Bookman's promise

Long after her own death, Isabel’s question rings in my ears.

Who are you?

Richard never told her.

Who was I?

Well, I was one of his greatest admirers: that cannot be disputed.

But he had many great admirers.

Who are you?

I knew him briefly and was deeply saddened when he died.

Many were saddened.

We went on a journey once, deep into the lost kingdom of cotton. There, on a sunny afternoon in May, Burton might well have influenced the beginnings of our great civil war.

Might have, could have, maybe. Never mind that. What is real? What is certain?

I shrug. I never stopped wondering, since he never used any of it, whatever he was writing in that notebook. At some point in my old age I even entertained the fancy that he intended to leave it behind, in my care, as a record of what he thought and did in those crowded weeks.

But why?

I look at it there on my shelf and it looks unreal.

What is real?

Only Mrs. Burton’s question is real. It is still there in my seventh decade.

Who are you?

I look in my mirror at a withered old man and find one answer.

I am…nobody.

BOOK III - Charleston

CHAPTER 20

We arrived in Charleston after dark, the ground crew rolled out an air stair, and we climbed down into another world. This was more than just an illusion and it was more than just the heat: the air smelled different—I could taste its salty tang—and the humidity was like a battering ram. As we walked across the runway to the terminal I said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Koko,” and she made a face and a go-away gesture with her hand.

I rented a car while Koko bought a street map, a guidebook, and a pictorial history. A few minutes later she navigated me out to Interstate 26 and turned me south toward the city. “We should stay at the Heart of Charleston,” she said, leafing through pages. “That’s a motel they built in the sixties on the site of the Charleston Hotel, where Burton and Charlie stayed. Won’t that be cool? Maybe their ghosts are still lingering there.”

I thought this unlikely, but if I couldn’t share her view of the afterlife, at least I could agree that it would be cool to stay there.

The highway swerved down the Neck and Koko provided a running commentary. In the Civil War, batteries had been built across the peninsula to fight off an attack from the north. The city limit then was far south of here and this was mostly country. Like all cities, Charleston had spread far from its core and the sprawl was still going on. We passed through a grim industrial area and a few minutes later I saw the harbor, ablaze with lights to my left, and a spectacular pair of bridges spanning the river. I got off on Meeting Street and ten minutes later we reached the motel. We took two rooms on opposite sides of the motel and were lucky to get them. There were three conventions in town and rooms of any kind were hard to come by.

By then it was well after ten. We were tired: we had to be after last night—but we were still in the throes of an artificial high, like a Coke sugar rush after a heart-sapping marathon. We met out on Meeting Street five minutes after check-in and found a pub a block away. Koko surprised me by having a beer. I said, “That’ll put hair on your chest,” and she laughed. “What else can I get in a place like this? One won’t kill me.”

She took her first cautious sip. “So what did you think of the tape?”

“I liked the feel of it. If the old lady was conning us she was a very skilled operator. We have to assume it’s real until we learn otherwise.”