Complication (2 page)

Which meant only two days left.

I started up the laptop and opened his e-mail program. A search for “Vera” yielded nothing but a couple messages containing words like
veracity
or
veranda
. I scrolled through the e-mails roughly corresponding with the date of the letter but found nothing. It was while picking through his latest messages I discovered confirmation of his purchase of an open return ticket from Chicago O'Hare to the Ruzyně Airport in Prague, Czech Republic. Using the same online travel service, he'd booked reservations at a place called the Hotel Dalibor.

His flight was leaving in four hours.

 

 

B
efore I realized what I was doing, I was thirty thousand feet in the air somewhere over the Atlantic. There had been no time to go back to my house and pack before racing to the airport, and I was saved by the fact that I'd kept my passport at my dad's place. I never used the thing, and during a period of my life a few years earlier, I'd been moving from apartment to apartment so often that I was afraid I'd lose it. While cleaning out his house I'd been wearing a ratty T-shirt, cargo shorts, and Adidas flats, an ensemble that didn't seem appropriate for intercontinental air travel, though I realized no one really gives a damn anymore. With no other clothes at hand, I ended up wearing one of his suits, a black Italian number two sizes too big. In my wallet I carried his credit cards. In his jacket pocket, I carried his e-ticket stub, his hotel reservation, my passport. Getting through airport security posed no problem as the name on the e-ticket matched the credit card and the name on the credit card matched the name on my passport. I stretched out my legs and marveled that my father had bought
a seat in first-class. This from the same man who routinely called the phone company to argue over surcharges.

I knew almost nothing about the last days of Paul's life—last years, even—and I assume my father didn't either. What we knew, what we'd always known about the trajectory of his life, was that Paul would either win the lottery or get struck by lightning. There was never any middle path for him. Back five years ago when he disappeared, I'd been shocked, but not surprised. Crucial difference being that having knowledge about light sockets won't preclude you from being shocked should you stick your finger in one, but unless you're an idiot, this shock should in no way surprise you.

Since the arrival of Vera's letter, my father had no doubt spent a lot of time studying Vera's terse correspondence, prodding its stonewalling sentences in hopes the words would suddenly give way and reveal whatever truth their author used them to conceal. But the letter never told him anything new, either about his son or the woman who claimed to have known him.

Was this Vera person saying my brother wasn't really dead? Or only that he'd died in a manner inconsistent with what was reported? And did she mean “reported” as in covered by the press, or was she just referring to official “reports,” like the inquest or whatever it was they had in the Czech Republic?

My father must have had similar questions. Weeks after receiving the letter, just two nights before he'd died, he'd booked the flight I was now on. He'd bought the ticket on a Friday for a plane that didn't leave until the following Thursday. Maybe he'd wanted to finish something at work, had a house showing or closing he couldn't miss. Maybe tickets were simply cheaper on this date. But it seemed strange to me that he would finally resolve to satisfy the curiosity Vera's letter provoked and then purposely
delay the same satisfaction. Had he wanted a chance to back out, room to change his mind?

I didn't have that luxury. After reading the letter, the choice was either immediately get to Prague or let the unknown Vera slip away and leave me forever wondering what it was she knew about Paul's disappearance. I reread the letter one final time then ate a meal of salmon and overcooked potatoes. After dinner I tried to watch an in-flight movie starring Sandra Bullock but twenty minutes in realized I'd seen it before. At some point I fell asleep, and when I awoke, I was beginning my final descent into Prague.

M
y plane touched down only fifteen minutes late, and not having any luggage, I was able to get out of the airport and find a taxi without much delay. Before leaving the airport, I rented a SIM card from a kiosk that gave me a temporary local cell phone number. I didn't anticipate using it much, but like most human beings from the richer countries of the early twenty-first century, I felt naked and lost if I was unable to access all information in existence at every conceivable moment, felt practically stripped of my identity. As it was already 6:30 PM, I told the driver to take me directly to the Black Rabbit. No time for the hotel.

Outside the airport lay weedy fields and encroaching darkness. On the four-lane highway, fields disappeared and traffic increased; blocky tenements layered in graffiti towered in the middle distance, foregrounded by newly built corporate offices springing up alongside the road. We entered a tunnel and emerged in a Prague more as I would have imagined it had I ever bothered imagining it at all. Blackened structures from bygone centuries piled dark into the low horizon, and noisy trams rattled along the far riverbank
while people ambled by on the narrow sidewalks. On the hill above us, St. Vitus Cathedral rose spotlit and jagged against the night while a steep slope cluttered with tiled roofs tumbled to the riverbank beneath. Across the water, countless spires jutted upwards into the murky eastern skyline like tent poles supporting a sagging canvas.

The cab crossed a stone bridge, and I watched white lights strung from the deck of a tour boat dance slowly in the distance, a ghostly constellation floating downstream, the people onboard rendered faceless by low banks of fog that clung to the water's dark surface. Here then was the Vltava, the river that claimed my brother. The current looked sluggish, stillborn. Too weak to drown a rat.

My cab driver pointed out the window at an imposing stone building as we came to a halt, said it was the National Theater. Atop its roof a winged goddess piloted a chariot pulled by three horses frozen in mid-gallop and about to heave themselves over the edge of the building and into the latticework of tramlines above the street. A block down was Ostrovní Street. No cars allowed. Too small, the cabbie said, too many people. He told me to head for Divadelní Street, then turn right.

The moment I stepped outside the cab and set foot in the city itself, I finally started to ask all those questions I should've asked before I left. Was I in Prague to fulfill a journey my father had been denied? Here to answer questions about Paul I hadn't thought about in years, if I'd thought about them at all? I couldn't say. A friend of mine, upon hearing his mother had died, got into his car and drove straight across the country, from Maine to California, never eating, stopping only for gas. Why California, he couldn't be sure. He would've kept going, he said, but for the ocean. Maybe this was my version of that. But as I stood there it
struck me that flying halfway around the world based on a letter from a stranger was more like something Paul would've done.

I headed down Ostrovní Street. The cabbie wasn't kidding—no broader than twelve feet at its widest point, the tilting and cobblestoned lane was hemmed in by low buildings crowded one into the next. Above a door on a building halfway down the block hung a wooden sign depicting an emaciated rabbit raised on its hindquarters. The rabbit's ears were drooping, mouth agape, milk white eyes sagging like melted dinner plates. A diseased, demented Bugs Bunny.

The Black Rabbit
said the sign in English.

The door opened onto a hallway leading to a curved stairwell cut from red stone and descending into a catacomb cellar enclosed by vaulted ceilings. Small white candles flickered atop sleek black tables, and well-dressed patrons chatted quietly over wine or beer. Too well dressed to be tourists, I figured. Czech professionals, Euro yuppies. No one paid me any attention whatsoever except a woman sitting alone in the far corner.

Thin and shapeless inside a loose black sweater, she was in her mid-thirties, her straight black hair swept forward with just a little window carved out for a face with jutting cheekbones and hard blue eyes almost gray. She was less pretty than striking. More striking was that she made no effort to hide the fact that she was openly staring at me as I approached.

“You must be Vera,” I said.

Her mouth parted, but no words came.

“My name is Lee,” I said. “Lee Holloway.”

Closer, she looked less thin than simply frail, her skin ashen, mouth inelastic and sad. When I'd received the letter, I wondered if Paul and this Vera person had been romantically involved, but seeing her now, there was no question. She was exactly his type, only more so. Thinner, darker. From the looks of it, more troubled.
I'd bet anything she had some weird tattoo hidden somewhere, some Goth leftover from a youth that was further away than she maybe wanted to admit.

“Paul was my brother,” I prompted.

She blinked. “He never mentioned he had a brother.”

This didn't surprise me. Paul liked to act like he had no family at all. A lone wolf.

“I'm sorry,” Vera said. “This is strange for me. You look just like him.”

People said this often enough that I'd stopped pointing out that my brother was at least three inches taller and forty pounds heavier. When last I'd seen him, he'd sported a bald head and a goatee. His nose bent to the left where it had been broken by a girl in a punk rock bar on North Avenue when he was twenty-four. He had a tattoo on his left forearm of Elmer Fudd, which he didn't like to explain but had to do with the way he laughed—a stuttering, gravelly monotone that surfaced and disappeared often for no apparent reason.

She motioned me to sit. A thin silver bracelet orbited her wrist, and a bottle of Matoni sparkling water sat half empty next to a glass on the table. She extended her hand and I moved to take it before realizing she wasn't offering a handshake but had merely paused in an upsweeping motion aimed at getting the waiter's attention.

“Your father sent you?” she asked.

“Not exactly. My father is, well, he's dead.”

She placed a hand over her mouth.

“Heart attack,” I said. “Mowing the lawn.”

“
Ježíš Maria
. That's terrible.”

“A lot of people die mowing the lawn. More than you might think. Not that you probably have any thoughts about lawn mower fatalities. Happened just Saturday.”

Some part of me wondered why the other was talking about lawnmowers.

“That's awful. I'm so sorry.”

My throat suddenly felt constricted, my face hot. Bad time to get choked up, but when is a good time? “Thanks,” I managed. “He was a good guy. A people person.”

Christ, I thought, next I'd be telling her he'd died with his boots on. I wondered whether my dad might have met Vera when he had flown out when Paul's personal effects were recovered. He'd returned without saying a word about his trip. Nothing about what he'd eaten, where he'd stayed, how much paperwork he had to fill out, whether he'd been treated with kindness or indifference. He came back carrying only the same suitcase he'd left with, and if he'd had Paul's possessions shipped back, I never saw them.
Are you going to be okay?
That was all he'd said in the car as we rode back from O'Hare. Worrying about how I was taking the news was I guess his way of trying to keep his own emotions at bay, to hold himself together. Not knowing what else to do, I'd reached out to squeeze his shoulder. He started crying and stopped in the same breath, like the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail. But thinking back to Vera's letter, I knew they hadn't met before. It was clearly a letter written to a stranger.

We sat in silence while she rummaged through a handbag and produced an unopened pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?” she asked. I'd hardly noticed up to now that she had an accent, slight though it was.

I shook my head.

“I also don't smoke.” She tore the cellophane wrapper and tapped the pack against the inside of her wrist. “I stopped long ago. But I told myself if your father came, I would make an exception. For you, I will also make an exception. Finally a waiter. Do
you like beer? Czech beer is very good. Your brother, he very much liked Czech beer. Perhaps I should order an extra one. Who knows if he will be coming back.”

For a moment of freefall, I thought she was going to tell me Paul was still alive. That he'd run into some kind of trouble, been forced to fake his own death five years ago. That he'd been hiding, lying low, waiting for things to blow over. She'd written the letter because she needed help. Together we could bring him back into the world. I started feeling guilty for believing all this time that he'd been gone.

But Vera wasn't talking about Paul coming back. She was talking about the waiter, who in the next moment arrived and took Vera's order with an air of weary reluctance. Across the room, a bedraggled-looking fiftyish man with long, unwashed salt-and-pepper hair spilling out of a wool stocking cap shared a joke with the bartender. His eyes had a bleary intensity as he repeatedly glanced over at our table. But then Vera probably provoked repeat glances wherever she went. She lit her cigarette, and the flame illuminated a small U-shaped scar riding across the ridge of her cheekbone beneath her left eye.

“When I wrote the letter,” she began as the waiter walked away, “I never believed anyone would come. Many times I tore it up. Always I wrote another. When finally I sent it, I felt difficult to come here day after day. But I came anyway. I've nearly lost count of the days. And now here you are. Why are you here?”