Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

He described the dark, how alone he felt. In the background, he could hear his lawyer shuffling papers. He had the distinct sense a light had been flicked on the other end of the line. It infused the grey where he was standing. In previous confidential talks with his lawyer, he had revealed the nature and extent of the fraud to which he had been party, so it was a matter not only of accounting for the monies, uncovering his complicity and culpability in the scam, but establishing that he was not the kingpin behind the fraud and that it was, in fact, masterminded by his father-in-law, Saul. He had papers to that effect, and tapes of conversations in a deposit box, but in the call now there was no talk of a plea bargain, nothing that suggested that he was planning on living, or exposing Saul.

Einhorn had come to a grander realization about himself. He was ready to assume personal responsibility. This was Saul’s doing. But it went deeper, and, if it were not this fraud, it would have been some other fraud perpetrated alongside somebody else equally as reprehensible as Saul Herzog. At best, he and Saul had found one another.

In not acting, in not going forward with the information he had on Saul, he was tacitly refusing to enter the narrative of accountability and full disclosure. His and Saul’s fraud was small potatoes really, running into eighty million dollars tops, when institutional fraud in the mortgage sector ran into the hundreds of billions.

If he had come forward first, he knew he could have negotiated a plea, faced the prospect of a white-collar jail that was no jail in the traditional sense of what lock-up could be like amidst rapists and murderers. He might have received a ten-year stretch, served five to six with good behavior. There were always second acts in American life. There was enough life ahead of him. It was an option.

There was the hope again that, in pressing the intercom, in calling for Elaine, she might yet come down, cry, and sit with him and understand that it was a damnable proposition all along, this life, that together they might brave what was to come, and arrive at a clearer understanding of who and what they had been as a couple, in what they had struggled to maintain between them. For there was something between them: the children.

Elaine had been faithful and agreeable, and, whatever the arrangement of their marriage as conceived by Saul, whatever Elaine thought in the cold light of deliberation, there must have been a sense that something held between them.

This, of course, was not the whole truth. There were men Elaine had liked more, men of lesser stature, in particular a gentile of low standing, and a man not open to compromise, or acceptable to Saul. In submitting to marrying Einhorn, Elaine had settled on the least of all terrible options. If she had a hint of what was slowly unfolding, if the demise of the family was at hand, she never let on. She never broke rank, never offered succor to Einhorn. Elaine was doing what she had always done. She was watching out for her interests.

It was Einhorn who was presuming too much, and, at the back of it, there was the great shame of Kenneth Caudill, what Einhorn had resorted to, so it was, in the end, his own undoing really. Kenneth Caudill had called him hours earlier, looking for money. Einhorn couldn’t tell if it was a ruse on the part of the FBI. It seemed so convenient, such a set-up. Kenneth wanted $50,000 to keep quiet. Einhorn had simply hung up mid-call.

*

Einhorn looked up. A light shone at the gated entrance to the house, then died. A shadow emerged. A car moved across the crackle of the loose stone drive. He was at the window. A door opened and then closed without sound. It was happening as though it had been planned for a long time, which it had.

He decided the closet was an ignoble place to be found hiding. His office was a far better place. Let them find him in the act of uploading or downloading a file, doing something suspicious and unnerving and deserving of his fate. Let Saul’s men make a mistake and kill him in his leather chair. Let Saul’s plan backfire. Let the forensics put together the last moments of his life, so it would be tragic, but, by uploading an incriminating file, it would be determined that Einhorn had found a decency and humanity to come forward before he was shot in the face.

THERE WERE PEOPLE in spandex working out in the fitness center at five fifteen in the morning. Nate passed them. The breakfast buffet wasn’t open for another fifteen minutes.

The center had a galactic feel of self-improvement. An infinity pool floated in an effervescent shimmer, a bead of mercury advancing the idea of space without boundaries, auguring how home in the future would most probably be experienced in a float of unmoored space aboard interstellar vessels crossing the void.

Nate saw existence better in the moment, what true history revealed, deep emptiness, so there was something to Ursula and Frank Grey Eyes’ way of seeing the universe.

It stalked him still, the quiet assessment of his time back home again, the inlaid memorial plaque out at the graveyard recessed into the grass for the unimpeded run of lawn equipment, and his house out there and now owned by somebody else. It seemed strange you could be so dissociated from your history that the recording of a deed could preclude you from ever returning, that your rights could be thus terminated.

He remembered Ursula telling him about what Frank had said, that the world was not owned, and that this was the great mistake the white man made that had caused so many wars. Of course, this opinion made Frank a bum in the eyes of everybody else, but Ursula believed it, and it was why she loved Nate too. He had walked willingly into the wilderness, away from possessions.

Ursula described a night in downtown Toronto when Frank had stood in the middle of a traffic island, dangerously drunk, shouting that the cars were salmon in the late crush of evening spawn. He kept shouting it to everybody around him. All you had to do was close your eyes and you could see it, the other life beyond the immediate one. Things died and were reincarnated as something it was not always possible to imagine, because that was the creator’s great trick. All was concealed, and it was the job of men like Frank Grey Eyes to go out and uncover it.

Frank wanted to just scoop up the salmon the way his ancestors had, to stand in the flowing, throbbing stream of life. Ursula held him back. She said that the salmon had not completed their journey. Frank stopped. He said that he had been wise finding someone like Ursula. She saw the salmon like he saw them.

They stood amidst the shoal of life as it passed around them on a traffic island in downtown Toronto and, together, they discovered where the salmon had gone. It was beautiful to know that nothing ever truly disappeared, that they were there, as Frank Grey Eyes had said, and that Toronto wasn’t the mistake everyone had said it was when he’d announced his departure.

Nate remembered how Ursula told him the story, the beauty of it, when it was nothing but a struggle with a drunk in the middle of an intersection, but she could invest herself with the spirit of another, and so it was about what Frank believed.

There was that pain in his abdomen again. He called to Ursula in the way he did when he was alone at the cabin, gave voice to her name like a soft incantation. It was almost enough to bring her to him.

He tried to call on the great strength of the great Per Ingebretson, that figure his father had so valiantly conjured to know that a man could continue alone.

He had talked about Per and his journey to Ursula. She’d smiled and imagined how the squaws would have found him strong and capable. To the First Nation’s people, the first incarnation of the white man was not feared. They were of a similar spirit, making their way without possessions in the world.