he: A Novel
John Connolly
For Jennie, with love
And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
1
At the Oceana Apartments, at the dawning of the last days, he chases butterfly memories.
Through the open window comes the sound of breaking waves. He has always loved the sea, long captive to its amniotic pull. So he lives here in this small apartment, lives here in Santa Monica, lives here with his wife,
lives here with the dream of who he was and the reality of what he has become.
He is old. He will not live much longer, here or anywhere else.
On this, the last set of his life – the walls, and the ocean behind – he is missing his marks. He is faltering in the final steps of the dance. The enchained recollections of his life have begun to slip away, until soon he will no longer have the power to bring to mind even his own name. So he tries to hold on to his memories, because each one that escapes, never to be recovered, represents a further dissolution of the self.
When all the memories have departed, so too will he.
The dead have no recall.
He was famous once.
No, he and Babe were famous once. But now Babe is gone, and he is alone.
Babe.
Every regret in his life holds the echo of this name.
He can remember meeting Babe, and he can remember losing Babe, but the events between are like paints imperfectly mixed, swirls of color and texture, each representing a single, beautifully ordinary day, a conversation perfect in its inconsequence, a moment of transitory joy, its essence both preserved yet elusive.
These remembrances are gemstones tumbling to the ground, shattering on impact. He struggles to retrieve the fragments, to maintain his hold upon them and comprehend their disparate meanings.
These remembrances are snowflakes swirling in his path. They melt in his hand at the instant of connection, so that he is left only with the chill of loss.
These remembrances are flickering images on a screen.
Two figures in a dance eternal.
He and Babe.
Now only he.
2
The mind is a theater. It cannot be allowed to go dark. It must be maintained.
This is what his father does, Arthur Jefferson, his sire; a rescuer, a restorer, a proprietor of auditoriums in British towns. He bears A.J.’s name for more than half of his own life, and A.J.’s features for much longer. He becomes a simulacrum of A.J., and A.J.’s disappointment in him is compounded as a consequence.
He is a child, eclipsed by his father’s shadow.
Now he, this child, is watching A.J. as A.J. stands in the Eden in Bishop Auckland, admiring the new lights, the upholstered rows, the gilded paintwork, just as A.J. will stand in the Royal in Consett
in the Royal in Blyth
in the Tynemouth Circus in North Shields
in the Metropole in Glasgow
(because, A.J. will tell him, there is a rhythm to names, and a poetry to places)
each one saved from the dark by A.J. the impresario, A.J. the dramatist, who invents plays to draw the crowds to his venues, words tumbling from him so fast that A.J. can barely write quickly enough to bind them to the page before they drift away. But A.J.’s ideas are light, and only verbiage lends them weight. Slowly A.J. learns. A.J. is no playwright. The dramas cease, to be replaced by sketches and skits.
All this he witnesses, boy and young man, this moon to A.J’s sun, and in attic rooms he practices his stage routines before empty seats and the scrutiny of mannequins.
3
It is 1906.
Pickard’s Museum, the Panopticon; formerly the Britannia Music Hall, and the haunt of whores. Old, even by the standards of these places, and hard with it, but Glasgow was always this way.
A.E. Pickard, with his Van Dyke beard and cutaway suit, will install waxworks in the Panopticon, and a carnival. A.E. Pickard, with his distorting mirrors and images of Chinese torture, will install a freak show in the Panopticon, and a zoo. The shadows of the Panopticon, the Pots & Pans, will smell of hay and shit, and the despair of human and animal alike.
He is the bonus on this night, the extra turn, no billing. He is sixteen years old, and is wearing clothes liberated from A.J. He shortens and patches, he tucks and cuts, all in the same room in which he perfects his turns. Only the coat he leaves untouched, because it is his father’s best.
He blinks against the lights in this primitive place. No seats in a room that can billet only a trio for musical accompaniment, and poor scrapings at that: laced ladies who smell of sherry and mothballs, and struggle to make their instruments heard above the clamor of the Audience.
He begins. In that moment he loses himself, and will never be found again.
And the Audience laughs: not against him but with him, like the wind blowing in a well-turned sail; and he feeds upon it, and it washes over him as the many become one, harmonizing in their joy.
Only as he takes his bow does he see his father.
It is amateur night. A.J. has come to sup with A.E. Pickard, and perhaps to seek out new meat for his own grinder. What A.J. witnesses is his son in borrowed threads – a familiar coat, a top hat fresh from the box – cavorting unexpectedly on a dusty stage for the drunks and the catcallers.
He cannot read the expression on A.J.’s face, but he knows that A.J. has no tolerance for secrets, gives no succor to indiscipline. He runs, but not to his mother, not to Madge.