Читать книгу And Sons - David Gilbert - Страница 13

LET’S NOW TURN to the second son, Jamie Dyer, sitting in a rented Honda Odyssey parked across the street from the Riverbank Cemetery in Stowe, Vermont. It was two in the morning, the temperature outside in the twenties. Jamie sat there and waited—I can picture him, sitting perfectly still, beyond still, pretending to be a lizard-like creature either on the hide or on the hunt, that motivation forever uncertain. I am nothing, he thought. Nobody sees me. He sat there and he waited and after some minutes he broke the pose and lit a joint. Because of his fondness for marijuana people assumed Jamie was a relaxed individual, one of those semiprofessional stoners in high school and college and beyond, but in reality he was often anxious, not in ways fearful or troubled, certainly not neurotic, but more like a juggler with too many thoughts tumbling through the air. Most of those thoughts tended toward the innocuous yet deeply felt, in the realm of I should learn how to fly an airplane, or I should run a marathon next year, or I should really pick up the guitar again, which he had only played for six months in seventh grade, but a few of those thoughts were machete-sharp, as in issues of personal worth and failed promise—oh man, that was a buzzing chain saw—but after a cleansing hit of dope a small pure sense of self seemed to open up—here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the man you’ve been waiting for—and Jamie settled onto the stage, the minivan’s dash his footlights. All of those previous doubts were reduced down into brief soliloquy: I am me. Three hits quelled him, the fourth he wisely denied. After all, there was hard work to be done tonight. The windshield carried the grimy aftereffects of snow, the wiper blades describing an arc similar to an open book, with this chapter landing on a full moon, a cemetery, a quiet country road, a setting evocative of madmen and axes. Jamie lowered his eyes to the navigation screen. He imagined a dot creeping up from behind, a crazed bloody dot dragging its left foot. Jamie locked the doors. He smiled. For distraction and fun, he pushed the button on the steering wheel and asked the minivan for the nearest Friendly’s. In seconds a Friendly’s popped up ten miles away. Maybe afterward he’d have a burger. “Nearest ATM?” There were four within two miles. He pushed the button once more. “Tell me, O muse, what the fuck am I doing here?” The computer asked him to restate the question. “Never mind,” he said.

Evidently there were four never-minds in the state of Vermont.

Since yesterday the minivan had doubled as Jamie’s temporary home. It was a rather comfortable nest, even if this morning a layer of frost covered the inside: an ice palace of his own breath, he reckoned, pleased that this metaphor from Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men mingled with his own life (despite Dennis Dormin’s fate). Jamie scraped the glass with his fingernail and wrote his name, just like Dennis did. It’s a small moment in the book, and a lesser writer would have wrung the image of every sniff and snore, but A. N. Dyer simply let the scene play, with Dennis late for work and waiting and waiting—“Goddamn it!”—waiting for those vents to defrost the despair of last night. It was a lovely bit of writing, Jamie recalled, as he watched the physical record of his sleep melt under that rising Vermont sun. He wondered which of those drips belonged to his dreams and which belonged to his father.

“I need to see you.” That’s what Dad said on the phone, his voice catching with improbable yet unmistakable emotion, like hearing a middle-of-the-night train whistle in Manhattan. “I need to see you, you and your brother. I want all of us together again, not like old times, of course. I’m not pretending there were old times to be had, though there were more old times than you care to remember, but how about new times, the three of us, you and me and Richard, and Andy, of course, you need to get to know Andy better. He’s a sweet boy, a caring boy, a good boy, hardly a boy anymore but a young man, a young man who needs more family than just me. Whatever happened between you and us and me was hardly his fault.”

“Um …”

“Please.”

“Ahh …”

“Please.”

Unlike his brother, Jamie had constructed a pragmatic relationship with the old man, even if the fix was rather leaky. They talked maybe six times a year, which seemed right for the both of them, and once in a while they shared a meal but always under an air of formality and obligation, as if documents were to be signed after dessert. Maybe Jamie would have preferred a closer bond with his dad—we all have our optative moments—but in his heart he understood that the man was ill-equipped for the task. Being a good and attentive father was neither in his nature nor in his nurture, and that was fine, even a relief as he became older and feebler and there was no reciprocal pressure on Jamie to be a good and attentive son. Jamie didn’t suffer over the relationship, not like Richard. Plus Jamie had his mother. Isabel quite obviously favored her youngest, who was the spitting image of her own adored brothers and a happy reminder of her scrappy male-dominated childhood, right down to her own mannish mother, a swimmer of some renown. Yes, Isabel saw in Jamie a certain charm she admired (whereas Richard just exhausted her) and with this maternal affection securely in pocket, Jamie the boy often preferred his father’s absence, not only as a means to spend more time with Mom, but also as a means to a greater end, which were those novels he admired from an early age, first as mysterious totems with a strange, tangible mass, their smell and touch evocative of stubble and cigarettes, all those words inside with their slow hatchings—d-o-g in Ampersand, h-o-u-s-e in The Bend of Light—until whole paragraphs were born into meaning, their exact significance unclear but the hope of significance present in their cries and squirms, in all those paragraphs and all those pages that pointed both to the future and to the past, the length growing longer as Jamie hit his teens and imagined writing a ten-page term paper fifty times over—what Herculean effort lay bundled in those books, his father’s quiet yet aggravated labor, and when Jamie in his late teens, early twenties, sat down and read all the books, they were better than any bullshit father-son bonding even if he only grasped half of what was being said, which became clearer over subsequent rereadings and opened up deeper understandings and engendered a different kind of awe—how funny and smart his father could be, how human, how moral, even after he carelessly broke Mom’s heart and rubbed all their noses in his bastard namesake, regardless, the books, these amazing books, they spoke to Jamie and he knew they would continue to speak to him, the author a far greater father than the man. Plus the residual fame helped with a certain kind of girl.

“Come and visit, please,” his father said. “I’m feeling … like dust.”

“Like dust?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Um—”

“I’ve never asked for much.”

That’s true, Jamie thought, and you never gave much either. Of all the Dyers, I knew and know Jamie the best. Friendship was imprinted upon us from the start, despite our obvious differences. We were born five months apart (me first) and were nurtured side by side by adoring mothers who embraced their youngest extra tight, though, more important, our nannies were from the same Caribbean island. There are photo albums filled with pictures of Jamie and me in Central Park, at the beach in Southampton, at the zoo holding hands. I was always taller than everyone, until ninth grade, when I stopped growing and soon became the shortest. We matriculated through the same schools in the same years and part of our education was learning that, like our fathers, we could be friends without all the fuss. We were probably closest in fifth grade, when Jamie briefly flirted with my Transformers obsession (I worshipped Megatron), but by upper school it was obvious that he was destined for cooler things, and with each matriculation our relationship became more asymmetrical, so that by the time we finished with Yale our years together had a funhouse-mirror effect. I was the type of student who reinvented himself with each new school, never satisfied with my status as both person and peer. I took the change of environment as an opportunity to fine-tune my persona, until junior year abroad, where I hit upon earnest dilettante and returned from Paris newly found. I graduated from Yale with a degree in English literature, my senior essay focusing on A. N. Dyer and the kidnapping of identity. It received a passing grade. But Jamie was one of those rare exotics who emerged fully formed, without pretense, it seemed. Everything was always possible for him, so why bother changing. From an early age he stood apart as the most striking in any group, man, woman, or child, blessed with perfect skin and mink-brown eyes and a smile that revealed crowded incisors but crowded in a way that Walt Whitman would have celebrated. You might have guessed he had some Cherokee blood. He was the first to swim in the ocean, the first to ride a ten-speed, the first to break his arm. Parents called him wicked, though they all adored him, teachers included. Jamie was the mirror that brought back the most alluring aspects of youth and everybody wanted to see themselves in his glow. A day in his company invariably produced uncalculated adventure: start in Chinatown searching for fireworks and end up in Queens watching a cockfight with three Chinese kids and a Russian switchblader named Stahn. I myself found these adventures exhausting (and always frightening), but for Jamie it was just another Saturday afternoon. Nothing was out of the ordinary, certainly not a cemetery in the middle of the night.

The almost full moon shone against the snow and created a drift of ghostly light. The last time Jamie was here, the trees were doing their best advertisement for autumn in Vermont. He had stood on that hill and watched his old girlfriend, his first real girlfriend, get planted into the ground. It was like Sylvia was a seed and cemeteries were gardens in reverse. Her daughters, Delia and Clover, had painted flowers and butterflies on the coffin, sentiments of I’ll Never Forget You, and I’ll Miss You, and Love and Peace in heartbreaking purple and green, a family portrait done on the lid—the girls, the house, the horses, the dog, Mom and Dad standing hand in hand—the backdrop of Green Mountains rendered by Sylvia herself over the course of a week in August. It seemed a shame to bury such a lovely thing. Nearly everyone was crying as two friends played “We Bid You Goodnight” on mandolin and violin. Delia and Clover leaned against their father like ponytailed two-by-fours holding up an unsteady wall. Jamie tried not to stare. Ed Carne did not like him. Jamie knew this because Ed told him so. “I don’t like you,” he said. “I don’t like you being here, I don’t like what you and Sylvia are doing, but this is her call, and whatever makes her happy, you know.” At 12:01 P.M. Jamie started to film, discreetly, he hoped. The coffin would stand as the final shot.

“Me going into the earth,” Sylvia had said.

“You going into the earth,” Jamie had said.

But here he was, six months later, checking for a sprout.

Jamie sat in the minivan, waiting on Myron Doty, who was late, but who could begrudge a man named Myron Doty, particularly when the man resembled the Myron Doty type, unimagined until the moment of introduction. Myron operated a ski lift in the winter and buried bodies in the summer. “I take ’em up. I take ’em down. I’m cold when they go up and I’m warm when they go down.” Jamie liked Myron, but then again Jamie provided favorable weather conditions for people like Myron to thrive, much like the panhandle of Florida. During our sophomore year I remember when Jamie quit painting (he was quite talented) and picked up a video camera instead. Almost instantly his weekly Sunday night Ecce Homo movies attracted a cult following, the screenings migrating from dorm room to coffee shop to midnight showings at the York on Broadway. His piece on Lord God, the New Haven street preacher/celebrity impersonator, created a minor stir around campus. Was this exploitation of a poor deluded black man or a happy vehicle for creative self-expression? Who knew and who cared, because it was funny and it was real and soon after Jamie found a white actor to play Lord God and he did a shot-for-shot remake and spliced the two together, like a Siamese double feature. More outrage followed—this was Yale, after all—but the movie became a hit on the festival circuit and even won an award at Telluride. For a brief moment Jamie Dyer, filmmaker son of the reclusive novelist, was the school’s most famous undergrad, until an actress took his place. During his senior year Jamie began to investigate the rougher neighborhoods around New Haven in search of similar characters sporting harder truths. He had this vision of a reenacted documentary titled The Pin Tumblers, using a Yale lock as his visual metaphor, but somewhere in the process, maybe when he saw that teenager get stabbed or watched that mother stare at her crying baby, stare without doing anything, something in him shifted, something infinitesimal yet essential—a matter of perspective, I suppose—and whatever life Jamie was trying to capture became stuck in his own head. He started to consider himself a professional witness, a type of superhero bystander, powerless yet unblinking. To me it seemed he was overcompensating for his natural optimism, which he distrusted. The films became darker. Fewer and fewer people attended those Sunday night screenings. I remember once telling him I no longer understood the point.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I just watched ten dogs get euthanized and for what reason?”

“What reason? Maybe because it happens.”

“But to what end? It’s not cathartic, it’s just sad. Toss in some narrative. Interview the ASPCA guy. Give us a sense of his job, his daily routine, his coping in the face of all that death. Denounce the practice. I don’t know, but say something I can hang my hat on.”

“But that’s a lie.”

“No,” I said. “That’s life without the f.”

“I know what you can do with that f.”

“I’m almost serious,” I said.

“Almost, huh? The safety of qualifiers. So what do you suggest, Philip, that we follow this guy home, that we see him make dinner, feed his kids, walk his own dog, see him wake up the next morning and start his day all over again? Is that what you require, oh audience? Because that feels ridiculous to me, feels like a device, a filter, even worse, a manipulation. Should we also follow the dogs on the street, or in their loving homes, humanize them as well? I’m not looking for art here. I want the opposite. I want the world without the person behind the camera constructing the scene. This is how dogs die, period.”

“Charming,” I said, lighting a Gauloises.

Jamie sighed and packed a bowl. “You know that famous photograph from Vietnam, the one of the soldier shooting the guy in the head, like the war photo of all war photos. It was taken by this guy Eddie Adams and he captured the exact moment the trigger was pulled. Boom. These two men, one in profile, in uniform, middle-aged, the other in full view, in casual wear, young—it’s almost like a wayward son meeting his disappointed father—anyway, those two men are forever connected by that bullet. An absolutely iconic image, almost beautiful in its true expression of horror. But do you know there’s a video as well? An NBC News crew filmed the whole thing, from almost the same exact angle, but there’s nothing iconic about that fucking footage, nothing artful about that man getting shot in the head, no innate drama, no archetypal story, just a cap-gun-like snap followed by the guy falling to the ground, a brief fountain of blood spraying from his head. Whatever sense of timelessness is destroyed in four seconds flat. It’s just plain horrible.” Jamie lit the pipe, the act carrying a certain native intensity, as though the smoke told the story of prehistoric man. “Look,” he said, after exhaling, “my goal is to fight that easy art-making instinct. People die. People suffer. This is how they die. This is how they suffer. It’s unspeakably small yet unspeakably big.”

“But the ‘art’ of that photograph is pretty effective,” I offered.

Jamie disagreed. “The ‘art’ of that photograph plays into our voyeuristic inhumanity, to artistically empathize with the horror, to transfer all our own dread into the image, turning a person’s death into a personal metaphor.”

Despite the college-worn earnestness, I did understand the motivation: the almost incandescent urge for the dreadful thing. When you are a decent person and you have grown up safe and comfortable, with parents who themselves have grown up safe and comfortable, in New York, no less, the Upper East Side of New York, no less, you often find yourself admiring the poor and desperate as if they are somehow more honest, more legitimate, than your tribe, Buddhists to your Capitalists, and you want to prove yourself conscious with a capital C by dipping into hardship—lower—into degradation—lower—into self-abasement. There is liberal guilt and there is liberal sin, where you go slumming, the most cheerful of vagrants. I know I was guilty of this. The stories I wrote in my creative writing classes always gravitated toward seedy locales, dive bars and trailer parks, with low-down folk in the dirtiest of circumstances. Ugliness seemed to signify emotional authenticity. Half of my characters had problems with heroin, and I had never seen heroin before but please give me a hit of that tragedy so I might swim in more human waters. This desire thankfully passed after graduation, when genuineness was no longer an issue for debate. The concrete had hardened. But Jamie, he became worse, turning into a tourist with forensic intent. He started to travel to ridiculously dangerous places and videotape whatever he came across. The siege of Sarajevo. The redlight district of Mumbai. The civil wars in Algeria and Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. The everything in Palestine. Why did he do this? Maybe he was rebelling against his father. This, right here, this is the real world, Dad. This is true tragedy. Or maybe he was rebelling against his own artistic tendencies, which tended toward the glib and too clever by half. Nobody was sure what the point was, least of all Jamie. He didn’t work for the press; he didn’t ask questions; he didn’t pursue stories; he just shot video like he was on vacation in Venice, hours and hours of video, animals, children, women and men, trees on fire, houses in ruin. Every few months a box of videotapes arrived in New York and his roommates added it to the stack in his otherwise empty room, Jamie Dyer growing in cardboard form. What are you going to do with all this stuff? was a regular question, and Jamie would just shrug. He had no plans to expose these miseries to the less miserable. He even turned down a few news agencies that were interested in his Darfur footage. His mother begged him to stop. You’re thirty … thirty-four … thirty-eight … forty-one, enough of this lunacy. What could he tell her, that it made him feel something in his gut, as though feelings were a rare substance formed only in places of high pressure and heat?

A rap-rap-rap on the minivan’s window.

Jamie startled, then smiled. It was Myron.

“You almost scared me to death.”

“Just trying to drum up business,” Myron said. “Me late?”

“Not really.”

“I feel late.” Myron slid into the passenger seat and proceeded to remove his gloves, his hat, his left shoe, his left sock, his hands enclosing his left foot, his toes like a nest of deformed baby mice. “Once you get frostbite you always got frostbite,” he said.

“When did you get frostbite?”

“Shit, I don’t have frostbite, thank Christ, but you gotta stay on top of it.” Myron Doty was a twice-divorced, thrice-incarcerated father of three who carried a certain nobility of failure that seemed passed down from a long line of disreputable Doty men, probably all the way back to the Mayflower.

“How’re things?” Jamie asked.

“Fine, as in fine print, as in always read the.”

“What happened?”

“I’m not privy to all the details yet.”

“Good winter though?”

“Winter is winter. You been running through the high grasses?”

Jamie handed over his half-smoked joint.

Myron cleared a path in his beard. “I will tell you I’m ready for the living to return to the dead. Don’t need to see another fucking skier, with his hollering and his whooping. It’s like I’m stuck on an assembly line manufacturing kick-ass fun.” Myron took five quick hits, pinkie splayed like he was sipping hot tea, then he put his sock and shoe back on. “You think your project worked?”

“Hope so. Reminds me.” Jamie handed over an envelope, the other half of the agreed-upon sum, which Myron counted, smiling like the cash was a real lifesaver, though his eyes twinkled with the opposite impulse. “You ready?” Jamie asked.

“Yup.”

Back outside, into air made material by breath, they crossed the road and stopped by Myron’s truck, where Myron handed Jamie a flashlight and a shovel and grabbed for himself a bigger flashlight and a better shovel. They started up the unplowed road, aptly named Cemetery Road. The earth seemed lit by the television moon and tonight’s episode was a doozy about the wackiest kind of grave robbers. Every footfall broke through a crust of melt and freeze. Only the taller headstones poked through the snow like something forgotten, and Jamie had the sensation of apocalyptic doom, of backyard archeology below his feet, tricycles and soccer balls, Frisbees lost, a place where everybody was once a child.

“That strong pot?” Myron asked.

Jamie nodded.

“Guess I’m really fucking stoned then.”

Jamie gave vapory shape to an uncertain sigh. Then he heard the opening riff of “Whole Lotta Love”—one of his all-time favorites—and after a pause where Robert Plant seemed to whisper in his ear You need coolin’, baby, I’m not foolin’ Jamie snapped back and recognized his ringtone. “Just my phone,” he confirmed out loud, in case Myron was in danger of floating away. It was Richard, and he was on a tear. “Like you said he called and asked me to come home, like my home isn’t my home, like I’m living a make-believe life or something. Come home. What an asshole. I should have hung up right then. Why do I have to be the better person? I know, I know, it’s not about him, right, it’s about me, about what’s healthy for me in the long run, but to make that kind of phone call when he’s an old man and it’s too late for anything, you know, too late for me to scream at him, to be functionally pissed, it doesn’t seem fair.”

Jamie was accustomed to these rants. His brother was most comfortable when angry, preferring those depths where the world squeezed. God forbid if you were stuck in line with him; then again, he moved things along nicely. Jamie only half-listened as he trudged through the snow and admired the stars above. A random line of poetry dropped into his head—The stars are mansions built by nature’s hand—its origin unknown. Regardless of these distractions, he could hear the hurt his brother could never hide. Sometimes Jamie wondered whether his own happy childhood was partly to blame.

“Why are you breathing so hard?” Richard asked. “Where the hell are you?”

“In Vermont.”

“Where in Vermont?”

“Outside, walking through snow.”

“At two in the morning?”

It was typical of his brother not to notice his side of the offense. “Yes,” Jamie said, “at two in the morning, thank you, and it’s cold, and I’m tired, and I’m in a graveyard visiting Sylvia Weston.”

“Sylvia Weston?”

“Yes.”

“Sexy Sylph died?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, how?”

“Breast cancer,” Jamie said, the shovel and flashlight awkward in his other hand. “I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”

“I always liked her. She was my favorite of all your girlfriends.”

“Mine too.”

“Fucking terrible,” Richard muttered. “Between Sylvia Weston and Charlie Topping. Anyway, I’m calling to tell you that I am going to go to New York, arriving late Monday, with the whole family. The kids will miss some school but I figure they can finally meet their grandfather. He didn’t sound good on the phone, out of it, you know, not all there. Sounded kind of desperate. It was weird. Certainly not the dad I remember. You need to come home, he kept on saying, like he had swallowed someone else’s voice. But I was hoping, I don’t know, I was hoping we might catch up as well. I know Candy and Chloe and Emmett would love to see you. But we can talk details later. How many years did you and Sylph date?”

“What?” Jamie asked, struggling over a snowdrift.

“How long did you date Sylvia?”

“Almost three years,” he said, though the truth was a little over two.

“Can’t believe she died.”

“I know.”

“She was so sweet. Dad had such a crush on her. We all did.”

While Jamie was always considered to be the more sensitive of the Dyer boys, Richard the rougher, mainly because of his teenage years of fighting and bullying, his general troublemaking, in truth Richard was the one who teared up easily, who consistently found the world unfair, who, especially after having children, flashed almost daily on images of Emmett and Chloe’s demise, terrified and helpless, seeing them in planes falling, in bird-flu epidemics, in futile moments of save-me-Dad-please, Richard doing the eggshell walk across fate, while Jamie, forever half-stoned and fortunate, poked his fingers into the sores, like a scientist more curious about the symptoms than the cure.

“Give my condolences to the family,” Richard said.

“What? Oh yeah sure.” And with that the brothers hung up.

Up ahead Myron planted his shovel into the snow. “Here we are.”

“Positive?”

“As positive as a poorly educated guess.”

The two of them started digging through a winter’s worth of weather, like airy dirt, Jamie mused, descendant of clouds. Yes indeed, I’m stoned, he thought. After shoveling up great wedges of this non-earth earth, they scraped against something hard. A headstone. SYLVIA CARNE · MOTHER · WIFE · SISTER · DAUGHTER. Jamie knew her primarily as Girlfriend. She was perhaps the most beautiful girl he had ever known, Sylvia Weston, blond but not obviously blond, with permanently chapped lips and a flinty nose, her smile the smile of someone who has found you first in a game of sardines. Sylph, as she was known in those days, was a bit of a hippie. She ate all her food using a single wooden spoon and laughed at herself for doing so, a raspy laugh, a great-grandmother’s laugh, Oma of some sturdy Nordic stock, Jamie would tease, as they smoked pot in those surrounding New Hampshire woods. Even then Jamie understood that her face was a face he should remember, kissing her forehead, her neck, tossing all those details forward like Hansel with his bread crumbs, so that decades later he might find his way back to her Finesse-scented hair and her love-bead necklace and her peasant skirt exposing a single black freckle on a sea of inner amber. Jamie and Sylvia dated until the summer after graduation. They loved each other yet were realistic and put their relationship on hold for college (she was heading to Middlebury), which soon became permanent except for a few brief but never very happy returns.

Many of my Exeter classmates still shake their heads at the mention of Sylvia Weston. She’s like an old high school injury that flares up during semi-erotic play. Back then we all knew she was having intercourse, more than intercourse, every kind of course with Jamie, from sophomore spring until graduation, sex and more sex, Jamie and Sylvia holding hands in the quad, yet we knew, the sweaty undercurrents of those public displays. They were magical in that way, adults among us children, the hopeful examples of what we might achieve if we ever fell in love.

Myron hit the coffin earth.

It was last July when she tracked Jamie down. He was in Caracas, in its outlying child-infested slums, when a mutual friend managed to get in touch with him. Sylvia Weston needs to talk, that was the message, and Jamie’s first reaction was, Oh shit, she’s pregnant. “I swear that’s what I thought,” he told her when he finally reached her by phone, “like my sperm was lying in wait all these years, a sleeper cell suddenly activated.”

“Funny.”

“I was a teenager again.”

“If only.”

“Well, yeah,” Jamie said, unsure of the subtext.

“It’s amazing I never did get pregnant,” Sylvia said. “We were hardly careful.”

“Totally.”

“You realize most of our fooling around happened outside the comfort of bed.”

“We made due.”

“Yeah, all over the place.”

“The Latin room,” he said.

“Oh jeez, the Latin room. And upstairs in the library.”

“Don’t think I’ve ever been more scared. You realize next May is our—”

She—“I know”—interrupted before Jamie could say “twenty-fifth reunion.”

“I don’t think I can go,” he told her.

“Yeah, me neither.”

“Really? I would have thought—”

And that’s when she told him. She spoke in unflinching terms, well versed in the broader conversation, its grimmer meaning, to the point of annoying Jamie, as if she owed him some shudder and tears, as if he were still the first instead of the hundredth, the thousandth, the old boyfriend in the far back row of her life. He offered her words of support, which sounded hollow, then he offered her a few battlefield sentiments, which she brushed away with a single statement of fact: “I’m going to die soon.”

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she said, hinting at the strain behind all this restraint.

“So so sorry. If there’s anything I can do …”

“Actually, that’s why I’m calling. I need help with something.”

“Of course, anything.”

“I have this idea for a video project that maybe only you would appreciate.” She went on to explain how she wanted to document herself answering the question, How are you? every day at exactly 12:01 P.M. right up until the very end. “I know it sounds ridiculous but it’s something I want to do. Just answer that question with complete honesty.”

“It’s not ridiculous at all,” Jamie said.

“And I want you to direct it.”

“Me?”

“It won’t take up too much time,” she said with sobering common sense.

“It’s not that, it’s just that you don’t need me. It’s basic stuff. Any video—”

“Please.”

“I’ll just be in the way, Sylph.”

Silence on the other end.

“Sylph?”

“I just really want you to do this,” she said.

“I’m in Venezuela.”

“We can catch up.”

“Did my mother put you up to this?” he said, hearing his narcissism too late.

“Jamie, I’m dying, okay, and I just want you to help me, that’s all.”

And of course he said yes—how could he not—and within thirty-six hours had gotten himself back to New York and in another twelve hours found himself in Stowe, Vermont. He took a room at a local motel and for the most part stayed away from the family and spent his days hiking and swimming and sleeping, and more sleeping, and reading, rereading a few of his father’s books, even Eloise and Tom, which had always been his least favorite though this time he quite enjoyed it, what with its bitter takedown tour of Tuscany by Sebastian and Louise, the non-eponymous main characters, who by the end confess a longstanding hatred of their best friends. All in all, an aspect of vacation settled into those strife-free days, except for the late mornings when Jamie would rendezvous with Sylvia and at the predestined, God-knows-the-reason time would push RECORD and feed her the line, “How are you?”

Sylvia: “I’m all right.”

Sylvia: “I’m fine.”

Sylvia: “Okay.”

Sylvia: “Hanging in there.”

Sylvia: “Good, thanks, and you?”

Day in and day out, she gave these standard answers to that most banal of questions, and Jamie began to get annoyed. Because he had expected something more, a philosophy, a struggle toward the profound. Was this her version of irony? He didn’t think so. That wasn’t in Sylvia’s nature. Plus she was sincerely dying—her face, long ago his lodestar, was collapsing under its own diminishing weight, her eyes growing denser yet brighter, white dwarves of luminous demise. It seemed Jamie was stuck watching from the lowly earth, wondering what any of this meant. Why did she bring him here? Did she still love him? What was she really saying?

“I’m good.”

“All right, thanks.”

“Good, and you?”

He tried to steep the question—“How”—with as much significance—“are”—as possible—“you?”

“Pretty decent.”

“Getting by, you know.”

A month passed and he considered going off script and blindsiding her with “Are you scared?” or “Do you believe in God?” or “Can I kiss you?” but come 12:01 P.M. he’d lose his nerve and stay on message.

“Super, thanks.”

“No complaints.”

That’s what Sylvia said a few days before she took that nasty turn. The whole family was at the Trapp Family Lodge, the Green Mountains standing in for the Alps. It was a special event where a few of the original cast members from The Sound of Music had gathered for a weekend with the relatives of their factual counterparts. There was Heather Menzies (Louisa) and Charmian Carr (Liesl) and Duane Chase (Kurt), even Daniel Truhitte (Rolf), who took Charmian’s hand, to the delight of everyone. These former child stars seemed swollen with age, as if stung by a very large bee, and Jamie found the whole thing pleasantly meta. After filming Sylvia, he wandered about, and when he saw little Gretl (Kym Karath) signing autographs, he lingered for a moment and tried to find in her eyes the memory of sitting in his living room during the holidays and watching The Sound of Music, a true story, his mother always stressed. “They escaped Austria during the war and now live in Vermont, in a Tyrolean-style lodge,” she told him and his brother, amazed by the tale, and of course by the songs too, which she knew by heart. Jamie was around six when he first saw Maria open her arms and spin in those hills, and he remembered thinking, These people are real, this all happened, a hundred percent true, even as he recognized Brigitta as Penny from Lost in Space. Was Mom disappointed that Dad never surprised the crowd by sweetly warbling that famous, age-old Austrian folk song? Oh, the days when families fled the Nazis together. Before Jamie knew it, he found himself in the front of the line, and Gretl (Kym) looked up and smiled, a black marker perched over a picture of her younger dirndled self. “How are you?” she said, and Jamie froze, the question snapping around his ankle, forever ensnaring him.

With the snow cleared, Myron banged his shovel on the turf until he received a hollow reply, after which he bent down and removed the square piece of sod that camouflaged a wooden trapdoor. Attached on the other side was a rope, which descended into that dark, surgical hole. It was only six feet but might as well have gone a mile underground. Myron pointed his flashlight down. The sides were braced with wood.

“Hardly a bulge,” he said, admiring his work.

Over the last few months Jamie had had misgivings over this particular direction in the project, especially since this part was his own idea and done without permission from Sylvia or her family. It was meant to be a coda. A recapitulation. But as he stood over that hole, he lurched into full-blown What-the-fuck-have-I-done terrain. How did this ever seem like a good idea? Jamie remembered when she became bedridden and talked to her family with terrible, if sometimes incoherent, purpose, as if the rest of existence were last-minute stuff, and he sneaked in a few minutes before 12:01 P.M., sheepish yet determined to fulfill her wishes, and the girls dutifully moved aside, and big Ed glared, and Sylvia, even in her heavily opiated state, understood the time and she sat up, curling a stray lock of hair behind her left ear, just like she did in high school, her secret message to him, but what was she saying now, as she gathered up her breath and answered the question with force-of-will clarity, “I am fine, thank you, and how are you?” maintaining the pose until he stopped recording and exhaustion dropped her back onto the pillow—Jamie, near tears, knew he had to continue with this project, just for a little while longer, just to keep her, if not alive, then not totally dead.

Five days later she was gone.

By then Jamie had called a friend who shot nature documentaries, and he asked him about filming in dark, confined spaces over an extended period—“For a weird time-lapse thing I’m working on”—and the friend told him he had the perfect rig, a reconfigured Sony PDW-700 with all the bells and whistles, enclosed in a weatherproof housing with an exterior Li-ion polymer battery and lights—“We call it the crab pot: load it, lock it, leave it. It’s how we did the hibernating-bear thing.” The friend overnighted the camera to Vermont, and two days after the funeral Jamie returned to the cemetery with his new pal Myron. The first night they dug a hole and built a shaft over the coffin; the second night they carefully sawed away the mountains on the lid and replaced it with a piece of plexi; the third night they installed the crab pot. After a few tests to set the lighting and frame the, well, frame the face properly—Jamie could barely look—they returned Sylvia Carne to darkness, except for six seconds a day.

“You need to check on it once in a while,” Jamie told Myron.

Myron saluted.

“You sure you can do this?”

“Absolutely.”

But the question was more self-directed, and over the following months, Jamie thought about paying Myron in full and leaving the camera and letting its memory run down to nothing. What an excellent find centuries from now: these crazed Americans even filmed themselves dead. The initial How-are-you? footage consisted of seventy-four consecutive responses, time- and date-stamped from late July to early October. In total, it was less than eight minutes of film, and Jamie had yet to watch a second. It didn’t seem complete to him. Not yet. He wanted the entire loss. At least this was his rationalization, that he wanted to peer into the absolute truth, to once again push boundaries. This is what happens, he would have told you, this is the final, not-so-stupid answer to that most banal but brutal question. But if you looked closer, you might have noticed a darker grip to his eyes, as if he was hauling a heavier load within. How are you? I’m confused, baby. I’m barely surviving. I’m a fucking mess. He moved back to New York and rented his own place in Cobble Hill, landing a job teaching videography at the New School, thanks to an old professor from Yale. He reconnected with friends (we even had a drink). He dated around. He thrilled his mother with his mere presence and managed an occasional meal with his father. Jamie did all of these things in hopes of—well, he wasn’t sure except to say that when the hour and the minute were in the range of 12:01 P.M., he hoped he might give that lifting darkness a decent response.

Myron grabbed the rope. He waited for Jamie to grab hold too.

What sort of witchy thing had she done to him?

On three they pulled.

“I’ll come back in the spring and fill in the hole,” Myron said.

The camera was heavier than Jamie remembered.

“You have to promise to send me a copy,” Myron said.

As he pulled, Jamie had the sensation of bringing up something from the bottom of the sea, a trap loaded with creatures, crustaceans with multiple legs crawling all over the cage, bottom-feeders feeding on thoughts of his father, his mother, his brother and half brother, the familial bait of one-way entrances, the forty-three years with nothing to show, nothing to feel, but the recorded evidence of this suffering world, right down to the first woman he ever loved, dying and dead and—

The camera reached the surface.

Once free and clear, Myron aimed his flashlight down into the hole, but before his curiosity could be answered, Jamie swatted his hand. The flashlight, knocked loose, landed with a thud on the Plexiglas, briefly swaying back and forth, its sideways beam seesawing over paint still bright and vibrant: part of a small house, smoke curling up from its chimney.