James Mason

1
James had been watching the paperboy for months. It was summer, and the first time since 1971, according to his ledger, that the newspaper had been delivered to his door by a kid on a bike. The bike was a blue Shwinn, with a banana seat and a carriage on the back, holding a neighborhood-worth of newsprint, wrapped in pink rubberbands or stuffed into plastic bags for protection from the weather. The kid was a war refugee, it occurred to James, one of the Southeast Asians he read about in the papers— a straight line of black hair across his forehead; eyes like barely-cracked walnuts.

“How strange,” thought James, “for a kid like that to go out and deliver the news, which is written about him.”

One day James caught the boy testing the doorknob. James was watching him through the pinhole when, instead of tossing the paper onto the stoop and passing the house, he walked up to the door and knocked. Then knocked again. His head pressed up against the door, James could feel the vibration in the wood. Then the doorknob, which was securely locked, jangled uselessly. Finding himself in such proximity with a foreigner, and always a little unsure how to act among strangers, James began to bark like an angry dog, which succeeded in frightening the boy away.

2
“One motion, each moment,” James had to remind himself, to spare him another day of remaining in bed, turning his head back and forth, eyes scanning the walls for slight variations of line and color, from which to decipher hidden meanings.

The ceiling fan stopped working months ago. The air flow in the house was static, so that the dust particles seemed paralyzed in zero-gravity— suspended by invisible electric currents, or by the very rays of light that reveal them, angled and warm through the unclean glass. And James remembered reading that, according to certain physical laws, if motion is slowed, then time must be slowed too— almost to the point of pause. It was this aura of stillness in the house that convinced James never to get a television, the flow of which mechanism, James thought, might one day be reversed so that instead of giving him having access to the world, it would have access to him.

3
Another thing that James’ ledger reported that day was a visit from the meter reader— a woman— the first since he began keeping his record thirty-one years ago. And of course, the usual appearance of the mailman (male, hispanic, trimmed mustache), and the trash man (Russian or Polish, thirty-something, dirty-blonde, thick- bodied). The year before, a census-taker visited this house, and was so persistent that James finally opened his door to her. The questions confused him— set him off on mental digressions so far from the original line of inquiry that he could barely respond at all. “Are you the owner of this home?” would bring back memories of its purchase in 1954, before they put in the highway, and the young expecting couple who sold it to him, before moving away to a larger house in the suburbs. The question, “How many people live in this household?” would set James to wondering who else might be living there with him undetected— Why does she ask such questions? Does she know something I don’t?

Sometimes it seemed to James, through the ever-narrowing pinhole on his front door, that he was visited by a thousand changing uniforms, and inside those uniforms, no person. Or as if it were the same person changing outfits, and that ghost-bureaucrat kept coming back to check up on him several times a day— to report on his whereabouts and activities, which never changed.

4
To keep the body busy— to subdue it into the unconscious activity of the everyday— James had learned to whittle. It was one thing that his nerves could do without being told. Everything else had to be uttered, commanded— “lift the skillet” (to an arm), “spread the oil in the pan by slowly rotating” (to the wrist), “release handle” (to the fingers). There is memory in the hands— James remembered reading somewhere— that survives the severest blow to the head. But, like all other forms of memory, it is selective, and biased towards what we wish were true.

James had recently lost the ability to focus his thoughts on reading books, or writing them, which since retiring from the Navy had been his only preoccupation. So whittling had become the cipher of his old age. As far as writing went, he could now only collect and record bits of data. His brain, hand, and pen did not work in harmony. But the whittling knife made sense.

Living as he did along the canal that divides the Downcity from the East Side, James whittled mostly model ships. In three days, on the anniversary of his father’s death, James planned to go outside and let the small fleet sail down the water to its tributary.

Together with his father and uncles— long dead now— James’ family had given fifty-five years to the navy. James’ father had spent his old age trying to take back those years, to wrest from the government the restitution he was owed for the sacrifice of his leg to a “friendly” mine during the first world war (with which undertaking he frequently occupied himself in times when James was in his care).

As for James himself, he grew up fully aware of how much greater a sacrifice his father and uncles had made, and with a persistent feeling that he himself owed much more to the Navy than he had given.

James worked as an off-base decoder for the Navy during World War II. In those years, every division of the military had its own intelligence unit, with very little communication between them. James’ team consisted of himself and two other men, both of whom, like James’ himself, were quiet and solitary. One of the officers, whom they called Vance, was so fat that James wondered how he got into the Navy, and whom James never recalled seeing without his spectacles; the other officer, Larsen, grew a short-cropped, red beard, in defiance of Navy regulations, and mumbled to himself. Together, yet alone, the three cryptologists sat hunched at their stations working out solutions to problems created by the Japanese. Occasionally, it would occur to James that a cryptologist is the student of his enemy— the teacher knows the answer, but a student must work it out on his own. Though, in this case, if the formula he sought was found, it could save men’s lives. Before long, Larsen’s mumbling would stop sounding to James like code and begin to sound like prayer.

5
The next day, James opened the shutters of his window, and looked out while the trash man emptied the bin into his truck, and moved on. As the sound of the trash truck faded into the distance, James looked upon the day as if to say, “You’re here, and I’m here, and we might as well just get used to each other.”

The sunlight was scattershot through the walnut tree on his small square of lawn; forming scintillating patterns as it passed through the blinds. James heeded the advice he’d heard since he was a boy, not to look directly at the sun. He whittled instead, whittled until his hands were tired, until the sun no longer shone through the East window, until the wood in his hands was smooth as glass.

The paperboy had come back that day with a slice of beef jerky between his fingers. He had knocked, and when no answer came, not even a sigh or whimper, he left the wrinkled meat on the mat outside the door. When James went to pick up the paper that afternoon, he saw the sliver of meat on the mat, and stared down at it like a line of code to be interpreted.

6
James finished another ship, cut out of a fresh panel of wood. Hollow, narrow, canoe-like, this ship might have been designed for speed. Most of the boats were shallow, given the quality and type of wood he had to use; but every tenth attempt or so, he built a frigate that could have sailed for the British Navy. Cursed with a seaman’s superstition, which turned any suggestion of ease into an omen of ill-luck, he appraised his latest creation with modest regard. “I guess she’s seaworthy,” he said. “She’ll take to the river, anyway.”

With her sharp, ridged contours and plashy complexion, James thought, she was not the prettiest ship to float on water, but she would make it out to the Atlantic, and perhaps, further. He named her “Sinker.” In Japan, James recalled hearing, mothers do not praise their children, because they fear that evil spirits will overhear and take the good child for their own.

James held onto the knob for a long while before turning it and opening it outward into the light.

Whenever James passed through the threshold of his house into the open world, even in the summer, he felt slightly cold, as though the architecture of his house were another layer of clothes that he were shedding. Denuded, James walked down the hill from his house, to the Main Street canal, in a gray church-suit, a belt and pin with the Navy insignia, and a white fedora hat.

When James was young, gentlemen still wore hats. Wearing a hat was a sign that you were humble before God. In a courtroom, or at a funeral, removing your hat meant that you understood the gravity of the place. But in the city, where you saw a head go bare, there were sure to be ten more with hats upon them and faces underneath that scowled at the gall of it. From his red colonial on Benefit Street, James watched as the generations lost their sense of modesty, the way a child might lose a shoe but hobble on, indifferent to its lack.

7
James’ only contact was a sister-in-law, Nancy. James frequently thought of her as still a teenager, because she was only fifteen when they met, in 1942. Her sister— James’ wife— Helen, was seven years her senior. And when he thought of Nancy, he still thought of her as a precocious child, full of coyness and curiosity. Nancy made a point of visiting James once a year, meeting him at the pier on August 8th, for the boat ritual.

“Oh. You,” James said, spotting Nancy in his peripheral vision.

“Yeah, ‘oh, you’ too,” said Nancy, putting a hand on his shoulder and stroking it gently.

James pulled his arm away jerkily. “Helen isn’t home. Come back later; she’ll probably be around,” he said.

“She’s dead,” Nancy said. “Been dead twenty-eight years to the day.”

James laughed. “That’s what I keep telling her; but they won’t let her go at the office. They need her there, almost much as I do. Damn, if Helen left now, they wouldn’t know where to find their own thumbs.”

If James were looking in Nancy’s direction, he would have seen her wrinkled eyes and freckled face dropping, her chin settling on the chest.
Looking vaguely in her direction, James added, “Maybe she should ask for a raise.”

“Jean wants to see you again,” Nancy said. “I told her, ‘What’s the point?’ but she wants to come see for herself. She’s stubborn, like her father.”

Now James frowned, as though a part of him understood. “Helen will take care of Jean.”

James had met Helen the day he finished college, and he understood then that it would be his last day with her before heading for duty in the Navy. So they talked and held hands in the quad until the sun went down, and before they knew it the sun came back up the next day, and James spent his first week as an officer sleep- deprived, feeling cold and hot at the same time— sweaty and thirsty, but with no appetite at all. Helen, on the other hand, was just about to get a head start on her second year by taking summer classes at Providence College, but knew with a stoic certainty that now she would not be able to finish her studies— because she would, inevitably, marry the lovestruck soldier.

“You guys were so lovey-dovey, it made everyone sick,” Nancy said. “I mean, sick. You guys were disgusting.”

“Nobody forced you to spy on us,” James returned.

“How else was I supposed to learn? We didn’t own a TV.”

Their first and only pregnancy was twins. Twin girls. They named the older one Mae and the younger, Jean. But the first one died before she left the womb, and the second one lived, but complications from her birth caused Helen to suffer liver failure, and death.

“I realized,” Nancy said, “that you only knew Helen for four years before she passed away. It’s weird; I mean, four years is nothing. You practically didn’t even know her.”

James smiled like it hurt.

“I know Helen better than I know anything,” he said.

Nancy looked into his profile. Unlike James, she could not see the young man underneath the old one. “That’s not saying much,” she said.

The water plunked against the sides of the pier, echoing underneath. The sun was slowly approaching the water horizon.

James opened the paper bag in which he kept his fleet of small ships, and pulled them out one at a time and ceremoniously pushed each one out to sea. They looked, at the sunset-moment into which James had quite accidentally stumbled, like real ships; and the sky, like fake sky.

“There’s no way of saying it without being cruel,” Nancy began, “but it’s time for you to move on; find someone else who fulfills you in the same way. It’s never too late.”

Nancy thought that, perhaps, in the dead space between her earnest platitudes and James’ response, her words may have found traction in the inner James, the one she had not seen for several years. Then, abruptly, James let out a fierce laugh that, after a few moments, turned into a cough.

“Do you remember when you used to give her those timepieces?” Nancy asked him. “For her birthday, Christmas, Easter, her graduation...”

“Of course,” James said, watching the object of so many hours of his devotion disappear into the distance. “She collected them.”

“No, James. She never did.”

James stood silently until the ships crowned the limit of his vision and were gone.

When he got back, James felt a slight disturbance in the permanence of the room. A breeze, unlike the calm he usually felt in the study. An open window jostled the blinds, making the louvers click against each other in a faint staccato. He looked up to meet the face of the paperboy, silhouetted by an azure sky, with neat rows of hair and peat-brown eyes. “Hi,” he said, with casual aplomb, as if spying on old men were a fashionable thing to do.

James took a long moment convincing himself that the boy’s presence was, in fact, material rather than theoretical. James was troubled by the boy’s face, marked with the pox, and utterly unreadable. He could be thinking anything, James thought, narrowing his eyes in unconscious imitation of the boy.

“Where’s your dog?” the boy asked, passing a biscuit from hand to hand, which motion, for what reason James could not fully apprehend, made his own hands feel suddenly weary and sore. “I thought you had a dog,” he says.

Knowing only that he wanted him to go away, James began to bark.

8
James collected phone directories from around the country. Sometimes, James looked up other James Masons, added them up, determined what percentages they accounted for in their region— always statistically insignificant, falling somewhere between .0001 and .0004 nationwide. He reported this data in his ledger. James was still missing directories from twelve states, a total of thirty-four area codes to go.

James’ area code, 401, was an important number, he thought, a prime number; the sum of the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet; the number that occurs most frequently in the Christian Bible; the number of deities in the pantheon of the Orisha tribe of West Africa (who are referred to as “the four hundred and the one”—the many and the only); the number found on the hull of the Titanic— a ship on which many passengers bound for Providence had walked, talked, and dined, but never arrived.

As he lay down in bed that night, James’ mind wound its coils around the thought of his wife, in this city, those days. In the Navy, James spent much of his time with maps. They often drew circles on the maps— the radii of locations where a communiqué was intercepted, or in which a foreign object was spotted. They drew circles, and circles around the circles, to suggest degrees of distance from the center. On his cerebral map, as sleep dropped, James drew four-dimensional circles around Helen in the year 1942, in the city of Providence.

9
James noticed the paperboy crouching on the sidewalk across the street, looking between the cracks at something tiny. The boy was talking to himself, in another language. He thought of Larsen.

James went out the door and crossed the unlined street. “What are you doing here?” James asked the boy.

“I live here,” the kid said, pointing to the house behind him— the one across the street from James’.

That’s impossible, James thought, a missionary and his wife live in that house. Or was that a long .time ago? “Don’t you go to school?”

“It’s summer,” the kid said.

He had an answer for everything, James thought. He’s a clever one. “Why are you always coming up to my door?”

“I deliver the paper,” the boy said. Then, “and my mother asked me to meet everyone in the neighborhood and to greet them.”

James bristled at this. So, his parents sent him out to spy for them. “But why?”

“The only people my parents know are people who live far away.”

He was standing now, his head still looking down at the sidewalk. His English was suspiciously good, though heavily accented. “They want me to meet all the neighbors, but no one is home all day but you.”

James stood quietly.

“Why are you taking your house apart?” the boy asked, pointing across the street, to where James’ house, from this distance, appeared full of holes— foot-sized gaps in the wooden structure that gave it the appearance of being chewed at slowly from the inside. One hole had grown so large that you could see the frame, which itself had been carved out of— whittled into small ships that were, by now, floating lazily down to the ocean, or sunk. “Are you building something?”

But James did not hear what the boy was saying now. His mind was circling around something that the boy had said earlier. How did it go? My parents know people who live far away....People live far away....The only people are people who live far away....My parents are people who live far away....?

10
James’ ledger had a light brown cover, tape-bound, cracked in the middle as though the whole book had been frequently folded. The yellowed pages were covered in tiny perfect letters, which grew larger and more awkward as one leafed through it, until, at the end, it appeared as though someone had simply broken pencils over the page and let the book close over the graphite dust.

When he met his daughter Jean for the first time, she was twenty, and a student at college. She had always believed that Nancy and David were her natural parents, and was awestruck when she learned that her hermit uncle was really her father. She pretended that she had to interview him for a History class, and he went along with it, because he felt that he owed her something. She asked him about his life, his tragic marriage, and his years in the Navy; James hesitated before telling her that he killed no one, that he saved no one, and that he never did quite enough in his capacity as an officer or a husband.

The next time he met Jean, it was after he underwent emergency heart surgery, and she came to the hospital to make peace with him before he could die. She confessed her anger, she thanked him for bringing her into the world, but let him know that she wanted so much more from him than what he had given her. She cried and beat her chest. She wrung her hands as though they were wet clothes to be strung up.

But if James could hear her speaking, he showed no hint of it. Instead, he looked down into his lap, at his own hands, which were, to his surprise, old man hands.