I made sure not to rush it. “If you think my mother owes you money, you ought to take it up with her. As for me, I think your story’s worth about as much as the teller.”
Lou and Frankie lifted him again.
“Big head now, I got it. I heard you had to sleep with a muzzle on, that true? You fucking cunt. I heard your mom wore earplugs around you, so she couldn’t hear you, cunt.” Dragged outside, he continued to yell, his boot heels scraping the ground.
• • •
Inside Nathan Sharp’s ballroom the fifty guests inspected me over duck and Bordeaux. These fund-raisers required little of me except to seem amused by the donors’ jokes or improved by their advice. From the swamps in the southeast and the windy states to the north they had been drawn to this mansion. I stepped out for a smoke and saw their shiny cars in a ring. Behind them the ocean rumbled in the starless night.
Fantasma Falls was a misnomer. There were no known falls yet found in a terrain marked for miles by desert, coastline, and canyon. According to one version, the title was the outright invention of Rutger Smitt, a paper baron, landowner, and amateur versifier from the previous century. Smitt, it was said, scoured the Dictionary of Geographic Terms, concocting the most alluring names he could to ease the settling of a land considered mean if not downright uninhabitable. Something of a pioneer in the field of branding, he was rumored to have coined the name Joy Beach, a waterless dump twenty miles north of the city, and Hallowed Hills, a stretch of accursed flatland to the east. Others, though, insisted the name preceded Smitt’s arrival and could be traced back to the slaughtered native population, who twice a year had visited a magical falls where ghosts were believed to take the shapes of men in order to reenact the scenes of their death. A committed minority held firmly to this latter view and were known to go on long hikes and walkabouts in the summer, searching for these still-undiscovered falls.
After dinner we retired to Nathan’s den, where Bernard had me do a show. A southerner bravely raised his hand. Next, a real-estate magnate named Gerald Picaso. The laughter stoked in that smoky, paneled room, decorated with the murdered heads of bears and moose, grew like a blaze, the faces of clannish men gathered around it, grinning and covetous. “This one’s ours!” a fat man said to much applause.
After dinner, Max pulled me aside, into an alcove decorated with paintings of flamingos.
“Do you believe any of it?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“All these speeches you give.”
“I don’t care what I do.”
“You know your mom and I talk. She doesn’t like this one bit. Not one bit!”
Soon after my encounter with Jesse Unheim I had Frankie and Lou look into Jesse’s claims about my father. A few days later, Bernard appeared in my room to confirm that a prisoner 8BA94 named Giovanni Bernini had, indeed, been murdered fifteen years into a thirty-five-year bid for arson and manslaughter at Dun Harbor Correctional.
“How do you feel?” he’d asked.
“Why, do you care?”
“Don’t be sore with me.”
“All right. I won’t be sore.”
“Another instance of her misguided way of protecting you. Ask me, this is a confirmation that what we’ve been doing has been right all along.”
“And what is it we’ve been doing?” I raised the cigarette to my lips. To sit at the kitchen table and ask this question while Bernard stood in the partial light of the vertical blinds was to create a poem. One made of time, not words. He liked to look between the blinds at the scrubby little garden, setting one back with his finger, like Harry Knott himself.
“Don’t be thick.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m giving you freedom,” he said.
“Okay, good,” I said with a slight smile.
“That’s right, it’s good. Freedom from being like your fuckin’ daddy, who apparently couldn’t keep his hands off another man’s cigarettes, that’s what I mean.”
Perhaps Bernard had filled me with freedom, for in that moment, as he paced in that easeful way, resting his hand in his back pocket (and in so doing slightly opening the flanks of his jacket), preparing, I knew, some diatribe, I experienced no dread. In fact, a kind of serenity — electrically charged — imbued the light tinkling of the blinds, the shard of shadow on the gray couch. Bernard, himself, but another phenomenon.
“Max probably told you I ran for Congress years ago. It wasn’t out of vanity. You of all people should know I have none. No, I ran because this country needs people who know the character of our enemies. I wanted it very badly. When people looked at me, they were looking at an idea disguised as a man. Twice I lost. Why? What wasn’t working? I asked myself again and again. Then it occurred to me.” He threw up his hands. “See, even then it had started. Senators, governors, congressmen. Aldermen, comptrollers, all the way down to the fucking garbage man — everyone, Giovanni, was an entertainer. An actor, a comedian, a tambourinist from the county grange.
“So I got into show business — the only business. Every business these days is show business. And it’s easy and it’s boring and it made me want to do a William Tell with about every last shit that walked into the Communiqué. But then I saw you.” He set his hands on his hips. “Now I hope you appreciate what we’ve all helped to do. What Frankie, Lou, and Nathan have helped me do. I don’t mean that you’re a movie star. No. Right now, I’m not talking to Giovanni Bernini, the actor, I’m talking to the spy Harry Knott, a man who has stepped out of the screen into the world. And even better, even better, yes! You’re them”—he flung his arm in the direction of the blinds—“at any moment you could be any voter in the world, and they know it. Don’t you see how rare this is? You’re both their movie hero and them at the same time.” He smiled. “What is it you think we’re up to, Giovanni? Why stop at governor? Hell, you’re gonna run this country, for, tell me, please, who in the hell can defeat a make-believe president?”
He ground out his cigarette, a favorite maneuver of his when approaching the coup de grâce. “About Lucy and me?” He laughed to himself. “Hell, I was hoping you’d hear about it. Really, what interest could I possibly have in a piece of ass like that? No, I was thinking of you, Giovanni. I got hard thinking of you: how you of all people thought you could have a girlfriend. Really, you think you’re gonna find some sweet little piece and sit by a lake and exchange rings? No, the family you’ve been allotted is the audience, the public, voters, customers — whatever the fuck you wanna call them. They alone preserve you, you understand that? Because you’re imaginary. Get it?”
“Sounds good.”
I stood and emptied the ashtray into the kitchen trash. When ballplayers say of a home run, “I knew as soon as it left the bat”—so I felt after this remark. Bernard tried some things, even patted me on the back. “Anyway, we’ll talk more about it,” he said as he left. “Absolutely,” I answered, with a grin. If his goal had been to make this sound bad, he had failed, for what could be better than becoming fictional?
That night, or one soon after, I wrote a letter to Mama explaining that she was not to visit. Calls followed. Letters. Most I tore up without reading. I knew what they would say. In fact, I almost mailed her a parody of my own, a note riddled with oh, my boys, and I was only trying to help yous. That gray prison in Dun Harbor. All those years I’d passed it on my way to the train station, and my father, my namesake, had been there.