FOR A MOMENT, I couldn’t form words. My heart slowed to a near stop, and every beat felt too loud in my chest, shattering the stale air in the room.
I could tell it had been a long time since Sue Kopek—if this was Sue Kopek—had left her bed. She tried several times to prepare herself to drop to the floor, but her body disagreed.
“Stupid feet,” I heard her mutter.
“How do you know who I am?”
In the low light, I couldn’t read her expression exactly, but it didn’t look like fear or surprise.
“You boys were supposed to be back last week,” she said, her voice parched and dry.
“Me? What boys?”
She didn’t react to the question. Instead, she looked around the room, her voice fluttering. “Tell me, where’s Orlo? And Jeffery?”
“I don’t—I don’t know who those people are.”
“Well, heavens.” She watched her hands run across the sheets. “You said you were all coming back together. I thought you were going to be late.”
“Who was supposed to be coming back with, with who?” I asked. I stepped farther into the room and felt woozy in its warmth. “Late for what?”
A floorboard creaked under my sneaker, and Sue’s eyes shot up from her hand to my face. Her eyes were wide. “Oh heavens, it’s just you! Hello, Arthur.”
“Yeah, I, I know. I’m sorry, how do you know me?”
“You boys were supposed to be back last week,” she said. “Tell me, where’s Orlo? And Jeffery?”
I took several quick steps back, hoping to escape the room’s warm and warped reality. “Who do you think is here with me?” I asked.
She shrugged, and again she was distracted by the roses and carnations sewn into her bedsheets. It reminded me of Kaitlin’s drunken nonchalance, the way she pretended to care about something else when she couldn’t be bothered to answer a question.
“How do you know who I am?” I asked again, more insistently.
She looked up as if she couldn’t believe that I existed. “Well, heavens, Arthur. You boys were supposed to be back last week.”
Outside, we heard a crack of thunder, followed by a slow, building drum line of raindrops on the roof. There was almost nothing in the room, beyond a small TV set, a bed, and a large pile of ceramic trays, the kind that charity organizations used to bring meals to the elderly.
“Tell me, where’s Orlo? And Jeffery?” she asked for the third time. Her voice was soft and whimsical, and she lay back against the headboard, her head rolling around gently.
“I don’t—I don’t know who Orlo is. Or Jeffery.”
“Arthur.”
“Yes?”
She froze and swallowed before speaking. “You boys were supposed to be back last week.”
“Sue.”
Her eyes stayed fixed on me. “Yes?”
“Who do you think is with me?”
She didn’t respond, so I took a step toward her.
“Who do you think I am?”
Her hand clutched the sheet.
“How do we know each other?”
I took another step.
“I—I need to go to sleep, I’m sorry, Arthur,” she said, and her body slid down, disappearing underneath the blanket.
“Sue, I need you—”
“You know where the upstairs room is.”
She pulled the blanket up, trying to escape me beneath her covers.
“Sue, tell me how you know who I am!” The frustration of ten hours on the train poured out.
I watched her face shift like the rounded ridge of a puzzle piece snapping into place. I was close enough now to recognize the look: unbothered, vacant, with more questions than answers. There was a perpetual surprise written into her eyebrows and the tops of her cheeks.
It was the same look my grandfather used to give me every time he lost track of a conversation and started over. My father called it “the reset.” It was the worst, most crippling progression of Alzheimer’s.
Old age was getting the best of Sue Kopek’s brain, and her resets were dangerously close.
“Tell me,” she asked. “Where’s Orlo? Or Jeffery?”
I nodded, swallowing the cocktail of pity and frustration. “I don’t know Orlo, Sue, but I need you to tell me who he is.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she whispered, and turned over to face the far wall.
“Sue, please,” I pleaded to the back of her head. “My, my grandfather passed away, a few years ago, his name was Arthur Louis Pullman, and I think he came here, during the last week he was alive, and I’m just trying to understand why. Please, if you hear me at all, tell me how you knew that I was his grandson. Tell me why you wrote him a letter.”
I stared at her in silence, but she didn’t respond or roll over. If she ever had answers for me, they were long forgotten.
I turned to make my way upstairs. As I reached the door, her voice stopped me. “Arthur?” It was frail, cracking in the middle of my name.
“Yeah?”
“Please take his napkin. I don’t need it anymore.”
“Whose napkin? Orlo?”
“Please take it.” She nodded toward the bedside table. “I don’t need it anymore.” I had to squint to see it, but on her bedside table was a crumpled-up used tissue.
I shuddered at her attachment and continued out the door.
As it clicked shut, I remembered the cabdriver. I ran back outside, flinging the door open and launching myself out into the pouring rain. I was drenched by the time I hit the end of the porch, my hair washed and my hoodie soaked through and clinging to my body. The cab was gone.
There were no signs of life within walking distance, and if I was going to make the train back, I had three hours to walk it, through the bitter-cold rain. I slouched back into Sue Kopek’s abandoned mansion.
In the living room, I found a cotton dress in one of the boxes that I used to dry my hair, then collapsed onto one of the couches. The splattering of rain against the old roof melted into white background noise and it was quiet in the house. Off the vaulted ceilings and through the crowded hallways, I could hear the echoes of Sue’s voice.
Oh, it’s just you, Arthur.
Sue Kopek must have thought I was my grandfather. It didn’t matter that I didn’t look like him, that he was an old man and I was a teenager; if her Alzheimer’s was forcing her to relive a moment in which she was waiting for Arthur and I walked through the door, I was Arthur. Alzheimer’s did that—skewed the details to make every moment feel like reliving a memory. To Sue, I had become a character in those memories that had become her reality.
But as I ran the cotton dress through my hair once more to dry it, I realized what that meant: I was my grandfather. If I could figure out what she was reliving, I could figure out what my grandfather was doing here, and what happened that was so significant that it had frozen her in time.
I began to pick back through the house. I remembered the copy of A World Away on the kitchen table. It was still glossy and new, and the binding was rigid, like most books before they’re read. I flipped through a few pages and they stuck together in chunks. Whoever received this book had set it down and never touched it again. I opened to the dedication page, hoping there would be an inscription, but there was nothing. Just the book’s original dedication:
for great purpose.—A.L.P.
I sighed. Another meaningless abstraction from the great Arthur Louis Fucking Pullman.
I climbed carefully to the second floor and pushed doors open at random. Sue had mentioned a room upstairs, but most of the rooms were empty. I tried to use one of the toilets, but there was no water in it.
At the end of hallway, there was one door left open, a shallow light streaming out of it from the moon.
I crept toward it, aware of how terrifyingly large this house was in the middle of the night. The old light fixtures and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were covered in cobwebs. Candleholders jutted into the middle of the hallway, holding more wax than candle.
I peeked around the corner. The window was covered in splatters, the residue of large raindrops, hundreds more streaking it every minute. It was the only bedroom, other than Sue’s, that wasn’t empty. There was a single mattress, directly in the center of the hardwood floor, with a blanket and pillow on top.
Next to the mattress, cleanly gathered, was a pile of tiny, ripped shards of paper.
My grandfather had been here.
My brain kicked into overdrive. This was exactly what my father had described in his funeral speech, five years ago. Shreds of paper my grandfather left behind. I overturned the mattress and rifled through the pillow and blanket. There was nothing.
I tried to think, but my brain was clouded with exhaustion and frustration. The paper was left behind to be discovered, like he wanted me to know he was writing, like he’d left a clue. I ran back through the kitchen and dug into the boxes of books and loose paper, searching for something with my grandfather’s scrawl.
I thought about the first poem, the “you” that he had been writing toward. Was it Sue Kopek? If it was, he would have been writing for her, and likely would have left it for her. It made sense, if that’s who he was writing to, but the only things I’d seen in Sue’s room were the television, the trays of old food, and—
The napkin. She had made such a big deal about the napkin, his napkin.
I made my way back to her room, the door groaning as I pushed it open. I tiptoed across the room, careful to avoid any loose floorboards, and snatched the napkin off the bedside table.
What she had called a napkin wasn’t a napkin at all—it was a crumpled piece of thick notebook paper with ink markings on the inside of it.
I turned to leave, but something caught my eye—the stack of paper, innocently set on the bedside table, wasn’t just paper: it was envelopes, small and stocky. I leaned closer; below them, barely visible, was a page of handwritten addresses. Halfway down, I recognized the Truckee address and recoiled, the wood beneath my heels grinding together in a slow creak.
Sue Kopek rolled over in her bed and my heart flew upward into my throat: her eyes were wide-open.
Her chest rose and fell steadily, as if she was asleep, and her face was expressionless, but her eyelids were pulled back as far as they’d go, leaving her eyes white and glowing. I gaped at her for a moment; it was impossible to look away from her terrifying stare. Quietly, she whispered, “You said you were coming back together.”
Without thinking, I ran. I didn’t care about the door behind me slamming. I took off up the stairs. I didn’t stop until I reached the far bedroom and slammed that door as well. I hurled myself onto the mattress and froze, listening for signs that I had been followed.
I did nothing but breathe and listen. But the house was silent, save the soft moan of old wood.
One finger at a time, I opened my hand around the crumpled notebook paper and spread it in front of me. The moon lit the page—it was the same cursive, my grandfather’s writing.
april 28, the 2010.
pillar porch ceiling mattress singing all in baxes
her castle
& we were jasters
moon through window, made of
built on
love
arthur
some days are cold nathingness
i feel us moving through it
speeches in your living room,
dreaming on your floor
songs with words that fill to the ceilings
who were we then?
where did
cold window lite from moon
i know cold
i know leaving
i know empty
i know sickness & health
i know temporary
& she knows them too
she waits here for us,
in empty boxes broken bells
in songs that still echo in the ceilings
in ruins of
a castle lite from the moon
she waits,
& we went
& never returned
but she knows the curious rush
to smell
see
touch
to know but not remember
to love
hurt
cry out
for history that doesn’t exist
but for the lite from the moon
felt but not seen
held but not understood
shrunk like threads
of oft-worn cotton
her head & mine,
a diary of time forgotten.
—arthur louis pullman