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May 1, 1986

The lilacs are in bloom; the air is pregnant with the sweetness of spring. It’s called Frühling here, in German literally a personification of earliness. We think of a young man dressed in a green skin-tight Medieval costume, jumping nimbly through the fields. This is Workers’ Day, a holiday in all of Europe, reserved for parades, solidarity, and consciousness-raising. Bonn has its first afternoon of sultriness in this season, and Arthur’s skin feels sticky.  He doesn’t exactly know what to do with himself, barred from his office by his wife Eva’s dictum that he must spend the day off with his family, “like normal people.”  But his five-year old daughter is at a birthday party for the rest of the afternoon, and Eva spends the day sitting on the balcony, sipping coffee and reading a book. She is expecting, and this is perhaps the reason she has this intense focus on family now. On a day like this, the apartment is oppressive; there is little air circulation. He makes an attempt to sit down at his desk and read his student’s Ph.D. thesis draft.  Christ! This guy can’t even write a single sentence right! Arthur’s shirt has turned damp. Seeking relief, he goes down into the courtyard.

“I’ll read a book, or something,” he says on his way out, loud enough so she can hear him, wherever she is in this spacious, spread-out apartment.

“Sure, see you later, Spatz.” Her cheerful voice comes back from the direction of the bathroom.

When he arrives downstairs, five floors below, he discovers he has forgotten his book. But there is nothing in the world that could force him to walk up again. Besides, more often than not, bringing a book along amounts to nothing but a good intention. As he enters the courtyard, the rabbit hutch emits wafts of intense odor from the droppings.  His daughter is too small to clean it out, but she has promised, with the seriousness of a five-year old, that she will “keep it clean forever” when she is old enough.  He sits down in the shade next to Prince Hirohito’s tree. It’s the tree the later-to-become Emperor Hirohito planted here sometime in the twenties when he was young. A swatch of skin on Arthur’s face itches intensely now; he rubs over it with his flat hand, then gropes with his fingers, and sure enough, he finds a single hair that had attached itself there. He takes his damp shirt off, and stretches out in the grass.  The coolness of the grass brings some relief. Wondering why grass doesn’t have the exact same temperature as everything else around, he dozes off.

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Claire cut the ribbons. Missy tied the ribbons into bows. Jerry attached the bows to the scallop seashells using a glue gun. Missy insisted they make three hundred ornaments — one for each of the two hundred wedding guests plus one hundred extra “just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” Jerry asked. “Someone can’t make it through the reception without just one? They need a yin shell for their yang shell? An Abbott shell for their Costello shell? An Agnew for their Nixon?”

Claire laughed. “Agnew, what a corrupt prick he was. As bad as Nixon. Do you guys even remember Watergate?”

“Don’t encourage him, Mom!” Missy said, glaring at her, then at Jerry. “What if some of the shells break? Or what if someone really likes them and wants two or three?”

“I’m sure that any heterosexual male with a pulse will gladly relinquish his sea shell if one of your girlfriends wants an extra one,” Jerry said in a facetious tone. “Especially if they’ll be used as pasties later in the evening.”

Missy slapped her hands on the table. “That is sick. These will be a nice memento of our wedding. People will love them.”

“Miss, I think you’re shell-shocked. Take a break,” Jerry said, as he glued another bow to a shell and placed it in the small pile of finished ornaments.

“Come on kids. Let’s be nice. Just a few weeks and it will all be over,” Claire said as Missy got up from the table and stomped off into the kitchen.

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Chapter One

Welcome to Oblivia

Rain throbs in the bones of the hand that carries the guitar case, Eliot Learner’s strumming/picking left hand. Striding down McDougall Street, head bowed to the needle-wet wind, he pictures himself making love to his wife. But the scene comes in like a broadcast from a shaky, handheld camera; as he rounds the corner at Bleeker he concentrates on steadying the picture and nearly plows into a woman whose long, dark hair is plastered to her skull and whose yellow raincoat is open, revealing an advanced pregnancy. Eliot looks up from the woman’s belly to her eyes, which are far away and narrowed, as if she’s trying to see her future through the downpour. “Excuse me,” he mutters, and moves aside for her.

Raising her hand, then dropping it, the woman says vaguely, “Oblivia.”

Eliot watches her waddle away. “Not yet,” he mutters.

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1.1       Afternoon. Erik and Annie in a rental car.

As they leave the interstate for the main highway, Annie can’t get over the fields of tall grass. She’s never been to California and never expected to see anything so natural and untamed just south of L.A. It almost reminds her of Kansas, she says, except the fields are more like a swollen prairie, undulating as she and Erik drive towards Laguna Canyon.

The fields fan out before them like an amphitheater, the road an aisle up the middle, leading into a canyon and then through to Laguna Beach where Erik’s cousin Walter has a house and a guestroom waiting for them. Everything is five minutes from the house, Walter has said, the beach, shops, restaurants—plenty for Annie to do while Erik is at his conference. And though Erik hasn’t been to the conference in three years, missing even the one in Hawaii, this year it’s just a few miles from where Walter now lives. Erik will be the first in the family to see how things are really going out on the coast, the first to know if the phone calls and emails are true, that Walter, finally, is as happy as he says he is.

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Chapter Nine

A family meeting is called. In Sirichai’s vast marble-floored sitting room, softly lit by many paper-shaded lamps—air-conditioned amber light inside and the hot night outside and drinks on tables and the servants gone—everyone apart from Surapat has gathered here to discuss Surapat. Sirichai is pacing in his house slippers, a glass of cognac cupped in one palm. He stops and swirls the glass, lowers his head, as though the fumes will provide the moment of striking insight that has up to now been lacking. At one end of a fat white sofa his wife sits, poised and alert, sipping a glass of white wine. At the other end of the long sofa, Benz, his daughter, is sitting cross-legged, in a skirt far too short for such a pose. She is the only one without a drink. Off to one side, in a fat white armchair, his oldest son, Noum, is taking ice cubes from a silver bucket and dropping them into a glass of beer. He brings his lips to the glass as the beer threatens to foam over.

“I would like everyone one in this room to start paying attention,” Sirichai says.

“We are,” says his wife. “We’re all listening.”  But this isn’t really what he means. He wants them to start paying attention to Surapat. To everything that Surapat has become and is becoming. He wants them to stop and pay attention to the last twenty-five years. Somewhere in that time are all the clues and minefields and missed opportunities; somewhere, hidden in his material success are all their collective failures.

“I mean …” says Sirichai and sighs. Sniffs his cognac again without drinking from it. “I mean pay attention to why these things keep happening to him.”

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                                                      Immo age, et a prima dic, hospes, origine nobis …

When A. was a child he dreamed of being a hero. In that time and that place many children dreamed of being heroes. The idea had always been in the air, so to speak. No one could say where it had come from but it had left its mark on history and on the secret lives of defeated men. When he lay in his little bed watching the shadows on the wall or listening to the sounds of the night A. imagined himself rescuing damsels in distress who were small children like himself or performing daring deeds in the games played by boys and men. A great war had been fought but A. did not remember it. It was before the time when the past began to shape his dreams. He remembered only a few moments that would remain in him like debris floating through space until they came to attach themselves to the system of memories that formed the core of his life. He remembered first the shadows on the wall that evoked the mysteries of the night and then the lazy, distant drone of a plane high overhead in the cloudless summer sky and the rain falling in the yellow circle of the streetlamp on the corner of his street. These memories would create vast constellations moving in a space as big as all the universe, infinite like his imagination, shining with the light of a thousand trillion suns.

He did not construct his dreams out of empty air. The world supplied the materials out of which his dreams were made. It had always been like that. He learned the stories told of heroic men, warriors and conquerors admired by women and the weak, men who conquered worlds and dazzled crowds and scaled the highest mountains. These were the heroes who inspired him. He played with a sword, leaping and whirling and thrusting and parrying the blows of evil men. He ran in the wind and swam in the river deep in the forest and then slept in the sun on the mossy bank dreaming of endless fields and a woman like his mother coming out of the sea and embracing him.

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