Days Between Stations Page 3

When he walked down the marble stairs into the living room he saw his uncle sitting in a huge stuffed lavender chair, puffing on his cigar and surveying him. Michel didn’t remember his uncle’s face at all, and it seemed different from eye to eye, features broadening and the light changing, shifting from mundane to something unpleasant—a face out of kilter. Watching his nephew move the patch back and forth, Jack said, “What are you doing?”

  “Uncle Jack?” said Michel, and it sounded false to him. He couldn’t imagine having ever called him Uncle Jack. He was correct, it turned out.

  “I thought your eyes were all right,” said Jack.

  “There’s nothing wrong with them,” said Michel.

  There was a time, thought Jack, when it would have taken Michel a full minute just to spit out that one sentence. The words would have bounced around in his mouth like a pinball. “Can’t you remember anything?” said Jack.

  “Twins.”

  Jack nodded.

  “Adrien.”

  “Adrien who?”

  “I don’t know. Just the name Adrien.” Michel didn’t need to remember anything to realize his uncle didn’t like him, but because he remembered nothing he couldn’t realize why. The following days he sat in his room staring out the doors that opened onto the balcony, watching the shadows that loomed over the yard. He became depressed and then slightly desperate; and the panic he’d warded off that first morning in Paris finally found him. He had come to California because the passport said to; he had expected, he thought it wasn’t unreasonable to expect, that he’d be welcomed here, that he’d find the things he expected a home to offer him—answers and the immediate, insistent belonging that went with a family. But he was still left faceless by the hostility he felt from his uncle. It would have been enraging had he been equipped for rage. Because he was not equipped for rage, he wore the patch; he realized the things it made him see weren’t really there, but he also realized that those things had been there once, that this eyepatch provided him glimpses into his own past. So he kept the patch because, branded faceless by something that had happened to him before he woke in Paris, he decided he should be faceless on his own terms, not until he remembered who he was but until he knew who he was, whether he remembered anything or not. His aunt could feel his despair. She didn’t feel jealous of his opportunity to start over again; she was considerate enough, even perceptive enough, to understand that for someone like Michel, it wasn’t an escape but a sentence—to have to start over. And the only time she ever really stood up to her husband, in over twenty-five years of being married to him, after the mistresses and the indifferences and the loud tawdriness of the marriage (she wasn’t a loud tawdry woman at all), was a week after Michel had returned, and she caught Jack scowling at the image of his nephew standing on the balcony at night, Michel’s one eye staring at the black of the sky and the other eye staring at the black of the patch that covered it. She said, “He’s your sister’s son.”

  “He’s not my son,” said Jack.

  “That’s not his fault. You hate him because he’s like your father.”

  He was stunned to hear her talk to him like this. “Fuck you,” he sputtered, as though that could deny it. Watching her turn and walk from the room, he thought to himself he’d about had enough from all of them, Michel and the doctor and now his wife. He looked once more at the form of Michel on the balcony and then called out after her: If he starts screaming I’m going to throw him out. But he didn’t suppose Michel would scream anymore. It first happened the day Michel arrived from France as a little boy, sent by his crazy mother from a small French village on the Atlantic coast. Jack hadn’t seen his sister since they themselves were children, long before the twins; but he’d happily anticipated in her son Michel a protégé of his own, to be groomed by the studios as Jack himself had been. The boy, however, was odd right off, like his mother, from the moment he came walking down the ramp of the plane too shy to even look up; his aunt took him by the hand and tried talking to him, though Michel understood only French. Jack hadn’t spoken French in a long time, so the conversation among the three of them was limited to broken attempts at the language and the boy’s frantic, painfully stuttered replies. The boy said very little at all, in fact; but that first afternoon, after arriving home, they could hear the child talking to himself up in his room in a torrent of discussion among myriad voices. When he talked to himself he didn’t stutter at all; in fact he didn’t sound like the same person. The two adults looked at each other; each had grave concern about anyone who talked to himself, particularly a child, as if the stuttering weren’t disturbing enough. That night they got a much worse shock. Jack was throwing a little party for a number of people whose favor was important to him; the party was held on the back lawn. It was a warm pleasant evening, and everything was going along smoothly when a sound came from the house. The small boy was standing on the balcony in full view, staring not at the lawn but the night, spewing a stream of verbal abuse at something or someone; Jack remembered enough French for his hair to stand on end. The guests just looked up at the boy in awe and consternation; and Jack scrambled inside, located the hired help and instructed one woman to shut the boy up by whatever means were necessary. She ran up the stairs, followed by Michel’s aunt; and the guests watched as the child was plucked from the balcony and disappeared from view.

  This happened several more times: in school, the shy, deferential student would be suddenly seized by a compulsion to scream whatever French obscenities he was capable of conjuring at the age of seven or eight. The teachers were always shaken by the transformation; the tirades were always in French, even when he was otherwise speaking English; the violence of what he was saying was clear in his tone and his eyes. Finally the aunt and uncle took him to a number of doctors. They talked with the boy but didn’t seem to find any answers. Though the stuttering was always evident, Michel never screamed for them. Jack told the doctors the stuttering was making the boy crazy; the doctors could find no indication the boy was actually insane, but there was something deep inside tormenting him, and it was this making him stutter, not the other way around. Rather than inhibit the boy and his conversation by making him more conscious of the stammer, the doctors felt the child should be encouraged to talk, stutter, even scream, in order to release whatever had a hold on him. By now the idea of listening to Michel at all drove Jack wild.

  An incident later in the school auditorium was the last straw. That was when Jack did what he should have done all along, which was come down on the boy hard. The boy didn’t scream after that. Jack’s wife worried that Michel became despondent, perhaps broken; but Jack knew that was a lot of nonsense. Nevertheless, it was true that as Michel grew up, their relationship decomposed, and along with it Jack’s hopes of molding an heir—a situation marked by constant disagreements and fights, and culminating in the boardroom confrontation they still whispered about around the studio. In Jack’s boardroom, before Jack’s directors, Jack’s nephew exploded in the stammering, word-wrenching fury of his childhood, lacerating his uncle with his own wild spastic tongue that somehow rendered what he said not ridiculous but all the more humiliating. Absolutely shaking then, face stricken, Michel burst out the door and was gone. Over the next few years Michel made a small student film that won a prize in a festival; and then disappeared.

  So if Michel began screaming there on that balcony, or so much as stuttered to his uncle once, Jack would cast him from the house. Michel was left to pursue his own discoveries as best he could. If he had in fact lost who he once was, there was no percentage in it for Jack to help Michel regain that past. Michel began wandering the city in the afternoon, peering in windows he supposed would remind him of something, looking in every face to see if that face recognized him. He still wore the eyepatch, unwilling to discard it. He walked along Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, through Venice, where the carnival would seem likely to yield at least one sign of the past. He waited for someone to call to him, for someone to grab
him by the shoulders and shake him. He spent days in Echo Park walking across bridges, looking for his name among the graffiti on the walls.

  He started going to movies.

  One day he passed a theater on Wilshire Boulevard near Lafayette Park, and he looked at the billboard and something stirred. He realized then that he’d been avoiding the movie marquees out of some aversion more eloquent than disinterest—now this billboard was the first familiar thing he had found since waking in Paris that morning. He paid his money and bought a ticket, and went into the theater and sat, alone in his row, waiting for the lights to fall and the screen to flicker for him, and he knew that it was this moment he had avoided—that if this moment were to mean nothing to him, he would have felt more utterly lost than ever, he would have felt isolated in a way the preceding days could not even imply. So it was a moment of wild exhilaration for him when, as the film began, he felt great excitement and passion. But something even more remarkable took place. The credits rolled by and he watched them carefully, something turning behind his eyes, and the story started, and he remembered it. He remembered all of it. He knew, not out of cleverness or precalculation, that the man Joseph Cotten came to Vienna to find was not dead at all, but alive; he remembered Orson Welles in the doorway with the cat at his feet, and in the ferris wheel musing over the insignificance of the people below him, and running through the sewers with the police at his heels. And he remembered in detail, painfully as though it was some recast shard of his own childhood, Alida Valli walking down the road with the leaves falling around her passing Joseph Cotten in cool disdain, too violated by his treachery to acknowledge he was waiting for her. This all came to Michel there in the theater, within the first few minutes of the picture.

  He went to another movie that evening but the same thing did not happen, and it dropped him into a sort of depression—but not enough to wipe out what had happened that afternoon. He learned that not all movies would do this to him. But he always had an inkling for the ones that would: He would pass a poster or a title and something would stir, like it had that first time; and he followed his hunches. He was almost always right. He remembered everything, and most clearly he remembered the faces: Oskar Werner’s stunned expression when his best friend and the woman they loved drove off the bridge into the water; the electrifying close-up of Falconetti in her trial, sentence and martyrdom; and most of all Chaplin, the look of humiliation and ecstasy, rose between his fingers, before the woman who’d gained her sight and lost her innocence; and like her, Michel wondered if, when he could see it all again, it would make him regret the squandered virginity of his instincts.

  Where he had lain in the bedroom of his uncle’s house feeling like a man without a persona, passive and unmoved and uninterested, now he was equipped for the thing he’d been so inadequate for: the rage, which he needed. Whether he remembered anything at all, he was still who he was; and now he felt the flashes of rebellion and intensity that had always come so easily to him, no matter how obstructed by the stuttering the expression of those things had been. Of course he didn’t know he had ever stuttered, he didn’t know those things had come so easily. He raged first of all at himself. It was his natural inclination to do this, and he didn’t know that either.

  One night he went into Venice to see some student films. He sat through the first four or five without feeling anything whatsoever. Only a minute or two into the sixth, he was overcome with nausea. He didn’t know why he felt this way. There was not, apparently, anything on the screen that would cause this reaction. The film was about an old woman who lived in a house somewhere in France; this was clear from the subtitles. She wandered from room to room, up and down the stairs, and outside the window one could see the sea. The entire film was of the old woman talking about her feelings in his house. She pointed out the rooms where her children had lived: three sons, she noted. The two oldest, who were twins, died when they were small. They went swimming one night where there was no moon, and in the morning she found the bodies on the beach. She went into town and bought two coffins, and put the bodies in the coffins herself; she showed with her arms how she lifted them up. Then she asked the men from the town to help her bury them. The old woman explained all of this in a monotone. Now she went on, she said, “living in the window, waiting to die in the window”—there was no window in the room, however, when she said this. Toward the end of the film, Michel thought he was going to be sick; nothing he saw before had affected him this way, his innards were churning. He was in a cold sweat when the picture ended, and the credit came on, “A film by Michel Sarre,” and he sat stunned in the seat still watching the white screen even as the lights went up, because though the last name was different, he instinctively understood that this was his film.

  On his way to the house that night, after leaving the theater, the streetlights went out one by one. At the top of the hill, he looked out over the basin of the city to see, suddenly, the rest of the lights vanish in a single moment. It was as though the earth itself had disappeared. The lights of his uncle’s house went as well. He walked up to the dark porch, and felt a pang of loneliness at the realization that movie screens from one end of town to the other were black at this moment; and when he opened the door, his aunt was there to greet him with a burning candle in her hand. She held it up to his face, looking to see if he was still wearing the patch; and as the patch did for him, the candle illuminated everything around her only a little at a time: in this sense his perspective was no longer unique, at least not at that moment. “The lights have all gone out,” he said; and she smiled. “What’s funny?” he said. “You used to have so much trouble saying your l’s,” she answered. He didn’t know what she meant. “It’s she second time this year,” she went on. “They’ll be going out a lot.”

  “A lot?”

  “From here on out.”

  From here on out? He didn’t understand it was the last twenty years of the twentieth century. She lit another candle for him and he went up the stairs to his room. He stood on the balcony and now noticed, over in the yard behind the next house, a small, half-completed bridge that stretched across one of the knolls and ended in midair. Other nights he would see the bridge progress until it completed its arc. Across the hills other people were building bridges; and later, as the lights went out more often, as more nights lapsed into blackness, more bridges were built. Someone was to explain to him that these bridges were built for following the passage of the moon at night, that as more nights passed lightless, the moon was the only light there was; and in that light Michel could see the moon-glistened figures on the moonbridges in their backyards, staring into the night, following the white globe’s journey. This is why all the bridges were built the same direction, because everyone watched the same journey; and across the city people stepped in time to the slide of the moon across the sky.

  One year after informing his wife that another woman was having his child, Jason returned to the apartment on Pauline Boulevard in San Francisco. He walked into the living room and both Lauren and Jules looked at him as though he’d left only ten minutes before to get a newspaper or carton of milk. Lauren vaguely remembered, to whatever extent she remembered anything about their last conversation, that he had said he would come back, and remembering that had eliminated any doubt even as it broke her heart. She was convinced by now, in the way she was convinced those moments Jules was being born, that heartbroken was a state she would know forever and with which she would therefore learn how to live. What Jason was not prepared for was the same wounded stoicism in the eyes of his son; he thought it unreasonable that he should be so judged by an infant fifteen months old. He avoided eye contact. He bought a blue truck in Oakland. He drove his family and possessions down the middle of California to Los Angeles, where Lauren found everything mysteriously familiar. They found the other Pauline Boulevard and took an apartment. Later Lauren lost Jason many times, and never reclaimed him; he reclaimed her when he chose to. She lost Jules only once, in his s
leep, when he was nine, for reasons no doctor ever knew. He closed his eyes at the exact moment that, thousands of miles away, another opened his to no name and white memory.

  The months that followed Jules’ death were a period of mute devastation. It was near the end of this time that Jason first saw the new neighbor. On his way up the stairs one night, Jason peered through the opened door of the third-floor apartment, which was still empty but for a few boxes and the occupant himself, who stood alone looking around him. He wore a long blue coat and had his hands in his pockets. Jason watched from the stairs and moved on just as the other man turned to face him; it wasn’t until much later that Lauren saw the neighbor from the window of their truck. He was walking up the steps to Pauline Boulevard as they were driving down the street to Hollywood. In the dark she saw only the back of his coat, and the eyepatch was a blur of black, like a bit of the night caught in his eye.

  She wouldn’t meet him for over two years. Even when Jason was gone, racing on the East Coast, or in Europe or Australia, and she was alone, she didn’t turn to the neighbor for a favor; innocent companionship would have been in order. Jason was incapable of being jealous, he was certain there could never be anyone else for her. It wasn’t in him to feel the measure of her depths, which had now become very deep. She watched from her window as though looking for a procession of funeral mannequins on a street with nowhere to go. She saw the cats in the corners of the boulevard, in the porticos and against the curbs, slinking out at dusk along the walls, appearing and vanishing. She had a cat of her own for a while. They knew each other’s presences, they could feel each other from other rooms; the sun through the window always settled where the cat had been, and from her pillow Lauren could see the ephemeral silhouette. When the cat was pregnant and it came time to give birth, Lauren was awakened in the night, opened her eyes to see the cat’s eyes glowing at her. Then, moving to the closet, Lauren grabbed a flashlight from the dresser. She followed the cat into the closet, and in the beam of the light watched four kittens emerge, each in its little sack; then she watched the mother eat the sacks and the offspring uncoil before her. Of course she thought of Jules then, and it was too much to bear.