Part 12 (1/2)

”You say the man lives in that house. I accept this,” I said. ”I say he lives there with his son and his son's wife. Her name is Irina.”

”And the son. Ilgauskas, so called. His first name?”

”We don't need a first name. He's Ilgauskas. That's all we need,” I said.

His hair was mussed, suit jacket dusty and stained, ready to come apart at the shoulder seams. He leaned into the table, square-jawed, sleepy-looking.

”If we isolate the stray thought, the pa.s.sing thought,” he said, ”the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”

We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.

”In our privatest mind,” he said, ”there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We a.s.sert or deny. We follow M with N.”

Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?

”The only laws that matter are laws of thought.”

His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.

”The rest is devil wors.h.i.+p,” he said.

We went walking but did not see the man. The wreaths were mostly gone from the front doors and the occasional bundled figure sc.r.a.ped snow off a car's winds.h.i.+eld. Over time we began to understand that these walks were not casual off-campus rambles. We were not looking at trees or boxcars, as we normally did, naming, counting, categorizing. This was different. There was a measure to the man in the hooded coat, old stooped body, face framed in monkish cloth, a history, a faded drama. We wanted to see him one more time.

We agreed on this, Todd and I, and collaborated, in the meantime, on describing his day.

He drinks coffee black, from a small cup, and spoons cereal out of a child's bowl. His head practically rests in the bowl when he bends to eat. He never looks at a newspaper. He goes back to his room after breakfast, where he sits and thinks. His daughter-in-law comes in and makes the bed, Irina, although Todd did not concede the binding nature of the name.

Some days we had to wrap scarves around our faces and speak in m.u.f.fled voices, only our eyes exposed to the street and the weather.

There are two schoolchildren and one smaller girl, Irina's sister's child, here for reasons not yet determined, and the old man often pa.s.ses the morning fitfully watching TV cartoons with the child, though not seated beside her. He occupies an armchair well away from the TV set, dozing now and then. Mouth open, we said. Head tilted and mouth hanging open.

We weren't sure why we were doing this. But we tried to be scrupulous, adding new elements every day, making adjustments and refinements, and all the while scanning the streets, trying to induce an appearance through joint force of will.

Soup for lunch, every day it's soup, homemade, and he holds his big spoon over the soup bowl, the old-country bowl, in a manner not unlike the child's, ready to plant a trowel and scoop.

Todd said that Russia was too big for the man. He'd get lost in the vast expanse. Think about Romania, Bulgaria. Better yet, Albania. Is he a Christian, a Muslim? With Albania, he said, we deepen the cultural context. Context was his fallback word.

When he is ready for his walk, Irina tries to help him b.u.t.ton his parka, his anorak, but he shakes her off with a few brusque words. She shrugs and replies in kind.

I realized I'd forgotten to tell Todd that Ilgauskas reads Dostoevsky in the original. This was a feasible truth, a usable truth. It made Ilgauskas, in context, a Russian.

He wears trousers with suspenders, until we decided he didn't; it was too close to stereotype. Who shaves the old man? Does he do it himself? We didn't want him to. But who does it and how often?

This was my crystalline link, the old man to Ilgauskas to Dostoevsky to Russia. I thought about it all the time. Todd said it would become my life's work. I would spend my life in a thought bubble, purifying the link.

He doesn't have a private toilet. He shares a toilet with the children but never seems to use it. He is as close to being invisible as a man can get in a household of six. Sitting, thinking, disappearing on his walk.

We shared a vision of the man in his bed, at night, mind roaming back-the village, the hills, the family dead. We walked the same streets every day, obsessively, and we spoke in subdued tones even when we disagreed. It was part of the dialectic, our looks of thoughtful disapproval.

He probably smells bad but the only one who seems to notice is the oldest child, a girl, thirteen. She makes faces now and then, pa.s.sing behind his chair at the dinner table.

It was the tenth straight sunless day. The number was arbitrary but the mood was beginning to bear in, not the cold or the wind but the missing light, the missing man. Our voices took on an anxious cadence. It occurred to us that he might be dead.

We talked about this all the way back to campus.

Do we make him dead? Do we keep a.s.sembling the life posthumously? Or do we end it now, tomorrow, the next day, stop coming to town, stop looking for him? One thing I knew. He does not die Albanian.

The next day, we stood at the end of the street where the designated house was located. We were there for an hour, barely speaking. Were we waiting for him to appear? I don't think we knew. What if he came out of the wrong house? What would this mean? What if someone else came out of the designated house, a young couple carrying ski equipment toward the car in the driveway? Maybe we were there simply to show deferential regard, standing quietly in the presence of the dead.

No one emerged, no one went in, and we left feeling unsure of ourselves.

Minutes later, approaching the railroad tracks, we saw him. We stopped and pointed at each other, holding the pose a moment. It was enormously satisfying, it was thrilling, to see the thing happen, see it become three-dimensional. He made a turn into a street at a right angle to the one we were on. Todd hit me on the arm, turned and started jogging. Then I started jogging. We were going back in the direction we'd just come from. We went around one corner, ran down the street, went around another corner and waited. In time he appeared, walking now in our direction.

This was what Todd wanted, to see him head on. We moved toward him. He seemed to walk a sort of pensive route, meandering with his thoughts. I pulled Todd toward the curb with me so that the man would not have to pa.s.s between us. We waited for him to see us. We could almost count off the footsteps to the instant when he would raise his head. It was an interval drawn taut with detail. We were close enough to see the sunken face, heavily stubbled, pinched in around the mouth, jaw sagging. He saw us now and paused, one hand gripping a b.u.t.ton at the front of his coat. He looked haunted inside the shabby hood. He looked misplaced, isolated, someone who could easily be the man we were in the process of imagining.

We walked on past and continued for eight or nine paces, then turned and watched.

”That was good,” Todd said. ”That was totally worthwhile. Now we're ready to take the next step.”

”There is no next step. We got our close look,” I said. ”We know who he is.”

”We don't know anything.”

”We wanted to see him one more time.”

”Lasted only seconds.”

”What do you want to do, take a picture?”

”My cell phone needs recharging,” he said seriously. ”The coat is an anorak, by the way, definitely, up close.”

”The coat is a parka.”

The man was two and a half blocks from the left turn that would put him on the street where he lived.

”I think we need to take the next step.”

”You said that.”

”I think we need to talk to him.”

I looked at Todd. He wore a fixed smile, grafted on.

”That's crazy.”

”It's completely reasonable,” he said.