The Speed of Light (23 page)

Rodney and the three visitors spent all morning and much of the afternoon shut up in the living room. At first Jenny had to overcome the urge to listen through the closed door, but when, after half an hour of secret discussions, she saw the two people who'd come with the reporter go outside and return with recording equipment, she didn't even attempt to persuade Rodney not to commit the error he was about to commit. She spent the rest of the day out of the house, with Dan, and returned in the evening when the journalists had gone. Rodney was sitting in the living room, in darkness and silence, and although, after giving Dan his supper and putting him quickly to bed, Jenny tried to find out what had happened during her deliberate absence, she couldn't get a single word out of him, and she had the impression that he was mad or drugged or drunk, and that he no longer understood her language. That was the first sign of alarm. The second arrived shortly after. That night Rodney did not sleep, nor the ones that followed: lying awake in bed, Jenny heard him wandering around downstairs, heard him talking to himself or maybe on the phone; on one occasion she thought she heard laughter, muffled laughter, like the kind you stifle at a funeral. That's how an unstoppable process of deterioration began: Rodney asked for a leave of absence from the school and stopped teaching, he didn't go outside, spent the days sleeping or lying in bed and ended up having nothing to do with Dan or with her. It was as if someone had torn out a tiny connection that turned out to be indispensable to his continued functioning and his whole organism had suffered a collapse, reducing him to a ghost of himself. Jenny tried to talk to him, tried to force him to accept the help of a psychiatrist; it was useless: he seemed to listen to her (maybe he really did listen), he smiled at her, touched her, asked her not to worry, over and over again he told her he was fine, but she felt that Rodney was living as far away from everything around him as a planet spinning in its own self-absorbed orbit. She let time pass, hoping things would change. Things didn't change. The broadcast of the television report did nothing but make everything worse. At first it didn't have much impact, because it was a local station that had produced it, but very soon the national newspapers were repeating its revelations and a major network bought the rights and broadcast the piece at prime time. Although the journalist sent them a copy, Rodney didn't want to see it; although in the accompanying note the reporter assured him that he'd fulfilled his promise of guarding Rodney's anonymity, reality contradicted him: it really wasn't difficult to identify Rodney in the report, and the result of this indiscretion or breach of confidence was that Jenny's life became stifled by hounding journalists and questions and gossip about her husband's seclusion. As for her relationship with Rodney, it quickly deteriorated until it became unsustainable. One day she took a drastic decision: she told Rodney that it would be better if they separated; she would go back to Burlington with Dan and he could stay by himself in Rantoul. The ultimatum was a last feint that Jenny hoped would get Rodney to react, confronting him unceremoniously with the evidence that, unless he restrained his free fall, he was going to end up ruining his life and losing his family. But the trick didn't work: Rodney meekly accepted her proposal, and the only thing he asked Jenny was when she intended to leave. At that moment Jenny understood that all was lost, and it was also then that she had her first conversation with Rodney in a long time. It was not an enlightening conversation. Actually, Rodney hardly spoke: he limited himself to answering, in an exasperatingly laconic manner, the questions she put to him and Jenny couldn't get rid of the feeling that she was talking to a child with no future or an elderly man with no past, because Rodney looked at her exactly as if he were trying to look through the sky. At some moment Jenny asked him if he was afraid. With a wisp of relief, as if her fingertip had just brushed the hidden heart of his anguish, Rodney said yes. 'Of what?' Jenny asked him. 'I don't know,' said Rodney. 'Of people. Of you guys. Sometimes I'm afraid of myself.' 'Of us?' Jenny asked. 'Who's us?' 'You and Dan,' answered Rodney. 'We aren't going to hurt you,' Jenny smiled. 'I know that,' said Rodney. 'But that's what I'm most afraid of.' Jenny remembered that when she heard those words she felt afraid of Rodney for the first time, and also that it was then she understood that she should leave Rantoul with her son as soon as possible. But she didn't; she decided to stay: she loved Rodney and felt that, whatever happened, she should help him. She couldn't help him. The last weeks were a nightmare. In the daytime Jenny tried to talk to him, but it was almost always futile, because, despite understanding his words, she was unable to invest the phrases he pronounced with any intelligible meaning, as they were closer to the hermetic and rigorously coherent ravings of a lunatic than to any articulate discourse. As for the nights, Rodney continued to pass them wakefully, but now he spent much of them writing: Jenny fell asleep rocked by the unceasing tapping of the computer keyboard, but when, some days after Rodney's death, she got up the courage to open his files she found them all blank, as if at the last moment her husband had decided to spare her the venomous outpourings from the hell in which he was being consumed. Jenny maintained that in the days leading up to his death Rodney had completely lost his mind; also that what happened was the best thing that could have happened. And what happened was that one morning, not long after Christmas, Jenny got up earlier than usual and, when she walked past the room where Rodney had been sleeping for the last while, she saw it empty and the bed still made. Worried, she looked for Rodney in the dining room, the kitchen, all over the house, and finally found him hanging from a rope in the shed.

'That was all,' Jenny concluded, abandoning for a few seconds the distant manner she'd managed until then to impart to her tale. 'The rest you can imagine. Death improves the dead, so it turns out everyone loved Rodney very much. Even the journalists came to see me . . . Just crap.'

For a moment I thought Jenny was going to start to cry, but she didn't cry: she stubbed out her second cigarette on the porch step, and just as she'd done with her first, kept it in her hand; after a long silence she turned towards me and looked me in the eye.

'Didn't I tell you?' she said, almost smiling. 'The problem isn't getting Dan to sleep. The problem is waking him up.'

Dan did indeed wake up in a foul mood, but it gradually eased as he had a bowl of cereal and his mother and I kept him company with a coffee. When we finished Jenny suggested we go for a walk before it got dark.

'Dan and I are going to take you someplace,' she said.

'What place?'

Jenny crouched down beside him and, making a screen with her hand, whispered in his ear.

'OK?' she asked, standing up again.

Dan just shrugged his shoulders.

When we left the house we turned left, crossed the railway tracks and walked along Ohio, a well-paved street, with hardly any houses or businesses, which headed towards the outskirts of the city. Five hundred metres on, across from a dense birch wood, stood a building with white walls, a sort of enormous granary surrounded by grass on the front of which was painted in large red letters: VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS POST 6750; beside it there was another smaller sign, similar to the one outside Bud's Bar, except that it was decorated with an American flag; the sign read: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. The building looked empty, but it must not have been, because there were several cars parked in front of the door; as we passed Jenny commented:

'The war veterans' club. They're all over the place. They hold parties, reunions, things like that. I've only been inside once, but I know that before we met Rodney used to go there quite a lot, or that's what he told me. Do you want to go in?'

I said there was no need and we walked away from the club along a dirt path that ran beside the highway, chatting, Dan in the middle and Jenny and I on either side, Jenny holding his left hand and I his right. After a while we left the highway, taking a path that went gently up to the left, between fields of young corn, and when we got to the top of a small hill we left the path, going into an irregular quadrilateral strewn with a handful of scattered graves, where there stood a couple of ash trees feeding on the earth of the dead and a rusty iron flagpole without a flag. Dan let go of our hands and ran across the cemetery lawn until he stopped in front of an unpolished tombstone.

'Here he is,' said Dan when we reached his side, pointing to the grave with one finger.

I looked at the tombstone, on the front face of which was carved a boy sitting under a tree reading and an inscription: RODNEY FALK. APR. 6 1948 - JAN. 4 2004; beside the inscription there was a fresh bouquet of flowers. 'A clean, well-lighted place,' I thought. The three of us stood in front of the grave in silence.

'Well, actually he's not here,' said Dan finally. After pondering for a moment he asked: 'Where are you when you're dead?'

The question wasn't directed at anyone in particular, but I waited for Jenny to answer it; she didn't answer. After a few seconds had gone by I felt obliged to say:

'Nowhere.'

'Nowhere?' asked Dan, exaggerating the interrogative tone.

'Nowhere,' I repeated.

Dan remained pensive.

'Then you're the same as a ghost?' he asked.

'Exactly,' I answered, and then I lied without knowing it:

'Except that ghosts don't exist, and the dead do.'

Dan looked away from the tombstone finally and, sneaking a look at me, made as if to smile, as if he was as sure of not having understood as of not wanting to show he hadn't understood. Then he moved away from us and walked to one edge of the cemetery, beyond which you could see in the distance a cluster of houses with paint peeling off the walls, maybe abandoned, and he began to pick up pebbles from the ground and throw them gently onto the neighbouring fields: a succession of uncultivated plots with a few weeds here and there. Jenny and I stayed beside one another, without saying anything, looking alternately at Dan and at Rodney's grave. It was getting dark and starting to feel a little cold; the sky was a dark blue, almost black, but an irregular strip of orange light still illuminated the horizon, and only the early chirping of crickets and a dim and distant rumble of traffic perturbed the impeccable silence of the hill.

'Well,' said Jenny after a while, during which I didn't think anything, didn't feel anything, not even an urge to pray. 'It's getting late. Shall we go back?'

It was almost dark by the time we got home. I had a dinner date in Urbana, with Borgheson and a group of professors, and if I wanted to get back to the Chancellor by the agreed time I'd have to leave immediately, so I told Dan and Jenny that I had to go. They both stared at me, a bit stunned, as if, rather than a surprise, my words were the prelude to a desertion; after an indecisive silence, Jenny asked:

'Is the dinner important?'

It wasn't. It wasn't at all. I told her.

'Then why don't you cancel?' asked Jenny. 'You can stay here: there're lots of bedrooms.'

She didn't have to repeat the offer: I phoned Borgheson and told him I felt tired and feverish and that, in order to be on form for the lecture the following day, it would be best if I skipped dinner and stayed in the hotel to rest. Borgheson accepted the lie without complaint, although it took a lot of doing to convince him not to come to my aid at the Chancellor. The problem solved, I invited Dan and Jenny to dinner at a restaurant called Kennedy's, a few kilometres out of town on the way to Urbana, and after dinner, while Dan played on his Game Boy with a classmate whose family was also eating there, Jenny told me how she'd met Rodney, talked about her job, her family, the life she led in Rantoul. When we left the restaurant it was almost ten. On the way back, Dan fell asleep, and when we got to the house I picked him up in my arms, carried him up to his room and, while Jenny put him to bed, I waited for her in the living room, looking at the CDs lined up in an aluminum pyramid beside the sound system. Most of them were rock and roll, and there were several by Bob Dylan. Among them
Bringing It All Back Home,
an album that contained a song I knew well: 'It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'. With the disk in my hands I began to hear in my head that inconsolable song that always used to bring back to Rodney the intact joy of his youth, and suddenly, as I waited for Jenny, remembering the lyrics as precisely as I did the music, I was certain that deep down that song spoke of nothing but Rodney, of Rodney's cancelled-out life, because it spoke of disillusioned words that bark like bullets and stuffed graveyards and false gods and lonely people who cry and fear and live in a vault knowing everything's a lie and who understand they know too soon there is no use in trying, because it spoke of all that and especially because it said that he not busy being born is busy dying. 'Rodney's only busy dying now,' I thought. And I thought: 'I'm not, yet.'

'Do you feel like listening to some music?' said Jenny as she came into the living room.

I said yes, and she turned on the machine and went to the kitchen. I avoided the temptation of Dylan and put on
Astral Weeks
by Van Morrison, and when Jenny came back, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses, we sat down across from one another and let the record play, chatting with an effusiveness fostered by the alcohol and by Van Morrison's raw voice. I don't remember what we talked about at first, but when we'd already been sitting there for a while, I don't know exactly why (maybe owing to something I said, probably owing to something Jenny said), I suddenly remembered a letter Rodney had sent his father from hospital in Vietnam, after the incident at My Khe, a letter in which he talked of the beauty of war, of the devastating speed of war, and then I thought that since I'd been in Rantoul I had the impression that everything had accelerated, that everything had started to run faster than usual, faster and faster, faster, faster, and at some moment there had been a blaze, a maelstrom and a loss, I thought I'd unknowingly travelled faster than the speed of light and what I was now seeing was the future. And that was also when, mingled with Van Morrison's music and Jenny's voice, I felt for the first time something both unusual and familiar, something I'd maybe sensed wordlessly as soon as I'd seen Dan and Jenny coming towards me that afternoon on Belle Avenue, and what I felt was that here, in this house that wasn't my house, before this woman who wasn't mine, with this sleeping child who wasn't my son but who was sleeping upstairs as if I were his father, that here I was invulnerable; I also wondered, with a twinkling commencement of joy, whether I wasn't obliged to give some meaning to Rodney's suicide, whether the house I was in wasn't a reflection of my house and Dan and Jenny a reflection of the family I'd lost, I wondered if that was what one saw upon emerging from the filth underground out into the open, if the past was not a place permanently altered by the future and nothing of what had already happened was irreversible and what was there at the end of the tunnel echoed what had been there before entering it, I wondered if this was not the true end of it all, the end of the road, the end of the tunnel, the breach in the stone door. This is it, I said to myself, possessed by a strange euphoria. It's over. Finito. Kaput.