Concert of Ghosts (23 page)

“I don't feel like speaking, Harry.” She sipped her Bloody Mary and looked out at the blue expanses. The sun burned on the window. She drew down the blind with a brisk movement. He took his hand from her fingers, a little depressed.

The navigator, in the casually friendly way of men who feel mighty in the skies, announced that the Rocky Mountains could be seen to the left of the aircraft. Heads dutifully turned. Tennant finished his brandy; he had no great desire to raise the blind and peer at any rugged mountain range, which would only remind him of the terrible space between himself and the planet's surface. He ordered another brandy, which came in a miniature bottle. He sipped it slowly; the first drink was still rushing to his head.

He looked at Alison's face, the fine eyelids in which could be seen pale veins, the short black hair, the solitary earring. He let his fingers drift across the back of her hand. Her response was sudden, and the last thing he expected—tears; they slid from her closed eyes and over her cheeks. She covered her face.

“Alison,” he said.

“I'll be all right in a second.”

Other people's tears. Tennant felt helpless even as he wondered how he could possibly comfort her. What had brought the tears on? A delayed reaction to violence? You didn't see two men killed every day of the week. It wasn't your commonplace event to smell burning flesh and hear the explosion of a grenade. Or was it some other thing from which he was excluded?

She forced a mirthless smile. “See? The storm passes. It only lasts a minute.”

He fingered the miniature of brandy, rolling it between his hands. Alison searched in her purse for a Kleenex, which she pressed against her eyes. She crumpled the tissue, leaned back in her seat, stared at the panel buttons overhead. “I get emotional sometimes. It comes out of nowhere.”

Tennant wasn't buying. Tears didn't come out of absolute zero. He finished his brandy, got up, walked toward the toilet at the rear of the plane. He glanced at the faces of the other passengers: One man had a laptop computer on which he was diligently gaping at spreadsheets. Corporate man, never idle, white-shirted. An ink stain on his sleeve spoiled the little cameo of perfection. A small boy, squirming from his mother's embrace, reached out to touch Tennant playfully. The mother looked at Tennant as if she needed to apologize for her offspring. Ordinary lives, Tennant thought, so goddamn normal. But somewhere lay a line dividing the mundane from the corrupt, except he couldn't draw it. It was the failure to recognize jeopardy that worried him.

Inside the toilet he washed his face, then looked at his reflection. Curiously, he thought he saw for the first time ever some resemblance to Rayland. It was slight, and depended on the angle of his head, but it was undeniable. An eerie moment, a correspondence between himself and his father. He wondered what other correspondences there were. Connections, membranes. He dried his face in a paper towel. If Paul Lannigan had taken his memory away, who had instructed him to do so? Who had paid him?

Who was it who'd kept tabs on Harry, who'd known he'd been in upstate New York the last nine years?

Rayland.

But did it follow that the old man must have known where Harry had been before that, during the lost years? Did it follow that some connection existed between Rayland and Lannigan?

Tennant had an image of a shabby transaction. This is my son, I want him to forget certain things, how much will it cost me? It was a squalid prospect. No, Rayland wasn't capable of any such thing. No father could harm his son so deeply. They had their sad differences, their relationship was tragically defunct, old angers had corroded it, true—but you couldn't jump from that breakdown to anything so dreadful as deliberately imposing amnesia on Tennant.
I want to remember my father as I knew him long ago. Childhood in North Carolina, the big Victorian house, endlessly humid, endlessly still summer afternoons, a hammock slung between oaks, Rayland and son lying together with books. I don't want to think about his association with Colonel Harker, his cronies in the sleaze of the arms business
.

He stepped out of the toilet. A middle-aged man in a long black raincoat with epaulettes was waiting to take his place. Tall, stiff, with a look that suggested lockjaw and a haircut that might have been inflicted by an open razor, the man brushed past him.

Are you one of them? Are you a member of the club? Or are you an angel?
How could you possibly tell anything now? If there were two sides, different parties with different goals, why didn't they wear badges so you could tell the good guys from the bad—if the distinction was that simple. Tennant had his doubts: Simplicity had no part in any of this.

He made his way back to his seat. He sat down, suddenly exhausted. Alison had her eyes shut. She opened them when she heard Tennant return. She looked at Harry a moment and smiled in a restrained way. He had a desire to draw her head against his shoulder and hold her, but she turned her face to the window against which the fierce sun lay. He thought of their lovemaking, the moment of unbearable intensity, the face of Maggie Silver, and then the fall from the dream.
I
could love this girl, this Alison Seagrove, the way I must have loved Maggie Silver once
.

In San Francisco a ghostly afternoon mist, rolling in from the Pacific, obscured the sun. Tennant remembered those mists and fogs that turned the sun to milk. He remembered how they'd filter light from the streets, and then, as whimsically as they'd come, they'd be gone. Sometimes, when the mist fudged the lower parts of buildings, San Francisco had the appearance of a city on stilts. He'd seen Golden Gate Park vanish, watched the Bay disappear, strolled through the lingering haze of the Haight, thinking how the city seemed to come and go at will, in and out of existence, a fanciful place. Now, in the taxi that passed the boxed houses of Daly City and headed toward the center of the city, Tennant felt he was traveling, not toward his private past, but into the heart of a place unknown and unknowable, a city of vapors. A dream city, half-recalled, unfinished. Had he really lived here once? Why hadn't he let this whole business lie still?

The need to know
. The driving force. But Maggie Silver would not be here. He was convinced of that. Even as the taxi headed toward Union Square, where a spectacular broadsword of sunlight perforated the mist, he felt the city was devoid of her presence.

Alison had directed the driver to Chinatown, to St. Mary's.

The taxi, whining, climbed. The driver was an old hippie with his gray hair worn in a ponytail. I might have known him once, Tennant thought. The hills of the city, impractically steep, made him wonder at the sheer nerve of men who'd chosen to build here: the ruthless dedication of construction. You tried to build something here too, Harry. Some kind of life once. Some kind of love. Devoted to a spirit, a phantom, a love from another dimension. Haunted, and not knowing how haunted he'd been.

He had a sense of strange physical imbalance, exacerbated by the unreality of San Francisco. It was as if gravity had been briefly suspended. Alison laid a hand on the back of his wrist, a sympathetic gesture. She understands what this place means to me, Tennant thought. She knows what's going on inside.

“I'm sorry,” she said quietly. “About how I behaved on the plane, it was stupid of me.…”

“Forget it.”

“Look. I care about you. But I don't know where it can go. I'm flying blind, Harry. And I don't like the sensation.”

He wished some of the old utterances still had currency.
Go with the flow. Play it as it lays
. But these, if once they'd been vibrant and useful, were trite and feeble now. Flying blind. He wondered if a time would come when they'd know exactly what direction they were taking. Look into tomorrow and what do you see, Harry? You and Alison Seagrove living a life of growing love and contentment in some quiet town in the heartland? Unstalked, unthreatened, at peace?
Get real
. He had the whiff in his nostrils of human flesh on fire: Could you whittle idly on the porch of some clapboard house and listen to a spring wind shake the oaks lining the street and forget something like that? Shove it inside the closet where all the bad memories were stashed?

“Why the hell couldn't we have met in some other way at some other time, Harry? Why couldn't we have been two different people? I get this feeling the gods are not what you'd call charitable when it comes to matters of the heart.”

“Charitable? They're a callous crew,” he remarked.

“I don't want callous. I want something good. I want to think there's some justice at the end of it all. I want to think it balances out somehow. But I don't have a sense of the future when it comes to you and me.” She sounded sad. Her eyes were dull with unhappiness. “You don't build relationships in the dark. You need to be able to hope for something. Anything. Any small thing you can just hold on to. I don't know what. Right now I feel this god-awful uncertainty. I don't know who you are or what the hell we're really doing together. What can we even
hope
for, Harry?”

“You said you care. So do I. I figure that's a beginning.”
And more than I would ever have expected
.

She sighed and sat back. “A beginning to what? Maybe there's nothing for us at the end of all this anyway. Maybe you and me are coming in through different doorways, Harry.”

“I don't want to think that way.”

“We're being positive, are we? We're being optimistic?”

“We're trying.” He thought: She doesn't even sound like herself. It was as if the grit had gone out of her. Let's have justice and hope. Some of that good stuff. Give us a rainbow. He wasn't accustomed to the idea of optimism because he'd never needed to think about it one way or another before. You didn't ponder such things as aspirations when your life was a mindless day-to-day affair and the heaviest matters you entertained had to do with whether your crop would flourish or fail. You had so few needs. Then somebody blows into your world and all kinds of sediments are stirred and suddenly nothing is ever the same. The map you thought flat was abruptly contoured. The landscape you considered featureless was filled with shadow.

He stared at buildings, swirls of mist, surreal outbursts of sunshine. From nowhere emerged a white-faced mime in top hat and tails pretending he was locked inside a glass box. His flattened palms pushed against imaginary barriers. On his face was an expression of exaggerated terror. Tennant watched him as the taxicab passed.

Nob Hill now, and Huntington Square, and the Fairmont, and the Mark Hopkins where so long ago he'd had that outrageous altercation with Rayland. Peanuts and booze thrown and his father's sudden flare of violence. He could still feel the sting of Rayland's hand on his cheek. In the square, a group of men and women went through the strange slow motions of
t'ai chi
, balancing one-legged, stretching, reaching for invisible objects. Tennant had an urge to tell the driver to stop, he wanted to get out, didn't need to go any farther because the city was impenetrable, he'd find nothing of himself here, the exercise was pointless. He restrained himself. There was a rough, dry sensation at the back of his throat.

When the taxi stopped on the edge of Chinatown, Alison paid the driver, who said,
Have a good one
. She and Tennant stepped out of the cab on the corner of Grant and California. The mist was unexpectedly cold even as it thinned. Tennant turned up the collar of his coat and shivered.

Across the way was St. Mary's Church. Poised on the rim of Chinatown, it had an incongruous look, a redbrick monolith besieged by Oriental forces, an outpost of Catholicism surrounded by Chinese souvenir shops and restaurants and Cantonese signs. The entrance to Chinatown. From somewhere came the sound of a guitar being strummed. A major, a minor, a seventh. Tennant thought of his broken guitar in the house in upstate New York. He couldn't remember ever having played the damn thing. It belonged in somebody else's life.

Opposite St. Mary's Alison set her overnight bag on the sidewalk and took Obe's photograph from her purse. “I figure this is the precise spot where the picture was taken. The background's the same.” She looked over at the church. A cable car sailed past, metal on metal, ferrying giddy tourists in the direction of Fisherman's Wharf.

Tennant, beset by an odd awareness that time had been charged with static electricity, gazed at the edifice of the church. An adjoining bookshop had a window filled with ecclesiastical volumes. Along the sidewalk a crazy man did a quick two-step, humming a tune as he went past. He glared at Tennant and Alison as if he considered them trespassers; then he danced on, still humming furiously.

“I don't remember,” Tennant said in a flat way. He was disappointed in his failure. He'd somehow foolishly imagined that the past would come back like cavalry charging. “Nothing. Sweet fuck all.”

“Five kids stood here. Obe took pictures. You saw something on the other side of this street. You pointed. Everyone looked. What did you see, Harry?”

The church yielded nothing.

“What did you see?” she asked again.

He stared hard at St. Mary's. Something happened over there. Something to do with the church. Long ago. He saw a woman emerge from the bookshop clutching a package. He strained for recollection, for clarity. It doesn't even need to be
clear
, does it? A spark would be enough. He turned his face away. Whatever had happened outside St. Mary's on a particular day more than twenty years ago was as closed as a miser's fist.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

Alison picked up her bag. “It was worth a try,” she said. “I hoped your memory might be jogged.”

“Wait. Gimme a minute.” He walked up and down, facing the church from different angles, as if he were himself a photographer assessing a shot—but it was a curious kind of photograph that could only be developed in the darkroom of his mind. Back down the years, Harry. Down anonymous little streets and lanes, past windowless houses, bolted doors, chain link fences. When the past faced you and you still couldn't remember it, you felt something more than despair—a heightened desperation, a fiery panic, because you were reduced to nothing. He wished he could set himself free, kick over the traces. He longed to be complete, but he would have settled for something less ambitious right then. A simple recollection; it wasn't much to want.