“Hey, buddy,” the driver was saying, as he awoke. For several moments he was completely disoriented. He shook his head slowly. Was he in Boston? In New York?
He was clutching a piece of paper in his hand. Washington, D.C., it said, under an address. George Wright.
His feeling of disorientation increased when he exited the cab. He did not recognize the block, nor the buildings on it. He wondered if the driver had taken him to the wrong place. Though at home he had had difficulty picturing the buildings of Hamilton Arms, he had hoped that being physically on Thirty-first Street would awaken some collapsed memory. Instead, it did the opposite. He turned in a slow circle. The neighborhood had brightened, improved; the buildings looked newly painted. The last time he had been there, with Ada, it had been alarmingly run-down. He had steered her quickly through the gate.
“Can I help you find something?” asked a young woman. She was pushing a baby stroller.
“Hamilton Arms,” said David, looking down at his ticket, and the woman shook her head.
“Haven’t heard of it,” she said. “Is it a restaurant?”
He turned in another circle. And then he noticed that there was a gate still, yes—perhaps the gate that once let him into the courtyard that led to George’s house.
“Never mind,” he said. He walked toward the gate. New metalwork displayed the words HAMILTON COURT. And the buildings beyond were all different: gone were the Swiss-style cottages, gone the empty swimming pool, the murals. The buildings were more upscale now. Totally nondescript. David wondered for a moment if he had made some mistake. He had been making them frequently.
An old man, a vagrant, was seated on the sidewalk, his back against the building that David remembered, suddenly, as what had once been the coffee shop. It, too, was different: the red brick had been painted a light gray; the sign was gone.
David approached him.
“Do you know—” he began, but the old man cut him off.
“Everyone’s gone,” he said. He looked away.
David almost gave up. He walked around the block several times—right and then right and then right and then right; that was a block, he reminded himself—to try to decide what to do. It was only on his third pass that he noticed an art gallery displaying paintings of the sort George used to make: large-scale abstract expressionist pieces in muted browns and blues.
They weren’t George’s, said the gallerist, when David went inside, but yes, he knew George Wright.
He looked at him strangely as he said it.
“Do you?” he asked David.
“Very well,” said David. “We’re old friends. Do you happen to have his new number?”
The gallerist, not wanting to give him the number directly, called George for him, and then proffered the telephone to David, and then stood to one side, an arm crossed about his torso, waiting.
George answered after six rings.
His voice, for several syllables, sounded rattling, disused. He cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said, when David asked if they could meet.
He was not far away. He no longer liked cafés, he said, so they met instead on a bench that overlooked the Potomac from a park that spanned the waterfront. It was the same one they always used to sit on together, said George by way of instruction, and David had to confess that he could not remember.
“Hang on,” he said, and he wrote down the directions messily on a slip of paper that the gallerist handed him.
When David arrived, George was waiting for him already. From the back, he looked hollow: as changed as the buildings he used to inhabit. His shoulders were sharp. David could see the bones of them through the light shirt he wore.
He paused for a moment, and George turned around. His face made it plainer. It was a skeleton’s face: it was painful to look at.
“I’ve got it,” said George, waving a languid hand before his body, as if to indicate, all of it.
It was then being called GRID, but George didn’t use the term. It, he said, and David understood.
They sat together for an hour. There was no use in explaining to George the favor for which he had sought him out: he would outlive George, David knew, even with the onset of his own disease. Instead, they both fell silent.
One memory, intact, occurred to David: It was of seeing George, for the first time, in the Mayflower Hotel, his hat rakishly askew, his clothing dark and warm-looking. He had looked strong; he had looked fearless. David, then, had imagined touching him. He touched him now: put an arm around George’s shoulders, felt the bones in them loosen slightly, felt the insubstantial weight of him shift almost imperceptibly toward David.
I’m sick, too, David could say, but what use would that be? It was different. He closed his eyes. The sun was going down; he could sense it through the skin of his eyelids, the gathering dusk, a familiar dimming of the sky.
He would count on Pearse, then, and ELIXIR, to deliver his story. He would count on the hope that he had taught his daughter well enough for her to one day solve the puzzle he had laid before her: an offering.
David returned to Boston on an overnight train. He had reserved a bed in a sleeper car, remembering his fascination with the idea of them as a boy; but he found he was too tall for them now, and he slept first fitfully, and then not at all.
He returned to the house in the morning and found that Ada wasn’t home.
He would wait, he thought; he would make her a nice lunch later. He was looking forward to seeing her. His daughter. His best and most valuable creation.
2009
Boston
When Ada emerged from Frank’s office, it was 5:00 in the evening and dark outside already. She had read for seven hours straight. She had gone back over several passages twice. She had not eaten since breakfast. At first she could not find Gregory and Frank; she wondered if they’d left. But finally she wandered around a corner and found them sitting on chairs in a sort of slapdash waiting room.
Frank was laughing, nearly shouting, at what seemed to be Gregory’s recitation of some shared memory. How nice it was, thought Ada, to be in the presence of people who knew her father and Liston.
“I’d imagine,” began Gregory, and then he saw her, and paused.
“I’m finished,” said Ada.
She felt pale and unsteady.
They stared at her for a moment. Then Frank rose to his feet, brushing off the legs of his pants. “Right!” he said. “Is there anything else you need?”
They did not ask anything further of her. It was not their story to ask for.
As they were leaving, Frank put both of his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. His face looked like family. In his embrace, for the first time in years, she felt young, childlike. She felt he could see into her past. He had known her since she was small: there were only a handful of people in the world who could say that.
“David was a good person,” he said. “We all knew that.”
Together, in silence, she and Gregory walked back to where he had parked. Their breath came out before them in long clouds. A cold frozen rain had begun.