The Confabulist (17 page)

A car drove past my window, its tires cautious on new snow. I’d chosen my lodgings with care, one street back from a main artery. I’d be able to recognize anything out of the ordinary, but the safety of crowds was close enough. I listened to the car disappear into the night. Had it slowed down as it passed my address?

I had taken all precautions possible. There was no way for me to disappear more fully than I had, or if there was, I didn’t know how to do it. I rolled onto my side and reminded myself that there is a fine line between vigilance and insanity. What I needed most was sleep.

When I was a child I hated going to sleep. Most children do, I
think. It would make more sense for adults to resist sleep. As life progresses it is less and less likely that you will wake up. The more sleeps you have behind you, the fewer you have in front of you. But children, who have no need to count out their days and nights, fight the end of each day as though their lives depend on it, while adults seem almost grateful to get into bed and fall off without effort.

My mother would come and sit beside my bed whenever I was against the idea of sleep. Our deal, she said, was that as long as I lay down and kept talking to her, she would stay. This always seemed a wonderful compromise to me, but it was a rare night where more than a few minutes passed before my eyelids dropped and sleep claimed me.

This night, alone in the dark in a strange room, the thought of my mother was enough to quiet my mind, and after a few false starts where the abrupt and terrifying sensation of falling jerked me away from the precipice of sleep, I was able to rest. The myriad whisperings and rattlings of the night no longer demanded parsing.

“And how, my dear Martin, are you? What did you do today?” my mother asked me. I couldn’t see her clearly—my eyes were fogged in, and after a moment I gave up trying to open them.

“I can’t remember,” I said.

“Nonsense. You can always remember. It might not be true, but you can always remember.”

I tried to recall what I had done that day. “I listened to the radiator.”

“Ah, yes. Did you know that a single bite of a radiator contains enough venom to kill a hundred men?”

I did not. Wait, this wasn’t right. “I think you mean the inland taipan.”

“Of course. Despite this, though, there are no recorded fatalities as a result of its bite. It’s very shy. Like you.”

“I’m not shy, I’m cautious.”

“You are cautious. Which is why you probably have taken note that your door has been opened.”

I told myself that this was just a dream, but in an instant my mother was gone and I was awake. I lay still, keeping my breathing slow and deep, and listened. I heard nothing, and then, directly to my right, between my bed and the small desk, the floor creaked. Someone was in my room.

“I know you’re awake.” A young woman’s voice, confident and angry, careened out of the darkness.

She flicked on the light and I was blinded.

“I only want to know why you did it.” The voice belonged to a young woman, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She was on the small side but clearly strong. She wore a black coat that went down to her feet, and had tied her thin black hair back with a ribbon. She wasn’t dressed like a typical assassin, I thought, and then reconsidered, accounting for the fact that I had no idea what an assassin wore, aside from what I’d read in detective novels, which I was beginning to suspect were not the most reliable sources of information.

I gave her the only answer I could. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t mean for it to happen like that.”

This seemed to surprise her. She didn’t say anything.

“How did you get in here?”

“I picked the lock.” She smiled, proud of herself.

“What’s your name?”

“Alice. Alice Weiss.”

“That’s an interesting name,” I said. Weiss. Could it be?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t at all what I thought it would be like.”

She pulled forward the shabby wooden chair and sat. She relaxed a little, but I could feel her tension and uncertainty. Her eyes wandered the room, settling back on me as I gathered enough courage to sit up in bed.

“How did you think it would be?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not like this. This is all so …”

Neither of us spoke. The night became loud again.

“What is it you want?” I asked.

This wasn’t going to plan for her. I sympathized—nothing had gone according to plan for me either. She folded her hands in her lap. “I’d like to know what happened.”

She was who I suspected she was. Alice Weiss. Harry Houdini’s daughter. I knew he and Bess didn’t have any children, so she must have a different mother. She had tracked me down because I had killed her father. She wanted answers. I wasn’t sure I could give her any.

“I don’t know how to tell you what happened. It was an accident.”

“I know. Everyone knows you didn’t mean it.” She said this like it was an insult.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you owe me answers. You made all this happen. You ruined everything. I want you to fix it.” Her head drooped and she sat still, as though checking her hands to see if they still held something important.

I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. There was no insight I could offer,
having never known the man. I’d killed him, that’s all. If it weren’t for me, then maybe she could have come to know him.

“It is a hard thing to grow up without a father,” I said. “I understand that your lack of a father is my fault. I had a father, though, and it’s possible you were better off. Sometimes an absent father is better.”

Alice seemed to be thinking about this. I remembered how Clara used to look when deep in thought. I missed her. Being alone with your thoughts can make you forget that the world is full of people with thoughts of their own. I should not have left the way I had.

“That’s what my mother told me,” she said. “That my father was a good man, but what he was great at was disappearing.”

“That sounds about right to me,” I answered.

“Maybe it is,” she said. “But he was never there to begin with. You can’t disappear if you never appeared.”

“What is it you want, then?”

She got up from the chair. “You could start by helping me find him,” she said. For a moment it seemed as though she was going to say something else. She took one last long look at me before walking out the door. It clicked shut behind her and left me alone again, listening to the sound of the dark.

Alice’s words rattled around my room for months. What did she mean? We both knew where her father was. I was the one who had put him there.

By the spring my savings had run out and I was forced to find work. I got a job on a construction site using an alias. It was hard labour
but I didn’t have to talk to anyone. I showed up, did my work, and went home.

Every so often I’d open the small leather book I’d found in my pocket and leaf through it. It seemed to have come into my possession the night I punched Houdini. I knew I didn’t have it before then. The pages made no sense, a bunch of jumbled words with confused letters. I’d also begun to have the feeling that someone was observing me, following my every move. It was an odd feeling.

I thought about Clara a lot. Constantly. For a while when I thought about her, it was in the present tense, still existent as part of my current reality. Soon, though, that began to fade. She became part of the past, a memory, and she ceased to live in my mind as anything other than a string of moments. But there was an ache there, a physical sorrow that increased the more she passed from substance into memory. For a while I could mitigate this by retreating to memory.

There was one particular moment that I kept going back to. We were at the park, sitting on a bench, talking and watching people walk by. There were some birds milling about, hoping that we were the sort of people who brought birdseed for them, but we weren’t, and eventually they figured this out and left. Clara was wearing a white cardigan and a blue dress with flowers on it. The wind kept blowing her hair into her face, but was warm enough that she took off the cardigan and put it on the bench next to her. We talked in a roundabout way about nothing in particular: school, people we knew, things we liked and didn’t like. It was the sort of conversation people who haven’t known each other long but understand they will have many more conversations have, uncomplicated and almost lazy but
also anticipatory. Eventually we got up and began to walk out of the park, and shortly Clara realized that she had left her cardigan on the bench. I jogged to get it, only a hundred yards back, and when I returned, hand outstretched with her prize, the look on her face was full of simple pleasure. My seemingly mundane gesture made her so happy. It was a strange math, how the size of an action corresponded to the outcome. At the time it didn’t seem particularly significant, but afterward this became the one moment out of all of them that I kept returning to.

Whenever my mind went too far into this line of thinking, my mother would intrude into my consciousness.

“You’re scared. You’re afraid there’s a darkness inside you that might escape. But the hiding you’re doing isn’t going to help, is it?”

It wasn’t, but this was the price I had to pay for my actions. I had abandoned Clara, killed Houdini, disappeared without a trace. There must be some cost to this. “It’s like you said. Not everything is reversible.”

“That’s true,” she said. “But almost everything is forgivable.”

“How do you know if it is?”

“You ask.”

She was right. She was always right. But I couldn’t ask for Clara’s forgiveness, not now. Forgiveness is earned. What had I done to earn anything? And I couldn’t ask Houdini’s forgiveness either. Alice, though, that might be possible. She’d asked me to try to fix things. It seemed to me she needed a memory of her father that would help her better understand herself. If I could give that to her, that might at least start me on the way back to Clara and the life I’d left.

What could I give to Clara? The only firsthand knowledge I had of Houdini was the feel of his gut as my fist sank into it. But I could
find someone who knew more. That person, I realized, was Bess Houdini. If there was one person alive who understood Houdini, it was her.

Bess Houdini wasn’t hard to find. Her house in Harlem was a well-known landmark, its address in the papers. In a matter of days I had quit my job, emptied my room, and made the trip to New York. I rented an equally spare and desolate room on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, paying cash and using a false name. It felt better to be doing something active, but the feeling that I was being watched didn’t abate.

MARTIN STRAUSS

Present Day

A
ND NOW
I’
M ANGRY AGAIN.
T
HIS BENCH,
D
R.
K
ORSAKOFF
, my own mind—it all boils up. I want to hit something or scream or pick up the trash can and throw it through the automatic doors, sending pebbles of glass skittering across the lobby. I haven’t been this mad in years. Not since my father died, at least. No one could make me as angry as he did.

Do we ever really get over the things that our parents do to us? There was no grand cataclysm that marked my childhood, but the sum total of it left an echo that is still here. My mother was everything gentle. She made things better, she fixed what went wrong, and she remains what I conjure when I think of goodness.

My father was not a villain, though he did villainous things. He was cold, distant, and had no time for children. At his best, he was an actor playing a father. At his usual, he was a man who endured his children. At his worst, he resented us.

He often appeared as though he wished he were elsewhere. He’d stare out the window, look at his watch, complain that we needed to go no matter where we were or where we had to be next. We were perpetually arriving early and leaving early, trying to keep up with his restless feeling that something was about to happen elsewhere. I imagine it exhausted my mother. I know it exhausted me.

Until I started to become like him, at about the age of fourteen. I ceased being a mere hindrance to him and became an adversary. A young man has options in life an older man doesn’t. I would get out of our town, see the world, and do things he knew he would never do. My ambition diminished him, but I couldn’t see that. Every time he reacted to me with jealousy, I redoubled my efforts to become free of him.