Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Now, seated before her computer, she read about Mulligan with interest. This was significantly different. There was informed and uninformed opinion. There was speculation and innuendo. There was stuff from the Paper of Record and stuff from the Unhinged Blogger of the Moment. It all began with the books; if it was all supposed to end there, things had somehow gotten inverted. It wasn’t only the terrible things (and there really were terrible things, things he hadn’t hinted at when providing his clever little biosketch), but the good things, the praise, the virtues that were imputed to him; it crept from the literary to the moral and then back again: the man was good because the books were good and the books were good because the man was good; the haters following the same tautological algorithm in the opposite direction. But there were also facts, with sources and citations, with corroboration, with actual photos and videos.

But if the abundance of facts left her questioning the composite truth, if the man himself left her questioning the composite truth, it was nevertheless beginning to look like Mulligan could be potentially useful, as a way into her story. An e-mail from Nables had informed her that he needed to see her copy “posthaste.” He expressed his doubts about the story’s value and focus, again, and expressed his dissatisfaction with her attitude and methods, again.

So it could be, say, that it was the writer from New York who had first become suspicious about the true origins of the Native American storyteller who’d entertained the midwestern town’s children. From these faint doubts, the entire story would gradually come to light. It was an angle — a feature angle, but if a piece of hard news arose from it, that would be fine. It would require fancy footwork. It would require the suspension of ethics. She would have to draw him in, maybe finesse an introduction to Becky. Nables would have to believe that Mulligan had had the idea on his own. So would Mulligan.

S ATURDAYmorning my eyes opened early, and I lay there comforting myself, a ritual I’d grown accustomed to. There are some mornings when I wake up dreaming a child’s plangent dream: I want my father, badly enough that it upends the day, even as its first cold light is just icing the slats of the blinds. I’d fooled myself that I’d done my grieving when he first got sick; I’d certainly done enough of it then. The telephone call from my mother telling me of the “significant” growth that had been discovered on my father’s brain came only days after Rae and I had returned with the kids from her parents’ house in North Truro, our annual vacation there an unfailing restorative so dependably lacking in any need to make real decisions that for the duration of our stay I always felt like I was my own pampered child. This year the trip had come two months after the successful publication of my third book, a story collection, and it was while we were at the beach one August day that the call had come from the Boyd Foundation. Suddenly years of difficulty seemed to have been completely overcome. I was a famous man, I was a respected man, now I was a secure man. I was stupid with health when my mother had called; sunburned and toned from swimming in the sea each day, immortal in my own mind. I sat with Rae at the kitchen table that night, weeping and drinking, until finally she’d corked the bottle of whiskey and led me to the bedroom, where she sat me down on the bed and then kneeled on the floor before me to remove my shoes.

Everything still worked, I remember thinking. I had a woman who loved me, taking my shoes off in a bedroom full of solid old pieces of furniture, chosen individually over the years, a bedroom made of the history of my own adult peculiarity. Kids sleeping in the next room. This was the moment, the time, when I’d always hoped that my father would die: when I didn’t need him. I had everything, and everything worked, so it was time to give up my father, the way I might give up a favorite old jacket with a torn lining. Was that really what I’d thought, when I dared to anticipate his decline and death? That I could substitute for him happy memories that would then take their place among all these other objects and possessions? My father would die and I could then contemplate the Empire dresser in the bedroom while recalling him, taking comfort in both object and memory? Of all the unexamined dumbnesses. Happy memories were just another greeting card idea that I hadn’t gotten around to looking at carefully. Now I had to look at it. “Happy memories.” What did these happy memories even consist of? My most familiar memory of my father is of him working at his desk, which was located in the dining room that we never used. His desk was a long piece of sanded and stained plywood that he’d laid atop three two-drawer file cabinets. Papers and books were piled on the dining table. I also remember him working at his desk in his office on campus. This was a conventional desk, made of metal. His office had embrasured windows, slits really, near the floor, which made for a dim, cool ambience. I remember him sitting in the easy chair in the living room under a lamp at night, reading. He read until late, usually heading upstairs long after my mother had gone to bed. He would look up and smile when I came in from wherever I’d been. I could remember him smiling. I could remember walking with him to the elementary school I attended, a half-mile stroll we shared each morning. That would be a happy memory. But then I might remember the last time I’d visited my parents before the diagnosis, when my father and I had taken a walk on a fall afternoon, winter and the smell of wood smoke in the air, and my father, breathing hard, had asked me to please slow down, I was going too fast for him. I’d looked at him and for the first time was aware that he had become an old man. The cancer would already have been eating him then, undoubtedly, but he was old in any event, and the imprint of death was present; the presaging of the something that would be eating him, and sooner rather than later. That would not be a happy memory. But the bigger point was that I couldn’t, now or ever, imagine spending the rest of my life merely remembering my father. To remember anything at all is to point out the ineradicable distance between you and that thing.

On the airplane the next morning I was sweating booze from every pore and it reminded me in this one respect of the hungover flights I experienced coming home from college on vacation, two weeks’ worth of dirty laundry stuffed into my duffel bag. Otherwise nothing in this most generically familiar of spaces seemed reminiscent of anything. I made conversation with an elderly woman sitting next to me who was returning home after visiting her son and his family in New Jersey, and all I could think, looking at her healthy old face, was that she would be alive after my father was dead. I gazed at a photograph of George Bush in the Times and thought the same thing. With even the least likely human on the face of the earth I would soon have more in common than with my father, who would enter death, that least human of things. Even the prospect of a burning Christian Hell, given that it’s composed of our most familiarly human fears, is more human than the nothing, the oblivion, we all face. The Greeks had it right; only the zombie detachment of an Asphodel Meadows could truly represent the annulment of death.

I’d told my mother not to bother picking me up at the airport, since I’d rented a car — not the huge, lulling SUV I had been tempted to reserve, but a mid-sized sedan that I knew would keep at bay my father’s sense of modest propriety, which I had a feeling would be easily provoked under these circumstances by any display of ostentation on my part (and I was right; catching sight of my wristwatch, an Omega I’d splurged on after returning from the Cape, my father told yet again one of his favorite stories, about the visiting dignitary to the campus, a wealthy and famous man, who had inadvertently delighted my father when he checked his watch — a Timex).