“I’m fine, Sol, really I am.”
“A change of scenery would do you good. There’s nothing to hold you here anymore, and the longer you stay, the worse off you are. I’m not blind, you know.”
“I’ll get over it. Things will start turning around soon.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it. You’re stuck, M. S., you’re eating yourself alive. The only cure is to get away from it.”
“I can’t just quit my job.”
“Why not?”
“I need the money, for one thing. For another, Stan depends on me. It wouldn’t be fair to walk out on him like that.”
“Give him a couple of weeks’ notice. He’ll find someone else.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes, just like that. I know you’re a pretty strong young fellow, but somehow I don’t see you working as a furniture mover for the rest of your life.”
“I wasn’t planning to make a career of it. it’s what you’d call a temporary situation.”
“Well, I’m offering you another temporary situation. You can be my assistant, my trailblazer, my copy-hand man. The deal comes with room and board, free supplies, and any petty cash you feel you might need. If these terms don’t satisfy you, I’m willing to negotiate. What do you say to that?”
“It’s summer. If you think New York is bad, the desert is even worse. Our bodies would fry if we went out there now.”
“It’s not the Sahara. We’ll buy ourselves an air-conditioned car and go in comfort.”
“Go where? We don’t have the faintest idea of where to begin.”
“Of course we do. I’m not saying that we’ll find what we’re looking for, but we know the general area. Southeastern Utah, beginning with the town of Bluff. It can’t do us any harm to try.”
We went on with the discussion for several more hours, and little by little Barber wore down my resistance. For every argument I gave him, he came back with a counterargument; for each negative I proposed, he proposed two or three positives. I don’t know how he managed to do it, but in the end he made me feel almost happy that I had surrendered. Perhaps it was the sheer hopelessness of the venture that clinched it for me. If I had thought there was the slightest possibility of finding the cave, I doubt that I would have gone, but the idea of a useless quest, of setting out on a journey that was doomed to failure, appealed to my sense of things at that moment. We would search, but we would not find. Only the going itself would matter, and in the end we would be left with nothing but the futility of our own ambitions. This was a metaphor I could live with, the leap into emptiness I had always dreamed of. I shook hands with Barber on it and told him to count me in.
We perfected our plan over the next two weeks. Instead of traveling straight through, we decided to begin with a sentimental detour, stopping off in Chicago first and then heading north to Minnesota before we picked up the road to Utah. It would take us a thousand miles out of our way, but neither one of us considered that a problem. We were in no rush to get there, and when I told Barber that I wanted to visit the cemetery where my mother and uncle were buried, he did not raise any objections. Since we were going to be in Chicago, he said, why not veer a bit further off course and go on up to Northfield for a couple of days? He had some odds and ends of business to take care of, and in the meantime he could show me the collection of his father’s paintings and drawings in the attic of his house. I didn’t bother to mention to him that I had avoided those paintings in the past. In the spirit of the expedition we were about to embark on, I said yes to everything.
Three days later, Barber bought an air-conditioned car from a man in Queens. It was a red 1965 Pontiac Bonneville with only 47,000 miles on the odometer. He fell in love with its flashiness and speed and didn’t haggle much over the price. “What do you think?” he kept saying to me as we looked it over. “Is this a chariot or what?” We had to replace the muffler and the tires, the carburetor needed adjusting, and the rear end was dented, but Barber’s mind was made up, and I didn’t see any point in trying to talk him out of it. For all its flaws, the car was a snappy little piece of machinery, as he put it, and I supposed it would serve as well as any other. We took it out for a trial spin, and as we crisscrossed the streets of Flushing, Barber lectured enthusiastically on Pontiac’s rebellion against Lord Amherst. We shouldn’t forget, he said, that this car was named after a great Indian chief. It will add another dimension to our trip. By driving this car out West, we’ll be paying homage to the dead, commemorating the valiant warriors who rose up in defense of the land we stole from them.
We bought hiking boots, sunglasses, backpacks, canteens, binoculars, sleeping bags, and a tent. After putting in another week and a half at my friend Stan’s moving business, I was able to retire with a good conscience when a cousin of his showed up in town for the summer and agreed to take my place. Barber and I went out for a last dinner in New York (corned beef sandwiches at the Stage Deli) and returned to the apartment by nine o’clock, planning to turn in at a reasonable hour so we could get an early start the next morning. It was early July, 1971. I was twenty-four years old, and I felt that my life had come to a dead end. As I lay on the couch in the darkness, I heard Barber tiptoe into the kitchen and call Kitty on the phone. I couldn’t make out everything he said, but apparently he was telling her about the trip. “Nothing is sure,” he whispered, “but it might do him some good. Maybe he’ll be ready to see you again by the time we get back.” It wasn’t hard for me to guess who he was referring to. After Barber returned to his room, I turned on the light and uncorked another bottle of wine, but alcohol seemed to have lost its power over me. When Barber came in to wake me at six o’clock the next morning, I don’t think I had been asleep for more than twenty or thirty minutes.
We were on the road by quarter to seven. Barber drove, and I sat in the shotgun seat, drinking from a thermos of black coffee. For the first two hours, I was only half conscious, but once we hit the open countryside of Pennsylvania, I slowly emerged from my torpor. From then until we reached Chicago, we talked without interruption, taking turns at the wheel as we passed through western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. If most of what we said escapes me now, it was probably because we kept shifting from one subject to another, in much the same way that the landscape kept disappearing behind us. We talked for a while about cars, I remember, and how America had been changed by them; we talked about Effing; we talked about Tesla’s tower on Long Island. I can still hear Barber clearing his throat, as we left Ohio and crossed into Indiana, getting ready to deliver a lengthy speech on the spirit of Tecumseh, but no matter how hard I try, I cannot bring back a single sentence of it. Later on, when the sun began to go down, we spent more than an hour enumerating our preferences in every area of life we could think of: our favorite novels, our favorite foods, our favorite ballplayers. We must have come up with more than a hundred categories, an entire index of personal tastes. I said Roberto Clemente, Barber said Al Kaline. I said Don Quixote, Barber said Tom Jones. We both preferred Schubert over Schumann, but Barber had a weakness for Brahms, which I did not. On the other hand, he found Couperin dull, whereas I could never get enough of Les Barricades Mystérieuses. He said Tolstoy, I said Dostoyevsky. He said Bleak House, I said Our Mutual Friend. Of all the fruits known to man, we both agreed that lemons smelted the best.
We slept in a motel on the outskirts of Chicago. After eating breakfast the next morning, we drove around at random until we found a flower shop, where I bought identical bouquets for my mother and Uncle Victor. Barber was strangely subdued in the car, but I attributed that to exhaustion from the previous day’s drive and did not dwell on it. We had some trouble finding West-lawn Cemetery (a couple of wrong rums, a long detour that took us in the opposite direction), and by the time we drove through the gate, it was close to eleven o’clock. It took us another twenty minutes to find the graves, and when we stepped out of the car into the broiling summer heat, I remember that neither one of us said a word. A crew of four
men had just finished digging a grave for someone several plots down from my mother and uncle, and we stood by the car in silence for a minute or two, watching the gravediggers as they loaded their shovels into the back of their green pickup truck and drove off. Their presence was an intrusion, and both Barber and I tacitly understood that we had to wait until they disappeared, that we couldn’t do what we had come for unless we were alone.
After that, things happened very fast. We walked across the road, and when I saw the names of my mother and uncle on the small stone markers, I suddenly found myself fighting back tears. I had not been expecting such a violent response, but once it hit me that the two of them were actually lying there under my feet, I couldn’t stop myself from shaking. Several minutes went by, I think, but that is only a guess. I can’t see much more than a blur, a few isolated gestures in the fog of recollection. I remember putting a stone on top of each marker, and every now and then I manage to catch a glimpse of myself on all fours, frantically plucking out weeds from the tangled grass that covered the graves. Whenever I look for Barber, however, I am unable to bring him into the picture. This suggests to me that I was too distraught to notice him, that for the interval of those few minutes I had forgotten he was there. The story had begun without me, so to speak, and by the time I entered it myself, the action was already far advanced, the whole thing was flying out of control.
Somehow or other, I was standing next to Barber again. The two of us were side by side in front of my mother’s grave, and when I turned my head in his direction, I saw that tears were pouring down his cheeks. Barber was sobbing, and when I heard the choked and miserable sounds that were coming out of his mouth, I realized that they had been going on for some time. I believe I said something at that point. What’s the matter, or why are you crying, I can’t recall the exact words. But Barber didn’t hear me in any case. He went on staring at my mother’s grave, weeping under the immense blue sky as if he were the only man left in the universe.
“Emily …” he finally said. “My darling little Emily … Look at you now … If only you hadn’t run away … If only you’d let me love you … Sweet, darling, little Emily … It’s all such a waste, such a terrible waste …”
The words tumbled out of him in a spasm of breathlessness, an onrush of grief that splintered into fragments as soon as it touched the air. I listened to him as though the earth had begun to speak to me, as though I were listening to the dead from inside their graves. Barber had loved my mother. From this single, incontestable fact, everything else began to move, to totter, to fall apart—the whole world began to rearrange itself before my eyes. He hadn’t come out and said it, but all of a sudden I knew. I knew who he was, all of a sudden I knew everything.
For the first few moments, I felt nothing but anger, a demonic surge of nausea and disgust. “What are you talking about?” I said to him, and when Barber still did not look at me, I shoved him with my two hands, jolting his massive copy arm with a hard and belligerent smack. “What are you talking about?” I repeated. “Say something, you big bag of guts, say something or I’ll smash you in the mouth.”
Barber turned to me then, but all he could do was shake his head back and forth, as if trying to tell me how useless it would be to say anything. “Jesus God, Marco, why did you have to bring me here?” he said at last. “Didn’t you know this would happen?”
“Know!” I shouted at him. “How the hell was I supposed to know? You never said a thing, you liar. You tricked me, and now you want me to feel sorry for you. But what about me? What about me, you fucking hippopotamus!“
I vented my rage like a madman, screaming my lungs out in the hot summer air. After a few moments, Barber began to back off, staggering away from my assault as though he couldn’t stand it anymore. He was still weeping, and his face was buried in his hands as he walked. Blind to everything around him, he lurched down the row of graves like some injured animal, howling and sobbing as I continued to scream at him. The sun was at the top of the sky by then, and the whole cemetery was shimmering with a strange, pulsing glare, as if the light had grown too strong to be real. I saw Barber take a few more steps, and then, as he came to the edge of the grave that had been dug that morning, he began to lose his balance. He must have stumbled on a stone or a depression in the ground, and suddenly his feet were collapsing under him. It all happened so fast. His arms shot out from his sides, desperately flapping like wings, but he had no chance to copy himself. One moment he was there, and the next moment he was falling over backward into the grave. Before I could start running to him, I heard his body land at the bottom with a sharp thud.
In the end, it took a crane to lift him out of there. When I first looked down into the hole, I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive, and with nothing to grab onto along the sides, I felt it would be too risky to hazard a descent. He was lying on his back with his eyes shut, utterly motionless. I thought I might fall on top of him if I tried to climb down, so I rushed back to the gatehouse in the car and asked the attendant to phone for help. An emergency squad was on the scene within ten minutes, but they soon found themselves faced with the same dilemma that had thwarted me. After some dithering, we all linked hands and managed to lower one of the paramedics down to the bottom. He announced that Barber was alive, but other than that the news wasn’t good. Concussion, he told us, perhaps even a fractured skull. Then, after a short pause, he added: “The guy’s back might also be broken. We gotta be awful careful getting him out of here.”
It was six o’clock by the time Barber was finally wheeled into the emergency room of Cook County Hospital. He was still unconscious, and for the next four days he showed no signs of coming back to life. The doctors operated on his back, put him in traction, and told me to cross my fingers. I didn’t leave the hospital for the next forty-eight hours, but when it became apparent that we were in for a long haul, I used Barber’s American Express card to check into a nearby motel, the Eden Rock. It was a gruesome, bottom-dollar place, with smudged green walls and a lumpy bed, but I did no more than sleep there. Once Barber woke up from his coma, I spent eighteen or nineteen hours a day at the hospital, and for the next two months that was my entire world. I did nothing else but sit with him until the moment he died.
For the first month, it was by no means dear that things would end so badly. Girdled in a huge plaster cast that was suspended from pulleys, Barber hovered in midair as though defying the laws of physics. He was immobilized to such a degree that he could not turn his head, could not eat without having tubes put down his throat; but for all that, he made progress, he seemed to be recovering. More than anything else, he told me, he was glad the truth had finally come out. If lying in a cast for a few months was the price he had to pay, he felt it was worth the trouble. “My bones might be broken,” he said to me one afternoon, “but my heart is finally on the mend.”
Those were the days when the story spilled out of him, and with nothing else for him to do but talk, he wound up giving me an exhaustive and meticulous account of his whole life. I heard every detail of his romance with my mother, I heard the depressing saga of his sojourn in the Cleveland YMCA, I heard the story of his subsequent travels through the heartlands of America. It probably goes without saying that my burst of anger against him in the cemetery had long since evaporated, but even though the evidence left little room for doubt, something in me hesitated to accept him as my father. Yes, it was certain that Barber had slept with my mother one night in 1946; and yes, it was also certain that I had been born nine months later; but how could I be sure that Barber was the only man she had slept with? The odds were against it, but it was nevertheless possible that my mother had been seeing two men at the same time. If so, then perhaps it was the other man who had made her pregnant. This was my only defense against total belief, and I was reluctant to let go of it. As long as a sliver of skepticism remained, I would not have to admit that anything had happened. This was an unexpected response, but looking back on it now, I feel that
it makes a peculiar kind of sense. For twenty-four years, I had lived with an unanswerable question, and little by little I had come to embrace that enigma as the central fact about myself. My origins were a mystery, and I would never know where I had come from. This was what defined me, and by now I was used to my own darkness, clinging to it as a source of knowledge and self-respect, trusting in it as an onto-logical necessity. No matter how hard I might have dreamed of finding my father, I had never thought it would be possible. Now that I had found him, the inner disruption was so great that my first impulse was to deny it. Barber was not the cause of the denial, it was the situation itself. He was the best friend I had, and I loved him. If there was any man in the world I would have chosen to be my father, he was the one. But still, I couldn’t do it. A shock had been sent through my entire system, and I didn’t know how to absorb the blow.
Weeks went by, and eventually it became impossible for me to close my eyes to the facts. With his body held rigid in its white plaster cast, Barber could not eat any solid food, and it wasn’t long before he started to lose weight. This was a man who was accustomed to gorging himself on thousands of calories a day, and the abrupt change in his diet caused an immediate and noticeable effect. It takes hard work to maintain such a mountainous excess of blubber, and once you slacken your consumption, the pounds drop off quite rapidly. Barber complained about it at first, and several times he even wept from hunger, but after a while he began to see this enforced starvation as a blessing in disguise. “It’s an opportunity to accomplish something I’ve never been able to do before,” he said. “Just think of it, M. S. If I can keep going at this rate, I’ll shed a hundred pounds by the time I get out of here. Maybe even a hundred and twenty. I’ll be a new man. I’ll never have to look like myself again.”
The hair grew back along the sides of his scalp (a mixture of gray and ruddy brown), and the contrast between those colors and the color of his eyes (a dark, gunmetal blue) seemed to set off his head with a new clarity and definition, as though it were gradually emerging from the undifferentiated air that surrounded it. After ten or twelve days in the hospital, his skin turned a deathly white, but with this pallor came a new thinness to his cheeks, and as the bloat of fat cells and puffy flesh continued to subside, a second Barber came up to the surface, a secret self that had been locked inside him for years. It was a stunning transformation, and once it was fully underway, it unleashed a number of remarkable side-effects. I hardly noticed at first, but one morning after he had been in the hospital for about three weeks, I looked at him and saw something familiar. It was just a momentary flash, and before I could identify the thing I had seen, it was gone. Two days later, something similar occurred, but this time it lasted long enough for me to sense that the area of recognition was located somewhere around Barber’s eyes, perhaps even in the eyes themselves. I wondered if I hadn’t noticed a family resemblance with Effing, if something about the way Barber glanced at me just then had not reminded me of his father. Whatever it was, this brief moment was disturbing, and I was unable to shake myself free of it for the rest of the day. It haunted me like a fragment from some unremembered dream, a flicker of intelligibility that had risen up from the depths of my unconscious. Then, the very next morning, I finally understood what I had been seeing. I entered Barber’s room for my daily visit, and as he opened his eyes and smiled at me, his face all languid with the painkillers in his blood, I found myself studying the contours of his eyelids, concentrating on the space between the brows and the lashes, and all of a sudden I realized that I was looking at myself. Barber had the same eyes I did. Now that his face had shrunk, it was possible for me to see it. We looked like each other, and the similarity was unmistakable. Once I became aware of this, once the truth of it was finally thrown up against me, I had no choice but to accept it. I was Barber’s son, and I knew it now beyond a shadow of a doubt.