Schroder: A Novel Read online

  The lights of Plattsburgh relieved me. Plattsburgh is a snarl of a town, surprisingly impoverished, barracks of transient white people hanging about, their children wide-awake all night. The clear lack of a police presence in Plattsburgh suggested it as a good place to stop. I needed a break. And to recover my wits. Meadow slept on. I parked under the spotlights of a heating-oil company parking lot, got out, and walked as far away from the idling car as I responsibly could. The huge drum lights from the port were at my back. My long shadow lay on the scrub grass. And that was when I began to breathe shallowly. My throat tightened. My hand went to my throat. Good God, I thought, not now. This had happened to me before, of course, but not for a long time. It had happened to me a lot when I was little. The cure for this had been—back in the dark days of Soviet-style medicine—long, lonely steam showers, my mother’s form a blurry silhouette waiting for me on the edge of the toilet, periodically asking me if I felt better yet. I do not want to suggest that my life, and the series of mistakes I was making, was fated. And yet, and yet. It had been years since I stood gasping for air like I did standing in the parking lot in Plattsburgh. I felt that I had just woken up in utter darkness only to be blinded by a bright, sourceless light. I was finally awake, but who was that beyond? Who held the spotlight?

  So this is what I did: I decided we would go to Canada. Just for a little. I had my passport, and I knew that even if Pop-Pop had alerted the police about Eric Kennedy, no one on God’s earth was yet looking for Erik Schroder. And since I lacked Meadow’s passport, and since she was asleep, I reasoned I would just scoop her up and lay her in the trunk and drive her across the border. I’d heard you could virtually roll right through the Canadian border. The stop would consist of a friendly chat that would probably go something like this:

  Hello there.

  Hello, sir.

  A German national, are you?

  Yes, sir.

  (A squint into my face.)

  Here for pleasure?

  Yes, true. Just wanting much to see this Canada.

  (A brief sweep with a flashlight of the empty backseat.)

  Well, you go ahead and see it, sir. You have yourself a nice night.

  The searchlights at the border were visible down the highway, giving the impression of a distant fire. I pulled over to the side of the road. I turned around and looked at Meadow asleep in the backseat. I gently shook her leg. No response. I got out of the car, and under no moon I opened the trunk. It was very small. Mini. I made a nest out of what I could—the Lake George towels and some of my friend’s forgotten clothes. I moved aside the jumper cables and brushed clean the rough fabric. Then I opened the roadside rear door, crouched in the cab, and lifted my sleeping child into my arms. I carried her out and laid her in the trunk, tucking the towels around each limb. She looked comfortable enough. I patted her shoulder. She would sleep through it, I told myself. The journey over the border would be less than fifteen minutes. And then we would have all the time in the world, how much or how little of it we wanted—no, we’d be outside of time; we’d be free of it. I returned to the backseat for Meadow’s backpack and tiptoed through the roadside gravel and placed it at her feet, only to find her open eyes staring up at me.

  “What are we doing, Daddy?” she whispered. “Why am I in the trunk?”

  I stood there looking down at her, one hand on the trunk door. Her eyes were shining and colorless. The taillights of the idling car lit the grass, the road, and my own body, doused with red light.

  “Would you mind terribly if—” I cleared my throat. “Would you be uncomfortable if—”

  My gut cramped. I took several steps into the grass and vomited. I stayed there bent over in the dark brush for a moment. When I looked back at the car, Meadow was sitting upright, her fingers curled over the rubber sealant of the trunk, looking concerned for me.

  But tell me, isn’t that what childhood is? An involuntary adventure? A kidnapping? Before birth, before your specific appearance, what angel asked you, in the astral light of the anteworld, Excuse me, little presence, would you like to be born now? Would you like to be born into this family or to that one? Into which sort of life? Into which set of circumstances?

  Tell me, when did you consent to your own life?

  VIOLATORS

  A little German history, if you will. Wars are often about maps—maps and borders—but occasionally they are also about walls. Most Germans cringe at the topic of modern history, and theirs is a villain-shaped shadow few of us have to live with, but let it be said that perhaps the unique result of their defeat at the hands of the Allies after World War II was the consequence of being divvied up. For a short time, in fact, before the country split into an East and a West in 1946, it was parceled by four, with a little smackerel of it going even to the French for some reason. And Berlin! Berlin itself was a mirror image of the splintered whole and was also divided fractiously (forgive me if you already know this) into four zones. This incoherence of a city was then marooned inside the erstwhile Soviet zone. Sure, we could consider Germany in terms of “divorce.” The “divorce” of Germany led to a kind of “shared custody” in which several monolithic parent powers were meant to maturely resolve disputes that were absurdly at odds with their warring national interests and entrenched ideologies. And so the war grew very cold, and civility impossible, and the mediation process resulted in a kind of bizarre and hostile parental agreement (see Potsdam) whereby the parents decided to split up the siblings, one child going westward and the other shuffling off with some natural reluctance to the east.

  So Germany was divided and Berlin was divided and for a while everyone was just trying to move forward and rebuild and forget. (Destroyed buildings, destroyed bodies, a half-destroyed race stacked like planks under the dirt of a black field.) Fairly soon, for reasons I won’t go into here mostly because I don’t know them, East Germany fell into a state of economic privation, and people were just trying to get their hands on some butter or maybe a banana or something. Of course, after giving this a try, many East Germans became disillusioned with socialism. It was inevitable, West Berlin was just too close. In East Berlin, for example, you could smell buttered toast wafting from the apartment buildings along Bernauer Strasse. When, in 1961, it became clear that the East German government was trying to devise a solution for the torrent of jaded East Berliners leaving for West Berlin and democracy every day, rumors of an actual wall were born. The GDR head of state and Communist Party boss Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973) answered a reporter’s question about rumors that a wall might be built to stop the exodus. Ulbricht’s legendary answer, as you may know, was “Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!”6

  And yet a wall was erected. A precast concrete construction with large reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete components. Unlike other great walls (China, Turkey), over the years, this one eventually morphed into something truly impenetrable, with many innovative add-ons: spotlights, antivehicle trenches, wire fencing, protective bunkers, watchtowers, and even a dog run. The Wall was not just a wall but a wide swath of seared and swept land, upon which desperate crossers could be handily sited between crosshairs.

  But the East Berliners did not give up the ghost of escape. The impenetrability of the Wall made them want to cross it all the more. Nowhere in the history of oppression do we see as much creativity as we do around crossing the inner German border. Between August of 1961 and November of 1989, thousands of daredevils from all over East Germany tried to make history by flinging themselves over this border in every conceivable manner. Some highlights? 1965: A Leipzig engineer casts a weighted Perlon string from the roof of an East German ministerial building and sends his family one by one down his spontaneous funicular. 1968: Bernd Böttger from Sebnitz attaches an auxiliary engine to a buoy and thereby invents the world’s first “aqua-scooter,” which pulls Böttger across the Baltic at the lamentable rate of five kilometers per hour. (He lives. I’m only telling you about the ones that lived.) O
r how about this one, undertaken in 1975, soon after the East German government signs a pact in Helsinki promising its residents freedom of movement: Two brothers in West Germany build a homemade aluminum airplane and cover it with Soviet insignia, then fly the aircraft straight into Treptower Park, where a third long-lost brother and the man’s young son clamber aboard. They fly back to West Berlin, the little boy screaming with pleasure and confusion the whole way. That one’s famous. And if it’s not, it should be.

  If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that making a dusty run for it across the control strip would have been way beneath my father. My father was a collector, a tinker, a wonk. My father was a squinter, a skeptic, a bender over documents, a taker-apart of small machines. For however long he contemplated our escape—that is to say, mine and his—I imagine that he investigated as much as he could the methods of wall crossings, weighing their relative merits. He would have studied them all: the sprinters, the jumpers, the tunnelers, the train commandeerers, the aviators, the gliders, the swimmers, the divers, the sailors, the bulldozers, the imposters, and the passport falsifiers. An internal GDR memorandum entitled “Overview of Attempted and Successful Border Violations Across the Border Security Installations (December 1974–May 1982)” makes for interesting reading. According to this document, 7,282 “border violators” were arrested during this time. Only 313 violators succeeded in crossing.

  It’s a slim number, but let’s say it’s correct.

  I’m not telling you all this to brag.

  I’m telling you this because I know about borders.

  HOWL

  So there we were, by the roadside, my daughter and myself. She was sitting obediently in the trunk of a stolen Mini Cooper somewhere just shy of Champlain, New York. And I had my hand on the trunk door and was debating how to explain this. In the end, I was unable to speak a word. An approaching eighteen-wheeler broke the silence between us, grinding up the highway and pouring its headlights across the sad scene. I made no move to hide myself from view. The driver did not stop. A man stuffing a child in the trunk of a car was no business of his!

  “Daddy?” Meadow said again, entranced by my scheme even as she detected danger in it. The telltale whistle below her breath betrayed her stress. That teakettle boil, that awful rasp, that constriction.

  I reached out my hand. Meadow took it.

  “Get out of there,” I said, laughing drily. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  She stepped out of the trunk and balanced on the fender before jumping off. She looked backwards at the road for a moment, more trucks approaching. Their headlights shone through the gap between her knees.

  “Where are we?” she said.

  “North,” I said.

  “Oh. Are we going to keep going and going?”

  “Not that way,” I said, pointing toward the border. “I don’t know anymore.”

  I sat on the fender and cleaned my face with my shirtsleeve.

  She turned around. “If we kept going, where would we be?”

  “Canada,” I said.

  “And after that?”

  “Baffin Bay. I think.”

  “And after that?”

  “Greenland?”

  “And after that?”

  “Jesus, Meadow, nowhere. The ocean. Come here. You need a puff.” I retrieved her backpack from the trunk, took her inhaler from the outside pocket of her knapsack, and shook it. She leaned forward and accepted two spritzes. I tucked the inhaler back where I’d found it, right beside the neatly curled tube of strawberry toothpaste.

  “No, after the ocean,” she said, exhaling medicinally into my face. “On the other side of the North Pole.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. Russia.”

  “And after that?”

  “I don’t know, Meadow.”

  “Daddy?”

  A line of traffic passed us, coherent, oceanic.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your face is wet.”

  I touched my fingers to my cheeks.

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess it’s because I’m crying. Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  We watched the traffic.

  “Do you get sad when I’m sad, Meadow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s really nothing that can be done about that. You just have to stand it.”

  “OK.”

  “You just have to stand it. You’ll be free of it much later, when your mother and I are gone. It’s all right to be relieved when other people die. No one ever tells you that.”

  She stared back at me.

  “Believe me,” I said.

  “OK.”

  I wiped my face.

  “Look at you—” I plucked at her shirt, sniffling. “Your clothes are still damp. Maybe that’s bringing on your asthma. How about you change into your pajamas in the backseat? While I take a look at the map. OK?”

  “Don’t you know the way back home?”

  “I know the way back home. Do as I say. OK?”

  Pulling away from the roadside, I made a screeching U-turn. I could feel Meadow watching me. I didn’t know what to say about my tears. There is nothing to say about them, even now.

  “You know what would cheer me up?” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’d like to see a very tall mountain. With you.”

  “All right. Is there one close by?”

  “Sure. There are mountains everywhere.”

  “Good. Because I have school Monday.”

  “Right, school.” Again, in the distance, I could see the orange glow of Plattsburgh. “When are they going to let you out of that place? Don’t Catholics believe in summertime? It’s hot already, for Pete’s sake. The blackberries are out. Outside is life.”

  “I don’t know. June, I think.”

  “It is June, hon. Put on your pajamas, would you?”

  In the backseat, Meadow unclasped her belt buckle and placed her glasses to the side. After a series of contortions and arm torques, her head popped out of the head hole and she smoothed down the fabric and replaced her glasses on her face. In the headlights behind us, the crown of her head was a star of static. It’s ridiculous, I wanted to say, how many steps there are to everything, how endlessly procedural this life is. I wanted to apologize for it.

  “Here’s an idea,” I said. “Now, you can say yes, or you can say no. Got it?”

  “OK.”

  “Consider this”—I swept my hand toward the windshield—“Mount Washington. Highest peak in the northeastern United States. Home of the highest surface winds ever recorded. And what’s great about Mount Washington is you can drive all the way up to the top. Right to the tippy-top, where you can buy fried chicken and a bumper sticker.”

  Meadow held her position of frozen listening.

  “But it might take us a couple days,” I said. “If you were willing, we could make a real road trip out of it. We could stop here and there. Cause some trouble, you know. It’s been a long time since we’ve—we haven’t had much time together. With all the razzle-dazzle between me and your mother.”

  Meadow was pensive. Her nightgown bore the magnified image of a blond girl singing into a microphone. The girl’s pupils were filled in with glitter. Meadow drew her seat belt across her chest and studied me in the rearview mirror.

  I smiled gamely. “I am happy to write a note to the nuns.”

  “I don’t get taught by the nuns,” she said. “That’s just music and religion.”

  “Then I’ll write a note to the Christless laypersons who teach you other subjects.”

  Meadow gave me a bitter smile. I loved her bitter smiles, signs of a frustrated intelligence. I didn’t want her to be frustrated, but if she was intelligent, there wasn’t any getting around it. I even had the thought that she was going to refuse me. I suppose, in a way, I trusted her to rescue us.

  “All right,” she said, shrugging.

&
nbsp; “Really? Are you sure? You’d miss a little school.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Really? Great. Great.”

  “Of course,” she added, “I’ll have to ask Mommy.”

  My heart sank. She had dutifully found the compromise solution that would keep all of us from getting what we wanted. We were once again prisoners of our own making.

  “Absolutely,” I said, swallowing bile. “We’ll find a pay phone and call Mommy first thing in the morning. See what she says.”

  “Well, maybe not first thing,” she said. “Just sometime along the way.”

  “OK, sweetheart. It’s nice of you to think of Mommy.”

  “How many days will it take?”

  “How many days do you feel like giving it?”

  She screwed her eyes. “Six?”

  “Six whole days? That’s great. That’s almost a week.”

  “It’s how old I am.”

  “Your lucky number. We haven’t spent six days together in—in forever.”

  “And I don’t learn that much in school. I already know the stuff they’re teaching me. Reading and stuff. I already learned when I was a baby.”

  “I’m sorry, Meadow. That kills me.”

  “So I would like to go to the top of Mount Washington. But I’m hungry. Actually, could I have a donut?”

  “Sure. Sure. I’m sure we can find you a donut somewhere around here…” We both looked out at the landscape, a thick wall of first-growth forest on either side of the road. “Or maybe in Plattsburgh. I bet there are zillions of donuts in Plattsburgh. You can have them all.”