Sea of Tranquility(48)

But Gaspery hesitated by the men’s room door for a moment, watching the party, and his happiness faded. Here was the awfulness that Zoey had warned him of, the utterly miserable knowledge of how everyone else’s stories would end. He looked out over the room, and for the first time in his life, Gaspery felt old.

Vincent and her husband clinked their glasses together. In fourteen months Alkaitis would be arrested for running a massive Ponzi scheme, then released on bail, at which point he would flee to Dubai—abandoning Vincent—and live out the rest of his long life in a series of hotels.

Vincent would live for another twelve years, and then disappear under mysterious circumstances from the deck of a container ship.

Nearby was Mirella, talking with her husband, Faisal. Faisal was an investor in Jonathan’s fraud scheme, and when the scheme collapsed in a year he would lose everything, as would the family members who’d invested at his urging. Faisal would die of suicide.

Mirella would find the body, and the note. Then she would remain for more than a decade in New York City, until in March 2020 she would travel to Dubai for unknown reasons, arriving just in time to be stranded by the Covid-19 pandemic. There she would meet Himesh Chiang, a guest at the same hotel where she was staying, and after some time the two of them would return to his native London, where they would survive the pandemic, marry, and live out the rest of their lives together; she would give birth to three children, have a successful career in retail management, and die of pneumonia at eighty-five, a year after her husband’s death in a car accident.

But so much is inevitably left out of any biography, any accounting of any life. Before all of that, before Mirella lost Faisal, before this party in this city by the sea, she’d been a child in Ohio. Gaspery shivered. He was thinking of the way she’d looked at him in the park, in January 2020. You were under the overpass, she’d said to him, with terrible certainty, in Ohio, when I was a kid. Not just that. She’d said he was arrested there.

He’d been thinking of 1918 as his final trip. He had made every effort to save himself, and after 1918 he was going home to face the consequences. But what he realized now, watching Mirella, was that it was too late. He was going to go to 1918, but there would be one more destination after that.





7




Remittance /


   1918, 1990, 2008





1


In 1918 Edwin had no more brothers, and only one foot. He lived with his parents on the family estate. He walked constantly, ostensibly because he was trying to improve his gait—he’d been fitted with a prosthetic and walked in a lurching way—but really because if he stopped moving, the enemy might get him. He walked at all hours of the day and night. Sleep transported him reliably back to the trenches, so he avoided sleep, which meant it ambushed him unexpectedly: while reading in the library, while sitting in the garden, once or twice at dinner.



* * *



—

His parents weren’t sure how to speak to him, or how to look at him even. They couldn’t accuse him of shiftlessness anymore, because he was a war hero but also something of an invalid. It was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t well. “You’ve changed so much, darling,” his mother said gently, and he wasn’t sure whether this was a compliment, an accusation, or pure observation. He’d never been good at reading people and now he was worse.

“Well,” he said, “I saw some things I wish I hadn’t.”

Understatement of the goddamned twentieth century.



* * *



—

He felt more empathy for his mother than previously, though. When Abigail floated off at the dinner table, when talk turned to the colonies and the look that her sons had once unkindly termed her British India expression came over her face, Edwin understood more vividly now that she was mourning a loss. He still found the Raj indefensible, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t lost an entire world. It wasn’t her fault that the world she’d grown up in had ceased to exist.



* * *



—

Sometimes in the garden, he liked to talk to Gilbert, although Gilbert was dead. Gilbert and Niall had both died in the Battle of the Somme, a day apart, while Edwin had survived Passchendaele. No, survived was the wrong word. Edwin’s animate body had returned from Passchendaele. He thought of his body now in strictly mechanical terms. His heart flapped deathlessly. He continued to breathe. He was in good physical health, except for the missing foot, but he was fundamentally unsound. It was difficult to be alive in the world.

“It’s not uncommon,” he heard the doctor say in the corridor outside his room, in the earliest weeks, when all he did was lie in bed. “The boys who went over there and wound up in the trenches, well, some of them saw things none of us should.”

He hadn’t entirely surrendered. He was making an effort. He rose and dressed in the mornings now, he ate the food that appeared in front of him at the table, and then, his strength exhausted, he spent most of the remaining day in the garden. He liked to sit out there on a bench under a tree and talk to Gilbert. He knew Gilbert wasn’t there—he wasn’t that far gone—but there was no one else to talk to. He’d had friends here, once, but now one friend was in China and all the others were dead.