The First Day Page 17

  She sat us down at the dining table and began immediately to carry in bowls of food from the kitchen, refusing my help.

  Where is your grandmother? I asked, and she shrugged, and I realised, suddenly, that she had done all this herself. So many more questions came, I had to stop myself. My anxiety was palpable, running through me. I could feel Orr’s blind eyes boring, his head shaking almost imperceptibly from side to side. Calm yourself, Sam, I imagined him saying, and I did.

  She was reserved but not intimidated. Orr, typically, bypassed small-talk, his curiosity unswerving as a child’s. In a similar spirit she answered his questions directly: where she’d grown up, why she lived with her grandmother, what happened to her mother (hit by a truck, she said, three years ago, while crossing a road in Portchester; Orr didn’t flinch). She began to lose interest when I interjected with questions of school, of her future plans. Her answers dropped to a word or phrase, her shoulders hunching into apathy. I felt guilt for occupying the space my father, in his bluntness, had created.

  As she carried the plates into the kitchen the front door rattled open and a woman appeared, in her late sixties, hair grey and unkempt, her teeth stained from smoking. As she entered the room she was rummaging in her bag, and stuck a cigarette in her mouth as she looked up. She started as she saw us, but immediately moved on past, staring at us all the while, into the kitchen. I looked at my father, whispered quietly that it must be her grandmother. He nodded. We sat in silence as they spoke in hushed tones in the kitchen, a quiver in Sarah’s voice, pained and plaintive.

  A few seconds later Sarah appeared with bowls of ice cream. Her face drawn, an edge in her movements. My insights are few, but I know shame when I see it, and it was as painful to me as if it had been my own body. She sat down opposite us again, silently, once or twice looking towards the kitchen, her grandmother’s unseen presence everything. I felt for her, I really did, but was dumb to help, my awkwardness, I well knew, just an addendum to her own. Orr leaned across and took my arm, helping himself to his feet. I moved to stand up, to help him, but he nudged me back into my seat.

  We both watched him as he edged his way around the table, to the empty doorframe. He stepped inside, and we heard him say, Hello, I’m Samuel Orr. Is there a seat you could help me into?

  Sarah and I sat across from one another. We ate without speaking, listening instead to the muffled voices in the kitchen, the exclamations, the—unexpected, I sensed—laughter. I watched Sarah slowly let her shoulders out, the tension releasing. Her eyes gave themselves to tears, but the rest of her face was impassive, and when I went to speak she snapped her fingers together sharply to shut me up. I smiled, laughed—I couldn’t help it—at the excess of the gesture, and then she smiled too, and her face, with a thin wet line down either cheek, was suddenly alive, transfigured. She let herself breathe, breaths that came and went like a child after running, taking in and letting out as much as she could.

  A few days later she messaged to say she was going to visit her father. He had eschewed representation and his case had been heard quickly, without our knowledge. For ‘criminal damage’, a term Courbet himself would have appreciated, he received a three-year sentence with a one-year minimum, to be served in a holding centre thirty miles north of the city. It was a week before he could get out of bed, but he was now able to receive visitors.

  I warned her that Philip may not now want to see us. I had, as I said, told her who I was, but in every story there are gaps, and I’d been careful enough, or cowardly enough, to leave out some of the darker ingredients. Even as she and my father exchanged confidences over dinner I had seen in him a caution, a withholding, which may have been either generosity or self-protection. Still, she asked if we would come, and I realised it was for her and not for him she was asking.

  I spoke to Rollins at the museum. He knew, obviously, but it was better that he knew that I knew he knew. I took the day off, hired a car. My father and I picked Sarah up in the morning. Orr sat in the front, beside me, staring ahead. For the first time in a long time he seemed nervous. The confidence sucked out of him, he sat in gloomy silence. Sarah climbed into the back, her earphones in, and I wondered if this was how it was going to go, but suddenly she took them out, synced her phone to my stereo, and filled the car with expletive-fuelled hip-hop. Orr began to tap the roof of the car with his hand, and she laughed, and we drove north.

  The walls of the prison—it was a prison, whatever other words they used—were the colour of dirty water. A reek of ammonia punched at us as we walked into the reception. The woman sitting behind the desk pointed us unspeaking towards a corridor, at the end of which we entered a large, open room with tables and chairs set out like a school cafeteria. A few other inmates sat at tables across from partners, parents, children. Those who were talking at all talked quietly, pointless secrets shared.

  Describe it, Orr said.

  You don’t want to know, I said.

  We sat down and waited. None of us spoke. Regret rose up in me. What was I thinking, agreeing to this, bringing them here? Orr shuffled in his seat, his dark glasses catching the fluorescents and throwing them back. Sarah put her earphones in. I remembered, at this moment, my mother telling me—I must have been twelve or thirteen years old at the most—that in the concentration camps they had prisons. Nowhere low enough that you can’t go lower.

  We looked up in unison, the three of us, as the door opened. He walked into the room, looked around. It seemed to take a moment for his eyes to adjust, and then. His face moved back, a bad actor expressing surprise. He stood still, unmoved, staring at us, for ten, fifteen seconds. I reached across, took my father’s hand. He walked towards us. I lifted my father out of his seat, and stood beside him. Between him and Philip.

  When he reached us he faltered, put a hand on the table. His face had cleared up decently, the bruising almost gone. A few marks still darkened his forehead, and one of his eyes was bloodshot. I realised I hadn’t seen his eyes before; each time I had seen him I avoided looking. They were unmistakably Orr’s. I reached out my hand, but he held his own up as though in warning, and Sarah came around me and helped him into a seat.

  Orr was silent throughout this interaction. He was looking at Philip, or looking at where Philip was, but his face betrayed nothing. We all sat down, Sarah beside her father, Orr and I on the other side of the table.

  How are you, son? Orr said.

  It sounded cruel, that son—though surely it wasn’t. Philip rocked back and forth a little.

  Did she tell you how she died? Philip said.

  Who? I asked.

  Philip continued to rock, forward and backward, concentrated. Sarah reached out her hand and gently put it on his back. He shook it off roughly, glared at her, and then looked back quickly at us, grimacing. The hatred was material, flesh and bone. He lifted a fist to his mouth, the knuckles pulsing white, set it back on the table.

  He turned to Sarah. Did you tell them how she died?

  Sarah nodded.

  She was knocked down, he said. She was knocked down by a truck. He stared at Orr. She was knocked down by a truck.

  Orr reached out his hand, blindly, across the table. Philip jerked back, as though under attack. He shook his head, ferocious.

  She was knocked down by a truck, he repeated.

  I am sorry, son, Orr said, and Philip leaned forward, into his face.

  You fucking should be, he said.

  I pushed my hand into his chest. Such little force required. He settled back, started coughing.

  Sarah stood up, walked out of the room. I wanted to follow her but could not leave my father alone.

  What is this for? I said.

  He lifted one hand to his face, to his scar. His face a mess of contortions, fraught and unspecific. He looked at Orr, steadily, and the movement began to slow, his face recomposing itself. He said nothing, but the rocking stopped, the shaking in the hands. His breathing steadied into a simple rise, fall. He sat, quiet, calm even, sta
ring at my father. At his father. Two, three minutes passed. No one broke the silence.

  Finally, Okay. He said okay. He stood up. My father followed the blurred form, and tried to stand up himself, awkwardly. I quickly moved to help him. Philip turned to walk away.

  Wait, son, Orr said. Philip.

  Philip stopped, turned.

  Can I touch you? Orr said.

  Philip stared at him. I see the boy again, sixteen years old, all the love and hatred packed tight into such a small space. I see him make a decision and refuse it, and then again, and then again. And then he said, Yes.

  Orr moved towards him, his hands out, and found his face. My own slow heart beats beats beats. Orr’s hands move across his features: his eyes, his mouth, his cheeks. He brings pressure to bear, draws Philip down towards him, and Philip allows it. Orr begins to kiss his face; forehead first, one cheek, then the other. His mouth finds the scar—even blind, he remembers—and stays with it, on it. Philip does not breathe, does not move. Eventually Orr lets go, steps back. He turns, holding out his arm for me to help him. I take it and he leads me away.

  In the reception we find Sarah. I hand my father to her, and excuse myself. I find the toilets. I stare in the mirror and start to feel that my scar is moving, growing rather, expanding. I literally lift my hand to my face to stop it, and then stop myself. But still it grows. It does not actually change—I’m not seeing things, my face is as it always has been—but the sensation is pure, intimate, and a kind of liquid pain, a pleasure, rips through me. It’s like a shudder: my body shakes but doesn’t move. But I stand there, through it, and let it happen. I keep staring, the mirror throwing me back to myself, and it slowly subsides, water draining through rice, and I am sparkling—I honestly don’t know how else to put it—and I love myself. It is absurd, I know. I feel like I’ve found something I hadn’t lost. It’s not the quick physical ecstasy of drugs, but something slower, more—really?—sexual. I don’t know.

  I stared into the sink, head lowered for a full minute, maybe longer, and then looked up again. Nothing was different, nothing. And yet, and yet. I walked back into the room, and there he was, sitting alone at the table. And this time it all came, all at once. The failure of feeling before is transformed, melted down and golden-calfed. All hatred and all love; the untainted joy, the sheer crude aliveness of it. One tiny decision piled upon another, one meaning giving way to another. The sky outside is inside. The walls are arbitrary, the tables are arbitrary, blood is arbitrary. Fuck lines, fuck borders. Fuck family, fuck the law. Fuck one thing following another. Fuck the past, fuck the future. Fuck apology and disappointment. Fuck fear and shame.

  I walk towards him. He looks up when he sees me approach, stares cautiously. I move to him, drag him out of his chair and embrace him. I put my lips on his cheek—that cheek, yes—and kiss him. He resists and then does not resist. When I release him I realise I am crying, but it doesn’t matter.

  The year found its own shape. Like any year, but not. Sarah slowly loosened, her caution attenuated. A couple of weeks after the prison visit she came to the city and I showed her around the Met, her and my father both, feigning and not feigning interest, and then we ate Brazilian food in a small café on 45th. I watched as the two of them fell into one another’s jokes, a shared disregard for the niceties of language pulling them closer together. At one point she reached across and moved his fork so that when he went to pick it up again he couldn’t find it. She laughed out loud at his confusion, and then took his hand and guided him. I could not quite bear the sentimentalism I felt, the joy at the pleasure they found in each other; unwarranted, unexpected. A fortnight later we returned to the prison, Philip sitting across from us again, though this time in silence, tempered, but present.

  And so it went—month by month the visit north, the ice caps melting, small gestures, uncountable kindnesses adding up to so little and so much. And in between—at first every couple of weeks, then every week, then every few days—Sarah’s life became enmeshed with my father’s, with my own; her concerns became ours, her joys framing and widening the joys we found possible for ourselves. The absurdity of it all: we became a family.

  For my father, I cannot say exactly how it was so easy. Whatever measure of hesitation he carried with regard to Philip seemed utterly irrelevant to Sarah, their ease childlike, their connection simple. For me, it was different. Sarah got at me, into me. She refused me apathy; she offered me—forced on me—the judgement of foolishness. She saw my failure to step fully into my life and, unlike everyone else, did not ignore it but poked at it, jabbed and shoved and won reactions. The complicated magnanimity of youth. She expected as much from me as she did from herself, and her demand was a form of generosity. It allowed me to imagine myself at the scale, with the imagination, that she did. Expectation creating hope. With the possibility of getting lost comes the possibility of being found.

  Twelve months later, we drove north again. Three of us going, four of us to return. The tension was true, but no truer than a new anticipation, a longing for possibility. We had not talked, between us, of what would happen. Philip, when he told us the day of his release, had said only that he would go home, to New Haven, Connecticut, and from there he would see. He agreed, reluctantly, to our coming for him. I had watched him more than spoken to him over these months, watched his body fight to allow him to speak, the simple descriptions even of his days a tiny battle. We were quiet in the car; I streamed Tavener to calm my nerves, and it mingled surreally with the concrete drone of the tyres on the road, the endless traffic flooding around us, drawing us forward.

  We pulled in to the car park shortly after 11 a.m. We walked together, still barely speaking, each of us, I suppose, lost in our own expectations, our own fears. Sarah carried a backpack for her father’s things; she looked like a misplaced hiker. The woman behind the desk—we knew her now as Marian—narrowed her eyes as we approached. She turned around, beckoned over a colleague, a man we didn’t know.

  Hello, Marian, I said.

  Sam.

  How are you?

  Sam, what are you doing here?

  We’re here for Philip.

  She looked up at her colleague. He smiled, whistled, shook his head. Philip’s gone, he said. He was released yesterday. He stared at our stupid faces. He’s gone, brother, he repeated.

  I am back in Mount Sinai. My father is almost eighty-one years old, but will not see eighty-two. I walked here this morning, across the bridge, into Manhattan. In a couple of hours Sarah will be here too, when she finishes classes. For the last two weeks we have both come every day, at least for a short visit.

  The cancer will kill him before his mind goes. Small mercies, he says, unironically. He is not in pain, but enjoys the morphine anyway. Never one to turn down pleasure where it’s going. He has a steady stream of visitors. In small groups they arrive in from Bushwick and Queens, carrying various absurd gifts to impress or humour him. Guest’s grandkids brought a mobile speaker loaded with hip-hop, with which he has enjoyed winding up the nurses. Ceci has come every day and stroked his face for half an hour. Even after a lifetime, I have not entirely abandoned my jealousy.

  As I sit here nursing my coffee I am remembering a trip we took, last summer, before he became ill. We went to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Sarah and I hiked a little, but mostly we just drove around, the three of us, stopping for snacks or drinks at various lookout points, the mountains green and lush stretching far in every direction. Sunsets came like gifts, and Sarah tried to adequately describe them for Orr, who seemed to take as much delight in her failure as he would have in seeing the sunsets themselves. On one day the clouds were so low we spent most of the day above them, as though out of the world entirely, looking down like gods. We pulled in at a rest stop, and Orr told a story I had not heard before. He and Anna had taken me on a day trip—I was no more than a year old—and we had gone to the Mourne Mountains. They took turns carrying me, strapped to each of their bodies in turn. We had
not walked far, he told Sarah, just up the side of a hill. In the distance was Silent Valley, and a crucible of mountains surrounded us, sloping in all directions. I pointed things out to Sam, he went on, birds overhead, or the trees in the foreground, on the slope of one of the mountains. And he would stare in a sort of vague wonder. And I became aware that we were not seeing the same things. I mean, what we were both seeing were just impressions, bits of colour, shape and form, outlines, that I gave names to. When I said trees I wasn’t really seeing trees, he said, I was seeing this clump of colour that I knew, that fitted my idea of trees. And Sam, who then didn’t know the word tree, even though he experienced the same thing, saw something different, unclouded by the definition, by knowledge or expectation. I’ve never forgotten that strange sensation, the realisation that seeing was not just what your eyes do. Not just the light but what you do with the light, what stories you can make out of it. If you don’t have useful words, or good stories, then you see less. The world isn’t just there to be seen, but to be created. When we look at the world we create it.

  When Sarah gets here I will step outside, wander the streets for a while. It was, at first, just to stretch my legs, to give Sarah some time alone with her grandfather. But it is more now. A week ago, I saw him, or thought I saw him. Lurking in a doorway across 85th, only a few blocks from the museum. I cannot be sure, of course. When we look at the world we create it. But I cannot help myself, or I do not wish, perhaps, to help myself. There is no fear in my suspicion. I walk the streets now as a target, like a deer waiting to be spotted. I want to draw him into the open, to show him I have nothing to hide, that he too has nothing to fear from me. Each being is distinct from all others, wrote Bataille. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity . . . But I cannot refer to this gulf which separates us without feeling that this is not the whole truth of the matter. The whole truth of the matter.