Quartet for the End of Time (17 page)

But still, I was troubled by something, which I can't help but puzzle over to this day, and that is that, as I later learned, the date of the
Destroyer
's return corresponded exactly with the estimated date of my own escape. It is only natural that the emptiness of the camp from which I'd fled, and the ease with which I was able to make my way, should strike me in this light as less the miraculous stroke of luck I originally believed it to be. It is possible that the location at which I had been held had been only a temporary camp inhabited by Semenoff's men during the brief time the
Destroyer
had been occupied by American troops (my own company). That it had, upon the train's subsequent return, been abandoned—the diplomacy of the Americans having been rewarded perhaps, if not directly with my official release, at least with a loss of interest in my affairs. If this was the case, who was it, that night, who had visited me in my grave, and with whom I had gratefully traded places? Was he indeed an enemy? A lingering marauder, only semi-connected to the Semenoff gang? Or had he instead arrived to grant me my release—the “diplomatic” proceedings of my capture and subsequent interrogations being now unnecessary? But why in the middle of the night? Why alone? Why had the semi-unconscious workings of my body achieved an end that, were it not for a chance sequence of events over which I had no control, would seem utterly impossible?

It is, as it always is, easiest to imagine him as an enemy. But something in me resists this, and—perhaps as a result of the pact that we sealed together that night—makes me think of him, instead, as a friend. But everyone knows there is no firm line that separates the two. Even the most powerful generals and secretaries of war know that. They especially. That is, after all, what every war is. An attempt to
draw that impossible line—to separate out one half of the story from the other. But it can't ever be done. Not with any sort of efficiency, or finality, or purpose in the end. And even the most hardened and battle-weary general will, in his final days, be forced to retreat from physical struggle into the quiet corners of his mind where he will continue to hunt among the shadows for the very same enemy he had been searching for outwardly all those years, and—needless to say—without any more luck. And so it is for me—that I reconstruct, again and again, in the quietest and most ill-lit corners of my mind, the man who released me from my grave that night, and who, for his trouble, was himself laid to rest. To help ease my conscience somewhat, I remind myself that the “release” my visitor may or may not have granted me that night would have, most certainly, been according to his own terms, not mine—but when indeed will it ever be otherwise granted? Darkness is darkness. Emptiness opens only onto further emptiness. I know this now not from any sixth sense, but from my own skin, which brushed up against it, from my own lungs, which emptied themselves into, then breathed it in, in turn. A perfect, impenetrable darkness. Those are indeed the only terms upon which any one of us may one day finally be “released,” and short of that there is always and must remain just the vain attempt at procuring from that darkness some identifiable shape—something to fight against. The promise, still, of eventual victory. When there is no longer any enemy to conjure from that emptiness, you will know that there is nothing to fight for any longer. You will have dissolved into it so finally, then, that there will be no shape to it at all. And you yourself—you will find—will have already been dead, like a star, for a thousand years.

E
VERYONE WAS SILENT FOR SOME TIME THEN
,
AFTER
D
OUGLAS
'
S FATHER
had finished speaking. The Indian nodded slowly, and then Douglas did, too. Chet, who seemed to have been sleeping, raised his head from where it had rested on the back of a tree and stared around, as if bewildered
by a world in which Douglas's father's steady voice did not hum. The baby cried softly and Aida rocked her, and Douglas hoped that she would begin to sing in the strange and tuneless way she did sometimes, which put their minds and hearts at ease, but she did not. She only rocked the child silently, and the child continued to cry. After a while, though, even without the comfort of her mother's voice, the child's cries dissolved into sighs, and Douglas's father said: It's another long day tomorrow; I believe I'll turn in. He put his hand on Douglas's shoulder as he said it, and something about his touch surprised the boy. It was not a protective gesture, and it was certainly not an embrace—it was just a moment of contact across distance—but it made him feel, somehow, and for the first time, as though he were an equal, and served to close the distance introduced between them by his father's tale. To return them to themselves, and to the regular passage of time, as it continued to proceed at an undisturbed pace from the point where they had left it. A point that—untroubled by their departure from its course, or indeed by their existence at all—absorbed them easily, as though they had never diverged, or thought to diverge, from its singular, uninterruptable flow.

Douglas and his father rose then, together, like men, and moved away from the fire to where their blankets had already been rolled out side by side. They fell into them gratefully, and soon Douglas heard his father's breath achieve the level pace of untroubled dreaming. He himself lay awake, however—his eyes wide, braced against the darkness, waiting until John and Aida had also lain down quietly, the child between them exhausted now. Until Chet, who sat out a long time after John and Aida and the child had retired—stirring the coals as if they actually required his tending—finally stood up and undid his fly and pissed into what was left of the fire—his back arched so that his head and neck, with its great Adam's apple, were thrust defiantly forward into the night. Until, having rebuttoned his fly, he traversed in a few cautious strides the distance between the fire and where his own blanket had been rolled out below Douglas's father's and his own. From his position, Douglas could not see but only sense the way Chet's arms extended themselves in front
of him in order to measure his pace and—though the night was as usual empty and blank and there were no obstacles in his path—protect himself against anything that might interrupt his course. Finally, he lay down and, after clearing his throat several times, in preparation for the hum of heavy breath that would soon begin to whistle through his nose in a sopranoed snore, he, too, fell fast asleep.

But even then—when the night had truly come to an end, and even the stars seemed to dim in acceptance of the total dominion of darkness— Douglas did not sleep. For the first time, perhaps in his whole life, he felt utterly alone. He let the feeling settle. He measured it—its distance from himself, and from his father and Chet—who remained, no nearer or farther away than they ever had been—then from John and Aida and the child. What was it against which he had been drawn that night, so different from all the nights that had passed before? What space had taken shape before him, suddenly, as a result of that encounter, and what was he in relation to it, and to that unmeasurable space beyond? He experimented—attempting to enter in and out of that shape, so newly introduced, at will. In, out, in, out, in, out, he went—until he began to forget which space he had always known, and wonder if there was perhaps no real difference at all—that he had known both all along. In which case the resulting shift in pressure between the two zones through which he imagined himself to move was not a shift in pressure between an actual interior space finally separate from the rest of the world and a space prior to that definition, but instead only a way of shifting the mode and quality of his perceptions—so they might seem at any point either to emanate from some central source within him, or to disperse themselves in horizontal waves, across a world both of, and not of, his own making.

—

M
ONTHS LATER
,
IN LONG STR IDE S
,
IT WOULD BE
C
HET ALONE WHO
would make his way back to Douglas's mother's door. He would stand awkwardly there, refusing to enter, a letter from Douglas's father extended toward her in one hand. He would not exactly cry—he had
never done so before, his whole life—but the tears were understood between them. They existed in the thickness of his throat and an inability to look the woman in the eye. He would say: I'm sorry, Lou—which was Douglas's mother's name, or what everyone called her, save Douglas. Finally, Douglas's mother would take the note from Chet's hand. She would read it several times through before she understood what it said, because her eyes could not train themselves on the words in the correct order, but—as our eyes and hearts are always wont to do—kept skipping ahead, instead, to the end. She would read, in Douglas's father's scrawled hand:

Chet will have told you that things have not gone off as expected or planned, but he will also assure you, as I will assure you myself, that I am an innocent man, as I hope you will know in your heart. I promise to get clear of this mess before too long. Until then, you needn't worry about either me, or the boy. The boy's safe, and has found employment —best he stay put for now. Tell your father I'm sorry, but that I'll make it up to all of you soon. Don't think I won't.

Your Arthur

 

When, after a long while, she had finally succeeded in reading it through, Douglas's mother would hand the letter back to Chet, confused, as if she had only by accident taken something from him that did not belong to her.

Well, thank you, Chet. For coming all this way, she would say. And not another word would be passed between them, nor any mention of the events that had come to pass in all that long time, between the early morning her husband and only son had risen before dawn and made their way, while she slept, out to the same road down which Chet had just come, in order to begin their journey, and the day that only Chet returned, to bring her the last news of her husband she would ever receive. Because even when Douglas did manage to write he never mentioned
his father. Having no more news of him himself, there was nothing to say, and so he spoke, instead, as his father had always done, about the bonus, and the progress that they'd made (a deal was always “just around the corner” whenever Douglas wrote). And then about the house and land in Virginia, or Tennessee, that would soon be theirs—just as soon (Douglas—as his father—always said) as that deal came through.

He repeated all of this, nearly word for word, each time he wrote until, one day, a letter was returned to him unread, and he learned that his mother had passed on.

But that was many years later. Many years after Chet had bowed his head and, feeling it disrespectful somehow to turn, backed slowly away from the door, afterward to make his way along the crooked path that led to the crossroads, where he would then turn toward the house of the Duke and, after a mighty apology, begin once more to pick from the earth—just as he and Douglas, and Douglas's father, had done before any of them had ever dreamed of the Bonus Army, or indeed of anything at all beyond the limit of that seemingly endless Kansas sky—the stones that each year were churned from it in an endless rotation of soil, and the combined forces of the earth's heavy gravity and the nebulous, always invisible and unpredictable forces of the climate and the air.

III.

Alden

UNDERGROUND
.
WASHINGTON
,
D
.
C
.,
1932–1934—
WITH A BRIEF DETOUR TO THE DON RIVER VALLEY
,
1932
.

A
lden had been waiting so many weeks for precisely this moment that at first he hardly understood when the Indian, John, simply handed him the object. Weeks in which he had been forbidden to speak to John directly; to inquire after what, if anything, was delaying the plan (whatever it was) from finally being put into effect. After a while, he had even begun to suspect that the whole thing—his part of it anyway—had been some sort of a mistake. A joke, even. That Biggs (who had introduced him to the Indian at the beginning of May) had simply made it all up; created the story from nothing—just, as usual, to make him look the fool. Maybe the Indian didn't even have anything to do with the party— he certainly kept quiet about it, if he did. Maybe he'd never done underground work in San Francisco, Wichita, or Carson City; was not, as Biggs had claimed, an expert on explosives—having worked with dynamite since the age of ten, in the gold and silver mines of southern Nevada.

But here it was. The Indian's nod, and the object, by now carefully
stowed in the inside pocket of the large leather satchel he always carried (recently emptied of the last remains of his family's midday meal) in anticipation of precisely this moment—now very much at hand.

It was, he considered only later, due to his tremendous excitement over the fact that the moment, against all expectation,
had in fact arrived
, that he announced his departure at all. He might easily have simply slipped away, just as he had done on so many occasions before.

But he did not.

And because he did not, but instead announced both his intention to depart and the direction he planned to depart in, Arthur had looked up and said, I'll come with you. Me and the boy. And turning to Douglas, then: Come on, boy, he'd said, smoothing the lapels of his threadbare suit. Let's go see what's happening down on the Mall.

A
LDEN HAD BEEN INTRODUCED
to the Indian by a mutual acquaintance, Fred Biggs, whom he'd met three years before. Though Biggs was several years older (they'd overlapped in high school by only a single year), he had so far managed to maintain both the physique and countenance of a rather luckless adolescence. As unassuming and indifferent as Biggs outwardly appeared, however—wearing clothes, like his features, one size too big for him, a terrifically bored look, and a hat pulled down so low it was nearly impossible to look him in the eye—he had been active with the more militant branch of the CPUSA since sometime well before Alden knew him. It was rumored that his demeanor—coupled with his young age—made him a perfect candidate for some of the party's most dangerous jobs. Because of this, Biggs had (before Alden had even managed to make his acquaintance) been elevated, unquestioningly, to the rank of local hero in his mind.