The Extinction Club (24 page)

It too was frozen in time, a reminder for my father of an era when his scion was a good obedient boy from a good loving family, before he went “off the rails.” The room had pneumatic furniture and a waterbed, along with several posters of French actresses. My old baseball trophies and plaques were also on display—a shock because I hadn’t seen them in decades. My father must have hauled them down from the attic, along with a framed picture of me wearing a cap from my Little League team, the Rhinos. I looked from photo to mirror and shook my head at the sad gulf.

At least put some clothes on
. I riffled through closets and drawers, ending up with black narrow-legged pants (
pantalon cigarette
), a black leather belt with studs, and pointed black boots with a complex crosshatch of straps and buckles. All acquired at Camden Lock. I had no problem with the fit: bucking the American trend, I had grown thinner with age.
Black. You were happy when you wore black. You shall wear black from now on
.

How could I
not
be happy, coming back to America for two years of high school with an English accent at the crest of the British New Wave? The girls mistook me for a rockstar.

I switched on my Dual turntable and set the needle onto an EP which, unless my father or the maid had been listening to it, had been sitting there for years.

My intent was to start tossing things out, but my heart wasn’t in it. I pulled a folded green garbage bag from its pack, but that’s as far as I got. How could one throw out vintage music and apparel from the ’80s? Or movie posters torn from walls on Boulevard St-Michel in the ’70s, one of Isabelle Adjani in
Possession
, the other of Catherine Deneuve in
Repulsion
? The magnetism of mad women: it drew me early.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” ended so I put it on again. From a tottering mound of sleeveless records I plucked a Psychedelic Furs EP (“Heaven”) that wouldn’t play because it was covered with candle wax. Don’t remember that night. “In a Big Country” was next, then “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” The 45! Which I cranked. It wasn’t until the next day, in the big country of Canada, that I made the connection. Three songs: two singer suicides and a suicide anthem.

I looked for
Abbey Road
and
The White Album
to test out the aural pareidolia Dr. Neefe had mentioned—
I buried Paul
and
Turn me on, dead man
—but couldn’t find either. So I
moved on, down the long hallway to my father’s office. On one side it looked over a garden, with its pillared porch and gazebo and widow’s walk; the other side looked over the ocean. The room was surprisingly congested for a chronic minimalist: a long row of filing cabinets containing a half-century’s worth of tax junk; a massive desk from Thessaloníki that I’d always coveted; an antique jade box from Carcassonne containing items I’d always scorned, like diamond cufflinks, gold tie clips and Cartier pens; and a large wooden chest from Inverness with souvenirs from around the world. I opened the latter’s lid and found three things that belonged to me: a
Stanley Gibbons Improved Postage Stamp Album
, a leather-bound
1001 Poems
, and an empty black book with a silver lock and pen entitled
Mon journal intime
—all lost gifts from my mother. Why do I love the things Mom gave me, I wondered, and feel indifferent to the things I give myself? I sat down on a sage-green chair I’d never seen before, and turned each item over in my hands.

Paris and London in the eighties: my real home was in the past, I’d always thought, but I was forced to live in the present. But now I backed off from this view. It was not the lands of lost content that I yearned to revisit. My homesickness, I came to realize, was for no place in particular but for some universal place I had never known. I examined my image—intently, as one examines a stranger—in a full-length mirror from Barcelona. My father was a great one for mirrors. I was with him when he bought it, bickering with a salesman on Las Ramblas. “I won’t haggle like a whore,” he said in Spanish, pretending to walk away. His angry eyes lay across mine like a mask.

In the blurred background was a daybed covered with a green and white early-American quilt, homespun by a weaver
in New Hampshire. My mother was a great one for quilts. I could see her reclining on it, gazing sadly into a hand mirror. In just over a year, I paused to calculate, I would see changes in my face that she had not lived to see in hers.

I closed my eyes.
A holiday, you need a holiday. About twenty years would do you. Not to the past—you’ve tried that before and failed—but to somewhere new, in the future. A holiday to end all holidays, a holiday to die for
. My head began filling like a suitcase.

Maybe not a holiday exactly—you can’t take a holiday from doing nothing—so much as a permanent relocation, to an impossible-to-find place where life was quieter, slower. I would leave the confusion and clamour of the city, the oxygen-poor air poisoned by industry and cars, for the calming, anchoring bedrock of nature. Where older, more natural processes were at work. Like Euripides, who moved to a cave by the sea because cities had become insufferable. Or Saint Anthony, a wealthy Egyptian who did the same after giving all his money away.

“Death is dwelling in the past,” my father said inside me. “Or in any one place too long.” Northward I would go, then, toward some old dream, some new darkness. Melt into a Canadian backwater not found in any atlas, restart my life where no one knew me, live as an anchorite on some lake isle.

I will arise and go now to Canada

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made …

I left Jersey, as the expression goes, under a cloud. I packed not a scrap of food or much in the way of clothing or essentials. I packed several unessentials, though, including my
philatelic gear: albums, tongs, magnifying glass, perforation gauge, stock books, glassine envelopes, mounts, hinges, drying book, watermark fluid and tray. Jammed them into my uncle’s canvas AWOL bag, along with my leather-bound anthology of poems.

And I shall have some peace there …

I drove my dad’s BMW a block and a half before hanging a U, back to the house for his survival kit and leather valise. And knapsack, into which I placed three bottles of his finest Scotch from Skye. I couldn’t help it, I really couldn’t.

Then on to the Central Jersey Bank, the West Sylvania branch, where I cleaned out, with the manager’s assistance, one of my father’s lesser accounts. I ranged the packets of twenties in his Halliburton valise, durable and waterproof, the kind favoured by criminals to haul cash.

Along Ocean Avenue, weaving in and out of traffic, engine thrumming, in a very powerful car. North on I-87 as darkness fell. I shut my eyes against the winding chain of taillights ahead and opened them again. The inside of the car glowed with precise, confident signal lights—including a radar detector—telling me everything was running optimally. With my teeth I opened a bottle of Talisker, took a quick slug. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand with a drunkard’s gesture that I caught in the rear-view. Along with something else: a semi, the tyrannosaurus of the freeway, an eighteen-wheeler, which honked fiercely as it passed. I honked back. Then pressed the down button on the window, the passenger side by mistake, and unfastened my watch. It was heavy and gold, a Nightingale family relic. I tossed it out the window and watched it in the mirror as it slid across the hazard lane.
Repeated the procedure with the car’s cellphone. Discarding the technology, I’d read somewhere, sharpens the senses, leads to deeper awareness. From my front pocket I pulled out four folded sheets of paper and spread them over the steering wheel. Turned on the dome light.

The top three contained Quebec real estate information, downloaded from my father’s computer: hunting cabins for rent; “renovatable” churches for sale; and a travel piece that described the Québécois people as “proud,” which in the lingo of these things usually means “suspicious, with a persecution complex.” I set these aside and focused on the last sheet, directions from my Uncle Vince.

Vince Flamand was my mother’s half-brother, a six-foot-six southpaw who was a first-round pick of the Detroit Tigers in 1967. At seventeen he could throw a tailing fastball that hit 96 on the gun, and despite his records for hit batsmen in every league he played, he went from high school ball to Triple A Toledo in just over a year. So why did he end up in Canada? Because, he explained, he didn’t want to fuck up his arm in Vietnam.

For about six months, once or twice a month, Uncle Vince would send me postcards or first-day covers from towns in Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. With lines like:

Hey Nile buddy,

Thought you might like this stamp of a grizzly … Just had a tryout with a club in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A nut-freezing twilight doubleheader. Threw two innings of shutout middle relief in the first game and saved the other—struck out the side in the 9th on 9 pitches. 8 heaters and a change. The ball’s not great up here, but it’s not great in Nam either.

Vince ended up playing not in Nova Scotia but in New Brunswick (as did Matt Stairs), pitching and hitting clean-up for the Marysville Royals. You can look up his stats on the Net. After feeling some soreness in his shoulder, he returned to the States, thinking he could con the draft board into a four-F. A few months later he was captured by the Viet Cong and spent several years in a bamboo cage.

He came back from the war with two shattered heels and an asocial gloom so severe that he moved into a shack in the Adirondacks the size of an outhouse, eating his meals from plates of bark, using whittled sticks as cutlery. When his weight dropped below a hundred, my father got him into a VA hospital in Lyons, some sixty miles from Neptune, which he’s been in and out of ever since. If he’d been only one inch taller, my mother told me, he would never have been drafted.

Before leaving Neptune, I e-mailed him for advice and got this reply:

Hey Nile buddy, I was just thinking about you, about the last time we took in a ball game. You remember, you smuggled in a bottle of Jim Beam and the Mets beat the Yanks at Shea? Or maybe the other way round. Or maybe it wasn’t with you. I was tanked, what do I know? You still playing ball? I remember you were one bad-ass third baseman. Bad-ass means good, right? Or was it second base? You could’ve been a pro if it wasn’t for that uppercut swing. OK, here’s what you need: penlight (not a flashlight), compass, black clothes, tar, wirecutters. North on I-87 for about 150 miles, to RT-3. Turn left on Blake then right on 190, then left on 11, right on 189, left on Frontier Road. Number 524 on right. That’s where Lightning lives. You remember Lightning? Don’t talk to him and don’t leave your car in his drive, ditch it some place in the woods. Put the tar on your face, and walk back to his place. In one corner of the backyard is a big STOP sign and a small
stone pillar with USA on one side and CANADA on the other. Don’t go anywhere near there. That’s where they put the sensors and cameras. Go to a spot directly in line with his back door. There used to be a dog house there. If the Feds have put a fence in since the last time I was there, that’s why you brought the cutters …

“Lightning” Leitner (I forget his first name), whose nickname derived from his slowness of foot, was one of Vince’s old catchers, a fellow draft dodger. He’s still up there, true, but six feet under. In any case, it worked. It worked in Uncle Vince’s time and it works now, post-9/11.

The night I crossed, as I was trying to find the STOP sign and obelisk, I heard sounds from behind me, from a tangled growth of bushes and stunted trees. Sounds not unlike human whispering. I turned off my penlight and froze.

A quivering beam of light was directed my way, which got closer and closer. And the whispering became louder and louder. I recognized the language.

“
Nǐ hǎo
,” I said. “
Bing jia ná dà
.”

I turned on my light and saw the scared faces of two women, one old, one young. I’m not sure what scared them more: the tar smeared like warpaint on my face or hearing words in their own tongue.

“
Nǐ shì shéi?
” said one of them. (Who are you?)

“
Wǒ jiào Nile
.”

“
Jǐng chá?
” (Police?)

“
Péng
.” (Friend.)

Silence, then a quivery voice. “
Hěn gão xǐng rèn shí nǐ
.” (Nice to meet you.)

“
Rèn shí nǐ wǒ yě hěn gão xĩng
.” (Ditto.)

“We follow?” asked the older one in English. “You know place?”

“I think so.” I pointed my flashlight toward a high chain-link fence with barbed wire strung along the top. There was no dog house in front of it, but the spot was roughly in line with the back door.

“We take bicycles?”

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”

They took their bicycles. I cut the hole and the three of us bent the wires back and jammed the bikes through. A dog barked in the distance, but the house remained quiet and dark.

On the other side of the fence was an evergreen jungle and an uphill slope that made for tough zigzag slogging, especially with bicycles that had to be dragged or carried, but we soon hit a well-worn path. A Canadian path. “Where are you two coming from?” I asked as we made our way slowly along it, three flashlights lighting the way.

They were smuggled into the U.S., the older one explained, aboard a freighter that docked in Seattle. How did they end up here, on the other side of the continent? She didn’t seem to know, or didn’t wish to tell.

You have been to China, sir?
whispered the younger one in Mandarin. She was quickly reproached by the other.

Yes, I lived there for a year or so. In Shanghai.

We come from nearby!
said the older one.

Did you like it, kind sir, in Shanghai?
asked the younger one.

I hesitated. The city’s a kiln, a steam-bath infused with oil and gas fumes, with methane and ammonium hydroxide, the way the world might have smelled when life was first being formed. It contains the prototype for the world’s worst air terminal, Hongquia, and a bar where depressed people can go to cry, where you pay an hourly rate for Kleenex, sad music, and life-size dolls to throw around.
It was very nice
.