EPILOGUE
hat summer, and the next, Artie took his sailboat for rides; he wouldT glide over the waves if it was windy, or he would go gently if there was only a breeze. But he was alone, Rob was never with him, except for one time during that second summer when Rob and Francesca had come back to visit. As Artie rode over the water alone his mind became blank, and he was grateful for that. But as soon as he tied the boat back up and returned into his life, the quiet dread rose within him.
Artie had watched as the new president sneeringly humiliated the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office. He listened with horror as the man said he would like to make Gaza “the new French Riviera.” He watched as the president deported people to foreign prisons and arrested students who had spoken out against the war in Gaza, students who could have been Artie’s a few years earlier, just taken off the streets. He watched as the president hung an enormous billowing photo of himself outside the Department of Agriculture building, and as he gave a military parade on his birthday. He watched as a prison was opened in Florida, “Alligator Alcatraz,” where people were held in cages and the mosquitoes were so bad that some of the guards quit. He watched as people in Gaza starved and the United States did nothing about it.
Every day brought something new. On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide.
—
ONE DAY a letter arrived from Brussels; it had no return address on it. Inside was a piece of paper with Rob’s handwriting: Get burner phones to call me with.
—
THAT SECOND SUMMER, when Rob and Francesca came over to visit for ten days, Artie did not mention going for a sail, and neither did Rob, who seemed preoccupied much of the time, although Artie did notice that he and Francesca seemed very much a couple, very loving to each other, just as he and Evie had noted when they visited them a few months before in Brussels.
The day before they were to leave, Rob said, “Dad, let’s go out in your boat.”
“Wonderful!”
And then Rob did something strange. He reached over and took Artie’s cellphone from him and said, “Leave this here.”
Once they were on the water, headed out of the bay—it was an overcast day, and the wind rippled against the sails—Artie said, “Son, what’s going on?”
Rob, who was sitting on the side of the boat, moved to be closer to his father, who sat in the stern with the tiller, steering. Rob said, “Dad.” He spoke with quiet seriousness. “Dad, listen to me. I’m working for the European Union. It’s serious stuff I’m doing. That’s why I want you to use burner phones and encrypted email.”
Artie said, “Okay, son. But you’re safe?”
Rob looked up at the sky for a minute, and then back at Artie. “This is what I’m doing. Even Francesca doesn’t know the whole of it. But American intelligence can’t be trusted anymore. So, the EU has to develop its own AI platform. And I’m working on that.”
Artie felt dazed. “What a world,” he finally said.
Rob said, “You have no idea.”
“Your mother doesn’t know about the kind of work you’re doing?”
Rob shook his head. “Let’s leave her out of this for now.” Then he added, “But whatever you do, stay off social media.”
“I have always stayed off it,” Artie said, and Rob nodded.
Artie steered past the islands without really seeing them. Rob said, “Really bad stuff is happening, and it’s going to get worse. When anyone enters this country, if there’s any sign of anything—right now it’s just people from foreign countries—but they have to hand over their cellphones, and the immigration people download what’s on them, and if there’s anything against —you know—our administration, they have to go back, they’re not allowed in.” He added, “And honestly? I think, even for citizens, I can see a time when due process just no longer exists. For any of us. Here.”
“But, son, you’re going to be okay?”
“I think so. They gave me an EU passport.”
It was hard for Artie to enjoy the sail because of this conversation, and Rob seemed distracted, he did not say much more after that, except to look at his father and say, “I’ve already said too much.”
The fog came in as they were headed back into the bay. It was a quick fog, and thick within minutes. Artie could not see where he was going, and he knew this to be a dangerous situation. The boat continued to move slowly, but Artie did not know if another boat would ram into them or not. In a few minutes, he did not even know if they had gone past their house, the fog was that thick. “Dad?” Rob said, and Artie said, “Right here! We keep going and hope for the best.” He did not want Rob to see his fear.
Later Artie figured that the fog had lasted only ten minutes, but what minutes they were! At one point Rob reached for him, and Artie held on to his son’s arm as he tried to steer the boat, having no idea where he was steering to.
Slowly, and then quickly, the fog was gone. Endicott Peabody’s house came into view, as though appearing through a mirage. Rob said, “I’ve always hated that guy,” and Artie, so relieved to be safe, broke into laughter, and Rob joined in.
—
THAT WINTER, Hoover Lakeland shot himself.
—
AS THE MONTHS passed by, Artie grew very weary, he was aware of this in himself. When he spoke to Evie of leaving the country, she said only, “Where would we go?” Adding, “Plus, I have clients who depend on me.”
Artie could not find people who would talk to him about what was happening in the country. Carl LeBlanc said, “Let’s not go getting ourselves depressed. He just wants to destroy us, so don’t let him.” This baffled Artie.
He preferred his nights out with Ken Moynihan because of the man’s kindness (and because Artie loved him), even though they never once spoke about politics.
—
THE NEW PRINCIPAL was a woman about whom Artie immediately had misgivings; she seldom smiled, except at the younger faculty. One day she walked by his classroom as he was clapping his hands and saying to the students, “Boys and girls!” He was summoned that afternoon to her office, where she said sternly, “Not only is it demeaning for your students to be called boys and girls, but you are not even sure that they are all male and female. There may be students who are neither.”
Artie just stood there, and then he said, “You’re right.”
“You bet I’m right,” she said.
—
AND SO OVER TIME Artie no longer taught with the enthusiasm he’d had for many years; he was assigning Confederate soldiers now, and he did not even really care. He did not go to the soccer games anymore.
He now had students who were using ChatGPT to do their assignments.
They simply typed in a prompt and out came a paper. He thought it was worse than plagiarism, in a way. The new principal was in favor of using AI, she held a seminar on how helpful it could be in teaching.
And then one day as he pulled into his parking space at the school, Artie turned off the ignition and he sat there; the car made a few final small pinging sounds. He was flooded with a great understanding: He was not fully himself any longer. He could not have described this to anyone, and he could not describe it to himself, but his mind seemed to be increasingly separated from the world: His mind was here, and the world was there. He was on a downward-sloping path, and no matter how hard he would try, he understood that day as he sat in his car that something was going to happen to him and he would not be able to prevent it.
Almost, a sense of peace arrived with this.
It went through his mind faintly: I will not have the free will to prevent whatever is going to happen to me. And his memory of what seemed to him previously to have been a vigorous wonderment at the concept of free will made him smile just slightly now. He left his car and went inside. Going to my fate, he thought. Just going to my fate, that’s all I can do.
DURING HIS SENIOR YEAR, Danny Marino had sometimes stopped by to talk to Mr. Dam if he found him alone in his classroom. “Danny, have a seat, sit down!” But Danny was struck that Damn-dam had missed many of Danny’s home soccer games that year. When Danny received his scholarship to a good college four hours away, Damn-dam was just thrilled for him. And after his first year there, Danny had gone to see Damn-dam in early June. Damn-dam was so proud of him, he said. Danny thought that the man looked strikingly older (he had gained more weight), but Danny thought that was just what happened to people at a certain age.
The next year when Danny went to visit Mr. Dam in the school (Danny was excited to tell him about the Shakespeare class he had taken at college) and went to check in at the front office, the woman—she was the new principal, but Danny thought she was the secretary—this woman just shook her head abruptly at Danny and said, “Mr. Dam does not work here any longer.”
Danny was baffled, and as he left the school a young guy—who had been in the office when Danny went in—came out and yelled, “Hey!” Danny turned and walked toward him, as a school bus pulled out with a weary groan.
“Damn-dam went crazy,” the young guy said to Danny. He put his hand to his ear and made swirly motions. “Lost it.”
Danny stared at him. “When?” he finally said. “When did this happen?”
“Like, a few months ago?” The kid squinted at him, the sun was in his eyes, and he tilted his head. “He was teaching, and the students said he just sat there and became all blank, and then he asked them for help. Nobody knew what to do. He hadn’t looked good for a while, he had those old man dirty glasses, I hate that, Jesus, when I get old if I don’t wash my glasses I’m going to kill myself.”
“But what happened to him?” Danny asked.
“Dunno.”
WHEN EVIE HAD received the call from the school that day in early February, she went to get Artie, who was in the principal’s office, and he looked dazed and said only “I’m very tired.” Apparently, he had been teaching his morning class and he’d sat down at his desk and stopped talking. The students had become nervous, asking him if he was all right. “Maria,” he’d said. And then he had said to the class quietly, a few times, “Can you help me, please?”
The next day Evie checked Artie into an expensive private hospital— Evie had her connections. He was there for two weeks before he came home.
With Artie’s permission, his psychiatrist told Evie the following, sitting at a conference table in the hospital: That Artie missed Rob and Francesca tremendously—“Well, so do I,”
Evie had said—and the psychiatrist nodded once and continued.
That when Francesca had had her miscarriage the month before, it had been especially hard for Artie. Evie was irritated. She wanted to say, “It was
very distressing to both of us.” (Evie did not care for the psychiatrist, this older man, bald with a huge nose and an indifferent tone of voice.) That the death of Hoover Lakeland had crushed Artie, starting him on a downhill slide, then Carl LeBlanc retired, and then Anne Merrill did the same.
That the state of the country weighed on him every day. Artie had said that others seemed able to live with it, but for him—because he had studied history, because he had loved history—it weighed him down always, particularly after those protests in which people were killed in the streets.
Evie drummed her fingers on the conference table.
That the new principal had ultimately—And here Evie cut the psychiatrist off. “I know all this,” Evie said, and the psychiatrist put his hands up. The psychiatrist added, as he got up to leave, that the antidepressants would take a few weeks to kick in. Which made Evie crazy, because she knew that too.
—
WHEN ARTIE CAME HOME from the hospital, he was quiet, mostly sitting in the living room and reading, although Evie soon noticed that a page would go unturned for many days. “Artie, what are you going to do?” She asked him this, and he looked up at her and said, “Oh Evie, I’m just tired. I’ll be all right.”
But he had called Rob early one morning—forgetting to use the burner phone—and he had said, “Rob, turns out I’m real depressed.”
Evie had taken the phone from him and walked away with it while she spoke to their son privately.
“You need your medication adjusted,” she said to Artie one day a few weeks later. And he shrugged.
His medication—she had noticed this—made him seem to exist behind a thick pane of plexiglass, as though she could not quite find his eyes.
Later that day he said to her, “Evie, it has to be very hard living with a depressed man.”
She went to him and took his hands. “It is,” she said.
“It must be like living with a child.”
“No, it’s not like that.”
“But it’s not like living with a grownup, either.” He sort of smiled when he said this to her.
He appeared to cheer up whenever Rob called from Brussels. But even then, Evie saw that he was not his former self. “He’ll get better,” Rob told her when she spoke to him, privately, upstairs.
Evie was terrified.
—
BUT IN THE midst of these months for Artie came an unexpected gift, and the gift was Anne Merrill. She had asked Evie once if she could come over, and Evie had said yes, and then Anne showed up regularly, just sitting quietly with Artie, and she and Artie began to talk with each other. This was usually when Evie was out working. “Tell me how you are, Anne,” Artie would say, and Anne would tell him that she was okay. She did not really miss teaching, her husband seemed attentive, thank God, and her daughter was still sober.
One day Artie asked Anne if they could go for a drive and she said, “Sure.” As she drove through the streets of Revere—he had asked if she would take him there—he said to her, pointing out the car window, “There.
There’s the three houses that Dad was in charge of, they’re still there.”
Then he said to Anne, “I need to get off this medication. I can’t really feel anything.”
They ended up walking along Revere Beach together, and they sat for a while on a bench. Artie turned to Anne and said with a small smile, “My occupation is gone. Just like Othello. My occupation was my students, and now they are gone.”
Anne put her hand over his for a moment, and then they finally drove back.
—
IT HAD BEEN a pleasant day: Evie thought this and was deeply relieved when Artie returned and reported to her how he and Anne had walked along Revere Beach for a while; the beach was bare in the cool springtime weather, except for a few other people strolling.
But he had not had his sailboat put into the water, and one day that spring he said to Evie as he gazed out the window, “I’m going to sell the sailboat.”
“Artie—”
He turned to her and said, “It’s just something I don’t feel up to anymore.” He added, “I’m not sure I’ll be around much longer.”
Immediately Evie asked him if he was thinking of harming himself, and she saw his face change, a look of real feeling came over it, as though for a moment he had been returned to his true self, and he said, “No. Oh no, no, no, I promise you that. No, I will never, ever do that.”
But then came that horrible heat wave in the beginning of June. They lost their power, and when Evie went upstairs she found Artie in his undershorts lying on the bed, his arms splayed out as though he was sunbathing, dead.
—
WHEN SHE TOLD ROB—who flew in with Francesca the next day—what Artie had said about not being around much longer, Rob was silent for a few minutes. And then he said, his voice breaking, “Dad had gifts. He knew stuff.” (Rob did not tell his mother that he had been detained for two hours as he had entered the country. He did not tell her that he was not going to risk coming back again, he would tell her that later.) Evie had requested an autopsy, and it was found, from the state of Artie’s heart and from the blood that had been drawn, that Artie had died of a massive heart attack, at the very same age his father had been when he had died of a heart attack as well.
AT THE FUNERAL on a warm day at the end of June—the blazing heat wave was over—held in the old white First Congregational Church, which was full,
Danny Marino sat with Rhonda Lazarre, and Rhonda wept so loudly that some old woman turned around and looked at her. Fuck you, Danny thought to the old woman (remembering how Damn-dam had tapped his own head and said “Next time you want to say fuck you to the world, you do it up here”). Danny put his arm around Rhonda, and she leaned into him, weeping.
Danny kept rubbing her shoulder. But Danny felt a sickness. He watched while a very tall man helped Mrs. Dam up the aisle, and he found out from overhearing people’s whispers that this was Artie’s son, who lived in Brussels. Danny was surprised that the son was so tall. He could not see Damn-dam in him at all.
But for Danny, his sickness had to do with a deep fear: Had Damn-dam killed himself? Danny thought it would be easy to say that it was a heart attack, but if he had gone nuts—and then died—maybe he had killed himself.
Danny could—almost literally—not bear this thought.
A woman played a piece of piano music, and in the program it said only Composed by Artie Dam. Danny did not notice that. He also did not notice— but felt it unconsciously—that while that piano piece was being played a sense of largeness came to him, he was briefly transported into a moment of comfort.
—
DANNY DROVE WITH RHONDA to the burial; he watched as Mrs. Dam stood next to her tall son—they were both wearing sunglasses, as was the woman with them who had played the piano piece, the son’s wife, apparently—and then they followed them with many other mourners back to their house for a reception, although Rhonda and Danny had not been invited for that. But Danny wanted to go, and he kept waiting to see Damn-dam’s son, and finally he found a moment to speak to him.
Rob had gone into the downstairs bathroom, and Danny went and waited for him to come out. “There you go,” said Rob, holding the door for Danny, but Danny shook his head and whispered, “I need to speak to you.”
This was something Danny always remembered afterward, the kindness of Damn-dam’s son. He was—to Danny’s eyes—a middle-aged man, and yet Rob had looked at Danny, really looked at him, and said, “What is it?” And then Rob added, “Here, step in here.” So Danny stood in the same bathroom that his own father had wept in three and a half years earlier.
It took Danny a few moments, but he was able to ask, in a hoarse whisper, if Mr. Dam had killed himself. Rob said, “Oh.” And he placed his hand on Danny’s shoulder, not taking it away for a few moments, and said, “Oh, I understand. I do.” He looked straight at Danny and said, “But no, he didn’t. He had a heart attack,” and he explained how they knew this to be true.
“Thank you,” Danny said. “Thank you so much.”
“You were his student?” Rob asked, and Danny nodded.
“Thank you for coming,” Rob said.
—
DANNY WENT AND FOUND the still-weeping Rhonda, and they left the reception together. They did not realize—of course—that they were stepping past Kenneth Moynihan, who was speaking to the father of Heather Morrison, who had come to attend the funeral of Artie Dam.
