Enoch's Folly

Kristian stuck his hands in his pockets and looked away from the statue and his two companions. “Sam stood on the deck as it all went down too. I guess he was right about musicians from Colne.”

  “Are you alright young man?”

  “Never better, Mr Watson. Never better.”

  He looked at his watch. “Let’s head back.”

  Rosti was waiting outside on crutches, his bag sitting on the sidewalk. He was smiling, and without a hat.

  “Nice day for a walk huh?”

  “Mr Rosti!” Watson exclaimed. “How are you feeling? How’s the leg?”

  “I can’t feel a thing. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m high, Mr Watson. Next stop, the big city. The Big Smoke. The Big Apple. Let’s get in that truck of yours and drive east. Wagons east, dear friends, back to where it all began.”

  Kristian noticed Rosti had shaved for the first time in days. The man’s face positively glowed.

  “Did I ask if you’ve got people there?”

  “You didn’t. My brother was in New Jersey, he went there about a thousand years ago to play minor league… We kind of lost touch. I’ll look him up if I can, but if I can’t it’s ok. For the past eight years or so Mr Watson has been my family, and he’s coming too.”

  Kristian picked up Rosti’s bag. This is fucking ridiculous, he thought. What work will these two find? Hatfield, at least, can tutor or something. He was sure she had reference letters in that bag of hers, lovingly preserved. He felt sick. We carry our lives around in our heads, and in writing if we can. We carry memories of what we’ve lost, and dreams of a future that won’t happen. When we’re kids, the future in our heads is so close we can reach out and touch it; As we get older, it gets further and further away. The conversation between Kristian’s three passengers faded into a murmur as he focussed on his thoughts. He tried to remember what his dream had been but nothing came to mind. He did well not to laugh aloud. Whatever it was, it hadn’t come true. Did it matter? Would it have helped? Helped what? Hard evidence was not required - the sense of things having gone wrong was enough to push someone in to despair. He was barely aware of driving as they left the outskirts of the town. The three of them chatted happily, not one of them raising the question of the point of the journey, or the inevitable separation from each other and reunion with hopelessness on arrival. Hopelessness and pointlessness were essentially the same thing. If there is no point, then hope is meaningless – non-existent. Whatever it is you hope for, even if you get it, is worth nothing. Kristian reflected that the platitude ‘where there is life, there is hope’, if it rang true at all, would be equally true in reverse. He concluded that hope was empty, and life a series of caricatures of the search for meaning, staggering towards an inevitable end.

  Kristian had tuned out the conversation around him, first down to a low murmur, then to nothing. It was a trick he learned very young, made necessary by the occasions on which his obsessive observation of detail became nauseating. He found himself angry at Mrs Hatfield for no reason, and it sickened him further. He wanted her to be happy. He wanted Watson and Rosti to be happy. He thought they might be, somehow, that they’d find a universe that suited them like the one they had in Paradise. The rail stop was bound to close soon anyway, Kristian was sure Rosti and Watson had known it, and they’d decided to give themselves an impression of choice, the sensation of control, by leaving on their own terms. Sometimes the sensation is enough. Sometimes? Most of the time. Most people are satisfied with thinking they have choices. But Hatfield? She didn’t want to be happy. She carried her sorrow around in her like a treasure, jealously guarded. The pursuit of happiness was put up there alongside life and liberty, but what was it really? The thinking person can’t be happy – not for long, Kristian was convinced of that. The great emptiness ahead would give him the space he needed to further talk himself out of the human condition. He focussed on the horizon, razor sharp between the white sky and surrendering earth.

  *

  Robert was working. Not writing, not researching, but really working. As a kid all he had wanted was to get away from the farm with all its repetitive, simple work and explore the world of ideas. Now he couldn’t stand writing, or trying to write, and was sickened by newspapers and journals and even any non-fiction book started. The human body wasn’t designed to sit down for ten hours a day, and the human brain wasn’t designed to soak itself in data, dead information – radically distinct from real knowledge. Robert was working – fixing, building, stacking. The kind of work that forces you to fill your lungs consciously. For the first time in a while, he was happy. Chen approached him when he stopped for a drink.

  “I have a message for you from Comely.”

  Chen handed him a note. Robert put it in his pocket without reading it.

  “That’s a bit weird isn’t it – he could have called the office. Or…” He stopped. “Mr Chen,” he started again.

  Chen looked about 20 but might have been in his early 30s, he was about 5’9” and strongly built.

  “It’s funny. The people who know me call me Chen. Anyone who doesn’t know me, but sees my name written down, calls me Mr Wei, because they think Wei is my family name. But not you Robert. You call me Mr Chen. You and the boss. He’s always called me Mr Chen, even the first time we met. You know, I’m pretty sure he called me Mr Chen before I even introduced myself. He’s that kind of guy though, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what kind of guy he is. Things are getting a bit strange, don’t you think? A bit unpredictable.”

  Chen smiled at him impassively.

  Robert put his cooler down. “You carry a piece for Comely. You’d kill for him, and probably take a bullet too. Is it worth it?”

  Chen kept smiling. “You know what my grandfather did? He built the railways, the great American project. He died out there too, half starved. My father was born in the old country but they came over here when he was a baby. After my grandfather died, they came to this city and worked up enough money to start a little restaurant. I worked there washing dishes. One night, when I was maybe twelve, I went out the back into the alleyway for a cigarette.”

  “You were twelve?”

  “Everybody smoked. So, there I was. Maybe the glowing ash attracted them. Three white guys came down the alley and beat the shit out of me. They didn’t rob me, they didn’t try to go through the back door – they didn’t ask anything of me. They just beat the shit out of me. I think they were in our street for the brothel, and I was just… a bit of fun on the side. I got a good look at their faces – they were smiling and making jokes. The next day I could barely walk because they had kicked me in the ribs so much, but I worked again. This young guy, looks kind of Italian, comes in. And it’s funny right because Little Italy and China Town are right next to each other but no white guys ever came into our place back then. So he comes in, and he starts speaking Cantonese to my mother like he grew up in her home town. He ordered his meal, and I was there staring at him from inside the kitchen. He asked about me, my mother told him what happened, but didn’t mention that I had been smoking. After he finished his dinner, he left. I was scared to go out for a smoke that night – but there was a knock on the back door. I asked my older brother to open it and I stood behind it holding a hammer. A hammer – no joke. And it was our guest. He asked to speak to me and I stepped out to see him. He asked me about the three guys who attacked me – to describe them, everything I remember – their clothes too, and anything they said. Their accents. He just stood there and listened. Sometimes he nodded. When I was done he said I had a good memory, and told me to take care. About five or six days later he comes by, and tells me that from now on the only thing I should be scared of on my cigarette breaks is the cigarettes. I was a kid, but I was smart enough not to ask what happened to those guys. You know something, before that our place had been robbed twice, and had our windows smashed maybe five times, in two years. It’s been twelve years since and no one has even littered out front. Later on I tracked Comel
y down and asked to work for him. So here I am. And you ask me if it’s worth it?”

  “Everybody’s got a story,” Robert said.

  “What’s yours going to be, Mr Harte?”

  Chen walked away before he could get an answer.

  Robert read the note.

  That night, he met Comely at a bar he didn’t know. Comely, it turned out, didn’t know it either.

  Robert arrived early and Comely was already there, sitting with his back to the door and talking to the barman about baseball. Robert was standing a yard behind Comely and about to clear his throat and interrupt when Comely said “my friend will have a spiced rum” and turned around. “Hello Bob.” Comely was holding a beer and smiled strangely.

  “Thanks.” Robert sat down.

  “David here used to play catcher for the Skeeters. They had some players back then.” He turned back to David.

  “You know when I was a kid I tried to play a game called cricket, and I could pitch – you pitch with a straight arm - but my batting was terrible. Turned out I was colour blind, and it’s played with a red ball on a grass field! I couldn’t see the damn thing. It was after that I started playing baseball.”

  David laughed. “No kidding!”

  Comely turned to Robert and drank from his beer.

  “How about you Bob? Baseball man? Or a cricket man?”

  “Cricket – they only play that in England.”

  “And India. And Australia. And the Caribbean too. And New Zealand. It’s a British Empire sport, old boy. That’s why it never caught on here. That and maybe we’ve got a lot of colour blind people here.”

  David laughed.

  “So where did you play it?”

  “On a grass field.”

  Robert would have to be satisfied with that. Finding out Comely was colour blind was enough for the time being.

  David disappeared to serve another patron.

  “Robert, I hope you didn’t mind me calling you Bob.” He set his beer down. “I’ve had about eight of these waiting for you.”

  “I was early.”

  “Well, I was very early. But don’t worry about it. In Russia, beer isn’t even considered alcohol.”

  “What is this place? I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “Neither had I. I like it though. Listen, Robert… The thing is – you need to get out of here. Things are… You know, I know you can take care of yourself, but things are going to get really ugly. Uglier that they might get where you were supposed to be heading. I can’t in good conscience put your head on the block, and that’s not even a metaphor now. Or your girl, for that matter. But listen – I’ll sort out some severance pay, and don’t say no, because you will need it, and the two of you should beat it, at least for a while.”

  “You can stop this, can’t you? I mean – you can stop him.”

  Comely grinned and swigged from his beer again. “I can’t fucking find him, Robert. Do you understand? I can find anything and anyone, but not him. I’ve become one of those baseball players who play one season too many, and now… now I can’t even see a white ball these days.” He put his beer down hard.

  Robert wanted to get Comely out of the bar and somewhere safe before he had more to drink.

  “So I leave, but what about everyone else? Everyone connected to you? Viroslav, Johnson, Chen, Rudkus - what about that kid, that serious little kid, Arturo?”

  Comely swayed. “I’ll do what I can to protect everybody.”

  Robert took his arm and led him toward the door. Comely slipped out of his grip with ease. “Robert, it would be impolite for me to leave without saying goodbye or, indeed, paying my tab.”

  Comely chatted with David and settled the account.

  “I’ll definitely visit here again,” he told Robert as they walked out of the place.

  Outside, traffic was humming through the streets, honking and breaking. The sidewalk was busy too, which meant Robert didn’t see the man holding a gun until he was right in front of them with a clear shot lined up.

  Comely moved fast, faster than Robert could have imagined, and flipped the man onto the kerb with an indifferent kind of violence, like he was breaking up ice in a sack. The man was screaming in a weird, unnatural way and clutching his hand… Robert felt the colour drain from his face. The man held one hand in the other and blood rushed through his fingers, he struggled to get to his feet and sprawled over. He took his good hand away to push himself up off the ground and Robert saw the man’s injured hand, now gushing blood, was missing the thumb and index finger. The gun was gone, no, Robert looked again, it was in Comely’s hand, and he saw a drop of blood on Comely’s shirt cuff. His straight razor was already folded shut, and he slipped it into his pocket.

  “Jesus Christ.” Robert heard himself whisper.

  “No more shooting.” Comely said quietly, flipping the revolver open and spilling the remaining bullets into a storm drain before holding it by the barrel and smashing it to pieces on the kerb. He turned to Robert.

  “The man needs a doctor. Go to a telephone booth and call him one,” he said, flipping Robert a coin and slipping away without another word.

  That night Robert resolved to leave town for a long time.

  Comely found himself wanting to do the same, but settled instead for a short trip to Winsted.

  *

  When Nando Hammett was twelve years old the short down on his face, long barely visible, began to turn black. He wasn’t sure who to blame for this. His mother’s mother’s hair was jet black, but the men on that side of the family could barely grow beards – so he was told. In the two photographs of his father that he’d seen Francis ‘Frank’ Hammett had a moustache but light hair. He had one faded picture of his maternal grandfather Evo, who was cleanshaven.

  The black down didn’t attract as much attention in his class as it would have in other neighbourhoods, but it bothered him. His mother had always meticulously dressed and groomed him for any public appearance, particularly school. She knew what ‘people’ said about single mothers, and strove to wash away the stigma of his father’s absence. Frank Hammett had departed without a word, leaving no clue as to his demons apart from a single glass vial Rida had peered at for minutes before hurling to the floor.

  Nando thought the black down looked like dirt, and had procured a safety razor and soap and removed it as best he could. The results were messy, but after the initial bloody gardening, he got the hang of it. Every week he carefully removed the now bristling whiskers. By the time he was fifteen, he shaved every third day.

  Nando stared into the mirror, studying the clues in his face. There was a hint of his father, slightly more of his mother, but mostly it was a mystery; A mixture of European and native ancestors he could only guess at. He held the brush in his hand, allowing the water in it to grow cold. The mug continued to steam on the edge of the basin. He was already on target to be late.

  “I am not American.”

  Nando was convinced his features would scream it the moment he walked through the door.

  Victoria was holding a party for her sixteenth.

  “Why?” he had asked her. “You hate people.”

  She laughed, and didn’t deny it. “It’s just one of those things we have to do,” she’d eventually answered.

  “No. Respiration. Working for a living. Those are the things we have to do. Well, you don’t have to work for a living – but my point is, throwing parties doesn’t fall into that category.”

  Victoria was irate.

  “You throw my class in my face like it’s an offence I committed.”

  And that was the end of any discussion of why she would hold a party.

  Nando rarely thought about his birthdays. As a child his mother wouldn’t say anything in the lead up to them, but would always – always – make the day itself something special. Something involving just the two of them during the day, like a zoo picnic or a live show, then a grand dinner at home with a handful of c
lose neighbourhood friends. For his fifteenth, he’d gone to a jazz cellar with two slightly older friends. It was the first time the tradition was broken. They didn’t really talk about it, but they knew there would probably be no turning back.

  He finished shaving and put on his Sunday best. He imagined his attire would be thought old fashioned, too earnest, but he knew, at least, he wouldn’t be embarrassed by it.

  “Fuck them.” He thought. He remembered the football game. He wondered if Victoria wanted him to look like a foreign kid ‘with dirt under his fingernails’. Nando realised that maybe you should give someone the benefit of the doubt when you’re starting to think you’re in love with them.

  He decided he wouldn’t drink. Maybe there’d be a champagne toast at some stage, but other than that – not a drop. He needed to be sharp. He’d gotten drunk with Victoria before. She would be a few glasses in and on the floor laughing, next moment she’d snap back into sobriety – analytical, precise, dissecting. Despite all the judgemental freaks Nando imagined would be congregated in that mansion, he knew Victoria would remain the most dangerous person at the party.

  Rida knew that the party wasn’t at “some friend’s” house the moment Nando had used the phrase. She knocked on the bathroom door, something she never did.

  “You don’t want to be late Nando. Not for this.”

  “Relax ma.”

  “She probably wanted you to get there early to help set up.”

  He could tell his mother was still outside the door, awaiting an answer, but he said nothing. A girl and her boyfriend setting up before her party was something normal people did. Mortal people. Victoria’s parents would have hired professionals for that kind of thing, and the idea made him feel slightly ill. It was another planet, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he could no longer breathe in its atmosphere.