The Facades: A Novel (13 page)

T
HE PLASTIC TREE SLUMPED BY THE WINDOW, STRUNG WITH
decrepit ornaments and a string of colored lights. Somehow I had pictured it looking different, before I’d found the supplies
in the closet and dragged them out, before I’d stacked Kyle’s parcels there, wrapped in old cartoon pages from the
Trumpet
. Christmas was a holiday that got harder to sustain as time went on; that was a lesson worth teaching. The boxes shrunk and
ceased to glow and meant less when you opened them. Kyle dutifully uncovered the existentialist classics I’d purchased for
him at Perlmutter’s, books whose plain covers and yellowed pages drably proved their seriousness.

“Have you even read all these books, Dad?” Kyle said.

“Most of them,” I said. “I read them a long time ago, when I was your age, and I’ve forgotten a lot, of course, but I learned—”

“Thanks.” He flipped a few pages of Camus’s
The Fall
, evidently unimpressed by the scabrous and richly ironic narration promised on the back cover.

Kyle turned a few hurried pages, looking for a signpost in the woods of print. Some dust might have come up in the process,
but I believe he exaggerated his coughing fit.

I was missing, among other things, the smell of pine. Years ago, in times that now seemed impossibly remote, I would drive
out to New Arcadia and buy a real tree from a plaid-shirted tough who would strap it to the roof of the car. Molly was bothered
by the scattered pine needles, so we bought the artificial tree, which had itself become less pretty and functional with time,
exactly as if it were real. There was something to be said for not pretending.

Kyle was at the window, making no attempt to conceal the fact that he was waiting on Lilly’s van, counting the minutes until
it arrived.

“Well, thanks, Dad,” he said, without turning around. “I guess it’s good to know your enemy.”

“Your enemy?” I said. “Your
enemy
?”

He snorted. “I know you think life is pointless, but why do you want me to think it’s pointless too? I didn’t know it was
something you tried to convert people to.”

“That’s not my position,” I said. “I don’t think that.”

“Really?” He turned, and I could see a second mirrored Kyle in the window. The face gave me a watery sneer. “What is the point,
then?” He paused. “As you see it.”

“As I see it,” I said. The words were not readily available. Kyle watched me triumphantly as I fumbled for my worldview. “As
I see it, the point is to endure as much shit as you can without any illusions.”

Kyle stood there for some time looking out to the cul-de-sac, still accompanied by his dim twin. He seemed to be considering
various rebuttals. Finally he laughed, and said: “You know, Bob is so
totally right
about you.” And, leaving this statement to hang, letting me steep in its cryptic air, Kyle went to the basement to collect
his things. I wanted to ask him what he meant but as it turned out, I never got the chance.

B
EFORE
I
KNEW
it the sky’s fade had begun, lowering the curtain on another brief and halfhearted midwinter day. You could feel buried in
a building, especially your own house, I thought. I threw on my coat and walked outside, hoping that the cold would brace
me. I set off with no destination in mind, hitching up my collar for extra anonymity as I walked the residential streets.
The neighbors were crowded around tables, eating, singing. Some of their young were out, sledding down their sloped lawns
or building snowmen and forts. (Bernhard had developed a late fascination with children’s snowmen, thousands of which he photographed
in his last years. Some claimed this showed a softening of his lifelong misanthropy, though it was just as likely that in
these first crude architectural attempts, he sought to understand himself and his own compulsion to build.)

The snow was piled in big, soft banks on the curb, along the driveways. I walked down the icy sluice of the street. Last Christmas
had not been so long ago. The three of us had driven to a Methodist church downtown, and Molly had sung “Once in Royal David’s
City.” I had listened to her sing and I had listened to the Methodist minister’s sermon, and afterward I’d shaken hands with
my neighbors feeling something like real warmth and goodwill toward them. Molly and Kyle had been fighting about something,
piano probably. Kyle had the expression
Molly and I called “the POW look,” but he had put on a decent-looking cardigan sweater and was enduring the proceedings. Kyle
had not looked at all susceptible to the sermon, the minister’s Christmas soft pitch, and when Molly sang from the balcony
above and behind me, I did not even look back—that’s how certain I was that it would all continue. Her voice, his reluctant
presence.

The irregularly placed streetlights let their pools of yellow fall in the snow. I turned into a lane that was somewhat unfamiliar
to me, the boughs of overhanging elms obscuring the sign. I took a left and started uphill, toward a clearing. I slipped a
couple of times on my way up, skidding backward on the ice. The motion lights of three houses converged in a pale circle,
though as far as I could tell there were no lights on inside the houses. They looked uninhabited, shrouded by trees. The cul-de-sac
was oddly bright, one of those Midwestern blank spots aliens might choose for an abduction. The bright gravel circle seemed
like a proscenium stage, where I was expected to climb and deliver an address I had not rehearsed. I stood in the convergence
of motion beams. It was difficult to see anything other than the houses’ dark outline in the glare. Some moments passed, I
am not sure how many. I felt as though I was awaiting some total, blinding revelation. Then I heard a noise from one of the
houses. It was a deep, anguished, bottomless cry, something you hear from your bed at night, coming from an unknown corner
of the neighborhood, and maybe for a moment you think of investigating. Ultimately it’s easier to let go, because it could
be coming from anywhere,
could just as well be your own house
, so you keep to bed, glad you haven’t interfered, although your sleep might be broken by echoes. I turned and hurried
away, looking back over my shoulder until I reached the end of the block.

K
YLE DIDN
’
T COME
home that night. The next morning there was no sign of him in the orderly, lodger-like spareness of his room. I didn’t make
too much of it at first, figured the Lillys had overdone it on the family wholesomeness, OD’d on eggnog or something, though
I did call the number on the creepy business card Cordelia Lilly had handed me, and then the F.C.O.D.P. itself, where I was
greeted by a recorded voice asking for my credit card number. I gave up and drove to work.

Around eleven Boggs stopped by. He was wearing a new V-neck sweater and scarf, most likely of cashmere, although I didn’t
reach over to actually touch them. My employer was in a philosophical mood.

“So, Norberg, we’ve reached the end of the year,” he observed. “Strange, isn’t it, how the new year continues to hold the
promise of renewal, no matter how many times we’ve seen a new year come and go, turning the calendar without changing ourselves
in any significant way.”

“True enough, sir.”

“But we have good reason to leave this year behind, don’t we? No question that something went awry for us. It must have been
around the time your wife disappeared. I have to admit, there was always something a little …
implausible
about your marriage. I hope you don’t mind me putting it that way.”

Actually, I didn’t like where this was going at all.

“The stunning and vastly talented wife. The insecure,
menially employed, vaguely creepy husband. And yet it was this unlikely fact that held everything in place, wasn’t it.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.”

Boggs stroked the cashmere scarf as if it was a cat that had settled there. I wondered whether the scarf was a gift from his
wife or one of his mistresses. “It was strange, Norberg, when your missus disappeared, when you became single,” he said. “I
felt myself growing diffuse. Seductions I might have achieved easily in the past became fraught and complicated. These were
beautiful young paralegals and court reporters aware of my reputation. What’s gotten into me? You’ve seen me destroying my
archive. I had some remarkable letters in there, and some truly remarkable photographs.”

I had heard rumors of the archive and fielded the occasional call from Jessica, Annabelle, or Bridget demanding the return
of their materials. In my mind, the Boggs archive was as vast and criminal as a Bosch triptych.

“What’s more, the cases aren’t going our way,” he continued. “I find myself dizzy in the courtroom, groping for a word just
out of reach, and at times I completely forget about the defendant, and it seems that the judge, the jurors, and the prosecutor
are gathered there in judgment of
me
.”

“It sounds like you might want to see a doctor, sir.”

“I don't know if there is a medical solution for this.” He reached into the pocket of his peacoat and produced a small wrapped
box. “A token of my appreciation for your efforts,” he said. “In the new year, we’ll have to assess where we really are and
attempt to regain our footing.”

He shook my hand awkwardly, then retreated through the front door. The gift was heavy in my palm and wrapped in blue
paper with an intricate snowflake design. It was a magnifying glass.

T
HE GIFT CAME
in handy when I finally got around to reading the morning’s
Trumpet
, which offered a dense summary of the events that had taken place at the Central Library the day before.

The headline read
ON HEROIC COP’S HUNCH, LIBRARY RAIDED; THIRTEEN ARRESTED
. Underneath this was a large, soft-focus, hagiographic portrait of the Oracle. There was an aura of legend gathering around
it already. The article recapped the librarians’ seven-month standoff and city hall’s increasingly harsh tactics as winter
wore on. The Oracle had reportedly met privately with Mayor Fuller two days before Christmas, sharing his strong premonition
that the library would soon be demolished, and the mayor, sick of the pause at the heart of downtown, had authorized a secret
raid, circumventing his uncooperative police chief. At 6:00
A.M
. on Christmas morning, the Oracle led a motley force of police
officers, private security guards, and mayoral aides into the library. They quickly disarmed four shotgun-toting librarians
who were changing shifts; from there, resistance was minimal, as the remaining holdouts emerged from their sleeping bags in
the stacks. The dozen librarians, who had twenty advanced degrees among them, were arrested and charged with, of all things,
disorderly conduct. Much was made of the fact that the raiders allowed them to bring library materials to read in jail, where
they would be spending at least a few symbolic nights. That left only Cassandra Clark in her second-floor office. I thought
of her burning memoirs up there under the portraits of fat three-piece-suited men with swollen knuckles
and bronze watch fobs. Maybe she was thinking about men in power, how they would always be looming over her, whether in the
form of these fading Victorian philanthropists or in the more loutish, illiterate form of Fuller. Maybe she was thinking that
without Molly, none of it mattered. She did not respond to the barked commands of the officers. It was then that the Oracle,
flanked by his partner, McCready, climbed the stairs to apprehend the “dangerous radical” and “experimental prose writer.”
According to the article, Cassandra Clark looked straight into the Oracle’s racer shades and said: “You are overdue.” The
two ex-detectives dragged her out, earning florid praise from the
Trumpet
hack who was probably already rehearsing his award acceptance speech. The demolition of the Central Library was scheduled
for mid-January, after a massive sale of library holdings to benefit the police officers’ pension fund.

B
Y THE END
of the day I’d heard nothing from Kyle, but I couldn’t succumb to paranoia, I told myself. Instead of imagining the worst,
I decided to go downtown and see Martin Breeze as I had promised. He seemed to have something important to say to me, and
not something he wanted to communicate by phone either. I closed the office at six and hit the road in the hope of beating
the traffic, but ended up in the thick of it, a slow creeping throng on the highway. Exiting I-99 early, I took the back way
downtown through one of the city’s grimmest neighborhoods, Fairgarden. It was a place of deep mythical danger. A number of
post-apocalyptic films had been shot on location there. There were
BEWARE OF DOG
signs on the lawns and trash bags in the windows. The drug houses had transoms of art deco glass. Huge
abandoned factories sunk back from the street like painfully shy old men whose glasses had fogged over. There was a graffiti
artist who lived in an undisclosed basement around here. Something of a preservationist as well, because his specialty was
tagging buildings that were about to be demolished by the city. There were some real gems in Fairgarden, late nineteenth century
masterworks built with brass staircases, molded fireplaces, glazed brick. Their copper had been stripped and the windows removed
from their casements. On the weatherizing boards the artist left his tag
BE
inside a large, convincingly 3-D wrecking ball that really seemed to swing. His art was an admonition to look closely at
what was disappearing, in a neighborhood where no one wanted to look at anything closely.

They said you weren’t supposed to idle at stoplights in Fairgarden, that it was best to push straight through, but I had no
choice. An old black woman was crossing the street in front of me. A kid’s blue winter coat was draped over her gaunt frame.
She pushed a shopping cart full of white running shoes. They were massive, unlaced, factory-fresh. The broken traffic light
bleated out a meaningless red as she pushed on, somehow, past the shells of buildings.