I never saw him again. Until today.
Rumor had it that he’d disappeared from Fort Dix the first week. He was in Canada, he was in Sweden. The Finns had jailed him for entering the country illegally, the Swiss had expelled him. He was in Belize City stirring up the locals, the British had got hold of him and the United States was pressing for his extradition. Rumors. They sifted back to me through my mother, friends, people who claimed they’d seen him or talked to someone who had. I was in law school, student-deferred. There were exams, the seasons changed, Erica visited on weekends, and there were long breathy phone calls in between. In my second year, the packages began to show up in my mailbox. Big, crudely bundled manuscripts — manuscripts the size of phone books — sent from an address in London, Ontario.
There were no cover letters. But, then, cover letters would have been superfluous: the moment I saw the crabbed scrawl across the flat surface of the first package (lettering so small it could have been written with the aid of magnification), I knew who had sent it. Inside these packages were poems. Or, rather, loosely organized snatches of enjambed invective in strident upper-case letters:
THE FASCIST NAZI ABORTIONIST LOBBY THAT FEEDS
ON THE TATTERED FLESH OF ASIAN ORPHANS
MUST BE CIRCUMVENTED FROM ITS IMPERIALIST EXPANSIONIST DESIGN
TO ENSLAVE THE MASSES AND TURN ARTIFICIALLY NATIONALIZED
PROLETARIANS AGAINST BROTHER AND SISTER PROLETARIANS
IN THE INTERNECINE CONFLICT THAT FEEDS
THE COFFERS
OF THE REVISIONIST RUNNING DOGS
OF BOURGEOIS COMPLACENCY!
The poems went on for hundreds of pages. I couldn’t read them. I wondered why he had sent them to me. Was he trying to persuade me? Was he trying to justify himself, reach out, recapture some sympathy he’d deluded himself into thinking we’d once shared? I was in law school. I didn’t know what to do. Eventually, the packages stopped coming.
Erica and I married, moved back to Westchester, built a house, had a daughter. I was working in a law firm in White Plains. One night, 2:00 A.M., the phone rang. It was Casper. “Jack,” he said, “it’s me, Casper. Listen, listen, this is important, this is vital—” Phone calls in the night. I hadn’t spoken to him in seven years, gulfs had opened between us, I was somebody else — and yet here he was, with the same insistent, demanding voice that wraps you up in unasked-for intimacies like a boa constrictor, talking as if we’d just seen each other the day before. I sat up. He was nearly crying.
“Jack: you’ve got to do something for me, life and death, you got to promise me—”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “wait, hold on—” I didn’t want to hear it. I was angry, puzzled; I had to be at work in five and a half hours.
“Just this one thing. You know me, right? Just this: if anybody asks, you stick up for me, okay? No, no: I mean, tell them I’m all right, you know what I mean? That I’m good. There’s nothing wrong with me, understand?”
What could I say? The phone went dead, the room was dark. Beside me, in bed, Erica shifted position and let out a sigh that would have soothed all the renegades in the world.
I was busy. The incident slipped my mind. Three days later a man in an elaborately buckled and belted trench coat stepped into the anteroom at Hermening & Stinson, the firm that had given me my tenuous foothold in the world of corporate law. No one paid much attention to him until he announced that he was from the FBI and that he wanted to speak with me. The typist stopped typing. Charlie Hermening looked up at me like a barn owl scanning the rafters. I shrugged my shoulders.
The man was big and fleshy and pale, his irises like water, wisps of white hair peeping out from beneath the fedora that hugged his bullet head. When I showed him into my office he flashed his credentials, and I remember wondering if TV producers had studied FBI men, or if FBI men had learned how to act from watching TV. He took a seat, but declined to remove either his hat or trench coat. Was I acquainted with a Casper R. Hansen, he wanted to know. Did I know his whereabouts? When had I seen him last? Had he telephoned, sent anything in the mail? What did I think of his mental state?
“His mental state?” I repeated.
“Yes,” the man said, soft and articulate as a professor, “I want to know if you feel he’s mentally competent.”
I thought about it for a minute, thought about Lake George, the poems, Casper’s tense and frightened voice over the phone. I almost asked the FBI man why he wanted to know: Was Casper in trouble? Had he done something illegal? I wanted to gauge the man’s response, listen for nuances that might give me a clue as to what I should say. But I didn’t. I simply leaned across the desk, looked the man in the eye, and told him that in my estimation Casper was seriously impaired.
That was a year ago. I’d forgotten the man from the FBI, forgotten Casper. Until now. Now he was back. Like a slap in the face, like a pointed finger: he was back.
“What are you afraid of?” Erica asked. “That he’ll say hello or shake your hand or something?”
It was dark. Moths batted against the screens; I toyed with my asparagus crepes and spinach salad. The baby was in bed. I poured another glass of French Colombard. “No,” I said, “that’s not it.” And then: “Yes. That would be bad enough. Think of the embarrassment.”
“Embarrassment? You were friends, you grew up together.”
“Yes,” I said. That was the problem. I sipped at the wine.
“Look, I’m not exactly thrilled about seeing him either — the weekend at Lake George was enough to last me a lifetime — but it’s not the end of the world or anything…. I mean, nothing says you’ve got to invite him over for dinner so he can lecture us on the wisdom of Mao Tse-tung or tell us how miserable he is.”
She was in the kitchen area, spooning the foam off a cup of cappuccino. “Are you afraid he’ll vandalize the house-is that its”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, we’re not kids any more — he s not that crazy.” I thought about it, listening to the hiss of the coffee maker. The house we’d put up was pretty cozy and dramatic. Modern. With decks and skylights and weathered wood and huge sheets of glass. It called attention to itself, stylish and unique, a cut above the slant-roofed cottages that lined the road. It was precisely the sort of house Casper and I had sought out and violated when we were sixteen. I looked up from my wine. “He might,” I admitted.
Erica looked alarmed. “Should we call the police?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, we can’t—” I broke off. It was futile. I wasn’t really afraid of that sort of thing — no, my fears went deeper, deeper than I wanted to admit. He would look at me and he would condemn me: I’d become what we’d reacted against together, what he’d devoted his mad, misguided life to subverting. That was the problem. That’s why I didn’t want to see him at the tennis courts or at the lake or even walking along the road with his shoulders hunched under the weight of his convictions.
“Hey”—she was at my side, massaging the back of my neck “why not forget about it, you’ve got enough worries as it is.” She was right. The EPA was filing suit against one of our clients-a battery company accused of dumping toxic waste in the Hudson — and I’d been poring over the regulations looking for some sort of loophole. I was meeting with Charlie Hermening in the morning to show him what I’d come up with.
“You know something — didn Rose say he’d been back nearly a month already?” She was purring, the cappuccino smelled like a feast, I could feel the alcohol loosening my knotted nerves. “And you only saw him today for the first time? If he was going to come over, wouldn’t he have done it by now?”
I was about to admit she was right, finish my coffee, and take a look at the newspaper when there was a knock at the door. A knock at the door. It was nine-thirty. I nearly kicked the table over. “I’m not here,” I hissed. “No matter who it is,” and I slipped into the bedroom.