Hi, I said. I was aware that I might have looked—what, predisposed? Intent, in any case, a seeker arrived from a great distance, having traveled across the wastes, through wind and weather, beset by bandits, transformed by my journey into the foreigner now beseeching her from the doorstep, and it made me self-conscious, so I affected an attitude of perfect me-ness: casual, blithe, amicable.
Good god, what’s wrong? she said, and pulled me inside. What happened, dear? Is your father all right?
Oh yes, I said. I assume he is.
Something downstairs? she said. Downstairs being her name for the business, because we had to call it, well, something.
No, no, everything’s fine.
Is it?
Turk, I said, when your father was getting on, near the end, did he talk to you about his work?
Oh, here and there.
Anything about the device he was working on?
I see. I’ve been down this road, Turk said. And no, not that I recall. I tried to piece it together, you know, but only after he’d gone up to Pickering, after the tape decks were stolen—that put a real scare into me.
He never said anything to you about what they were supposed to do?
No, Turk said.
I have something for you, I said.
Oh? How exciting, Turk said sotto voce, folding her hands together as if she were a little old lady and not the immortal being that had created my world, as if she didn’t already know exactly what I had for her.
I reached into my bag and handed the slim boxes, white with foxing, to Turk.
These are recordings of your father, I said. From Pickering.
Artifacts from the deep? Turk asked. You went to the institute to get them?
Asher Schiff, I said.
Really? she said. Isn’t that something. How did you track him down?
It wasn’t hard, I said. He used to treat my father.
So he did. I’d forgotten that. He’s in good health, is he?
Seemed so, I said.
He was good with Father, Turk said. He was always helpful when I’d go up to visit. It’s funny—years later I started to see him around, at Zabar’s, out on Broadway. Finally I stopped him one day and reintroduced myself. This was ten years after we’d last spoken, and he remembered my father as if it had only been the day before. Turns out his office was just around the corner. I suspect we had some of the same clients. I saw him out once with his family. You fear for a psychologist’s family a little bit, don’t you?
Mhmm, I said.
You didn’t go to him looking for these? she said, holding up the boxes.
No, I said. Just doing some personal excavation.
Did he tell you where the treasure’s buried?
Not much help there.
Sometimes the wrong answer’s more useful than the right one, Turk says.
Maybe.
So what’s your plan?
What do you mean?
Sweetheart. You’ve been rattling around like a ghost since the funeral, doing god knows what. You’re not sleeping, are you?
I shrugged.
All this detective work, Turk said. What exactly are you looking for? Something that can’t be explained. What did you go up there to see Schiff for? Something about your father?
No, I said.
What, then?
Something about my past. The usual.
And you wound up with my past instead. What a shame.
Past, present, and future, I thought. I could have told her what I’d found on the tapes, but I didn’t. I didn’t trust her. Good Turk, who’d been like a mother to me. I could have asked her the central question that had been eating away at me like an acid since I’d found her father’s question on the tapes, but she was right: I was trying to prove an unprovable. All the research, digging through my past, my father’s past, Albert’s past, all of it was a search for clues that might tell me what Turk, if I could trust her, could have told me in a single word, yes or no. The question: Wasn’t everything that had happened to me since that night in 1978 a complication?
I knew, though, that if the answer was yes, Turk wouldn’t tell me. If she’d created the complication and had adhered to its rules for this long, surely she wouldn’t break them simply because I asked. Equally possible: She’d been part of it for so long that she would no longer recognize that she was part of it. This had been her life, too, this elaborate fabrication.
Does it sound far-fetched? Is it really any more absurd than what my father did, creating an analogue version of Hazel Saltwater, one that turned me into the unrecognizable, the impostor, the photocopy?
You need a little R and R, Turk said. Why don’t we watch a movie?
I’m okay, I said. I’m going up to see Dad.
Thank god, Turk said.
Mm? I said.
That’s the right thing to do. All this business—you’ve been barking up the wrong tree, dear. Go see your father if you want to know about the past.
27.
In Cornwall there is snow on the ground. My father’s house, perched on a hill overlooking the Hudson, battered by the weather, appears to have recoiled slightly from the water, turned its face away from the source of all its trouble. Built as a small hotel during the spa boom in the late nineteenth century, it is solid, and it stays warm inside. From my father’s discursions on timber joists and horsehair plaster, I gather that the ancient asbestos insulation is holding up fine. He moved into the old ruin when Vik and I got married, having sold us the apartment at the Apelles for a dollar.
Why did I expect to find the house empty? He is home, alive and well, for once not reading a book but watching, of all things, ski jumping.
He turns slowly to look at me, as though I’ve caught him in a state of meditation. His eyes long ago faded to a milky blue, the green and brown radials of his irises submerged in Caribbean waters. Struggle though it is through those presbyopic lenses, he still consumes books at a frightening pace. He doesn’t write anymore, and in most respects he has mellowed, but when he is reading, he budges for neither love nor money. Won’t answer the phone or the door, and on those occasions when I haven’t been able to reach him for days on end, I’ve raced up the Palisades Parkway fearing the worst, let myself in expecting to find him facedown on the hall rug, only to find him absorbed in, say, some nine-hundred-page treatise on the formation of the Teutonic character, looking at me, as he is now, as if I’d roused him from an epic sleepwalk. Hello, dear heart, he’ll say to the crazed woman standing in his living room. I understand how recollection is a riptide that can carry you far from shore, yet it does nothing to console me when he, accompanied by only his faulty cardiovascular system, decides to take a temporal vacation, close as he is to crossing that final threshold.
He holds out his hand to me.
He offers me some tea in the spare mug he has at hand not because he’s prescient but because he always has a spare mug, just in case. I settle into the sofa, which is generously piled with quilts, as naps are an essential part of his day. He rocks gently in his leather armchair. With the mug of tea warming my hands, mint steaming up, sock feet tucked in lumps beneath my thighs, I feel as though I’ve been packed in cotton batting, and it’s harder to feel as though I’m a fading image, someone about to crop myself out of the photograph.
If this visit is part of the complication, if it is a detail courtesy of Turk’s grand plan for me, it is a generous gift.
My father points at the TV and says, I’ve never paid much attention to this sport. What an oversight! Once, not long after I moved up here, Charles Quail was going to take me to see some jumping up around Amenia, but when we got there, the ramp had turned to slush. I remember the structure had a certain utilitarian elegance—you can imagine, like the underside of a long pier—but nothing to recommend that it was capable of facilitating anything so sublime as this, he said, waving at the TV. Charles would go on endlessly about the sport, you know, with great passion, but to be confronted by that brown, dripping, wooden thing about as elegant as a shipwreck… We ate at a Wendy’s and drove home. If only I could have seen them flying, I would have been a lifelong fan. How right he was. If anything, he undersold the whole enterprise. Imagine! All these years I could have been an enthusiast, if not for one too-warm day in February.