Imagine Me Gone Read online

  “No,” I called through the door. “Because it’s stuck.”

  “Well, push it harder.”

  “He’s tried. I knew this would happen. I told your father.”

  Kelsey bashed her tail against the bottom of the door, excited by our voices. I heard Michael passing through from the living room.

  “Alec’s trapped himself in the toilet,” Celia told him.

  “I keep saying he’s the fortunate one,” Michael said. “But no one believes me.”

  “That’s not helpful,” Mom said. “I have to check the meat. Could you two help your brother, please?”

  “Just open it,” Celia said. “I need my barrette.”

  “I can’t,” I said, my cheeks burning, a strange light-headedness lifting my body until I almost floated there just a few inches from them, the door the only thing covering me.

  “What are the conditions like in there?” Michael asked. “Are you well provisioned?”

  “You’re just encouraging him,” Celia said, walking off toward the living room. “Leave him there and he’ll come out.”

  But Michael stayed. He sat in the creaking wicker side chair by the hall table. I heard the drawer open, and a moment later the end of a black shoelace appeared under the door.

  “What’s this?”

  “You could tie it to the bolt and pull.”

  I pressed my bare back to the wall and slid down it until I was sitting cross-legged.

  Michael had hated his school as much as I hated mine, at least in the beginning. He’d cried about it, even though he seemed too old to. I listened at night from my bedroom, to Mom telling him it would be okay, that he would meet people and it would get better. That was when the two of us had still played together with Kelsey on Sundays, steering her into the same room as the white Persian cat that had come with the house, so we could watch them fight. But now Michael usually went into Oxford to go record shopping instead. And during the week he didn’t get home until suppertime, and always studied afterwards.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked, fiddling with the shoelace.

  “In bed,” Michael said. “Where, of late, he is wont to be.”

  “Why does he sleep so much?”

  “I guess because he’s tired,” Michael said. “Very tired. Apparently unemployment will do that to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He picks you up from school, doesn’t he? Did he ever do that before?”

  Dad had started coming to get me from school in the last month, in the blue Skoda wagon. On the way home, on the straightaway of the country road, he’d speed up to eighty or ninety miles an hour, and then shift the car into neutral and turn the engine off. We’d swoop into the valley, freewheeling through the open fields, seeing how far we could get, if we could make it all the way to the pub at the bridge, until we were going only a few miles an hour and cars behind us were honking and passing.

  “He’s not still in there, is he?” Mom said, agitated now. “This is ridiculous. Where’s your father? Michael, get your father.”

  I leaped to the sink and put my clothes on. And then went to the door, and was about to slide the lock open but I didn’t. I waited. For Dad’s footsteps on the ceiling above me. For the sound of him moving in their bedroom. He would have to get up now. He’d have no choice. And then I heard him on the stairs, and heard his voice just on the other side of the door.

  “Alec?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s the trouble, then?”

  “The lock. It’s jammed.”

  He walked out of the hall without saying anything and came back a moment later, and I heard a scraping at the base of the door, and saw the tips of a pair of pliers. But they wouldn’t fit through the crack. He got up again and returned with a smaller pair, which he slid through to me.

  I clasped them to the knob and scraped them along the metal.

  “You have to squeeze,” he said.

  I stopped the scraping and made a little grunt. “It doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s still stuck.”

  “For God’s sake,” Mom said, charging back in. “The food’s on the table.”

  “Open the fucking door,” Celia said.

  “You will not use that language,” Mom said.

  All four of them were there now, and Kelsey, too. Dad didn’t say anything.

  The blood was pumping in my ears.

  “That’s it, then?” Mom said to Dad. “You’ve got nothing else to offer?”

  “Alec,” he said. “Step back, step away from the door.”

  “What are you doing, John?”

  “I’m going to break it down,” he said.

  “No!” I said. “Wait, let me try again.” And I grabbed the pliers, biting the steel with them and yanking the bolt across.

  John

  From the clearing in the woods, I can see down through the spruce trees to the river, where a long slab of rock parts the slow-moving waters covered now in morning shade. The rock is mute and still in the encroaching summer heat. It has the inhuman patience of objects. A reminder that mineral time does not care for sentiment, or life. Every human thing, a ruin in waiting. On a planet that is a ruin in waiting. Which says nothing about divinity, one way or the other. I only know that this trial is what has become of my sliver of time.

  My great return to Britain was a great failure. There was a recession. Purposeful risk was a hard enough sell to my complacent countrymen. The declining market made them more cautious still. I did what I had told all the entrepreneurs I ever trained not to do: moved my family before I had sufficient commitments. These, at least, are some of the excuses Margaret encourages me to give myself for what happened. That is, when she is not eaten up by fear and rage at the fact that she and the children have been uprooted twice now: first to go over there, to retrieve our furniture from where it had remained in storage, to settle the children in English schools, and then less than three years later to retreat back here to America. Because of me. Because I was fired by my own partners, told they couldn’t afford my debilitation any longer—at the firm I had started. Back here to a different town and different schools, everything new again. Walcott, west of Boston. Because at least here, a man whose business I had helped to start pitied me sufficiently to offer me a job. Which itself couldn’t possibly last, and didn’t. Eighteen months of work, and then the suggestion that I go part-time, and then, a few months ago, the end to that, too.

  Against the monster, I’ve always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the self-consciousness of it? Let meaning be immanent, noted in passing, if at all. But that won’t do when the monster has its funnel driven into the back of your head and is sucking the light coming through your eyes straight out of you into the mouth of oblivion. So like a cripple I long for what others don’t notice they have: ordinary meaning.

  Instead, I have words. The monster doesn’t take words. It may take speech, but not words in the head, which are its minions. The army of the tiny, invisible dead wielding their tiny, spinning scythes, cutting at the flesh of the mind. Unlike ordinary blades, they sharpen with use. They’re keenest in repetition. Self-accusation being nothing if not repetitive. There is nothing deep about this. It is merely endless.

  I taught my children how to handle themselves on the water, how to step in and out of a boat, how to row, how to steer an outboard and tie knots, and when I had the chance I showed them how to sail. I taught them how to ride their bicycles, and in the country, in Samoset, I cut paths in the field for them to ride on, and built them a tree fort. And back in Britain, for the two and a half years we lasted there, I showed them castles and Roman walls, and taught them what history I remembered from school. You could say that I fathered them as I was never fathered, but that sounds awfully American and psychological. My father did what his time expected of him without complaint, and I have no bitterness toward him. We weren’t meant to know each other and we didn’t. He didn’t plant the monst
er in me. It’s older than him, and far savvier. He worked for his family’s shipping business in Belfast, and when he turned thirty he became their agent in Southampton, where he met my mother. He saw his family through the Depression and the war, and ensured that his children were properly educated, and throughout it all he spoke very little, which was no deprivation given that I’d never known him to behave otherwise. It’s easy to make too much of fathers, I want to say.

  A few months ago, a fog blinded me, thicker than ever before. I slept in the monster’s arms. I felt its breath on my neck, its scaled stomach rising and falling against my back, its head and face invisible as always. I couldn’t pretend anymore to Margaret that I was working. The children receded into noises grating on my ears. I stopped moving. Weeks went by indistinguishable one from another. I could smell the rot of myself, my armpits, my breath, my groin, as though the living part of death had already commenced, the preliminary decomposing, as the will fades. In Dante and Milton hell is vivid. Sin organizes the dead into struggle. The darkness bristles with life. There is story upon story to tell. But in the fog there is nothing to see. The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.

  But it didn’t happen. Through the window by the bureau I saw the leaves of the Japanese maple and the roof of the house next door and clouds stretched across the sky. Particulars began to return. Dust in the sunlight. The weave of the carpet. The very things which earlier harbingered trouble by threatening to derail my attention and distract me from the through line of a conversation were now, strangely, signs of mental animation: the registering of color, the sharp delineation of objects against their grounds. I got out of bed. Talking seemed nearly impossible but I started eating again with the family. Margaret was exhausted but still she made sure to cook a meal most every night. I noticed again how oddly beautiful my children were, even amid the moroseness I had imposed on the house. Celia’s black hair shone in the buttery light of the sideboard lamp and her enormous eyes coursed with anger at the stifling fact of me and her mother. And Alec—uncannily already my height, always trying to keep up with his sister, measuring his opinions against the force of hers, guileless yet acting at the same time (perhaps his acting is what makes him guileless). I can’t imagine I was ever that young, not so unguardedly. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, unsure of who or what I am.

  And then there is Michael’s empty chair. He came back with us from Britain, but he couldn’t stand it here. Or maybe he couldn’t stand me. Simon, a friend of his from the comprehensive, said he could go back and live with his family to finish his last year of school, and eventually we consented. Of course it made sense. If I hadn’t created such a wreck of things he wouldn’t have been so miserable. The fact is, his being gone makes it easier. It’s harder for me to look at him than at the other two. When he was little he tripped on the stairs in Battersea and hit his head. It wasn’t a serious injury and Margaret didn’t ring me at the office. But around that time, midmorning, I got a terrible headache, bad enough that I left the building to get some air. Walking in the park, trying to shake it off, I sensed something had happened to him. When I rang Margaret I didn’t mention that I already knew what she had to tell me, because I didn’t want to disturb her.

  Michael was quiet and very thoughtful as a boy. There were times when he had the air of a mystic about him, as children sometimes do, as if he were staring calmly into the nature of things and had the wisdom to know there were no words for it. But more often his prescience spun him into worry. Was there enough petrol in the car to get us to his grandmother’s house? Did we have enough time to make the train or would it leave without us? What if the water boiled over when his mother wasn’t watching? What if the policemen didn’t know where to find the criminals? His questions had no end and no answers sufficient to mollify him. I didn’t mind. Then he became old enough to realize his questions were childish and instead of asking them aloud, he turned them inward. We stopped having the conversations where I explained simple things to him. School, which made him so unhappy, took over, and whenever I tried to protect him from it, like speaking to a classmate’s parents about how their child was teasing him, I only made it worse. Now he’s taller than I am, thin as a rail, and he talks as fast as can be, not questions but endless invention, his imagination running out ahead of him, to make sure everything stays in motion, that he doesn’t get stuck.

  A few weeks ago, the first night that I ate with Margaret and the children again, Celia kept scrunching her napkin on the table beside her, clenching and unclenching. When I told her to put it on her lap, she shouted at me that she would do what she wanted. Margaret slammed her utensils down and said if we didn’t stop it she would leave the table. But the next night was a little better. Michael wasn’t there to distract his brother and sister with laughter, but still, it was better.

  Being up and about again, I started taking these walks. I wake early and bring Kelsey, who runs off the leash once we reach the woods. The cool oxygen of the plants and trees before the sun has dried them feels like a balm to my lungs. I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none. I don’t meet other people here, and that’s what matters. My mind can rest. Which is when my situation becomes obvious. There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.

  It’s midmorning by the time I cross back over the river and follow the path into the field at the end of our street, which is saturated now in the July heat. The grass is intensely green, the scrub-apple trees by the road past blooming, on into their pure summer verdancy, along with the rhododendron and the lilac, their flowers gone, their leaves fat with sun. The air smells of the fecund soil—the flesh covering the skull of the planet, the muck from which the plants rise, busy in the mindless life of heat. Celia and Alec were drugged with sleep when I left the house, as they always are, and I didn’t want to wake them. In summer, I can’t be sure of their whereabouts, but last night at dinner I paid attention, and got a sense of where they would be today.

  Turning before I reach the house, I carry on into the center of the town. It’s quiet. Kids are away at camp or on holiday. The shops have bins and tables of merchandise out on the sidewalk and signs announcing sales. A few skateboarders sit glumly on the bench under the awning of the ice cream store watching the cars move slowly past. Across the street a woman smiles at me and waves enthusiastically and I nod and wave back, though I have no idea who she is. A mother of one of the children’s friends, in all likelihood, someone I’ve met at the school or in a driveway picking up Alec or Celia. I look away and keep walking lest she cross the street and begin speaking to me. In another time, I would have hooked into the aggression of her good cheer and doubled it up until running into her became an event with a momentum of its own. I’ve lived vicariously at times off that birthright of the American upper-middle class—their competitive optimism. It’s what I loved about working in this country. What are your plans? How’s the project? How’s business? When I left university in Britain, we didn’t have entrepreneurs. We had managers and industrial relations. Meeting someone at a party led to the circumlocutions designed to tease out where you’d been at school, one’s accent having made one acceptable company in the first place. In America, I flew all over the country talking to people about their wildest ambiti
ons and they were always delighted to see me, even if I could promise them nothing. Calling them back a year or two later, after my partners and I had raised a fund, and telling them I wanted to help them create what they’d been dreaming of was a heady feeling. But that was a lifetime ago.

  Back then, in Samoset, we rented a house for three hundred dollars a month. We had a secondhand station wagon, a vegetable garden, enough money that Margaret could stay home. Alec used to gallop up the street to meet me as I was walking back from the bus. He’d take my briefcase and carry it with him across the front lawn and around the house, where Michael and Celia would be playing in the tree fort or in the barn, and they’d come rushing over to push through the back door ahead of me, calling out to their mother that I was home. In the summer, we’d eat outside on a picnic table left by the previous tenants. I’d moved the table over toward the edge of the woods, onto a mossy square of concrete, and from there you looked back across the circular dirt drive to our octagonal house, white clapboard with a black roof and brick chimney. Margaret’s great-great-grandfather had been a carpenter in the town, and it turned out he was the one who had built the place for a Methodist minister. There had been an enthusiasm for the design among members of the Spiritualist movement. Having no right angles, the octagon was said to leave no corners in which evil spirits might become trapped. In the evening, with the windows illuminated, it resembled a squat lighthouse sending its warning in all directions. When the children were full and drowsy and had ceased their play I’d sometimes pretend with them that the house was haunted and tell them stories about the people who had gathered there a hundred years ago to speak with the dead by candlelight. Michael didn’t want to listen, pretending he was too old for ghost stories. Margaret would say, You’ll frighten them before bed, but Alec and Celia would squeal to me, No, no, keep going. I told them how the neighbors would come and join hands in the dark listening for the voices of their departed relatives, who would appear in our very living room and speak of the life of the dead. Alec clung to my side, Celia became very fixed and still, peering into the trees behind us, long after Margaret had cleared the table and Michael had gone off to his room, the three of us there together under the full-laden branches of the oak, surrounded by the hum of crickets. I sensed their tremendous need for me in those moments—for my voice to go on, to carry and protect them from everything that encircled us. And I did protect them. I told them they were safe because their mother’s ancestor had built our house so that no ghosts would ever stay, that all the frightening things that might ever have happened were long in the past and couldn’t possibly reach them now. Then I’d put Alec over my shoulder and take Celia’s hand and walk them into the house and up to their beds.