Mystery

“The only time you wanted to really spend time with me was when you saw that you could use me. You wanted me to get interested in what happened to Jeanine Thielman. You wound me up like a clock and turned me loose. And you’re pleased because I did just what you wanted me to.”

“And you did it because of who you are,” von Heilitz said. “If you’d been another sort of kid, I …”

“You wouldn’t have done anything at all.”

“But you’re not another sort of kid.”

“I wonder what I am,” Tom said. “I wonder who I am.”

“You’re enough like me to have met me next to Hasselgard’s car,” von Heilitz said. “And to have turned up at the hospital on the day Michael Mendenhall died.”

“I’m not sure I really want to be like you,” Tom said.

“But you don’t want to be like your grandfather, either.” Von Heilitz stood up and looked down at Tom, sprawled on the St. Alwyn’s double bed with a paperback book beside him. Tom felt strong and conflicting currents of emotion—the old man wanted to come near him, put his hand on his cheek, hug him, and what he had said made it impossible.

“What I told you in that clearing was the truth, Tom. I do love you. And we’re going to accomplish something great. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re going to do it—together.” He put his hand on the bottom of the bed, and hesitated.

Tom thought, I don’t want any speeches, and what von Heilitz saw in his face made him back away from the bed. “You don’t have to come over to Hobart’s with me. I’ll check in with you before I go.”

Tom nodded, scarcely knowing what he wanted anymore and too unhappy to think about it clearly. He did not see von Heilitz walk out of the room. The connecting door closed. He picked up his book and began reading. He could hear von Heilitz pacing around his room. In the book, Esterhaz drove along the shore of a steaming lake. It seemed to Esterhaz that another person, a barely visible person of terrifying strength, lived inside him, and that this other person was someone he had once been. Von Heilitz began speaking into his telephone. Why did I talk to him like that? Tom wondered; it’s like I expect him to be an ordinary father. Victor Pasmore was an ordinary father, and one of those was enough. Tom nearly got off the bed and went into the other room, but his enduring unhappiness, an unhappiness that tasted like anger, kept him nailed to the bed and the book.

There was a lot of invisibility in the world, Esterhaz thought. He took another pull from the pint bottle between his thighs. A lot of people disappeared into it, and other people barely noticed they were gone. Sorrow played a role, humiliation played a role. It was a foretaste of death, death in advance of death. Being left behind by the world was a big part of it. Drunks, wastrels, and murderers, combat soldiers after a war, musicians, detectives, drug addicts, poets, barbers, and hairdressers … as the visible world grew more and more crowded, so did its invisible counterpart. Esterhaz pulled up at a stoplight, and for a moment willed himself to see the invisible world he had just imagined, and a mob of shuffling, indifferent Invisibles, dressed in rags and old clothes, pulling on bottles like his own or leaning against lampposts, lying down on the snowy sidewalks, slid effortlessly into view.

Tom looked up from the book, awakened by a memory that seemed to come from some version of himself hidden within him—a memory of having seen himself here in this shabby room, alone and reading the book he was reading now. He had looked at the self he was now, the almost grown Tom. A nearly abstract violence surrounded this memory—an explosion of smoke and fire—as it surrounded Esterhaz.

Exhaustion that seemed to come from every cell in his body pulled him downward, and Tom thought, I have to get up, but the book slipped from his hand, and he saw the caged animal that was his grandfather snapping his heavy body sideways toward a window as the arrow pierced his haunch. He reached for the book. His fingers touched the dark half of the face on the cover, and his grandfather looked up from the yellow note into his eyes, and he was asleep.

Or not. He looked at the window once, and saw darkening air. Some time after that he heard Lamont von Heilitz come through the connecting door and walk up to the side of the bed. I’ll come with you, he said, but the words stayed inside him. The old man untied Tom’s shoes and slipped them off his feet. He turned off the light. “Dear Tom,” von Heilitz said. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about anything you said.”

“No,” Tom said, meaning, no, don’t go, I have to come with you, and von Heilitz stroked his shoulder and leaned over in the darkness and kissed his head. He moved backwards, moving away, and a line of light came into the room from the door, and he was gone.