Thirty years later, he watched Mark suddenly start shaking his head as he played with some small toy and realized his son was experiencing the same thing. If Mark got up to walk then, he'd topple uncertainly, as if having difficulty balancing on those tiny, distant feet: a feeling Paul remembered well.
Since micropsia was one symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, he and Janet had taken Mark for EEGs and CAT scans, but nothing definitive had ever shown up—no unusual spikes on the EEG, no sign of dark, mysterious structural abnormalities on the CAT scan. Definitely a mixed relief for parents wanting a name and a cure for whatever it was that tormented their child.
But the micropsia was only a signal, the beginning of what might be hours or days of altered behavior, when Mark would be sullen, uncooperative, unpredictable. Withdrawal, long periods of immobility with some toy forgotten in his slack hand. Reversion to infantile behaviors: nagging whines or imperious shrieks, throwing things, arching and flailing. They couldn't send him to school when he was in one of these periods, and though he was an exceptionally bright child, his academic progress suffered. As did his social development.
Some seizure activity occurs deep in the brain, the neurologists told them, and wouldn't necessarily show up on an EEG. On the assumption that Mark had some undetectable activity, they'd given him antiepi-leptic clonazepam, but it had little effect on the symptoms. And neither Mark nor Paul could endure the side effects of drowsiness, torpidity, disorientation. After the fifth drug had done no better, Paul had insisted that they try alternative therapies.
The key, Paul felt, would have to be conscious acts on Mark's part. He needed to sense in himself the beginning of the slide, and resist. Once in the state, he needed to let his parents or teachers know, and find ways to get out of it. Talking did nothing to help; what seemed to work best were activities that reached Mark through other senses: massage, structured play with brightly colored blocks, interactive drawing, and large-muscle kinetic activity like dancing together or walks outdoors—anything that countered the tendency to focus on little things and the effect of anxiety and isolation. Mark's taking an intentional role in governing his own mental state was not only his best hope in combating the seizures; it was essential to his sense of self, a way to assert that he had some control over his life.
Vivien listened intently, and in a doorway light she stopped him to look sharply into his eyes. "Do you know the most fascinating aspect of what you've told me? That your response has been so like Ben's, when he was wrestling with your various conditions. The role of conscious, intentional behaviors. Self-observation and self-discipline. That marvelous faith in reason. That marvelous arrogance again."
"I suppose so," Paul admitted.
"You say that rather grudgingly."
"It's just that I'm not always and exclusively grateful for some of the long-term effects of Ben's training. I hate the thought that I'm visiting the same sins on my own son."
Vivien's eyes glinted. A greedy light. He regretted letting her see this much of his feelings toward Ben. The knowledge was something she'd salt away, hoard. To what end? He smoothed his mustache and eyebrows with a flick of his free hand. "Do you remember all of his treatments?" Vivien turned and began to walk again. Muffled in the fog, the sounds of the city were faint, just their footsteps and the occasional hoot of foghorns from ships on the bay. Behind them, another pedestrian had appeared on the otherwise empty street.
"For the Tourette's. Not for the earlier stuff."
"I ask because, your resentment notwithstanding, I recall he felt he'd found some very effective ways to help you when the medical community could do nothing. He wrote to me about it in great detail. It is too long ago for me to recall the specifics, but perhaps among my letters—" She let the thought hang. Even in the darkness, he could see her lips draw down. "That is, if any of them are recoverable."
At the thought of a cure for Mark, Paul's hopes leapt. He coughed, trying to conceal the desperate interest she'd certainly perceive in his voice or his face. He'd be sorting through the letters soon enough. And, with or without her approval, be looking at them very closely.
Several blocks ahead, Paul was relieved to see a brighter cross street, mist-blurred, and the occasional passing car. He knew San Francisco fairly well, knew they were heading generally in the right direction. But in the fog, after the wine, he felt disoriented, not sure where they were. He glanced back to see the bulky shadow of the person behind them, closer now. A sudden tic caused his hand to rise and ring an invisible bell.
"You do realize," Vivien went on, "that in your prognosis for Mark you have set up a rather classical equation? The hidden, unconscious, 'animal' processes of mind on one hand, the conscious, intentional 'human' self on the other. All sorts of lovely resonances!"
"I hadn't seen it in such exalted terms. I'm just trying to give my son a chance for a normal life."
"In any case, I think you are wise to take the prognostications of the medical experts with a grain of salt," Vivien said. "There is a great deal we don't know about ourselves." She laughed humorlessly, a dry cackle.
They made it to the cross street, and as they turned Paul glanced down the street they'd just come from. Their fellow traveler had vanished.
Again Vivien steered him, turning toward a bench. "Do you mind if we sit, Paulie? I'm afraid I'm not used to so much exercise."
Paul sat next to her. A few cars passed, occupants invisible. The fatigue of the long day began to catch up with him.
"I understand you are no longer with Mark's mother," Vivien was saying.
"Janet and I separated three years ago and finalized our divorce two years ago. I'm living with a wonderful woman named Lia McLean."
"Mmm. My, how lightly your generation seems to take such things.
Tell me: How does Mark get along with your—what is the term nowadays?—significant other?"
"There've been a few minor adjustment problems, but she and Mark generally do just fine together."
"And you feel that Lia is a better match for you than Janet?"
Her voice had become brittle, full of veiled accusation—issues of marriage were obviously something to avoid with Vivien. He wondered if her own divorce had anything to do with her attitudes. And their conversation had begun to resemble an interrogation again. Still, he found himself liking her for her outspoken curiosity, which seemed to invite the same in return. "Frankly, yes," he said. "But now I think it's your turn, since we're being reciprocal. Royce—tell me about him."
"I am not in communication with him."
"Your choice or his?"
"I'm not sure it was anyone's choice. Royce found me a difficult mother, I found him a difficult son. Perhaps it is because we're similar people."
"How so?"
Vivien tilted her head and gazed at him. "Similar outlooks on life, perhaps. Or similar disappointments with ourselves—and therefore with each other."
"I'm not sure I understand."
"For many years, when Royce was a boy, I was a victim of what I call Rimbaud's disease. A term your father coined, actually. After Rimbaud, the French Symbolist poet. Are you familiar with him?"
"I've read his Illuminations. I don't think I understand it that well."
"He was brilliant, a prodigy. By the time he was seventeen, he was acknowledged as a genius who had changed the world of poetry forever.
Then, when he was twenty, he gave it up. Stopped writing. Became rather a rough fellow, ended up running guns in Africa. Died at thirty-seven." "So what's Rimbaud's disease?"
Vivien brought her voice low, as if confiding a treasured secret. "It's what killed him. Not physically—he had cancer. I mean metaphysically. At his deathbed, his sister called in a priest. Rimbaud was in anguish, and the priest sat by the bedside, prepared to administer extreme unction. Do you know what Rimbaud's last words were?"
"No. Sorry."
"'Show me something.' Do you see? He'd exhausted the world! It had nothing left for him. He'd given up poe
try, a life of literary celebrity, and had gone on an increasingly desperate, violent quest for novelty and sensation—but could not find it anywhere. 'Show me something.' The most terrible death of all!"
For a moment Paul could see it in her face, just below the mask of pride and command: desolation, emptiness. A disappointment on the deepest level: Life has no meaning. Nothing is real enough. There is no purpose.
"But you aren't dead," he said.
"No. I have escaped. At least so far. I have certain pleasures to sustain myself with. In any event, I'm afraid dear Royce caught some of that dread disease from me. It's no wonder that he needs to keep his distance, or that he harbors less than fond feelings for his mother."
A thought occurred to him: "Do you think it was Rimbaud's disease that killed my father?" he asked.
Vivien looked at him shrewdly. Again, she seemed to save away whatever she gleaned from his question. "I can't answer that for you. Perhaps if you encounter more of his letters as you're sorting my things, you'll find an answer for that as well. Certainly Ben loved to ponder such metaphysical questions and to write letters about them. You may be surprised to find how much you have in common with your father." She observed his reaction with a small upturn at the corners of her mouth, her eyes steady on his. "Or, if I understand your predicament correctly, you might be relieved that you have so little in common with him."
They had taken another turn, a short block between commercial streets, lit by angry orange vapor lights, the curb lined with trash cans and glistening plastic garbage bags. Abruptly a shape rose up in front of them and stood, blocking the sidewalk.
"What the fuck?" Paul said. Absurdly, his first feeling was embarrassment for using profanity in front of Vivien.
"Indeed," the man said. He was bearded, big, dressed in layered rags. Paul pulled Vivien to the left, to walk around him, but the man moved to block them. Vivien recoiled, disengaging her arm and falling behind Paul. Paul was glad to have both hands free. He stood facing the man, appraising him. Tall, beard and hair matted, face dirty. Hands out and forward, ready.
"Stand and deliver," the man said. "Your purses or your lives." There was a crazed pleasure in his face. Only in San Francisco, Paul thought, Years of LSD and who knows what else. A mugger who inhabits a private world, who fancies himself a highwayman of old England. A nutcase. The thought did nothing to reassure him.
"Leave us alone," Paul told him.
Suddenly the man rushed forward, his gap-toothed mouth open in a joyful rage, and Paul had no choice but to meet his charge. The mugger's weight hit him and he fell backward, hard against a lamppost. The stinking beard was in his face, and then Paul's head rocked as a punch nearly crushed his cheek. The next punch hit him in his Adam's apple, and an explosion of pain burst in his windpipe, gagging him.
The pain seemed to wake Paul up. He broke free of the mugger's grip, ducked another punch, hit him with an uppercut, felt the shock of impact in the bones of his hand. He swung him by the rags on his shoulders, hurtling him with all his strength into an iron railing. The mugger hit hard, fell, was up immediately. The look of joy was gone, replaced by a glowering anger. A trickle of blood ran down from a cut on his cheek.
A knife appeared in his hand, long and very thin, sparking in the orange light. And then he was lunging at Paul, the knife moving almost too fast to see, up and under, going for the soft places below his rib cage. Paul dodged backward, avoided the blade, avoided a counter-slash, almost feeling the parting of his own flesh, the burning blade in his guts. His veins surged with adrenaline, a toxic mix of fear and anger.
As the mugger came on again, Paul's hands found a steel trash can and swung it suddenly up at the snarling face. It was a lucky blow, hitting the arms, sending the knife spinning away into the fog. The can upended, spewed garbage.
Paul picked up another can, swung again, connected solidly, followed up, shoving it at him, knocking him down. The mugger fell onto his back, head cracking the sidewalk, and Paul was on him immediately, putting one foot on his neck as he gulped for air.
"Mother/wcfeer/" Paul said, panting. "Fucking screwball nutcase!" Pain throbbed in his cheek and his outrage flared. He felt an urge to stomp the guy's throat but checked it in time. Anyway, the bearded face that stared up at him was full of fear now, as if staring through a crack in the stage set of his Robin Hood world. The scariest sight of all, Paul thought: the reality we deny every day of our lives. Poor son of a bitch.
He settled for a token kick in the ribs, just a reminder, then glanced back to Vivien, trying to catch his breath. "You all right?"
"I—I think so," she said. She stared in unabashed fascination at the mugger as he moved tentatively on the littered sidewalk. "Oughtn't we call someone, or whatever one does under such circumstances?"
Paul glanced up and down the empty street. He didn't like the idea of Vivien walking on her own to find a phone, and he couldn't leave her with this twisted fuck. "If we can find a phone."
The mugger was up and gone by the time they reached the end of the block. Knowing it was pointless, Paul called the police from a pay phone, gave them a description: big, bearded, crazy. It was dark, Officer, foggy—there wasn't much time.
He hung up and turned back to Vivien, who had waited, leaning against a wall, hugging her arms to her chest against the cold, observing him with a disconcerting intensity. His own hands were still shaking, but she seemed to have recovered completely. In fact she looked refreshed, almost pleased. Of course, he thought: The evening's excitement was a nice short-term respite from Rimbaud's disease.
When they reached the brightly lit portico of the hotel, she paused, arched one ironic eyebrow at Paul. "Thank you for a most stimulating evening," she said. "What is the expression? 'You certainly know how to show a girl a good time.'"
14
PAUL SPREAD HIS NOTES AND photos under the spotlight of Vivien's desk lamp. When she'd inspected each one closely, she clasped her hands in her lap, listening to him passively. Although she'd been confrontational all evening, the sight of the damaged house seemed to wound her. She'd poured them wine again when they sat down—maybe it was beginning to get to her.
Despite his growing fatigue and the bruises he'd gotten in the fight, he plugged ahead, outlining his plans. First, get the house closed off against the weather, then subcontract out the repair of the main systems—electricity, heat, plumbing. Install a permanent, lockable gate at the bottom of the driveway. Inside the house, her papers would be the first priority. Paul would set up a temporary heater in the smoking room, sort Vivien's papers, get them safely stored. Then begin work on the monumental task of sorting the rest of her belongings, disposing of them or taking them for repair as needed.
Paul handed her one of the estimates he'd prepared. "This is just for the short term, basic repairs. Bear in mind, my estimates for subcontracting costs are very rough and could go a lot higher. But my own work won't exceed these numbers. So, for closing off the house and putting your belongings into basic order, I expect I'll need four weeks, about four thousand dollars. Subcontracting and materials expenses come to around ten thousand, which I'll need in hand before I begin. I also need two weeks' advance pay for me—say two thousand." He slid several sheets across to her. "This is a personal-services contract between you and me, based on the estimate. There's a copy for each of us, and I've also made a copy for your insurance company. They should also get notice soon, since they'll want to look the place over before I start."
"Insurance!" Vivien laughed darkly. "What a lovely, sensible idea! I have no insurance. I stopped paying those crooks ten years ago when they doubled my premiums for the third year in a row. No, this will be coming out of my pocket—which I hope you'll remember when you are billing me. Fourteen thousand—that's a lot of money."
"That's just for the first phase. A rough estimate for the longer term work might be $50,000 to $100,000. It'll depend on your decisions: Do you want to pay to have paintings professionally restored, or for tax
idermy? How far are you willing to go to repair your furniture, clothes? And some things won't be repairable—how much will you choose to replace at value?"
She digested it all in silence for a time. "Very well. I'll expect you to keep costs down wherever possible. After the first phase, I'll look for a more accurate estimate, and we can decide at that time about the rest of it." She found a pen and signed the contracts with a jagged signature. Her movements were listless, careless. Paul wondered if it was the shock of seeing the house, or the attack, or the cumulative effect of the wine they'd drunk.
"One other expenditure you should consider," Paul said, folding his copy of the contract, "is a security system. Until you've got one installed, the house just isn't safe. In the short term, while we're doing repairs, I'll camp out in the carriage house. At least until the gate is up. I expect to be working long hours anyway—it'll save me money and commuting time."
"I'd be very grateful. But why not sleep in the house?"
"The carriage house is in much better shape. I can set right up. I won't get in my own way."
"You're not afraid of ghosts, are you?" She was rallying already, finding a way to goad him.
"The idea of ghosts hasn't figured large in my planning."
"Perhaps presences is a better term. Forces. But you don't believe in ghosts?"
"I'm really not sure—"
"Maybe spending time at Highwood will help you make up your mind." A cunning voice.
Paul had to smile. Suddenly the pattern of it came clear to him. "My sister warned me that you enjoy being difficult," he said.
"Is that what I enjoy."
"Maybe I should say you enjoy challenging people, provoking them.
Surprising them. I think you're asking to be challenged and provoked in return. Asking to be surprised. Maybe you're still not entirely free of Rimbaud's disease."
She looked at him, pleased. "I didn't claim I was free of it. Only that it hadn't killed me yet. But yes, you're correct. Very insightful. Your father understood that about me also."