He sat at the desk in the workroom now, cleaning the typewriter. He blew on the keys, using a damp rag to lift dust and hair from the felt pad. He opened the drawer to his left, thinking of the next major item on his list, a plan to reorganize reader mail. The drawer held a couple of old wristwatches and some stamps, rubber bands, erasers and foreign coins.
Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn't seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of things or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance.
Scott stood and looked at the wall charts, the blueprints of Bill's long book. In over eight years here, he'd never had so close a look. Large foxed sheets filled with mystical graffiti. Even the tape that fixed the paper to the wall was sun-stained and coming loose. These were interesting things to study, all the arrows and scribbles and pictographs, the lines that connected dissimilar elements. Something primitive and brave-natured here. At least that's how it looked to Scott, examining each sheet. Themes and characters attempting to draw together, linked in squiggles and dash trails, an obsessive need to meet and maintain. Bill's long-suffering book. And Bill's own scratchy voice in one of his clear-souled semidrunks of some years ago, saying, "Stones have no point if they don't absorb our terror."
Charles Everson was not returning calls. Not that he knew where Bill was and not that he would tell Scott even if he knew. No one knew. This was the essence of Bill's disappearance as Scott understood it. Scott understood it as a kind of simulated death.
He sat at the desk again, putting his face to the keys and blowing hard.
Bill had his picture taken not because he wanted to come out of hiding but because he wanted to hide more deeply, he wanted to revise the terms of his seclusion, he needed the crisis of exposure to give him a powerful reason to intensify his concealment. Years ago there were stories that Bill was dead, Bill was in Manitoba, Bill was living under another name, Bill would never write another word. These were the world's oldest stories and they were not about Bill so much as people's need to make mysteries and legends. Now Bill was devising his own cycle of death and resurgence. It made Scott think of great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns. Mao Zedong of course. Mao was pronounced dead many times in the press-dead or senile or too sick to run a revolution. Scott had recently come across a photograph of Mao taken in the course of his famous nine-mile swim at the age of seventy-two, following a long disappearance. Mao's old pelt head sticking out of the Yangtze, godlike and comic.
He opened the drawer to his right and found some more foreign coins, some binder clips and lapsed driver's licenses. He knew where Karen was, blank-faced in Manhattan, all receptors working. The next major item was reader mail, how to take it out of chronological order and structure it geographically, country by country, state by state.
He put his face to the keys and blew.
He raised the front end of the typewriter and rubbed the damp cloth over the pad, lifting dust and hair.
Mao used photographs to announce his return and demonstrate his vitality, to reinspire the revolution. Bill's picture was a death notice. His image hadn't become public yet and he was already gone. This was the crucial turn he needed in order to disappear completely, even from those he'd loved and trusted all these years. He would return in his own way, living somewhere else, more remotely, in one or another kind of disguise. Scott thought the photograph might make him look older. Not older in the picture but older as himself, after the fact of the picture. The picture would be a means of transformation. It would show him how he looked to the world and give him a fixed point from which to depart. Pictures with our likeness make us choose. We travel into or away from our photographs.
He opened the middle drawer and found a narrow black brush, some stamps, some rubber bands and old lead pennies and a bottle of typewriter correction fluid.
Bill would make a return to the book. This was the essence of Bill's return. He would work on the novel with fresh energy, cut it back, gut it, strip it six ways to Sunday. He's a new man now. He has the power of a reconstructed secret. Scott imagined him hunched over a desk, working the old spare territories of the word.
He lifted the typewriter cover and cleaned the hammers with the black brush.
He put his face to the keys and blew.
Karen's life had no center with Bill on the lam. She was all drift and spin. Scott missed her in more ways than he could name. He was left with the memorized body, the ageless shape and cadence and the way she arched and twisted, dull-eyed in the near terror of this approaching thing, then all the noise descending on their last held stroke. It was broken down to match-light in his brain. He half hated her and badly wanted her back. She was the one love, the routine astonishment, someone you could dream of as your sister and then wake to find next to you in bed, without shame or contradiction. Every time she heard a creak in the floor she thought it was an armed attack. Always on nameless alert. She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. We are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said. Pleasure in lists. The old black keys were smudged by years of anxious pawing. He used the damp cloth, rubbing one key at a time. There was happiness in these little fixit missions, the dignity of keeping on.
Everson was tight-lipped in his tower redoubt. Mao aswim in his river. The night before on TV Scott had seen some footage shot by a tourist in rural China and it showed strange things, it showed a Chinese Christian cult in a meeting by a river and they were in the midst of a collective ascension with young men and women walking into the river arms aloft, faltering, swirling, many swept downstream. The footage was shaky and had a quality of delirium, an abnormal subjectivity, the kind of offhand amateur fleetness that was hard to trust, but they used slow motion and stop-action and they circled floating heads and then they ran it all from the start, people dressed mainly in white marching into the river in sets of two and three, arms still flying as the heads disappeared. And Karen not here to see it. A bonanza for our gal Karen. And Karen drifting and spinning. He looked at the wall charts. He could arrange the reader mail geographically or maybe book by book, although there was a great deal of mail that referred to both books or neither book, the philosophical mail, the stories of writerly desire, the verities and nullities. Bill was hiding from his photograph. He'd engineered the whole damn thing the same damn way he developed impressionistic ailments that he could then control with medication.
He put his face to the keys and blew.
He opened the lower righthand drawer, the deep compartment designed for files, and he saw some old passports, old bank books, he saw some postcards from daughter Liz.
Bill's return would not be complete without Scott, of course. When the time was right Bill would contact him. A phone call, a few terse instructions. Scott would deal with the house and furnishings, all the legalities of selling and closing, and he would spend many days packing manuscripts and books and shipping them to Bill and would then work out the final quiet arrangements and do the last little things and drive off in the long night to join Bill and make their new beginning.
There was a packet of letters from Bill's sister. He knew Bill had grown up with an older sister in various places in the Midwest and the Great Plains but the most recent of the letters was eleven years old, so maybe she was dead. He found Bill's army discharge papers and some insurance policies and a document labeled Notification of Birth Registration. This piece of paper advised that there was a record of birth preserved in the state office for the registration of vital statistics, Des Moines, Iowa. Near the bottom of the page was a seal marked Department of Commerce. The date on the document corresponded to Bill's date of birth, which Scott had seen many times on records and forms, and the name of the child was Willard Skansey Jr.