Magnetic Field(s) Read online

  When they got home, Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer found that Emily Dickinson had been right when she spoke of the time after death—for the survivors—as an “awful leisure.” Mr. Mortimer, who did not play tennis as much as his wife, and who did not keep the women’s chorus running smoothly, found himself shrinking from reminders of his son at the same time that he sought out and clung to reminders of his son. Finally he made the decision and either destroyed or disposed of everything. The clothes he gave to the Salvation Army, the records he donated to the college library, the tapes he stored in the attic train room, which he never again entered. He never again went into the woods next door or into the studio in the cellar.

  He started getting reports from Callahan. Often these were several pages of single-spaced typing, together with photocopies of relevant documents. Anthony Blaquere was thirty-seven years old and had never been married. He lived with his mother in a working-class neighborhood, in the bottom half of a duplex, which she owned. The top half was rented out. He had been arrested twice in the last five years, once for assault and battery—a fight in a bar—but the charges were dropped when the other man withdrew his complaint. The other arrest was for drunk driving, for which he was convicted, given a suspended sentence and assigned to the police department’s Driver Training Program, which he completed successfully. He did not go out much, except for an occasional movie, and even more occasionally to a porno movie. He frequented three bars in his own neighborhood. He had an older brother and an older sister. The sister was married to a Marvin Jacobs, who managed the distributing firm for which Blaquere drove a truck.

  The garage that did the routine maintenance and repair on all the distributor’s trucks revealed that they had repaired Blaquere’s truck the day after the accident. Blaquere himself had brought it in, even though it still had two thousand miles to go before its next scheduled tune-up. He claimed it sounded like it was missing on one cylinder. Nothing was really wrong; somehow one of the sparkplug cables had pulled loose. “Oh, while you’re at it, you want to take a look at that reverse beeper? It went out on me last week.” The beeper was repaired. Photocopies of the deposition, the repair order and the invoice were enclosed.

  Mortenson’s Tavern, next door to the Stereo Supermart, was the fourth bar on Blaquere’s delivery route for Mondays. Thomas Mortenson, who owned the place and worked the day shift, revealed that Blaquere usually made his deliveries in fairly prompt fashion, but that fairly regularly—once every six weeks or two months or so—he would come in obviously hung over. On those days he would have a boilermaker or two. Hair of the dog. On the day in question he had complained of a terrible hangover and had his two boilermakers. “He is a big man,” Mortenson said. “He can hold his liquor pretty good.” No, he did not know if the driver had been drinking before he arrived that morning—how would he know?—but yes, his speech had been a little slurred.

  The man who worked the morning shift in the Astor Club, the first bar on that delivery route, said that Blaquere had simply wheeled in his hand truck, picked up his empties and left, almost without saying a word. But at the Tahiti Lounge he had had two shots of whiskey and a beer, and at The Spot he’d had another boilermaker. “Getting an early start, hey, Tony?” Blaquere held his close-cropped head in both his huge hands. “Got to kill the demon,” he said. “It feels like there’s six dogs in there fighting it out. Only way to do the beasts in,” he said, holding up the shot glass. Photocopies of the three depositions were enclosed.

  In the autumn Mr. Mortimer taught his classes as usual, except that it was pretty obvious to everyone that he was distracted most of the time. A few students complained that he would trail off in the middle of a sentence sometimes in class, and end up staring out the window. At other times he would lash out sarcastically “for no reason at all” at some student “who hadn’t done anything to deserve it.” The dean and the president called him in and suggested he take a leave of absence.

  “I had thought of doing that,” he said calmly, “but this is what I need right now.”

  It was the first time that either man had ever known him to admit that he needed anything. He went on teaching his classes one way or another, and spent even more time in his carrel in the library, but found he could only read articles in journals. He felt his mind to be in a kind of neutral, numb. He could ingest ideas and discriminate between them as sharply as ever, but he could not produce new ones. Now again he walked the aisles of the library, randomly taking books down and reading their dedications and acknowledgment pages, a wistful feeling passing over him whenever they mentioned the author’s children. “To my sons Timmy and Robin,” “To my daughter Kathleen” and “Some acknowledgment is due also to my children, Robert and Alicia, who put up with all that typing at all those late hours.”

  He found that he and Allison were being invited to dinner more often than usual, and that all the people they knew were being terribly bright and cheerful. At these dinners there would as often as not be a child, either at the table or upstairs in bed, and everywhere throughout these houses were the evidences of an ongoing life that included these children—cribs and high chairs, bicycles, wagons, doll houses, musical instruments, a little toy seal he found in the bathroom, made out of some tinny kind of metal. When he rolled it along the windowsill, the striped ball on its nose turned. It would have been so easy to put it in his pocket. It couldn’t be worth more than a dollar; it would probably not even be missed. He let the wheels spin themselves out and put it back on the windowsill.

  He found that he could not any longer think about his son without conjuring up also an image of Blaquere, the man hulking like a bear or a gorilla there on his chair at the hearing, there on the running board of his beer truck. And with these images came a feeling of cold tenseness in his skin and his limbs, his teeth clenched, his cheeks tingling, his arms tight, his heart beating slow and hard. When he saw Blaquere on the running board of his truck, he saw also, out of the corner of his mind, the blur of blue jeans and T-shirt and the spreading redness on the pavement.

  There was more news from Callahan. Marvin Jacobs, Blaquere’s brother-in-law, had a brother Michael, a captain in the Harrisburg Police Department. Blaquere’s older brother, Ryan, was married and lived in the suburbs with his wife and three children. He was a sergeant in the same police department. “I warned you at the outset,” Callahan wrote, “that we would very likely encounter resistance, and we are. Every petition we file takes three times as long as usual to process, and is often rejected on the flimsiest technicality or no technicality at all. These all have to be filed again and the process begun again from scratch. I don’t think I can get a hearing set before the spring, but by then we should have as strong a case as could be made, I think, and should be able to move on both fronts, the reopened criminal case and the civil suit for wrongful death. Enclosed please find a photocopy of Ms. Krantz’s deposition.”

  Rachel Krantz had worked at the Stereo Supermart on Harrison Street for three years. She was now twenty-seven years old and had recently broken up with her boyfriend, who worked in the accounting office at Blue Cross. Because of the breakup she had decided to move back in with her mother in Philadelphia, and maybe finish up her degree in social welfare at the University of Pennsylvania. On the morning in question she had opened up the store as usual at ten o’clock. She liked the mornings best because almost no customers came in till around lunchtime, and she could leave all the various display systems turned off. After noon there would be three or four stereos going full blast, all tuned to different stations.

  “I was sitting in the front, going over the week before’s receipts. I remember because it was my last day there and I realized I was actually feeling sentimental about the place. The other two people I worked with were in the back. I heard a loud roar and looked out the window. It was one of those trucks double-parked outside. The beer truck went into reverse. It sort of lurched backwards and then it stopped. The driver opened the door and got out or stuck his head ou
t and looked back. Then he waved at this other man who was standing on the sidewalk, and then he got back in his truck and drove away. Just then the one customer who was in the store came up and asked me about speakers and I went back to the listening room with him. We must have been in there, I don’t know—forty-five minutes, an hour? But he did buy a set of AR 145. I didn’t even hear about the accident until now.”

  The hearing was set for May. Mr. Mortimer drove to Harrisburg in a rented Mercury Cougar. He stayed with Mrs. Baxter, and on Sunday morning he and his mother-in-law drove out to the cemetery, which they entered through a neo-classical arch in a vaguely Roman style. Mr. Mortimer had never been bothered by cemeteries, and as he drove between these gently rolling green slopes the neat rows of graves looked to him as if they were flowing over the hills like waves. Their orderliness made him think of one of those waves his father would have studied, all of whose parts were in some sort of harmonic relation to each other. Was that it?

  But even as he was pleased by the mathematical neatness around him he was struck by the anonymity of the markers that in fact marked or distinguished nothing. He could read their names, he could read their dates, they would still remain anonymous. He would never stand in their kitchens chewing on a cold ear of corn from the fridge at eleven-thirty at night after watching the late news. Other people’s lives. Other people’s deaths. In a broad, shallow bowl in these hills, like a wide meadow that might have been a wheatfield, the wind making a sea surface of its hair, in one of the graves in this row of graves, his son was buried. As they started to leave, approaching that Roman arch along the wide, boulevard-like main road, he remembered the one trip he and Allison had made to Paris, walking up the Champs-Elysées.

  After lunch he spoke with Callahan on the phone and arranged to meet him outside the courtroom. He and Mrs. Baxter had an early dinner. He watched some TV for a while. He got up and said he felt restless and thought he would just drive around for a while. He looked up Blaquere’s number and address in the phone book in a gas station. He drove there in the gathering evening, and cruised past the house once. Then he went around the block and parked across the street, two doors up from the house. The duplex was like a twin of itself, one sitting on top of the other. Identical screened-in porches top and bottom. In the bottom porch two figures were sitting in lawn chairs. They must have been talking, because from time to time one of them would gesture. The air was muggy. The house was covered with asbestos siding that was brown but streaked or mottled—to resemble what? Soon Mrs. Blaquere, whom the neighbors called Mrs. Blacky, would get up and go to bed. Anthony Blaquere would go to the kitchen and take a beer out of the fridge. He would put the flip-top ring in the ashtray and take his first drink there in the kitchen. TV was a pleasure he indulged himself in, and this forestalling of the pleasure was somehow good too, real good, an assertion of willpower. He carried the can into the living room and turned on the set, its jumpy blue glow filling the dim room. Mr. Mortimer drove away.

  In the morning he and Mrs. Baxter made themselves a good breakfast, and then he drove downtown. As he got out of his rented car in the parking lot of the Hall of Justice, he looked up to see Blaquere coming with the same two men toward him and the building behind him. He walked out from between the parked cars and saw that the other man had now spotted him, pouncing his snout-like nose forward and snarling, pointing and jabbing his finger the way he had done in the hearing room. He was trying to speak but his fury made it impossible, and the choking stammer made him even more enraged. He waved again, one downward, scornful swipe.

  Mr. Mortimer pulled the .45 from his belt and snapped off the safety with his thumb. He squared off and dropped down into a crouch, the way he’d seen the TV cops do it, holding the big gun with both hands, his knees and elbows bent to take the recoil, aiming at Blaquere’s chest. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Callahan running toward him waving and calling, “No! No, Charles, no!” The kick of the recoil did not surprise him, but the noise of the blast did; it jolted him and made him blink. The noise was a room—formal, even elegant, but absolutely bare. The large window on his right, with many panes, flooded the room with light—its white walls, its hardwood floors, the creamy richness of its baseboards and moldings. The room was long, and on his left, at the far end, an archway opened onto another room and gave some suggestion of the size and complexity of this structure. A foot or so behind him was one of the end walls of the room, and at the far end of the room was Blaquere. The impact of the bullet had knocked him back against a car. His eyes were still furious but now also puzzled as he lurched forward. Mr. Mortimer fired again, keeping his eyes open this time. The man looked as if he’d been kicked in the chest. He sat down on the pavement with his back leaning against a car, his legs twisted under him, and then that look of panic came into his eyes when he realized that this was, for him, what all his life he had called “dying,” a word that up till that moment had had no meaning.

  * * *

  The letter from Michael Harrison came in the morning on Saturday. Later that evening they were going to Anselm’s goodbye party for them, and on Monday they would head back to California. Les Champs Magnétiques was “finished” except for some minor editing changes. Anselm had already begun the process of setting up a traveling installation-performance schedule that would, ideally, include Boston, New York and Washington-Baltimore. The piece would live or be housed in various lofts or galleries or dance studios in those cities, if everything went the way it should. David would take care of the West Coast and do what he could with places like Dallas and Boulder and Santa Fe. As he opened the mail, the party tonight seemed both anticlimactic and premature. The piece wasn’t in fact finished. Of course it would never be finished; that was part of what it was all about—everything can be packaged, nothing will fit. Yet there was something satisfying about the feeling of closure, of a neat ending, that he gave up only reluctantly.

  Michael’s letter was cheerful and chatty. His recitals in San Francisco had gone very well, considering the usual semi-pro circumstances—pianos with slow or muddy action, squeaky pedals, halls with poor acoustics, and so on. He had played some of David’s songs and had seen all their mutual friends, including

  3 / DANIEL

  the Riordans.

  “You probably already know of Annie and Daniel’s breakup, but if you don’t I’m sorry to be the first to let you know, since the information should have come from one of them. The whole business was quite sudden for everyone, but it goes something like this: Daniel fell in love with an old student, Connie, with whom he had been having an affair for the last couple of years. He announced to Annie only in June that he was leaving her and moving in with Connie. Annie was naturally thunderstruck by the news. I think she is just now coming out of the shock of it all. She’s keeping the house, at least for now, and Daniel has moved into Connie’s apartment in Presidio Heights. Both seemed pretty well, considering. Annie was alternately up and down when I visited her: excited about the prospect of independence and yet feels understandably sad about the split. Daniel was a bit subdued, but the two evenings I spent with him were uncannily normal, given the circumstances. He has been staying away from any socializing, although he and Connie and I went to Chris Garfield’s concert last week, which, I gather, is the first time he had been ‘in public’ with her.

  “I don’t know what to say about all this—it’s really not easy to assimilate the split of two friends who, despite obvious irritations, had developed a kind of special language together and who looked more solid year by year. I don’t know Connie well enough to even say anything about her. She is younger than Annie (I think she’s about twenty-three) and amazingly beautiful, a classic Swedish blonde, a model—though she must have some brains, since she was being scholarshipped through school. She was very silent during my visits with them, which is understandable, I suppose, since she doesn’t yet know any of Daniel’s friends and is essentially the ‘new kid on the block,’ very conscious of not wanting
to make a bad impression. It will take some time to tell what she’s about.

  “I’m very sad about Annie—”

  When Danny came down, late as usual, to breakfast, he took one look at them and asked, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Danny,” Jane said, hugging him to herself.

  David watched his son move ambivalently into the hug, repeating, “Hey, what’s up?”

  “We just got a letter from Michael in San Diego. Daniel and Annie are splitting up.”

  He watched Danny’s eyes go wide in astonishment. He looked at the table where the two yellow sheets of Michael’s typed letter lay, unfolded now. They had been invisible to the boy at first, David thought, just part of the general litter that covered the table and seen out of the corner of the eye as part of the breakfast mess. Now they were, sprawled between the sugar bowl and the milk carton, the focal center around which the rest of the table and the people around it, the bricks of the wall, the window, even the bees buzzing and knocking themselves dead against the glass, organized themselves.

  “Oh no,” Danny said.

  They had named him after Daniel. The Riordans were his godparents. Twenty years. They did not have any closer friends. They had bought the cabin on the Russian River together—“time sharing”—though they almost never used it except as a foursome. It was their “country place,” where they would go to be completely, comfortably wacky together—get pleasantly drunk, smoke dope, walk in the woods. They went skinny-dipping together in what they took to be a secluded bend of the river—till two guys floated past in a canoe rigged up with a sail, an ice chest and even a little Coleman stove, selling beer, soft drinks, ice cream and hot dogs. Their prices were printed on their sail and they weren’t wearing any clothes except for their plastic strap-on bow ties. Daniel would bring his stories to the cabin, the ones that were later published as The External World, and they would listen to him read them out on the deck in the summer or around the Franklin stove in the winter. David would bring his guitar and they would listen to something new—if he had it—or they would all sing whatever they were in the mood for.