The Great Perhaps (8 page)

When, unbelievably, the elevator has finished descending and the heavy doors open on the ground floor, Henry lets out a small sigh of joy. He wheels himself as fast as he can past the waiting families, the off-duty nurses standing beside the coffee urn quietly chatting, the enormous security guard busy reading a newspaper, then all the way across the lobby, swinging wide through the front doors, rolling outside onto the sidewalk beside the busy street.
Traffic! What is this?
the sound of traffic having been something Henry had forgotten to even begin to forget. A taxicab pulls up and the bearded driver helps Henry into the backseat, folding up the wheelchair, forcing it into the taxi’s trunk. Henry can hear the buzz and static of the cabbie’s CB, the odd snatches of voices like the thoughts and sounds of memories he has yet to dismiss, so that when the cabbie asks, “Where to, pops?” when he turns around from behind the steering wheel and glances at his passenger in the rearview mirror, Henry gives the response he has already planned, speaking six of the eleven words he intends to use today, his voice hesitant, gravelly, predictably weak, as unsure as it was when he was a boy, when his words first began to fail him. “O’Hare. I’m going on a trip.”

A
CLOUD HAS APPEARED WHERE IT SHOULD NOT BE.
There it floats, quite mysteriously, as if having fallen from the open vastness of a blue and white sky, drifting in the middle of a marshy field, its gray shape unchanging, hovering only a meter or two above the muddy earth. The cloud has begun to cause some panic among the superstitious villagers whose sugarcane and potato farms lie just outside of Meerut, and so Lieutenant George Kasper has been dispatched to see what there is to see.

George Kasper—unwitting descendant of the London Kaspers, with family relations in England beginning in the fifth century, and with other crooked branches of the same family tree reaching from England to France back to Germany—would rather be drawing his maps. Instead, today, on this morning in the year of 1857, in the unvanquished colony of British India, the young lieutenant stands glaring at the shape of a single gray cloud, unmoving, uncelestial, the soft, wet-smelling sugarcane extending around him in all directions, distinctly marking how alone in this moment he truly is. Ishari, his sepoy scout, forever loyal, only a boy really, age twelve or thirteen, a Hindu by birth but more and more British each day, stands some hundred meters back along the dry road. He watches each of the lieutenant’s gestures, trying his best to read George’s thoughts through his physical expression, his every movement, his every twitch.

“Well, I must admit, Ishari, this is certainly something of a puzzle,” the young lieutenant whispers. George, only thirty-two years old himself, thinks he ought not foul this up in front of the young Hindu. There has been trouble recently in Meerut: unexplained fires in colonial storehouses, and yesterday the British hanged another sepoy, Mangal Pandey, a Hindu private of the Thirty-fourth Regiment who attacked his British sergeant with a sword and wounded a nearby adjutant on his horse. George feels the young boy’s eyes along his back and takes another step deeper into the swampy muck. The cloud looms closer, making a terrible aching sound. George blinks again. The sun cuts behind an acacia tree. George hears the low, heartbroken moan again, and holds his hand up, shielding his eyes. Suddenly he smiles, relieved, seeing the cloud is no cloud at all. It is a rhinoceros, magnificent and ancient and startling white, lurching there in the mud.

George stares a little longer and sees the poor giant is trapped in what may very well be quicksand, too old to struggle or perhaps just resigned to the fate that lies beneath the florid estuary.
Dear old man
, George thinks.
It seems your reign has come to an end. As a geographer for the British East India Company, it is my sad duty to inform you that we no longer have any use for rhinoceroses of any kind. From now on, you and all of these unpredictable rivers, these septic marshes, these troublesome plains, will all be redrawn, refigured on my map. These plundered kingdoms and useless villages will be made uniform and compliant to the thoughtful order of British rule.
The animal gives a low, melancholy groan again, sinking deeper. It will soon drown in the mud. George decides he will have to shoot it, that being the Christian thing to do.
A magical cloud? A magical cloud? The sooner these people learn of civilisation, the better off all of us will be
, George thinks. The young lieutenant raises his Enfield rifle, aims for the monster’s enormous head, but finds he cannot fire. The brutish creature is staring directly at him now, its head bowed, its great horn radiant. The lieutenant places his finger on the rifle’s trigger, but still he cannot shoot. There, stranded in the weeds and murk, white as carved stone, the rhinoceros looks like a god.

“Ishari, go fetch the largest rifle you can find,” George calls back. “Ask the colonel if he knows where to find an elephant gun.” Ishari nods, holding his helmet as he does, and hurries off, his knees stepping high, as he has been taught. George turns back to the rhinoceros and sees the sad monster rearing its gigantic head, its gray horn luminous, huffing once, a low, baleful melody that ends with a lilting, dirge-like whistle.

“Help is on the way,” George says, taking a step closer. He reaches a hand out toward the rhino’s soft, febrile hide. The animal’s wrinkled white skin is covered in bristly brown hairs. The lieutenant changes his mind, and returns his hand to his hip. The rhinoceros sinks farther. A number of bubbles explode around its trapped mass as it quickly begins to descend. George lurches forward without thinking, but the rhino is much too dangerous, its enormous head lashing about in panic. All at once, the empty valley echoes with the report of rifle fire. George turns quickly, surveying the gray land, his stern hand shading the sun, and catches sight of Ishari hurrying back along the road. The young lieutenant curses, seeing the boy is empty-handed. He turns back to the rhinoceros, which has sunk even farther, its noble head the only thing remaining above the dark murk.

Ishari reaches the lieutenant entirely out of breath. He is so winded he cannot speak. The lieutenant, seeing the red in the young sepoy’s cheeks, softens, impressed by the boy’s exuberance, dedication, and loyalty. He places his hand on the Hindu boy’s shoulder and notices the poor, trembling child is covered in blood. The boy opens his mouth to speak, but is still too overcome, too frightened. Ishari turns, pointing back toward the military cantonment. Another rifle shot echoes across the open field, then a second, then a third.

“Ishari, my boy, what has happened? What have you seen?”

But Ishari still cannot speak. He reaches his hand up, touching the young lieutenant’s clean-shaven face, then collapses. Only then does the lieutenant see the young sepoy has been stabbed, a gaping wound left across his back. The boy clutches the lieutenant’s ankle, sinking into the soft, wet ground. He gasps, coughing up blood, trying to untie the lieutenant’s bootlaces. George kneels beside him, clasping the boy’s shoulder, but sees it is already too late. The poor child is dead, his hand fast at the laces of his commander’s brown boot. George looks up and sees a cloud of smoke rising steadily from the direction of the cantonment. Something is wrong. He leans over and gently folds the fingers of his fallen protégé away from the toe of his boot. He makes a perfect knot in each shoelace and then feels for his pistol. He finds it at his hip and then rushes off. The road is uneven and full of stones, and the lieutenant is out of breath before he reaches the outskirts of the military encampment. His heart pounds dreadfully with each stride, and once or twice he nearly trips. He can hear gunfire and the sounds of what must be screaming by the time the gray, bulky shapes of the barracks come into view. Moments later, his heart wrenched loose in his chest, his brow slick with sweat, he stumbles into the cantonment and sees the impossible: the other British officers of his regiment, the Eleventh, lie dead.

A foot, a leg, an arm, a face staring there wide-eyed in the mud, the barracks are a shambles.

Somewhere beyond the shadows of the cantonment are more shouts and more gunfire, and the lieutenant, stricken, brandishes his weapon nervously, still unsure what has happened. Certainly it must have been an ambush of some kind, the Thuggees perhaps, but there is no sign of any assailants other than spent rifle cartridges and the loamy, blood-smeared bodies of his fellow officers. Hurrying into the first barrack, the regimental headquarters, he sees it is empty, a wooden table and chairs smoldering with fire, papers and field manuals strewn about. The next barrack, the colonel’s quarters, is untouched, signs of struggle strangely absent. The colonel’s pajamas, blue-and-white striped, lie on the dirty ground, a bedpan overturned on the white sheets of the imperious-looking field cot.

The third tent is inconspicuously crowded. The lieutenant, lifting the tent flap aside, gags uncontrollably; the pungency of death—of recently moved bowels and emptied bladders—steams through the air with acrid corruptness. The lieutenant covers his mouth and sees his three fellow officers, lying beside one another in the mud, all of them empty-eyed. The colonel, his proud red mustache now creased with dirt and blood, looks stupidly content, smiling up from the patchy earth. The major, his eyes closed, seems pensive as if in prayer, a slit across his throat leaving little to keep his head attached. The sergeant, a bulky man, lies face-down, his cranium crushed by something heavy, the stock of a rifle perhaps. Outside the tent, someone is singing bravely in Hindi.

George reaches down and touches the dead colonel’s hand. Another series of rifle shots ring out. Through the tent flaps, he can see that the cantonment is on fire now, great red and black flames leaping from the pointed canvas roofs toward the cobalt sky. He can hear someone running, many, many feet hurrying back in this direction. Someone shouts angrily in Hindi nearby, and George, without thinking, shoves the expired colonel aside, crawling beneath the field cot, pretending to be dead. Though the major’s loaded rifle is near his feet, George does not try and reach for it. He does his best not to weep. The sound of angry feet approach. His heart beats recklessly now, pounding in his closed throat, his eyes shut tight. He feels his breath vacillating uneasily in his chest, as he hides beside the still-warm bodies of his three fellow officers, their open mouths rank with blood, their gruesome wounds already drawing flies.

Outside the small cantonment, the makeshift barracks echoing with rifle fire, George can hear the screams of what he guesses are the final pleas of English women and children.
The children, the colonel’s daughters!
George thinks.
What will become of them?
Certainly the sepoys, the Hindu and Muslim infantry once loyal to the British East India Company, have all lost their minds. With their own swords and borrowed Enfield rifles, they move through the crowded streets of Meerut, murdering all the British they can find. George lies there beside the dead, wondering in his spinelessness if he will ever see his beloved London again.

When three Indians, their tan uniforms covered in specks of blood, storm into the tent, George cannot help himself from letting out a startled gasp. With their lustrous swords in hand, they glance about for survivors. And then the lieutenant begins to cry, the tears quickly running down the sides of his dirty cheeks. His heart starts to tremble uncontrollably: his heart beats as it did when he was a sickly child, “
Young George has a terrible heart condition, he mustn’t run or get overly excited
,” it beats as it did when he was an inconsolable young man, his father asking, “
How do you expect to become a great soldier against all your doctor’s prohibitions?
” and George’s reply, “
There is a need for geographers, and geographers aren’t expected to wield anything heavier than a map and pen. It will be with a map and pen that England will put the world to rights
”—suddenly his traitorous heart is no longer his own.
No, no, no
, he mutters to himself.
No!
Gasping for air, his heart pounding in his chest, he is overcome with fright, much deeper than the terror of the moment. His heartbeat echoes with thousands of years of secret cowardice, running all the way back along the deformed branches of his blighted family tree, thousands of years of hidden weakness having finally produced this most misshapen, most frail of all human hearts, “
The boy will be lucky to see his tenth birthday, and if he does, the noise of a slammed door or a bolt of lightning might do him in
,” the organ wholly defective in its diminutive size. And now the minuscule muscle in George Kasper’s heart can do no more and beats its final beat. The sepoys searching the nearly empty tent find the three murdered officers and quickly hurry on. But already it is too late: Lieutenant Kasper is dead, his pusillanimous heart having failed. His perfectly ordered and thoroughly uncomplicated maps of a British India, a British India that will never be, lie in a small notebook, pressed tightly against his chest.

A
SECRET: THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT KINDS
of clouds, distinguished by size, shape, and height of the cloud base, which Jonathan has unwillingly, over the years, memorized. There is the cirrus cloud, the cumulus, the nimbus, the stratus, the cirrostratus, the altocumulus and altostratus, the nimbostratus, and the stratocumulus. Today Jonathan thinks about each of these different kinds of clouds as he searches for his antiseizure medication. The den, littered with bedsheets, his dirty clothes, and mountains of research, now resembles a child’s fort. The light from the east-facing window is much too bright in the morning, so Jonathan has hung two bedsheets—one over the window and one curtaining off the sofa where he has slept. Moving aside three different large-scale maps of Japan, Jonathan finds his bottle of pills and swallows one down with a cold glass of water.

A
NOTHER SECRET:
at the Field Museum, where he does his research, Jonathan will sometimes walk down to the World Under the Sea exhibit to talk to the life-size models of underwater creatures. The models—a life-size humpback whale, a pair of male and female dolphins, a hammerhead shark, and an enormous purple giant squid—all stare back with sad eyes of black glass, silent, attentive, a thoughtful audience. The creatures do not stir. They float there, listening quietly. Jonathan will sit on a bench before the great squid and smoke a cigarette, wondering aloud why everything in his life seems to have gone to shit. The museum where Jonathan does his research is mostly empty at this time of the morning, and the World Under the Sea exhibit has been under construction for some three months now, affording the tall, sad-faced professor dressed in his wrinkly beige jacket a moment or two of absolute stillness.

Jonathan stares at the giant squid and smiles.

“And how are you today, old friend
Architeuthis dux
, younger cousin of
Tusoteuthis longa
?”

The purple tentacles gleam from the overhead lights.

“Well, I am equally awful. I’m afraid we’re not going to find
Tusoteuthis longa
anytime soon. At least, not before the French. I’m not going to be able to keep my research lab here if they find it first. And I’m afraid that my wife is not in love with me anymore, if you can believe that.”

The squid does not respond.

Jonathan stands, searching his jacket pocket for another cigarette. He does not find one.

“No, I don’t know. I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do.”

He smiles, staring into the beast’s great black eye.

“Maybe I ought to be more like you. Maybe I ought to get used to being alone.”

From down the tiled corridor, Jonathan can hear footsteps and the jingling of keys. He stands, then leans forward past the inoperative security barrier, touching the great squid’s sturdy tentacle. A security guard, Roger, pokes his head around the corner of the exhibit, smiling when he sees Jonathan standing there.

“Hey, Professor, what are you doing down here so early?” he asks.

“Just visiting these guys,” Jonathan says.

Roger nods. His tattooed neck, a musical quarter note with flames around it, catches Jonathan’s eye once again. Roger, glancing over his shoulder, digs into the front pocket of his blue uniform and takes out a joint. Roger lights it quickly and takes an unbelievably long toke, then hands it to Jonathan, who also drags deeply, closing his eyes, imagining he is underwater. For a moment, he is happy to be drowning, and then, feeling his hands and feet beginning to tingle, he lets out a breath. A strange, numb sensation begins to extend all the way down his left arm. He stares at his fist, opening and closing his fingers. It feels empty, his hand. It feels completely numb.

“You all right, Prof?” Roger asks, and Jonathan just nods.

“Yeah, I guess,” he mutters. Then, shaking his head, “No. No, I’m really not. Not at all, actually.”

A
NOTHER SECRET STILL:
Jonathan has been eating a lot of fast food lately. In the drive-through of McDonald’s, Jonathan finds himself staring up at the cloudy sky, the sky so much like the unstill sea, imagining the shape of the giant squid rising from its depths to gorge itself on a school of silver prehistoric fish. When Jonathan blinks, he realizes it is only a dark airplane floating there, drifting through the threads of the choppy clouds. He glances over at the glassy drive-through window and sees that the teenage McDonald’s employee, unnaturally overweight, with an explosion of purple zits on the dark skin of his forehead, is shouting at him.

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan says. “I was just daydreaming.”

“You’re the one with the Big Mac and large Coke?”

“Yes.”

“It’s going to be a minute, man. One of our fryers is down today.”

“That’s okay. I was just thinking: Did you know that some giant squids spend years of their lives completely alone, only breaking their solitude once or twice every few years to mate?”

“It’s $5.38. You can pull up to the second window.”

“Of course.”

S
TILL ANOTHER SECRET:
in front of his Monday Paleontology 101 class, Jonathan does not remember what he was just talking about. His teeth feel hard, his mouth dry, as he tries to recall what he has just been saying. The blank, uninspired faces of the students in the lecture hall stare back at him glossy-eyed, spoiled, and impatiently confused. A girl with too much makeup on, wearing an unflattering pink tank top, blows a large bubble with her bubble gum, glaring at him with resignation. Other students check their cell phones to see what time it is. Jonathan, his face flushed with embarrassment, glances down at his notes. He clears his throat, sees something familiar in his handwritten outline, then looks up at the daunting faces again. The girl in pink blows another bubble and then pops it with her finger. The sound of her bubble-gum chewing makes Jonathan incredibly anxious.

“I seem to have lost my place,” Jonathan says, scratching his beard. “I apologize.”

He sees the girl in the pink top yawn. Obviously, she doesn’t understand how difficult all of this is.

D
ISAPPOINTED AFTER HIS
lackluster class, Jonathan returns to his cramped office and finds a small pink note on his desk. It’s from Ted, one of his research assistants. It says:
The French have their boats in the water—they’ve been chasing some sperm whales and think they might have found It.
Jonathan’s heart slowly breaks. He reads the words over and over again, shaking his head. He feels like crying. The French team of paleontologists, led by that unremitting asshole Dr. Jacques Albert of the French Sédimentologie Association, have been following a congregation of sperm whales—natural predators of various species of squid. Apparently, they have now triangulated the position of what may be the first known living specimen of
Tusoteuthis longa.
Jonathan crushes the piece of paper in his hand, collapsing into the chair beside his desk. He sighs, staring at the computer. A decision has just been made, something he has been considering all morning. He places his fingers on the computer keyboard and types a quick email to
Dragonflydr
, Dr. Arzt in Germany, telling her about the new developments concerning the French research team. He ends the electronic missive with this sentence:

Jonathan rereads it once more and then hits
Send
. Just then his office telephone rings, its beige receiver vibrating in its plastic cradle, and Jonathan lets out a little shout, sure it is either Dr. Arzt with an angry response or news that the French have captured the first prehistoric giant squid. His hand trembles as he reaches toward the phone, slowly slipping it from its base. “Hello…,” he mumbles and is overwhelmed with joy to hear Madeline’s soft, familiar voice.

“Jonathan? It’s your father. He escaped…from the nursing home, again.”

“What?”

“They found him. At the airport this time. They think he was trying to buy a ticket to Japan.”

“My father was at the airport?”

“Jonathan, you need to go to the nursing home right now,” is all Madeline says.

T
HE FIRST TIME
Jonathan ever goes to a museum he is holding his father’s hand. Before the antiseizure medication, phenytoin, is introduced, there is a series of bizarre, painful, experimental treatments to try and help the boy overcome his neurological dysfunction. One particularly agonizing experiment, prescribed by an avant-garde neurologist by the name of Dr. Roberts, involves aversion therapy, during which Jonathan, only seven or eight years old, suspicious in a powder-blue butterfly-collared shirt and brown corduroy pants, is ordered to look at book after book about clouds—staring at the drawings of stratus and nimbus within—forced to watch hour after hour of filmed footage about storm clouds and meteorology, fainting and waking, fainting and waking with each turn of the book’s page or each flicker of the film’s frame. His father, Henry, greatly terrified for his boy and following the advice of Dr. Roberts, decides to bring Jonathan to the meteorology exhibit at the Natural History Museum in St. Louis. Holding his hand as they stand before a glass-encased diorama—a replica of a gray storm cloud menacing a miniature midwestern farm—father and son try to address this strange malady together. Jonathan bravely stares up at the odd shapes, the faded, dusty world of meteorology, facing his condition with courage. The hall where the display stands is entirely quiet, interrupted only by the whispers of the father and son. Jonathan lets go of Henry’s hand and reaches out, putting his palm against the glass, but then pauses and frowns, his body beginning to convulse, his eyelids twitching, his dark brown shoes turning in on themselves until the boy falls backward, his father awkwardly catching him. Though that particular experiment fails, Jonathan will never forget the feeling of being carried back to the car, still pretending to be unconscious, carefully huddled in his father’s arms.

A
RRIVING AT THE
South Shore Nursing Home, a little less than a half hour from their house, Jonathan finds his father resting in his semiprivate room—incoherent, weakly mumbling, his thin face strained with frustration. His father does not seem to recognize him. His father’s greenish gray eyes are wide and empty and blank. He is lying in his bed, holding his transistor radio tightly against his chest. Jonathan glances at the old man’s hands as he slowly moves the dial back and forth, his mouth looking slightly frozen, the lips curled in a weak sneer.

Jonathan says, “Hi, Dad, how are you doing?” but he does not get a response. Jonathan takes hold of his father’s hand and immediately the old man seizes his wrist, his grip stiff as a claw.

“I…was…lost,” his father whispers aloud, his voice slow and garbled and gruff. The voice is foreign, the voice of someone just learning to talk.

“Dad, did the doctors tell you what happened?” Jonathan asks.

Henry nods. He mutters, “I’m okay,” which are the final two words he allows himself today. He hopes that his son will somehow understand the blank spaces between these sounds, the significance of the pauses, all the words he happens not to be saying.

“Why did you go to the airport, Dad? Do you hate this place that much? Are you unhappy here? Do you want to find somewhere else? Because we can. I don’t…I mean, well, it’s okay now. Just take it easy. Just stay calm. Are you breathing okay? It doesn’t sound so good. Are you breathing all right?” Jonathan asks.

Henry nods to himself but does not say anything. Just then, Jonathan notices his father’s uncovered feet: they are swollen, purple, and caked in red sores. They are lying uncovered at the end of the bed, a strange, disgusting odor rising from them. Jonathan glances at the curled-up feet, then back at his father.

“Did they explain what you did, Dad?” Jonathan asks again. “You took off from here? And then they found you at the airport. Why did you try and leave, Dad?”

But Henry does not answer.

“Listen, I’m going to go talk to the nurse. I’ll be back in a minute, all right?”

His father looks at him with bright eyes that seem unconvinced. Jonathan unzips his coat and places it in the chair beside the bed. “See. I’m leaving my coat. I’ll be right back. I’m just going to go down the hall.”

Henry nods as his son touches his hand and then slowly closes the door.

T
HE NURSE SAYS
his father escaped around lunchtime and was found at a counter at O’Hare Airport about two hours later, waiting in line to buy an international ticket. He’s been unresponsive since he was discovered and may have suffered a minor stroke of some kind, possibly a small infarction. She describes it as some sort of neurological storm that has passed but may have left his speech and reflexes slightly diminished. She tells him the old man refuses to eat or get out of bed. He refuses to be washed and the blood clots in his legs and feet are getting worse. He has been sedated because he was threatening the nurses, clawing at them angrily when they wheeled him back into his room. He has been throwing things, the nurse, a round-faced black lady named Rhoda, says, adding, “He threw his food tray right at me and I told him that was no way for a man his age to act.”