The Death of All Things Seen Read Online Free PDF Page B

felt the same, drugged effect in the shunt of blood toward the vital organs. His hands and feet were always cold in a way they had not been years before. Maybe it was his age? He was undecided. He yawned into the back of his hand.
    What he liked to watch on the television in his aloneness, in the deep freeze of winter, in the satellite beam of new choices, was reruns of Hawaii Five-0 – the azure sea and palm fronds, the scooping dig of island natives in the break of waves in their long canoes, and, of course, the immaculately dressed Jack Lord, the signature turn of his head at the show’s beginning. Jack Lord, a colonial viceroy, a man Nate connected with the calm, judicious equanimity of his own father.
    How strange, the insistent drag of history, a show that could find him here alone and could breathe life into events connected to shots of his father in his time out on Midway Island in advance of the attack on Japan.
    *
    Nate opened the letter at the kitchen table. Helen Price had been known as The Other Woman , and before that as The Coat-check Girl , a title his mother had settled on in the early days.
    There was a brief description of some film reels, recordings that had belonged to his father and that had come into the possession of Helen Price who had subsequently bequeathed them to Nate. In view of the reels’ age and fragility, the law office was seeking advice on how they should be sent.
    Nate looked up into the gauze of falling snow, the world gone flat and two-dimensional. The letter was still in his hand. He looked down at it. His eyes adjusted to the glob of floating light and found their focus.
    There was no indication of the content of the reels, or of how many there were, though what was significant, what could not be discounted, was that the reels had been kept all these years, and bequeathed, not through the execution of his father’s will, but through his father’s mistress, Helen Price.
    Nate searched for a sweater in a cedar chest he had built with his own hands. The piney tang of it dropped to the depth of his soul. Wood shavings curled amidst the folded wool sweaters, socks, and hats, all hand-knit. He had become fastidious in his solitude, in the quiet arrangement of everything. He stood in the room, as if everything had been awaiting his presence before it took on the approximation of existence.
    He was a clockmaker, moving the hands of his own existence. Or he was a drowned man in a well, staring up through clear water. It was life seen through the wrong end of a telescope, small and isolated, and just beyond comprehension. He hugged himself, his throat tightening as he stared at sunlight streaming in an angled light on an empty mattress. A shiver ran through him. He leaned toward the frame of the window, wincing against the snow’s incandescent shock.
    *
    On the Internet in his study, he searched for Helen Price. He found a brief mention of her accident, then a series of articles related to her death at the hands of her husband in an apparent murder-suicide. Walter Price had been involved in a systemic, long and protracted extortion scandal. At the end of Helen Price’s obituary, there was mention of a surviving son, Norman Price, an established playwright in Chicago’s theater.
    Nate went out toward the kitchen. He was still absently holding the letter. When he noticed, he balled it in his fist. He was not obliged to answer. He was angry and sad in the same instance. He had been discovered and sought out.
    He looked at the date at the top of the letter, the postmark two weeks old already. He could ignore it, or simply write and refuse delivery. He could instruct that the film reels be destroyed. It was his prerogative. He muttered a catalogue of excuses of why he should not respond. The tapes meant little to him.
    It mattered little what his father might now say. His correspondence with him had declined when the threat of the Vietnam War had receded and ended. A congressional act was