After James (16 page)

All that prevented me from glazing over—scientific or technical language tends to leather my brain—were the irritatingly bolded words, the text version of Durant's full-voiced pronouncements, and the building evidence that he'd made himself open to a kind of lunacy that brought false traces of his daughter. His need to argue for the traces was desperate and sad, and I wondered if his social manner, warm but challenging, was more than just a way to keep his workers on task. In testing me, he kept us both distracted from the possibility that he was irreparably heartbroken.

Upon a stray thought I wondered if Amanda sensed as I did that we might make a beautiful advantageous mutation together.

A breeze reached me but failed to stir the pages in my hand.

Both “Decor”s are nine stanzas of nine lines (they're terrible, pointless poems, I think you'll agree), which makes the fifth line of the fifth stanza the middle line of the poem. And in the middle of this line, in each poem, we find the key.

And, from the second “Decor”:

forget me, Father. Already I've known the one absence I'm imprisoned within is how he put it. To have trouble finding the words makes sense for a casting director and so we are alike, he and the mute. There are no true clichés in this business, he said rotely. Other parts often come open. Auditions are best done on-site. The weather here gets tied up in arteries.

Each middle line is long, eighteen syllables. Extracting the middle word sequences we arrive at

and

Now we do the train move, switching the cars at the point of chiasma and sectioning out the mirroring material to construct the new lines. After extraction and transposition they read:

save me, father. I'm imprisoned

and

forget me, Father. here lost

Was I to enter a whole new order of despair? Or were these accidents of language, products of over-reading? Because I couldn't bear the one possibility—that my daughter was “imprisoned” or “lost”—I chose for weeks to think that I'd imposed the patterns and connections. I know that fragments of language travel on invisible vectors and reproduce as if through binary fission at
incalculable rates. There are rational explanations for what would otherwise seem inexplicable coincidences of this sort within language and outside it. In fact I was researching them on the day that “August” appeared on Three Sheets and cast me into the dark certainty I've lived in since. Somehow, though there'd been a “June” and “July,” I hadn't anticipated a poem whose title was my own name. I quote here only the first stanza.

You let his name slip. I made you describe him. You said a bend in a road, a single blue tie, walls covered with images of gas clouds spooling two hundred light-years high tacked up by this man who long ago walked out of the straw upon his schooling.

Coincidence does not extend this far, Amanda. Her favorite view was at the bend in the road at the crest of a hill that looked over our acreage to the sea. The blue tie was the only one I owned as she was growing up, and she laughed at me whenever I wore it. Deep space photos that I'd tacked up covered the walls of her bedroom. And it's true, a scholarship allowed me to leave the small Nebraska farming town where I grew up.

Imagine my horror at seeing myself. But you can imagine, can't you? I sense the poems reach you, too. I think that you feel something of my loss for seeing what I see. Your distress—it's obvious to me—is a bitter comfort to me, I confess. If a mystery grows large
enough, if there comes a point after which there's no hope of explanation, then our troubles are vaulted to the realm of…not the metaphysical, a dated category I have never accepted…but the omniphysical, what the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss called “the one lasting presence” that might be there at the end of all inquiry, a presence not that surpasseth understanding but that surpasses current understanding and, I admit, even given the exponentially increased pace of intellectual gain, likely always will.

The disappearance of my daughter as a causal event could be brought to hand with enough evidence, but the everlasting condition of her absence will never make sense, not to me. And so, on the good days, the poems at Three Sheets can seem to understand me. Even as they wound, they can seem to be my friend.

Can you see them that way? I ask that you don't let go, don't abandon them out of fear for me. We can encourage each other. We have been made to matter to one another in ways no one else could comprehend.

I'm sorry that the poems have caused you the pain of empathy, but I must tell you that I've come to treasure our like-mindedness. There is no name for this state as it has evolved in me in recent weeks. To me, the closest name is “Amanda.”

And so the letter ended where it began, upon Amanda. Durant was like someone out of Nabokov, afflicted with a referential mania. He'd offered a plea for mercy in the guise
of a pattern analysis, with circumstantial evidence, weak and incoherent. Was his daughter a character in the poems, the “you” being addressed, or was she in fact the voice of them, telling him in code that she was “imprisoned” or “lost” (and which was it?)? Maybe the details in “August” could be fitted to his past, but blue ties and deep space posters aren't uncommon, and the other poems, objectively read, supported none of his imaginings. He had read cleverly and wrongly. It seemed obvious now that he'd wanted Amanda and me in Rome not just the better to guide our work but out of sheer lonely despair.

I tucked the letter into my pocket and sat there, the park and the city resuming around me. Above the trees the very sky seemed material. What I thought was this: my parents are dead, the Londoner is lost to me, Dominic is fading and will soon forget us both. The two people I felt closest to in that moment were Durant and Amanda, and sitting in the olive light of a stone city, I knew them hardly at all.

The rest of the afternoon was free. I wasn't prepared to return to the apartment and risk letting Durant engage me in talk. He read me much better than he read the poems. I walked south toward Piazza di Spagna. The traffic and jostle of Roman streets require of pedestrians an alertness that should have simplified my thoughts—I'd learned too much, too suddenly—but in fact the walking opened an emotion I'd not wanted to confront. I was angry at Durant. It was small of me, I conceded, to be angry at a man carrying a great loss,
but by involving Amanda and me in his troubles he had found a way to prolong his pain and make it more acute, luring us with money into what I could now think of only as a kind of sickness. But guilty anger is not a clarifying feeling. I suppose because I have a northern soul my idea of clarity opens in my mind vast landscapes, reaching to horizons and the most distant geological times, places almost untouched by human event. The true north. And so Rome, historied, cultured and culture-defining, was not likely to afford me the kind of space I needed to see these questions clearly.

Or that's exactly wrong. The clarity of empty vastness was only an idea that didn't hold up to scrutiny. I thought best amid clamour, especially virtual clamour.

Using a street map called up on my phone, I headed south toward the Spanish Steps, looking furtively into the faces of those I passed. How many of these people were like Durant, reconstructing their losses in the shades and surfaces of their days? How many saw in the available light ghosts they knew by name? In a big enough city, a pedestrian city, I sometimes imagine I see the same face over and again, but always a stranger's face, though less a stranger on every encounter. A face strange yet familiar, as if from my other life in a parallel universe. The recurring face in Rome was of a dark-haired, slender man just slightly older than I, maybe in his midthirties. There he was coming down a side street or looking out from a doorway. At a table across the bar, crouched by the tire of a car near Durant's apartment, in a gallery queue. He was usually well dressed, sometimes casually so. On every instance of seeing him I was aware of my
failure
to see, of having grouped
a series of first glances into a type based on a general similarity and so overlooking each distinct feature. It was what everyone did, this lazy way of seeing. It was what poetry should have saved me from.

And yet there he was again entering the Japanese paper shop where I stopped to buy a small notebook and pen. He was half-turned away from me, examining a display of ornate leather blotters and fountain pens. (How could there still be a market in beautiful writing objects?) This time I really looked. Who was he? Or rather, who was this version of him? I held to my guess of his age. He couldn't have been forty but neither did his face hold youth. He wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a mandarin collar (also called a Mao, a Nehru, or a Japanese ((was this coincidence?))). A thick watch with a metal band. No wedding ring. His shoes looked handmade, of the kind that could be cheap in a poor country but very expensive in a place like Italy. The oddest thing about him was his movement, or lack of it. He was still, even facially, as if not only assessing the pens but also intently listening to them. Whatever they communicated, he turned and left the store without even glancing farther inside.