I feel like smoking, but I munch a carrot stick instead. “How did he account for the three missing decades?”
“He said he was kidnapped by Soviet sailors who needed a cabin boy, then taken to Irkutsk to avoid a Cold War incident. Yeah, I know. Brendan’s bullshit detector was buzzing, so he shuftied me over and asked, ‘Recognize me, Jacko?’ The guy hesitated, then burst out, ‘Daddy!’ End of call. The last ‘Jacko’ we interviewed was Bangladeshi, but the imperialists at the British embassy in Dhaka refused to believe he was my brother. Would I send ten thousand pounds and sponsor his visa application? We called it a day after that. If Jacko’s alive, if he reads the book, if he wants to locate us, he’ll find a way.”
“Were you still working at the homeless center all this time?”
“I quit before I went to Cartagena. A shame—I loved the job, and I think I was good at it—but if you’re chairing a fund-raising meeting the same day a six-figure royalty payment slips into your bank account, you can’t pretend nothing’s changed. More ‘Jackos’ were trying their luck at the office, and my phone was hacked. I’m still involved with homeless charities at a patron level, but I had to get Aoife out of London to a nice sleepy backwater like Rye. So I thought. Did I ever tell you about the Great Illuminati Brawl?”
“You tell me less about your life than you think. The Illuminati: as in the lizard aliens who enslave humanity via beta-blocking mind waves beamed from their secret moonbase?”
“That’s them. One fine April morning, two groups of conspiracy theorists hide in my shrubbery. Christ knows how it started—a stray remark on Twitter, probably. So, the two groups realize they’re not alone, each group convinces itself that the other group are the Illuminati’s agents. With me so far? Stop smirking; they kicked the crap out of each other. The police were up in a jiffy. After that I had to put up a security fence and CCTV. Me, f’Chrissakes, holed up like an investment banker! But what choice did I have? Next time the loonies might not be hell-bent on defending me but attacking me. So while the contractor was in, I went out to Australia, which was when Aoife and I met you on Rottnest.” She pads over to draw the curtain on the night harbor. “Beware of asking people to question what’s real and what isn’t. They may reach conclusions you didn’t see coming.”
In the street two dogs bark furiously, then stop.
“If you don’t publish again, the loonies’ll move on.”
“This is true,” says Holly, looking evasive.
“Are you working on another book?”
Now she looks cornered. “Only a few stories.”
I feel envious and pleased. “That’s brilliant. Your publishers will be doing backflips down the corridors.”
“There’s no guarantee anyone’ll read it. They’re stories based on people I knew at the center. Not a psychic in sight.”
“Right now, The Collected Shopping Lists of Holly Sykes would go straight to number one on preorders alone.”
“Well, we’ll see. But that’s what I’ve been doing here all summer. Reykjavik’s a good place to work. Iceland’s like Ireland; being famous here’s nothing special.”
By chance our fingertips are almost touching. Holly notices at the same instant, and we pull our hands back onto our laps. I try to come up with a joke I can turn this micro-embarrassment into, but nothing springs to mind. “I’ll call you a taxi, Crisp. It’s gone midnight.”
“No way is it that late.” I check my phone: 00:10. “Sodding hell, it’s tomorrow already.”
“So it is! What time’s your flight to London?”
“Nine-thirty, but can I ask you two last things?”
“Anything,” she says. “Almost.”
“Am I still ‘the spiral, the spider, the one-eyed man’?”
“You want me to check?”
Like an atheist wanting to be prayed for, I nod.
As she did in Shanghai, Holly touches the spot on her forehead and lets her eyelids almost close. What a great face she has but … it shouldn’t be that gray, or stretched. My eyes wander to her pendant. It’s a labyrinth. Some symbolic mind-body-spirit thing, I guess. From Ed?
“Yes.” Holly opens her eyes. “Same as ever.”
A possible drunk laughs maniacally outside. “Will I ever know what that means? That’s not my second question.”
“Some day, yes. Let me know when you know.”
“I promise.” The second question’s harder because one answer to it scares me very much: “Holly, you’re not ill, are you?”
She reacts with surprise but not denial. She looks away.
“Oh, sod it.” I want to unask my question. “Forgive me, it’s not—”
“Cancer of the gall bladder.” Holly attempts a smile. “Trust me to choose a nice rare one, eh?”
I can’t even attempt a smile. “What’s the prognosis?”
Holly wears the expression of someone discussing a tiresome inconvenience. “Too late for surgery—it’s spread to my liver and … um, yeah, it’s all over the shop. My oncologist in London gives me a—a—a five to ten percent chance of being here this time next year.” Her voice croaks. “Not the odds I’d choose. With chemo and drugs the odds improve, up to twenty percent, maybe, but … do I want to spend a few extra months puking in bin-liners? That’s the other reason I’ve been here in Iceland all summer, shadowing poor Aoife, like, y’know, whatsisface from Macbeth.”
“Banquo. Aoife knows, then?”
Holly nods. “Brendan, Sharon, their kids, my mother, and Örvar too—I’m hoping he’ll help Aoife when, y’know. When I can’t. But nobody else knows. ’Cept you. People get so maudlin. I have to spend what energy I’ve got cheering them up. I wasn’t going to tell you either but … you asked. Sorry to put a downer on a lovely evening.”
I see her, and see Crispin Hershey through her eyes, and perhaps she sees Holly Sykes through mine. Suddenly it’s later. Holly and I are standing by the table, hugging goodbye. It isn’t an erotic hug. Truly it isn’t, dear reader. I’d know.
It’s this: As long I’m holding her, nothing bad can happen.
• • •
THE TAXI DRIVER has earlobes full of metalwork and just says, “Okay,” when I tell him the name of my hotel. I wave goodbye until I can’t see Holly anymore. I’ve arranged to go to Rye before Christmas, so I’ll just ignore this unpleasant premonition that I’ll never see her again. The radio’s tuned to a classical-music station and I recognize Maria Callas singing “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma—Dad used it in the model-airplane scene in Battleship Hill. For a moment I forget where I am. I switch on my iPhone to text Holly, to thank her for the evening, and as I’m writing it, a message from Carmen gets relayed through. She sent it while I was delivering my lecture earlier. It has no text: it’s just an image of … a blizzard?
A blizzard at night through a windscreen?
I tilt my head and rotate the phone.
Mashed-up asteroids? No.
It’s an ultrasound scan.
Of Carmen’s womb.
With a tenant in it.
December 13, 2020
THE KEY by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: That’s the one. But having found the title in my cupboard-under-the-stairs of once-read books, the mind of Crispin Hershey drifts away from Devon Kim-Ashkenazy’s novel-in-progress (Across the Wide Ocean, three generations of abused women from Pusan to Brooklyn). I know it’s happening, but I feel powerless to stop it. Up, up, and away my mind rises, through the ceiling tiles and roofing slates, over the bunker where the English Department has been temporarily housed since 1978. Espy the theater’s curvaceous roof by Frank Gehry; skim over Lego-like accommodation blocks; circle the Gothic chapel from Lincoln’s era; tumble amid the glass-and-steel science buildings; up to the president’s house, red-bricked, gabled, ivy-veined; through the lych-gate to the cemetery, where Blithewood College lifers turn into trees at the speed of worms and roots, and up the highest tree of all, spirals Hershey’s absent mind, known only unto squirrels and crows; the Hudson
River stately winds between the Catskills’ pigeon-toes; a train’s revealed, a train’s obscured, a quote around a broken cup, “I like to see it lap the miles and lick the valleys up.” GoogleEarthlike soars his mind, through clouds where snowstorms brew; New York State has dropped away, and Massachusetts flew, and Newfoundland is ice-entombed and Rockall gull-beshatten, where no eye sees the lightning flash its momentary pattern …
“CRISPIN?” DEVON KIM-ASHKENAZY. “Are you okay?”
My postgrads’ faces suggest it was a prolonged zone-out. “Yes. I was recalling a Tanizaki novel that does wonderful things with a similar diary-narrative to yours, Devon. The Key. It could save you from reinventing the wheel. But generally,” I hand her back her manuscript, “good progress. My only cavil is the, uh, violation scene. Still a little adverb-rich, I felt.”
“Fine.” Devon uses a breezy tone to prove she’s unoffended. “The violation in the flower shop or the violation in the motel?”
“The one in the carwash. Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better. Japheth?”
Japheth Solomon (author of In God’s Country, a Mormon bildungsroman-in-progress about a Utah boy escaping to a liberal East Coast college where sex, dope, and a creative writing program provoke existential angst) asks, “What if we can’t decide if a metaphor’s a three or a four?”
“If you can’t decide, Japheth, it’s only a three.”
Maaza Kolofski (Horsehead Nebula, a Utopia about life after a plague destroys every male on earth) raises her hand: “Any holiday assignments, Crispin?”
“Yes. Compose five letters from five leading characters, to yourself. Does everyone know what a letter is?”
“A paper email,” answers Louis Baranquilla (The Creepy Guy in the Yoga Class about a creepy guy in a yoga class). My pre-Internet credentials are an ongoing joke. “What do we put into these letters?”
“Your characters’ potted life histories. Whom or what your characters love and despise. Details on education, employment, finances, political affiliations, social class. Fears. Skeletons in cupboards. Addictions. Biggest regret; believer, agnostic, or atheist. How afraid of dying are they?” I think of Holly, suppress a sigh and push on. “Have they ever seen a corpse? A ghost? Sexuality. Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small? Snazzy or scruffy dressers? It’s a letter, so consider their use of language. Would they say ‘mellifluous’ or ‘a sharp talker’? Foul-mouthed or profanity-averse? Record the phrases they unknowingly overuse. When did they last cry? Can they see another person’s point of view? Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth”—I rap my knuckles on the table—“you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue. Ersilia?”
“Seems …” Ersilia Holt (a thriller named The Icepick Man about Triad gangs versus Taliban cells in Vancouver) scrunches her face, “… kinda deranged, to actually write letters to yourself?”
“Agreed, Ersilia. A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”
My ten postgrads look sober. So they should.
“Art feasts upon its maker,” I tell them.
THE FACULTY STAFF room is empty but for Claude Mo (medievalist, not tenured) and Hilary Zakrewska (linguistics, not tenured either), who are engrossed in the fireside witticisms of Christina Pym-Lavit (head of political science, chair of the Tenure Committee). If their tenure track at Blithewood ends in failure, no other Ivy League college will be offering them a career. Christina Pym-Lavit waves me over. “Pull up a pew, Crispin, I was telling Hilary and Claude about the time I blew a tire while driving John Updike and Aphra Booth to the Iowa workshop, both of whom you knew, I believe?”
“Only ever so slightly,” I say.
“Don’t be coy,” says the Tenured One, but I’m not. I interviewed Updike for The New Yorker back when I was the Wild Child and shifted units in the U.S.A. I haven’t seen Aphra Booth since she threatened me with legal action in Perth, whenever that was. That pile of undergrad assignments back in my office suddenly doesn’t strike me as such an awful prospect, so I make my excuses. “Grading, on the last day of the semester?” exclaims Christina Pym-Lavit. “Would that all the staff were as conscientious, Crispin.” We agree to meet at the Christmas party later, and I head off down the corridor. As a guest lecturer I’m excused the cow’s arse of campus politics, but if I’m offered a full-time position next year, I’ll be burrowing so deep that only my shoes’ll be showing. I’ll need the salary, there’s no doubt about it. Thanks to the “recoupment arrangement” ex-agent Hal negotiated, 75 percent of my ever-dwindling book royalties go to my ex-publishers to repay money I owe. I need a job with accommodation attached, too. I’ve kept the Hampstead house, just, but it’s in the hands of a letting agent. I use the rent to pay alimony to Zoë. Alimony that Zoë refused point-blank to renegotiate: “Just because you got a Spanish girlfriend pregnant? Seriously, Crispin—why would I?” Carmen hasn’t gone all legal on me, but child care costs an arm and a couple of legs even in Spain.
“Who da’ man?” Inigo Wilderhoff clatters down the stairs with a mighty suitcase and his anchorman teeth flashing white. “I directed your friend to your office, just a minute ago.”
I stop. “My friend?”
“Your friend from England.”
“Did he give a name?”
Inigo strokes his professorial beard. “Do you know, I don’t believe he did. Fiftyish. Tall. An eye patch. My taxi’s waiting outside, I gotta fly. Enjoy tonight’s party for me. Au revoir till January.” I manage a “Take care,” but Inigo Wilderhoff’s suitcase is already thwack-thwack-thwacking down the steps.
An eye patch? A one-eyed man.
Calm down. Calm down.
MY OFFICE DOOR is ajar. Our secretary is nowhere to be seen—security is lax at Blithewood College, two miles from the nearest town. In I peer … Nobody. Probably a mature student with corrective glasses who sounded a bit British to Wilderhoff, wanting a book signed for eBay. He’ll have seen I’m out and gone for a tactful wander until my surgery hour at three P.M. Much relieved, I walk over to my desk.
“The door was open, Crispin.”
I yelp, twist, knocking clutter from my desk onto the floor. A man is standing by my bookshelves. With an eye patch.
Richard Cheeseman stands still. “Quite an entrance.”
“Richard! You scared the sodding shit out of me.”
“Well, pardon me for scaring the sodding shit out of you.”
We ought to be clapping each other’s back, but I just gape. Richard Cheeseman’s flab had melted away after a month of Latin American prison diet, but his civilian clothes accentuate how hard, gnarled, and leathered he’s become. That eye patch—when did that happen?—gives him the air of an Israeli general. “I—I was all set to see you in Bradford after Christmas. I’ve arranged it with Maggie.”
“Then it looks like I’ve saved you a trip.”
“If I’d known you were coming here, I’d have …”
“Laid on champagne, a brass band? Not my style.”
“So”—I try to smile—“to what do I owe this pleasure?”
Richard Cheeseman sighs and bites at a hangnail. “Back in the Penitenciaría, one method of slaying minutes was to plan my first trip to New York as a free man. The tinier the details, the more minutes my reverie would kill, you see. I used to refine my plans, night after night. So, when I found myself unable to face a family Christmas at Maggie’s, full of jollity, pity, Christmas TV specials, then, naturally, New York was where I f
led. And once there, what could be more appropriate than a ride up the Hudson Line to see the leading light, the chiefest friend of the Friends of Richard Cheeseman, Crispin Hershey?”
“The Friends of Richard Cheeseman was the least I could do.”
His stare says, The very fucking least you could do.
I try to delay what I dread is coming. “Did you damage your eye in a fight, Richard?”
“No, no, not a knife fight, nothing so Shawshank Redemption. It was a spark from a welding torch on my very last day as a prisoner in Yorkshire. The doctor says the patch can come off in a week.”
“Good.” The framed photo of Gabriel is on the floor. I pick it up, and my visitor remarks, with sinister levity, “That’s your son?”
“Yes. Gabriel Joseph. After Garcia Marquéz and Conrad.”
“May your son be blessed with friends as true as mine.”
He knows. He’s worked it out. He’s here for payback.
“Must be tough,” remarks Cheeseman. “You here, him in Spain.”
“It’s less than ideal,” I try to sound casual, “but Carmen has family in Madrid, so she’s not alone. She’d been told she couldn’t have children, you see, so for her, Gabriel was a minor miracle. Well, a major one. We were no longer an item by that point, but she was determined to go through with the pregnancy and”—I reposition Gabriel next to my sticky-tape dispenser—“he’s the fruit of her labor. Won’t you sit down? I could scare up a shot of brandy to celebrate …”
“What—to celebrate my four wasted years in prison?”