The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(114)

In the morning there was a spider on his blanket. Its sesame eyes. He blew at it and it scuttled away. Some dream of his father. Later in the day he remembered. A wasted figure shuffling along the corridor of the shabby clinic. Pushing a wheeled stand before him with his tubes and vials. Days perhaps from death and a nameless burial in the hard caliche of a potter’s field in a foreign land. Who stopped and turned with his watery eyes. Paper slippers and a stained white gown. Where is my son? Why doesnt he come?

He cycled through the small port. Down the thin graveled estuary road and out along the flats. Where salt was once evaporated for the city of Carthage. Frumentaria. The Roman word. The lights of Ibiza coming up off to the north. He sat on a stone that held an ancient iron ring and worked on a flat tire against the coming darkness. His bike standing on its forks against the wall. He listened as he fed the rubber tube past his ear. He sorted a patch from the small leather satchel that hung from the underside of the bicycle seat.

One day he met an American girl from Baltimore and they walked through the old town. They walked among the stones in the little cemetery. He told her that he would be buried here but she looked dubious. Maybe, she said. People dont always get what they want. There were razor marks on her arms. He looked away but not in time. I have to go, she said.

In the evening he gathered wood and tarballs along the beach and built a fire and sat by the warmth of it in the sand. A dog came up the beach in the dark. Just the red eyes. It paused and stood. Then it went around by the rocks and continued on. The flames sawed in the wind and he slept wrapped in his blanket and woke to a fire burned down almost to coals. Green mineral flames and embers scuttling away down the beach. He pushed fresh wood into the fire and sat listening to the slow black lap of the waters in the dark. Rush boats dragged up onto the sand. The clang of bronze or iron in those ancient nights. The moans of the dying. If you burrin away the key to the codex yet against what like tablet can this loss then be measured?

Dont be afraid, she would say. Most frightening of words. What did she see? For whom blood was all. And nothing. A man of gifts without consequence. As a child she would make up games that even then were difficult for him to follow. She took him up to the attic where in later years she would at least for a while hold her own against a world heretofore unknown. They sat crouched beneath the eaves and she took his hand. She said that they were meant to find something hidden from them. What is it? he said. And she said it is us. It is us that they are hiding from us.

What she believed ultimately was that the very stones of the earth had been wronged.

Why can you not bury him? Are his hands so red? Fathers are always forgiven. In the end they are forgiven. Had it been women who dragged the world through these horrors there would be a bounty on them.

When he got back to the windmill it was still dark and he climbed the stairs and sat at his little table. He sat with his forehead pressed into his hands and he sat for a long time. Finally he got out his notebook and wrote a letter to her. He wanted to tell her what was in his heart but in the end he only wrote a few words about his life on the island. Except for the last line. I miss you more than I can bear. Then he signed his name.



* * *



—

They sat in the winter sun in the hospital window at Berkeley. His father wore a plastic nametag on his thin wrist. He’d grown a wispy white beard and he kept touching it. Oppenheimer, he said. It would be Oppenheimer. He would answer your questions before you asked them. You could take a problem you’d been working on for weeks and he would sit there puffing on his pipe while you put your work up on the board and he’d look at it for a minute and say: Yes. I think I see how we can do this. And get up and erase your work and put up the right equations and sit down and smile at you. I dont know how many people he did that to. It didnt make any difference what the problem was. If you’re just talking about mathematics maybe Grothendieck. G?del of course. Von Neumann was never in that company. Or Einstein for that matter. He was the better physicist of course. He had this extraordinary physical intuition, but he had trouble solving his own equations. Later, his problem was that he wanted to. He thought that it was a shortcut. I think it led him down the garden path. After General Relativity he never did anything again. I knew him, sure. In the sense that anybody knew him. Maybe G?del did. His friends from Europe. Besso. Marcel Grossmann. Before he became Einstein.

He cycled to San Javier in the evening and drank a single glass of wine at the bodega.

An old man came shuffling along the road in his ropesoled shoes. A smile that held a single yellow tooth. The poppies along the road bright as paper flowers. In the evening he carried his blankets down to the beach and slept in the sand. What are you afraid of? she said. What can you fear that has not already come to pass?

The owner of the bodega was a man named Jo?o who spoke good English. He’d learned it working in hotels along the Costa Brava. It was his friend Pau who had died. An older man who used to sit quietly at one of the small wooden tables with his glass of wine. The skin of his cheeks dark and drawn and polished and his wrists brown against the white of his cotton shirt. He sipped his wine with a certain gravity and he had a white scar across his forearm that you could see when his shirtsleeves were rolled. It was put there by a thirty caliber machinegun and there were four more of them across his lower chest. His hands had been tied behind his back and the bullet which had broken his arm had already passed through him. He said that it was a matter for philosophy whether he had been shot five times or four.