The Death of All Things Seen Read online

  THE DEATH OF ALL THINGS SEEN

  Michael Collins

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About The Death Of All Things Seen

  It’s 2008 and Norman Price – a moderately successful forty-something playwright living in Chicago – considers the shuddering impact of the financial crash. What’s needed, he thinks, is the will for a new existence. When his parents die, one shortly after the other, The New Existence becomes Norman’s mantra as he tries to recalibrate his own shaken world.

  Into Norman’s tentative re-building, a couple of bombshells are dropped. His parents’ old house has to go on the market, forcing him to revisit the past. And then he receives a mysterious email from a man he has never met but whose name is instantly, painfully, familiar.

  Norman’s new existence is suddenly threatened by past secrets.

  Michael Collins takes post 9/11 America as the background for a deeply moving novel about complex identities and the fragility of humanity.

  To my wife and children

  Thanks to Maggie McKernan, David Godwin, Dominique Bourgois and Kim McArthur for faith and guidance.

  To Amal Chatterjee, Joe Lemrow, Will Tomory and Karl Ameriks as early readers. To Heidi and Nora for editorial insights, advice and countless hours of reading.

  And to my parents for the early years of sacrifice and love and showing me how to live life and take chances.

  The world breaks everyone,

  and afterward, some are strong

  at the broken places.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About The Death Of All Things Seen

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part 2

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About Michael Collins

  Also by Michael Collins

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  IT HAD BEEN over a decade since Helen Price had driven along the Gold Coast in the push of an early afternoon commute. This time, however, she was driving against the flow of traffic, heading to the city and not out toward the suburbs. The direction sat as a point of significance, figuring in the literal transformation of her life these past few years, the run against the grain of any true forward momentum, a life pushing backward in time toward old memories, to islands of remembrance of who she was and who she had once been.

  How had it come to pass, this vast sweeping change, this passage of time, so she found herself at a point where life appeared, neither here nor there, but belonged to the past? Maybe this was the melancholy essence of growing old, of being old.

  *

  There was only an hour to go before her doctor’s appointment. Yet, Helen couldn’t help weigh the significance of a receptionist’s polite insistence that she switch her appointment from Monday to Friday, and to Dr Marchant’s downtown office where allegedly a last minute cancelation had opened up in the late afternoon, the concatenation of facts hemming her into a reality that there could be no further happiness, no further life.

  She considered staying on Lake Shore Drive, then, deciding against it, she changed lanes, exiting into merging traffic along Michigan Avenue. She felt an almost immediate sense of déjà vu in having taken this route so many times before.

  It was not, however, quite as it had been. Nothing was anymore. If she could alter the perspective ever so slightly, if she could beg such small mercies on this day of remembrance, reclaim the past for a moment, she would swap her compact Toyota Corolla for one of those bygone fin-tail floating Detroit fortresses.

  What she had in mind was the 1963 Buick 4600 Invicta with the tomato red leather interior she and her husband Walter had purchased the first year of their marriage – the Invicta, the first and last car she ever drove straight off a showroom floor.

  She’d adjust, too, the garish fluorescence of the Michigan Avenue storefronts, temper them with the Technicolor warmth of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, filtering everything through a Hollywood cheesecloth that had defined an America of pillbox hats and high heels. How one appeared to the world mattered once.

  And, if she could effect those changes on this melancholy day, she would go back further through the blur of history, undo so many events, finding a point of re-entry into life when she had the thread of continuity. She would begin by re-aligning historical details, remote and yet personal to her, events as she now remembered them – reinstate the Shah of Iran, unhood and march the hostages back to American shores, send Khomeini back into exile. Reinstall Nixon, unplug the Watergate devices, silence Deep Throat, undo Nixon’s visit to Red China. Fill the empty gas pumps of the 1973 Oil Embargo, keep the bigness of US cars and the monopoly of Bethlehem Steel, resanctify the unions, resurrect Jimmy Hoffa. She would also lead a retreat out of Vietnam, dislodge the bullets from the brains of MLK, Bobby and John F. Kennedy. She’d repeal, too, the benevolence of the Marshall Plan, spinning back time to some twilight pre-adolescence of first cognition, stop time somewhere after the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, begin it again in the Cold War brinksmanship with the defined enemy of the Communist Soviet Union.

  She was aware she had not included undoing the recent horrors of 9/11, not started at that new point of national hysteria. It was not her history, not really. She felt the emotional slippage. The inconsequential piling of new histories that no longer impinged on her immediate life with any sense of real urgency, just as untold tens of millions before must have surely arrived at certain points in their own lives where events, even as monumental as Pearl Harbor, just floated, unmoored of any real significance – psychological life lived, not in a forward trajectory, but built up around points of personal perspective – each generation, no, each individual at the end, an island unto itself.

  Helen Price was conscious of how upset her son Norman would be with her in expressing this melancholy sense of loss. Undoubtedly, he would have stridently argued against her present vision of history, pointing out her incongruous lament for a succession of generations who had slaughtered themselves across a half-century of two world wars, plunged themselves into the shadow of nuclear annihilation, not to mention the protracted economic miasma of the preceding age of Robber Barons, The Stock Market Crash, and The Great Depression.

  She could almost hear Norman’s voice in her head, his rarified, injurious assessment of other people’s lives that had already coalesced in his indignant, hurtful one-man shows, from Confessions of a Latchkey Kid, to his follow-up, Angry Man, a scathing indictment of Walter that had become a minor Chicago theatrical phenomenon.

  How would Norman now title her life – Sad Woman, Dying Woman, Lonely Woman? She tried to imagine the exchange, her story unfolding as a natural corollary to Walter’s life, a companion piece to Angry Man, another black box theater production, her offstage v
oice playing against Norman’s voice, carried over the stilled dark. This, the perceivable endgame, a pitiless assessment of two people who had gone broke educating what turned out to be a recalcitrant gay man who had decided to damn the history of civilization for perceived homophobic injustices.

  She felt her heart race even as she reached for the word homophobic. The estrangement was Norman’s doing, and yet, in coming again to her own life, she would have to cede to some of his points, to a revisionist history now taught in schools that gave him his confidence, his optimism, his distaste and distrust of the past.

  And yet it wasn’t exactly how history had unfolded, not really, not how she remembered it. She found herself shaking her head ever so slowly, seeing further back before Norman, memories of her early courtship, the drive-in ice-cream parlors and drive-in movies; the solidarity of small-town homecomings, the flotilla of convertibles escorting Kings and Queens to the floodlit fields of night game inter-county rivals, everyone seeking simply to reclaim the familiar, to set aside recent horrors, to fall in love with poodle-skirted girls in push-up bras, cashmere sweaters and mother-of-pearl earrings. It played just so in her mind, in spools of old reel turning slowly against the foreground of a more recent, but disconnected, debased present.

  *

  Time was running out for Helen Price.

  She had started to think of herself again in the third person, remembering how she self-consciously had identified herself as Helen Price when first married, writing out her signature over and over again with a trembling adult resolve, and now to come upon that name again, Helen Price, her name, and all that it once represented, and to think of it on a headstone.

  She felt her eyes blur. She remembered how the end had ignominiously started in the nadir of an itinerant Thanksgiving at a suburban Red Lobster less than a year ago, a compromise in the absence of a family, an experience so unsettling it had set her and Walter on the high seas a month later for a lavish Christmas Caribbean cruise ultimately overshadowed by a low grade salmonella outbreak linked to a dubious barrier reef buffet of crustaceous delights. It was the persistence of stomach pains in the months after the cruise that had augured all was not well with her. Cancer was in her uterus and then in her lungs.

  How often had she thought, what if she had never gone on the cruise? The entire fiasco opened up again, the Medevac rescue efforts off the coast of St Croix, a quotient of elderly summarily helicoptered to an island hospital for precautionary reasons, her included, and against her better judgment. A month later she had discovered that travel insurance had not covered the six-minute airlift, the Medevac outfit billing an astronomical $11,000 to their credit card.

  *

  Helen turned after crossing the Chicago River, edging along Upper West Wacker. She knew she should have turned earlier onto Superior, toward the vast medical complex of Northwestern Hospital and the Oncology office of Dr Marchant.

  Instead, she followed the contour of the river’s bend. She wasn’t going to Dr Marchant’s office. She gave herself to this truth, lost in the elongated fall of shadows. She passed across gelled bars of afternoon light intersecting the East / West streets in a roll call of presidential names – Washington, Madison, Monroe and Adams – before turning east again toward the lake on Jackson, crossing Franklin until she finally passed the intersection of La Salle. This was where she had worked until 1992, the ground zero of her existence.

  She craned forward. Above her, two hooded figures stood atop the Mercantile Exchange, an Egyptian grasping a sheaf of wheat and a Native American holding an ear of corn. Time seemed to have stopped here. The commodities exchange and the Federal Reserve Bank belonged to another age, to a time when the nation’s wealth had been tied to the Gold Standard, to a cache of gold set against the float of currency.

  ‘There you go again!’ she heard Norman say in her head. And yet it meant something to her. It defined the way she had experienced life for so many years, the ticker tape of futures tied to the breadbasket of grain, cereals, and soybeans grown out on the great plains of Oklahoma and Nebraska, to the dairy farms in the glacial moraines of Wisconsin and Minnesota, the railway yards of livestock movement, the trundling shunt of railway gauges coupling and decoupling, trains snaking out toward the East, South, and West.

  Maybe it was just nostalgia, the same story generationally played out time and again, but no, it was different! The slippage all the more stark now in this new age of informational management and digital superhighways, in the Wi-Fi bandwidth of things unseen, in the derivatives markets tied directly to Walter’s retirement account, based on what exactly? Calculated wagers securitized against something.

  Helen felt a shudder run through her. Was there ever such a sense of loss as the one she now experienced? In times past, be it plague, famine, war, or simply the wrath of God, there was some sense of an ending and reasonableness to it. She thought of Lot, walking away from all that had come before, but toward a future. That was the difference, the prospect of hope, of a new beginning.

  *

  Helen was willing to admit to her own failings. It was just her perception, her way of seeing the world. She felt the need to defend herself again. No, nothing made sense anymore. Not really. She felt her lips forming the name Theodore Feldman, reeling in time again, finding a way back to the most distant and yet respected man she had ever known. Mr Theodore Feldman, distinguished, decorated veteran of World War II. He called the Japanese ‘Gooks’, his one betrayal of his personal history in the Pacific carnage. Where had men like that gone, men of means, manners, and material substance? She knew where. Life detached from a fading, tangible, older world of physical materiality; life lost to a digital age.

  She recalled fondly the arterial vacuum suction tubes running through her office building. This was how commerce had worked once upon a time, in the hive of corporate activity, with its division of labor between the sexes and ages. Memos materializing as items of substance, memos first taken down word for word in a cryptic shorthand secretarial script, then passed on and typed up by pools of girls.

  It still existed within her mind, the gurgle of the water cooler serviced by that lifelong Culligan Man in his dickey bow and crisp white short sleeved shirt with the hitched polio limp passed off as a war injury. She observed all this sitting in an outer office of bubbled privacy glass, opening the morning mail with a dagger of a letter opener, screening all calls for Mr Feldman until he buzzed and called her in, whereafter she spent the greater part of her day transcribing, pen and pad in hand.

  She remembered, too, how Mr Feldman strode back and forth punctuating his ideas with a series of affectations that perhaps even he was unaware of inhabiting, stopping mid-stride in a slanting sunlight, then shifting into the colder grey of more rational deliberation, moving to and fro in a mental cursive of looping patterns through the office, finding his way toward some coherent thought.

  She could almost smell his aftershave and how, through all of it, she had remained an undeniable physical presence into which she had allowed Mr Feldman to pour his professional expertise. At times, Mr Feldman looking askance in her direction, at the way she shifted ever so slightly, whereupon he subtly readjusted a phrase, because of her influence, her presence – who knew, really?

  She thought if she were to explain the business memo process, if there was something she could pass on to this new generation, it would undoubtedly include reference to this spatial sense of awareness, this fluid movement in time, this assemblage of thoughts found here and there in the touchstone of physical things and spaces. Yes, that was it, her sense of physical presence in time.

  And there were other memories. That time Mr Feldman took to using a gold-plated putter that came with one of those automatic cups that spat the ball out again and again, a corporate Christmas gift when such tokens were expected, Mr Feldman sighting up his points of managerial reprimand for the salesmen in the field, a series of balls hit in slow, methodical succession, the ball’s silent roll across the billiar
d green of the carpet.

  She remembered, too, the speeches Mr Feldman spent days constructing for the board of trustees. The attenuated way he had of coming to subtle points regarding the general running of the company. Mr Feldman looking off toward Lake Michigan for a word or phrase to capture a thought just so. The old-world, soft-shoe way he had of speaking around and not particularly to an issue, circumscribing points of business suggestive enough to land upon the overall challenges, but lest anybody forgot, for this was a nation of optimists, the opportunities that still existed – remarks that always inspired the corporate board members to nod approvingly amidst desserts and cognac, leading to furtive considerations concerning drinks elsewhere – Mr Feldman politely retreating and placing a jocular call to the office with uncharacteristic warmth in the hum of accomplishment to ensure the office, as he put it, ‘hadn’t burned down!’ A remark that always made Helen flush.

  On these occasions Helen had always found comfort, hearing the raspy scratch of Mr Feldman’s five o’clock growth on the end of the receiver, and so, too, the clink of china plates being gathered from the impressive spread of tables, the general hubbub of corporate entitlement which made her feel all was well, that everything which mattered in the world was in the capable hands of irreproachable men of sound character and good moral judgment. She would never, ever have thought Mr Theodore Feldman would have bowed out, stepping from his corporate office window atop the Chicago skyline on the Black Monday of 1987, but he did.

  That was when her life had most surely ended, or so said Norman in the years afterward, implying improprieties of a most sordid sort, pressing against her loyalty and fond remembrance of Mr Feldman with his general cynicism of all things past, the accusations surfacing at being left in the nurse’s office because she simply could not leave work. ‘It was as simple as that, Norman!’