15
FAYE IS IN HER DARK BASEMENT CELL cringing in anticipation of another panic attack because the house spirit’s hot breath is right up next to her and he’s holding the chain-link fence and pressing his face against it and his black eyeballs are bugging out and he’s telling her exactly what he’s going to need from her, which is vengeance and retribution.
But retribution for what?
She wishes more than anything that her mother were here to stroke her forehead with a cold washcloth and tell her she’s not dying and hold her till she slept, and Faye would wake up in the morning blanketed and warm, her mother beside her having fallen asleep sometime in the night while watching over her.
Faye could use that tenderness right now.
Yes, but where was your father when you needed him, the ghost says. Where is he now?
Faye doesn’t understand.
Your father is a terrible, evil man. You must know this.
Yes, I suppose. He kicked me out of the house.
Oh, it’s all about you, eh? Jeez, Faye. Selfish?
Okay, then he’s evil why? Because he works at ChemStar?
C’mon. You know what I’m talking about.
Faye’s impression of her father is that of a mournful silence. Sometimes staring off into the distance. A man who keeps everything locked up within. Always some slight melancholy, unless he was telling her stories of the old country, stories about his family’s farm, the only subject at which he seemed to brighten.
Faye says: He did something back home, didn’t he? Before he came to the U.S.
Bingo, the ghost says. And now he’s being punished for it, and you’re being punished for it. And your family will continue to be punished for it, to the third and fourth generation. Those are the rules.
That’s not very fair.
Hah! Fair? What’s fair? How the universe works and your sense of fairness are very different things.
He’s an unhappy man, Faye says. Whatever he did, he’s sorry for it.
Is it my fault that just about everyone on earth by now is paying for some evil committed by a previous generation? No. The answer is no. It is not my fault.
Faye often wondered what passed before her father’s eyes when he stared into the distance, when he stood in the backyard looking into the sky for an hour. He was always so maddeningly vague about his life before America. All he’d talk about was that house, that beautiful salmon-red house in Hammerfest. All other details were forbidden.
Alice told me something, Faye says. She told me the way to get rid of a ghost is to take it home.
The house spirit crossed his arms. That would be rich, he said. I would love to see that.
Maybe I should go to Norway. Take you back where you came from.
Oh I dare you. I double dare you! That would be seriously entertaining. Go on. Go to Hammerfest and ask about Frank Andresen. See how well that works for you.
Why? What would I find?
Probably better if you didn’t know.
Tell me.
I’m just saying, there are some mysteries of the universe that ought to remain mysteries.
Please.
Fine. Fair warning? You won’t like it.
I’m listening.
You will find that you are as awful as your father is.
That’s not true.
You will find that you two are exactly alike.
We are not.
Go ahead. Try it. Go back to Norway. You’ve got yourself a deal. I’ll let you out of jail right now. And in exchange? You go find out about your dad. Have fun with that.
And just then the door to the room pops open, and light from buzzing overhead fluorescent lamps spills in, and there appears, in the doorway, remarkably, Sebastian. With his bushy hair and baggy jacket. He sees her and comes to her. He has the keys to her cell. He opens the door and crouches down and takes her in his arms and whispers into her ear: “I’m getting you out of here. Let’s go.”
16
BY NOW THE MAYOR is practically lecturing at poor old Cronkite, who looks dispirited and withered and sad. There have been threats, is what the mayor’s saying. Assassination attempts against all of the candidates, bomb threats, even threats against himself, the mayor. Old Cronkite doesn’t seem to be looking at him but at a spot just past him.
“That true?” asks Agent B——. “About the threats?”
“Not true,” says Agent A——. “Nothing credible.”
They’re watching in the Haymarket, on the television above the bar. The mayor is holding old Cronkite’s microphone for him and might as well be interviewing himself. He says, “Certain people planned to assassinate many of the leaders, including myself, and with all of these talks of assassination and it happening in our city I didn’t want what happened in Dallas or what happened in California to happen in Chicago.”
The Secret Service agents feel bristly at him bringing up the Kennedys like that. They take small, measured sips from their mocktails.
“He’s lying,” says Agent A——. “Nobody’s trying to assassinate him.”
“Yeah, but what’s old Cronkite gonna do? Call him a liar on live TV?”
“Old Cronkite doesn’t seem to have his heart in this one.”
“Checked out, passion-wise.”
Quick break from the mayor’s interview to a shot of Michigan Avenue to show what appears to be a real full-size military tank rolling down the street. On television, it looks like something out of World War II footage, like the liberation of Paris. The tank is rolling right in front of the Hilton, and they begin to feel its rumble in their bellies, and the assembled politicos in the Haymarket Bar gather close to the plate-glass windows to watch it rattle hugely by—all save for the two Secret Service agents at the bar, who are not surprised by the fact of the tank (it had been mentioned in the many “eyes only” memos leading up to the event) and anyway the Secret Service always maintain in public an air of unflappability and total discipline and composure, and so they watch the tank roll by on TV, unimpressed.
17
FAYE HAS BEEN PRAYING all night for a rescue, but now that a rescuer has come she hears herself telling him no.
“What do you mean no?” Sebastian says. He’s crouching on the floor with his hands holding her shoulders like at any minute he’s going to shake some sense into her.
“I don’t want to go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” she says. Her brain feels fuzzy and swollen. She tries to remember what the house spirit had told her, but already it’s fading. She can remember the sensation of talking to the ghost, but she can no longer remember what he sounds like.
She looks at Sebastian, at his worried face. She remembers they were supposed to have a date last night.
“I’m sorry I stood you up,” she says, and Sebastian laughs.
“Another time,” he says.
The clenching in her chest is releasing, her shoulders loosening, the bile in her stomach seeping away. It’s as if her whole body is a spring after it’s sprung. She’s relaxing—this is what it feels like to relax.
“What was I doing when you came in?” she says.
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Was I talking to someone? Who was I talking to?”
“Faye,” he says, putting his palm gently on her cheek. “You were sleeping.”