WE EXITED THE interstate at Ohio State Route 8, near Hudson. In the back seat, Sal mumbled the directions, often just seconds before we got to them. “It’s harder in the dark,” he complained as we corrected and recorrected, off, then on, then back off another exit ramp.
Mara was cross-legged on the passenger seat with a stack of newspapers up to her belly button, and had been scanning up and down every page with a single finger.
“Left here!”
I jerked left, the back wheels of the Camaro skidding out into the middle of an intersection, Sal flying into my father in the back seat. The rubber found the asphalt, the car shook, and I corrected us back onto Graham Road.
My father had been silent for most of the drive, pulling through copies of the Tribune, and announcing every time he found something that might be of interest—like the report of a protest, or the arrest of a protestor, or an article about the Vietnam War. But by the late sixties, we discovered, everything was about the war, and it was impossible to separate what might be relevant from the hundreds of other op-eds and exposés and profiles and conspiracy suggestions the Tribune had chosen to run.
It was strange, the way they all talked about Vietnam. It was like it was a profound part of every person writing about it, but it had become so big and mysterious that they could only talk about it in the abstract, like it was an idea. “Ever since the war,” “hard to imagine with the war,” “divided by the war.” No one knew what to say about it, or what was really going on, and still, no person or part of American culture was unaffected by it.
I’d always believed that modern America was incapable of being wrapped up in something so all-consuming; I had figured that the ability to know everything had given us the ability to avoid everything. Thousands of poor teenagers could be dying in a jungle, and images of it could be hitting us faster and more often than ever before, but as long as they were running on a front page or a Twitter feed next to a politician’s sex scandal or a Kardashian baby, we’d find ways of avoiding it. I figured being the land of the free had made it difficult to be brave.
But hearing the clips aloud, listening to the headlines as Mara shuffled through them, I realized I might be wrong. The way they talked about Nixon, about the war, about the dissent, it all was strangely reminiscent of the way people talked about the age of Twitter. Abstractions had consumed us again; every celebrity felt the need to speak on “the state of the world these days”; every institution and event had to adjust their mission to account for how “crazy things are right now.” Maybe Jack wasn’t so far off; maybe there was a war buried just beneath the surface of everyday American life.
“Arthur, can I ask a question?” My dad was folding another Tribune over neatly in his lap.
“Um, sure.”
“Why are there people who want to hurt you?”
Mara and I exchanged a look. “Well,” she answered. “The political group—the one your father was a part of—they’ve had something of a . . . resurgence, and they believe that your father is still”—I shook my head quickly to stop her—“they believe that your father left something, and they believe they are entitled to it . . . by any means necessary.”
“Huh.” He clicked his tongue nervously. “And these are the people who—” He pointed to Sal, who nodded. “And now these people know exactly where we’re going?”
“Yes,” Mara said. “And they have a gun.”
“Good to know,” my father said.
The streetlights got closer as we entered a town. Kent, Ohio. It looked like every Midwest town, with buildings like hand-me-downs, too big for the businesses that filled them: First National Bank of Kent, Herren-Schempp Supply, Lindy’s on Main, all three-story storefronts standing like skyscrapers in the tiny town.
“Take a right—that street right there, past the bank. Keep your eyes open.” Sal pointed past a digital clock that read 11:35. We were the only headlights on the road.
My dad sat up. “What are we even looking for?”
“Anything Grandpa would have noticed,” I said, scanning the area as I slowed to twenty-five miles per hour. “Anything he would have wanted us to see.”
The buildings began to thin and disappear, farther from the road. A sign told us that the speed limit was fifteen miles per hour.
“Things that might have been there a long time ago, also,” Mara added. “Back when he was first making this trip. He must have had a reason for coming to this spot.”
Sal pointed ahead. “That was it. That’s the parking lot. That’s where I dropped him.”
The lot was remote. A single streetlight hung over it, the only light in the area. From what I could tell, we were in a park of some kind, with wide stretches of open grass extending from all four sides of the concrete. Walkways cut across it, twisting and curving out from the lot like endless veins, disappearing into darkness. In the distance, buildings surrounded the grass, covered in dozens of perfect square windows; offices, or apartments, I imagined.
There was one other car in the lot, a Ford Explorer parked directly in the center.
“Is that his car?” I asked, but Mara didn’t answer. No one said anything, and I felt our collective breath get deeper and slower as I parked next to it.
“What do you think?” Mara asked as soon as we were out of the car and watching the two older men pull themselves from the back seat. “About Sal’s story?”
“What about it?”
“Do you think,” she said, turning to make sure I was the only one who could hear, “that it sounds like a man with Alzheimer’s?”
“Or?”
“Or . . . like a man pretending to have Alzheimer’s?”
“Jesus, Mara.”
“Think about it, Arthur,” she said. “Really think about it. He led a car from Chicago to Ohio to exactly this spot, got out, and no one saw him again until he turned up dead the next day. Supposedly. Even though no one can prove that. If you were going to fake your own death, can you imagine—”
“Um, I’m sorry.”
Her insistence had forced her voice too loud. My father’s face hovered a few feet behind her, completely blank. “Did you say . . . faked his death?”
“No.” Mara tried to recover. “No, that’s—that’s not what I think. That’s—that’s—”
“It’s just this crazy theory,” I said, taking a step toward him. “Some people, crazy people, they think he was faking his Alzheimer’s, just so he could, I don’t know, make a clean getaway, and go live in peace with some buried treasure. It’s all ridiculous.”
I had to strain to hear him. “They—they think he’s alive?”
“Yeah, but that’s just Jack. He doesn’t know anything. I mean, he was confirmed dead, right? You saw him dead . . . right?”
With barely any movement, my dad shook his head. “No, they . . . they just sent me the ashes. I never saw him.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Now it was my turn for disbelief. My dry throat cracked. “It was from a hospital. The hospital called you?”
My dad could barely speak. “I—I think so. I thought so. I don’t know.”
“Well.” Sal leaned against the Camaro casually, like a spectator. “Now what are we looking for?”
Mara took charge. “We’ll split up. You and I”—she pointed to Sal—“we’ll each take an Arthur Louis Pullman with us. If you find anything, you text us. If you see Jack, or any of them . . .” She paused, and all four of us looked around. “Then shout.”
I looked at my father. He was still reeling. I’d never seen him so unsure of himself. Our eyes locked, and he gave me a feeble smile. “At least take Sal’s phone. So I can get ahold of you if . . . so I can get ahold of you.”
I nodded in return, took the phone, and followed Mara to one of the concrete walkways.
“Should we really be out here in the middle of the . . .” The wind carried my father’s whisper all the way to my ears, fading into silence as we moved in opposite directions.
Our footsteps felt dangerously loud, and I began to breathe in rhythm with them, in and out through my nose. The farther we walked, the more it felt like the darkness would never end, like we were on the very edge of the world, and moving past the parking lot was just moving out into the infinite nothing. Occasionally, we’d hear a noise—a branch falling, a car starting, grass colliding with grass—and Mara would jump, spin, and settle herself with a single breath.
We passed another empty parking lot, this one with no light to offer us. Past it were the buildings that had been in the distance, and we tiptoed around them, aware of all the places someone could be hiding. They were all surrounded by bushes, dressed up and professionally maintained. There were signs in front of some of the buildings, but they were too far from the sidewalk to make out in the dark.
“What is this place?” she whispered once we were a few hundred feet from the streetlight. “I can’t make out what any of these buildings are. They seem . . . almost like . . .”
“I tried to kill myself.”
The words were out of my mouth before I felt myself speaking.
“I’m sorry?” Mara hesitantly turned to me. “Did you say—”
“A couple weeks ago. After I punched that wall, they pulled my scholarship so I couldn’t go to UCLA. And my girlfriend hated me so much that she fucked somebody else, and . . . a year ago, I remember thinking, This is it, I’ve got everything I ever wanted, because I earned it, and then all of a sudden, all of it was gone. And I didn’t have anything to look forward to, or even anything to do; I was just . . . nobody. So I started my car, in my garage, and I-I sat there. I didn’t move.” I took a deep breath. “I’m on suicide watch. That’s why my dad’s been so weird . . . and that’s why the police are so serious with me. That’s why I get those dreams about . . . It’s because I tried to kill myself.”
The lines on her face didn’t move as she listened with her mouth hanging half open.
“I, I don’t really know why I just told you that. I’m sorry for, for putting that on you. It’s stupid, and really, really fucking embarrassing, and, and I don’t really wanna talk about it, or anything, I just . . . I guess I needed to tell somebody. To tell you. I needed to tell you. I’m sorry.”
Mara studied me without moving. “Did you . . . did you want to die?”
“I didn’t.” I swallowed. “I don’t know, I didn’t decide anything. I just didn’t have a reason to move.”
A tremor crossed Mara’s tiny face, but her expression held, fighting pity or disgust or confusion or whatever it was she was feeling.
“I don’t actually send any postcards,” she said finally, her voice wavering.
“What?”
“The postcards I write to my dad? They’re not going to anyone. Leila used to send them, but after she died, he stopped speaking to me. Two years, and I haven’t heard anything from him. I think he sees me as part of this thing, this country, or . . . this stupid, naive idealism that killed her, so . . . I just write them. And pretend like they’re going to someone who would care where I am.”
I watched her shift uncomfortably in front of me. She didn’t look at me while she spoke, instead kicking the cracks in the concrete between us. We were the farthest we’d been from any light, but I felt like I could see her the clearest, complete with the rips in the corners of her picture-perfect postcard.
“Do you feel better? Since your . . . Are you feeling better?” she asked, using the end of her jacket sleeve to wipe her cheek clean.
“I don’t really know what that means.”
She nodded but didn’t look away from me, so I kept going.
“I think, if I was sitting in my car right now, I would try to get out.”
Without a beat or a warning or even a change of expression, Mara launched herself across the pavement and latched on to my neck, and for a moment, I was blinded by everything about her. The skin of her cheek was soft against mine, with warm life below it pulsing heat. I finally placed her smell; it was a candle, one I’d kept in my room when I was a kid, a Vanilla Wood-Fire that had burned through to the bottom in three days, but I kept relighting the recycled wax because it just smelled more and more like a fire. I could hear her nose over my right shoulder, a calm inhale and a sputtered “I’m sorry,” and for a second, she was the only thing that really existed; no trains or poems or clues or coincidences, no Jacks or Sals or phone calls from parents, no hallucinations of ex-girlfriends or cars in garages, no pain or danger or shame or disappointment, because in her world, those things didn’t exist; in her world, everything was ashes and vanilla and warm skin. I wasn’t feeling nothing; I was feeling everything.
“We’re all ruined,” she whispered against my ear. “Everybody’s ruined.”
Sal’s phone buzzed and the real world came back. Mara uncoiled herself from my neck, but stayed a foot away. I held my shirt to block the light and read a text from my dad:
nothing here, heard voices. meet back at the car NOW. BE CAREFUL
Mara read it over my shoulder and looked back in the direction we’d come.
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
She didn’t protest.
We continued slowly down the walkways, now navigating between more buildings than grass.
“Over there, I see them—” the wind whispered, but I pretended I didn’t hear it.
“I can hear their foosteps—” I ignored it.
“Quick, somebody get out and shoot them—”
Mara didn’t react. The voices were in my head.
We turned the corner and the largest grass field yet opened in front of us. It was ink black, and looked to be in a small valley, giving way to a tall, forested hill on the other side.
“Actually,” Mara said softly, “I think we’re at a uni. A campus.”
Across the grass field, a stone threw light in my direction, then disappeared.
Without thinking, I turned toward it, stuck on the darkness where the light had just been. Automatically, I began to walk.
“Where are you going?”
I didn’t turn around.
“Don’t walk in the middle of the field, Arthur—where are you going?”
Another stone, this one from the top of the hill, caught a bare sliver of moonlight and signaled to me like a lighthouse. Something about the light, about the stones and the hill, felt loud and unignorable. The wind picked up, as it had in the chapel with my grandfather, and I ran toward the hill, toward the light, faster with every step. The breath drained out of me but I heaved for it anyway. Mara whispered something but I didn’t hear it, the wind forming an empty tunnel of noise around me. It felt ten degrees colder as I ran, but still I pressed forward.
“Arthur, calm down! That could be them! That could be—”
The picture formed more clearly as I ran, the rest of the world blurring in response. I reached the bottom of the hill, and what had been a stone became a bell, smooth, round, cast iron, and mounted in a brick structure. I ran my hand across its aged surface. Its name, and only its name, was inscribed below: Victory Bell.
I recognized it from somewhere; this was an image I’d seen before. I could feel my grandfather.
My legs collapsed beneath me, and I fell to the ground before it in prayer. I could hear his voice, too loud to understand a word. I could feel his breath, pumping air into my own lungs.
“Arthur, what is this?” Mara had caught up. “What are you doing?”
Light again flashed in my face. It was a small, temporary glare, but it blinded me. I looked to the top of the hill. The second stone was shining back through the trees, disappearing and reappearing between the branches as they swayed.
I launched myself toward it. The light grew in front of me, larger as I went faster, my elbows clearing the low-hanging branches. I noticed other stones behind it begin to shine, signaling me in. I ran straight toward the one in the center, unflinchingly, crashing my hands against it, a stone structure taller than I was, perfectly smooth granite and bronze.
There were words inscribed in the rock. Breathlessly, I traced them.
The first time, I didn’t understand. The second, details began to form. The third, the whole truth crystallized.
Mara reached the top of the hill, panting behind me, and read after I did. We both stood in silence, the wind howling from the top of the hill across the plain.
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
I would have sworn I heard the bell ringing mournfully in the emptiness, and my grandpa’s mirage became real.