By Ben Greenman
From forthcoming collection, as yet untitled
Hard day.
James comes home.
He stands at the head of his street.
Here's the city whirling around him.
He tries to bring his focus down to the spot where he stands.
That's when he notices that there is a police barricade, lights whirling in the background.
He is not worried about access to his building because all the cops on the street know him.
“Except this one,” says the cop standing there.
James is not aware he has spoken out loud.
James is the son of a man who was a famous doctor when living, and who is now the memory of a famous doctor, and who was also a writer during retirement, who started with an essay collection that detailed his most important cases, the best-known of which involved a renowned potter and numbness in the fingers, and then, after that memoir was a nationwide bestseller, went on to write a novel, which he called The Golden Age of Silver while he was writing it but which was published as The Detained Man.
The cop has read the novel, but he has no idea that he is speaking to the author’s son.
Even if he did, a brief inquiry would reveal that James has not read the novel as a result of a wrenching rift with his father in his late teens.
The barricade is there, and the lights whirling, because a man a few buildings down has murdered a number of people, some relatives of his, some not, after concealing an echoing sensation in his head that had intensified over a period of months.
The cop can only say to James that there has been an incident.
The cop adds that James cannot go to his building, not for a little while, and notes James’s pinched frown and the uncomfortable way he shifts his weight at the news that he is being kept back.
The cop is rubbing his fingers because he has recently lost feeling in them.
He does not think to mention it to James, because he has no idea that he is speaking to the author’s son.
If he did, James would have been able to extend a tentative diagnosis of meningioma, as he read the memoir several times before he saw his father entering a hotel with a colleague’s wife, confronted him about it, and received only stony silence in return.
Lack of bravery which results in lack of communication unfastens the entire race.
