“It’s our sweet baby,” she said.
She reached for the little brown Fioretti and allowed it to fall open between her hands, to a place marked by a playing card. Blue-backed with a pattern of white crescent moons. Deftly, her fingers dealt him the card, but he did not care to see its face and would not turn it over.
*
When he got home that night, my grandfather found Uncle Ray and my mother asleep on the couch in front of the television set. It was long past sign-off. Random-sample ants of wild signal swarmed the screen. All the lights were out, and the gray radiance of television static bled the room of color. Uncle Ray was sitting up at one end of the couch with his chin sunk to his chest. My mother lay across the cushions in her corduroy overalls, knees pulled to her chest, head in Uncle Ray’s lap. Her lips were stained a dark shade of what my grandfather presumed, judging from a half-eaten candy apple that lay upside down and stuck to the coffee table, to be red. Uncle Ray’s outstretched right arm lay along the length of my mother’s body from her shoulder to her hip.
It was an innocent, tender scene; it disturbed my grandfather. The glow of the television disturbed him. It made him think of will-o’-the-wisp, the radiance of decay. Ignis fatuus: the light of an old magazine full of old news burning in a trash bin; the flicker of genius insight that had caught in his mind that evening as he was driving around Forest Park looking for my grandmother. He tried to rekindle it now. A phantom boy scampering down the beach at sunset. The RAND Corporation, the Traveling Salesman Problem. Topographic heuristics applied to the problem of dead reckoning in inertial guidance. He chased the foolish fire a moment longer, verging on it . . . and it winked out and was gone, never to return.* What did it matter? It was going to cost a fortune to hospitalize my grandmother, get her the care she needed. The adventure of Patapsco Engineering was over for him. He would have to get Weinblatt to buy him out and find more reliable work, a regular paycheck.
He went to the television. Just before he switched it off, the foam of entropy brimming from the screen seemed to reverse, to organize itself into a familiar pattern. For a few seconds my grandfather stood motionless, the hair standing up on the back of his neck, as a coherent image appeared on the television’s screen. Holes for eyes. Nose a slash of black. Jagged jack-o’-lantern grin. When he read in the paper afterward that for the final transmission of The Crypt of Nevermore, Barry Kahn had taken the butchered pumpkin, put a candle inside, and let the play of the little flame fill the next forty-five minutes of dead air, my grandfather wondered. He wondered if an image could be retained by the phosphor coating of a cathode tube, or if it had bounced off some angle of the atmosphere and returned, an electronic revenant.
He switched off the television. The face lingered in negative on his retinas until, like a will-o’-the-wisp, like a flash of insight, it faded and winked out. After that, until his eyes adjusted, the room was dark.
*
“Remember that book I used to love, Strangely Enough?” I asked my mother that afternoon at my kitchen table as we stood looking down at the grinning horse skull with its mad mandala eyes. Strangely Enough by C. B. Colby, a nonfiction collection of pieces about “unexplained” incidents and paranormal events, had been a staple of the Scholastic Book Club in the 1960s and ’70s and among the key texts of my childhood. “There was a piece in there, something kind of similar. A transmission, the call sign of a TV station in Houston, Texas, appeared one day out of the blue on televisions over in England, I think it was. But, like, years later, after the station that broadcast it had gone out of business. Nobody knew where the signal came from or where it was before it reappeared.”*
“Huh,” my mother said.
“So maybe what Grandpa saw was something like that.”
My mother looked at me. She’d had a couple of slugs of Drambuie by then, and the look in her eyes did not trouble to be merciful.
“Maybe not,” I said.
She put the skull back into the middle of the stained towel and wrapped it up. She set the bundled skull into the Old Crow box. I found a roll of packing tape, and she sealed the box along every seam as though to prevent any future exposure, or possibly escape, of its contents. She left with the box under her arm and I have not seen it, and we have not discussed it, since.
20
There were a lot of painters living at Fontana Village. They painted detailed oil portraits of World War II aircraft, still lifes with seashells, nostalgia-brown scenes of shtetl weddings. They exhibited their work in the lobby of the Activity Center, at the annual holiday art fair.
Sally Sichel was not that kind of painter. She had studied at Pratt and taught painting at UC Davis with Arneson and Thiebaud. Joan Mitchell was the bridesmaid at her first wedding. Her work was not well known—my grandfather, whose idea of great painting began with Winslow Homer and ended with Analog magazine cover artist Kelly Freas, had never heard of her—but she was hardly unknown. Her canvases hung in museums and on the walls of collectors as far away as Japan. Back when SFMOMA was still in the War Memorial Veterans Building, they used to keep a small Sichel in a dim corner, where I paid it a visit once not long after my grandfather’s death. Like most of Sally’s work from the sixties, it seemed to be rooted in some dense and private mathematics. Its lacework of parabolas and angles—red-orange against titanium white—confused the eye. Retinal afterimages turned the white regions to jumping blue-green neon.
When she met my grandfather, she had been a widow for less than two months, but she had been alone and grieving for much longer than that. Leslie Port, her third husband, had succumbed, slowly at first and then in a dizzying rush, to an unspecified disease that, my grandfather only later came to realize, must have been AIDS. The disease was poorly understood at the time, and Leslie’s care was a prolonged bout of expensive flailing. Though Les had worked for years at Hewlett-Packard—he helped to invent the screen-and-button interface used by ATM machines and gas pumps all over the world—and made a good living, in time his treatment devoured his savings, along with all of Sally’s mental and emotional resources. Along the road to his death were wild switchbacks in diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription. Leslie’s first wife and three adult children, with their spouses and ex-spouses, formed a repertory company of guilt, cluelessness, and resentment that seized upon each reversal to stage marathon productions. Sally told my grandfather she had not touched a paintbrush in three years. “I haven’t had the time,” she said. “Or if I had time, then I didn’t have the energy. I was too tired. I’m still tired.”
They were lying on their backs in my grandfather’s bed, a queen. My grandfather lay on the side (the left) that had been the haunt of his insomnia, dreams, and cares for all the years of his marriage and then widowerhood. In that long-desert region of the mattress there was now, astonishingly, the warm body of a woman and a smell of amber and cloves. It was their second night together. She had begun with her head nestled against his shoulder, but his shoulder was too bony and her cheek was too hot. The name of her perfume was Opium and he found the smell of it alarming, but he liked the rasp of her low voice in the dark. She had been telling him her life story in scattered chapters with footnotes and asides. Her story was seventy-two years long. He still had not made an appointment with the specialist, nor said anything to Sally about the funny numbers on his blood panel—that was all she needed, another sick man on her hands—but he had a feeling he would not live to hear the whole megillah.