And Sons. David Gilbert
just be in the way, Sylph.”
Silence on the other end.
“Sylph?”
“I just really want you to do this,” she said.
“I’m in Venezuela.”
“We can catch up.”
“Did my mother put you up to this?” he said, hearing his narcissism too late.
“Jamie, I’m dying, okay, and I just want you to help me, that’s all.”
And of course he said yes—how could he not—and within thirty-six hours had gotten himself back to New York and in another twelve hours found himself in Stowe, Vermont. He took a room at a local motel and for the most part stayed away from the family and spent his days hiking and swimming and sleeping, and more sleeping, and reading, rereading a few of his father’s books, even Eloise and Tom, which had always been his least favorite though this time he quite enjoyed it, what with its bitter takedown tour of Tuscany by Sebastian and Louise, the non-eponymous main characters, who by the end confess a longstanding hatred of their best friends. All in all, an aspect of vacation settled into those strife-free days, except for the late mornings when Jamie would rendezvous with Sylvia and at the predestined, God-knows-the-reason time would push RECORD and feed her the line, “How are you?”
Sylvia: “I’m all right.”
Sylvia: “I’m fine.”
Sylvia: “Okay.”
Sylvia: “Hanging in there.”
Sylvia: “Good, thanks, and you?”
Day in and day out, she gave these standard answers to that most banal of questions, and Jamie began to get annoyed. Because he had expected something more, a philosophy, a struggle toward the profound. Was this her version of irony? He didn’t think so. That wasn’t in Sylvia’s nature. Plus she was sincerely dying—her face, long ago his lodestar, was collapsing under its own diminishing weight, her eyes growing denser yet brighter, white dwarves of luminous demise. It seemed Jamie was stuck watching from the lowly earth, wondering what any of this meant. Why did she bring him here? Did she still love him? What was she really saying?
“I’m good.”
“All right, thanks.”
“Good, and you?”
He tried to steep the question—“How”—with as much significance—“are”—as possible—“you?”
“Pretty decent.”
“Getting by, you know.”
A month passed and he considered going off script and blindsiding her with “Are you scared?” or “Do you believe in God?” or “Can I kiss you?” but come 12:01 P.M. he’d lose his nerve and stay on message.
“Super, thanks.”
“No complaints.”
That’s what Sylvia said a few days before she took that nasty turn. The whole family was at the Trapp Family Lodge, the Green Mountains standing in for the Alps. It was a special event where a few of the original cast members from The Sound of Music had gathered for a weekend with the relatives of their factual counterparts. There was Heather Menzies (Louisa) and Charmian Carr (Liesl) and Duane Chase (Kurt), even Daniel Truhitte (Rolf), who took Charmian’s hand, to the delight of everyone. These former child stars seemed swollen with age, as if stung by a very large bee, and Jamie found the whole thing pleasantly meta. After filming Sylvia, he wandered about, and when he saw little Gretl (Kym Karath) signing autographs, he lingered for a moment and tried to find in her eyes the memory of sitting in his living room during the holidays and watching The Sound of Music, a true story, his mother always stressed. “They escaped Austria during the war and now live in Vermont, in a Tyrolean-style lodge,” she told him and his brother, amazed by the tale, and of course by the songs too, which she knew by heart. Jamie was around six when he first saw Maria open her arms and spin in those hills, and he remembered thinking, These people are real, this all happened, a hundred percent true, even as he recognized Brigitta as Penny from Lost in Space. Was Mom disappointed that Dad never surprised the crowd by sweetly warbling that famous, age-old Austrian folk song? Oh, the days when families fled the Nazis together. Before Jamie knew it, he found himself in the front of the line, and Gretl (Kym) looked up and smiled, a black marker perched over a picture of her younger dirndled self. “How are you?” she said, and Jamie froze, the question snapping around his ankle, forever ensnaring him.
With the snow cleared, Myron banged his shovel on the turf until he received a hollow reply, after which he bent down and removed the square piece of sod that camouflaged a wooden trapdoor. Attached on the other side was a rope, which descended into that dark, surgical hole. It was only six feet but might as well have gone a mile underground. Myron pointed his flashlight down. The sides were braced with wood.
“Hardly a bulge,” he said, admiring his work.
Over the last few months Jamie had had misgivings over this particular direction in the project, especially since this part was his own idea and done without permission from Sylvia or her family. It was meant to be a coda. A recapitulation. But as he stood over that hole, he lurched into full-blown What-the-fuck-have-I-done terrain. How did this ever seem like a good idea? Jamie remembered when she became bedridden and talked to her family with terrible, if sometimes incoherent, purpose, as if the rest of existence were last-minute stuff, and he sneaked in a few minutes before 12:01 P.M., sheepish yet determined to fulfill her wishes, and the girls dutifully moved aside, and big Ed glared, and Sylvia, even in her heavily opiated state, understood the time and she sat up, curling a stray lock of hair behind her left ear, just like she did in high school, her secret message to him, but what was she saying now, as she gathered up her breath and answered the question with force-of-will clarity, “I am fine, thank you, and how are you?” maintaining the pose until he stopped recording and exhaustion dropped her back onto the pillow—Jamie, near tears, knew he had to continue with this project, just for a little while longer, just to keep her, if not alive, then not totally dead.
Five days later she was gone.
By then Jamie had called a friend who shot nature documentaries, and he asked him about filming in dark, confined spaces over an extended period—“For a weird time-lapse thing I’m working on”—and the friend told him he had the perfect rig, a reconfigured Sony PDW-700 with all the bells and whistles, enclosed in a weatherproof housing with an exterior Li-ion polymer battery and lights—“We call it the crab pot: load it, lock it, leave it. It’s how we did the hibernating-bear thing.” The friend overnighted the camera to Vermont, and two days after the funeral Jamie returned to the cemetery with his new pal Myron. The first night they dug a hole and built a shaft over the coffin; the second night they carefully sawed away the mountains on the lid and replaced it with a piece of plexi; the third night they installed the crab pot. After a few tests to set the lighting and frame the, well, frame the face properly—Jamie could barely look—they returned Sylvia Carne to darkness, except for six seconds a day.
“You need to check on it once in a while,” Jamie told Myron.
Myron saluted.
“You sure you can do this?”
“Absolutely.”
But the question was more self-directed, and over the following months, Jamie thought about paying Myron in full and leaving the camera and letting its memory run down to nothing. What an excellent find centuries from now: these crazed Americans even filmed themselves dead. The initial How-are-you? footage consisted of seventy-four consecutive responses, time- and date-stamped from late July to early October. In total, it was less than eight minutes of film, and Jamie had yet to watch a second. It didn’t seem complete to him. Not yet. He wanted the entire loss. At least this was his rationalization, that he wanted to peer into the absolute truth, to once again push boundaries. This is what happens, he would have told you, this is the final, not-so-stupid answer to that most banal but brutal question. But if you looked closer, you might