Shadow Man: A Novel
Jeffrey Fleishman
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 1586421980
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Foreign correspondent James Ryan was there whenever the world changed: in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in the former Soviet bloc. But now he can't remember these events; he can't recall anything long-term, except the summer of his fifteenth year following his mother's death. It was the summer his father told him to call him Kurt. The summer the mysterious and enchanting Vera burst into their lonely, quiet lives. The summer his own world opened, then irrevocably changed.
James, at fifty-two, suffers from a severe case of early onset Alzheimer's. The novel unravels James's predicament through the clear glimpses he retains of that long ago summer, and through the desperate attempts of his wife and his nurse to bring him back to the present, if only for stolen moments. Each has her motives: his wife trying not to lose the man with whom she shared so much - wars, death, love, loss of a child, history. And his nurse, the half sister he never knew he had, needing James’s adolescent memory to understand the biological father and mother she never met.
Told from the perspective of a man betrayed by his own mind, Shadow Man is a novel of identity and suspense that travels across continents and deep into the pasts that make us each who we are. It explores the power of memory to heal and to mask, and of the limits of unconditional love. Set in Philly and the eastern shore of yesteryear, in the Middle East, and throughout Eastern Europe, Fleishman's trademark descriptive but spare lyricism shines. Shadow Man is a touching and haunting novel perhaps most similar to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though it is a work of fiction.
strangled widows in their bathrobes before the police arrested him climbing out of a window. I had packed shorts, T-shirts, one pair of jeans, my dictionary, and the Beatles’ White Album. You never know when you might come across a stereo. The White Album was my favorite, a jumble of moods and images. That’s what I liked most about the Beatles; they were magpies (one of my favorite words, looked up after I heard it in a poem) gathering a little of this and a little of that and turning them into
Then something happens, and there is blankness, an empty canvas stretching millions of miles long. I don’t know. I hear something in me sometimes, a voice calling through deep, deep bone, but it never surfaces.” “I will tell you about me, James.” She is Eva Kapuscinski. She was a linguistics professor at the University of Warsaw. Her father was a partisan killed in that beguiling time of the 1950s, the beginning of the long run of communist tyranny; her mother was a poet who hanged herself from
it’s useless. I’m talking to a man with a blank face.” She smears jam on her toast, puts the knife down hard. She leans toward me. “I’m angry that this story has become mine alone. My burden, not yours. That’s not fair, James. Part of me thinks part of you is blessed not to know that story. Is that selfish?” She leans back and picks up the knife, studies the jam on its blade; she seems to bury a word, or maybe a sentence, behind her lips. She breathes out, closes, then slowly opens, her eyes.
damage. I was not that cynical, or maybe I was not that scientific. I believed in cells and spirits, a commingling of things like dead plankton floating, descending, falling onto the ocean bed or accumulating on reefs and the hulls of ships, giving new life, a kind of resurrection in the depths. Maybe it was that way in the sky and space, too, like those comets in Nut Johnson’s telescope; they could be fiery, galactic matter as easily as they could be souls racing between purgatory and paradise.
pull me away from Kurt. I didn’t let go but one of the men pried my fingers from Kurt’s, and the men lifted me and it seemed I was floating. When they put me on the ground, I dove back and held Kurt again. Tighter. The men peeled me away and I cursed them. They sat Vera in a chair and draped her in a blanket, and she almost disappeared; a cop drew chalk marks on the carpet and another one slid the gun into a plastic bag the way I had seen them do in the movies. It all moved slowly as if