Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman

want to move. I want to sit here and finish this bottle of wine, and what’s wrong with that? This is what I know now. I see the glass. I see the wine. I taste. This is who I am. Now.
    “The communists were scattered and scared. They knew …”
    The surfer finds his wave.
    “We thought there’d be tanks, like before, like in ’68 …”
    He’s up.
    “Hardly a shot was fired. We went from city to city. Champagne and barbed wire …”
    The wave lifts quickly, steep, sharp.
    “They were waiting for magic …”
    The surfer slices down the folding water.
    “Democracy and capitalism will save us …”
    Faster he moves.
    “A new vocabulary spread overnight across half a continent …”
    He’s in the curl.
    “A wall fell. New faces with new power. The unimaginable before us …”
    He’s lost.
    “You wrote about it, James. Every day for months …”
    He’s free of the curl, racing along the wave’s last remnant.
    “An era ended. The missiles in their silos. It can happen, the impossible.”
    The surfer rides to shore, standing, he doesn’t fall.
    “What a time, James …”
    He picks up his board and jogs toward a twisted towel in the sand.
    “C’mon. We’re soaked. We have a hotel room down the beach.”
    He takes the towel and walks, shrinking in the distance.
    “Okay, James. What’s my name?”
    I cannot answer her.

six
    Eva’s going to keep him out tonight. She does that sometimes, tries to spill herself into him, compressing all their years into hours. Maybe it’ll bring him back. Maybe the mention of Prague or Budapest at the right time in the pitch of night will glow across his synapses and become as real to him as Kurt and Vera. I pray for his tangled brain to see. It can happen. There are miracles. A miracle led me to James. He and I are forever entwined.
    Before she died, and what a sad way it was, Vera told me in a letter barbed with notations and thick as a book that she was my mother and Kurt my father. It was a startling revelation; a voice echoing across time. The letter was kept from me for many years. It lay in a taped box beneath a floorboard hidden by a Persian carpet in a small house in New England. I had walked over that carpet all my life and never knew that just below my feet was the story of how I came to be. Secrets, though, like air bubbles, wriggle their way to the surface. When I finally read it, Vera had been dead a long while, but her words, ahhh her words, coiled through me and found home. “This tale, my daughter, is for you.” Is there a sweeter phrase? Page after page, Vera whispered to me. I pieced her story together and made a map of words and memories that led me to James. My half-brother doesn’t know this side of Kurt and Vera. Things changed, were altered back when he was a boy, and by the time he became a man, and his name went from Jim to James, he had no inkling. Why would he? We were orphans in different places, children of worlds that touched briefly and bounced away. The letter told me this. Yet there is still much I do not know. Imagine you have a life but thenyou discover you have another that lies in the murk of an addled man’s mind. My story lives inside his darkness. James must remember more. I wait. I perch like a blackbird on a branch, patient for lost trinkets and flashes of tin.
    When James is out like this with Eva, I come to his room and sit in the moonlight. The halls are quiet, the deranged sedated and tucked away for the night — it’s amazing how the muddled brain can slumber — and the only sound is the occasional shuffle of nurse shoes on polished floors or pills spilled across a counter, drumming like rain on a roof.
    I read James’s newspaper stories and try to put myself in those moments of history. It will bring us closer if I can experience them the way he did: NO SHOTS FIRED IN CZECH “VELVET REVOLUTION.” SLEDGEHAMMERS, FREEDOM BREAK OPEN BERLIN WALL. ROMANIAN PRESIDENT EXECUTED BY FIRING SQUAD . And my favorite, from a