And Sons. David Gilbert
Eric Harke stood up and after lifting his glass, did a curious thing: he sort of tossed a grin over his shoulder as if whatever deity that had so blessed his life was giving him a congratulatory pat, after which Eric froze and squinted, spotting a shape, it seemed, a person approaching, possibly familiar, yes, yes, I know this person, his face suggested, his brow treading deeper, his mouth momentarily hitching on the proper weight of the words before giving them voice,
“You know those games, sir, that start off innocently enough,”
his delivery obviously practiced in front of the mirror, along with every interstitial stammer and twitch, those tricks of authenticity, as well as the false naïveté of a mid-century American boy,
“or almost innocently enough, like a game of catch or tag, and you’re all in it together, in the beginning, you’re all in cahoots, but things sort of evolve on their own, suggestions are made, rules are changed, and suddenly hitting is allowed and that area over there is out of bounds. You know those games, sir? Well, those are the kinds of games that can only happen once. They can never get repeated, no matter how hard you might try. When the game is over, the game is over. Maybe that’s why you don’t want it to end. Maybe that’s why you keep on playing even if the next rule is harsher, maybe even unreasonable. You know what I mean, sir? It’s like those games in the quad, the games you can probably see from your window right now. There’s a moment, who knows when, but there’s a moment when it’s too late and you’re left with nothing else to do but to keep on playing, even if it’s not fun anymore, even if you know it’s stupid, you keep on playing, even if you know someone’s going to get hurt, seriously hurt, you keep on playing because the only way the game can end is with blood, and when that happens, sir, well, it’s not really a game anymore, is it?”
Eric paused to allow for his earthly return, then he smiled that famous smile as if invigorated by a dip in one of his native ten thousand lakes. “I hope that wasn’t too ridiculous.”
“Could there be a better Edgar Mead?” Rainer pronounced. He raised his glass in artistic salute, while Richard tried to anchor his insides, unsettled by the personal effects of gravity, and though he did lift his glass along with the others, he never took a sip. No, after cheers Richard put the glass back down on the table without comment, just like he let the phone keep on vibrating in his pocket without saying a word.
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