The Death of All Things Seen Page 4

  Joanne took it good-naturedly. She believed in the table as pv ☺ pp.

  *

  In the background, throughout the day, Norman kept a small TV playing on CSPAN in the faint belief that this was how democracy worked, and that this too was part of The New Existence – reform, self-analysis, accountability, and transparency – the great show of collective reconciliation.

  In truth, he thought it was crap, but the hearings captivated Joanne who liked the crispness of congressional and senatorial members and their staff, the polite decorum of the process. She seemed to have plenty of time to wax on life and politics, on her sense of how the world would reform under Obama, who raised great hope in her.

  Joanne was interested in the power of talk, in the power of reconciliation. She communicated all this with sincere conviction as she ran her tongue along a joint.

  Norman watched her move between the playroom and the TV room. She had a way of running her hand through her hair. She was quoting figures – the extent of the losses was astounding. Norman obligingly pretended to write it down.

  Joanne was, she told him in all sincerity, absolutely for law and order. She was interested in the process of transparency. She wondered if the Lehman Brothers would eventually testify, then made a face when Norman said nothing.

  She knew the Lehman Brothers were dead! Was Norman even listening to her?

  She wanted his opinion on whether a certain senator wore boxers or not. She liked sincerity in a man more than anything else. As she talked, she crossed her arms. She was talking and simultaneously looking between the TV, Norman and Grace playing in her room, while in the kitchen, Randolph pushed his food bowl across the floor with his nose.

  It went this way, Norman guarded in his criticism in a way he might not have been with Kenneth. In intertwining with her distracting influence, in allowing her into The New Existence, he believed Joanne was drawing him closer to a feeling of empathy and understanding, leading to a flattening of life’s ambitions and hopes, connecting him with the velvet hammer of assumed and perhaps welcomed responsibility.

  What he wanted at a deep level was to flush irony from his vocabulary, to tear down that essential wall that kept him from actually living life. He was looking elsewhere for inspiration without being fully cognizant of doing so, where the stated goal was not actually the stated goal, and that, in the margin of anxiety, perhaps genius would find root and surface.

  There was, of course, the practical care and keeping of Grace that Joanne could provide. It wasn’t all about his own mania, his own interest. Grace survived as the singular event that could not be undone. What he tried to convince himself, in the distancing of Kenneth’s absence, in the silence of days, then weeks, and now months, was that Grace represented the watershed of a personal commitment toward ideas of hope and humanity, toward ideals that outlasted the flame of passion or intimacy. She was exerting a needed influence on his life, changing him for the better, normalizing him.

  What Joanne Hoffmann was teaching him, what he was seeing when he stared into her image in the hallway mirror, was the power of the accumulation of small actions, an atomized life.

  He noted Joanne’s attentiveness when she dressed Grace, matching socks and color-coordinating outfits. He would come upon them in the kitchen, Joanne cutting food into bite-sized bits, steamed broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts, and spinach to be eaten before there was even a mention of dessert. Joanne inflexible in her resolve, her arms folded in stand-offs that could last a half-hour. At times Joanne sent Grace to her room to think about ‘making good choices’ (gc), when Norman would have simply given in, not out of love, but expediency.

  He wanted to put Joanne on the spot about her own apparent bad choices (bc), but managed to quell the cynical reflex. He was beginning to see how, through the act of talking and an associated pantomime of actions, a child might eventually navigate the world.

  He wrote it all down in its exact details, revising and adding to his new formulary for life’s grand equation. Was this, in fact, how you raised a child? He thought of Romulus and Remus. Raised by wolves, they had founded the city of Rome. He considered the question under the working title – What if Joanne Hoffmann had raised Romulus and Remus?

  And he could catalog a series of other distractions. Joanne said that Grace would need to be kitted out with a new coat and boots for the walks she, Joanne, and Randolph took along the lake, so Norman was obliged to turn from his own preoccupations to notice the bare outline of defoliated trees, to see that winter had already settled upon them.

  Since the purchase, there was the added equation – Joanne and Grace’s pre-walk routine. Grace demanding that she be allowed to change out of her Princess Jasmine underwear into Princess Aurora underwear, or Belle underwear, the demand made with such petulance that the formula was skewed by a tantrum (t), as Grace thrashed her legs on the floor like something out of The Exorcist. A tantrum (t), could rise exponentially, denoted by (t)X.

  The tantrums and the socio-political reality beneath them – the polyester underwear purchased at Walmart – shot to hell his stand against globalization and child labor exploitation. It was, he reflected in his most sanguine moment, part of the new poverty. This was economic life under The New Existence, in which princess underwear could be bought for the price of a Big Mac.

  He had his working formulae, seeking what he called the elusive dark matter of the human condition. He felt himself on the far reaches of a profound understanding, where there might be no single solution, where each case might be the exception, a concept that had at its center a dark nihilism.

  This was life in The New Existence, and it didn’t end with the morning routine.

  Norman began to face the 24/7 reality of childcare. After the reprieve of the morning walk there was another change of clothes, a smock for finger painting, the mounting pile of laundry, all part of the monotonous sinkhole of commitment a child’s life entailed if you decided against daycare, or didn’t simply hand a child over to Sesame Street and SpongeBob SquarePants.

  In this he better understood his mother’s choices. Hers had been the new era of delegated responsibility, where a life no longer had to end with marriage, and the rearing of children didn’t have to be a soul-killing proposition.

  But, of course, it was never that easy. He was, as he had described in the opening of Confessions of a Latchkey Kid, ‘Formula Fed!’ with its double-entendre in that spirited age of dehydrated foods and pills, where nobody wanted to suffer the recourse of slaving over a stove.

  How it had changed, that sixties lightness of existence, a calculated minimalism that might be ascribed to a processor, to the functionality and purpose of something, and not the thing itself, not its beauty. He was thinking of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans.

  Something had changed in the interim. Why were chefs now so popular, why was the kitchen part of a new eroticism, and why were there so many goddamn cookbooks on the market?

  He now bore witness to it. The mid-morning snack, the organic lunch with the sugar allowance noted, the small juice box and the wholegrain animal crackers, the calorie-counted dinner, and, at the evening’s end, his concentration broken in the midst of reviewing the day’s work by the quack of a rubber duck, the splash of the ritual bath, so that he was forced to get up and close the door.

  For the longest time, life had thrown up nothing but a quiet stasis of days. He had forsaken the tempestuous shouting and making up of a sexual relationship for The New Existence. There were agreed terms of civility and order to maintain with Joanne Hoffmann.

  At one point, Joanne called Norman into the hallway. He compliantly appeared. She was in the process of putting a sticker on the top of each of Grace’s winter boots. Each kitten had its paws raised. Joanne explained how when the kittens’ paws aligned correctly, they completed a heart. Then Joanne made Norman do it.

  Joanne swept her hair off her face and lit a joint, observing as Norman dutifully brought the kittens together. In so doing, Norm
an gained an insightful awareness into how, even in the teaching of the simplest of tasks, the act of communication required one to take into account the other’s temperament and self-awareness, so Grace learned not so much her right from her left, but a strategy to complete the task.

  As in all things, a balance needed to be struck.

  4.

  AMERICA HAD ITS great stories of rags to riches, and so, too, did Canada, though celebrated in a different way. Canada didn’t lay claim to greatness. It didn’t set men on pedestals.

  If Nate Feldman were to tell it, Canada had been a providential lifeline. He had made a small fortune in organics from the late twentieth-century obsession with all things natural and had gotten in on the ground floor of the Green movement long before it was fashionable.

  He did it out of necessity, eking out a subsistence existence in the early years after his escape. He tapped a line of trees around his small cabin, drawing a viscous maple syrup, and later, in the disaster of the early onset of one winter and a briar of grape vines freezing, he’d fallen on the idea of making an ice wine that went with a salmon he’d caught and smoked.

  These items – the maple syrup, the ice wine and the smoked salmon – became synonymous with a rugged Canadian mystique. He added honey and unleavened bread later to his gift baskets. The world, or at least a part of it, was seeking a point of reconnection.

  It accounted for a small fortune, but a fortune founded on a dark secret. He remembered, at one time, a teacher asking, what of the fortune of a man who makes it on an initial sum of stolen money – was the investment and return thus tainted? How could one make reparation? Could an immoral act be made right?

  In the quiet of his kitchen, he felt a reflexive ache of deepening loss, how his life had unfolded in those first years, the serendipity of events, the alignment of chance, the run of good luck that might otherwise have seen his ruin. He had been watched over. He truly believed this.

  He gathered wood around the side of the house, then set a blaze going in the fieldstone firepit. This was home now in the enveloping warmth of a dry heat. He felt its deep pull in the throw of amber light contrasted against the outside brilliance. He had cords of wood piled high to see him through winter, a cache gained during the summer months.

  *

  He had come to live in anticipation of future events, to set his perspective in the reach of the next season. He considered this a great personal realignment with the natural order of the universe. He thus accounted for his days in a labor of advancing effort.

  He was seeking excuses to not acknowledge the letter. He might retire now and sleep as the animals did. He was due it. All things must rest. He was stalling. He knew it.

  *

  The letter was a week old and curled at the edges by the dry heat of the fire. He passed it on the way to the kitchen. He found and opened a can of soup, poured the contents into a pot and set it on the stove.

  A crown of flame whispered over his thoughts. He stood in an oblong shadow and stared into the monotony of falling snow. Memory floated in a grey static that cleared and played when he focused and closed his eyes. There was always another life playing within him.

  Where to begin? In 1971 with his arrival into Canada? Yes, there!

  Thank God for the Canadian wilderness and the length of an undefended border. How easy it had been to cross the divide under cover of night, venturing into the far north, passing unnoticed through a drift of human settlements, brief flickers of habitation that had grabbed a living from the inhospitable land. It was still there, the legacy of trading posts that held on long enough for towns to take hold and give rise to generations who intermarried and stubbornly survived long past the boom times of gold or silver mining, or whatever it was that first brought them together.

  In the weeks before he left for Canada, he’d torn pages from an encyclopedia in the public library, circled the names of towns. Havre-Saint-Roche had caught his interest. It was described as a ramshackle town, once beset by debauchery and gambling, where civilization had never quite taken hold. Its original French-Canadian population had been joined by Russian and Ukrainian immigrants lured to the Canadian wilderness with the promise of arable land that had proved unable to sustain a livelihood, let alone a family. Though, as indentured figures, most had been compelled to repay their debt and thus forced to push further west. Most had come down with malaria, smallpox, or trench foot. Some survived, others died, while others walked into the wilds and were never seen again.

  He had arrived in Havre-Saint-Roche following a night and a day hitching north after crossing the border near the shoals of Sault Ste. Marie. He was affirming certain truths to himself about life, how hope and progress could sputter and die without ceremony. He was seeking examples of a truncated and lost history, seeking tangible evidence of the reality of human insignificance, a point of disconnection.

  Havre-Saint-Roche wasn’t really a town anymore by 1971 – just a weigh station surviving on a post office and a Department of Forestry and Land Management Bureau.

  Nate stayed in the vicinity almost a week, pitching a small canvas tent along the river’s edge. He set fishing lines in a pool of still water, jigging them until he caught three speckled trout which he gutted and salted to add to his supplies. He started a small fire in advance of morning’s pale light, then wandered amidst the remnants of an elaborate network of rigged lines where teams of horses and men had toiled under the boil of black flies and mosquitoes, felled logs carted through the marsh toward the rush of fast-flowing rivers.

  Nothing had survived intact. A dormitory house roof had all but collapsed. He stood in the dappled light, a blue sky shining on a series of identical cots, suggesting the compact sameness of an early settlement. In the wide yawn of a dark stable door, he looked at the crucible of what had once been a firepit that had burned in the service of shoeing horses, making sleds, chains and irons, along with all manner of tools required for extracting old growth timber. In the center, an anvil sat near a tarred accordion bellows like the folded wing of a monstrous bat.

  In inhabiting the stillness, in surveying the creep of vegetation, the ruin, it had the feel and fallout of a great calamity, but that was what had drawn him there. He had not been seeking to restart life, but to hold life in abeyance, to sit out the rush of destruction in the conscientious objection that too much life was discarded by generals in the vainglory of conflicts that might have been resolved if young men simply refused to serve, if they laid down their arms on both sides, if they chose to run away.

  *

  At times, in the vast stillness, in his aloneness, Canada rang with a certain unassailable truth that all could and would be subsumed and undone by nature. He said the word, Canada, like a mantra when the overwhelming insignificance of it all brought on a flutter of trembling anxiety.

  In the torn encyclopedia pages he brought with him, he had circled a reference to one particularly ill-conceived mining operation. Financed out of Ottawa, it had sprung up in the dying days of wood, just as steel began to be used to rebuild the metropolises along the lakes, after the great fires of Chicago and Toronto.

  He had found the entrance to the mine, the grim, black mouth agape in the agony of collapse, a splinter of blackened beams within. Twenty-two miners were buried alive a half-mile into the side of a hill in a flash flood in the spring of 1929, the calamity meriting just a footnote in the encyclopedia. The event, and the town, had all but been forgotten after the onset of the Great Depression.

  All things changed. Nate let the thought settle. After the depression, men no longer went into the wild, and instead lined up at soup kitchens in the great metropolises on both sides of the border. What it signified was the destitution of the body and the mind, a destruction of the spirit of the age.

  It was the prophetic ending Nate had needed when he first arrived, that solitary pilgrimage into desolate lands, inhabiting the cleaving sense of how time could and did outrun the ingenuity of the best-laid plans. Oh, Canada
.

  *

  He left Havre-Saint-Roche in the light of early morning for what was his true destination, the town of Grandshire. He extinguished his fire with the stomp of his boot, and made his way along a dirt road following a page with a map torn from the same encyclopedia.

  He had read that Grandshire was a town built by an enlightened industrialist, Augustus Grandshire, a prominent socialist with progressive New England sensibilities who had transported his vision of a Utopian collective across the border into the wild Canadian backwoods.

  Upon first arriving, Nate surveyed the town. It emerged from a break into a clearing of land run along a river’s edge. It survived in its shabby grandeur. In accordance with its founder’s Utopian reach, a pulp mill had been set at a distance from the residential district, so Grandshire achieved, at the time, a rarefied divide – separating the toil of one’s daily labor with the reprieve of nature.

  In the town center stood the remnants of a chapel. Prayer services had been read from a belfry over a loud speaker, so when the wind blew, people forty miles away had been given to proclaiming that they could hear the word of God carried on the wind through the whispering pines.

  It was not then the place it had once been, but it showed how one man’s influence could make a difference, how those who might not have fared so well could be saved by being born into a place where attitudes and ways of conduct were well-established. In a way, it reminded Nate of the influence of John F. Kennedy on his own adolescence, how the decade started with a promise of putting a man on the moon. How strange, Kennedy long dead, and Nate out in the Canadian wilds, while at the decade’s end, a man did walk on the moon, and the world knew all about the Sea of Tranquility, while, in South East Asia, war raged unabated.

  How could it have been, that anomalous proposition, the claiming of a moon when there was so much yet up for grabs on Earth?

  *

  Nate lodged for the first few months in what had once been a plush hotel, complete with a grand tearoom with velvet-covered couches and a dance hall with draped curtains and a stage.