken of us sitting in the Suicide Hall with Tesla—and everything changed.

It was all real. At that moment, looking down at the image, I understood that everything I had denied, everything that I'd made myself ignore and forget—all of it had been true. This was the realization that left me sobbing and helpless in the antiques store. All these things returning like a flood, and with them, an abrupt, desperate urgency.

Everything had changed—but still, at the same time, my situation remained stubbornly the same. It was true that, despite my doubts and despair, I had never completely given up looking for you. After all, how could I? My memories of you, and our time together, were the things that defined me: I could not stop searching for you any more than I could forget to breathe. But despite this, the facts were still facts. I was still an old man, living alone in Los Angeles. You were still gone, and I still knew nothing more than before about what had happened to you.

So finally, because I couldn't think of anything else to do, I started to write.

 

 

Now, sitting in Battery Park, I remember the first time I saw you near this river: that cold afternoon, a century ago. The gray clouds blanketing the sky and the dark mirror of the current, the foghorns of barges and the leafless trees. How you fell, and for no clear reason I decided to help. The lines of your face against the monochrome winter world. Pale skin, dark curling hair, a shabby antique dress. My surprise, and the distance in your eyes: two strangers thrown together, briefly facing each other in the endless rush of days.

I shake my head, blinking the present back into focus. I could spend (and have spent) days wandering through these memories, but that's not why I came here.

So why did I come to New York?

When I bought the airplane ticket I told myself that I was returning here to search for you one last time, equipped with the results of my studies and the urgency of my failing heart. But writing these pages, some part of me has always understood that my recollections might be mistaken and that, in the end, my searching hasn't really answered anything. Heaven only knows, for that matter, whether the Kingdom of Ohio ever existed as you described it to me, or as I've tried to piece it together.

Although I've tormented myself for years with the need for some clear truth about what happened to us, and what happened to you, I'm not any closer to certainty than I had been at the beginning. And maybe, I tell myself, that's simply the way life is: maybe the past is always, ultimately, unrevealed and unknowable. An endless series of “what if” questions whose answers never arrive.

Maybe that's why, if I'm honest with myself, the truth is that I really came to New York to say good-bye. To stand in the place where you might pause and glance up on your way through the vastness of the world, this final point of shared passage between us.

In front of me, small waves on the surface of the Atlantic reflect fragments of late-summer sunlight; behind me the city begins in a gleaming wall of skyscrapers. I think of how we stood here together. And I hope—if such wishes mean anything, or have any power through the barrier of time—that somewhere you have been, or will someday be, happy.

Finally, ignoring the protests of my legs and back, I climb to my feet and start walking again. Past the neoclassical fortresses of Wall Street and the quiet avenues of Tribeca, I make my way north toward Canal Street.