Complication Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Complication (noun)

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  INSIDE THE MIRROR MAZE

  CHAPTER 3

  INSIDE THE MIRROR MAZE–PART II

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  INSIDE THE MIRROR MAZE–PART III

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 6

  The Cruel Geometry of Zugzwang

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  The Cruel Geometry of Zugzwang—Part II

  CHAPTER 9

  The Cruel Geometry of Zugzwang–Part III

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 10

  The Woeful Saga of Kelley and Was-Kelley

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  The Woeful Saga of Kelley and Was-Kelley (cont’d)

  CHAPTER 13

  The Woeful Saga of Kelley and Was-Kelley (cont’d)

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  Complication (noun)

  1. A condition or event that is complex or confused.

  2. An intricate and often puzzling relationship of parts.

  3. (Medicine/Pathology)—A secondary or negative reaction during the course of an illness.

  4. (Horology)—Beginning in the sixteenth century, any feature of a timepiece beyond the standard display of hours, minutes, and seconds. Used to refer to both the mechanism itself and the timepiece housing it. Examples include calendars, phases of the moon, signs of the Zodiac, and automatons engaged in various acts erotic, whimsical, or religious in nature.

  5. A big can of worms.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  The Saturday morning before my life went out the window, I opened the front door to find two policemen holding their hats in their hands and examining them like unfamiliar, vaguely distasteful things. Both men were balding, beads of perspiration glistening on their heads. Both had mustaches so stereotypically Chicago cop I wondered if these mustaches were meant to be ironic, even if Chicago cops aren’t famous for their sense of irony. “I hate to be the one,” the less-bald policeman told me, “but I’m afraid I have to inform you that Lee Holloway is no longer with us.”

  Obviously there had been a mistake.

  Lee Holloway was me.

  But then Lee Holloway was also my father. We shared our first name. Mr. Holloway, the policeman told me, had experienced a major cardiac event while mowing his lawn a few hours ago.

  “Heart attack,” he clarified.

  “The EMTs did everything they could,” said the other.

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” the first finished.

  The police told me the name of the hospital where the body was being kept and offered to give me a ride. I said no thanks, they nodded, replaced their hats, and strolled off toward their squad car. As they got in, I tried to imagine and simultaneously not imagine the last moments of my father’s life, wondering whether he realized what was happening, wondering what thoughts might have been going through his head. Instead my mind kept returning to the image of an abandoned lawnmower running in the middle of his big backyard in the south suburbs, the battered old thing spewing plumes of blue smoke into a cloudless sky until it ran out of gas with a shudder.

  I made phone calls and handled the funeral arrangements with a numbed efficiency that now strikes me as slightly deranged. When I called into Grimley & Dunballer Recovery Solutions on Monday and said I wouldn’t be in, my boss must have been in a good mood because she didn’t quote me the company bereavement policy. Instead she told me she was terribly sorry and to take as much time as I needed. We both knew this meant not a minute longer than dictated by the company bereavement policy, but I’d learned to appreciate those occasions when she revealed her human side by, say, making a facial expression or ingesting food. Grimley & Dunballer was the second-largest debt collection agency in the Midwest, and I’d been there for five years working as a client services liaison. If my job sounds dull, that’s because it was.

  The funeral was held on a Tuesday. My dad’s sister Sally flew in from Tampa for the services and acted as ringleader like she always did at family functions. Two women my dad had dated at different times, a couple neighbors, and few of his real estate coworkers also attended. During the wake, one of these colleagues recounted at length the hilarious e-mails my father used to send, mostly jokes unfit for repeating at a wake. A guy named Gus kept going on about how my dad was booked to show a place in Bridgeport the day he died.

  “He would have made that damn sale,” Gus told me.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I replied.

  “A people person, your dad. Could talk to anyone.”

  I nodded, unsure what to say.

  “He died with his boots on,” Gus said, clutching my shoulder, narrowing his gaze. “Never forget that. Your dad died with his boots on.”

  Why this should be important to me I didn’t know. I’m sure Gus was trying to be kind, which is what kept me from pointing out that my dad had in fact been wearing green and white striped flip-flops when he’d died. Later someone remarked that I was doing a good job holding myself together, but stoicism had nothing to do with it. I was numbed out, not so much dealing with my grief as refusing to acknowledge its existence, unwilling to process on any but the most surface level what had happened. For the rest of the wake, I stood around eating sandwiches and shaking hands with decent people I barely knew and keeping myself from punching the wall, and then it was all over.

  It wasn’t until much later that I thought it was a little strange that no one, not even my Aunt Sally, mentioned my younger brother Paul. No one talked about my mother either, who’d taken off to join a New Age commune of sorts in Albuquerque when I was thirteen, never to be heard from again, although her absence from the conversation was decidedly less strange as most of the people present never knew her. Aunt Sally was convinced that my dad would’ve lived longer with a strong female presence in his life, and she was probably right. He smoked and drank and ate like it was the 1950s and had predictably developed a heart condition as a result. A second wife might’ve nagged him into shape, but he had no interest in a second wife. And so it was as if it had always been just the Three Holloway Men. Or, as I often thought of it, the two of them and me.

  Both were beer-and-a-shot kinda guys, diehard Southsiders who enjoyed tinkering with their motorcycles and bitching about the White Sox and listening to Steve Dahl on the radio. After returning from college, I’d moved to Wicker Park, a northside neighborhood not far in terms of geographical distance but in other ways a whole different planet. As adults, my dad and I hadn’t been what you would call close. Not that there was any animosity between us. We still talked on the phone fairly often and I made a point of dropping by during the holidays. We just didn’t have much in common. I was supposed to be the smart one in the family, but I had not gone on to land an especially smart job or lead an especially smart life, and in some vague way I felt like I’d disappointed him.

  By Wednesday evening I’d already done most of the heavy lifting in getting his affairs in order. An estate lawyer and longtime family friend agreed to act as executor, and the real-estate company Dad worked for would be putting the house on the market. I boxed his clothes save for a couple of suits. Whether he needed it or not, my father bought a new suit each year, and the two I saved looked like they hadn’t ever been worn. I dropped the rest of the clothes off at the Salvation Army but decided to keep his watch. A Tag Heuer—the same kind, he would tell people with a pride only half ironic, worn by Steve McQueen.

  In the basement I found a box full o
f photo albums and loose pictures. I dug around for a good photo of Dad and me together to take home but couldn’t find any. There were lots of pictures of him with Paul, though. Ones I hadn’t seen in years, ones my Dad obviously wanted to keep but didn’t want hanging on the walls, as if Paul’s absence was too much to confront on a daily basis. I kept all the photos, even though I knew they’d just remain in the same box until the day someone found it in my own basement and wondered what the hell to do with them. All the furniture that I could carry on my own, along with his books, pots and pans, dinnerware, tools, golf clubs, and aptly-named stationary bike, I moved to the garage. I put a notice on Craigslist—SUNDRY HOUSEHOLD TREASURES FREE TO GOOD HOMES—and left the garage door opened. Nearly all the possessions my father had amassed over six decades were gone within the span of an afternoon. The one object nobody took was the crappy lawnmower he’d been pushing when his heart called it quits.

  Looking back, I realize I was in a fugue state of sorts, narrowing my brain to one small task at a time to keep it from being overwhelmed by the wide enormity of grief I knew was waiting. It was just like when my mother had left us, that feeling of having the ground beneath your feet suddenly open like a trap door and leave you in freefall. By Thursday night, the bedroom, kitchen, living room, and basement were taken care of, and the only thing left to do was clean out his home office. A large, unframed poster of a climber silhouetted against the setting sun and dangling from the edge of a steep rock cliff was tacked above the desk where his laptop sat. IT IS NOT THE MOUNTAIN WE CONQUER, it announced in giant type, BUT OURSELVES. I ripped the poster down and threw it on top of the growing mountain inside the garbage bag and then started in on the file cabinet, tossing anything that didn’t need to be passed on to the estate lawyer. My father was organized when it came to paperwork. Tax forms, credit card bills, auto and home insurance policies, bank statements—each had its own manila folder with all its contents meticulously arranged by date. It was like he’d been expecting an IRS audit for the last twenty years. It didn’t occur to me that maybe he’d instead been anticipating the scenario I was now enacting.

  His desk was mostly empty. Left drawer: a pack of unopened sticky notes, pens and pencils, a stapler, a desktop calendar with no appointments noted. Right drawer: envelopes, larger envelopes, two reams of printer paper. The top drawer held nothing but a single white envelope with his name and address penned in a tight script. No return address was provided. I removed the letter from the envelope and read.

  Dear Mr. Lee Holloway,

  My name is Vera. I live in Prague and I was close with your son. Please know Paul spoke very kindly of you.

  I am writing to you for reasons that I believe your son’s death is not what was reported. I think he did not drown in the flood. I cannot tell you more at this time because it would not be sensible for all manners of reason. But I am urgent to meet you, so that I can share with you an important part of Paul’s life I’m sure is unknown to you but which I am certain will be of great interest.

  Please come to a café called the Black Rabbit on Ostrovní Street in the Nové Město district of Prague 2. I will be there every day between 6 and 8 pm for three months from the date of this letter.

  My hope is I will meet you soon.

  Sincerely Yours,

  Vera

  No other correspondence from Vera or anyone else was in the desk. I checked the file cabinet again. Nothing there, either. His Rolodex (he had a state-of-the-art laptop but still used a Rolodex) didn’t reveal an address for anyone named Vera or anybody else in the Czech Republic. I sat down at my father’s desk and reread the letter. One hundred and fifty-eight words counting the signature. A greeting, ten economical sentences, a closing. No last name. No return address, e-mail address, or telephone number. The letter was postmarked two months and twenty-eight days ago.

  Which meant only two days left.

  I started up the laptop and opened his e-mail program. A search for “Vera” yielded nothing but a couple messages containing words like veracity or veranda. I scrolled through the e-mails roughly corresponding with the date of the letter but found nothing. It was while picking through his latest messages I discovered confirmation of his purchase of an open return ticket from Chicago O’Hare to the Ruzyně Airport in Prague, Czech Republic. Using the same online travel service, he’d booked reservations at a place called the Hotel Dalibor.

  His flight was leaving in four hours.

  Before I realized what I was doing, I was thirty thousand feet in the air somewhere over the Atlantic. There had been no time to go back to my house and pack before racing to the airport, and I was saved by the fact that I’d kept my passport at my dad’s place. I never used the thing, and during a period of my life a few years earlier, I’d been moving from apartment to apartment so often that I was afraid I’d lose it. While cleaning out his house I’d been wearing a ratty T-shirt, cargo shorts, and Adidas flats, an ensemble that didn’t seem appropriate for intercontinental air travel, though I realized no one really gives a damn anymore. With no other clothes at hand, I ended up wearing one of his suits, a black Italian number two sizes too big. In my wallet I carried his credit cards. In his jacket pocket, I carried his e-ticket stub, his hotel reservation, my passport. Getting through airport security posed no problem as the name on the e-ticket matched the credit card and the name on the credit card matched the name on my passport. I stretched out my legs and marveled that my father had bought a seat in first-class. This from the same man who routinely called the phone company to argue over surcharges.

  I knew almost nothing about the last days of Paul’s life—last years, even—and I assume my father didn’t either. What we knew, what we’d always known about the trajectory of his life, was that Paul would either win the lottery or get struck by lightning. There was never any middle path for him. Back five years ago when he disappeared, I’d been shocked, but not surprised. Crucial difference being that having knowledge about light sockets won’t preclude you from being shocked should you stick your finger in one, but unless you’re an idiot, this shock should in no way surprise you.

  Since the arrival of Vera’s letter, my father had no doubt spent a lot of time studying Vera’s terse correspondence, prodding its stonewalling sentences in hopes the words would suddenly give way and reveal whatever truth their author used them to conceal. But the letter never told him anything new, either about his son or the woman who claimed to have known him.

  Your son’s death is not as reported.

  Was this Vera person saying my brother wasn’t really dead? Or only that he’d died in a manner inconsistent with what was reported? And did she mean “reported” as in covered by the press, or was she just referring to official “reports,” like the inquest or whatever it was they had in the Czech Republic?

  My father must have had similar questions. Weeks after receiving the letter, just two nights before he’d died, he’d booked the flight I was now on. He’d bought the ticket on a Friday for a plane that didn’t leave until the following Thursday. Maybe he’d wanted to finish something at work, had a house showing or closing he couldn’t miss. Maybe tickets were simply cheaper on this date. But it seemed strange to me that he would finally resolve to satisfy the curiosity Vera’s letter provoked and then purposely delay the same satisfaction. Had he wanted a chance to back out, room to change his mind?

  I didn’t have that luxury. After reading the letter, the choice was either immediately get to Prague or let the unknown Vera slip away and leave me forever wondering what it was she knew about Paul’s disappearance. I reread the letter one final time then ate a meal of salmon and overcooked potatoes. After dinner I tried to watch an in-flight movie starring Sandra Bullock but twenty minutes in realized I’d seen it before. At some point I fell asleep, and when I awoke, I was beginning my final descent into Prague.

  CHAPTER 2

  My plane touched down only fifteen minutes late, and not having any luggage, I was able to get out of the airport
and find a taxi without much delay. Before leaving the airport, I rented a SIM card from a kiosk that gave me a temporary local cell phone number. I didn’t anticipate using it much, but like most human beings from the richer countries of the early twenty-first century, I felt naked and lost if I was unable to access all information in existence at every conceivable moment, felt practically stripped of my identity. As it was already 6:30 PM, I told the driver to take me directly to the Black Rabbit. No time for the hotel.

  Outside the airport lay weedy fields and encroaching darkness. On the four-lane highway, fields disappeared and traffic increased; blocky tenements layered in graffiti towered in the middle distance, foregrounded by newly built corporate offices springing up alongside the road. We entered a tunnel and emerged in a Prague more as I would have imagined it had I ever bothered imagining it at all. Blackened structures from bygone centuries piled dark into the low horizon, and noisy trams rattled along the far riverbank while people ambled by on the narrow sidewalks. On the hill above us, St. Vitus Cathedral rose spotlit and jagged against the night while a steep slope cluttered with tiled roofs tumbled to the riverbank beneath. Across the water, countless spires jutted upwards into the murky eastern skyline like tent poles supporting a sagging canvas.

  The cab crossed a stone bridge, and I watched white lights strung from the deck of a tour boat dance slowly in the distance, a ghostly constellation floating downstream, the people onboard rendered faceless by low banks of fog that clung to the water’s dark surface. Here then was the Vltava, the river that claimed my brother. The current looked sluggish, stillborn. Too weak to drown a rat.