The Resurrection Man's Legacy: And Other Stories

The Resurrection Man’s Legacy

I DID NOT KNOW THE PHRASE RESURRECTION man eighteen years ago. I was a boy then; such men were yet uncommon.

I know it now—we all know it—and yet the phrase retains for me a haunting quality, simultaneously wondrous and frightening. I met him only once, my resurrection man, on the cusp of a hazy August morning, but he haunts me still in subtle and unspoken ways: when I look in the mirror and see my face, like my father’s face; or when I take the diamond, my uniform shining beneath the ranks of floodlights, and hear the infield chatter, like music if you love the game.

And I do. I do.

It was among the things he bequeathed to me, that love, though he could not have known it. We do not understand the consequences of the actions we take, the meaning of the legacies we leave. We cannot.

They are ghosts of sorts, actions in a vacuum where all action has passed, inheritances from the inscrutable dead. Legacies.

They can be gifts and they can be curses. Sometimes they can be both.

My father returned to the States in April of 1948, following the bloody, methodical invasion of Japan, and he married my mother the week he landed. She died in childbirth eleven months later, and I sometimes wonder if he ever forgave me. One other significant event occurred in ’49: Casey Stengel, a ne’er-do-well journeyman manager, led the Yankees to the first of an unprecedented five straight victories in the World Series.

Twelve years later, in 1961, my father died too. That was the year Roger Maris came to bat in the fourth inning of the season’s final game and drove his sixty-first home run into the right-field seats at Yankee Stadium, breaking Babe Ruth’s record for single-season homers. In Baltimore, we still say that the new record is meaningless, that Maris played in a season six games longer than that of our home-grown hero; but even then, in our hearts, we knew it wasn’t true.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

Two days after my father’s death, the monorail whisked me from Baltimore to St. Louis. I had never been away from home. The journey was a nightmare journey. The landscape blurred beyond the shining curve of the window, whether through speed or tears, I could not tell.

My great aunt Rachel Powers met me at the station. Previously, I had known her only from a photograph pasted in the family album. A young woman then, she possessed a beauty that seemed to radiate color through the black and white print. She wore an androgynous flat-busted dress and her eyes blazed from above sharpened cheek bones with such unnerving intensity that, even in the photograph, I could not meet them for more than a moment.

The photograph had been taken forty years before my father’s death, but I knew her instantly when I saw her on the platform.

Jake Lamont? she said.

I nodded, struck speechless. Tall and lean, she wore a billowing white frock and a white hat, like a young bride. The years had not touched her. She might have been sixteen, she might have been twenty. And then she lifted the veil that obscured her face, shattering the illusion of youth. I saw the same high, sharp cheek bones, the same intense eyes—blue; why had I never wondered?—but her flesh was seamed and spotted with age.

Well, then, she said. So you’re a boy. I don’t know much about boys. And then, when I still did not speak, Are you mute, child?

My fingers tightened around the handle of my traveling case. No, ma’am.

Well, good. Come along, then.

Without sparing me another glance, she disappeared into the throng. Half-fearful of being left in the noisy, crowded station, I lit out after her, dragging my suitcase behind me. Outside, in the clear Midwestern heat, we loaded the suitcase into the trunk of a weary ’53 Cadillac, one of those acre-long cars that Detroit began to produce in the fat years after the war.

We drove into farming country, on single-lane blacktop roads where you could cruise for hours and never see another car. We did not speak, though I watched her surreptitiously. Her intense eyes never deviated from the road, unswerving between the endless rows of corn. I cracked the window, and the car filled with the smell of August in Missouri—the smell of moist earth and cow manure, and green, growing things striving toward maturity, and the slow decline into September. That smell was lovely and alien, like nothing I had ever smelled in Baltimore.

At last, we came to the town, Stowes Corners, situated in a region of low, green hills. She took me through wide, tree-shadowed streets. I saw the courthouse, and the broad spacious lawn of the town square. On a quiet street lined with oak, my aunt pointed out the school, an unassuming antique brick, dwarfed by the monstrous edifice I had known in the city.

That’s where your father went to school when he was a boy, my aunt said, and a swift electric surge of anger—

—how could he abandon me?—

—jolted along my spine. I closed my eyes, and pressed my face against the cool window. The engine rumbled as the car pulled away from the curb, and when I opened my eyes again, we had turned into a long gravel drive. The caddy mounted a short rise topped by a stand of maples, and emerged from the trees into sunlight and open air. My aunt paused there—in the days to come I would learn that she always paused there, she took a languorous, almost sensual delight in the land—and in the valley below I saw the house.

It had been a fine old farmhouse once, my aunt would later tell me, but that had been years ago; now, the surrounding fields lost to creditors, the house had begun the inevitable slide into genteel decay. Sun-bleached and worn, scabrous with peeling paint, it retained merely a glimmer of its former splendor. Even then, in my clumsy inarticulate fashion, I could see that it was like my aunt, a luminous fragment of a more refined era that had survived diminished into this whirling and cacophonous age.

This is your home now, my aunt said, and without waiting for me to respond—what could I say?—she touched the gas and the car descended.

Inside, the house was silence and stillness and tattered elegance. The furnishings, though frayed, shone with a hard gloss, as if my aunt had determined, through sheer dint of effort, to hold back the ravages of years. A breeze stirred in the surrounding hills and chased itself through the open windows, bearing to me a faint lemony scent of furniture polish as I followed my aunt upstairs. She walked slowly, painfully, one hand bracing her back, the other clutching the rail. She led me to a small room and watched from the doorway as I placed my suitcase on the narrow bed. I did not look at her as she crossed the room and sat beside me. The springs complained rustily. I opened my suitcase, dug beneath my clothes, and withdrew the photograph I had brought from Baltimore. It was the only picture I had of my father and me together. Tears welled up inside me. I bit my lip and looked out the window, into the long treeless expanse of the backyard, desolate in a cruel fall of sunshine.

Aunt Rachel said, Jake.

She said, Jake, this isn’t easy for either of us. I am an old woman and I am set in my ways. I have lived alone for thirty-five years, and I can be as ugly and unpleasant as a bear. I don’t know the first thing about boys. You must remember this when things are hard between us.

Yes, ma’am.

I felt her cool fingers touch my face. She took my chin firmly, and we stared into each other’s faces for a time. She pressed her mouth into a thin indomitable line.

You will look at me when I speak to you. Do you understand?

Yes, ma’am.

The fingers dropped from my face. That’s one of my rules. This isn’t Baltimore, Jake. I’m not your father. He was a good boy, and I’m sure he was a fine man, but it strikes me that young people today are too lenient with their children. I will not tolerate disrespect.

No, ma’am.

Good. She smiled and smoothed her dress across her thighs. I’m glad you’ve come to me, Jake, she said. I hope we can be friends.

Before I could speak, she stood and left the room, closing the door behind her. I went around the bed and lifted the window. The breeze swept in, flooding the room with that alien smell of green things growing. I threw myself on the bed and drew my father’s picture to my breast.

Among the photographs that are important to me number three relics of my youth. They are arranged across my desk like talismans as I write.

The first photograph, which I have already described to you, is that of my aunt as she must have looked in 1918 or ’19, when she was a girl.

The second photograph is of my mother as she was in the days when my father knew her; aside from the photograph I have nothing of her. Perhaps my father felt that in hoarding whatever memories he had of her, he could possess her even in death. Or perhaps he simply could not bring himself to speak of her. I know he must have loved her, for every year on my birthday, the anniversary of her death, he drew into himself, became taciturn and insular in a way that in retrospect seems atypical, for he was a cheerful man, even buoyant. Beyond that I do not know; he was scrupulous in his destruction of every vestige of her. When he died, I found nothing. No photographs, but the one I still possess. No letters. Not even her rings; I suppose she wore them to the grave.

The third photograph I have mentioned also. It is of my father and me, when I was eleven, and it captures a great irony. Though it was taken in a ballpark—Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium—my father did not love baseball. I don’t remember why we went to that game—perhaps someone gave him the tickets—but we never attended another. That was when I felt it first, my passion for the sport; immediately, it appealed to me—its order and symmetry, its precision. Nothing else in sports rivals the moment when the batter steps into the box and faces the pitcher across sixty feet of shaven green. The entire game is concentrated into that instant, the skills of a lifetime distilled into every pitch; and no one, no one in the world but those two men, has any power to alter the course of the game.

In those days, of course, I did not think of it in such terms; my passion for the sport was nascent, rudimentary. All I knew was that I enjoyed the game, that someday I would like to see another. That much is my father’s due.

The rest, indirectly anyway, was the resurrection man’s gift, his legacy. But I have no photograph of him.

I slept uneasily that first night in Stowes Corners, unaccustomed to the rural quiet that cradled the house. The nightly symphony of traffic and voices to which I had been accustomed was absent, and the silence imparted a somehow ominous quality to the stealthy mouse-like chitterings of the automaids as they scurried about the sleeping house.

I woke unrested to the sound of voices drifting up from the parlor. Strange voices—my aunt’s, only half-familiar yet, and a second voice, utterly unknown, mellifluous and slow and fawningly ingratiating.

This voice was saying, "You do realize, Miss Powers, there are limits to what we are permitted to do?"

I eased out of bed in my pajamas and crept along the spacious hall to the head of the stairs, the hardwood floor cool against my bare feet.

My aunt said, Limits? The advertising gave me the impression you could do most anything.

I seated myself on the landing in the prickly silence that followed. A breeze soughed through the upstairs windows. Through the half-open door in the ornate foyer below, I could see a car parked in the circular drive. Beyond the car, the morning sun gleamed against the stand of maple and sent a drowsy haze of mist steaming away into the open sky.

My aunt was rattling papers below. It doesn’t say anything about limits here.

No, ma’am, of course not. And I didn’t mean to imply that our products were not convincing. Not by any means.

Then what do you mean by limits?

The stranger cleared his throat. Not technological limits, ma’am. Those exist, of course, but they’re not the issue here.

"Well, what in heaven’s name is the issue?"

It’s a legal matter, ma’am—a constitutional matter, even. We’re a young company, you know, and our product is new and unfamiliar and there’s bound to be some controversy, as you might well imagine. He paused, and I could hear him fumbling about through his paraphernalia. A moment later I heard the sharp distinct snick of a lighter.

He smoked, of course. In those days, all men smoked, and the acrid gritty stink of tobacco smoke which now began to drift up the stairs reminded me of my father.

I do not smoke. I never have.

Our company, he resumed, "we’re cognizant of the objections folks might raise to our product. The Church—all the churches—are going to be a problem. And the doctors are going to have a field day with the need to come to terms with grief. We know that—our founder, Mr. Hiram Wallace, he knows that, he’s an intelligent man, but he’s committed. We’re all committed. Do you know anything about Mr. Wallace, ma’am?"

I’m afraid I don’t.

It’s an inspiring story, a story I think you ought to hear. Anybody who’s thinking of contracting with us ought to hear it. Do you mind?

My aunt sighed. I heard her adjust herself in her chair, and I could imagine them in the quaint, spotless parlor I had seen the night before: my aunt in her white dress, her hands crossed like a girl’s over the advertising packet in her lap; the resurrection man, leaning forward from the loveseat, a cigarette dangling between his fingers.

Aunt Rachel said, Go ahead then.

It’s a tragedy, really, the resurrection man said, but it ends in triumph. For you see, Mr. Wallace’s first wife, she was hit by a bus on their honeymoon—

Oh, my!

Yes, ma’am, that’s right, a bus. There was a hardy smack as the resurrection man slammed his hands together; I could hear it even at the top of the stairs. Like that, he said, so sudden. Mr. Wallace was heartbroken. He knows what you’re feeling, ma’am, he knows what your boy upstairs is feeling, and he wants to help—

With these words, an icy net of apprehension closed around my heart, and the tenor of my eavesdropping swerved abruptly from mild curiosity to a kind of breathless dread. The resurrection man’s next words came sluggish and dim. I felt as if I had been wrapped in cotton. The landing had grown oppressively hot.

The potential applications for this technology are mind-boggling, he was saying. And I won’t lie to you, ma’am, Mr. Wallace is exploring those avenues. But this, this service to the grief-stricken and the lonely, this is where his heart lies. That’s why we’re offering this service before any other, ma’am, and that’s why there are limits to what we can do.

But I’m afraid I still don’t understand.

Let me see if I can clarify, ma’am. Of all the forces arrayed against us—all the people like the churches and the doctors who’d like to see our enterprise go down the tubes—our single most dangerous adversary is the government itself. Our senators and representatives are frankly scared to death of this.

But why?

It’s the question of legal status, ma’am. What does it take to be a human being, that’s the question. All the agreements we’ve worked out with congressional committees and sub-committees—it seems like a hundred of them—all the agreements boil down to one thing: these, these … beings … must be recognizably non-human, limited in intellect, artificial in appearance. No one wants to grapple with the big questions, ma’am. No one wants to take on the churches, especially our elected officials. They’re all cowards.

Aunt Rachel said, I see, in a quiet, thoughtful kind of voice, but she didn’t say anything more.

In the silence that followed, something of the magnitude of my aunt’s devotion came to me. I did not know much about Stowes Corners, but I suspected, with a twelve-year-old’s inarticulate sense of such things, that the town was as rigidly provincial in perspective as in appearance. Whatever the stranger below was selling my aunt, he had clearly come a long way to sell it; there could be no need for such controversial … beings, as he had called them … here—here in a place where my aunt had told me that she was among the few folks in town who owned automaids.

I couldn’t really afford them, Jake, she had said last night at supper, but the work was getting to be too much for me. I’m glad you’ve come to help me.

Now, with the sun rising over the maples and throwing sharp glints off the car in the drive, the resurrection man coughed. I hope you’re still interested, Miss Powers.

Well, I don’t know a thing about boys, she said. And I don’t want him growing up without a father. It isn’t right that a boy grow up without a man in the house.

That icy net of apprehension drew still tighter about my heart. My stomach executed a slow perfect roll, and the sour tang of bile flooded my mouth. I leaned my head against the newel and shut my eyes.

I agree entirely, ma’am, came the other voice. A boy needs a father. You can rest assured we’ll do our best.

From below, there came the rustle of people standing, the murmured pleasantries of leave-taking. My aunt asked how long it would take, and the resurrection man said not long, we’ll simply modify a pre-fab model along the lines suggested by the photos and recordings—and through all this babble a single thought burst with unbearable clarity:

Nothing, nothing would ever be the same again.

I stood, and fled down the hall, down the back stairs. I slammed through the kitchen and into the gathering heat.

When the front door swung open, I was waiting. As the resurrection man—this stout, balding man dressed in a dark suit, and a wide bright tie; this unprepossessing man, unknowing and unknown, who would shape the course of my existence—as this man rounded the corner of his car, his case in hand, I hurled myself at him. Frenzied, I hurled myself at him, flailing at his chest. What are you going to do? I cried.

Strong hands pinned my arms to my sides and lifted me from the ground. The rancid odors of after-shave and tobacco enveloped me, and I saw that sweat stood in a dark ring around his collar. Calm down! he shouted. Just calm down, son! Are you crazy?

He thrust me from him. Half-blinded by tears, I stumbled away, swiping angrily at my eyes with my knuckles. Without speaking, the resurrection man dusted his suit and retrieved his case. He got in his car and drove away, and though I could not know it then, I would never see him again.

My father’s body came by slowtrain several days later. He had returned to Stowes Corners only once in the years after the war, to see my mother into the earth where her family awaited her. Now, at last, he came to join her; we buried him in the sun-dappled obscurity of a Missouri noon.

As the minister quietly recited the ritual, a soft wind lilted through the swallow-thronged trees, bearing to me the sweet fragrances of freshly turned earth and new-mown grass. I watched an intricate pattern of light and leaf-shadow play across my aunt’s face, but I saw no tears. Her still, emotionless features mirrored my own. The service seemed appropriate—minimal and isolated, infinitely distant from the places and people my father had known. There was only the minister, my aunt, and myself. No one else attended.

When the minister had finished, I knelt before my mother’s tombstone and reached out a single finger to trace her name. And then I clutched a handful of soil and let it trickle through my fingers into my father’s grave. I shall never forget the sound it made as it spattered the casket’s polished lid.

Several years ago, I chanced upon an archaeologist’s account of his experience excavating a ruined city, abandoned beneath the sand for thousands of years. Such a project is an exercise in meticulous drudgery; the Earth does not readily divulge her secrets. Stratum after stratum of sand must be sifted, countless fragments painstakingly extracted and catalogued and fitted together for interpretation. You are in truth excavating not one city, but many cities, each built on the rubble of the one which preceded it.

I am reminded of this now, for recollection, like archaeology, is a matter of sifting through ruins. Memory is frail and untrustworthy, tainted by desire; what evidence remains is fragmentary, shrouded in the mystery of the irretrievable past. You cannot recover history; you can only reconstruct it, build it anew from the shards that have survived, searching always for the seams between the strata, those places of demarcation between the city that was and the city that would be, between the self that you were and the self you have become.

How do you reconstruct a past, when only potsherds and photographs remain?

A moment, then.

An instant from the quiet, hot August day my father was interred—one of those timeless instants that stands like a seam between the geologic strata of a buried city, between the boy I was and the man I have become:

Afternoon.

In the room where I slept, the blinds rattled, but otherwise all was silent. Outside, somewhere, the world moved on. Tiny gusts leavened the heat and lifted the luminous scent of pollen into the afternoon, but through the open window there came only a cloying funerary pall. Far away, the sun shone; it announced its presence here only as an anemic gleam behind the lowered blinds, insufficient to dispel the gloom.

I stood before the closet, fumbling with my tie. My eyes stung and my stomach had drawn into an agonizing knot, but I refused to cry. I was repeating a kind of litany to myself—

—I will not cry, I will not—

—when a voice said:

Hello, Jake.

My spine stiffened. The tiny hairs along my back stirred, as if a dark gust from some October landscape had swept into the room.

It was my father’s voice.

I did not turn. Without a word, I shrugged off my jacket and swung open the closet door. In the dim reflection of the mirror hung inside, I could see a quiet figure, preternatural in its stillness, seated in the far shadowy corner by the bed.

I don’t want him growing up without a father, my aunt had said. It isn’t right that a boy grow up without a man in the house.

What in God’s name had she done?

The figure said, Don’t be afraid, Jake.

I’m not afraid, I said. But my hands shook as I fumbled at the buttons on my shirt. I groped for a hanger, draped the shirt around it, and thrust it into the depths of the closet, feeling exposed in my nakedness, vulnerable, but determined not to allow this … being, the resurrection man had called it … to sense that. Kicking away my slacks, I fished a pair of jeans out of the closet.

In the mirror, I saw the figure stand.

I said, Don’t come near me.

And that voice—my God, that voice—said, Don’t be afraid.

It smiled and lifted a hand to the window, each precise, economical gesture accompanied by a faint mechanical hum, as though somewhere far down in the depths of its being, flywheels whirred and gears meshed in intricate symphony. I watched as it gripped the cord and raised the blind.

The room seemed to ignite. Sunlight glanced out of the mirror and rippled in the glossy depths of the headboard and night stand. A thousand spinning motes of dust flared, and I winced as my eyes adjusted. Then, my heart pounding, I closed the closet door, and at last, at last I turned around.

It was my father—from the dark hair touched gray at the temples to the slight smiling crinkles around the eyes to the slim athletic build, seeming to radiate poise and grace even in repose—in every detail, it was my father. It sat once again in the wooden chair by the night stand, stiffly erect, its blunt fingers splayed on the thighs of its jeans, and returned my stare from my father’s eyes. I felt a quick, hot swell of anger and regret—

—how could you abandon me?—

—felt something tear away inside of me. I blinked back tears.

My God, what are you?

Jake, it said. It said, Jake, don’t cry.

That swift tide of anger, burning, swept through me, obliterating all. Don’t you tell me what to do.

The thing seemed taken aback. It composed its features into an expression of startled dismay; its mouth moved, but it said nothing. We stared across the room at one another until at last it looked away. It lifted the framed photograph that stood on the night stand. A moment passed, and then another, while it gazed into the picture. I wondered what it saw there, in that tiny image of the man it was pretending to be.

One thick finger caressed the gilded frame. Is that Memorial Stadium?

It looked up, smiling tentatively, and I crossed the room in three angry strides. I tore the photograph out of the thing’s hands, and then the tears boiled out of me, burning and shameful.

You don’t know anything about it! I cried, flinging myself on the bed. The creature stood, its hands outstretched, saying, Jake, Jake— but I rushed on, I would not listen: You’re not my father! You don’t know anything about it! Anything, you hear me? So just go away and leave me alone! In the end, I was screaming.

The thing straightened. Okay, Jake. If that’s the way you want it. And it crossed the room, and went out into the hall, closing the door softly behind it.

I lay back on the bed. After a while, my aunt called me for supper, but I didn’t answer. She didn’t call again. Outside, it began to grow dark, and finally a heavy silence enclosed the house. Eventually, I heard tiny mutterings and whisperings as the automaids crept from their holes and crannies and began to whisk away the debris of another day, but through it all, I did not move. I lay wide awake, staring blindly at the dark ceiling.

During the days that followed my aunt and I moved about the house like wraiths, mute and insubstantial, imprisoned by the unacknowledged presence of this monstrous being, this creature that was my father and not my father. We did not mention it; I dared not ask, she proffered no explanation. Indeed, I might have imagined the entire episode, except I glimpsed it now and then—trimming the shrubs with garden shears or soaping down the caddy in the heat, and once, in a tableau that haunts me still, standing dumb in the darkened parlor, gazing expressionlessly at the wall with a concentration no human being could muster.

Inexorably the afternoons grew shorter, the maple leaves began to turn, and somehow, somewhere in all the endless moments, August passed into September.

One morning before the sun had burned the fog off the hills, my aunt awoke me. I dressed quietly, and together we walked into the cool morning, the gravel crunching beneath our feet. She drove me to the school my father had attended all those long years ago, a mile away, and as I stepped from the car she pressed a quarter into my hand.

Come here, she said, and when I came around the car to the open window, she leaned out and kissed me. Her lips were dry and hard, with the texture of withered leaves.

She looked away, through the glare of windshield, where morning was breaking across the town. A bell began to ring, and noisy clusters of children ran by us, shouting laughter, but I did not move. The two of us might have been enclosed in a thin impermeable bubble, isolated from the world around us. Her knuckles had whitened atop the steering wheel.

You can walk home, she said, you know the way, and when I did not answer, she cleared her throat. Well, then, good luck, she said, and I felt a reply—what it might have been, I cannot know—catch in my throat. Before I could dislodge it, the car pulled from the curb.

I turned to the school. The bell continued to ring. Another clump of children swept by, and I drifted along like flotsam in their wake. I mounted the steps to the building slowly and carefully, as if the slightest jolt would destabilize the churning energies that had been compressed within me. I was a bomb, I could have ticked.

My aunt and I were in the kitchen, eating supper, that wall of impregnable silence between us. I ate with studied nonchalance, gazing steadfastly into my plate, or staring off into the dining room beyond the kitchen. The creature that looked like my father sat alone in there, shadowy and imperturbable, its hands folded neatly on the table.

Aunt Rachel said, Jake, it’s time to move on with your life. You must accept your father’s death and go on. You cannot grieve forever.

I pushed my vegetables around my plate. Words swollen and poisonous formed in my gut; I could not force them into my throat.

She said, Jake, I want to be your friend.

Again, I did not answer. I looked off into the dining room. The thing looked back, silent, inscrutable. And then, almost without thought, I began to speak, expelling the words in a deadly emotionless monotone: You must be crazy. Do you think that thing can replace him?

Aunt Rachel lowered her fork with shaking fingers. Her lips had gone white. Of course not. Your father can never be replaced, Jake.

That’s not my father, I said. It’s nothing like him!

Jake, I know—

But she could not finish. I found myself standing, my napkin clenched in one hand. Screaming: It’s not! It’s not a thing like him! You must be crazy, you old witch—

And then I was silent. A deadly calm descended in the kitchen. I felt light-headed, as though I were floating somewhere around the ceiling, tethered to my body by the most tenuous of threads. The things I had said made no sense, I knew, but they felt true.

My aunt said, Look me in the eye, Jake.

I forced my stone-heavy eyes to meet hers.

You must never speak to me like that again, she said. Do you understand?

Biting my lip, I nodded.

Your father is dead, she told me. I understand you are in pain, but it is time you face the facts and begin to consider the feelings of others again. You must never run away from the truth, Jake, however unpleasant. Because once you begin running, you can never stop.

She folded her napkin neatly beside her plate and pushed her chair away from the table. Come here, she said. Bend over and put your hands on your knees.

Reluctantly, I did as she asked. She struck me three quick painless blows across the backside, and I felt tears of humiliation well up in my eyes. I bit my lip—bit back the tears—and finished my meal in silence, but afterwards I crept upstairs to stretch on the narrow bed and stare at the familiar ceiling. A sharp woodsy odor of burning leaves drifted through the window, and shadows slowly inhabited the room. An orchestra of insects began to warm up in the long flat space behind the house.

I dozed, and woke later in the night to a room spun full of gossamer moonlight. The creature sat in the chair by the night stand, cradling the photograph in its unlined hands. It looked up, something whirring in its neck, and placed the photograph on the night stand where I could see it.

I’ll go if you like, it said.

I sat up, wincing. Light, please, I told the lamp, and as the room brightened, I gazed into the picture. A boy curiously unlike myself gazed back at me, eyes shining, arm draped about the slim, dark-headed man next to him. My father’s lean, beard-shadowed face had already begun to grow unfamiliar. Looking at the photograph, I could see him—how could I not?—but at night, in the darkness, I could not picture him. His lips came to me, or his eyes, or the long curve of his jaw, but they came like pieces of a worn-out jigsaw puzzle—they would not fit together true. And now, of course, he is lost to me utterly; only sometimes, when I look into a mirror, I catch a glimpse of him there and it frightens me.

I reached out a finger to the photograph. Glass. Cold glass, walling me away forever.

I remembered the dirt as it trickled through my fingers; I remembered the sound it made as it spattered the lid of the casket.

You’re not my father, I said.

No.

We were quiet for a while. Something small and toothy gnawed away inside me.

What are you? I asked.

I’m a machine.

That’s all? Just a machine, like a car or a radio?

Something like that. More complicated. A simulated person, they call me—a sim. I’m a new thing. There aren’t many machines in the world like me, though maybe there will be.

I could cut you off, I said. I could just cut you off.

Yes.

And if I do?

The sim lifted its hands and shrugged. Gone, it said. Erased and irrecoverable. Everything that makes me me.

Show me. I want to know.

The sim’s expression did not change. It merely leaned forward and lifted the thick hair along its neck. And there it was: a tiny switch, like a jewel gleaming in the light. I reached out and touched it, ran my finger through the coarse hair, touched the skin, rubbery and cold, thinking of what he had said: Erased and irrecoverable.

You’re a machine, I said. That’s all. And everything—the fear and anger, the hope and despair—everything drained out of me, leaving a crystalline void. I was glass. If you had touched me, I would have shattered into a thousand shining fragments. My aunt must be crazy.

Perhaps she only wants to make you happy.

You can’t replace my father.

I don’t want to.

Insects had begun to hurl themselves at the window screen, and I told the light to shut itself off. The darkness seemed much thicker than before, and I could perceive the sim only as a silhouette against the bright moonlit square of the window. It reached out and picked up the photograph again and I thought: It can see in the dark.

Who knew what it could do?

The sim said, Did you go to many games at Memorial Park?

You ought to know. You’re supposed to be just like him.

I hardly know a thing about him, the sim said. And then: Jake, I’m not really a thing like him at all. I just look like him.

That was the only game we ever went to.

I see.

All at once that day came flooding back to me—its sights and sounds, its sensations. I wanted to describe the agony of suspense that built with every pitch, the hush of the crowd and the flat audible crack of the bat when a slugger launched the ball clear into the summer void, a pale blur against the vaulted blue. I remembered those things, and more: the oniony smell of the hot dogs and relish my father and I had shared, the bite of an icy Coke in the heat, and through it all the recurrent celebratory strain of the calliope. A thousand things I could not say.

So we sat there in silence, and finally the sim said, Do you think we could be friends?

I shrugged, thinking of my aunt. She too had wished to be my friend. Now, in the silent moonlit bedroom, the scene at the table came back to me. An oily rush of shame surged through me. Is it really so bad, running away?

I don’t know. I don’t know things like that.

What am I going to do?

Maybe you don’t have to run away. The sim cocked its head with a mechanical hum. A soft crescent of moonlight illuminated one cheek, and I could see a single eye, flat and depthless as polished tin. But all the rest was shadow. It said, I’m not your father, Jake. But I could be your friend.

Without speaking, I lay down, pulled the covers up to my chin, and listened for a while to the whispery chatter of the automaids as they scoured the bottom floor. A breeze murmured about the eaves, and somewhere far away in the hills, an owl hooted, comforting and friendly, and that was a sound I had never heard in Baltimore.

I had just begun to doze when the sim spoke again.

Maybe sometime we can pitch the ball around, it said, and through the thickening web of sleep I thought, for just a moment, that it was my father. But, of course, it wasn’t. An unutterable tide of grief washed over me, bearing me to an uneasy shore of dreams.

That October, I sat alone in the sun-drenched parlor and listened to the weekend games of the ’61 World Series on my aunt’s radio. The Yankee sluggers had gone cold. Mantle, recovering from late-season surgery, batted only six times in the whole series; Maris had spent himself in the chase for Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.

Yankee hurler Whitey Ford took up the slack. I read about his game one shutout in the newspaper. Four days later, when he took the mound again, I listened from hundreds of miles away. In the third inning, the sim came into the room and sat down across from me. It steepled its fingers and closed its eyes. We did not speak.

Ford pitched two more flawless innings before retiring with an injury in the sixth.

I stood up, suddenly angry, and glared at the sim. You ought to have a name, I guess, I said.

The sim opened its eyes. It did not speak.

I’ll call you Ford, I said bitterly. That’s a machine’s name.

Dreams plagued me that year. One night, I seemed to wake in the midst of a cheering crowd at Memorial Stadium. But gradually the park grew hushed. The game halted below, and the players, the bright-clad vendors, the vast silent throng—one by one, they turned upon me their voiceless gaze. I saw that I was surrounded by the dead: my father, the mother I had never known, a thousand others, all the twisted, shrunken dead. A tainted wind gusted among the seats, fanning my hair, and the silent corpses began to crumble. Desiccated flesh sloughed like ash from the bones, whirled in dark funnels through