John and my father, having fled before the takedown, had plunged into the storm like a couple of foxes diving for lemmings and didn’t know they’d been saved, so their antagonist existed at that moment in the pseudo-quantum state of lying in forced prone restraint position on the filthy linoleum back at Roosevelt while simultaneously pursuing the two of them in the snow, if only in their imaginations—though their shared belief that at any moment a pair of iron hands would pincer their shoulders and they’d be in short order eating their own teeth must count as a shade of reality in which the counterman’s existence was as real as the genuine article’s. My father would have something to say about the third and fourth state of the counterman’s existence, the one here, in these pages, and the one there, in his pages, but if you really want to play around in the garden of meta, try The Horseshoe Crab or his first one, El El Narrows. (It’s 1968, Mexico, and el-el protagonist tartamudo, Duo—the el el additionally a play on the of Longshore Laredo, the U.S. company pouring funds into the Dirty War—hamstrung by his tripping tongue, has ceased talking and is instead writing a bildungsroman, protagonist of which is a character named Duo. Halfway through El El Narrows [coincidentally, also the title of Duo’s novel], writer Duo is shot by a soldier on a dark street, in a neighborhood colloquially known as Los Estrechos, the Narrows. In the closing pages, which come quite early, we learn that it was Duo’s own brother, Salmar, who pulled the trigger. Duo’s novel is left unfinished, another unfertilized egg destined for the frying pan. I digress, but you get a sense of what I’m dealing with.)
My father had lost sight of the younger, swifter companion as soon as they’d hit the open air, and he’d trudged dutifully down the hospital’s arcing driveway and into the street, where it seemed possible that the snow might be shallower. He’d turned right, to what he felt assured was the north, and had been staggering blindly, with every step expecting said cliff, when a dark form appeared at his elbow. In his fright, he pitched face-first into the snow, his shoes carving channels, and he flopped around in the powder, his sweater failing to forestall the avalanche up his torso while his pants committed the same act of betrayal on his nethers.
Oh mother of Christ, he shouted around a mouthful of snow, and rolled onto his back, where at least he might be able to fend off the attack with some sort of pawing/kicking action, and it was from that position that he made out a familiar beard, a hat, and an extended glove, which grabbed his hand and hoisted him up. It was John, of course, who’d been right there all along.
You’re going the wrong way, John yelled through his scarf.
Yes! my father shouted back. Am I?
John possessed a couple of preternatural physical talents, one of which was an instinctual connection to the earth’s magnetic fields, which granted him an ability to navigate perfectly under any circumstances (the other was hawk-like eyesight; on a planar stretch of Nevada highway, he could read a billboard at two and a half miles), and his gut told him thataway to the Apelles. I wonder now if John, like a chess piece, was capable only of certain proscribed movements that night; if perhaps his directional gift was nothing more than an expiration date. Looking into the past, aren’t we all chess pieces? Why shouldn’t the same hold true when we look into the future?
Together they trudged northward, and after a couple of blocks unmolested by the counterman, they assumed he had surrendered to the blizzard. My father arrived back at the Apelles around 2:00 a.m. John, who made a detour, arrived around 3:00 a.m.
The timeline is what allows me to see clearly through the aged panes of wobbled glass, straight through to that night. Sure, temporal triangulation is an analgesic, a distraction from this ragged sack of retrospection I’m dragging along the concrete behind me. But the precise timing, everyone’s movements that night executed as if according to an exquisite plan—we were even then a complication, each one of us a gear locked in rotation with all the rest, marching forward in conjunction, pausing, marching forward, pausing, none of us any more or less culpable than any other. Just a grand machine executing a design.
30.
Do you remember Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1913, caused a real ruckus at the Armory Show? It was one of my mother’s favorites. It is one of my favorites because of Duchamp’s precise expression of superposition, of the possibility of multiple physical states occupying the same position at the same time—the nude not at the top and bottom of the staircase simultaneously but possibly in either place, or somewhere in between—it fills me with hope. The nude is both everywhere and nowhere. I’ve come to understand that if my perception could be altered, I might be able
