There was a big band in a shell up on the boardwalk playing patriotic standards. The gulls were crying and the sea was breaking on the beach with these little plashes. Sun was shining. The sand was hot, there was a breeze. It all helped. Eventually I began to calm down. And then I started thinking about the Japanese saboteurs lying just off the coast in their little subs.
Thank god I took a pill and fell asleep on the sand before I worked myself into another state. When I woke up, the band was playing “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” I was between a couple of umbrellas. There were girls under them, or families, people, in any case, I suppose, and puffs of their conversations came to me when the wind shifted. It was getting toward evening. I could feel a little breeze on the wet cloth between my shoulders.
I looked out at the sea, out where the submarine nets were. Up and down the coast there were gun batteries and watch posts. Full-time coastal defense. If I’d been a sub commander, I would have parked beyond the nets and after dark put an insertion team in an inflatable. They could have landed right there, right where I was sitting. Piece of cake in blackout conditions. From there, easy to get to the rides on the boardwalk. The hospital was across the street, but in an operation like that, you’d be more interested in the high-visibility objective, the one with psychological impact. Blowing up hospitals is pretty despicable work, even for saboteurs. If it had been me, the roller coaster would have been the first thing I’d hit. Guaranteed success: loosen a few nuts, pry-bar the joints, pull some nails, take a hacksaw to a couple of joists. It wouldn’t take much to kill an entire Cub Scout troop or some Rotarians and their wives. You sabotage a few other rides, just to eradicate any possibility that it was a freak accident or a maintenance oversight, and suddenly up and down the West Coast there’s full-scale panic.
So that night I went back. Everything had been locked up tight, and I scaled the fence and wriggled into the area there beneath the tracks. There was a spot inside all the crosshatching, like a nest. It was dark as pitch but I could feel that the concrete was covered with nuts and bolts. I was revolted, as though I’d been feeling around under the fridge for a quarter I’d dropped and discovered a blanket of dead roaches. The flags were popping in the wind. I heard the waves. And voices, very faint at first, hushed, and the shushing sound of something being dragged over sand.
My father presses the hex nut into my palm.
The voices got closer and I began to sweat. The same cold, shivering sweat as earlier. The dragging sound of the raft was distinct—there was no question in my mind that I was hearing canvas on sand. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. I cowered there inside the roller coaster, in the dark, praying that I wouldn’t be killed, but knowing that as soon as they swept their red filters across my face I’d be shot. They came closer, and I heard shushing, one voice shushing another, and the hissing of the canvas, more whispering. And then giggling. I lifted my head and made out figures moving against the moonlit water, only about twenty feet away. They tumbled down onto the thing they’d been dragging, which I could see then was a big, flat raft, and I realized what I’d heard was nothing more than a soldier and his date looking for a place to bed down.
Look at this Finn, my father says to the television. He’s like a UFO. Do you think the skis are designed primarily as airfoils or as vehicles for achieving maximum speed on the ramp?
I don’t know, Dad.
And is there an ideal speed at which to launch, or is it simply, Go faster, fly farther?
I really don’t know, Daddy. Probably works according to a logarithmic scale. Weight times speed divided by height times speed.
Probably so, he says. I’m sure they have the drag coefficients worked out to the thousandth decimal point.
He shakes his head at the pointlessness of such precision.
Sleet ticks at the window base. The raven is standing in the middle of the blank field, as still as a painting. Suddenly it extends its wings to shiver off the precipitation, then goes back to standing sentry.
I believe that, like Lazlo Brunn, I need to shift my perception of time, to arrest my perception so that a glacier’s progression toward the sea emits a grinding screech that sets my heart racing; so that the moon is a blur zipping around a wildly oscillating earth, so that an oak grows and dies in the span of a breath. Stellar time, rock time, radioactive half-life time. I need to stride over generations, two hundred, three hundred at a time. This isn’t grief but a new way to survive.
Explain, I say. Are you part of it, Daddy?
Part of what? he says.
The complication, I say. This thing that’s between me and my real life.
My father stares at me, as I expected he would, admittedly the correct response to what would sound like insanity to him if he is, in fact, part of the complication. In that case, he would be no more conscious of it than a character in a book is conscious of the book.
Your life doesn’t feel real to you? he says after a long pause, channeling old Dr. Schiff.
Plenty real, but I have my suspicions, I say. Around the edges it can seem a little hypothetical.
What is a father’s response to the knowledge that his only child has lost her marbles? For mine, it is to rise, slowly, glacially, in fact, and shuffle over to the sofa. He sits down next to me and pulls me close to his bony flannel frame, and he grows to twice, three times his size, enveloping me in peace, and I cannot but help thinking that I am doing nothing more than transferring my tragedy to him, this lovely old neurotic catastrophe who failed at every turn to protect me from the onslaught of the world because he could not even protect himself. Charged by bulls, he threw books; beset by floodwaters, he built levees of paper. He told a joke that killed a man. He gave a test that turned out to be a suicide note. He was too distracted to save his own daughter from destruction. The catalogue of his failures is a heavy tome.
Neither you, he says, nor I, nor Vik, nor anyone, is a thought experiment.
Prove it, I say into his arm.
Impossible, he says, And that’s the staunchest proof I know. Proof by contradiction. I cannot simultaneously exist and not exist, ergo… How can I posit the possibility of my existence if I do not exist? Therefore, I exist because I don’t not exist. Except, of course, when I go to the post office. Twenty years and I’m still invisible to that woman behind the counter.
I have to go, Daddy. It’s sleeting.
Just stay here tonight.
Have to go, Daddy, I say.
Do you believe me when I tell you what happened in Poland was real? he asks.
Of course I believe you, I say.
You’ve read that story before, so you might be inclined not to believe it, he says. But it’s true.
I’ve read a version of it. In Slingshot.
The version you read was fiction. Now you know the truth. Do you believe me?
I believe you, I say.
And this business about a hypothetical life? he says.
I’m working on it. I’m righting the ship.
How’s that?
I’m rewriting The Blizzard Party, I say.
Are you? he says and sits up, his face bright.
I’m all but finished, I say.