As it turns out, it was waiting patiently for me, the one room in the apartment with no ghosts from my childhood, and no memory of Vik. A few months ago, when I decided to abandon the bedroom and move the bed to the empty room, the electrician, punching neat little squares on either side of the headboard for wall lamps, found Push’s matrix of secret tubes. He said there was no way to run wire without ripping out the entire wall first. In every direction, his test taps struck metal. I told him I’d go with floor lamps, and I had a drywaller tear out the plaster, all of it. There, packed as tightly as cigarettes from one side of the room to the other, were vacuum tubes, and affixed to each were gauges, inlets and outlets, a series of interconnected flat handles that, like organ stops, opened and closed the valves that made possible Push’s voyeurism.
In the Apelles, there are many ways to listen. The heating vents, the doormen who are only too happy for you to stop by for some gossip, old-fashioned hallway loitering, the pneumatic tubes. By manipulating the handles, I can pick up transmissions from all over the building. Most of the inlet slots in the apartments have been covered over, but even through plaster and paint they provide a little sonic connection. At night I open all the valves and let the building sing me to sleep.
What do people talk about? The contours of their day, how much they hate people who they wish liked them more. Money, their bowels. Eavesdropping is spiritual pornography, a novelty that ceased to interest me much after I realized that the source of my excitement was not the content of the conversations I overheard, but the power to overhear them. I prefer the insect hum of all the voices at once, the droning proof of life. A building full of people, a living entity.
I can only assume that William Push spent his last years, his decade of sequestration, sitting at the controls there, pulling levers, monitoring the gauges, sorting through his neighbors’ pneumatic notes, playing the valves with the virtuosity of Rachmaninoff, teasing music from the building’s residents, plucking each one like a guitar string, sounding discord on the ninth floor, generating joy on the third. He must have come to believe he was the composer of their desires, that their every feeling was an expression of his grand structure, his direction giving form to the unspoken, the unfelt, the unimaginable. Without him at the helm, the building’s fragile organic systems would rot. Thus the trouble with endless observation—we come to mistake interpretation for creation. Even our own behaviors, so quaintly called choices, are nothing more than observation and reaction followed at light speed by a transformative brain trick that bends temporal perception: voilà, free will.
Old men are strange creatures. My father is ninety-three years old. When I begin to question him about his past, he answers readily, without suspicion. It is a little shocking how willingly he offers up his most heavily guarded secret, the locus of his shame, after a lifetime of keeping it locked away so deeply within himself. Perhaps, as a person ages, he cares less and less what others think of him. Only monsters are predisposed with their legacies, anyway. He never even asks why I want to know.
All the same, it doesn’t arrive on a silver platter. He has to tunnel his way to the story at his core when I ask, with no preamble, whether he ever made his confession to Albert Caldwell, as part of their pact. In the book, I say, you just leave it hanging. You never say.
Oh, I couldn’t have told him about Poland even if I’d wanted to, he said, much less write about it. In those days, it was all still classified. Make no mistake, I was far from ready to tell anyone—I didn’t need any motivation to keep it to myself.
What about now? I say.
Oh, all activities have been declassified. I suppose I could tell anyone I wanted.
Have you ever?
No, he says. After a moment he says, Ah, I see.
He waves the remote at the TV until it mutes, and he tips his head back and breathes at the ceiling for a while. He is moving into a dream state; when we’re talking, it’s not unusual for him to sit there for minutes on end, examining the beams above his head, massaging the arm of his chair. We’ll sit with the house creaking around us until he finds his way. And so I wait.
Finally he begins. After the war, he says, I went back to Princeton. This was the fall of ’46. The dorm at night was like an asylum. Boys weeping in the showers, screaming in their sleep. Christopher Stanwyck stabbed his roommate with a fountain pen in the middle of the night, raving about the Japs. None of us were in our right minds that first year back, but we adjusted. Most of us did. The astonishing power of focus and intellectual engagement. And the elastic nature of youth. We’d argue about Sartre and Popper in the eating clubs with real vehemence—there’d be fistfights! Brawling over philosophy, can you imagine? But you have to understand, arguing about No Exit with boys who’d been POWs, boys who’d seen firsthand the worst impulses of humanity become manifest—they understood that these works were necessary to the survival of the species.
You didn’t bring your own experiences into the discussion, that was poor form. But
