The World of the End (48 page)

“Be strong,” they demanded of him with their encouraging grins. He watched them walk away hand in hand, as if there was no other way, hastily returning to their eternal journey back to expose history’s first couple, two indomitable lovers, indefatigable provocateurs who, no matter how far they go, would always remember to stay close, perfectly choreographed in their movements, their intentions, their destinations. Only when they disappeared among the masses, did he gather the courage and leave the alley at a dead run, secure in the knowledge that, unlike the old couple, his journey was nearing its end.

37

The Unavoidable Conclusion

Two hours. No more. That’s the amount of time that passed from the moment the overwrought righter arrived on the doorstep of the woman with the answers till he left her apartment, pale and shaken. Two hours is also all it took to travel to Marian’s residence. All the missing tiles of the mysterious mosaic of disappearance had been drawn out of hiding, hovering in the air in the form of spliced sentences before finally touching down and merging into a cohesive picture. Half-formed questions, quarters of answers, jumps in time, appalled interruptions, onerous silences, tears aplenty. And this is another way to describe the most loaded conversation he’d ever had: so much information in so little time. He had never before guessed how dense the truth was, and at the same time, how horrifyingly simple. He marshaled all of his powers as a storyteller when, sitting on the surging multi, he retold the tale to himself on the way to 1700.

A clear and continuous chronology. That’s the secret. Along with a grain of logic. Because were he to connect two simple facts, the emptiness that filled his wife upon death and her admiration for the greatest of playwrights, he would have deduced that she had moved at quite an early stage to the faraway city that her platonic lover and his adoring fans called home—an unavoidable conclusion. That, alongside other, far less obvious conclusions, ones that cunningly escaped his attention on account of their improbability, such as the identity of the biological mother. When she opened the door, smiled, and said she’d waited for him, he felt a slight queasiness. He expected to meet a complete stranger, a woman who just happened to have birthed his wife. Soon enough he discovered that her short stature and the soft dreaminess that radiated from her face were merely a trap laid by first impression for the casual gazer. The moment he cleared the angelic hurdle of the glazed turquoise eyes, the naturally plush red lips, the high cheekbones, the lofty forehead, the velvety golden mane that framed the refined beauty, he succeeded in finding countless little cracks in her demeanor that spoke to the very opposite: During the course of their conversation, she will bow her head on more than one occasion and suddenly her eyes will rise up and peek at him in panicky suspicion, bordering on paranoia, and when she will hush and listen to him speak, an anxious nerve pulsating near her ear will mar her polite countenance with angst, and she will slump her lips into an expression of disappointment or commiseration even when neither is necessary, and she will stroke her concave chin with her stubby fingernails until her skin is raw and red.

Even before being exposed to her body language, he tried distancing himself from the clammy feeling her looks evoked, as though he knew the woman. He was sure he had seen her over the course of the past two weeks, certain that it was only in this world that he had come across her. She shook his hand and put an end to his ignorance with four syllables. He felt blessed relief when he understood that he hadn’t been wrong, she was the woman he’d seen in the park outside the multilingual labs on the day he went looking for Marian, the woman into whose arms his child returned after he failed in his attempt to cling to his father, the woman he had seen outside the café, breaking a bottle over the head of the lying Belgian, and if he was unable to see the invisible line that connected the two formerly disjointed points, then the queasiness in his stomach was only churned by the sound of her name, Catherine Dumas. Hidden blades poked at his diaphragm when he smiled at her amiably and said he was pleased to meet her. A second unavoidable conclusion flashed, disappeared, and reemerged behind one of the creaking doors in his mind. Was it possible that Robert was … and then she commanded his straying train of thought, saying matter-of-factly, “Marian was right. He does look like a little you. No doubt the boy inherited the inquisitive eyes from his father.”

He almost yelled at her not to talk about the child right now; soon, but not right now. He wanted to get the facts in order, the chain of events that brought him to the apartment of the ex-con who had filled her nemesis with lead, but she had already brought up the kid. The Mad Hop was right. A small syllogism that proves her exclusive identity—had she not been the legal guardian, she would not have gotten custody of … but where was he? He sought out the last of the Mendelssohn offspring, perking up his ears and listening for childlike rustling behind one of the far doors of the apartment, perhaps a jubilant sparkle of laughter or even an irate wail, piercing the counterfeit calm imposed by John Ward’s madrigals warbling in the background.

“Henri’s at a friend’s house. He’ll be back in the evening,” she cooed in her effeminate voice.

“Henri?” he asked, clearing his throat, finding it difficult to hide his dissatisfaction with the name.

“In my opinion it’s better than 9562300483371, no?” She bit her lip hesitantly and the possessive anger that had surged inside of him at the sound of the name was replaced by gratitude. All the grit and grime she labored to conceal behind the softness and the calm evaporated at the mention of the child’s name, and he understood that the fetus Marian had lost five years ago had become Catherine’s only solace. He figured that the grandmother and the grandson had come to 1616 on the heels of the lost mother, even though he had no idea how Catherine had managed to find her new address.

Catherine laughed and corrected him. “How could I have come looking for my daughter if I didn’t even know she was dead? When I learned about the aliases and the right to adopt close kin, had there been such, I took my chance, and when I found out I had a grandson I proceeded with the understanding that it would be years before she … after all, she’s so young…”

Then she told him about the meeting. The one that took place far from Shakespeare’s hometown.

Three months after adopting the child, she brought him in for an interview in Aliastown 1996—a common practice put in place in order to assess the child’s satisfaction with his or her legal guardian. After passing the evaluation, Catherine decided to treat her grandson to a spur-of-the-moment trip to March 2000 to visit one of his best friends from their “greenhouse” days, a child who was also being raised by his grandmother. The kids played for hours while the grandmothers chatted, till Catherine peeked at her godget and said it was time to go. Henri’s protestations got him another hour of play with his redheaded alias friend. When they left, Catherine promised they would come back again soon.

On their way to the multi-wheel that would take them home, they passed a long line of people waiting for the Vie-deo machine, and the curious child lagged, looking them over as his grandmother urged him to carry on. Catherine took his hand and marched quickly in the direction of the multi stop, when all of a sudden the child turned his head, released his grip without any warning, and sprinted madly toward the line, disregarding her calls, and, like a creature in a trance, galloped toward the only woman who didn’t notice him and fell upon her heedlessly, clinging to her leg with devout longing. The woman was so startled by the intensity of the surprise attack, that for the first few seconds she merely stared at the child without opening her mouth to speak. Catherine was far more shaken when she recognized the genetic attraction her grandchild had experienced when she first met him. Only the child, who didn’t understand a thing, showed no signs of alarm, emitting a long cry of admiration that brought bashful smiles to the agitated faces of those waiting in line. The woman looked around helplessly, trying, in vain, to delicately pry the child away. The boy wrapped both his hands around her leg and pressed his smiling face to her side. Catherine was sure she was headed toward another heart attack, more severe than the one that sent her to the Other World, when she asked Henri to behave like a good boy and tried to get him to relinquish his grip on her astonished daughter’s leg.

Then their eyes met. The ignorant daughter and the knowing mother. Catherine couldn’t control the urge to caress her daughter’s cheek, and when her trembling fingers almost touched her daughter’s face, Marian withdrew and pushed the child away with all her might, finally free of the passionate touches of the two strangers who looked at her with open wonder. Feeling cornered by their stares, Marian left her place in line and began walking away, not daring to turn back and face the strange pair’s inscrutable demands. Only once Catherine regained her composure and called her daughter by name three times did she slow to a halt. The two trotted toward her, the grandmother trying to quell the child’s ardor with her tenacious grip and the grandson doing his best to wiggle free, not understanding why she insisted on denying him this inexplicable pleasure, as Marian fixed them with the frightened stare of a woman on the run.

The silence could have gone on for hours had Catherine not shaken her hand and identified herself. “Hello, Marian. I’m Catherine Dumas, your mother, and this is Henri, your son.”

Ben believed Catherine when she said that Marian burst out laughing a few seconds after the dramatic announcement, certain that he wouldn’t have acted any differently had he been in her shoes. Marian asked the woman what weird soap opera she’d stepped out of, and when Catherine repeated her earlier statement, this time in a more forceful voice, her daughter said she was “demented” and asked that she stop bothering her. Catherine maintained her composure, pointed at the long line in front of the Vie-deo machine, and said in an even tone, “I guess we barged in on you just as you were about to take out the tapes of your life. I’m sorry. Go back to your spot on line. We won’t bother you anymore. Just do the two … the three of us a favor and watch the first tape, the one that begins with your birth. Remember my face. Imprint it on your mind. And if you want, call me.”

Marian did not voice any resistance when her mother took her godget and pressed her thumbprint into its memory. Catherine looked her full in the face and in a crushed voice added, “Please, don’t disappear. I lost you once already…”

*   *   *

Ben noted, “Were it not for Henri you could have passed her right by on the street without knowing she was your daughter.”

Catherine shook her head vigorously, every muscle in her face revolting against his comment. “Absolutely not. As I said, there’s no way I would have let her go a second time.”

“But how would you have known…?” He fell silent at the sight of her burning turquoise irises. Now and again she sipped from the tall glass of water on the edge of the table, unfurling for him the story of the young theology student in the sixties in Paris, just a few years before the uprising, in which she did not take part on account of the disastrous turn life had handed her. Robert. Her heinous roommate. The failed actor who cut and pasted freely from the truth, threading a false string through its entire length. Like the fact that he never made it on time to auditions because he used to party till the wee hours and that, when he did make it, he was always ushered out the door unceremoniously on account of his poor skills. Like the fact that he used to drink himself into a stupor and then crawl to her room and beg until she’d prod him away from the door with a broomstick and swear she’d rent elsewhere if he did not leave. Like the fact that when they met, he swore up and down that he loved men, convincing her to move in with him, taking advantage of the innocence of the young woman who had run away from her drunken father’s house. Like the fact that one time, when she was cramming for a final, she forgot the key to her room outside the door and only remembered it late at night, unaware that the charming scoundrel had already seized the opportunity and made a copy for himself. Like the fact that, several days later, Robert came home one evening drunk as a sailor and decided it was high time to demand his due, broke into her room while she was in the shower, and hid behind her drapes, pouncing on her like a man possessed not long after she’d fallen asleep. By the time she woke up and managed to get her bearings, it was too late. Like the fact that she carried the results of the brutal rape in her womb for nine awful months, during the course of which she lost her job caring for an old sickly priest, no longer able to hide her pregnancy. Robert was sent to jail, and she swore never to reveal to him what he had done. He had no knowledge whatsoever of the twins she bore in the late days of her final innocent spring. The girl who was vehemently opposed to abortions was not examined once during her gestation period and was accordingly shocked when she found herself lying on the delivery room bed, sweaty and in pain, listening to the midwife tell her with a wink and a whisper, “We’ve got another one on the way out.…” Her initial shock turned to a muffled shriek when one of the nurses put the twins in her arms and she noticed the tiny mark on her firstborn’s chest, the unmistakable perfect star, the badge of dishonor Robert had bequeathed to his daughter.

Catherine knew she would not be able to shoulder the financial burden of raising two daughters and so, during the first month of the girls’ lives, she sold all she had, hoping to make the impossible happen, praying day and night for divine intervention in her predicament. The miracle refused to materialize, and when she went to see her only kin, her fanatical father chased her off his property, calling her a whore.

Catherine poured herself a fresh glass of water, gulped it down thirstily, and continued, this time at a quicker pace. She grew impatient when telling of the hardest decision of her life—separating the twins so that she could raise one of them. As soon as she had decided to give one of the girls up, she knew she would keep the one bearing the telltale mark as an act of self-flagellation. Each time she looked at the mark she would be reminded of her terrible deed. The lump sum of money she received went toward ensuring some financial security for the “marked” one. The random meeting in the park with the strange man who answered to the name Arthur was, as far as she was concerned, a sign from above, and she insisted on one single rule—that the adopting parents not change the child’s name, even though the transparent nature of her own deceit was readily apparent to her: If both babies answered to the same name and were outwardly identical, perhaps then, with time, she would come to believe she had birthed but a single child. Deep in her heart, she hoped the two sisters would never meet, and cried for weeks on end after the deal was done. And maybe her insistence was merely the result of her desire to leave her small mark on the two-month-old baby girl who was taken from her in the middle of a glorious, sun-dappled day. Six months later she found a job and took the baby along to the apartments she cleaned sixteen hours a day, but by eighteen months she enrolled her in day care, preferring to keep the glowing baby out of the filthy apartments. When one of the apartment owners grew overly interested in her, she knew she had no choice, that she’d never let history repeat itself, and so, in a back alley deal, she acquired a gun, disgusted by the thought that she carried a weapon in her bag and, doubly so, by the reason she was forced to carry it. Over the years she vigorously rebuffed the advances of many men who were not indifferent to her beauty and, to her dying day, she kept herself apart from them.