The Death of All Things Seen (3 page)

No, Helen Price was not a religious woman, yet something was being asked of her, some grave and purposeful decision. She reached for her pills beside the subpoena. In opening the bottle, she tipped her head back, feeling the reflexive gag of self-preservation. She managed swallowing them, their effect almost immediate in the sudden euphoria of knowing how it would now end.

In the long corridor of her funneling exit, in the falling snow, she headed south on Columbia. Driving parallel to a desolate Grant Park, she was startled by the wail of a police siren, a sound hard to pinpoint against the tumbling end-over-end effect of the pills.

In her rearview mirror, she caught sight of something she could no longer face and, closing her eyes, felt the disembodied sponginess of the accelerator pedal beneath her foot. Beyond the broad six-lane stretch of Lake Shore Drive, she imagined the cradling grey of Lake Michigan like a vast subconscious stirring.

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

—DANTE ALIGHIERI

N
OBODY
JUMPED
TO
their death in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 as they had in the Crash of 1929, and though the losses were equal, there was no run on banks or the chaotic dissolution of so many lives.

The crisis was more a
correction
, the lightweights on the morning shows, educating the ignorant about the volatility of the bond, securities and derivatives markets, while down on Times Square, outside the glass enclosure of the
TODAY
show, the faithful held up signs that said, ‘We Luv U Al!’ or ‘We Luv the Big Apple!’

In their so doing, it confirmed an undeniable truth for Norman Price: that whatever the outcome of the crisis, life would go on. There would be no revolution.

In truth, for anybody who gave a shit, it was difficult deciding
what had happened
and
who was at fault
. Sometimes too much freedom, too much democracy, too much choice, too much talk could – and did – achieve nothing.

For Norman Price, in the midst of his own crisis, the financial crisis was a distraction signifying there were no longer any essential truths, no longer a beginning, middle, or end to events; a realization that eclipsed, among other things, the passing of his parents. It spared him mourning them, or otherwise trying to understand the events surrounding their deaths. Their motivations were as convoluted as any accounts related to the financial crisis.

Initial eyewitness accounts suggested that Helen Price, in hearing a siren, had hit the accelerator instead of the brake. It was a reasonable explanation. Helen Price was old and ill. She had been on her way to a doctor’s appointment. There were, however, other circumstances that told a different story. The officer driving the unmarked police car had been Walter Price. He had witnessed the incident, and yet he had neither assisted at the scene, nor called 911. He had simply driven away.

There was much made by the police of
what was
known
and
when it was known
, given how in the early hours of the morning, Walter Price had been granted unrestricted access to a comatose Helen Price at Cook County Hospital, where he had ended her life before taking his own with a single bullet to the head.

Allegations of racketeering, extortion and money laundering surfaced. Just days before, Helen Price had been served a subpoena in a reconvened grand jury stemming from an investigation into systemic extortion by the South Side police. It was an old story of city corruption, the twists in the story, Walter and Helen’s age, and the fact that Helen had been suffocated. It signaled how brutally unforgiving the system had been, and so, too, underscored the culpability of the police who had allowed Walter unsupervised access to Helen.

Norman stood apart from it now. Walter and Helen’s respective wills served as eventual directives. He hadn’t participated in their funerals. Helen was cremated. Walter detailed a similar wish. Norman had uncovered it in a grim correspondence of legal documents that eventually found their way into his life. He inherited his parents’ collective possessions, the house, and associated bonds and stocks.

*

Norman looked up. Beyond his window, snow fell. It was not yet seven in the morning. He had been writing for almost two hours, or trying to. He lived for this feeling of accomplishment, sifting through the silt of an awakening subconscious, unlocking life in a word or line. He believed mystery and understanding lay at liminal thresholds of awareness in the way ascetics prayed and believed there could be communion with a greater power.

What mattered now was that he was at his desk again.

In the interim since his parents’ passing, life had changed. Not least his jettisoning of his philandering partner, Kenneth, who had been carrying on a long-term relationship with an investment financier, Daniel Einhorn, whom Norman had introduced to Kenneth during discussions concerning Einhorn potentially financing an off-Broadway run of one of Norman’s plays that was eventually never financed. There had been, in the not-too-distant past, heady days of a potential breakthrough and rising fortunes, when the climate of investment largesse had funneled down into the Arts with gallery openings and a burgeoning interest in theater. That was over now.

Much had changed. If the decision to dump Kenneth dovetailed with his parents’ death, which it had, it was coincidence, or so he believed. You moved through stages of existence. What you endured at one point, what sustained you, suddenly couldn’t. It was how he might have described his father’s life, his mother’s, his, too, and the life of the city.

*

Today, Norman was aware of a Chinese language CD playing in an indecipherable babble in his daughter, Grace’s room. He had adopted her three years previous from China, claiming her against the eventualities, that whatever happened in his life, she might be there to establish a normalcy and continuance in his own life. He had retained custody of her after the breakup with Kenneth.

He felt that continuance, but so, too, the burden of her influence in hearing the Chinese CD. Yes, he could have tried to learn Chinese, but he had decided against it. The linguistic distance ensured his influence would be as unobtrusive as possible. What Grace brought of herself would remain intact. Principled ideas of autonomy, justice, and sovereign independence were important to Norman Price.

Norman stared at the sliver of a hallway mirror, Grace, reflected in the image of another mirror, lost in a sort of repeating Escher effect. She was earnestly arranging her Barbies in a bleak tribunal outside a Victorian dollhouse guarded by a porcelain pair of salt-and-pepper shaker Scotty dogs. If Norman had one pressing regret, it was how Grace had changed since the adoption. He consciously connected a coldness settling over her to a latent survival instinct that she must have perfected in response to the way institutions, such as the one she had been rescued from, functioned, on the absolute uniformity and anonymity of those it housed.

Or perhaps he was overthinking it. Maybe it was his sense of guilt, his aloneness and disconnectedness from life when he was writing. Or maybe all Chinese were like this, the billion faces so absolutely the same, or apparently so from Norman’s perspective, if he could submit to such an idea without racist intent – it was hard deciding.

*

In truth, losing Kenneth was a burden lifted, a feeling that eclipsed most everything else going on around him, a self-imposed austerity measure like how it felt to cut up your credit cards, as attested to by the honest folk who talked on the conservative radio stations about assumed personal responsibility as a quasi-religious atonement for wrongful purchases, and how there was nothing wrong with America or capitalism. It was the people who needed to atone and make amends.

There was a new beginning. He felt it everywhere, in the sweep of change, in the simple pronouncement of ‘Yes we can!’

As evidence, he had ventured out into the cold dark of a Chicago night in early November, holding Grace’s hand as the throng pressed down on Grant Park, to experience the rousing sense of history being made, John McCain, distinguished and decorated former prisoner-of-war, unable to overcome the rainbow coalition of minorities unsettled by the lies which had led to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the collapse of the economy.

Norman consigned his parents’ deaths with McCain’s defeat, with the passing of an era, with a generation that had served and died for the American cause. It was not that Norman didn’t care, or that the nation wasn’t thankful or respectful. It was just that certain types, certain histories, mattered less in the emerging narrative. In defeat, McCain, like Norman’s parents in dying, quietly surrendered the past to the present.

*

Norman saved his file for the day. At times it was enough for a writer to show up. Turning, he watched in the hallway mirror his live-in nanny’s blue-grey Weimaraner, Randolph, stir and go toward the bathroom. This was part of what he was calling
The New Existence
. Norman listened to the faint lapping sound of the dog’s tongue drinking from the toilet bowl.

Joanne Hoffmann, Grace’s nanny and Randolph’s owner, was also up and performing a series of contorted Yoga holds in his living room, her flannel pajama bottoms riding low on the spread of her pelvis. Beside her was a tent-like structure – sheets draped over a table in the living room – a conceit that still persisted from when Joanne had first moved in. In observing it, there was the resurrection of a routine, a filling in of life in the vacuum of what had come before. He was not fully reconciled with what it all meant, but it was part of
The New Existence
.

Norman had hired Joanne on New Year’s Day, Joanne, his neighbor, fallen on hard times. Her long-term partner had dumped her. Norman had learned the disconsolate details on New Year’s Eve in the apartment hallway as Joanne was coming out to walk her dog.

She’d mentioned her separation with an oblique apology related to the fights that had raged in the final weeks before her break-up. Fights Norman ‘must undoubtedly have overheard’. He hadn’t, but he had felt obliged to pretend he had, to respect the implosion of what he learned had been a long-term relationship.

He learned it all in one long sentence, how management had been disinclined to extend her lease, her credit shot. She wasn’t working. She confided she was considering returning home for good, but there was a family complication. She stopped abruptly. She had a dresser and an antique table, family heirlooms, on Craigslist, priced to sell. She asked if Norman might be interested. She could show him after Randolph was let out.

At midnight they rang in the New Year together, Joanne, in the minutes before, removing cellophane from a tray of cheeses, crackers and dips Norman had bought in the eleventh hour of the dying year. He dusted off two champagne flutes, opened a bottle of champagne, so it was done just in time, the clink of glasses after the ball dropped at Times Square, each counting down the seconds, each standing at a distance, watching the television, whereafter, Joanne produced a joint from the turned-up cuff of her cardigan. She grew her weed on a windowsill in a makeshift window box greenhouse.

Back in the living room, Norman talked about Grace’s adoption, the trip to China, ending with the eventual undoing of his relationship with Kenneth and Grace’s delay in speaking. Joanne, in turn, talked about her ex-partner. They toasted with an understanding of their own shortfalls and an emphasis on their partner’s failings. It was good to talk.

It helped that Norman had tangentially known Peter Coffey, a pedantic, long-standing post-doc, who, as Joanne explained, after a dissolute eternity as adjunct faculty, had finally gained a tenure track position at a small community college in Oklahoma. At the time of his departure, he was already dating a former student. He took the girlfriend with him, not her. Joanne described Coffey as a second-rate poet, and, truth be told, a poet with a small penis, but then wasn’t that what was behind most bad poetry?

Under the influence of liberally poured wine and pot, Norman learned that Joanne could become truculent. She had a way of scrunching her nose when she got mad, absentmindedly rimming her wine glass in a circular motion, her eyes glossing with a deepening hurt.

*

Norman turned to his computer again. He pulled up the website for the realty agency he had contracted to offload his parents’ house. He had not gone out to the house. He simply wanted it gone. He stared at the low-res feed of his childhood home on the realty’s Virtual Walk-Thru. A grainy fisheye sweep of a wavering feed stalled in the hallway. To go any further required an email address. It said so in a pop-up window. Then another pop-up offered financing options – three- and five-year arms, balloons, variable and fixed rates, a flashing banner indicating
Bad Credit Isn’t a Problem
, a legacy banner, pre-financial meltdown. There were, of course, no such loans anymore.

Another flashing pop-up offered a trial membership in FreeCreditScore.com, the pop-ups reminiscent of garish billboard signs he had seen on a trip taken in his early adolescence with his parents along Route 66. At the time, the roadside motels were already diminished in the way Hitchcock had prophetically anticipated, so that, much later, Norman, in looking back on it, would understand that
Psycho
’s deceptive genius was not the shock of Janet Leigh’s shower scene murder, but something further reaching, more innominate – the death of the American love affair with the car and the open road, and, with it, a certain aimless, transient freedom that had allowed snake oil salesmen to pitch their wares town-to-town in the shadowy in-between of promise and despair.

There were, among the greats, many ways to tell a story. Truth had to be played like a good poker hand, concealed until the end, though what he feared most was that freedom and understanding had been eclipsed, so there was only sensationalism and no substance anymore. Maybe that was just the lament of the pedantic, the contrarian, the literalist, the fate of the Chicken Littles of the world.