Bruce Bauman: Broken Sleep

One evening, after Malcolm finished a meeting with Bickley, he suggested they stop for dinner on the way home. Before they ordered, Malcolm declared, “I think you should stop working.”

“Why? Are you sure? Do we have the money?”

“Yes, I am sure. It’s time we start a family.”

Hannah blanched.

“Ach, my dear”—he clasped her hand—“you misunderstand. I’m sorry to have scared you. We will adopt. During my meeting today with William, he confirmed that he has found us a boy. He can arrange everything.”

“Oh, Malcolm,” Hannah exclaimed, “how lucky I was to find you!” And in that moment, Hannah blindly accepted her parents’ worldview — things do happen for a reason, and there is always hope.

“Your ghost is alive.”

Through the phone, Moses could practically feel Sidonna Cherry’s self-congratulatory pat on the back as she breathlessly relayed her discovery. He sighed. She continued, “Old and in failing health, but alive. Not only is your father still kicking, he owns a condo exactly three point six miles from your door.” Forty years of intractable angst and three thousand therapeutic miles later, and he ends up in spyglass distance from my home , Moses thought. What a cosmic joke. “West on Venice, north on Ocean. All the way to—”

“Hey, Ms. Cherry, stop.” Damn, how he wished his father had been dead. Until he again remembered that he needed him alive.

“Professor, there’s more.”

Professor? He hadn’t told Cherry that he was a professor of American history in the irrelevant department in the Southern California College of Art and Music (aka SCCAM) in Pasadena.

“Okay. Slowly, though.”

“He also has a place in Rio, not sure of that address, where it seems he spends most of his time. As of last night, he was here , in L.A. According to all official records, Hannah is your birth mother. Are you positive she is not your mother?”

Nothing about Moses’s past made sense anymore. Malcolm Teumer had slept with his mom. Hell, they were married. Moses was born on December 8, 1958, and for forty years he had believed Hannah had given birth to him.

“Unfortunately, I’m sure.”

“If she doesn’t know who your actual mother is, I don’t think there’s anyone left alive who can help, except your father.”

This “father” had stuck around for two years after Moses’s birth before (according to Hannah) evaporating into the suburban air. Except for a failed search at the age of seventeen, where certain scents before going dead had hinted toward South America as his ultimate landing place, Moses remained unknowing of where Malcolm lived. Or if he was even still alive.

Cherry waited on the other end of the phone for an answer as he began to imagine for the umpteenth time, in another of what he termed his “daymares,” a new version of his father’s journey, this time from New York to Destination Do-Over Land.

He gazes up at the gray clouds of the October sky, unmoved by his sister’s goodbye wave from the open window of her olive green Pontiac, and before her eyes he vaporizes into the futuristic Pan Am terminal and emerges a new man, wading in the Pacific tides of Avalon among breathless sea maidens, his exhalations emptying the toxic fumes of the Nazis’ total war, a survivor reborn with no past … and with no son .

“Yo, Hamlet, you faint or something? You want your father’s address?”

“Yes. Fax it to me now. Thanks. I’ll call you.” Almost too cautiously, Moses returned the phone to its bright yellow cradle.

His insides clenched; instead of relieved, he was livid. Now that his father was alive and so damn close, there would be, he hoped, no more forays into scores of imaginary pasts. He slumped in his swivel chair in the room that he kept dimly lit and New York winter dark. Despite two decades in L.A., Moses had subconsciously re-created New York in his room: a groggy Decemberish gray filled with the aura of dread and the resounding roar of an onrushing subway at midnight, even when it was silent. Right then, the sound in his room couldn’t have been more quiet and the bursting cacophony of confusion in his head any louder.

Eleven months before, Moses had been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. Immediately upon hearing the news, Hannah flew from New York, and after a hail of apologies, diversions, and self-recriminations, unveiled the preposterous notion that she and he did not share DNA. Believing them both to be adoptive parents, it was only after Teumer disappeared that she uncovered the truth that Malcolm was Moses’s biological father. She bemoaned her inability to help save him, for whom she had sacrificed so much. Moses and his mom fell farther into their abyss of sighs, adding yet another step to their dance of indecipherable silences.

While Moses suffered with his body’s cancerous disintegration, trying various treatments that counted as a holding-the-line action of staving off death (not a bad thing unless you had a more sanguine worldview than Moses), they attempted, without success, to find Teumer’s whereabouts. Finally, he and his doctor had engaged in a blunt and necessary conversation.

“Moses,” Dr. Hank Fielding, a white-haired, square-headed oncologist in his early sixties, spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, “after the last round of chemo, you’re in what I like to call ‘qualified remission.’ The strong probability is that it won’t last. Your platelets are still too low.”

“Which means?”

“The bone marrow registry still has no match for you. You need a donor.” Jay, Moses’s wife of five years, clenched his wrist in panic. Afraid to look at Jay, trying to control his emotions, Moses stared at the wall behind Fielding while he continued in his avuncular tone, “I’m so sorry, Moses. You must find him.”

In Moses’s presence, Jay obeyed her father Al Bernes’s (né Bernstein) credo, voiced in his art-dealer jargon: “equipoise and stoicism in the face of crisis.” Her twitching and bouncing legs, outbreaks of canker sores, and forced reassurances that “It’ll be all right” (along with a more frequent late night dipping into the alcohol cabinet) belied the truth. Beneath her varnished exterior brewed a cauldron of fear.

After Fielding’s unspoken or else , Moses and Jay agreed, although a bit appalled at becoming a California cliché, to hire a private detective to track down his father. Moses told him, “The family name was Temesvar, taken from a city in Hungary where they lived before moving to Germany. I guess it was an assimilated name even then. I think it got rearranged when he came here. Maybe he went back to using it.” With so little to go on, the first and then a second detective came up empty.

With her worry outweighing her hesitancy, Jay contacted Randy Sheik, least offensive of the Sheik brothers who owned the successful indie Kasbah Records. After leaving Miami in 1985, where her father owned a world-class art gallery, Jay had attended UCLA, and after graduation she and Geri Allen opened a chicly influential art consulting firm. The Sheiks and Kasbah became a major client. Randy, always happy to hear from Jay, suggested a woman with the Baskin-Robbins 31-Flavors name of Sidonna Cherry. “She’s unorthodox. She don’t ever let you meet her in person. But she watches you. And she sure the fuck gets results.”

Unorthodox suited Moses. Unlike the other PIs, after he explained his situation, Cherry didn’t try to snow him about the benefits of a joyous, fairy tale father-son reunion.

Cherry’s call delivered the first of many messages from the suddenly undead, which like a siren’s unholy song could not be silenced or ignored, unshrouding decades-old secrets and lies repeated so often that they had become truths.