The Death of All Things Seen Read Free Page A

sent a shudder through her.
    *
    It was tempting just to close her eyes, to end it here. She circled the block of her former life. It was all there, arrested and contained, so like she remembered it. She wanted to pull over, park her miserable Toyota import, go stand again in the mosaic lobby and feel the overpowering reassurance of her own existence.
    She passed the gleam of her office building once more. Why had she come down here? When she got the news of her illness, her first thought had landed on Mr Feldman, that she might yet meet him again on the other side of life.
    What did such thoughts say about her? Had Norman been right in his accusations? Such questions, and in the lateness of life! No! She wouldn’t answer them! She would not.
    She sniffled. She wanted to go deeper, find that place within herself where it all still existed, the time before her illness, before that godforsaken 9/11, before the accumulation of joys and regrets that had somehow, quietly, rubbed out her significance.
    It was decided. The choice had always been hers. She felt a control she had not felt in a long time. Yes, that most surely was it, why she had come here one last time: to reclaim the feelings of those years of comfort in what had been back then, the incalculability of life in an emerging modern world of options, where she had continued to work after marriage, and even after Norman’s birth, the surrogate infrastructure of daycare overseen by attentive professionals in child psychology, all vastly more equipped to nurture growth than any mother sequestered with a child and a TV in the doldrums of the mid-afternoon soaps.
    How forward-looking it had all seemed. How liberating! The delegation of tasks per one’s merits, one’s interests, the uncompromising vision that everyone could have everything one needed, or at least the opportunity to seek it. And now it was gone.
    Helen felt her eyes tear, intent on what needed to be done. On the seat beside her lay a letter from the State Attorney’s Office, a subpoena requiring her testimony in a case she had thought long closed, now reopened, alleging Walter’s criminal obstruction of justice in perjuring himself by providing an alibi for two officers accused of executing two gangland dealers who had been set to testify against members of Chicago’s South Side vice unit.
    She was sobbing, her thoughts settled on Norman, on his Angry Man show, on the quiet indictment of a fiction that might yet be appraised as fact, as evidence. What would he say about her and about Walter, about their lives? Helen ran the back of her hand under her nose, tasting her own tears, drifting in the blurred flow of traffic against the falling snow. The subpoena was already a week old. It had been served to her door, which she had obstinately refused to open despite the persistence of the serving officer. She had not yet formally acknowledged its receipt, not even against the stiff formality of the follow up messages left on her answering machine.
    She thought again of the hours running up to Walter’s departure earlier that morning and what a court would demand of her again, a reinvestigation into monies she had allegedly laundered for Walter in the grim years of a greater city corruption. It was come upon them again, the entanglement of her secrets with Walter’s, what had not yet, and might now, be discovered. She had survived it once, just barely. She couldn’t do it a second time.
    She looked through a blur of tears, seeing again her own effigy seated by the small telephone table picked out so far back at the beginning of her marriage, listening to and then erasing each call from an attorney, then hearing the call from Dr Marchant’s office, the polite insistence of the voice asking her to come down on a Friday and in the late afternoon for a consultation. How was such a coincidence possible, such an alignment of Fates, this convergent sense of an ending?
    No, Helen Price was not a religious woman, yet