Oh Lord! A few minutes ago I was in a fine old mood about what I did, and now I'm sickened. What's wrong with me? This bloody book, that's what's wrong. It's wearing me out. I'm tired of listening to the bloody voices in my head. I'm tired of feeling as though I'm responsible to them. My father wouldn't have wasted a day of his life, long though it was, writing about Galilee and the Gearys. And the idea that anyone, let alone his son, could sit down day upon day to report the voices that chatter in his head would have struck him as ludicrous.
My only defense would have been to convince him that my book keeps at bay a creeping madness that I owe entirely to him. Though even as I say that I can well imagine what his response would be.
"I was never mad."
How would I reply? "But Poppa," I'd say. "There were months on end when you wouldn't speak to anybody. You let your beard grow to your navel, and you wouldn't wash. You'd go out into the swamp and eat rotted alligator carcasses. Do you remember doing that?"
"Your point?"
"That's the act of a madman."
''By your definition.''
"By anybody's definition, father."
"I was not mad. I knew exactly why I was doing what I was doing."
"Tell me, then. Help me understand why half the time you were a loving father, and the rest of the time you were covered in lice and excrement-"
"I made a pair of boots out of excrement. Do you remember those?"
"Yes, I remember."
"And one time I brought back a skull I'd found in the swamp-a human skull-and I told my bitch-wife that I'd been away in Virginia and I'd dug up you know who."
"You told her you had Jefferson's skull?"
"Oh yes." He gives me a sly smile here, remembering with pleasure the pain he caused. "And I reminded her how his narrow lips had looked, and put my fingers in his sockets where his watery eyes had been. I said to her: did you kiss his eyes?Because this is where they lay…"
"Why did you do something so cruel?"
"She did a lot worse to me. Anyway it was good to see her weep and wail once in a while. It reminded me she still had a heart, because sometimes I doubted it. And oh Lord, how she carried on! Screaming at me to give her the skull. It wasn't dignified, she said. Dignified! Ha! As if she ever gave a damn about being dignified! She could behave like the filthiest gutter whore when she was in heat. But she came after me, telling me about dignity!" He shook his head, laughing now. "The hypocritical slut."
I remembered this now. The walls of L'Enfant literally shaking as husband and wife raged at one another. I hadn't known what was at issue at the time; but in hindsight it's little wonder Cesaria was so distressed.
"Eventually she snatched the thing from me-or tried to-and somehow in the mllee it dropped to the ground and smashed. Pieces flew in every direction and she let out such a shriek and went down on her knees to gather these pieces up so fucking
tenderly you'd have thought he was still in there somewhere…"
"So did you tell her it wasn't Jefferson's skull?"
"Not right then. I watched her for a while, sobbing and moaning. I'd never been completely certain of what went on between them until that minute. I mean I'd had my suspicions-"
"He built L'Enfant for her."
"Ah, that proved nothing. She could make men do anything, if she put her mind to it. The question wasn't: what did he feel for her? The question was: what did she feel for him? And now I had my answer. Watching her picking up the pieces of what she thought was his bones, I saw how-oh how-she loved him.'' He paused and regarded me with black and turquoise eyes. "How did we get to this?"
"You being mad."
"Oh yes…" He smiled. "My madness… my wonderful madness…" He drew a deep breath; a vast breath. "I was never mad," he said again. "Because the mad don't know what they're doing or why. And I always knew. Always." He exhaled. "Whereas you…" he growled.
"Me?"
"Yes, my son. You. Sitting there day after day, night after night, listening to voices which may or may not be real. That's not the behavior of a sane man. Look at you. You're even writing this down. Just take a moment and think about how preposterous that is: setting down something as if it were the truth, though you know you 're inventing it."
"I don't know that for certain."
"But I've been dead and gone a hundred and forty years, son. I'm as dusty as Jefferson."
I fumbled for an answer to this. The thing is, he was right. It was strange-no, it is strange-to be exchanging words with a dead man the way I am now, not knowing how much of what I'm writing is reportage and how much of it invention; not knowing if my father is speaking to me through my genes, through my pen, through my. imagination, or whether this dialogue is just evidence of some profound insanity in me. Sometimes I hope it's the latter. For if it's the former-if the man is here in me now-then that prospect he said I feared so much is dose; that time when he comes back from his journey into death, leaving the door through which he passed open wide.
"Father?"
Writing the word on the page is a kind of summons, sometimes.
"Where are you?"
He was here moments ago, filling my head with his voice. (That story of the skull he showed to Cesaria; I'd never heard it before. When I see her next I'm going to ask her if it's true. If it is, then I'm not inventing his voice, am I? He's here with me.) Or at least he was.
"Father?"
Now he doesn't answer.
"We didn't finish our conversation about madness."
Still silence. Ah well; another time perhaps.
I began this passage talking about clearing my desk, and I end up with a visitation from my deceased father. That's how it's been from the beginning: the strange, the grotesque, even the apocalyptic, has constantly intersected with the domestic, the familial, the inconsequential. While I sat sipping tea I dreamed I was on the Silk Road to Samarkand. While I listened to the crickets I saw Garrison Geary playing the homy mortician. While I was plucking the hairs from my ears one evening I saw Rachel looking back at me from the mirror in my bathroom, and I knew she had fallen in love.
It's perhaps not surprising that I choose the Silk Road as an example of the strange and Garrison's cold coupling as an image of the grotesque. But why do I think of Rachel and Galilee when I picture the apocalyptic?
I don't exactly know, to be honest. I have some uneasy suspicions, but I'm afraid to voice them in case doing so turns a possibility into a likelihood.
I can only say this with any certainty: that as the visions continue to come, it's Rachel I feel closest to. So close in fact that sometimes when I get up from a period of writing about her-especially if I've been recording something that happened to her in private (just the two of us, in other words)-I feel as though I am her. My body's heavy and hers is light, my skin is Italianate, hers is pale, I move like a man who has only just regained his mobility (I'm lumpen; I stumble), she moves as though she were a silk sail. And yet, I feel I am her.
Many, many pages ago-having somewhat awkwardly described the first liaison between Rachel and Galilee-I remember writing that I was faintly sickened by the pall of incestuous feeling that attended such description. I can honestly say now that all such concerns have disappeared, and for that I must thank the presence of my Rachel. She's made me shameless. Taking this journey with her, listening to her weep, listening to her rage, listening to her express her longings for Galilee, I have become braver.