In the Image
Dedication
For my parents,
Susan and Matthew Horn,
who took me all over the world,
and for my husband,
Brendan Schulman,
who took me home.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 Tourists
Chapter 2 In the Valley of Discarded Names
Chapter 3 Barbarians at the Gates
Chapter 4 The Missing Link
Chapter 5 Go Bang Your Head Against the Wall
Chapter 6 A Long and Dreamless Night
Chapter 7 The Same Long and Dreamless Night, Elsewhere
Chapter 8 The Better Deal
Chapter 9 Floodgates
Chapter 10 The Book of Hurricane Job
Chapter 11 A Tourist in the Lost City
Landsmann Family Tree
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
More Praise for In The Image
Copyright
CHAPTER 1
TOURISTS
ACCIDENTS OF FATE are rarely fatal accidents, but once in a while they are. Two accidents of fate occurred in Leora’s life before she turned seventeen. First, her friend Naomi Landsmann, walking home from their high school on a bright, cold winter afternoon, dropped her glove while crossing a street, bent down to pick it up, and was run over by a car whose newly licensed driver never bothered to look back. And second, eleven months after Naomi’s death, Naomi’s grandfather Bill Landsmann, spotting Leora’s name in the local paper, tried and failed to become Leora’s friend.
Bill Landsmann was a tourist. He didn’t look like a tourist—no loud-printed shirt, no sunglasses, no healthy tan. In fact, he didn’t look much like the type to go anywhere. He was an old man, somewhere in his sixties or seventies, with a completely white-haired head and a fragile, almost waiflike body that made it particularly hard to picture him lounging on a beach or trekking through the tundra. He had arms like thin reeds and legs like baby tree trunks, and it looked as if a wave or a gust of wind could easily knock him down. Nothing would make Bill Landsmann stand out in a crowd of old men of the skinny variety except perhaps his voice, which was the only clue to the casual observer that he had been anywhere at all. Bill Landsmann spoke with a pronounced German accent, not a harsh one but a refined one, adjusting his pronunciation of r’s to suit the word and the occasion, the kind of German accent that might at one time have suggested elegance and culture. There was, however, one other clue to the fact that he had been around. When he looked at things, he didn’t see them as other people do. Most people register what they see, however unconsciously, as part of a continuum of time and space, each place and moment melting into the next like sand castles dissolving underwater. But when Bill Landsmann looked around, he saw the world separated into frames, as if his eye were a camera and he were cropping out rectangles of the world, blinking an eye and trapping a moment on the film of his retina. And it showed in the way he glanced at things.