Nate set the projector on a chair. A length of cord ran to a wall socket, the projector pointed to the interior of a closet wall into a maw of darkness. A light glowed, a smell of scorched dust illuminated in a scattered beam. A label cautioned the bulb had to warm and cool in the vacuum tube apparatus, its filament visible to the eye.
Nate followed the instructions. He had the box of reels on the bed, the dates labeled. They were in chronological order. He had dates in his head, certain years. He moved them accordingly with some calculus of events running through in his head.
It was the saddest he had been in a long time. He was aware of it. He had hoped for a sequence of mishaps, a border crossing where he was denied entry into America and turned back. That would have ended it.
He would be lying if he said he didn’t know why he had come south again. In Grandshire, on the Internet, he had seen pictures of Norman Price, the jawline of the Feldman family. He went searching for it not long after the letter from the lawyers.
He knew a dark secret was being revealed, one long suspected. It was still a great shock, even across the span of years, this disconnectedness to a half-brother, a relationship that could never be repaired, and yet the letter from Helen Price had arrived in the immediacy of a need, his own illness, in how this might actually work out.
He felt a shame in having conceived the idea. His kidneys were failing. He had been poisoned as Ursula had been poisoned. How best might it be explained? Did he dare ask for a kidney?
He was thinking, how Frank Grey Eyes might have asked. Perhaps in the apparent poetry of some grander, cosmic story, referencing a shared life source of a great headwater, the attendant tributaries of two life streams run to remote and distant regions, two waters diverged in the babble of different journeys, then rejoined in the brackish estuary of a great watershed, some opening to the sea, where all was one again.
This was how Frank Grey Eyes might have put it, but much better in his grand and overarching theory of everything. It was hard to speak with the conviction of Frank Grey Eyes, because that was Frank Grey Eyes’ undoubted gift and truth.
It sounded wrong appropriating what was not his understanding of life, when he didn’t believe in everything Frank Grey Eyes believed in.
Nate checked the public records of births and deaths. It was all there on the Internet, the year and the date of Norman’s birth. Perhaps Norman already knew this secret, but Nate doubted it. This was Helen Price asserting her hold over the Feldmans.
It was how he saw it, a cold indictment passed down. It was cruel, sending him these reels. She was asserting her influence in death. It suggested the sort of woman she was, or had been, calculating, reaching out in death to stab at him.
Nate looked up. His head was not clear. He needed to voice what he was thinking. He made his appeal. ‘You see, Ursula, what this woman has done to my mind?’ He was standing in the half-light, the curtains drawn in advance of viewing the tapes. ‘This is the trap she set for me.’
*
The tapes had all been recorded at the office. The ones he was interested in were taken post Norman’s birth, in a lapse of almost two months when Helen Price was not there to run the camera. It was easy establishing how Helen had filed the tapes.
The reel rolled in static-filled black and white in contrast to what was, back then, a glorious day of brilliant light and cut shadows. His father stepped into and out of frame, a series of out-takes that had never been edited. They had simply been recorded, labeled and stored.
There was no narrative, no purpose and, eerily, no sound. The tapes simply existed, a contrail of memory, evidence that survived the act itself, eclipsing time, this the sort of evidentiary material St Peter might be charged with reviewing in the great assessment of a life, in advancing one’s destiny toward Heaven or Hell.
*
There was the single sequence at a certain date. Nate fed the reel in a blurred advance and arrived at a scene. Helen Price’s gloved hand adjusted the lens. She emerged, walking away from the camera, this woman, now dead, the spread of her hips betraying what had happened and so recently. Nate held his breath. He cared little about Helen Price. She was there in the historical record. To get to his father, he had to go through her.
Her hair was combed in a wave off her forehead. She was drawn, her eyes sunken, suggesting a period of convalescence, her lips a shade not identifiable in black and white, and yet he observed the exercising control she maintained, an influence and presence that would not be dismissed. It was communed in the quiver of her hold in the crook of his father’s arm, this the first time Helen Price had appeared alongside his father, his father suffering through it, and left holding the baby. There were sayings that literal.
They both looked stunned. It was recorded without sound. It went on longer than it should. His father’s lips began moving. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth. He was saying something. It added a solemnity and underlying mystery to have his father speak and not hear it.
He remembered far back with Ursula, how she had quieted him on their first night after the act was done. She had wanted to hear his heart and not his opinions. Words meant so little and he had quietly caved to a love that would sustain them. It was the opposite in this instance, the silence so sharp in the insistence of an underlying rage barely contained.
In releasing the child, there was opportunity for some show of affection. His father was a head taller, his lips near the crown of Helen Price’s head. He did not kiss her, when, at one point, there had been an act and an intimacy that begat a child, and Nate felt a deepening sense of her pain, for the betrayal of what had happened.
Nate stopped the projector at the moment the child was surrendered and they were suddenly out of frame. In their absence, he could see the shrouded relief carving of a giant Egyptian and Indian cradling time aloft out over the city.
It was 4.46 p.m. by the clock, deep afternoon in late April 1963. April 22 to be precise.
Nate checked the historical meteorological records. The mercury read sixty-two degrees at two in the afternoon in what was described as a week of glorious weather, a high pressure front of blue skies. It was a point of no importance, but a fact, nonetheless, that could be accessed on the Internet. The Cubs were playing well out of the winter pen in Arizona, in advance of what would be their first winning season since 1946. Jack Brickhouse was making the calls on WGN.
Nate spent another hour screening reels in the way an ad man might audition actors for a part. His father wore his pants cinched above the hips. He had a figure not dissimilar to Clark Kent, as played by a vintage George Reeves, the original Superman, when vainglory and heroism were not necessarily aligned, the glasses worn such a weak conceit. It was, he understood, less Lois Lane being actually duped, as her wanting to be duped, to permit normalcy to proceed alongside valor as it did, or had, in the lives of so many who had served during the war effort.
Nate fed another spool, unraveling unremitting hours of tedium, his father at his office window, his gaze drawn to the camera like some desultory God.
At some point, a tripod had been purchased. Helen appeared in one sequence, smoking at his father’s desk in the fashion of James Cagney. He thought her so fundamentally ignorant. Her misconception of how men of power acted, when she had evidence to the contrary, when at certain moments, there must have been confidences gained and succor sought, before eventually, and without ceremony — like mild-mannered Clark Kent — his father had taken his leave, not up, up and away, but to his death below.
*
On his laptop, Nate opened a site from the Philippines. You could buy a kidney on the Internet, or begin the brokering. He stared at a line of bantamweight men, all smiling, fathers with their arms raised revealing stitch marks running beneath their ribcages.