When they came up from the underground at the Holland Park station, Tom said he was hungry. Terman said that the moment Isabelle got back they would go out to a neighborhood Indian restaurant that wasn’t half bad, then he remembered that Isabelle was not expected to return. He was suddenly aware of the weight of the gun in his pocket and he put his hand on it to verify its presence.
“Did it stand up on reseeing?” Tom asked.
“There are some things I can’t get enough of,” said Terman.
On one of their daily outings, Tom broached the subject of Isabelle’s absence. “It ran its course,” Terman said. And another time: “We’re on temporary vacation from each other.”
From time to time Terman called Max to ask when the man upstairs might be expected to leave. He was told that there was no available hotel space in London during August, but that they (undefined) were trying to work out a solution acceptable to all parties. “I don’t want him here any more than you do,” Max would say in his role of embattled ally subject to forces beyond his control. “We all have our crosses to bear.” Or: “The two of you might like each other if you gave it a chance.”
Unable to sleep, Terman would hear him in the early hours of the morning, typing in his room on the third floor at seemingly incredible speeds. The man left his room once or twice a day, at least when Terman was there to observe his behavior, to stretch his legs or to go to the bathroom. He seemed to take his meals in his room, though evidence for him eating anything at all was mostly circumstantial.
Terman thought he might rediscover the physical world through Tom’s eyes — it was one of his secret justifications for sightseeing which he otherwise hated — but objects continued to evade him despite their insistent presence. He urged the visible world on his son, rushing him from place to place, hoping Tom would capture what his father missed. In his father’s company, and out of it, Tom lacked the patience to obeserve. Sights went through him like a sieve, slipped away like unacknowledged feelings. They were there to witness each other’s failure to witness.
One of the reasons he wrote fiction, he confided to Tom, was to account for exerience that otherwise eluded him.
“I know what you mean,” Tom said. “It’s like having a reminder of something you lived through.” He thought of his thefts as a manifestation of the same principle, though at this point could barely recall the compulsion to steal.
“But the reminder is in code,” Terman said, “and the code is impenetrable, so that the writing never reflects on the real life, if any, that inspired it. It invents its own experience.”
“Which is to say it offers a substitute for real experience,” Tom said. “You make it sound pretty dry.”
“What the hell is real experience?” shouted Terman, arguing not with Tom but with private voices. “Fiction just exchanges one set of imagined possibilities for another.”
Henry Berger, travelling with false passport, books two places on the next available flight to New York. He notices a small man with thick-lensedglasses watching him from behind a copy of Vogue. Berger is reading a News of the World when the announcement comes that the plane is boarding. He stands up with the others, signals to the woman who is travelling with him, dawdles, lights a cigarette, hangs back at the end of the line. Why have an operative tail him? he wonders. Is it just a precaution on their part or are they aware of the full danger he represents to them? The woman standing next to him says, Why don’t I turn in these tickets for something a little more convenient?
Though Tom made no complaint, though he was dutiful in his admiration of whatever his father set before him to admire, he thought that they were doing things backwards, that this was what they ought to have done five weeks ago when he first arrived in London. It had taken all this time to get to first things, to provisional beginnings. He couldn’t seem to remember why it had taken them so long to get started.
They were faced with a final decision, a last full day, and found themselves, brochures strewn across the parlor floor, paralyzed by a surfeit of choices. Upstairs, the fat man typed away, frightening in his decisiveness. The mot juste, several at once, Terman imagined, sprang to the page at his touch.
They replayed the same conversation they’d been having for the past two weeks, though appeared to switch roles. “You make the choice,” Terman said.
“Yeah. Well, what if you don’t like the choice I make?”
“Try me,” said Terman, who already felt severely tried. Nothing they had done together, not one of the trips they had taken, had fully satisfied his expectations.”
“I’ll give you my reasoning first, okay?” Tom said, speaking quickly as if afraid the words might escape him if he hesitated even for a moment. “Obviously, there are any number of interesting places we haven’t visited. Okay? Since we can’t go to all of them, and since I have really no basis for choice, what I’d like to do instead is go to a film in the afternoon and say goodbye to Astrid in the evening, if that’s all right with you, Dad.”
What could he make of such soft treatment from his former enemy? “Why don’t we sleep on it,” Terman said, “and make a final decision in the morning? I think, insofar as we can make out what it is, we ought to do something memorable.”
Tom looked at the movie listings in Time Out while Terman considered what his life would be like when Tom was gone. He had a book open on his lap but the words he read, or seemed to read, were only occasionally the ones that belonged to the text. He stopped himself and returned to the top of the page — the book was Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis — determined to make connection with what appeared before his eyes. The words refused his attention. Although in English, they seemed to translate themselves into an unknown foreign tongue as he took them in.
It was almost midnight and the fat man was still typing in his room. He had stopped briefly at nine, then had started again a little after ten with renewed energy. “I’d like to kill him,” Terman said. It was not what he planned to say. Tom looked up, startled. Terman laughed. “I don’t mean everything I say,” he said.
“I think you do,” said Tom.
Terman had not seen it before, though he had been the principal writer under an assumed name, and so its rare appearance at the Electric Cinema (Tom had brought the movie to his attention) seemed almost providential. “I don’t know if I can sit through it,” Terman warned him, though the idea of going with his son to see something he had once collaborated on half appealed to him. The movie was called Nightowl, which was not its original title, which was the third or fourth title of the unhappy project. According to the note in Time Out, the movie had been discovered in a Worst Films Festival in San Francisco and had subsequently achieved something of a cult following. “The bizzare closure is one of the glories of the independent American Cinema.”
The print, as it turned out, was bad, the colors faded. The theater seats were uncomfortable. A neon light flickered distractingly to the right of the screen. A handful of the small stunned audience staggererd out before the film’s notable conclusion. Certain lines that he had particularly relished in the moment of creation were missing or significantly changed. Yet the event of the film moved him as if in looking at snapshots of children, he had come across a face he could not wholly account for but with which he shared recognizably some deeply buried secrets. His eyes teared mysteriously and he kept his hand at the side of his face to protect himself from embarrassment. He thought the direction self-conscious and static, though more accomplished than he had reason to expect. By focusing endlessly on the same few characters and objects, the camera forced the viewer, if he survived, to see them without preconception. The film had three false endings before the final unexpected one where the young boarder, the title figure, moves into the wife’s bed in the guise of the husband he has just killed. “Close your eyes,” he says to her in the other’s voice before entering the bedroom. (And she does.) “I want you to remember me as I was.” Her arms reach out in expectation to the approaching shadow.