The Red Arrow

I want to say, first of all, that I am happy. This was not always the case. In truth, it was hardly ever the case--even when I felt happy I wasn’t because I knew that was all it was, a feeling, an illusion that would soon be chased out by something I call the Mist. That I am happy now can be attributed to the fact that the journey worked, the treatment worked. I won’t describe the treatment yet, because if I do so now, I’ll lose you. What you should know is that I am thirty-three years old, of solid physical health (good levels of the new good cholesterol, low levels of the bad, proper pulse, no chemical dependencies), a professional failure, and am sitting solo on the Frecciarossa train waiting to depart from Roma Termini for Modena by way of Bologna. I am in Italy for my honeymoon; I was married in September, nine months ago, but we delayed the trip for better weather. Back on Piazza di Pasquino, at the very posh G-Rough hotel, a seventeenth-century townhouse converted into a temple of Italian design, Annie, my wife, is still asleep--as we both understand this trip is something I should do on my own--in the palatial king bed, an original piece by the famed furniture designer Guglielmo Ulrich, as is all the room’s furniture, and after whom the room is named, and about whom I speak as if I’ve got a clue who he is. I don’t.

I’m going to Modena to find a physicist. Because of the terms of my contract, I am not allowed to name or acknowledge him in any way, publicly or privately, until our project is complete and he has decided if he wants to credit me. For that reason, I will simply call him the Physicist, though if you’re that curious it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the one famous theoretical physicist native to Modena.

I need to find the Physicist because he owes me a story. His story, specifically; more specifically, the second half of his life’s story, from our present moment all the way back to what he calls the “great realization,” the moment when he had a “breakthrough in perception,” as he describes it, after which he excelled in the study of physics, the result of which is his groundbreaking though still-controversial theory of quantum gravity. (I’m not allowed to name that either.) Everything from birth up to a year before the great realization I’ve already got, but it’s the “realization” that matters: it is my ticket out of a sizable debt hole I created when I failed to write a book promised to one of our nation’s largest publishers, publishers who paid me a rather sizable advance I can’t pay back because I blew it all on things like four days in the junior suite of the luxury G-Rough hotel. Many dark-suited women and men in a Manhattan high-rise are eagerly waiting to give me a legal suplex if I don’t deliver.

The good news is that, posttreatment, I’m able to forgive myself for getting into such a position, and I feel grateful for that. Yet no matter how profound the treatment was, how life changing--and it was those things--I realize I can’t ignore that the debt is still very real, still my problem to solve, and, worse, that it haunts me beyond its financial implications. It’s the last thorn stuck in my foot from years spent walking through thorns. Except not only is it keeping that time alive, and keeping me connected to it, it’s also got the power to infect the new life I’ve been gifted. And so even in my happiness and clear mind I also feel anxious enough about the day’s potential that I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything from the G-Rough’s impressive a.m. spread, not even a prosciutto slice or cube of melon to go with my morning cappuccino, which, now in the gut, has me feeling about as eager as possible for this train to come awake and race me closer to closure.

The solution is simple: all I’ve got to do is find the Physicist, get the rest of his story, and finish the job I was hired to do, which is to ghostwrite his memoir. Indeed, through a sequence of events that can seem either cruel or felicitous depending on which side of a life-changing treatment you find yourself, I found myself in a position where, by ghostwriting the Physicist’s memoir, I could cancel my debt with my publisher. Whenever I turn in a new ghostwritten section, the money I’d normally receive in compensation is instead deducted from my negative balance. The more of his life I write, the more of my life I get back.

But then he disappeared. Vanished. All calls to voicemail. His email like a dead address. And nothing but stonewalling from his handlers. So where I’d thought there was some good old-fashioned professional collaboration and momentum, there is now only his absence, an absence that’s not only thrown the project into a state of limbo, but also stands to resurrect my debt, a debt I cannot pay because I am worth approximately zero dollars, which everyone seems to agree on except the state of California, where, under its “community property” laws, I am not worth approximately zero dollars because I am married, meaning Annie--good, bright, unwavering Annie, whose love has been the one thing I’ve not screwed up, and whom I continue to adore more and more every day, especially after my treatment--could see her wages garnished or private assets seized should I be sued, a thought that sends my already hot stomach spinning like a Maytag.

Worse, I’m reminded of this fact nearly constantly by a guy named Richards--that’s his last name, he pronounces it “Ri-shard,” I guess the s is silent? Richards is the editor on this memoir, an older guy from Montana with a JD who moved to New York and went into books but still talks like he hung a shingle in Bozeman. He’s been in the game awhile, but from what I gather he’s had a bad few years--mainly from him saying again and again, “I’ve had a bad few years”--and this book, the Physicist’s memoir, for which he had to put his neck on the line in order to win it at auction, is his last big swing at saving his job. If that wasn’t pressure enough, a recent regime change at the publisher has made it expressly clear that he’s “the whitetail in their sights,” to use his words. To say he was stressed about this project from the beginning would be putting it mildly. And then everything came apart. When I asked Richards early in the Physicist’s disappearance if he was certain it was useless to try to explain the situation to his higher-ups, he just laughed a little pathetically into the phone and said, “Barking at a knot,” whatever that means.

I feel for Richards, truly, but I fear he’s beginning to crack. Or has cracked already. At first his correspondences were understandable: vaguely anxious emails asking if I’d heard anything, maybe once a day. I kept explaining that I’ve never actually had direct contact with the Physicist, so what could I do? But that didn’t seem to matter. Then the emails picked up in frequency and desperation. He started peppering them with phrases like “What will I do?” which became “What will we do?” which evolved into the more personal “I’m sure you’ve got to be worried” before tipping over into “A situation like yours--I can remember from law school what it could mean for you and your wife, so unfortunate,” and then back to “We’ll be ruined” and “You’ll be ruined” and, finally, “I’ll be ruined.”

Then he started calling once a day, sometimes twice, every time leaving me a voicemail where pretty much the only thing I can hear is this weird labored breathing sound he makes between clauses. It sort of sounds like he’s sipping soup.

And then, just minutes ago, he took it to a whole new level when he decided to FaceTime me while I was in a cab on my way to the station. I know I shouldn’t have answered, but it seemed so weird that he was FaceTiming that I convinced myself that maybe he was calling to say that contact with the Physicist had been made, all is well, I can enjoy the rest of my honeymoon. So I answered and there he was, his face looking how it looks in pictures online, red and kind of swollen, like a boxer’s, and his head, which I’ve always described to myself as profoundly rectangular, complete with a flattop buzz cut of white hair, seemed even more rectangular when I saw that it fit so perfectly into the frame of the phone screen that it was like he wasn’t talking to me through the screen but was the screen itself, like some disembodied digital personality from the future whom I was holding in my hand.

“Did you mean to FaceTime me?” I asked.

A heavy exhale scratched through the speakers. “It’s been a tough ride,” he said, talking to what felt like no one in particular.

“Is there news or something?”

“I just thought that it would be good for us to chat face-to-face.” There was a looseness to his eyes, a shine.

“It’s like three in the morning there--are you drinking?”

“Maybe I’m a little roostered up. It’s been a bad few years. And it could get so much worse.”

A deep and almost boyish loneliness emanated off Richards. It was undeniable. If this is what he wanted me to feel by FaceTiming, then his plan had worked. I did feel for him. Not least because he seemed to be calling from an emotional space I’d only recently been freed from myself. Even though he’s always treated me less than kindly--he hated my involvement with the project--and more recently had become a badgering pest with designs, at times, to incite fear in me, even stooping so low as to mention my wife, all so that he might be less alone in his own uncertainty, I wanted to help this man. An opportunity to relieve suffering: that’s how my mind posited it to me then in the taxi, holding Richards in my hand--a thought I can’t imagine having had only a few weeks ago. A warm thought, a simple thought, a thought I was about to share with the real, vulnerable Richards reaching out to me from a place of elemental fear in what would be our most candid and unifying moment, except that just as I was about to speak his whole face hardened, and his voice dropped into a dry, edgy tone as he said directly into the screen, his digital eyes staring straight up into mine, “So much worse for you too, don’t forget.”

The screen felt hot. I looked away. Through the taxi’s windshield I could see Termini coming into view, hard-edged and impersonal, and maybe it was because of what Richards had said, or maybe because the station’s architecture is simply that austere in its modernism, but it looked to me like a prison through whose doors was the suffering Richards wanted me to join him in. I could feel it and I was afraid. But now when fear comes, it’s like I can witness it. Not visually, but relationally, a charged cloud rising through me and expanding out in jagged waves, an event within, but not a part of me, no, just another thing that happens, and then it passed, and then before I was even cognizant of what I was doing I’d looked back at my phone, smiled, and said, “You know, Richards--it is what it is. I’ve got to go,” and then I hung up, paid the taxi, and disappeared into the crowd, a mass of discrete events dressed in tailored suits and summer linens, gripping suitcases and smartphones, checking wristwatches, patting their pockets for tickets or a cigarette, each needing to be somewhere other than there, a blur from which I emerged onto the Frecciarossa 9318, car 8, seat 19D, where I am sitting now, waiting to begin a day trip north on the speed rail to Bologna, where I’ll then transfer to a commuter rail and ride three stops up to Modena, the place where I believe, as of yesterday, I might find the one man who can cut the final thread connecting me and my past.

No one has joined me yet in my four-seat unit, which, before my treatment, I would’ve perceived as confirmation of my deep suspicion that I am despised by all people. Why despised? For many reasons. Whatever reason they want. Not least of which, I was certain, was that my very presence stirred up repulsion, as if just seeing me was like accidentally catching a glimpse of some abscess. That’s what I was like, I thought--an abscess in the smile of reality. Of course I didn’t think I looked like an abscess, but that was part of the horrid trick: there was some negative aura about me I could intuit but never see. Some days it seemed no nastier than a dour blur, but on other days, like today--a day when I’m really in the thick of confronting how I’ve failed and made a mess of everything and gotten myself into this position--it would be raging, like the demented glow of a bug zapper. But that’s not how I feel: faintly in the window I see my red beard and freckled face reflected and know that I am perfectly ordinary.

Little TVs over the aisle show our route of Roma to Bologna as a red line up the boot with a speedometer resting at zero beside it and a clock above counting down to departure. As the seconds fall, I straighten my spine, open my lungs to the conditioned air, and begin simple, steady breaths. One, then another, following each with my attention until the rhythm settles first my stomach and then my mind so completely I can drop behind it and watch.

Through the speakers comes a prerecorded message, the only word of which I catch is “Frecciarossa,” a name that was only a name to me until last night when I was dozing off in the Ulrich bed--one half of my mind still in this world, the other lost in early dreamlessness--and I heard a voice call out, “The red arrow,” a phrase so empty of context that it felt like a spell from the cosmic beyond, or so I thought, letting sleep pull me deeper, not realizing it was Annie who’d said it from across the room at the midcentury secretary where she was sitting, still in her dinner outfit of black-on-black jeans and blouse with a green silk scarf for color, writing in her notebook these repetitive pages of Italian vocab she’d picked up throughout the day, along with notes on how and when the vocab stuck in her mind, a nightly habit she’s maintained since we arrived in the country over a week ago, one expression of her commitment to learning the language that began when she was assigned to the development team for a new AI-powered language-learning program at the company where she works. “My task isn’t just to learn a language,” she’d first said of the project, “it’s to pay attention to how I learn it, and when.