A Paper Son (32 page)

***

“Where the hell have you been?” Lucy asked. She was sitting on the couch next to Eva, holding a beer. The red book sat on the table.

“Have you been writing?” Eva asked. “You took your computer.”

“On the bus,” I said. “And no.”

“What bus?” Lucy said. “Where did you go?”

“Muni,” I said. “Nowhere.”

“What do you mean, ‘nowhere'? You've been gone all day.”

“Why? What time is it?”

“Almost five.”

“That doesn't seem right,” I said.

“Okay,” Lucy said, “you're right. I just made that up, because I enjoy being wrong about easily verifiable facts.” She took a swallow of her beer. “What do you mean, ‘nowhere'?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “My car doesn't work.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“I was hoping maybe you might have been writing,” Eva said.

“I'm aware of that,” I said. I sat down at my desk and started rubbing my temples. The parade of characters still filled my mind; I'd never had a dream so organized, so literal. Even the bus's advertising placards had been accurate—local tax lawyers, the MOMA, Giants season tickets.

“What did you find out about that book?” I asked Lucy.

“It's a cookbook,” she said.

“A cookbook?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tofu recipes.”

“I thought they were poems.”

“They are,” Eva said. “I'm sure of it.”

“Tofu recipes, every page,” Lucy said.

“Says who?” I said.

“Says Chinatown,” she said.

“A tofu cookbook in verse?” I said.

“Maybe we still need your girlfriend,” Lucy said. “Have you called her yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you should.”

“I can't,” I said. “My phone got stolen.”

“You're that scared of her? She seemed pretty friendly to me.”

“It really did get stolen. On the bus. Along with my computer.”

“You're serious?”

“Yes.” I turned to Eva. “So no, no writing.”

Lucy sat forward, her eyes bright. I was reminded of her enthusiasm for theft. “You got mugged? Someone stuck you up? Gun? Knife?”

“I think I fell asleep,” I said.

She sat back, clearly disappointed. “You fell asleep and someone swiped your bag? That's lame.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I'll try to do a better job of getting robbed next time.”

“Good,” she said. “You missed a great opportunity.”

During our exchange, Eva had been making small movements, and now I saw that she'd been gathering her things together. She rose to her feet and pulled on her coat. And then I saw her face. She looked stricken.

“What's wrong?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

She didn't answer.

Lucy looked up and understood something in Eva's face or in her movements and with an almost audible snap her entire demeanor changed. She leapt from the couch. “Eva, wait!” she said. “It's just a coincidence! Give it some more time. You'll see!”

Eva ignored her. She buttoned up her coat, shouldered her bag, and headed toward the door.

“Eva, please!” Lucy said. “You've got to believe me!”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “She'll see what?”

“Fuck, fuck,” Lucy muttered. She took a few lunging steps toward Eva, but she turned her foot on the edge of one of her suitcases, stumbled, and would have fallen had she not been able to catch herself on another stack of luggage. Eva yanked the door open, stepped through, and slammed it closed. “Eva!” Lucy yelled again. We listened to her footfalls recede, and then we listened to the machinery of the elevator carry her away.

***

In the quiet that followed her departure I came to understand that I was on the verge of completely abandoning all attempts to make sense of my life that month. I'd just been robbed and I'd just had a chat with my father, either of which should have been enough to leave me reeling. In the context of these last few weeks, though, they seemed almost mundane. Lucy had come to know things, somehow, and maybe I should have been alight with curiosity about what, and how, and why Eva had just stormed out, and maybe a half-dozen other things somebody with a more level head might have seen fit to question. But fatigue had come over me, and it filled all the spaces that curiosity and ambition might have occupied otherwise. In that thin slice of my life I once considered professional, there were other pressures mounting—all my progress reports would be due in just over forty-eight hours, and I knew I hadn't heard the end of my decision to send one of my students on an errand that had almost killed him. It was now the first of February; I was sure there were January bills still waiting to be paid.

“She's gone,” Lucy said, “and she's not coming back.”

“Maybe that's okay,” I said. “It would be nice if things could get a little simpler around here.”

“That's what you're concerned about right now?” she said. “Simplicity? Are you really that incurious?”

“No,” I said. “I'm plenty curious. But I'm sort of habituated to strangeness at this point. When something normal and explicable happens, that will get my attention.”

“I'm glad you think this is a good time for sarcasm. That's helpful.” She reached for her coat. “Get your shit,” she said. “Let's go.”

“Where?”

“I need to tell you some things. But first I need to get the hell out of this apartment.”

We made our way down to Polk Street and found a table at a café. She ordered a burger and a beer; I ordered an omelet and coffee.

“Bring him a beer, too,” she told our waitress. She turned to me. “You're going to need it,” she said. “Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“What would you say if I told you that several times Eva told me what you were going to write?”

The hair on my arms stood up. “I don't know,” I said.

“Well, she did,” Lucy said. “Several times. Specifics.”

“Like what?”

“Like a lot of things. Like how long they would be in China, and how they got away, down the river. So tell me: How is that possible?”

I shook my head. The lights in the café seemed too bright. I closed my eyes and pressed my palms into them until I saw fireworks.

“Well, unlike you, Eva was actually trying to figure out what was going on here. She had some theories. Do you want to hear them?”

“Enlighten me,” I said.

Two open bottles of beer arrived, along with a cup of coffee. I reached for the beer.

“You know the Theory of the Thieving Historian,” Lucy said, grabbing her own bottle. “She gave that up after about two days and replaced it with the Theory of the Unwitting Psychic Channeler. The names are mine, by the way, thank you very much.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'm neither of those things.”

“Unwitting,” Lucy said. “It means you wouldn't know if you were.”

I took a long gulp and my beer crackled and fizzed in my throat. I suppressed a cough.

“But then, because your stories matched hers so closely, she sharpened that one until it was the Theory of Henry Incarnate.”

“Meaning?”

“You're Henry.”

“That's crazy,” I said.

“Compared to what?” she said.

Our food arrived, sending plumes of steam up into the space between us. She smacked out a blob of ketchup and plunged a bundle of fries into it. I didn't feel like eating. I sucked down more beer and watched my coffee cool.

“At the same time,” she said, chewing now, “she was wondering about herself. So she developed the Alternate Theory of Amnesia and Suggestibility. In that one, she is an amnesiac who remembers nothing about her real past, and somehow she has become convinced that your story is hers, and she's letting you dictate her memories to her.”

“That's crazy, too,” I said.

“You can stop saying that,” Lucy said. “It's all crazy. Especially that one. Because, as I told you, she knew what you were going to write before you wrote it.”

“I don't know about that. So why did she leave?”

“Because your stories ended at the same time,” she said.

“Who said mine ended?”

“Henry disappeared from Angel Island in the summer of 1929,” she said, “and that was the last thing anybody knew about him.”

“Who said mine ended?”

She chewed off a hunk of her burger. “You couldn't write last night,” she said, through a full mouth, while smearing a rivulet of beef juice across her chin with the back of her wrist. “You crossed out all those things in your notebook. And then your laptop vanished.”

“It didn't vanish. It got stolen.”

“Doesn't matter. It's gone. And that was enough to convince her of the truth of her final theory.”

“Which was?”

“The Theory of Utter Delusion.” She washed down her bite with half her beer bottle. “You're a delusion. So am I. You, me, your apartment, your story,
The Barbary Quarterly
. We're all hallucinations, and she's really dead and in purgatory, or in a coma at SF General, or caught in some CIA mind-fuck experiment. So you're really an embodiment of some part of her mind, and since she doesn't know anything in the story beyond Angel Island, you can't either. Sounds crazy as everything else, but I have to admit, she had some pretty compelling arguments.” She hoisted her burger again. “Still feeling habituated?” she said.

Maybe there was an explanation for Eva's predictions about my story. Either she or Lucy had the chronology wrong, and Eva wasn't foretelling the story, but repeating what she'd read, and somewhere in the process the events had been reversed. Or maybe I really wasn't inventing my story after all, but echoing something I'd heard or read too long ago to remember, something that had stayed in some deep part of me and was now resurfacing in disguise. I'd rejected this explanation the first time it came up, but now that the hidden messages in my mazes had appeared, I had to reconsider the possibility.

I finished my beer and as the alcohol worked its way through me the problem turned over in my mind. I saw it not for all its complexity but as a simple pair of options—a pair of options that would keep me up all night. Either Eva wasn't crazy, and there really was some invisible link between my story and Henry's, which would mean I had to accept the orchestrations of forces well beyond my understanding. Or perhaps she was crazy—which would mean I was so entwined in her craziness as to be inseparable from it.

It was immediately after the first bell the next morning when the endmost fifty feet of Russian Hill Elementary School's oblong concrete foundation broke clean off, with a sound like thunder, and slid down a newly created cliffside, carrying upon its back Annabel's disintegrating kindergarten classroom, which it deposited directly beneath a cataract of mud and water.

I had arrived that morning and adjusted my route to pass by the cafeteria, where I hoped to see Annabel and to find out if we were quarreling, but the folding tables and chairs that had served as her temporary classroom furnishings had all been put away and the room was its usual dark echoing space.

I didn't have time to chase her down so I headed to my classroom, settled in, and commenced my Monday.

“It's day twenty-eight now,” Kevin said to me upon making his entrance that morning. “Four weeks, in other words. It's a good thing Barney is an expert scuba diver, because his doghouse is underwater now.”

“No it isn't,” Eliza said, “and you shouldn't joke about it. This is a real disaster with real people getting hurt.”

Kevin shook his head sadly. “I don't know what you have against Barney. He's never done anything to anybody, except for when he was in the army, and that was for your freedom.” He turned back to me. “Hey Mr. Long, is Atlantis real?” he said.

“No,” said Eliza. “It's make-believe.”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's the sort of thing that's hard to disprove.”

“What does that mean?” he said.

“It means you never know,” I said.

“That's not what that means,” Eliza said.

And then the bell rang, and then came the boom and the crack, and then a sound like we were standing atop a breaking dam, and then a sudden crash that did not end but became a long series of smaller crashes. The floor seemed somehow loose beneath my feet for a second, and then my chair separated from my desk, rolled across the floor, and bumped into the cabinets. The kids froze, their eyes wide. The overhead lights flickered twice, and then a third time, and then went out. In the distance on the far edge of the playground I could see that the hill was the wrong color, the wrong shape.

“Under your desks!” I yelled. As Californians we were all well drilled in earthquake procedures, and within a few seconds my students had disappeared beneath their makeshift shelters. I bolted for the door, shouting at my students to stay put. Chaos had risen in the darkened classrooms I ran past; several people were shouting and I could hear crying. I slammed through the doors at the hallway's end and the storm broke over me. I shielded my eyes from the water but saw nothing unusual yet. I darted through the next hallway and burst through the door that should have taken me to the end of campus and Annabel's classroom.

It was gone, and so was the earth that should have been beneath it. My vision went gray, and then red, as though blood was flooding across the surface of my eyeballs, and then just as quickly my eyes cleared and I saw everything. The foundation had snapped and like a raft going over a waterfall, it had tilted until it was almost entirely on end, and then carried her classroom some dozen feet down the hill, where both had lodged, half-buried in mud. From unseen conduits in the hillside torrents of brown water gushed, falling onto the room and plunging in through its broken windows and open doorway.