David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

The newborn grandmother nods, unsurprised. “Pity. I’d’ve liked to thank her. I owe her so much.”

“How so?”

Wendy Hanger looks surprised, but decides to tell me. “By and by, I fell asleep, and didn’t wake until morning. Esther had gone. A nurse brought me breakfast, and said they’d be moving me to a private room later. I said there must a mistake, I didn’t have insurance, but the nurse said, ‘Your grandmother’s settling your account, honey,’ and I said, ‘What grandmother?’ The nurse smiled like I was concussed and said, ‘Mrs. Little, isn’t it?’ Then, later, in my private room, a nurse brought a … like a black zip-up folder. In it was a Bank of America card with my name on it, a door key, and some documents. These,” Wendy Hanger heaves an emotional sigh, “turned out to be the deeds to a house in Poughkeepsie. In my name. Two weeks later I was discharged from the hospital in Milwaukee. I went to my stepsister’s, apologized for trying to kill myself on her sofa, and said I was heading east, to try to, y’know, make a fresh start, where no one knew me. I think my stepsister was relieved. Two Greyhound bus rides later, I walked into my house in Poughkeepsie … A house that a real live fairy godmother had apparently given me. Next thing I knew, forty years or more flew by. I still live there, and to this day my husband believes it was a gift from an eccentric aunt. I never told no one the truth. But every single time I turned my key in the lock, I thought of her, I thought, ‘Three on the Day of the Star of Riga,’ and pretty much every hour since I learned my daughter-in-law was pregnant, I’d wonder if I’d run into a Marinus … This morning, holy crap, was I a mess! The day I become a grandmother. My husband told me to stay at home, so I did. But Carlotta, who runs the cab company for us these days, deviced to say that Jodie’d twisted her ankle and Zeinab’s baby was running a fever, so please, please, please, would I go to the station and pick up Dr. I. Fenby? And, y’know, there’s no reason why you’d be Marinus, but when I saw you I …” she shakes her head, “… knew. That’s why I was kinda spooked. Sorry.”

Dappled sunshine shivers. “Forget it. Thank you.”

“The Riga message. Does it make sense?”

I should be careful. “Partially. Potentially.”

Wendy Hanger considers criminal networks, the FBI, The Da Vinci Code —but smiles, shyly. “Way, way over my head, hey? Y’know, I feel … lighter.” She dabs her eyes with her wrists, notices the splodges of makeup, and checks in the mirror: “Holy crap, it’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Can I just, like, fix myself?”

“I’ll take the air, you take your time.” I get out of the car and walk over to the bench. I sit down, gaze over the stately Hudson River at the Catskill Mountains, egress, transverse back to the car, and ingress into Wendy Hanger. First I redact everything that’s happened since she pulled over. Then I trace the memory cord back forty-one years to a Milwaukee hospital. Redacting memories of Esther hurts, but it’s for the best. The messenger will forget the message she’s carried for so long, and everything else she just told me. At odd moments she may fret over a blank in her memory, but soon a Pied Piper thought will come dancing along and her untrained mind will follow …

WENDY HANGER SETS me down at the daffodil-clustered roundabout on Blithewood’s campus, just below the president’s ivy-veined house. “That was a pleasure, Iris.”

“Thanks so much for the guided tour, Wendy.”

“I like to show the place to folks who’d appreciate it, specially on the first real day of spring.”

“Look, I know my assistant paid by charge card but”—I hand her a twenty-dollar bill—“buy a bottle of something silly to celebrate your life as a granny.” She hesitates, but I press it into her hand.

“That’s generous of you, Iris. I will, and my husband and I’ll drink to your health. You’re sure you’re good for the trip back?”

“I’m good. My friend’s driving us back to New York.”

“Have a great meeting, then, and an excellent day, and enjoy the sunshine. The forecast’s patchy for the next few days.” She pulls away, waving, and is gone. I hear myself subaddressed in Ōshima’s plangent tones: Looking for your Sorority House?

I try to spot him, but see only students crossing the well-tended lawns with armfuls of folders and bags. Four men are carrying a piano. Ōshima, I just received a sign from Esther Little .

The front door of the president’s house opens and Ōshima, a slight figure with hands buried deep in his knee-length mugger’s hoodie, emerges. What sort of sign?

A mnemocrypted key , I subreply, walking towards the house. Wet catkins fur the twigs of a willow. I haven’t solved it yet, but I will. Is anyone at the cemetery? I unbutton my coat.

Only squirrels, humping and jumping , Ōshima flips back his hood and angles his white-whiskered, septuagenarian Kenyan face to soak up the sun, until a quarter-hour ago. Take the path leading up to your left from where I’m standing .

I pass within a few yards. Anyone we know?

Go and see. She’s wearing a Jamaican head-wrap.

I follow the path: What’s a Jamaican head-wrap?

Ōshima shuts the door behind him and walks the other way. Holler if you need me .

UNDERFOOT, OLD LEAVES crackle and squelch, while overhead, brand-new leaves ooze unbundling from swollen buds and the wood is Bluetoothed with birdsong. At the base of a trunk the girth of a brontosaurus’s leg, I find a gravestone. Here’s another, and another smothered by ivy. Blithewood’s campus cemetery, then, is not a regimented matrix of the dead but a wood whose graves are sunk between, and nourish the roots of, these pines, cedars, yews, and maples. Esther’s glimpse was precise: Tombs between the trees . Rounding a dense holly tree I come across Holly Sykes, and think, Who else? I haven’t seen her since my visit to Rye, four years ago. Her cancer is still in remission but she looks gaunter than ever, all bone and nerve. Her head-wrap is the red, green, and gold of the Jamaican flag. I scuff my feet to let her know someone’s coming, and Holly slips on a pair of sunglasses that conceal much of her face. “Good morning,” I venture.

“Good morning,” she echoes neutrally.

“Sorry to bother you, but I was looking for Crispin Hershey.”

“Right here.” Holly gestures at the white marble stone.

CRISPIN HERSHEY

WRITER

1966–2020

“Short and sweet,” I remark. “Clichéless.”

“Yes, he wasn’t a big fan of flowery prose.”

“And a more peaceful, more Emersonian resting place,” I say, “I can’t imagine. His work is urban and his wit’s urbane, but his soul is pastoral. One thinks of Trevor Upward in Echo Must Die , who finds peace only in the lesbian commune on the Isle of Muck.”

Holly inspects me through her dark lenses; she last saw me through a fug of medication, so I doubt she’ll recall me, but I’ll stay prepared: “Were you a colleague of Crispin’s here at the college?”

“No, no, I work in a different field. I’m a fan, though. I’ve read and reread Desiccated Embryos .”

“He always suspected that book would outlive him.”

“Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.” A blue jay swoops onto a fungus-ruffled tree stump by Hershey’s grave, emits a volley of harsh jeers, then a breathy trill.

“They don’t make those birds where I’m from,” says Holly.

“A blue jay,” I say, “or Cyanocitta cristata . The Algonquin name was sideso and the Yakama called it a xwáshxway , but their territory was over on the Pacific, so now I’m merely showing off.”