4. But when he arrived at the house of his son, and his son’s wife, and his two grandsons, William Landsmann found redemption— 5. in the form of slides, his own slides, images of his granddaughter, Naomi Landsmann, 6. which William Landsmann’s wife, who was sick in the mind but not in the soul, had sent far away to their son in her madness, 7. or perhaps not in madness at all, but in the wisdom, even out of the deepest depths of forgetfulness, of knowing what is worth keeping.

8. May this memory, and each memory created in its image, be a blessing.

Chapter 11 A Tourist in the Lost City

CHAPTER 11

A TOURIST IN THE LOST CITY

ATTENTION, ATTENTION!!!!
NEW YORK HAS SUNK INTO THE ATLANTIC!

THE NIGHT before her wedding, Leora had a dream. She dreamt that she had become a deep-sea diver.

It was nighttime in her dream, just as it was outside while she was dreaming: a warm summer night, shuddering with summer-night whispers, moist grass sleeping under a thin mist that hung in front of her parents’ house like a veil. Leora’s body remained sleeping, tossing uneasily through its very last night in its narrow single bed, but she rose up out of the bed and left her body behind. Not like the way you see it in movies. She didn’t turn into a ghostly image of herself, glancing back at her body and smirking as she went off to another world. It was more straightforward than that, as if her body were a sister of hers with whom she had been sharing that narrow bed, and she simply kicked that sister to the side a bit to free herself from the bed, stood up, and walked away, leaving her sister tossing through her violent sleep behind her.

She left her bedroom slowly, treading silently in the dark, leaving the lights out. She walked down the stairs and out the front door into the summer-night mist, wrapped in the vibrations of chirping crickets who were rattling the air as if to scare people back into their houses, to keep intruders out of the deep enchanted summer night. She walked through her neighborhood, then past Jason’s parents’ house, then past Naomi’s old house, then past Bill Landsmann’s house, and then out onto the highway. No one was on the road.

She walked along the highway for a very long time, passing signs beckoning her first toward the towns where her parents grew up, closer to New York City, and then to the ones where her grandparents grew up, even closer, toward that ring of ruined sprawl where her great-grandparents once dropped anchor like Columbus, setting foot for the first time in the New World. She passed these exits, but she didn’t take them. Instead she kept walking.