All Those Vanished Engines (23 page)

I got myself a gin-and-tonic—that much is true—and sat at the kitchen table under the fluorescent light, studying a pack of well-thumbed photographs of my son when he was small. My wife had taken so many, I used to say you could make of a flip-book of his childhood in real time—enough for both of us, as it turned out. More than enough. I could look at them forever, and yet I always felt soiled, somehow, afterward, as if I had indulged myself in something dirty. In the same way, perhaps, you can look at photographs of naked women on the Internet for hours at a time, each one interesting for some tiny, urgent fraction of a second.

I went upstairs to lie down. In the morning, I telephoned the offices of
The Bennington Banner
, where someone was uploading the bi-weekly edition. I didn't have a precise date, and I didn't even know exactly what I was looking for. But a good part of the archives was now online, and after a couple of hours I found the story. On the first of November, 1939, a Bennington College student had died in an car accident. The road was slippery after a rainstorm. She hadn't been driving. The details were much as I'd suspected.

“What do you think about what's happening in Virginia,” said the woman on the phone.

“Virginia?”

The
Bennington Banner
is about small amounts of local news, if it's about anything. But this woman paid attention to the blogs. “There's some kind of disturbance,” she told me. “Riots in the streets.”

Subsequent to this conversation, I took a drive. I drove out to the Park-McCullough House. The place was boarded up, the grounds were overgrown. After ten minutes I continued on toward the former Bennington College campus and took a left down the Silk Road through the covered bridge. Along the back way to the monument I looked for likely trees, but it was impossible to tell. When I reached Route 7, I continued straight toward Williamstown. I thought if there was a message for me—a blog from the past, say—it might be hidden in my grandfather's painting, which was, I now imagined, less a piece of de Chirico surrealism than an expression of regret.

It had rained during the night, and toward three o'clock the day was overcast and humid. In my office, I sat in the wreckage with my feet on the desk. I looked up at the painting, and I could tell there was something wrong with it. I just had a feeling, and so I turned on my computer, IM'd my ex-wife in Richmond, and asked her to meet me in Second Life.

Which meant Romania, where she was working, supposedly, as some kind of virtual engineer. In Second Life, her office is in a hot-air balloon suspended above the Piata Revolutiei in Bucharest; you'd have to teleport. It was a lovely place, decked out with a wood-burning stove, but she didn't want to meet me there. Too private. Instead we flew east to the Black Sea coast, past Constanta to the space park, the castle on the beach, where there was always a crowd. We alighted on the boardwalk and went into a café. We both got lattes at the machine, and sat down to talk.

God knows what Romania is like now. God knows what's going on there. But in Second Life it's charming and picturesque, with whitewashed buildings painted with flowers and livestock, and red-tile roofs. In Second Life my ex-wife's name is Nicolae Quandry. She wears a military uniform and a handlebar mustache—a peculiar transformation from the time I knew her. It's hard not to take it personally, even after all these years—according to the Kanun, or tribal code, women under certain circumstances can take a vow of celibacy and live as men, with all the rights and privileges. Albanian by heritage, Nicola—Nicolae, here—had a great-aunt who made that choice, after the death of her father and brothers. Of course her great-aunt had not had a grown autistic son.

It was always strange to see her in her hip boots, epaulettes, and braid. She had carried this to extremes, because once I had told her that her new name and avatar reminded me of Nicolae Ceau
ş
escu, the Romanian dictator whom I'd researched extensively for my novel—not that she looked like him. He was a drab little bureaucrat, while she carried a pistol on her hip. With Saturn hanging low over the Black Sea, its rings clearly visible, she stood out among all the space aliens that were walking around. “My psychiatrist says I'm not supposed to talk to you,” I typed.

“Hey, Matt,” she typed—my name in Second Life is Matthew Wirefly. “I figured you would want to bring Adrian a birthday present.”

It was hard to tell from her face, but I imagined she sounded happy to hear from me, a function of my strategy in both marriage and divorce, to always give her everything she wanted. Besides, everything had happened so long ago. Now I was an old man, though you wouldn't necessarily have known it from my avatar. “Yes, that's right,” I typed. “I bought him a sea turtle at the aquarium. I'll bring it to his party. Where's it going to be?”

“Oh, I don't know. Terra Nova. You know how he likes steampunk.”

Actually, I didn't know. I'd thought he was still in his sea-mammal stage, which had lasted ten years or so. The previous year he'd had his party on the beach in Mamaia Sat, and I'd ridden up on the back of a beluga whale.

Now we typed about this and that. A man with six arms wandered by, gave us an odd look, it seemed to me. The name above his head was in Korean characters.

After a few minutes I got down to business. She had never known my grandfather, but I tried to fill her in. After a certain amount of time, she interrupted. “I don't even believe you have a psychiatrist,” she typed. “What do you pay him?”

“Her,” I corrected. “Nowadays they work for food.”

“Hunh. Maybe you could ask her to adjust your meds. Remember when you thought the graffiti on the subway was a message for you? ‘Close Guantánamo'—that's good advice! ‘Call Mark'—you're probably the only person who ever called. And you didn't even get through.”

Good times, I thought. “Hey, I misdialed. Or he moved. Hey, le monde n'est qu'un texte.”

“Fine—whatever. That's so true. For twenty years I've thanked God it's not my responsibility anymore, to act as your damn filter.”

She knew what I meant, and I knew what she meant. It's possible for me to get carried away. But I hadn't ever told her during the eight years of our relationship, and I didn't tell her now, that I had always, I think, exaggerated certain symptoms for dramatic effect.

Once, when New York City was still New York City, I'd belonged to a squash club on Fifth Avenue. Someone I played with got it into his head that I was Canadian, introduced me to someone else—I let it go. It seemed impolite to insist. Within weeks I was tangled up in explanations, recriminations, and invented histories. When I found myself having to learn French, to memorize maps of Montreal, I had to quit the club.

This was like that. When Nicola and I first got together, I pretended to have had a psychiatric episode years before, thinking that was a good way to appeal to her—a short-term tactic that had long-term effects. It was a story she was amusingly eager to believe, a story confirmed rather than contradicted by my parents' befuddled refusal to discuss the issue, a typical (she imagined) Episcopalian reticence that was in itself symptomatic. And it was a story I had to continue embellishing, particularly after Adrian was first diagnosed.

But like all successful lies, it was predominantly true. These things run in families, after all. And sometimes I have a hard time prioritizing: “What's happening in Richmond?” I asked her. “What's happening down there?”

Nicolae took a sip from her latte, wiped her mustache. Above us, from the deck of the space park, you could see the solar system trying to persevere, while behind it the universe was coming to an end. Stars exploded and went cold. “Matt,” she typed. “You don't want to know. It would just worry you. I don't even know. Something downtown. Abigail has gone out and I—fuck, what could you do, anyway?” She touched the pistol at her hip.

After we logged off, I sat for a while in peace. Then I got up on my desk so I could look at the picture,
Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance.

Kneeling, my nose up close, I saw a few things that were new. No, that's not right. I noticed a few things I hadn't seen before. This is partly because I'd just been to the house, circled the drive. But now I saw some differences.

My grandfather had never been able to paint human beings. Trained as an architect, he had excelled in facades, ruins, urban landscapes. But people's faces and hands were mysterious to him, and so instead he made indistinct stylized figures, mostly in the distance. Shapes of light and darkness. Star-shaped ghosts with oranges in their hands. Some of the ghosts lie folded up inside a chest of drawers. The haunted house in the moonlight, or else a burning light behind the clouds, descending to the roof. Men and women in the corn, beyond the porte cochere. A single light at the top of the house, and a shadow against the glass. Kepler's eye. I wondered if this was where the dumbwaiter reached the third floor.

Down below, along the garden wall, a woman lay back against a tree trunk. Her face was just a circle of white, and she had long white hair. She was holding an orange, too, holding it out as if in supplication. Her legs were white. Her skirt had ridden up.

I thought I had not seen that tree against that wall that morning, when I had stopped my Toyota on the drive. My grandfather was good at trees. This was a swamp willow, rendered in miniature, so that the branches drooped over the woman's head. I thought there was no tree like that on the grounds of the Park-McCullough house. So instead I went to look for it.

8. I
N
Q
UANTICO

Naturally, after forty years I didn't find anything valuable. But there was a willow tree along the Silk Road, set back on the other side of a ditch. He must have been going very fast.

I dug down through the old roots. And I did find something, a key ring with two stainless-steel keys, in good condition. One of them, I assumed, was a secret or backdoor key to the abandoned McCullough mansion. The other was much smaller, more generic, the kind of key that could open many cheap little locks. After a detour to my office, I took it home. I unpacked my satchel, took out my laptop. I arranged various stacks of paper on the kitchen table. And then I used the little key to unlock the steel dispatch case that had come to me from Puerto Rico. I knew what I'd find, the various documents and exhibits from the court-martial of Captain Robert Watson Claiborne, USMC.

After dinner (Indian take-out and a beer), I began my search. The trial had taken place at the marine barracks at Quantico, Virginia, during the second and third weeks in January 1919. There were about eight hundred pages of testimony, accusations and counteraccusations regarding my grandfather's behavior aboard the USS
Cincinnati
during the previous November, the last month of the European war. Captain Claiborne was only recently attached to the ship, in command of a detachment of marines. But during the course of twenty-seven days there were complaints against him from four Marine Corps privates and a Navy ensign, when the vessel was anchored off Key West.

Colonel Dion Williams, commander of the barracks at Quantico, presided over the court, and the judge advocate was Captain Leo Horan. On the fourth day of the trial, my grandfather took the stand in his own defense. Here's what I found on Page 604 of the transcript, during Captain Horan's cross-examination:

463. Q. In his testimony you heard him say in substance that he came into your room on the occasion when he came there to see a kodak, and that you and he lay on your bunk or bed and that he slept, or pretended to fall asleep, and that at that time you put your hands on his private parts; that he roused himself, and that you desisted, and this was repeated some two or three times, and that at the last time when he feigned sleep, you reached up and pulled his hand down in the direction of your private parts. Is that true or not?

A. That is not true.

464. Q. Did anything like that happen?

A. Nothing whatsoever.

465. Q. Did you fondle his person?

A. I did not fondle his person.

466. Q. Or touch him in any way except as you might have—

A. I only touched him in the manner as one might touch another, as one would come in contact with another lying down next to each other on a bed, the approximate width of which was about as that table (indicating).

467. Q. I see. Referring to another matter, will you tell the court, Captain Claiborne, what kind of a school this was you say you started at Sharon, Connecticut?

A. A school for boys.

468. Q. Average age?

A. Average age was twelve or thirteen.

469. Q. The length of time you ran it?

A. One year, just before the war.

470. Q. I see. Did you sleep soundly on board the
Cincinnati,
as a general rule?

A. I did.

471. Q. Now Captain Claiborne, in your original response to the complaint against you, in the matter of Ensign Mowbray's testimony as to your behavior on the night of the sixth of November, I have here your response saying that you could not have knowingly or consciously done such a thing. I believe your words to Commander Moses, as he testified, were that you had done nothing of the sort in any conscious moment. What did you mean by that?

A. I meant that this could not be true, that I had a clean record behind me, and that I surely did nothing of the sort in any conscious moment. He immediately interrupted me and went on to say, “Oh, I know what you are going to say about doing it in your sleep,” or something of that sort. I said, “Nor in any unconscious moment, for surely no one who has had a record behind him such as I can show you would do such things as these in unconscious moments, or asleep.” This is what he must have meant when he referred to a qualified denial.

472. Q. I see. The alleged conduct of you towards Ensign Mowbray—do you now deny that that might have been in an unconscious manner?