The Facades: A Novel (14 page)

After abandoning Molly’s car to the mercies of the night, I walked briskly toward the
Trumpet
building, frightened although I had nothing of value, my life included. Passing through the revolving doors, I was surprised
at the amount of activity in the lobby. Reporters were enthusiastically supping in the adjoining greasy spoon, tossing bills
on the table and hurrying off as they fastened nostalgic fedoras. It was far different from the glum hush I’d experienced
on my previous visits to the building. They must have been energized by the library debacle, which had been
picked up by national wires. For the moment, at least, until the story was wrung dry, they must have felt central in more
than just geographical terms, capable of rekindling the
Trumpet
’s glory as they headed off for the prison, the tenth precinct station, the doomed library itself.

Still, I had to question the fact that, in these lean times, the
Trumpet
had hired an elevator operator. He held the metallic grate for me, overdoing it a little in his tight navy coat with rubbed
brass buttons. Before I’d even finished giving him the number, he turned a lever, pressed a button, and we juddered up.

“Mr. Breeze mentioned that you two had an appointment,” the operator said, revealing, at these close quarters, a new set of
dentures and breath that smelled of sardines. “You should definitely find him up there, Mr. Norberg.”

Unnerved by the operator’s knowledge—which wasn’t strictly a matter of doing his job well, I felt—I commented nervously that
one didn’t run into elevator operators much anymore.

“They say I’m very good at what I do,” he said. “Very discreet.” And with an awkward adjustment of the lever, which jerked
the carriage to a halt, he disgorged me into what remained of the
Trumpet
’s culture department. The light in the hall was dim and faltering. I passed several desks that looked like they had been
ransacked, proof copy littered everywhere, reference books splayed on the floor. Behind a milky glass door stenciled with
the name
L. P. BURROUGHS—LITERARY CRITIC
was a vacant room in which a lone bulb hung over a spread-eagled inflatable woman, her red lips puckered. At the end of the
hall, light wedged from Breeze’s door; I moved toward it cautiously. It seemed best to knock, which I did, calling Breeze’s
name. A hum and a slight dripping noise was my only reply from the office.
I pushed the door open and found Breeze seated at his vintage Royal typewriter, which I’d assumed was solely decorative. He
was sitting there very stiffly, completely upright as if he was posing for a mid-century secretarial manual. Breeze was not
typing anything on the Royal, although there was a half-finished page stuck in the rollers. His fingers, which were poised
inches above the home row, had a sickly bluish color—as I moved closer, I realized that the dripping sound was water rolling
off his fingertips onto the keyboard.

His glasses, also, had second lenses of ice.

There was frost in his stubble and his thinning hair, lending a surreal dignity to his features. Purple bruises marred the
right half of his face, and he leaned slightly away, as if weighted by the wounds. His stiffness was either the result of
rigor mortis or the extended period of time he’d been left in some kind of meat cooler. Aside from the discoloration and the
grimace, he was well-preserved.

The humming sound came from the space heater Breeze had told me about wanting the last time I’d been here—it was producing
a stale warmth and had made some progress in melting Breeze’s legs, judging from the pool of water that had formed around
his ankles and spread on the carpet.

Even the scribes of the culture department would have struggled to evoke the sound my mouth made. All I could think to do
was grab the page out of Breeze’s typewriter, stuff it in my pocket, and look for a way down from the fourteenth floor that
didn’t involve a second ride with the so-called elevator attendant. I found a door for the stairs, but when I turned down
the final flight, I was dismayed to see the attendant waiting there for me.

“Please allow me, sir,” he said with a smile, holding the door. “When I’m given a job, I like to do it thoroughly,” he explained.

I eased past him, hyperventilating into the putative safety of the lobby, and ran for the revolving doors.

“Watch your step, sir,” he called after me, cheerfully.

Fairgarden was nothing after that. I chain-smoked on my walk back, finding the car untouched in its drift of soiled snow.
I got in, locked the doors, and turned on the overhead light. There, against the steering wheel, I read Martin Breeze’s final
column.

Tutored by Breeze’s recent columns, I did not take long to find the acrostic he had encoded along the right edge the piece––though
I was waylaid momentarily by the left-hand column’s strangled and now poignant howl, “FtfmiWSH-wic-wobsa.”
See her live in the w
… was Breeze’s unfinished message to me. See her live in what? I thought about it, with Breeze’s final prose work pressed
to the wheel, insofar as I could think of anything except the critic defrosting in his office. A few minutes after I turned
the engine to warm the car, it occurred to me.
Wozzeck
. Berg’s
Wozzeck
was the opera’s first production of the spring season; I had been sent a pair of complimentary tickets as always, my only
Christmas gift.
See her live in
—well, it was called
Wozzeck
, not
The
Wozzeck
, but I wouldn’t be too hard on Breeze for his last gaffe. Though as usual this message was received with mixed feelings.
An atonal opera about a German soldier losing his mind could hardly bode well. I shivered, checked my mirrors, and drove out
of Fairgarden toward home.

M
OLLY LIKED THE
way people’s voices sounded on our old answering machine. She liked the hum and whoosh of the old tapes that had been recorded
and re-recorded a hundred times, the vinylish hiss, the voices barely afloat in static. When she was out, she had often serenaded
the answering machine with parts of arias, which I would find on the tape when I got home. It had never occurred to me to
save them. When I arrived home dazed from the
Trumpet
’s crime scene, I managed to process two facts. Kyle was still not there, and someone had called the answering machine, leaving
a message long enough to fill almost the whole tape. What was on that tape was not going to be pleasant for me,
I could tell. I filled the tub with scalding water and poured a glass of wine. I thought of Martin Breeze and the powerful
hand that had pushed down the lid of that freezer, then carried the frozen body back down the hall.

I hurried out to the kitchen, skirting the mirror, and brought back the answering machine. I set it on the back of the toilet,
arranged my wine and cigarettes on the rim of the tub, and pressed play. Settling into the bath, I listened to the tape rewind.
Something loosened in my body. I felt some sense of the relief Breeze might have felt when his brain turned off, relieving
his muscles of their duties. For a moment, dissolving in the hot water, I almost felt like I had when Molly had touched my
shoulders, all the pressure in my body going, as I let myself fall into the hands of the one person I didn’t distrust.

The tape took a while to rewind. I half expected the voice on the tape to be hers, explaining it all. The tape clicked on,
and there was only a hush at first, nothing but static and throat-clearing.

“Well, bucko, I guess you know who this is. This is Bob, this is Bob Lilly. We have your kid over here, he’s fine, he’s safe,
I think he’s asleep now. I just wanted to fill you in on that, bucko, because … well, I may be in the minority on this, but
I don’t think you’re an evil man …” Here the tape became unintelligible, as Lilly exchanged words with his wife in the background.
I knew what Lilly was going to say, that Kyle wasn’t coming home, because Kyle didn’t want to come home, and the Lillys now
knew everything. Lilly continued on, beating around the bush, using words like “custodian,” “malaise,” and “unfortunate tryst,”
and I began to remember another time that I had suffered on account of this answering machine, which still had Molly’s voice
recorded on it. It was the only recording I had of her speaking voice, I realized. The only recording of her playing herself.
Hello, you’ve reached the Norbergs. If you have a message for Sven, Molly, or Kyle, please leave it at the tone
.

About two weeks before her disappearance, I’d found a message from Martin Breeze asking her to meet him at the Vantages Hotel.
“I hope your husband doesn’t get this,” Breeze had said nervously, in the manner of someone aware that he is making an unfunny
joke. Or maybe the joke was impossible to pull off with so much dead-serious desire going on beneath it; Breeze would have
cuckolded me in a second, given the chance. He must have been thrilled to even pretend that he was arranging an assignation
with Molly, rather than an interview for the
Trumpet
, in which my wife expressed her desire to “become someone else” when it appeared a week later.

I made a joke about it when Molly played the message in the kitchen. She was chopping an onion as Breeze’s message played.
“I bet Breeze reserved a room for the night, just in case,” I said, and my own joke sounded just as forced as Breeze’s had,
curdled with fear. It didn’t help that Molly took me literally.

“Martin Breeze?” she said. The knife fell to the cutting board beside her.

“I wasn’t seriously …”

My wife’s eyes were filled with tears, but whether genuine or onion-induced, I couldn’t say. “You know, it is extremely tiring
to live as a figure in someone else’s paranoid dream. Extremely. Fucking. Tiring.” She punctuated each of these words with
a slash through the onion; her knife handle thudded the wooden cutting board.

I slid back deeper into the lukewarm water. My ears were
partly submerged, so I did not catch every word of Bob Lilly’s monologue. I got the gist, though. It informed me that Kyle
would be remaining with them as long as he felt this was the best option, and I should agree to this situation unless I wanted
my “illicit relationship” to be made public. Meanwhile, I was still thinking of my wife at the cutting board, her eyes full
of tears, and the message from Breeze, who was now defrosting a few miles away. I lowered myself further into the tub until
only my mouth was not submerged.

Under the water it was like listening to some demented operatic trio.

Satanic actions
, Bob Lilly sang.
Custodian, spiritual malaise, bucko
.

Paranoid dream
, my wife trilled back.
Extremely tiring
.

I hope your husband doesn’t get this
, sang Breeze, leaking melted ice.

Then the tape clicked off and there was nothing but the drip of the faucet, heard from below.

T
HE HAVEN OF THE
T
RAUMHAUS WAS AHEAD.
I
N THE WEAK AND
fumbling high beams, the trees looked stark; several scared animals fled into the depths, fleeing my predatory approach.
I arrived strangely elated. The pines wavered in the wind. The rustle of pine needles and the rush of I-99 blended into a
reassuring static. The lights in the patients’ rooms, which brightened the squares of their windows softly but exactly, were
half on and evenly distributed, giving the Traumhaus the appearance of a chess or checkerboard with no pieces on it. That
is to say, no one was looking out. Those who were inside were inside. I showed my family member card to the desk clerk, who
was absorbed in a weighty tome about some fellow named Zauberberg. He did not even look up at me.

The portrait of Bernhard on the landing depicted the architect at a long, unadorned steel desk, befitting his aesthetic. Bernhard
leaned on one elbow, a pencil clamped between thumb and forefinger and aimed downward, jutting toward the climber of the stairs,
almost threateningly. His ironic smile seemed to acknowledge this. As I climbed the stairs, I tried to meet the architect’s
eyes. It is surely pointless to stare down a figure in a painting, but in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I let my
gaze linger every time I arrived at the Traumhaus on the green and cloudy irises of the architect, framed by his thick black
glasses. As I did so I realized that the painting had changed. Or, if I lived in a world where paintings did not change on
their own, as I still believed I did, the painting had been altered. The alterations were minor yet significant. The two lenses
of the architect’s glasses had been darkened, concealing the two watery and suggestive pupils and the somewhat baggy folds
of flesh that had cupped them. The vandal had done good work, using the same paint, the same slightly expressionistic brushstrokes.
What should I have made of the fact that the architect’s painted shades had the same tint as the Oracle’s? I retreated down
the stairs and stood before the doorway sentry’s desk, clearing my throat several times before he looked up from his book.

“Yes?” he asked, annoyed.

“I think you’ve been vandalized,” I said. “The portrait of Bernhard on the landing. Someone has …”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,” said the sentry, only now sliding his bookmark in and closing his tome with a reluctant
sigh. “I’m only the doorkeeper here. My job is to admit a select few and turn away the rest. That was what the classified
ad said, verbatim. Everything else is beyond my purview.”

“Well, that’s fine, but surely,” I said, “surely you’ve noticed the change in the portrait.”

“The architect of this building was a very private man,” the sentry replied, with the air of a government functionary reciting
doctrine. “As you probably know, he spent the last months of his life here in almost total seclusion. Perhaps the sunglasses
in the portrait represent this privacy.”

“But,” I sputtered. “As of last week he was not wearing sunglasses.”

“I understand, Mr. Norberg,” the sentry said, rudely reopening his book, “but I hope you’ll understand that décor is not my
area. I should add that it is unwise to become overly attached to any aspect of the Traumhaus. We do not deal in permanence
here.”

Under Bernhard’s shaded gaze, I retraced my steps. Upstairs in the Wittgenstein Lounge, a formidable crowd had gathered around
the TV. Backs to the placard that read
THE LIMITS OF MY LANGUAGE ARE THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD
, the distracted memoirists tuned in to the mayor’s victory parade. The reception was choppy, almost avant-garde, due to the
weather, but the residents didn’t look shocked or dismayed by what they saw. Fuller, bald head agleam, rode in the first car
of a motorcade down the newly christened Oracle Avenue. A row of shivering extras lined the curb, holding cell phones and
Fuller re-election signs. As the motorcade passed, Fuller’s limousine SUV to the Oracle/McCready cruiser, giant silk screen
prints unfurled from the streetlights. The Oracle, cooler than ever in his triumph, regarded the street below from multiple
postures of profound thought, his ever-present shades colored now tangerine orange, now magenta, now lime green. One after
another they unrolled, vivid against the dirty snow, as Fuller’s motorcade made its way toward the Central Library, already
rigged with dynamite. “It’s hard to remember anything … exhilarating … in Trude!” the newscaster exclaimed. The audience response
was hard to gauge; a general melancholy pervaded the lounge and I sensed that their attentions were directed elsewhere. Onscreen,
the revelers began a broken countdown to the Central Library’s demolition. I
turned away. The detonation sounded from the speakers as I went to look for my mother.

I
WALKED DOWN
the hall under the fluorescent tube lights. The lighting had been controversial with critics, as was the gray industrial
concrete that arced high over my head. There was no comfort here, the critics had said, no assurance, the building did not
embrace you but instead held you at a cold remove, and the lesser rooms were almost reminiscent of the anterior regions of
those caves where our ancestors stored their dead. This was no way to treat the old and senile and chronically upset. But
the mellow beauty of the pink and white fluorescents against the gray concrete won some of them over in time. It mirrored
the moon on the snow outside, and maybe it made a counterargument of its own: that in the approach to death all familiar things
become strange to us, as we lose their textures and the ability to hold them and even their names. The brutalist aspect of
this hallway could be considered a kind of respect, an honest vision that was really no less troubling than the kitten posters,
teddy bears, and religious kitsch that filled most homes of this kind.

The Traumhaus did provide a foot of shelf space outside each resident’s door which displayed their relics, their trophies
and tools and crafts, along with photographs of their younger selves and families. These shelves also held the inboxes where
residents’ memoirs were returned, on the first and fifteenth of each month, like paychecks. I was pleased to see that Mom’s
memoir had been stamped
HIGHLY HARROWING
. That meant she would be staying put in the Robert Walser Room, which she’d inherited from Vollstrom, who’d been demoted
to the Kleist
Cabin. She enjoyed that room, and I enjoyed visiting her there, with its vista looking out on a staggered canopy of deciduous
trees and the frozen pond trapping the wooden ducks, a wintry landscape Walser himself might have enjoyed walking through.
He was a good patron for my mother, I felt: nervous, humble, uncertain. Maybe she would start writing her memoirs on napkins
and the backs of postcards, as he had, in a script so tiny as to be almost invisible. A small library of his works was propped
between two bookends on her desk.

I couldn’t help lingering for a moment at the memory shelf. The photo of the three of us, Mom, Dad, myself, had been captured
thirty years ago on an analog camera’s Kodachrome. Maybe it was the result of the fluorescent light, but the colors in the
photo seemed to have deepened over the years, and the ruddiness of our cheeks from the cold and the redness of my red coat,
which I had no actual memory of, threatened to bleed into the snow. It was a dispatch from a world so far in the past it seemed
fictional, those days before my father deserted us for a Swede named Claudia and the chairlifts of old Europe. His black-gloved
hand was clapped on my shoulder and I stared into the camera with deerlike blankness. My nose was running. Mom was laughing
beautifully at something, a joke my father had made, judging from the tremor of smile in his frost-encrusted beard, this moment
of adult humor now lost to history.

Taking the bundled pages in, I flipped through my mother’s manuscript. Having long since exhausted her childhood, adolescence,
and the early years of her marriage, the only periods she remembered in any detail, her recent work had become spare and experimental
by necessity, the thick forests of prose giving way to fragile saplings of text framed in white space. The lines
she had punched into a mostly blank page resembled the snowy hill it described:

This brief verse had grown a tumor of commentary in three distinct hands: one of them, writing in red, had taken issue with
the “steely plumage” image as a description of ski poles. A blue cursive hand critiqued the assonance of “falls” and “fault”
in the last line, while the red hand disagreed. A green hand had circled the words “he flies” and “my son” and “falls” to
no apparent end.

“This is very nice, Mom,” I said, laying the manuscript on the edge of the desk. She turned from the manual typewriter where
she was working. Despite widespread arthritis and eye problems in the Traumhaus, Bernhard insisted the residents type on manuals
because they would be “redolent of bygone days.” The physical difficulties of typing on them would “duplicate the awkward,
painful process of recalling the past.” An almost empty bottle of Wite-Out stood on the windowsill, sunk in a dried and caked
moat of spilled fluid. There were a few spare ribbons and a date stamp that read
TRUDE PUBLIC LIBRARY
.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. She tipped her reading glasses back into her thick gray hair. “What did they say? Have
I gotten it all wrong again?” I shook my head and handed her the title page with its seal of approval. Her smiles wavered
at the end like they’d forgotten their source. “They were right,” she said. “I was sure that I forgot and mixed everything
up and wrote it down wrong, but they were right.”

This
they
concerned me at first, they could have been new phantoms in her house, but I soon saw what she meant. Even as she spoke the
words she had one of Harris’s little notecards in her hand. I recognized it right away. I could picture the silent comedian
discreetly shedding it out of a suit sleeve or a false pocket. This was Harris’s schtick, and the sentiments on this notecard
my mother was now looking at—and similar ones strategically placed on every available surface in the room, I now noticed:
the nightstand, the sill, the table, the mini-fridge, the closet door—weren’t original in any way. They assured her that she
was beautiful and smart and what she was doing was worth doing, and they were expressed in the most clichéd fashion imaginable.
You could understand why he’d taken the vow of silence if this is what Harris had to say, and yet there it was: the proof
of love, stashed in dozens of subtle places, where they would not stand out but would go on making their daily claims, telling
my mother to believe in herself and hang in there, written with the full knowledge that they would be forgotten almost the
moment they were read, only to be read again, believed for a moment again, forgotten again.

And to be honest I was overcome by Harris’s simple little notes, his strategy to prevent losing the woman he loved, who was
constantly receding from him. Would Molly have laughed to find one of these notes by her mirror? I left the room, closing
the door behind me, and shook out in the fluorescent-lighted hall under the brutalist archway, knowing that however many times
I told my mother that it wasn’t her fault, I was the shade, unsteady and flickering, and it was the steady simple messages
of the notecards that were necessary to her now.

* * *

V
OLLSTROM ANSWERED THE
door in a frayed and cigarette-burned pink bathrobe. He did not look well. His gray hair was greasy and had grown to his
shoulders. He was shirtless under the robe and I could see his rib cage, the old cheesy skin stretched over it like cellophane.
The Kleist was an oversized, windowless cubicle. The desk within was covered with stacks of paper, notecards, legal pads,
and Post-its, the detritus of a failed filing system. Near the top of the stack was the cover page of Vollstrom’s December
memoir, the verdict stamped plainly over his name.

He was not alone in the room. A young, scholarly-looking man with a pince-nez and blue medical scrubs sat in Vollstrom’s reading
chair, writing in a notebook.

“Norberg, may I introduce my new friend Frank, the orderly. We have been spending a
great deal of time
together lately.”

Frank lifted his pen from the page and aimed it in my direction.

“Should I not be in here?” I asked.

“You may stay a while,” Frank said. “The patient has not been having a productive day in any case, so it’s just as well. However,
you may not give him any cigarettes.”

“Frank has been such a help to me here in the Kleist Cabin,” Vollstrom said. “My god, the Kleist Cabin! What is next for me?
The Franz Werfel? I’ve heard the most horrific things!”

Frank recorded this in his notebook.

“I see I’m digressing. Where was I? Ah yes, Frank. And his helpfulness. He prevents me from doing things that might actually
aid my work, such as smoking, and instead distracts me with his shiny specs, the scratching of his pen, and constantly referring
to me in the third person. Frank is just the amanuensis I need.”

“That’s enough,” said Frank.

“There are rooms in the basement, you know,” Vollstrom said to me. “You can hear the throb of the heater and the progress
of bodily fluids through the pipes. They are named after writers so obscure that only scholars of the German language know
how to pronounce them.” He sighed, walked over to his bed, and fell back on the stiff mattress.

Judging from the action of his pen, the orderly devoted at least a paragraph to this movement.

“What can he possibly be writing?” Vollstrom asked. “How many ways are there to describe recumbency?” He seemed to register
Frank’s reproving look without even opening his eyes. “Yes, Frank, I know, there are innumerable ways, but the bread of experience
grows stale. The same set of rooms, the same vistas. The demand for my work remains steady. Every two weeks, the next installment
is required. It grows tiresome.” He smiled wearily. His hair was arranged in an oddly symmetrical pattern around his head
on the pillowcase, an ashen halo. “Suicide is much in my thoughts these days, of course, but in the end it would give Bernhard
too much pleasure. No, I would not make it so easy for him. He’ll have to go on trying to kill me with commentary, with the
contradictory glosses, the tiny marginalia. Look at it, Norberg. The one who writes in red never agrees with the one who writes
in blue. The one who writes in black is simply insane. Perhaps it is my friend Frank here, who I notice has a black pen in
his hand.”