On the stunted commercial street in town there were three places still open for business, one of them the diner, and I ate there once and stuck my head in the door two or three times, scanning the booths. The sidewalk was old pocked bluestone. In the convenience store I bought a fudge bar and talked to the woman behind the counter about her son’s wife’s kidney infection.
At the library I devoured about a hundred pages a sitting, small cramped type. When I left the building the book remained on the table, open to the page where I’d stopped reading. I returned the next day and the book was still there, open to the same page.
Why did this seem magical? Why did I sometimes lie in bed, moments from sleep, and think of the book in the empty room, open to the page where I’d stopped reading?
On one of those midnights, just before classes resumed, I got out of bed and went down the hall to the sun parlor. The area was enclosed by a slanted canopy of partitioned glass and I unlatched a panel and swung it open. My pajamas seemed to evaporate. I felt the cold in my pores, my teeth. I thought my teeth were ringing. I stood and looked, I was always looking. I felt childlike now, responding to a dare. How long could I take it? I peered into the northern sky, the living sky, my breath turning to little bursts of smoke as if I were separating from my body. I’d come to love the cold but this was idiotic and I closed the panel and went back to my room. I paced awhile, swinging my arms across my chest, trying to roil the blood, warm the body, and twenty minutes after I was back in bed, wide awake, the idea came to mind. It came from nowhere, from the night, fully formed, extending in several directions, and when I opened my eyes in the morning it was all around me, filling the room.
Those afternoons the light died quickly and we talked nearly nonstop, race-walking into the wind. Every topic had spectral connections, Todd’s congenital liver condition shading into my ambition to run a marathon, this leading to that, the theory of prime numbers to the living sight of rural mailboxes set along a lost road, eleven standing units, rusted over and near collapse, a prime number, Todd announced, using his cell phone to take a picture.
One day we approached the street where the hooded man lived. This was when I told Todd about the idea I’d had, the revelation in the icy night. I knew who the man was, I said. Everything fit, every element, the man’s origins, his family ties, his presence in this town.
He said, “Okay.”
“First, he’s a Russian.”
“A Russian.”
“He’s here because his son is here.”
“He doesn’t have the bearing of a Russian.”
“The bearing? What’s the bearing? His name could easily be Pavel.”
“No, it couldn’t.”
“Great name possibilities. Pavel, Mikhail, Aleksei. Viktor with a k. His late wife was Tatiana.”
We stopped and looked down the street toward the gray frame house designated as the place where the man lived.
“Listen to me,” I said. “His son lives in this town because he teaches at the college. His name is Ilgauskas.”
I waited for him to be stunned.
“Ilgauskas is the son of the man in the hooded coat,” I said. “Our Ilgauskas. They’re Russian, father and son.”
I pointed at him and waited for him to point back.
He said, “Ilgauskas is too old to be the man’s son.”
“He’s not even fifty. The man is in his seventies, easy. Mid-seventies, most likely. It fits, it works.”
“Is Ilgauskas a Russian name?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Somewhere else, somewhere nearby, but not necessarily Russian,” he said.
We stood there looking toward the house. I should have anticipated this kind of resistance but the idea had been so striking that it overwhelmed my cautious instincts.
“There’s something you don’t know about Ilgauskas.”
He said, “Okay.”
“He reads Dostoevsky day and night.”
I knew that he would not ask how I’d come upon this detail. It was a fascinating detail and it was mine, not his, which meant that he would let it pass without comment. But the silence was a brief one.
“Does he have to be Russian to read Dostoevsky?”
“That’s not the point. The point is that it all fits together. It’s a formulation, it’s artful, it’s structured.”
“He’s American, Ilgauskas, same as we are.”
“A Russian is always Russian. He even speaks with a slight accent.”
“I don’t hear an accent.”
“You have to listen. It’s there,” I said.
I didn’t know whether it was there or not. The Norway maple didn’t have to be Norway. We worked spontaneous variations on the source material of our surroundings.
“You say the man lives in that house. I accept this,” I said. “I say he lives there with his son and his son’s wife. Her name is Irina.”
“And the son. Ilgauskas, so called. His first name?”
“We don’t need a first name. He’s Ilgauskas. That’s all we need,” I said.
His hair was mussed, suit jacket dusty and stained, ready to come apart at the shoulder seams. He leaned into the table, square-jawed, sleepy-looking.
“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”
We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.
“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.”
Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?
“The only laws that matter are laws of thought.”
His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.
“The rest is devil worship,” he said.
We went walking but did not see the man. The wreaths were mostly gone from the front doors and the occasional bundled figure scraped snow off a car’s windshield. Over time we began to understand that these walks were not casual off-campus rambles. We were not looking at trees or boxcars, as we normally did, naming, counting, categorizing. This was different. There was a measure to the man in the hooded coat, old stooped body, face framed in monkish cloth, a history, a faded drama. We wanted to see him one more time.
We agreed on this, Todd and I, and collaborated, in the meantime, on describing his day.
He drinks coffee black, from a small cup, and spoons cereal out of a child’s bowl. His head practically rests in the bowl when he bends to eat. He never looks at a newspaper. He goes back to his room after breakfast, where he sits and thinks. His daughter-in-law comes in and makes the bed, Irina, although Todd did not concede the binding nature of the name.
Some days we had to wrap scarves around our faces and speak in muffled voices, only our eyes exposed to the street and the weather.
There are two schoolchildren and one smaller girl, Irina’s sister’s child, here for reasons not yet determined, and the old man often passes the morning fitfully watching TV cartoons with the child, though not seated beside her. He occupies an armchair well away from the TV set, dozing now and then. Mouth open, we said. Head tilted and mouth hanging open.
We weren’t sure why we were doing this. But we tried to be scrupulous, adding new elements every day, making adjustments and refinements, and all the while scanning the streets, trying to induce an appearance through joint force of will.