After James (13 page)

“Yes.”

It was all much bigger than poetry, she said. Durant was convinced that the Poet possessed something of his, a great, specific loss.

“What are you talking about? What has he lost?”

She took the can and walked back to the living room. Watching her walk away only intensified my wish to follow her meaning. She stopped and turned and seemed to be having an argument with herself. The winning self nodded and spoke.

“ ‘The sun winks and we play blind.' ”

“Is the poem quoting someone? Who said it?”

“He did.”

“Who did?”

“August. To his daughter. In their last conversation before she went missing. Three years ago.” She winced slightly to hear herself. She had come to the apartment to say exactly as much as she'd said, but she was betraying Durant. “Don't tell him we've met. Or you can say we've met but that we both insisted there be no talk about the poems.”

A missing daughter. Durant had impressed upon me the seriousness of the work, but I hadn't quite believed it connected to anything real. I stood and started toward her. She drifted away slowly so that my path pushed hers to the doorway.

“Missing how? Did she run away?”

“He gives few details and there's nothing online. She was in her thirties. She seems to have walked out of her life and never reappeared. Private detectives found no trace. Then there's me, and now you.”

“How did you learn all this? Is it in the poems?”

“He told me in one short, drunken conversation. I found nothing of her in the poems.”

“What about the sun winking?”

“I don't know. Maybe a coincidence. Or maybe he thinks he coined an expression that in fact he overheard. Maybe it's out there, circulating like an old penny.”

The words in her answer impressed themselves visually. I pictured the
coin
in
coincidence
and then saw the
penny
and it dropped.

“You're not telling me everything. I need the whole story.”

Whether the whole story was Durant's or hers, she seemed to be calculating the cost of telling it, reading numbers on some invisible meter. She offered to meet me the next afternoon in the park of the Villa Borghese. She pulled the sunglasses down over her eyes, a way of announcing her exit, or of preventing me from reading something in her face.

My life falls to its rhythms, some common to many, some mine alone. Breaking the rhythms, taking my eggs poached for once, changing the route to a job, choosing to stop loving or stop failing a loved one, I inscribe a new line in my brain. It's the patterns that I can't get outside, whether I recognize them or not, that define me. To see my specific self—sorrows and fears and pathologies—reflected in external reality effects a recognition. Some such moments calm me. Others do me in.

My father was a military man. He and my mother had taken early retirement in a town near the base in Nova Scotia where he'd last served. I grew up many places but this last town had become familiar and I knew it wouldn't be lost to me as the others had, even if, and sooner than I imagined, it would come to contain the greatest loss.

One week each summer and Christmas, Montreal to Nova Scotia, back.

In every sense he was a hard man to know.

My parents were United Church Protestants. When they both turned sixty-two they moved to Turkey for a year to work for an NGO in a refugee camp near the Syrian border. The circumstances of their deaths were ambiguous. They were found sitting inside their car on a dirt road, a few kilometres past the last cotton field, where the stony desert took up, dead of blunt force trauma. I had the accident report sent to me and translated. In separate sections, it described the conditions of the vehicle and of its occupants. I read about the car but only glanced at the second section, not allowing myself to read left to right, up to down. Instead I cast my eyes over the words, registering random phrases. The white Kia
outwardly showed no evidence of having hit anything. Inside, matters were different. My parents seemed to have met a very sudden stop. They were dashed on the dash, steered into the steering wheel. Neither had been wearing a seat belt, a detail underlined by hand in the original document, as if to explain their fate or to blame them for it, yet they always wore seat belts and the car's annoying reminder bell was in working order, a signal detail, though what it signalled I didn't know.

Normally, they were buckle-up folks, my parents. Resourceful, tough, good in crises. They strapped themselves in, lashed themselves to masts in storms. In their third week at the camp one of their colleagues was killed when his car, leading a van of police officers to a food-collection point, tripped a thousand-pound bomb placed under the road by the PKK, Kurdish separatists “agitating” for a homeland. Before the day was through they'd contacted the man's wife, a woman in Pennsylvania they'd never met, and arranged immediate support for her, somehow collecting names and numbers of the couple's family and friends. After which my father set out himself, on the same road, overland at the bomb crater, to organize and secure the food transport.

There were dangers everywhere. A Turkish nationalist group in the area had been implicated in the murders of Christians, some of them foreigners, and Al-Qaeda and ISIS had begun setting up thereabouts to promote their specific lunacies across the border, inside the civil war in Syria. I asked them to return to Canada but my mother said, as if she had no say in it, “Your father wants to see this through.” For
him, the world was complicated but life was not. Life was an enactment of duty to principles. He regarded my central passion—literature—as an indulgence, unforgivably inward. The inwardness was a kind of selfishness, even a cowardice. When I started graduate school he was warily proud, and my quitting it confirmed his assumptions. He believed I would never have a steady job, let alone a career, and whether or not I married, would never surrender my self-indulgence to the building of a family of my own. In so many words, he said all of this, said it once, on what would become our last Christmas Eve together. With some embarrassment, some pride, I'd produced at the table a little magazine in which I'd had three poems published, a magazine of the kind read only by the other contributors, though my parents wouldn't know that. My idea was to suggest I was making some headway in the writing world. My mother hugged me. I can still feel her bracelet pressing into my back. He looked at the poems, not seeming to actually read them, said I was just “playing a game,” and announced he had to say his piece.

I was hurt but not angry. I still don't know if he was right. I've written just one poem since. That night I tried to tell him in words other than these that I agreed, that to write poetry is like playing a game, a board game, but it's play in service of the real, a game in which the win is the defeat of the game itself. In the last move the gaming piece (imagine a stone) leaps from the board into the world, the real, the physical, a red quickness, the actual, and the game becomes a kind of miracle, rules broken and laws suspended. It's a lesser miracle, but one connected to the greatest of them, the creation
of life itself, in which inanimate material, a stone (imagine a gaming piece), is struck into consciousness and set down in the home space, the world.

“Words,” he said.

The final word was his. Though he'd worked his whole life, and lived modestly, my parents' worth when they died was under six thousand dollars, not enough to cover their funeral and the estate lawyer. It was months before the NGO, on an audit, discovered the missing funds. Near the time of their deaths my father stole from the organization almost forty thousand lire. His defenders argued he must have been paying protection for the organization, though no one could say to whom. Other details emerged. Expensive new windows and a stack of rugs and blankets in their apartment in Gaziantep. A tight schedule of doctors' appointments for my mother. Everything seemed telling at one moment, meaningless another. To repay the missing funds, the organization sold their car, still in good working order.

Fourteen billion years ago the universe began with form but no predictability. In time, patterns formed. Complex systems. Life. And inside it all—I hear it—howling chaos.

Durant called my cell later that afternoon to ask that I meet him for dinner in Monti, near the Santa Maria Maggiore. It was only while I was in the taxi, as the driver called out to friends along the street, as if Rome were a village, that I had enough distance from Amanda's visit to think clearly about what I'd learned. If Durant saw allusions to his daughter in
the poems, he would want to test his readings—he was a man of science, after all—but there existed no empirical measures of meaning in language or art. Had he brought in Amanda, and now me, to confirm that the poems had something to do with his daughter or to rescue him from going over a final edge?

I've been calling her “Durant's daughter” but before I left for dinner I played detective and tried to hunt up her name. There was nothing online so I called Larunda and spoke to what sounded like the same program assistant I'd spoken to days earlier. I said I was from the Petros One Group, a(n invented) private insurance company, and that I had to file something on behalf of August Durant but was unable to reach him. Again I met with resistance. “I just need to finish a form,” I said. “A certain interval has passed and I need his daughter's first name. It's illegible on the document I have.” She said, “No chance.”

He was waiting for me at a window table, more than halfway into a bottle of red wine. The moment I sat down I sensed someone had preceded me. He received me with his usual warmth but did I detect a slight strain in his smile? Or was it that I saw him differently now? His voice was already full, but crisp—there was no suggestion that the wine had brought it forward—so maybe someone had been sharing the bottle with him. And then, yes, I noticed the stain of a red drop on the tablecloth, under the edge of my plate.

“I hope you haven't been waiting long.”

“Not long. Have you had a good day, James?”

“I can't say. There's no way of taking my bearings.”

“Well, let's stop working, then. Have a drink and let the mind unclench.”

Durant's side of the conversation was wonderfully far-ranging. Tracing how exactly a comment about the wine had taken us to serial-killing lions, I found that his connections moved associatively, playfully, like my cha-chas, rather than logically. The route went more or less from the 2008 Le Cupole Rosso Toscana to its label's colour of red like those in the frescoes in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme to cave paintings to the life of cave dwellers to the fear of cave bears to predator habits to anomalies within predator populations to serial-killing lions. By the time he took a pause we were onto a second bottle, our plates were lined with small rabbit bones, and it was time for dessert. What struck me then was the size of the man's passions. He took a huge interest in the world but his enthusiasm was disciplined. His nature wasn't acquisitive so much as embracing. When he held up his glass he seemed to read the properties not just of the wine's colour but of the light that revealed it. He wanted to know life in all its registers. How else could someone who had suffered such a loss let himself be opened by poetry?

“When did you first learn of Three Sheets?” he asked.

So we hadn't stopped working after all.

“A girl I was living with told me about it.”

“How did she come across it? Could you ask her?”

“We're not in touch. Likely someone sent her the link.”

He nodded.

“They say it's organic, the way information travels on the internet. But it's not. It lacks the full range of human
emotion and intent, the nuance of the conversational gambit, or the necessity to share that binds a speaker and listener. I must sound like your grandfather.”

“Studies show a decline in oral skills among young people in recent decades. And so-called social skills. Sort of what you'd expect.”

“But you have the skills, James. Where did you learn them?”

“I don't know. I was very shy growing up. I learned to listen. Then in school I learned to converse, debate. I had a few professors who expected words on demand.”

“And so you have political skills, wouldn't you say?”

“I've never thought of them as political. I try not to play angles on people.”

“And yet when you sat down here, you asked if I'd been waiting long. It wasn't simply a polite inquiry, was it?”

It was what my mother used to call a “God-in-the-garden” moment, my thoughts rendered naked and ashamed.

“I sensed I was entering upon someone's exit.”

“There's your sharp intuition at work. You sensed an absence, someone missing.”

“I suppose. But it's no concern of mine.”

“And so why ask the question? It must be that you wondered if I was meeting someone specific, someone you know. Am I right?”

“If you weren't right then I'd think you were paranoid.”

“You've met those in the building. But who else do you know in Rome except me?”

“I'm not sure how well I know you. Maybe I know no one.”

“There, you see? A politician's answer.”

He took an interest in the dessert menu and recommended the amaretto semifreddo with chocolate sauce.

“She likes you,” he said. I took a sip of water to stall the moment, as if the gesture might help me decide what to think, but the motion of my hand up and down seemed only to give away what I felt. Confusion, a tinge of guilt, anger. “She thinks you're better suited for the job than she was.”

“There are no innocent conversations, are there? Drinks on the piazza, dinner on a rooftop, and here now, it's one constant performance review.”