Shadow Man: A Novel (16 page)

“He wore a beret, a white T-shirt, and blue jeans. He was like wire. He held the saxophone slightly away from his chest; he bent forward as if he were bending a lover for a soft kiss in the middle of a slow dance. The music was scratchy, like raspy bubbles, each one distinct, long, floating through the bar like a pack-a-day smoker whispering secrets in the corner. That’s what you said, James, and I laughed and laughed. You could be so full of yourself, so full of words. We stood with our beers and watched him. He never opened his eyes, remember? He just played, eyes closed and bent. You said he sounded like Ben Webster or maybe was it Coleman Hawkins. I didn’t know. I just knew it was beautiful. I had heard jazz on smuggled records back in Poland, but had not seen the intimacy of it. It was erotic.”

“Erotic?”

The lady smiles.

“What, you don’t believe in the jazzman of Budapest?”

She fishes in her bag and steps under a boardwalk light.

“Read this headline:
SAXOPHONE BLOWS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
.

“His name was Boris. He once played French horn in the Hungarian symphony. But jazz was the music he loved. He said he took tunes like ‘Body and Soul’ and turned them into his language, not changing them so much, but ‘edging it’ with his perspective, which he said wasn’t that of a black American but of a Hungarian sick of the way most of his life had been lived behind a wall. He said he riffed misery. He played and drank until dawn, and then left the club to eat eggs and bread at a small café. He blew his sax softly over an espresso. He gave funny names to his songs: ‘Apples
and Apparatchiks,’ ‘Proletariat Moonlight.’ He finished his breakfast and slipped his horn into a case, and walked out the door, a bent man disappearing in the morning fog. As he was leaving, he turned and said: ‘Half a continent changing, believing in magic and Rice Krispies.’”

“What happened to the man?”

“I don’t know, James. He told us he didn’t know how to find ‘the notes to this new life, this freedom.’ That’s what I always found so odd about your job, the journalist. You press so close to people. Get to know them in a compressed instant. You hear their stories, all unfolding like tiny plays. You write and take a piece of them with you, and then they are gone, fading further back in your notebook as new stories are told, listened to, collected. It’s a strange intimacy you journalists have. I was the voice for all those stories, James. I was the translator.”

“Did I write many stories?”

“Thousands.”

“I can’t remember a single one. How can I have written so many words and not remember?”

It is cruel to leave a man this way. The lady tells stories and I try to hold them, attach them to molecular structures, but memory is not there. I move my arm, wiggle my toe in a cold shoe, my brain works, but it can’t summon memory, and all her sentences, I can’t even remember how many she has spoken, they are like words written in white ink, shining for a moment before they disappear. I guess that’s what’s happening, but I can’t say for sure. I can’t say if I’ve been leaning on this boardwalk railing for days, years, or centuries. I like this woman. But I like her only in the instant; after that she’s gone, and then another instant and that’s gone. I want to believe her — but who knows how long this thought will last; it may already have disappeared. I touch her, I see her, I turn her face to the boardwalk light, nothing; only a pretty lady, like an ad in a magazine.

Turn the page, another face, another story, or are they the same face, the same story, page after page, denied recollection? I kick the boardwalk railing. I kick and I kick, and rage wells in me. I want to yell into the night, to scream my name and have my lost self echo back. I’m breathing hard and banging on the railing. I want to fight. I want to hit. I want to strike something to take the anger from me. But my arms get heavy and my breathing turns to weakened gasps, little misshapen puffs of fog in the cold night. I am a spent, useless storm. The lady steps back and then comes toward me, putting her hand to my cheek; it is a warm hand and she rubs my cheek as if she is polishing an ancient genie’s lamp. Have I thought this before? Have I felt this sensation?

“James, it’s okay. Calm down. A bad moment, just a bad passing moment.”

She rubs my cheek. I feel her hand mix with water, smearing it in the cold night. I feel sweat on my back, my brow, but the rage is gone, curled back up, like my memory, in some hidden place.

“How long has it been night?”

“Two or three hours.”

I am Jim. She calls me James. When did Jim become James? When did Jim get spots on the tops of his hands, gray hair on his forearms, wrinkles around his eyes, a crick in his neck? When did he age? What was it like? The body pulling ahead of the mind, leaving the mind behind, like a temple in a jungle. This thought disappears, too. Kurt, in that summer he told me to call him Kurt, one night pulled an abacus from his closet. It was old, with painted wooden beads. He’d had it since he was a kid. He said it was simple and exotic, that you could get to infinity by sliding beads. But I slide through the abyss. I am a broken abacus, beads skittering from side to side, numbers not adding up, infinity out there, or me lost in it. The lady kisses me on the cheek and wraps herself around me and I bend to hold her — I don’t know why — and her mouth slides to
my neck and warms me as the cold blows over my back and through my hair.

“Get a room.”

The lady and I turn.

“Relax, just kidding. Nice evening. A little chilly, but you two seem cozy. Everything okay?”

“Yes, Officer,” says the lady.

“Vacation?”

“Just out of the city for the weekend.”

“That’s good. Got to escape the grind every so often. Best time to be here, now and in the winter. It’s almost here. I like the night shift in winter. Nobody on the beach. Nobody to cuff, no reports to fill out. None of the crazy shit the summer heat stirs up.”

He steps to the boardwalk and looks over the empty sand to the sea.

“Sometimes, with a full moon, the surfers come. They’re not supposed to, but I like watching them in the night. The cold doesn’t bother those guys. Wet suits. They’re mostly guys, but sometimes in the darkness you’ll hear a girl’s voice in the waves.”

He has hair the color of a threatening sky and a full belly, a round man wearing a blue coat and a silver badge. His polished-brimmed hat rides high on his forehead and his face is meaty, pale, marbled with faint blooms of capillaries. Yet it’s a nice face, inviting, coaxing. The radio on his shoulder coils up from his chest like a snake with a big head. His gun must be under his coat; he’s bulky, rattling with metal and creaking with leather, breathing in the cold air, his green eyes watering, his gloved hands strumming the railing.

“It’ll snow early this year.”

He seems sure. He checks his watch. A big wave breaks.

“It’s lovely, all this, don’t you think?” says the cop. “The cold brings purity. I’ve always thought that.”

The lady, the cop, and I stare at the ocean. His radio crackles.

“Charlie, we got a fire in a barrel out by the school. Probably just
kids but you’d better check it out. Over. That Johnson kid. Over. Most likely. Over. On my way. Over.”

The cop looks into the lady’s eyes, glances at me and back to her.

“There’s burning barrels and mischief in the night,” he says, laughing and walking away, becoming one with the darkness.

The lady steps in front of me. “Let’s dance, James.”

She holds both my hands, and then slides one of her hands around my back. I put one arm around her. We stand like a wind vane. Still. I feel foolish. My feet are cold. No one is out. Just us in a circle of light, like a scene in one of those Lizabeth Scott movies Kurt liked so much. Lizabeth in a bedroom, long nightgown, a noise, eyes widen, the mouth tightens, a gun moves through the bedroom shadows toward the light. A scream. A pop. Music wells. Cut to a man in a fedora, smoking on a corner, looking to a window, seeing a silhouette …

The lady shuffles her feet, leans left, and guides me toward her. She shifts right and we do a little spin.

“There is no music, James. But there is the sea. Listen.”

The sea is dull, a muffled roar trapped in a shell, distant, but rhythmic. I want to walk into the sea to drown this void, this not knowing. I know enough to know that I don’t know. I am cognizant of my ignorance, that loss of self, except for that brief long-ago time (how long ago?) that I suppose now plays over and over; it’s even playing now, dancing with this lady, who I don’t know, but who says I do, who insists I do, but I do not. She whispers in my ear: Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Tirana, Trieste, Belgrade, Warsaw, Bucharest, détente, terrorists, Iraq, Iran, jihad, martyrs, suicide bombers, lemons, Sorrento, bandoliers, war crimes, mass graves, memorials, flames wisping from the earth, Montenegro, gunrunners, islands, sex, love, flowers, secret notes, a trip to Tunis, moonlight, pain, blood in a taxi, a baby lost, white linen, language, the meaning of words.

“Some things, James, are indescribable.”

“Like what?”

“Hope.”

We dance to the edge of the light. She stops, takes my hand. A dog runs out of the darkness, through the light, under the boardwalk railing and onto the beach. A young man follows in a sweater and a white scarf flowing like a ribbon. He nods and descends to the beach, running after the dog. The dog stops, bending down, leaning back, ready to spring. The man pulls a Frisbee from his sweater. It glows. Green. Like a spaceship, or a deep-sea creature. He throws it. The dog runs. Sand flies. The Frisbee soars, hovers, and is snatched from the black by the dog, who hangs briefly suspended over the waves; the sound of teeth clicking plastic. The dog runs to the man. The Frisbee spins again. The lady smiles. She rubs my cheek with a warm hand as if my face is an ancient genie lamp.

“One more night, James. Let’s go to the hotel.”

Eva called again.

They drank wine, danced on the boardwalk, but nothing came back to James. Eva is upset. She is measured, but upset. She is learning that love has limits against the cruel designs of science and genetics. We spend most of our lives in between, I suppose, veering from one to the other until we are shriveled, put in the ground, or are burned and scattered in gray streaks across shorelines and valleys. My father, not my real father, but the man who adopted and raised me, Jeremiah, taught philosophy at a New Hampshire community college. His worldview was drawn from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Dinner table chat was brooding, recantations of misery pulled from that day’s newspaper: starvation, coups, wars, plagues, and death. It was there, every day, the great Hobbesian creed played out with centrifugal force and written in the black ink of headlines. My mother, not Vera, but Connie, Jeremiah’s wife, was a part-time nurse and social worker, and her inclinations were less foreboding than her husband’s. Things, people, the planet and souls, yes, even winos, druggies, and murderers, could be redeemed. Saved.

“How can you wake up with no belief in the power of the human spirit to change things?” she’d say at the table.

“Tell that to villagers burned and singed, blistered by napalm.”

I ate quickly when I was a child. One day I’d want to be a saint; the next a poet stewing in grim verse, like Rimbaud. I went into nursing. Maybe it was seeing Connie all those years in her folded white hat helping people in need. I don’t know. I was good in science as a teenager, intimate with mechanisms, precise in biology, drawn
to the frog in the jar and the clues beneath the scalpel’s cut. I wanted structure and, not liking weapons or the prospect of barracks in distant lands, enrolled in nursing school and graduated a woman in white. I moved to Boston. My life was work, books, an occasional movie, an occasional party, brief affairs with surgeons and pharmacists; it’s amazing how self-contained, how incestuous, the world of medicine is. My days were parsed into specific hours, my hand reaching through the dark to turn on a light to read until I could sleep again. Years went by.

I was working the night shift when Jeremiah and Connie, after returning from a party where everyone had to wear a T-shirt with their favorite Hobbesian quotation (Connie, the quiet, compassionate rebel, refused and chose a peace symbol), phoned and told me to come home for the weekend. They sounded nervous but assured me no one was ill; they said they had something they wanted to give me, something that should have been given years before. I couldn’t imagine what it was, and, when Friday came, I left Boston in a flash, down the turnpike and through a dusk of autumn leaves. I opened the door to the Tudor house on Mill Lane and found Jeremiah and Connie sitting in the soft light beneath the kitchen table, where for so many years of my childhood we played Risk and Clue. They were holding hands. They turned and Jeremiah slid a worn envelope toward me. Connie was crying. I unfolded the letter.

“This tale, my daughter, is for you.”

It took more than two hours to read. Jeremiah and Connie, who knew its contents, never moved. The only sounds were turning pages and wind at the back door. I finished the last page and folded my mother’s words back into the envelope. I could feel tears on my face. I was born and taken from Vera and carried away. I was processed and fingerprinted, a picture of my infant face stapled to a folder. I was adopted and given a name. I was loved. Connie made tea and told me Vera died when I was six and that the letter arrived
a year later through the adoption agency. There never was a right time to give it to me. Once when I was sixteen, and once when I was twenty-three, Jeremiah lifted it from its hiding place beneath the floorboards. But he never could put it into my hands. He didn’t want the taint of an unknown ghost mother on our lives. That was selfish. I wanted to yell how selfish that was. I couldn’t. I wasn’t angry. I should have been, but nothing welled inside me, except the mystery of Vera and the revelation of James. I do not hold it against them, not too much anyway, the secret Jeremiah and Connie kept. I was their daughter before I could crawl. They bandaged, fed, and schooled me. They costumed me for Halloween, drove me to summer jobs, and held me through bad dreams. Could Vera have done more? But I remind them at least once a year now that if they had told me earlier, I could have found James before his mind crumbled. These words sting them but this is their penance. I am entitled to that. They are good people, they really are, dark and bright angels arguing over the world’s ills, clinging to their love, a strange communion, like oil and water. I cherish them. But Vera’s letter was vindication. There was something in me during childhood, not gnawing but ever-present, that suggested I was in the wrong place, like a picture tilted oddly on a wall. Where this feeling came from I do not know. We carry instincts into the world, woven into us before birth, intuitions there before learning. I never expressed this, never told Jeremiah and Connie of my faint estrangement to their love, but I felt the razor’s edge of identity when I read Vera’s letter.