I did not know the phrase "resurrection man" eighteen years ago. I was a boy then; such men were yet uncommon.
I know it now -- we all know it -- and yet the phrase retains for me a haunting quality, simultaneously wondrous and frightening. I met him only once, my resurrection man, on the cusp of a hazy August morning, but he haunts me still in subtle and unspoken ways: when I look in the mirror and see my face, like my father's face; or when I take the diamond, my uniform shining beneath the ranks of floodlights, and hear the infield chatter, like music if you love the game.
And I do. I do.
It was among the things he bequeathed to me, that love, though he could not have known it. We do not understand the consequences of the actions we take, the meaning of the legacies we leave. We cannot.
They are ghosts of sorts, actions in a vacuum where all action has passed, inheritances from the inscrutable dead. Legacies.
They can be gifts and they can be curses. Sometimes they can be both.
My father returned to the States in April of 1948, following the bloody, methodical invasion of Japan, and he married my mother the week he landed. She died in childbirth eleven months later, and I sometimes wonder if he ever forgave me. One other significant event occurred in '49: Casey Stengel, a ne'er-do-well journeyman manager, led the Yankees to the first of an unprecedented five straight victories in the World Series.
Twelve years later, in 1961, my father died too. That was the year Roger Maris came to bat in the fourth inning of the season's final game and drove his sixty-first home run into the fight-field seats at Yankee Stadium, breaking Babe Ruth's record for single-season homers. In Baltimore, we still say that the new record is meaningless, that Maris played in a season six games longer than that of our home-grown hero; but even then, in our hearts, we knew it wasn't true.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
Two days after my father's death, the monorail whisked me from Baltimore to St. Louis. I had never been away from home. The journey was a nightmare journey. The landscape blurred beyond the shining curve of the window, whether through speed or tears, I could not tell.
My great aunt Rachel Powers met me at the station. Previously, I had known her only from a photograph pasted in the family album. A young woman then, she possessed a beauty that seemed to radiate color through the black and white print. She wore an androgynous flat-busted dress and her eyes blazed from above sharpened cheek bones with such unnerving intensity that, even in the photograph, I could not meet them for more than a moment.
The photograph had been taken forty years before my father's death, but I knew her instantly when I saw her on the platform.
"Jake Lamont?" she said.
I nodded, struck speechless. Tall and lean, she wore a billowing white frock and a white hat, like a young bride. The years had not touched her. She might have been sixteen, she might have been twenty. And then she lifted the veil that obscured her face, shattering the illusion of youth. I saw the same high, sharp cheek bones, the same intense eyes --blue; why had I never wondered? -- but her flesh was seamed and spotted with age.
"Well, then," she said. "So you're a boy. I don't know much about boys." And then, when I still did not speak, "Are you mute, child?"
My fingers tightened around the handle of my traveling case. "No, ma'am."
"Well, good. Come along, then."
Without sparing me another glance, she disappeared into the throng. Half-fearful of being left in the noisy, crowded station, I lit out after her, dragging my suitcase behind me. Outside, in the clear midwestern heat, we loaded the suitcase into the trunk of a weary '53 Cadillac, one of those acre-long cars that Detroit began to produce in the fat years after the war.
We drove into farming country, on single-lane blacktop roads where you could cruise for hours and never see another car. We did not speak, though I watched her surreptitiously. Her intense eyes never deviated from the road, unswerving between the endless rows of corn. I cracked the window, and the car filled with the smell of August in Missouri --the smell of moist earth and cow manure, and green, growing things striving toward maturity, and the slow decline into September. That smell was lovely and alien, like nothing I had ever smelled in Baltimore.
At last, we came to the town, Stowes Corners, situated in a region of low, green hills. She took me through wide, tree-shadowed streets. I saw the courthouse, and the broad spacious lawn of the town square. On a quiet street lined with oak, my aunt pointed out the school, an unassuming antique brick, dwarfed by the monstrous edifice I had known in the city.
"That's where your father went to school when he was a boy," my aunt said, and a swift electric surge of anger --
-- how could he abandon me? --
-- jolted along my spine. I closed my eyes, and pressed my face against the cool window. The engine rumbled as the ear pulled away from the curb, and when I opened my eyes again, we had turned into a long gravel drive. The caddy mounted a short rise topped by a stand of maples, and emerged from the trees into sunlight and open air. My aunt paused there -- in the days to come I would learn that she always paused there, she took a languorous, almost sensual delight in the land -- and in the valley below I saw the house.
It had been a fine old farmhouse once, my aunt would later tell me, but that had been years ago; now, the surrounding fields lost to creditors, the house had begun the inevitable slide into genteel decay. Sun-bleached and worn, scabrous with peeling paint, it retained merely a glimmer of its former splendor. Even then, in my clumsy inarticulate fashion, I could see that it was like my aunt, a luminous fragment of a more refined era that had survived diminished into this whirling and cacophonous age.
"This is your home now," my aunt said, and without waiting for me to respond -- what could I say? -- she touched the gas and the car descended.
Inside, the house was silence and stillness and tattered elegance. The furnishings, though frayed, shone with a hard gloss, as if my aunt had determined, through sheer dint of effort, to hold back the ravages of years. A breeze stirred in the surrounding hills and chased itself through the open windows, bearing to me a faint lemony scent of furniture polish as I followed my aunt upstairs. She walked slowly, painfully, one hand bracing her back, the other clutching the rail. She led me to a small room and watched from the doorway as I placed my suitcase on the narrow bed. I did not look at her as she crossed the room and sat beside me. The springs complained nastily. I opened my suitcase, dug beneath my clothes, and withdrew the photograph I had brought from Baltimore. It was the only picture I had of my father and me together. Tears welled up inside me. I bit my lip and looked out the window, into the long treeless expanse of the back yard, desolate in a cruel fall of sunshine.
Aunt Rachel said, "Jake."
She said, "Jake, this isn't easy for either of us. I am an old woman and I am set in my ways. I have lived alone for thirty-five years, and I can be as ugly and unpleasant as a bear. I don't know the first thing about boys. You must remember this when things are hard between us."
"Yes, ma'am."
I felt her cool fingers touch my face. She took my chin firmly, and we stared into each other's faces for a time. She pressed her mouth into a thin indomitable line.
"You will look at me when I speak to you. Do you understand?"
"Yes, ma'am."
The fingers dropped from my face. "That's one of my rules. This isn't Baltimore, Jake. I'm not your father. He was a good boy, and I'm sure he was a fine man, but it strikes me that young people today are too lenient with their children. I will not tolerate disrespect."
"No, ma'am."
"Good." She smiled and smoothed her dress across her thighs. "I'm glad you've come to me, Jake," she said. "I hope we can be friends."
Before I could speak, she stood and left the room, closing the door behind her. I went around the bed and lifted the window. The breeze swept in, flooding the room with that alien smell of green things growing. I threw myself on the bed and drew my father's picture to my breast.
Among the photographs that are important to me number three relics of my youth. They are arranged across my desk like talismans as I write.
The first photograph, which I have already described to you, is that of my 'aunt as she must have looked in 1918 or '19, when she was a girl.
The second photograph is of my mother as she was in the days when my father knew her; aside from the photograph I have nothing of her. Perhaps my father felt that in hoarding whatever memories he had of her, he could possess her even in death. Or perhaps he simply could not bring himself to speak of her. I know he must have loved her, for every year on my birthday, the anniversary of her death, he drew into himself, became taciturn and insular in a way that in retrospect seems atypical, for he was a cheerful man, even buoyant. Beyond that I do not know; he was scrupulous in his destruction of every vestige of her. When he died, I found nothing. No photographs, but the one I still possess. No letters. Not even her rings; I suppose she wore them to the grave.
The third photograph I have mentioned also. It is of my father and me, when I was eleven, and it captures a great irony. Though it was taken in a ballpark -- Baltimore's Memorial Stadium -- my father did not love baseball. I don't remember why we went to that game -- perhaps someone gave him the tickets -- but we never attended another. That was when I felt it first, my passion for the sport; immediately, it appealed to me -- its order and symmetry, its precision. Nothing else in sports rivals the moment when the batter steps into the box and faces the pitcher across sixty feet of shaven green. The entire game is concentrated into that instant, the skills of a lifetime distilled into every pitch; and no one, no one in the world but those two men, has any power to alter the course of the game.
In those days, of course, I did not think of it in such terms; my passion for the sport was nascent, rudimentary. All I knew was that I enjoyed the game, that someday I would like to see another. That much is my father's due.
The rest, indirectly anyway, was the resurrection man's gift, his legacy. But I have no photograph of him.
I slept uneasily that first night in Stowes Corners, unaccustomed to the rural quiet that cradled the house. The nightly symphony of traffic and voices to which I had been accustomed was absent, and the silence imparted a somehow ominous quality to the stealthy mouse-like chitterings of the automaids as they scurried about the sleeping house.
I woke unrested to the sound of voices drifting up from the parlor. Strange voices -- my aunt's, only half-familiar yet, and a second voice, utterly unknown, mellifluous and slow and fawningly ingratiating.
This voice was saying, "You do realize, Miss Powers, there are limits to what we are permitted to do?"
I eased out of bed in my pajamas and crept along the spacious hall to the head of the stairs, the hardwood floor cool against my bare feet.
My aunt said, "Limits? The advertising gave me the impression you could do most anything."
I seated myself on the landing in the prickly silence that followed. A breeze soughed through the upstairs windows. Through the half-open door in the ornate foyer below, I could see a car parked in the circular drive. Beyond the car, the morning sun gleamed against the stand of maple and sent a drowsy haze of mist steaming away into the open sky.
My aunt was rattling papers below. "It doesn't say anything about limits here."
"No, ma'am, of course not. And I didn't mean to imply that our products were not convincing. Not by any means."
"Then what do you mean by limits?
The stranger cleared his throat. "Not technological limits, ma'am. Those exist, of course, but they're not the issue here." "Well, what in heaven's name is the issue?"
"It's a legal matter, ma'am -- a constitutional matter, even. We're a young company, you know, and our product is new and unfamiliar and there's bound to be some controversy, as you might well imagine." He paused, and I could hear him fumbling about through his paraphernalia. A moment later I heard the sharp distinct snick of a lighter.
He smoked, of course. In those days, all men smoked, and the acrid gritty stink of tobacco smoke which now began to drift up the stairs reminded me of my father.
I do not smoke. I never have.
"Our company," he resumed, "we're cognizant of the objections folks might raise to our product. The Church -- all the churches -- are going to be a problem. And the doctors are going to have a field day with the need to come to terms with grief. We know that -- our founder, Mr. Hiram Wallace, he knows that, he's an intelligent man, but he's committed. We're all committed. Do you know anything about Mr. Wallace, ma'am.?"
"I'm afraid I don't."
"It's an inspiring story, a story I think you ought to hear. Anybody who's thinking of contracting with us ought to hear it. Do you mind.?"
My aunt sighed. I heard her adjust herself in her chair, and I could imagine them in the quaint, spotless parlor I had seen the night before: my aunt in her white dress, her hands crossed like a girl's over the advertising packet in her lap, the resurrection man, leaning forward from the loveseat, a cigarette dangling between his fingers.
Aunt Rachel said, "Go ahead then."
"It's a tragedy, really," the resurrection man said, "but it ends in triumph. For you see, Mr. Wallace's first wife, she was hit by a bus on their honeymoon --"
"Oh, my!"
"Yes, ma'am, that's right, a bus." There was a hardy smack as the resurrection man slammed his hands together; I could hear it even at the top of the stairs. "Like that," he said, "so sudden. Mr. Wallace was heartbroken. He knows what you're feeling, ma'am, he knows what your boy upstairs is feeling, and he wants to help --"
With these words, an icy net of apprehension closed around my heart, and the tenor of my eavesdropping swerved abruptly from mild curiosity to a kind of breathless dread. The resurrection man's next words came sluggish and dim. I felt as if I had been wrapped in cotton. The landing had grown oppressively hot.
"The potential applications for this technology are mind-boggling," he was saying. "And I won't lie to you, ma'am, Mr. Wallace is exploring those avenues. But this, this service to the grief-stricken and the lonely, this is where his heart lies. That's why we're offering this service before any other, ma'am, and that's why there are limits to what we can do."
"But I'm afraid I still don't understand."
"Let me see if I can clarify, ma'am. Of all the forces arrayed against us -all the people like the churches and the doctors who'd like to see our enterprise go down the tubes -- our single most dangerous adversary is the government itself. Our senators and representatives are frankly scared to death of this."
"But why?"
"It's the question of legal status, ma'am. What does it take to be a human being? That's the question. All the agreements we've worked out with congressional committees and sub-committees -- it seems like a hundred of them -- all the agreements boil down to one thing: these, these...beings...must be recognizably non-human, limited in intellect, artificial in appearance. No one wants to grapple with the big questions, ma'am. No one wants to take on the churches, especially our elected officials. They're all cowards."
Aunt Rachel said, "I see," in a quiet, thoughtful kind of voice, but she didn't say anything more.
In the silence that followed, something of the magnitude of my aunt's devotion came to me. I did not know much about Stowes Corners, but I suspected with a twelve-year old's inarticulate sense of such things, that the town was as rigidly provincial in perspective as in appearance. Whatever the stranger below was selling my aunt, he had clearly come a long way to sell it; there could be no need for such controversial. . .beings, as he had called them. . .here -- here in a place where my aunt had told me that she was among the few folks in town who owned automaids.
I couldn't really afford them, lake, she had said last night at supper, but the work was getting to be too much for me. I'm glad you've come to help me.
Now, with the sun rising over the maples and throwing sharp glints off the car in the drive, the resurrection man coughed. "I hope you're still interested, Miss Powers."
"Well, I don't know a thing about boys," she said. "And I don't want him growing up without a father. It isn't right that a boy grow up without a man in the house."
That icy net of apprehension drew still tighter about my heart. My stomach executed a slow perfect roll, and the sour tang of bile flooded my mouth. I leaned my head against the newel and shut my eyes.
"I agree entirely, ma'am," came the other voice. "A boy needs a father. You can rest assured we'll do our best."
From below, there came the rustle of people standing, the murmured pleasantries of leave-taking. My aunt asked how long it would take, and the resurrection man said not long, we'll simply modify a pre-fab model along the lines suggested by the photos and recordings -- and through all this babble a single thought burst with unbearable clarity:
Nothing, nothing would ever be the same again.
I stood, and fled down the hall, down the back stairs. I slammed through the kitchen and into the gathering heat.
When the front door swung open, I was waiting. As the resurrection man -- this stout, balding man dressed in a dark suit, and a wide bright tie; this unprepossessing man, unknowing and unknown, who would shape the course of my existence -- as this man rounded the comer of his car, his case in hand, I hurled myself at him. Frenzied, I hurled myself at him, railing at his chest. "What are you going to do?" I cried.
Strong hands pinned my arms to my sides and lifted me from the ground. The rancid odors of after-shave and tobacco enveloped me, and I saw that sweat stood in a dark ring around his collar. "Calm down!" he shouted. "Just calm down, son! Are you crazy?"
He thrust me from him. Half-blinded by tears, I stumbled away, swiping angrily at my eyes with my knuckles. Without speaking, the resurrection man dusted his suit and retrieved his case. He got in his car and drove away, and though I could not know it then, I would never see him again.
My father's body came by slowtrain several days later. He had returned to Stowes Corners only once in the years after the war, to see my mother into the earth where her family awaited her. Now, at last, he came to join her; we buried him in the sun-dappled obscurity of a Missouri noon.
As the minister quietly recited the ritual, a soft wind lilted through the swallow-thronged trees, bearing to me the sweet fragrances of freshly turned earth and new-mown grass. I watched an intricate pattern of light and leaf-shadow play across my aunt's face, but I saw no tears. Her still emotionless features mirrored my own. The service seemed appropriate -- minimal and isolated, infinitely distant from the places and people my father had known. There was only the minister, my aunt, and myself. No one else attended.
When the minister had finished, I knelt before my mother's tombstone and reached out a single finger to trace her name. And then I clutched a handful of soil and let it trickle through my fingers into my father's grave. I shall never forget the sound it made as it spattered the casket's polished lid.
Several years ago, I chanced upon an archaeologist's account of his experience excavating a ruined city, abandoned beneath the sand for thousands of years. Such a project is an exercise in meticulous drudgery@ the earth does not readily divulge her secrets. Stratum after stratum of sand must be sifted, countless fragments painstakingly extracted and catalogued and fitted together for interpretation. You are in truth excavating not one city, but many cities, each built on the rubble of the one which preceded it.
I am reminded of this now, for recollection, like archaeology, is a matter of sifting through ruins. Memory is frail and untrustworthy, tainted by desire; what evidence remains is fragmentary, shrouded in the mystery of the irretrievable past. You cannot recover history; you can only reconstruct it, build it anew from the shards that have survived, searching always for the seams between the strata, those places of demarcation between the city that was and the city that would be, between the self that you were and the self you have become.
How do you reconstruct a past, when only potsherds and photographs remain?
A moment, then.
An instant from the quiet, hot August day my father was interred -- one of those timeless instants that stands like a seam between the geologic strata of a buried city, between the boy I was and the man I have become:
Afternoon.
In the room where I slept, the blinds rattled, but otherwise all was silent. Outside, somewhere, the world moved on. Tiny gusts leavened the heat and lifted the luminous scent of pollen into the afternoon, but through the open window there came only a cloying funerary pall. Far away, the sun shone; it announced its presence here only as an anemic gleam behind the lowered blinds, insufficient to dispel the gloom.
I stood before the closet, fumbling with my tie. My eyes stung and my stomach had drawn into an agonizing knot, but I refused to cry. I was repeating a kind of litany to myself --
-- I will not cry, I will not --
-- when a voice said:
"Hello, Jake."
My spine stiffened. The tiny hairs along my back stirred, as if a dark gust from some October landscape had swept into the room.
It was my father's voice.
I did not turn. Without a word, I shrugged oil my jacket and swung open the closet door. In the dim reflection of the mirror hung inside, I could see a quiet figure, preternatural in its stillness, seated in the far shadowy comer by the bed.
I don't want him growing up without a father, my aunt had said. It isn't right that a boy grow up without a man in the house.
What in God's name had she done?
The figure said, "Don't be afraid, Jake."
"I'm not afraid," I said. But my hands shook as I fumbled at the buttons. on my shirt. I groped for a hanger, draped the shirt around it, and thrust it into the depths of the closet, feeling exposed in my nakedness, vulnerable, but determined not to allow this. . .being, the resurrection man had called it. . .to sense that. Kicking away my slacks, I fished a pair of jeans out of the closet.
In the minor, I saw the figure stand.
I said, "Don't come near me."
And that voice -- my God, that voice -- said, "Don't be afraid."
It smiled and lifted a hand to the window, each precise, economical gesture accompanied by a faint mechanical hum, as though somewhere far down in the depths of its being flywheels whirred and gears meshed in intricate symphony. I watched as it gripped the cord and raised the blind.
The room seemed to ignite. Sunlight glanced out of the mirror and rippled in the glossy depths of the headboard and nightstand. A thousand spinning motes of dust flared, and I winced as my eyes adjusted. Then, my heart pounding I closed the closet door, and at last, at last I turned around.
It was my father -- from the dark hair touched gray at the temples to the slight smiling crinkles around the eyes to the slim athletic build, seeming to radiate poise and grace even in repose -- in every detail, it was my father. It sat once again in the wooden chair by the nightstand, stiffly erect, its blunt fingers splayed on the thighs of its jeans, and returned my stare from my father's eyes. I felt a quick hot swell of anger and regret --
-- how could you abandon me? --
-- felt something tear away inside of me. I blinked back tears.
"My God, what are you.?"
"Jake," it said. It said, "Jake, don't cry."
That swift tide of anger, burning, swept through me, obliterating all. "Don't you tell me what to do."
The thing seemed taken aback. It composed its features into an expression of startled dismay; its mouth moved, but it said nothing. We stared across the room at one another until at last it looked away. It lifted the framed photograph that stood on the nightstand. A moment passed, and then another, while it gazed into the picture. I wondered what it saw there, in that tiny image of the man it was pretending to be.
One thick finger caressed the gilded frame. "Is that Memorial Stadium?"
It looked up, smiling tentatively, and I crossed the room in three angry strides. I tore the photograph out of the thing's hands, and then the tears boiled out of me, burning and shameful.
"You don't know anything about it!" I cried, flinging myself on the bed. The creature stood, its hands outstretched, saying, "Jake, Jake --" but I rushed on, I would not listen: "You're not my father! You don't know anything about it! Anything, you hear me? So just go away and leave me alone!" In the end, I was screaming.
The thing straightened. "Okay, Jake. If that's the way you want it." And it crossed the room, and went out into the hall, closing the door softly behind it.
I lay back on the bed. After a while, my aunt called me for supper, but I didn't answer. She didn't call again. Outside, it began to grow dark, and finally a heavy silence enclosed the house. Eventually, I heard tiny mutterings and whisperings as the automaids crept from their holes and crannies and began to whisk away the debris of another day, but through it all, I did not move. I lay wide awake, staring blindly at the dark ceiling.
During the days that followed my aunt and I moved about the house like wraiths, mute and insubstantial, imprisoned by the unacknowledged presence of this monstrous being this creature that was my father and not my father. We did not mention it; I dared not ask, she proffered no explanation. Indeed, I might have imagined the entire episode, except I glimpsed it now and then -- trimming the shrubs with garden shears or soaping down the caddy in the heat, and once, in a tableau that haunts me still, standing dumb in the darkened parlor, gazing expressionlessly at the wall with a concentration no human being could muster.
Inexorably the afternoons grew shorter, the maple leaves began to turn, and somehow, somewhere in all the endless moments, August passed into September.
One morning before the sun had burned the fog off the hills, my aunt awoke me. I dressed quietly, and together we walked into the cool morning the gravel crunching beneath our feet. She drove me to the school my father had attended all those long years ago, a mile away, and as I stepped from the car she pressed a quarter into my hand.
"Come here," she said, and when I came around the car to the open window, she leaned out and kissed me. Her lips were dry and hard, with the texture of withered leaves.
She looked away, through the glare of windshield, where morning was breaking across the town. A bell began to ring and noisy clusters of children ran by us, shouting laughter, but I did not move. The two of us might have been enclosed in a thin impermeable bubble, isolated from the world around us. Her knuckles had whitened atop the steering wheel.
"You can walk home," she said, "you know the way," and when I did not answer, she cleared her throat. "Well, then, good luck," she said, and I felt a reply -- what it might have been, I cannot know -- catch in my throat. Before I could dislodge it, the car pulled from the curb.
I turned to the school. The bell continued to ring. Another clump of children swept by, and I drifted along like flotsam in their wake. I mounted the steps to the building slowly and carefully, as if the slightest jolt would destabilize the churning energies that had been compressed within me. I was a bomb, I could have ticked.
My aunt and I were in the kitchen, eating supper, that wall of impregnable silence between us. I ate with studied nonchalance, gazing steadfastly into my plate, or staring off into the dining room beyond the kitchen. The creature that looked like my father sat alone in there, shadowy and imperturbable, its hands folded neatly on the table.
Aunt Rachel said, "Jake, it's time to move on with your life. You must accept your father's death and go on. You cannot grieve forever."
I pushed my vegetables around my plate. Words swollen and poisonous formed in my gut; I could not force them into my throat.
She said, "Jake, I want to be your friend."
Again, I did not answer. I looked off into the dining room. The thing looked back, silent, inscrutable. And then, almost without thought, I began to speak, expelling the words in a deadly emotionless monotone: "You must be crazy. Do you think that thing can replace him?"
Aunt Rachel lowered her fork with shaking fingers. Her lips had gone white. "Of course not. Your father can never be replaced, Jake."
"That's not my father," I said. "It's nothing like him!"
"Jake, I know --"
But she could not finish. I found myself standing, my napkin clenched in one hand. Screaming: "It's not! It's not a thing like him! You must be crazy, you old witch --"
And then I was silent. A deadly calm descended in the kitchen. I felt light-headed, as though I were floating somewhere around the ceiling, tethered to my body by the most tenuous of threads. The things I had said made no sense, I knew, but they felt true.
My aunt said, "Look me in the eye, Jake."
I forced my stone-heavy eyes to meet hers.
"You must never speak to me like that again," she said. "Do you understand?"
Biting my lip, I nodded.
"Your father is dead," she told me. "I understand you are in pain, but it is time you face the facts and begin to consider the feelings of others again. You must never mn away from the truth, Jake, however unpleasant. Because once you begin running, you can never stop."
She folded her napkin neatly beside her plate and pushed her chair away from the table. "Come here," she said. "Bend over and put your hands on your knees."
Reluctantly, I did as she asked. She struck me three quick painless blows across the backside, and I felt tears of humiliation well up in my eyes. I bit my lip -- bit back the tears -- and finished my meal in silence, but afterwards I crept upstairs to stretch on the narrow bed and stare at the familiar ceiling. A sharp woodsy odor of burning leaves drifted through the window, and shadows slowly inhabited the room. An orchestra of insects began to warm up in the long fiat space behind the house.
I dozed, and woke later in the night to a room spun full of gossamer moonlight. The creature sat in the chair by the nightstand, cradling the photograph in its unlined hands. It looked up, something whirring in its neck, and placed the photograph on the nightstand where I could see it.
"I'll go if you like," it said.
I sat up, wincing. "Light, please," I told the lamp, and as the room brightened, I gazed into the picture. A boy curiously unlike myself gazed back at me, eyes shining arm draped about the slim, dark-headed man next to him. My father's lean beard-shadowed face had already begun to grow unfamiliar. Looking at the photograph, I could see hi m -- how could I not? -- but at night, in the darkness, I could not picture him. His lips came to me, or his eyes, or the long curve of his jaw, but they came like pieces of a worn-out jigsaw puzzle -- they would not fit together true. And now, of course, he is lost to me utterly, only sometimes, when I look into a mirror, I catch a glimpse of him there and it frightens me.
I reached out a finger to the photograph. Glass. Cold glass, walling me away forever.
I remembered the dirt as it trickled through my fingers; I remembered the sound it made as it spattered the lid of the casket.
"You're not my father," I said.
"No."
We were quiet for a while. Something small and toothy gnawed away inside me.
"What are you.?" I asked.
"I'm a machine."
"That's all! Just a machine, like a ear or a radio?"
"Something like that. More complicated. A simulated person, they call me -- a sim. I'm a new thing. There aren't many machines in the world like me, though maybe there will be."
"I could cut you off," I said. "I could just cut you off."
"Yes."
"And if I do?"
The sim lifted its hands and shrugged. "Gone," it said. "Erased and irrecoverable. Everything that makes me me."
"Show me. I want to know."
The sim's expression did not change. It merely leaned forward and lifted the thick hair along its neck. And there it was: a tiny switch, like a jewel gleaming in the light. I reached out and touched it, ran my finger through the coarse hair, touched the skin, rubbery and cold, thinking of what he had said: Erased and irrecoverable.
"You're a machine," I said. "That's all." And everything -- the fear and anger, the hope and despair -- everything drained out of me, leaving a crystalline void. I was glass. If you had touched me, I would have shattered into a thousand shining fragments. "My aunt must be crazy."
"Perhaps she only wants to make you happy."
"You can't replace my father."
"I don't want to."
Insects had begun to hurl themselves at the window screen, and I told the light to shut itself off. The darkness seemed much thicker than before, and I could perceive the sire only as a silhouette against the bright moonlit square of the window. It reached out and picked up the photograph again and I thought: It can see in the dark.
Who knew what it could do?
The sim said, "Did you go to many games at Memorial Park?"
"You ought to know. You're supposed to be just like him."
"I hardly know a thing about him," the sire said. And then: "Jake, I'm not really a thing like him at all. I just look like him."
"That was the only game we ever went to."
"I see."
All at once that day came flooding back to me b its sights and sounds, its sensations. I wanted to describe the agony of suspense that built with every pitch, the hush of the crowd and the flat audible crack of the bat when a slugger launched the ball clear into the summer void, a pale blur against the vaulted blue. I remembered those things, and more: the oniony smell of the hot dogs and relish my father and I had shared, the bite of an icy Coke in the heat, and through it all the recurrent celebratory strain of the calliope. A thousand things I could not say.
So we sat there in silence, and finally the sim said, "Do you think we could be friends.?"
I shrugged, thinking of my aunt. She too had wished to be my friend. Now, in the silent moonlit bedroom, the scene at the table came back to me. An oily rush of shame surged through me. "Is it really so bad, running away?"
"I don't know. I don't know things like that."
"What am I going to do?"
"Maybe you don't have to run away." The sim cocked its head with a mechanical hum. A soft crescent of moonlight illuminated one cheek, and I could see a single eye, flat and depthless as polished tin. But all the rest was shadow. It said, "I'm not your father, Jake. But I could be your friend."
Without speaking I lay down, pulled the covers up to my chin, and listened for a while to the whispery chatter of the automaids as they scoured the bottom floor. A breeze murmured about the eaves, and somewhere far away in the hills, an owl hooted, comforting and friendly, and that was a sound I had never heard in Baltimore.
I had just begun to doze when the sim spoke again.
"Maybe sometime we can pitch the ball around," it said, and through the thickening web of sleep I thought, for just a moment, that it was my father. But, of course, it wasn't. An unutterable tide of grief washed over me, bearing me to an uneasy shore of dreams.
That October, I sat alone in the sun-drenched parlor and listened to the week-end games of the '61 World Series on my aunt's radio. The Yankee sluggers had gone cold. Mantle, recovering from late-season surgery, batted only six times in the whole series; Maris had spent himself in the chase for Babe Ruth's single-season home run record.
Yankee hurler Whitey Ford took up the slack. I read about his game one shut-out in the newspaper. Four days later, when he took the mound again, I listened from hundreds of miles away. In the third inning, the sim came into the room and sat down across from me. It steepled its fingers and closed its eyes. We did not speak.
Ford pitched two more flawless innings before retiring with an injury in the sixth.
I stood up, suddenly angry, and glared at the sim. "You ought to have a name, I guess," I said.
The sim opened its eyes. It did not speak.
"I'll call you Ford," I said bitterly. "That's a machine's name."
Dreams plagued me that year. One night, I seemed to wake in the midst of a cheering crowd at Memorial Stadium. But gradually the park grew hushed. The game halted below, and the players, the bright-clad vendors, the vast silent throng -- one by one, they turned upon me their voiceless gaze. I saw that I was surrounded by the dead: my father, the mother I had never known, a thousand others, all the twisted, shrunken dead. A tainted wind gusted among the seats, fanning my hair, and the silent corpses began to crumble. Desiccated flesh sloughed like ash from the bones, whirled in dark funnels through the stands. And then the air cleared, and I saw that the dead were lost to me forever. Silence reigned, and emptiness. Endless empty rows.
Day turned into dream-haunted night and into day again. My father receded in memory, as if I had known him a hundred years ago. My life in Baltimore might have been another boy's life, distant and unreal. I was agreeable, but distant with my aunt; I ignored Ford for the most part. I passed long stifling hours in school, staring dreamily, day after day, across the abandoned playground to the baseball diamond, dusty and vacant in the afternoon. I had no interest in studies. Even now, I remember my aunt's crestfallen expression as she inspected my report cards, the rows of D's and F's, or the section reserved for comments, where Mrs. O'Leary wrote, Jake is well-behaved and has ability, but he is moody and lacks discipline.
In March of '62, on my birthday, I came home from school to find a hand-stitched regulation baseball, a leather fielder's glove, and a Louisville Slugger, knotted with a shiny ribbon, arranged on my bed. I caressed the soft leather glove.
From the doorway, my aunt said, "Do you like them, Jake?"
I slipped on the glove, turned the ball pensively with my right hand, and flipped it toward the ceiling. It hung there for a moment, spinning like a jewel in the sunlight, and then it plunged toward the floor. My left hand leaped forward, the glove seemed to open of its own accord, and the ball dropped solidly into the pocket.
Nothing had ever felt so right.
I said, "I love them."
My aunt sat on the bed, wincing. Already, the arthritis had begun its bitter, surreptitious campaign. She smoothed her dress across her knees.
I brought the glove to my face. Closing my eyes, I drew in the deep, leathery aroma. "Gosh," I said, "they're fine. . .I mean, they're really fine. How did you ever know?"
My aunt smiled. "We're getting to know you, now. Besides I had some help."
"Help?"
She nodded, and touched the bat. "Only the best," she said. "Ford insisted on it."
"It's. . .well, it's just tremendous. I mean, thank you."
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to my cheek. "Happy Birthday, Jake. I'm glad you like them." She lifted her hands to my shoulders and gently pushed me erect. "Now, look me in the eye," she said. "There's something we need to talk about."
"Yes, ma'am?"
"I've made some phone calls. I've talked to Mrs. O'Leary and some other folks at school."
I glanced away, let the baseball slip from my glove into my waiting hand. My aunt touched my chin, lifted my head so that I was looking in her eyes. "Listen, Jake, this is important."
"Okay."
"Mrs. O'Leary says you'll pass and go on to junior high, but it's a close thing. And starting next year your grades will count toward college. Did you know that?"
"No, ma'am."
"Every member of my family for two generations has gone to college. I do not intend for that to change."
I said nothing. Her eyes were a sharp intense blue. Penetrating. So we were family, I thought. She said, "Ford thinks you might like to try out for baseball next year. Is that true?"
I had never considered the possibility. Now, turning the ball in my hand, I said, "I guess."
"I talked to the junior high baseball coach, too. You have to bring your grades up or you won't be eligible for the team. Can you do that?"
"Yes, ma'am -- it's not that I'm dumb or anything. It's just --" I paused, searching for words that would not come. How could I explain? "I don't know."
Aunt Rachel smiled. "But you'll do better, right?"
I nodded.
"Good." She smiled and reached out to squeeze my hand. I could feel the pressure of her fingers. I could feel the ball's seams dig into my palm. "Oh, that's fine, Jake. Have you ever played ball before?"
"No, ma'am," I said.
"Then you have some catching up to do. I think there's someone outside who'd like to help."
I stood and went to the window. Ford waited below, his shadow stretching across the grass. He wore a glove on his left hand, a baseball cap canted over his eyes. When he saw me, he lifted the glove and hollered, "Hey, Jake! Come on!"
I lifted my hand in a half-reluctant wave and just then Aunt Rachel stepped up behind me. She tugged a cap firmly over my head, and let her fingers fall to my shoulder. "Go ahead, have fun," she whispered. "But remember our deal."
"Yes, ma'am!" I shouted. Scooping up the bat, I ran out of the room. I bounded down the steps, through the kitchen, and into the sunlit backyard where Ford awaited me.
Ford pitched, and I batted.
The sun arced westward. Time and again, the Louisville Slugger whistled impotently in the air, until at last I threw it down in frustration.
"You're swinging wild," Ford said. "You're hacking at the ball."
He picked up the discarded bat, and swung it easily for a moment with his large and capable-looking hands.
"Like this," he told me. He planted his feet, and bounced a little on his knees. He held his elbows away from his body, tilted the bat over his shoulder, and swung smoothly and easily.
"Watch the ball," he said. "You've got to eye the ball in, and meet it smoothly. You want to try?"
I shrugged. Ford handed me the bat and took his position sixty feet away. I bobbed the bat, swung it once or twice the way I had seen the pros do, and relaxed into the stance Ford had shown me, the bat angled over my right shoulder. I tracked the ball as it left his hand, saw it hurtle towards me, but I held back, held back. . .
. . .and at the very last moment, just when it seemed the ball would whip by untouched, I swung.
I felt the concussion all along my shoulders and arms. My mouth fell open, and I tossed the bat into the grass, hooting in delight. Ford clapped his hands as the ball rocketed skyward, disappeared momentarily into the sun, and began to drop into the high grass beyond the yard.
Gone.
"Now we have to find it," Ford said.
I set off across the yard, jogging to keep up with Ford's long strides. My arms and shoulders ached pleasantly. I could taste a slight tang of perspiration on my upper lip. Half-curiously, I looked at the sim. Not a single droplet of sweat clung to his perfect, gleaming flesh. He walked smoothly, and easily, his knees humming with every step.
When we finally found the ball, far back in the field behind the house, I threw myself exhausted in the grass. Ford lowered himself beside me, propping his weight on his elbows, and we remained that way for a while, sucking thoughtfully on sweet blades of grass. An old game my father and I had played came back to me and I began to point out shapes in the clouds -a chariot, a skull, a moose -- but the sim did not respond.
"Do you see anything?" I asked him, and when he did not answer I turned to eye him. "Well, do you?"
He chased the grass stalk to the far comer of his mouth and smiled. "Sure I do, when you point them out, Jake. You go ahead, I like to listen."
And so I did, until the charm of the game began to wear thin; after that we just lay quiet and restful for a while. At last, my aunt called me for supper. Inside, for the first time, the sire came into the kitchen and took a chair at the table while we ate. He shot me a glance as he sat down, as if I might have something to say about it, and I almost did. A quick flash of anger, like heat lightning flickered through me. I looked away.
"Discipline," Ford told me that summer. "In baseball, discipline is everything."
That, too, was a legacy. And though I imagine Ford could not have known it -- what could he really know, after all? -- perhaps he sensed it somehow: this was a lesson with broader implications. Certainly Aunt Rachel knew it.
"For every hour you spend on baseball," she told me that night, "you must spend an hour reading or doing homework. Agreed?"
And so commenced my central obsessions, those legacies that have shaped my life. From that time onward, my youth was consumed by baseball and books. During that summer and the summers that followed -- all through my high school career- Ford and I worked in the quiet isolation of the backyard. I took to baseball with a kind of innate facility, as if an understanding of the game had been encoded in my genes. I relished the sting of a line-drive into well-oiled leather, the inexorable trajectory of a flyball as it plummeted toward a waiting glove. I relish it still. There is an order and a symmetry to the game which counteracts the chaos that pervades our lives; even then, in some inchoate, inexpressible fashion, I understood this simple truth.
Every pitcher has to have a repertoire, Ford told me one day, a fast ball and a curve. Leaning over me, he shaped my fingers along the seams of the ball. Hide it in your glove, he said. Don't tip off the batter.
Summer after summer, until the season broke and winter closed around the town, Ford coached me through the pitch -- the grips, the wind-up and pivot, the follow through on the release. I wanted to hurl with my arm. Save your arm, he told me; he showed me how to use my legs.
But it was more than merely physical discipline; Ford had a strategic grasp of the game, as well. He taught me that baseball was a cerebral sport, showed me that a well-coached team could prevail over talent and brawn. Some days we never touched a ball at all. We sat cross-legged in the grass, dissecting games we had heard on the radio or read about in the paper. He fabricated situations out of whole cloth and asked me to coach my way through them, probing my responses with emotionless logic.
Occasionally, in the frustration of the moment, I would stand and walk away from him, turning at last to gaze back to the far distant house, past the sim sitting patiently in the grass, to the back porch where my aunt waited, watching from the steps that first summer, and later, as the arthritis began to gnaw away inside her, from the hated prison of her powerchair.
In those later years, she preserved her dignity. On our infrequent excursions into town, she insisted on walking upright; she masked her pain and held her head rigidly erect, regal as a queen. She did not give up. Standing there in the open field, I would remember this, and her simple lesson, the litany she lived by, would come back to me: You must never run Chagrined, I would remember another thing that had been said to me -Ford's voice this time, saying, Talent is never enough, Jake. Discipline is everything -- and I would walk back and take my place across from him.
Tell me again, I would say.
Tiny motors whirred beneath his flesh, drew a broad smile across his features; he would tell me again. Day after day, through the long summer months, he told me again. We hashed over countless situations, until the strategies came thoughtlessly to my lips, naturally, and I did not walk away in frustration anymore.
During these same years, I spent nights alone in my bedroom, studying during the school year, reading for pleasure in my stolen hours. At first, in a kind of half-conscious rebellion against my aunt's ultimatum, I read only about baseball -- strategies and biographies, meditations on the game. But gradually my interests broadened. I read history and fiction and one memorable summer, everything I could find about simulated people. I read about Hiram Wallace and his absurd tragedy. I read his encomiums for the specialized sims he called grief counselors -- and opposing editorials from every perspective. The resurrection man had been right about one thing: Wallace had his critics.
But none of them convinced me.
At the school library one fall I researched the matter. I flipped anxiously through news magazines, half-hoping to run upon a picture of the stout, hearty salesman that had come to the house, half-fearing it as well. That night, I lay awake far into the morning, examining in a magazine graphic the wondrous intricacies of Ford's design. I remember being half-afraid the sim would walk in upon me, as if I were doing something vaguely shameful, though why I should have felt this way, I cannot say. After that, during sleepless nights, in the darkness when the image of my father would not cohere, I thought of Ford: I imagined the twisted involutions of his construction, the gears and cogs and whirring motors, the thousand electric impulses that sang along his nested wires, far down through his core, to the crystal-matrixed genius of his brain.
* * *
This is what I remember about high school:
Empty stands.
Not truly empty, you understand -- the crowds came in droves by my senior year, when I won ten of eleven as a starter. By that time, a few local fellows, short on work, had even started looking in on practice. They lounged in the stands, trimming their nails or glancing through the want ads; every once in a while, if someone got a piece of the ball, they would holier and whistle.
And hundreds showed up for the last game of my high school career, when I gave up the winning run on a botched slider in the seventh. But the stands were empty all the same.
Afterward, I stood on the mound and-watched the crowd disperse. A few teammates parted my shoulder as they headed in to see their families, but I just stood there in the middle of the diamond.
My aunt had never seen me play; she could barely leave the house by then. And Ford? Who would take him to the ballpark?
A jowly,- red-faced man awaited me at school the following Monday. I had seen him in the stands during practice the last week or so, looking on with a kind of absent-minded regard, as if he had more important things on his mind. I assumed him an out-of-work gas jockey or a farmhand with time on his hands.
I was wrong.
He sat across from me in the cluttered office off the locker room, his beat-up oxfords propped carelessly on the comer of Coach Ryan's desk. He wore a shabby suit and a coffee-stained tie; his shirt gapped at the belly. Coach Ryan had introduced him as Gerald Haynes, a scout for the Reds.
"So what happened the other night?" Haynes asked.
I started to speak, but Coach Ryan interrupted. He fiddled with a pencil on his blotter. "Just an off game, Mr. Haynes -- an off pitch, actually. The boy played a solid game." He looked at me as if he had just noticed I was there. "You played a solid game, Jake."
Haynes lifted an eyebrow. "What do you say, son?"
"I made a bad decision," I replied, when the silence had stretched a moment too long. "I went with the slider when the fastball had been working all day. It hung up on me." I shrugged.
"Jake's got a pretty good slider, actually --" Coach Ryan began, but Haynes held up his hand.
He picked up a paper cup that sat on the floor and dribbled a stream of tobacco juice into it. I could smell the tobacco juice, intermixed with the locker room's familiar stink of mold and sweat. "Why would you make a decision like that, son!"
"I knew there were some college scouts in the stands. I wanted to show them what I had."
Haynes chuckled.
"I didn't know you were there," I said.
Coach Ryan said, "I didn't tell him. I didn't want to make him nervous, you know?"
"So you pitched to impress the people watching am I right?"
My bowels felt loose, like I might be sick, but I met his eyes. "Yes, sir."
Haynes put the cup down and leaned close to me. I could smell his polluted breath. "You pitch to win, Jake. That's the cardinal role, okay?"
"Yes, sir."
"You aren't ready to throw sliders, and you certainly aren't ready to throw them on a three-two count in the last inning of a tied ballgame. You want to know about sliders, I'll tell you about sliders. A badly thrown slider can throw your arm out a whack for good, ruin your career. I've seen it once, I've seen it a thousand times."
"Yes, sir."
"You want to take care of yourself." Haynes leaned back and crossed his arms over his belly. He stared at me for a while.
I knew I shouldn't ask, but I couldn't help myself. "Why is that, sir?"
Haynes dug a clump of snuff from behind his lip and flipped it into the cup. He stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and extended his arm to me.
I reached out and took his grip. He squeezed hard and smiled. "I've seen better, son," he said. "But you ain't bad. You ain't bad."
Those were the days before ballplayers commanded the astronomical salaries they draw now, as Aunt Rachel quickly pointed out. "I'm entirely against it, Jake," she told me one evening early in July.
I sighed and shifted uncomfortably in one of the claw-footed chairs in the parlor. The Reds had, in fact, extended mc an offer, but I had been chosen in the late rounds. My signing bonus was negligible, my proposed salary more so. You're got talent, all right, Haynes had told me, but you ain't no ace, son.
Not yet, I had thought.
Now, I glanced at Ford. He sat on the loveseat across the room, his back straight, his hands resting fiat on his thighs. "Well, Ford," I said. "What do you think?"
The sim tilted his head with a faintly musical hum. He looked to my aunt and then back to me. "I don't know, Jake," he said at last. "I can't answer things like that."
"Well, wouldn't you like me to play pro ball?"
"Sure. I guess so."
"Don't you think he ought to go to college?" Aunt Rachel said drily.
"Yes, ma'am. I guess so."
I crossed my arms in exasperation and swung my legs over the arm of my chair. I managed to hold the pose for all of thirty seconds before my aunt's silent disapproval compelled me to lower my feet and sit up straight.
"Thank you," Aunt Rachel said. Then, after a brief silence, "Jake, you know that machine can't be a part of this."
I didn't answer.
"I only want what's best for you. You know that." She coughed weakly, grimacing, and straightened herself in the powerchair.
The doctor had told me she was in extraordinary pain, but it was easy to forget. She did not speak of her illness; she refused pain medication.
I felt awful. I wanted to apologize to her. But this was an opportunity that might never again present itself. I said, "College will wait. I can go to college anytime."
"Every member of my family for two generations has been to college."
"I didn't say I wouldn't go. I said it would wait."
My aunt guided her chair to the broad windows that overlooked the front. I could see the caddy out there, more broken-down than ever, and on the knoll at the end of the long drive, the stand of maple overlooking the valley. I wondered what she could be thinking--if, like me, she was remembering the day she had brought me to this place, this home, and how she had paused up there to look out over the house and the land and to let me look out over them for the first time, too. I wondered what it had cost her to take me in, what it might cost her yet.
She said, "There are some things you should understand."
She did not turn around. I could see her gray hair, pulled into a loose bun, and the shawl she had taken to wearing across her shoulders even in July.
"Yes, ma'am?" I sought her eyes in the window, but her reflection shimmered, liquescent in the failing light.
She turned the chair and I cut my eyes to the sim, but he didn't say a word. He merely sat there, implacable and still, inhumanly so, watching.
My aunt cleared her throat. "Your father didn't leave much for you. He was a young man and hadn't much to leave. I don't have much either." She chuckled humorlessly. "I am an old woman, and I am sick. The doctors will have what remains to me. You understand?"
"But I can help. I can send you money. Some ballplayers make great money, more money than you can even imag --"
She held up her hand. "Not in the minors, Jake. What will you do if you injure yourself?"
"I can go to school if that happens."
"But how will you pay for it?"
I glanced at Ford, but the sim was quiet.
My aunt said, "Right now you have scholarship offers from three schools. If you injure yourself so you can't play ball that won't be true."
"And if I injure myself playing ball in school, I'll never play in the majors."
"In that case you'll have something to fall back on."
Again, there was silence. I stared at her resentfully for a moment, and then I looked away. I studied the faded floral pattern on the rug and nagged at my lower lip with my teeth.
Aunt Rachel said, "It's decided, then?"
Before I could think, the words were out: "Nothing's decided. I'm eighteen. I can do what I want."
My aunt drew her eyebrows together. "Of course, that's true. If that's the way you feel, you'll do whatever you wish." She touched a button on her powerchair, wheeled around, and zoomed out of the room.
"Christ."
I stood, walked through the dining room to the kitchen, and went outside. The sky had begun to grow dark, stippled with the first incandescent points of stars. Somewhere, I knew, players were taking the diamond, uniforms shining in the glare of banked floodlights. I could almost hear the good-natured give and take of the infield chatter, the mercurial chorus of the fans.
Dry grass crackled behind me, and turning, I saw Ford, one half of his face limned yellow in the light from the house. Up close, he smelled of machine oil and rubber, stretched taut over burnished steel.
"Are you okay?"
I stared away into the memory-haunted yard. Here, here was the place where it had begun, my passion for the game. Here, where we had so often thrown the ball around, honing my skills until I could send the ball sizzling over the plate in a single smooth motion, like a dancer.
"I shouldn't have said that about doing whatever I want."
The sim stood beside me. A breeze came up, leavening the night heat. "What are you going to do?" Ford asked.
"I don't know. Go to school, I guess." "I see."
We were silent for a few moments, watching fireflies stencil glowing trails through the darkness. I said, "When I'm away, I'll miss you."
Ford cocked his head, something humming in his neck.
I said, "You'll take good care of her?"
"I will."
I raised a hand to the machine's shoulder and squeezed once, softly. I started back to the house. When I was halfway there, Ford said, "I'll miss you, too, Jake."
Smiling in the darkness, I said, "Thanks," and then I turned and went up the stairs and into the kitchen. I lay in my darkened bedroom for a long while before I heard the whine of the screen door and the sound of the sim coming into the house below.
The last time I saw the house in Stowes Corners, I was a senior in college. I have not been back since.
But the moment lingers in my mind, as timeless as the day my father was buried and Ford came to me in the humid stillness of a Missouri noon. Once again, I am reminded of the archaeologist, his search for the seams between the strata of the buried cities, built pell-mell one atop the rubble of another. This, too, is such a moment -- a seam between the boy I had been, the man I would become:
* * *
I was twenty-three, informed by a grief pervasive in its devastation. My aunt had died two nights previous. A major stroke. Merciful, her doctor had called it. Painless. But how could he have known?
Three of us gathered that afternoon -- the minister; a probate lawyer named Holdstock; myself. I had blown two week's work-study salary on the flowers which stood in ranks about the open grave, exuding a heady, cheerful perfume that seemed blasphemous. The sun printed the shadows of the tombstones across the grass, and the awning above us snapped in the breeze as the minister closed his book.
Once again, I crumbled dry earth between my fingers. I listened as it trickled against the coffin. Nothing changes.
I shook hands with the minister, walked the lawyer to his Lincoln.
"Everything's taken care of?" I asked.
Holdstock smiled at the question, asked twice in as many hours. "The auction's set for two weeks tomorrow. I'll be in touch."
We shook hands, and he opened his car door. He turned to look at me, and an odd expression -- half embarrassment, half determination -- passed over his face. He tugged nervously at the lapels of his dark jacket.
I knew what was coming.
"Listen," he said. "My boy's a big fan. He loves Tiger baseball. I was wondering, could I --" He held a pad in his hand.
"Sure." He fished a pen out of his coat, and I scrawled my name on the page.
"My boy has lots of autographs," he said. "We usually head down St. Louis for opening day and --" He shook his head. "Aw hell, I'm sorry."
He held out his hand again, said, "Best of luck, Jake," and shut the door. The Lincoln pulled away. A drop of perspiration slid between my shoulder blades. I shrugged off my jacket, slung it over my shoulder, and surveyed the cemetery. Everything was still. Yellow earth-moving machinery waited behind a screen of trees; I was delaying the inevitable.
I got in my car and drove away from the town, into a region of summer-painted hills. The house was to be sold, the furnishings auctioned. Medical expenses had taken everything just as Aunt Rachel had predicted. I'd made a list for Holdstock; the few things I wished to keep had been delivered to the hotel. For reasons I had avoided analyzing I couldn't bring myself to stay at the house.
Now, however, the funeral behind me, those reasons lingered like uneasy specters in my mind. You must never run away from the truth, Aunt Rachel had told me. Once you begin running, you can never stop.
Before I had gone twenty-five miles, I cursed and pulled to the side of the road. With a kind of nauseating dread, I swung the car back toward town. There was unfinished business.
A realtor's sign stood at the head of the long drive, but when I emerged from the maples and paused atop the hill, I saw that everything was the same. It seemed as if no time at all had passed. I might have been a boy again. Steeling myself, I touched the gas and started down.
The locks had been freshly oiled, and my key sent the tumblers silently home. As I stepped inside, something whirred at my feet; an automaid sped around the comer, treads blurring. Bulky and low, it looked curiously antiquated; the newer models were sleek, silent, somehow disquieting.
I closed the door. Afternoon sunlight slanted through half-closed blinds. The hardwood shone with a merciless gloss, but everything else seemed faded. The floral-patterned rugs had been drained of color, and pale sheets glimmered over furniture ear-marked for auction. I could smell the musty odor of stale air and enclosed spaces, and the lemony ghost of my aunt's furniture polish, somehow disconcerting. It was a house where no one lived anymore.
I found Ford upstairs in my old bedroom. He sat rigidly in the chair by the window, his broad unlined hands flat against his thighs. He looked just the same.
"I wondered if you would come," he said.
I examined the dim room, lit only by an exterior glare cleft into radiant shards by the blinds. An old Orioles pennant dangled from one tack on the far wall, but the room was otherwise devoid of personality. The photo albums where I'd kept my baseball cards were gone, stored now in the shelf over my desk in Columbia. Gone too were the photographs --my aunt, my father, my mother. They stood now on the end tables in my apartment. Nothing remained.
"I've been reading about you in the papers," Ford said.
"I'm the big news, I guess," I said.
"Do you have a contract yet?"
"Soon. We're negotiating." I shrugged.
The sim didn't say anything so I crossed the room and lifted the blind and gazed into the backyard for a moment. A bird chirped in the eaves.
"When do you graduate?"
"August." I laughed. "She couldn't hang on to see it, you know."
"I'm sure she would have liked to."
"Wouldn't have mattered anyway, I suppose. I'll be on the road in rookie league by August."
"And then?"
"Who knows? I saw Haynes recently. Remember him? He said, 'You ain't an ace yet, son, but you're getting better.' I plan to make it."
"So the old dream is coming true," Ford said.
"I guess. We'll see."
I sat on the denuded mattress. In here, in the room where I had been a boy, the years seemed to have fallen away. I felt as fractured and alone as when I had been twelve years old, as much a stranger to this room and house. I could not help but recall the day the resurrection man had come, could not help but remember his dark suit and garish tie, his unpleasant stink of after-shave and tobacco. It isn't right that a boy grow up without a man in the house, Aunt Rachel had said, and now, remembering this I felt ice slide through my veins.
So this is what it all had come to.
I said, "I wanted to thank you. You've done everything for me."
"It's nothing," the sire said. "I understand."
We sat for a moment. Outside, the bird whistled merrily, as if it was the first bird, this the first day.
Ford turned to look at me, his neck swiveling with a hum so slight you could miss it if you weren't paying attention. He smiled, and I could hear tiny flywheels whir inside of him, and it all came back to me. Everything. The long days in the backyard, and Ford's strong hands gentle on my own, curving my fingers along the seams of the ball. The nights alone, here in this very room, when the darkness seemed to whirl and I could not remember my father's face. Ford -- his vast intricacies, the thousand complicated mechanisms of his being -- Ford had filled the void.
Ford said, "I didn't know about this part. I knew so much. They filled me up with so much knowledge about baseball and King Arthur and pirates and wars -- all the things a boy might conceivably wish to know or learn. But they left this part out. I wonder if they knew?"
And then, for the first time, I thought of legacies. And though I did not say it, I thought: They didn't know. How could they!
But all I said was, "Nobody told me either."
I looked straight into his eyes, just as my aunt had taught me. "I'll be on the road a lot," I said, "there's nothing I can do. I'm sorry."
The sim smiled and bowed his head. The coarse hair at the base of his neck had neither grown nor been cut. It was the same color it had been always. And when he lifted a thick sheaf of it away, I saw what I knew I would see, what I had seen once before: a colored switch, like a tiny gem. The sunlight fell against it, and shattered into myriad colored fragments along the walls of the room.
Show me. I want to know, I had said all those years ago, and he had shown me, and I had seen that he was not my father, not even a man, but just a machine. A machine.
I reached out to the switch, touched it with trembling fingers, tensed to throw it home --
And if I do? I had asked him once.
Gone, he had told me. Erased and irrecoverable. Everything that makes me me.
Ford said, "We had some times, Jake."
"We had some times, Ford," I replied. "That's for sure."
And then I cut him off.
I remember it all. I remember the room as I saw it last, barren of everything that had made it mine. I remember Ford, slumped in the wooden chair, another lost possession -- just furniture, awaiting auction. I turned away and walked down the stairs and through the foyer to the porch. I stood there for a long time, my eyes watering in the afternoon glare, and then I walked to the car and drove away.
I didn't look back.
But every day is a backwards glance. When I take the mound, I feel his fingers around my fingers, showing me the grips. And when I'm up by one in the ninth and the tying run is on third, it is his voice that I hear in my head.
I live in a fine house now, with my wife and son, and I play in Memorial Stadium more frequently than I might ever have hoped. My family attends every game.
But I have a recurrent dream.
In the dream, I stand on the mound, clutching a baseball and staring across the grass to the batter. The crowd is wild. If I look to the stands I can see them by the thousands, venting as one a full-throated roar. And with that enhanced acuity that comes to us in dreams, I see all the dead who are lost to me, scattered among the throng. The mother I could not know, the father I can barely remember. Aunt Rachel. Ford. The resurrection man, who unknowing shaped my destiny, and left for me this legacy, its blessing and its curse.
The game rides on a single pitch. The bases are loaded, one out remains in the final inning the count stands at three and two. I have to throw a strike.
But even as the pitch leaves my outstretched fingers, I know that it is poorly thrown. A slider, it hangs up on me, seeming almost to float. The batter steps close, shoulders tensing with the pressure as he delays the swing, and then, in the final moment before the ball is over the bag he whips the bat around in a single blurring motion.
You can hear the impact all over the park.
The ball leaps skyward. The crowd noise surges to a crescendo, and holds there momentarily, battering conducive. And then, all at once, it is gone.
Silence fills the stadium.
I wheel around to track the progress of the ball, a diminishing speck as it climbs higher, still higher. I watch as it begins its long descent through the quiet air, plunging toward the second deck. And that is when I notice: my mother and father, Aunt Rachel and Ford, the resurrection man himself -- gone, all of them, gone. As far as I can see, the empty stands, the endless empty rows.
~~~~~~~~
By Dale Bailey
Dale Bailey's frequent appearances in F&SF have received a lot of attention. "Home Burial," which appeared in our December issue, came out to critical acclaim. His story "Giants in the Earth" (August, 1994) has just been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
Dale sent a baseball story too late for last summer's issue, so we saved it for this summer. "The Resurrection Man's Legacy" manages to combine the feel of early Bradbury with early Asimov to come up with a heart-warming tale that could only be written by Bailey.
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