His eyes snapped open and Martin was at his side, one finger pressed to his lips, the other hand cutting the volume to nil. Michael felt hollowed out, but his brother only pointed to his wristwatch, then put both hands together, as if in prayer, and laid them on the side of his head. Quiet. It’s late. Everyone is sleeping. Michael, wounded, nodded. Martin was talking—his jaw was moving and Michael assumed that he was producing words—but Michael could only stare at his own hands.
Since Michael’s appearance yesterday, he’d worn a look of blissful perseverance. Martin had wondered if he was some sort of holy fool, offering up his suffering to the greater glory of God. Now, for the first time, Michael looked like someone from whom every treasure he’d ever carried had been snatched. Martin touched Michael’s shoulder, enough to get his attention, and began to play the air in front of him as if it were an invisible piano. With the fingers of his right hand he worked the valves of a make-believe trumpet. He took Michael’s hands in his own and placed them back on the speaker, and as he punched the button, the eye of the wireless glowed again. Martin nodded yes-yes-yes and that idiot’s grin came back to Michael’s face and he smiled and nodded back, a mirror of his brother, and squeezed Martin’s hand. Having Martin understand meant the world to him.
Michael could feel the music coming through the speakers again, but the song had changed. This one was a light rainfall on his palms instead of the thunderstorm of the earlier tune, but he could feel it, could almost hear it, and he had been so parched for sound that even this quieter number made his senses bloom. He closed his eyes and leaned, stock-still, against the cabinet. Martin stayed with him, his hand over the other speaker, trying to feel what his brother felt.
AN HOUR LATER, Michael was alone, the apartment dark. Martin had mimed sleep; it was becoming a game for the two of them now, not the earlier grim attempts at communication but a contest to see who could out-charade the other. He left the room and returned a few minutes later with a pillow and a bedsheet for his brother. Michael wondered if this meant that Francis wasn’t coming back. Had Michael been exiled from the fancy hotel? Had this been Francis’s plan all along: to convey Michael to the United States and deposit him with Martin? Had he been traded, if only temporarily, for the blond girl? On the sofa, Michael knit his fingers together and webbed them over his still-full belly. He rested his chin on his chest and closed his eyes. When he opened them—ten minutes later, maybe an hour—Yeats was sitting in the same chair Martin had occupied earlier in the night.
“Where have you been?” Michael said.
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“I’ve been here for hours.”
“So have I.” Yeats made a steeple of his long fingers and tapped them against the bridge of his nose. “This Bronx is a very strange place.”
“Only the Bronx?” Michael sat upright on the sofa. He ran his hands roughly over his face, shaking off the last traces of sleep. “Mr. Yeats, I can’t make sense of a single moment I’ve spent in America. And I’ve got a theory I’d like to run by you—about your nature, your origin, the substance of your being—but you have to promise not to take it personally.”
Yeats crossed his legs and sat back in the chair.
“I’ve been speculating that you might be a figment of my imagination. That your apparent presence is the result of some psychological or physical injury that I’ve suffered—an injury which has rendered me somehow off balance, mentally speaking.”
“You’re saying I am a delusion.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. And you must admit that if our roles were reversed, you’d be asking yourself the same question.”
Yeats seemed about to answer, but paused and composed himself. “Why is it so difficult to accept that communication is possible between the spiritual and material planes?”
“I don’t deny it at all. But the sort of visitation I’m familiar with is Virgin-Mother-on-a-mountaintop, not dead-poet-in-New-York.”
“And yet, here I am.” Yeats stood and began pacing the room.
For all of his doubts, Michael didn’t want Yeats to be a figment; it was more comforting to think that he was a ghost or some other entity from the world beyond. If he was a delusion, then Michael was only talking to himself, although a part of himself that wore a Yeats mask. But if Yeats was real, then it was a sign that some outside assistance was available. Or perhaps it was simply, and necessarily, companionship—contact with a mind other than his own.
“So tell me,” Michael said. “What’s so strange about the Bronx?”
Yeats stopped his circuit of the room. “I was in this flat, but all was in a state of flux. The weather changed minute to minute: sun and then clouds, hotter and colder, pouring rain and then blue skies. At the same time, the buildings themselves aged. Freshly laid bricks one moment and derelict the next. I saw this flat as it is now, and as an empty lot, and as a clapboard-covered house. I saw it as a run-down tenement—squalid in its appearance, one window covered in boards, its bricks scored by black smoke.”
“A vision of the future, do you think?”
“The future, the past, the current moment. It was as if I were flipping through an enormous book, forward and backward, trying to locate a particular page. It may have been the most peculiar part of this entire experience.”
“Simply existing, months after your death—that’s not the most peculiar part?”
“Of course not. I expected some sort of existence after my physical death. But this sensation of time, of the way it fluctuated—it was unsettling.” Yeats peered out the window. Across the street, a row of identical houses. Over the roofline, the hazy glow of the Grand Concourse was visible. “Gradually, the pages became somewhat easier to control. I could slow their movement, explore each before turning to another. I have seen many people in this flat, and I have seen inventions that Wells or Verne could not have imagined.”
“The future, eh? I’ve always imagined the skies full of zeppelins, and—”
“It’s as ragged as the present. Worse, even. Fires burning unchecked, whole city blocks in ruin. The past, at least, was quieter. This land is newly settled, and you need only scratch away the veneer of asphalt and brick to see the land for what it was. Meadows. Hillsides. Forests. The imprint of mankind’s efforts is widespread, but it does not run deep. What was built here could be swept away in no time at all.”
Yeats seemed uncomfortable, fidgety even. Michael had seen him sit, legs crossed, for hours on end, but now Yeats paced, shifted, looked quickly in one direction and then another.
“Are these your new accommodations?” Yeats regarded the sofa, the chair where he had been sitting, the oval coffee table. He seemed disappointed by the lank drapes, the faded floral rug, the narrow polished breakfront with its collection of cups.
“I don’t know. Francis was here earlier but he left with a woman.”
“A woman?” Yeats seemed more interested in this than in anything Michael had yet said. “What sort of woman?”
“A pretty one. She arrived during dinner and later the two of them left. There was some sort of a row about it. She was a bit of a wild one, I think.”