Fantasy The Best of 2001 Read online

  I had an instantaneous attraction to the illustration below the title. I can no longer recall whether it was a photograph or an artist’s rendering, but if the latter, it was done in an extreme style of photo-realism. It was precise and detailed. Perhaps I did not know at first glance if it were photo or painting. It had something of a sepia quality to it, though it was surely in color, mostly muted browns and blues.

  What shall I describe for you first? It would be simple to say the cover featured a young man on a highway. But while technically accurate, I fear this would instill precisely the wrong impression. The “young man” is more an adolescent forced into an early maturity. Yet, how can I say that I knew this on first glance since the figure was depicted in the distance and his back was to the reader’s eye? The “highway” was actually an older, two-lane road, nothing like the interstate monsters of our own age. There was no traffic. There were no reflective-green road signs. No gas stations. No halogen lamps rising into the clouds. The landscape was pastoral—the road was framed by forests of bare trees, stark with the autumn season. The young traveler carried a sailor’s tote. He was attired as a working man, in blue jeans, a coat of leather or canvas, boots. He approached a covered bridge, partly shrouded in mist, set in the distance, in the upper right-side of the cover, just below the last “e” of the title.

  Now, the first oddity that should have been evident was the absence of an author’s name anywhere on the cover. But I failed to realize this until I finished reading the novel.

  After studying the cover, I attempted to hand the book back to its owner, who was busy trying to cram his valise under his seat. When he finally sat back and saw the extended book, he waved it away, saying, “Trust me, you’ll like it.”

  “I told you,” I countered, “I’m not a reader. I don’t want it.”

  He smiled and let his head give a series of fast, patriarchal nods.

  “Yes,” he said, “I heard you. You do not read. You do not like books. I hear it quite often.”

  But still he would not take the book from me. Instead he pulled in a phlegmy breath and said, “You keep the book. No need to read it if you don’t want. But just in case you change your mind.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” I said, more loudly than I intended.

  “You give it to me at the end of the trip.”

  “I don’t—” I began, but he held a finger up to his mouth and made a shushing sound as if trying to quiet an infant.

  I was caught so completely off-guard that I canceled the end of my protest and he said, “You know, if I remember correctly, there’s a wonderful card playing chapter someplace near the middle.”

  I stared at the man and decided to walk away. I got out of my seat and saved it with my duffel, tucked the book into my back pocket and walked toward the club car, fuming. By this time, the train was ready to pull out of the local station and I’ll confess that the knowledge that I was leaving de Sale for the last time inflamed my regret and my sense of shame. I had experienced as many happy as sad days on the hill and since my parents’ accident, it was the closet thing I had to a home. The thought of living with my sister was as unappealing to me as it was to her husband. So, as I wormed my way into the overheated club car, the weight of the unknown future came to me in the form of a subtle panic.

  When a seat opened near the window, I raced for it against someone’s dog-faced grandmother and claimed it without any remorse. The bitter righteousness of the orphan and all. The table was littered with the remains of the previous occupant’s breakfast, a small lake of spilled coffee and powdered sugar. I mopped and brushed with a napkin and looked out the window at the decrepit, ash-covered landscape of mills and row houses that had come to represent New England to me.

  We picked up speed slowly and the train occasionally lurched, but for the most part there was a steady, nap-inducing sway to the motion that produced in me a kind of low-grade trance, a state perpetually on the border of sleep, but never crossing fully into that territory. When the waiter finally arrived, he had to grunt to signal his presence. I ordered a cherry soda and he immediately launched into a bored, well rehearsed explanation that the tables were reserved for “full-meal dining only.” I asked for a corn muffin to go with the soda and the man gave me a dismissive look and moved off toward the galley.

  Everyone else in the car seemed in high spirits, dressed up for travel and looking forward to reuniting with a distant clan. The sound of all this anticipated happiness made me more fearful than angry and I suddenly wished I had taken one of the interstate bus lines with their bad ventilation and horrific toilets.

  I leaned back into the booth and felt Klingman’s book press against my coccyx. And then came, depending on your point of view, the moment of my redemp­tion or my damnation.

  I’m sorry to be so melodramatic, my confrere. But I know, beyond any possibility of doubt or confusion, that this moment, this simple action, the basic kinetics of my arm reaching behind my back and extracting the book, that this was the moment when my life jumped tracks and veered wildly in a new direction.

  I went beneath that picture of the wandering young man and started to read his story. Within a paragraph, the train began to vanish and the world of the refugee began to assert itself into my consciousness with such power and clarity that I was helpless in its presence.

  At some point, I assume, I paid for and ate my muffin. But I did so without thought or taste. At some point, the club car must have emptied of its breakfast customers and filled with a lunch crowd, disposed of the sandwich eaters and swelled with the supper shift. For reasons I still do not understand all these years later, no one bothered me. No one disturbed the universe of my reading. Not even my surly breakfast waiter.

  You want, at this point, some sense of the novel. I’m hesitant to even attempt such a gift. In the end, it’s a cheat, isn’t it? At best, I’d be offering the shadow of the experience. Which is to say, I’d be offering you nothing. Less than nothing. You could, of course, try to track down the novel and read it yourself. Let me save you the effort. You’ll never find it. I know this as surely as I know my own name. And even if you could locate a copy, your experience of the book could never be my experience. Have you never heard the saying, the reader creates his own book?

  But for the sake of my story, let me write that the novel was a Bildungsroman. A coming of age tale. The protagonist was a boy my own age and, if you can believe it, also an orphan. The title referred to his sense of unbelonging and chronic displacement. The boy wandered the country, chapter to chapter, region to region. At one point, he even rode the rails, as I was doing. The hero worked odd jobs along the road. He met fascinating characters and had all manner of adventures.

  Am I making the novel sound like a lark, a series of lighthearted episodes? It was anything but. A dark tale, there was a sense of the ominous and the morose on every page. More than any plot-driven danger that befell the boy, there was at the heart of the narrative an aura of foreboding evoked by the prose itself. And in the end, the hero remained the refugee of the title, still unsettled, still unembraced. After all those pages, the boy continued to live as a wanderer and stranger in the land of his birth.

  I finished the book two stops before we pulled into the Capital. The sun had gone down. My backside was in a state of advanced paralysis. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and my bladder was on the verge of rupture.

  I want to write this as precisely as I am capable because it will inform your sense of my entire story: when I finished that book, I felt as if I had been remade. I felt as if I had been changed into another person somehow. As if my consciousness had not been simply opened up, but redesigned and redirected, refocused, trained to think, to imagine, in an entirely new manner.

  I closed the book and tried to stand and stumbled on my sleeping legs. I used the table tops as crutches and made my way to the rest room where I urinated for some record-breaking span of time. I splashed my face and neck with water. And then, instin
ctively, I ran to find Klingman.

  My duffel was on my seat where I had left it, but Klingman was not in the adjoining chair. I looked up and down the aisles. No Klingman. I thought of searching the Seaboard Star, car by car, from coach to first class. But before I could begin, the train began to move again. And as it pulled out of the station, I saw the old man outside, seated on a wooden bench on the boarding platform. He was staring at me, smiling. He brought one hand away from the book he was reading and gave me a single, slow motion wave. I moved into my seat and brought my face to the window and watched him recede and grow smaller. I stood there, one knee resting on my seat, my arm above my head braced against the window, until Klingman disappeared from my sight. And in the instant that he vanished, I was overcome with a sense of what I now swear was pure grief.

  I have come to know grief all too well and too often in my life. As anyone my age has. Grief is what age insists on teaching us. And the sensation of utter loss I experienced in that train car, watching a stranger fade into the distance, was akin to the dispossession and the cold sorrow I had felt when my parents were killed on an icy highway in Manitoba.

  I think I might have dissolved into tears had I not felt the hand on my shoulder. I jumped and turned to find my breakfast waiter smiling at me. He removed his hand but I couldn’t bring myself to ask what he wanted. He leaned forward and whispered, “Klingman says, ‘You’re welcome.’ ”

  I cringe again as I write this because on the page it may read a presumptuous statement. But I have never doubted that the message contained anything but genuine warmth and good wishes.

  The waiter moved on and left my car. I sank into my seat and held the book in my lap as if it were a fragile pet. For the rest of my trip I looked from the book cover to the countryside passing my window. My mind was empty and exhausted and my entire body was chilled. I knew, sensed, that something had happened to me but I could not begin to understand what it was.

  When we arrived at the Capital, I pushed the book into my duffel and buttoned my coat. I was the last to exit the train. My sister and her husband were waiting for me. For some reason, they were both dressed formally, as if on their way to an opera. They had the same tired, dour look on their faces. I knew they wanted some immediate groveling—enough so that I’d embarrass myself without making a scene. And honestly, I would have complied but I was tired enough to collapse.

  I followed them to the parking garage and climbed into the back of their sedan for the drive to the country house where we were to spend the holiday. Under the guise of weary concern, my sister lectured me the entire way, grounding all of her many opinions regarding my character in the disappointment and disgrace that our mercifully dead parents would be feeling if they could see how badly I’d turned out. My brother-in-law played Greek chorus, warning of the ravages the future would hold should I fail to “turn things around.”

  Somehow, I managed to stay awake and take all of the berating in a silence that I hoped passed for contrition. When we arrived at the house, I passed, politely, on the dinner that Sis had kept warm in the oven. I apologized one last time for my mistakes, promised we would talk in the morning and climbed upstairs to one of the guestrooms.

  I closed and locked my door, threw the duffel on the loveseat and opened it, intending to climbinto bed with the book. Not to read it, mind you—my eyes and my brain were beyond reading at this point. No, I simply wanted to hold it close to me, the way a child might hold a stuffed bear. But the book was not in my bag. I emptied all the contents, all of my possessions, and sorted through each item. Then I resorted over and over again until it was clear there was no book to be found. You can imagine how frantic I was.

  I made myself settle down enough to think logically and decided that the book must have fallen out in the car on the ride home. My brother-in-law was an erratic driver at best and my sister’s non-stop scolding had only degraded what little skill he possessed. We had taken some sharp corners getting onto and off of the expressway. My duffel had been sitting in the rear passenger footwell and had, most likely, toppled during one of those turns. The book, which had been sitting atop the rest of my gear, likely fell out of the bag and was now resting beneath the driver’s seat.

  I managed to wait until I heard my hosts retire for the night, then I made my way downstairs and out through the laundry room into the attached garage. The sedan was unlocked and I performed an elaborate, let us say obsessive search, but there was no sign of the book.

  I returned to the guestroom and went through the bag again and again and came up empty each time. I lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and tried to think of the other possibilities. I’d either dropped the novel on the train, in the station, or in the parking garage. Tomorrow, I decided, I would find a way to return to the station and combthe area. Perhaps locate a lost and found office. If nothing turned up, I could inquire with the train line—I still had my ticket stubwith all the pertinent information. The worst case scenario, I imagined, would involve purchasing a fresh copy of the novel at a bookstore. Though I didn’t have an author’s name, I had the title and that, I thought, should be sufficient. This was a distasteful option, however. I very much wanted the copy that Klingman had given me. I wanted, needed, that specific book. That object.

  But with a plan of action decided, I attempted to sleep. Of course, it was futile. By 3 A.M., I was consumed with a level of anxiety I had never known. Even my expulsion hearing paled in comparison to the worry and nervous tension. I experienced that night. I paced the floor. I tried to exhaust myself with sit-ups and push-ups. I raided the medicine cabinet and swallowed a handful of aspirins. And I went downstairs and rifled my sister’s library drawers until I found an incomplete Pinochle deck. (That they called this book-free room a “library” has always amused me.) I took the deck upstairs and spent an hour running through my various routines, making cards disappear and reappear and trade places. And for the first time since I’d initiated myself in the brotherhood of monty, the cards failed to bring me any solace.

  Can you imagine, old friend, how desperate I felt in this moment? It was the kind of realization that reroutes the intestines and bites into the heart. What I did next should inform you of my state of mind that night. As my anxiety began to trammel my reason, I started to repack my duffel. When I was done, I slipped downstairs, found the key to my sister’s convertible in her pocketbook and borrowed her car. My brother-in-law, up until the day he died, was incensed with my use of the word “borrowed.” But as I backed out of their driveway, I had every intention of returning before morning.

  I tried to retrace the route to the Capital and got lost several times. Finally, I secured directions at a highway gas station. It was only after I’d parked in the train station garage that I realized I had no money for the exit fee.

  I searched the garage and the areas of the station that I’d passed through. There was no trace of the book. The lost and found office was closed but I pestered a ticket clerk until she opened the door and let me inspect every bin. I inquired about a search of the train I’d arrived on, the Seaboard Star, and was informed that it had just been thoroughly cleaned before its imminent departure and that no books had been discovered.

  An analyst I knew briefly once theorized that my actions that night were the result of the accumulated traumas I’d been experiencing since the death of my mother and father. That my parents’ demise and my banishment to de Sale and my expulsion from the school all coalesced and exploded inside of me. And that the force of that explosion propelled me back onto the train.

  The truth is that as I sat on a bench in the cold of the National Station, I felt all my panic and doubt slip away from me and I became as focused as a young Houdini. And at the heart of this utter calmness I found the certainty, the absolute conviction, that if I did not recover the Klingman copy of Refugee, I would die. This confession, I would guess, leads you to believe that I was not in my right mind when I decided to re-board the Seaboard Star and ride north once again, i
n search of the book and, perhaps, in search of Klingman.

  But you must trust me, F, when I write that I was as sane as I have ever been. Sane enough to approach every conscious soul in the station and proffer my father’s vintage Hamilton “Mason”-model wristwatch for the price of a train ticket. This was self-inflicted robbery, but it took me until the last boarding call before I found an elderly porter who knew the value of what I offered. He paid me what I’d asked and threw in the cost of breakfast and lunch.

  For hours, I walked back and forth through all the cars of the northbound Seaboard Star, looking under every seat, checking every rest room, inquiring of every uniformed hand. But there was no trace of my lost paperback.

  And so I tried, with a surprising degree of success, to re-create the book in my head. I closed my eyes and slouched down in my chair, huddled into myself and let the rocking of the car lull me into a kind of lucid dreaming, a recollection of the story that was, if not a perfect re-creation, even more interesting for its discrepancies. Where my imagination insisted on rewriting the author, it managed, to my delight, to retain the overall mood and tone and, if you can stand it, theme of the book.

  I’d had only enough cash to get to Manchaug, a one-horse valley town in the farmlands a few hours west of Quinsigamond. My exact plans as I got off the train have faded over time, but I believe I hoped to find a ride into the city and to look up all the Klingmans in the phone directory. Before I left the depot, however, something made me stop at the ticket counter and inquire if there were any bookstores nearby.

  Remember that this was when people still retained a degree of literacy and civility. The clerk explained that Pittsfield was my best bet for selection, but there was a local antiquarian shop about ten miles down Route 4.