Apu closed his eyes and breathed. Then, exhaling, he gave a little smile and opened the floodgates of the past.
“For a long time,” Apu said, “he controlled us with money, the money he gave us to live on, the money he promised us as our share, and we did as he asked. But also with something much more powerful than money. This was the idea of the family. He was the head and we were the limbs and the body does what the head instructs it to do. We were brought up that way: in the old-school concepts. Absolute loyalty, absolute obedience, no arguments. It wore off eventually, but it worked for a long time, long into our adult lives. We are not children but for so long we jumped when he jumped, we sat when he said sit, we laughed and cried when he said cry or laugh. When we moved here, it was fundamentally because he said, now we move. But we all had our own reasons for going along with the plan. Petya of course needs a lot of support. For D, even if he didn’t know it, America was his road to this metamorphosis that he wants, or he doesn’t want, I don’t know, or he doesn’t know, but at least here he can explore it. For me, there were people to get away from. Entanglements. Not financial, though for a period I had gambling debts. I got past that time. But there were romantic difficulties. There was a woman who broke my heart, another woman who was a little crazy, good crazy most of the time but not all of it, and maybe dangerous for me, not physically but again in the heart, and a third who loved me but who stuck to me so close I had no room to breathe. I broke up with them all or they broke up with me, it doesn’t matter, but then they didn’t go away. Nobody ever goes away. They circled me like helicopters shining bright floodlights down on me and I was caught in their crossed beams like a fugitive on the run. Then a friend of mine, a writer, a good writer, said something that scared the pants off me. He said, think of life as a novel, let’s say a novel of four hundred pages, and then imagine how many pages in the book your story has already covered. And remember that after a certain point, it’s not a good idea to introduce a new major character. After a certain point you are stuck with the characters you have. So maybe you need to think of a way of introducing that new character before it’s too late, because everyone gets older, even you. He said this to me, just before my father decided we had to move. And so when my father made his decision I thought, you know, this is great. Even better than trying to introduce a new character here, where the exes are circling with their floodlights. This way I get to throw away the whole book and start writing a new story. That old book wasn’t that good anyway. So I did it, and here I am, and now I am seeing ghosts, because the trouble with trying to escape yourself is that you bring yourself along for the ride.”
In the painting, now, I picked out the figures of the hovering helicopter women, and saw the small black silhouette of a cowering man below them, the only shadow-figure in that work without shadows. The haunted man and the ghosts of the lost past, haunting him. And the present, I now perceived, was unstable, the buildings crooked and distorted, as if seen through a pane of old, uneven glass. The look of the cityscape reminded me of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And that at once brought back my early image of Nero Golden as the master criminal Dr. Mabuse. I didn’t bring that up, but asked about German Expressionism. He shook his head. “No, the distortion is not referential. It’s actual.” He had developed a problem of the retina, macular degeneration, “luckily the wet kind, because for the dry kind, there’s no treatment, you lose your sight and that’s that. Also, luckily, only in the left eye. If I close the left eye everything looks normal. But if I close the right eye the world turns into this.” He jerked a thumb at the painting. “Actually I think it’s the left eye that sees the truth,” he added. “It sees everything distorted and deformed. Which in fact everything is. The right eye is the one that sees the fiction of normality. So I have truth and lies, one eye for each. It’s good.”
In spite of his customary sardonic manner I could see he was agitated. “The ghosts are real,” he said, gathering his strength. “For some reason I feel better saying this to an anti-spiritual being like yourself.” (I had once told him that I thought the word spiritual, which was now applied to everything from religion to exercise regimes and fruit juice, needed to be given a rest, for perhaps a hundred years or so.) “And it’s not a drug thing. I swear. They just appear, in the middle of the night but also in the middle of the day, in my bedroom or in the street. They are never solid. I can see through them. Sometimes they are sort of buzzy, crackling, broken up like a defective video image. Sometimes they are well defined and clear. I don’t understand. I’m just telling you what I’m seeing. I have the feeling I’m losing my mind.”
“Tell me exactly how it happens,” I said.
“Sometimes I don’t see anything,” he said. “Sometimes I just hear things. Words that are hard to make out, or, also, perfectly clear. Sometimes also the images show up. What is strange is that it’s not necessarily that they are talking to me. The circling exes, yes, for sure, but otherwise it’s like they are just getting on with their lives but I am excluded from those lives, because I have excluded myself, and there is a deep feeling of having done something wrong. All of them are from back home, you understand? All.” The smile had gone from his face now. He looked very upset. “I have studied the seeing of visions,” he said. “Joan of Arc, Saint John the Divine. There are similarities. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it seems to come from within, from the region of the navel, being extruded from the body. At other times it feels purely external. Afterwards often one passes out. It’s exhausting. This is what I have to tell you. Tell me what you think.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said. “Tell me why you think it’s happening.”
“I think I left in a bad way,” he said. “I was in bad shape. I left without making my peace. This is where you will find it hard to go along with me. The familiar spirits are angry with us, the deities of the place. There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things and I, we, all of us, we just ripped ourselves away, just tore off the corner of the page where we were standing, and that was a kind of violence. It’s necessary to put the past at rest. I have the strong sense right now of not being able to see my way forward. It feels like there isn’t a way forward. Or that for there to be a way forward, first there must be a journey backwards. That’s what I believe.”