The ghosts and remnants of an abandoned American military base in Germany. A medieval monastery's modern secrets. An unsuspecting professor uncovers much more than he imagined, but who can he tell?
Jason Carr knew his DNA test results would be complicated, but not to the extent of compelling him to visit a decommissioned Army base and a medieval German monastery, and in the process uncovering a world of surprises involving his family.
As an established university graphic design historian and researcher, his proficiency in the intricate design and text of ancient manuscripts was something he treasured enhancing and sharing, ever since living in an American military community in late 1980s Cold War Germany.
He had been confident in his expertise and place in a comfortable academic life of teaching and disseminating his research. But keeping newly discovered secrets from newly discovered family was a challenge he could not have imagined or prepared for.
How to be informed by history, even complex personal history, while also moving on and forgetting, would prove to be Jason's greatest trial yet.
How do you make unimaginable connections, uncover shocking truths, and then decide who gets to know?
The ghosts and remnants of an abandoned American military base in Germany. A medieval monastery's modern secrets. An unsuspecting professor uncovers much more than he imagined, but who can he tell?
Jason Carr knew his DNA test results would be complicated, but not to the extent of compelling him to visit a decommissioned Army base and a medieval German monastery, and in the process uncovering a world of surprises involving his family.
As an established university graphic design historian and researcher, his proficiency in the intricate design and text of ancient manuscripts was something he treasured enhancing and sharing, ever since living in an American military community in late 1980s Cold War Germany.
He had been confident in his expertise and place in a comfortable academic life of teaching and disseminating his research. But keeping newly discovered secrets from newly discovered family was a challenge he could not have imagined or prepared for.
How to be informed by history, even complex personal history, while also moving on and forgetting, would prove to be Jason's greatest trial yet.
How do you make unimaginable connections, uncover shocking truths, and then decide who gets to know?
“DNA tests are the astrology of the medical fields.”
Jason’s declarations such as this one often made Amanda wonder how much success she would ever see with him and always caused her to carefully consider her response. The conversational impasse between the therapist and patient, on trendy bright yellow furniture of a soft fabric he couldn’t identify in the dim lighting, was made almost cinematic by the delicate music strains coming from a spherical Bluetooth speaker in the corner. It flowed through him with low, pulsing sounds that combined a synthesizer with some sort of flute.
“OK, you’re the professor, I’ll trust you,” she said, after several seconds of eye lock. “But I am curious, who said that?”
“A colleague upstairs in my building. A very smart one,” he said, his arm shooting up into the air with index finger raised. “An art historian, actually.”
“So, a graphic design professor and his art historian colleague have decided that everyone involved in sequencing genomes is the equivalent of, what, quacks or charlatans?”
He laughed. She looked at him through her white, thick-framed glasses that dominated her face, surrounding eyes that were mischievous but steady. He knew her well enough to know she had an office persona and a social one. Her legs were pulled up onto the seat so that her knees were up nearly at chin level. The clipboard rested against her abdomen through pressure and gravity, while the pen stood ready for action in her right hand.
“You still haven’t decided?” she asked, her face softening. “You make this too hard.”
“How long have we known each other?” he asked. “I mean, twenty years?”
“It feels like a hundred right now,” she said. “And speaking of time, let’s get some things done here. We don’t have that much time today, do we?”
An hour ago, he had been working in his office across campus, reveling in the fact that he had a rare free day to engage in some research. Most of his students had turned in their projects, and his departmental committee obligations could continue to be ignored for another week or two or three. The university hired him here mainly to do research, and the time to further it was precious and intermittent.
Not one to have previously sought out therapy, he had enjoyed getting to know the adult staff over at the campus counseling facility as he accompanied the occasional student to get checked in to get checked out. He was excited to discover his old friend Amanda as one of the longtime counselors, which further encouraged him to make an appointment, this time for himself.
When his phone had rung that morning with her name on the screen, he groaned. She had taken him on as a client, allowing him to leapfrog her waiting list, as a favor due to their grad school connection when they had known each other in Arizona. He knew instantly that he had forgotten, and as he answered the call, he was already putting on his jacket and leaving the office, so that he could truthfully tell her he was “running late.”
“You forgot again, didn’t you?”
“I mean, I guess so,” he said, a combination of real and forced contrition in his voice.
“Well, hurry over, and we can probably fit in about half an appointment,” she said. “You remember where to find me?”
“Funny. See you in a minute, and I am so sorry.”
It was raining steadily and had been for most of the week, and the cool early November air had finally rejected any memories of the Arkansas summer heat. The occasional low rumble of thunder made its way across the minor Boston Mountains and through the campus buildings and leaf-covered green spaces.
As he scurried across campus, his cell phone rang, and he almost expected Amanda to be canceling the appointment.
“It’s OK,” he muttered to himself, seeing it was his mother. He quickly clicked the side button to silence the call. It was dispiriting to receive frequent calls from his mother asking him the same question each time, whether he remembered when the two of them went to see Superman at the theater when he was ten. He did most of the time. “She won’t remember she called anyway.”
Now, he stared at Amanda for a moment, wondering whether to be annoyed or just admit the fact that he had now missed three appointments. Not exactly a cliffhanger from their last session, but he could see that she was ever more interested in the answer.
“You know that I’m very nervous. Jennifer is insisting I get it done,” he said. “I stand with all other men through history who feel that if you don’t get tested medically, nothing bad happens. And then, when it does, you’re just dead. It’s a great plan.”
“You realize why we have such limited time today because you quite literally forgot about our meeting. And there are much worse things than being dead,” she said. “Of course, you know this already.”
He sat, head slightly rocking back and forth, with no words coming to him.
“I know. I know,” he said. The accompanying slight panic in his face must have been obvious to Amanda, who gave a knowing and oddly tender smile. The floor at his feet was wet, and his shoes were flecked with bits of orange leaves and a few sloppy twigs. “You never know what could happen or what they could find. I’m freaked out.”
“And I’m trained,” she said. “I’m almost like a professor I’m so smart.”
“OK, wait,” he said, hands raised in front of him. “I just can’t accept it, but I’m petrified, it’s true.”
She sat there and stared at him, with a look somewhere between a smirk and slight irritation. He could see she was doing that therapist thing of just sitting and waiting for him to keep going. The hair on his fifty-three-year-old head had mostly gone by this point, with a bit of thin blonde on top, and some short-cropped remnants along the sides that shared red, white, and gray down into a beard of similar colors. Forehead worry lines, deep sunken blue eyes behind black and clear glasses, and a slight double chin completed the traditional frumpy professorial vibe.
“Jason. Mr. Professor. You have noticed a few times things aren’t coming to you quite as fast.”
“You worry me,” he said, slinking back a bit more in his chair. The wind and rain struck the window simultaneously, which he usually loved, now becoming some sort of melancholy portent of a possibly difficult future. “I don’t think it’s really that often, at least from what I hear from my wife. But who knows.”
“You’re forgetting today is coupled with the fact that you originally sought me out due to your anxiety about this issue and how Jennifer has mentioned a few things to you. A few months ago, at our first appointment, you said, ‘I can’t go through what my mother is going through with her dementia, and the fact that they say dementia is hereditary, it’s really starting to affect me.’ Pretty direct quote. I write things down.”
His mom seemed to be at the tail end of her battle with dementia. He spent a lot of time with her and Dad, as moral support and now all kinds of bathroom use and bathing support he wasn’t trained for or comfortable with. Her inability to recall elements of all aspects of her life did not seem to affect her knowledge of phones and that people could be reached. Dad finally gave in and thought it was a good idea for her to be able to call anyone she wanted to, however often. When Jason did answer, she would call him by a different name, sometimes her Uncle Ed or her father, and ask when he’d be home with the schnitzel.
“I know I’ve said this to you, but Lina up in Art History said these DNA tests are basically genetic astrology. She specializes in Renaissance altarpieces, but I trust her.”
As an academic, Jason was generally a skeptic, which was roughly the point of being an academic. Look for problems and try to understand them and maybe solve them, like stopping the next Stalin or Mao. He knew nothing about DNA aside from that science fiction movie with the guy who had his legs surgically altered so he no longer matched his DNA, or whatever it was.
“The science is getting better every second, I’ve heard,” she said. “I mean, it’s real. There’s a real chance of finding out a potential future for you if you want it. No excuses.”
“I did one or two searches for ‘DNA testing’ and I’ve been hounded by advertisements for it when I just check the weather or shop for a mower,” he said. “It’s the cookies thing, I know. But tell me nobody’s watching. And what happens when they go out of business?”
She continued to look at him, but with a slight twist of the lips. Her Apple watch buzzed, and she looked down at it.
“Oh, well, I guess I only have a few more minutes,” she said.
“You think I should do it, obviously,” he said.
“Have some pity on your wife. Just to be sure,” she said. “And I guess I am officially telling you to. Maybe I’m not supposed to do that, who knows.”
He knew that all the knowledge he had acquired, for which people came to him to learn, could never save him from a future with a disintegrating brain that would see him reduced to his own nightmare. Like his mother’s life, a person he’d been told he resembled in so many ways, from hair color to love of chili relleno. To be a burden to so many, an echo of a former person that continued a decay of diminishing existence.
“Would you want to know?” he asked her. “There’s no cure, and the implications of making a point and finding out and there being no cure... it just kind of really pisses me off. Figure it out already. It can’t just be the Diet Coke or plastics or whatever they’re saying.”
“Look,” she said. “I’m into behavior modification to assist people in helping themselves. I can’t officially push a DNA test on you because I don’t really understand the mechanics behind them either. It’s just not my expertise. However, I can help someone in an ongoing anxiety attack who is looking at a real problem find some solutions. I can, and do right now, prescribe you the typical journaling, urging you to take a run and create a list of affirmations each day. But I find myself with the opportunity to suggest, pretty strongly, that you have an opportunity many of my patients don’t have and can find some medical-based answers to assist you in making a plan to get through this.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like you to make a plan and write it out. And, somewhere on the list needs to be ‘listen to your wife.’ I agree with her on the test.”
She had come forward to sit on the front edge of her seat, elbows on knees, hands together. “One thing is the same, though, with most of my patients. Often, the answers are really hard to hear, but they’re a great place to regroup and plan out a future.”
“Thanks. I just don’t know. Maybe I should.”
She shifted in her chair with a loud sigh. He could sense a change in her demeanor.
“So, here’s the thing,” she said, voice turning more academic and clinical. “I have rarely done this, but I really feel compelled to do this now. I just don’t see you moving forward if you don’t take the test, and if you’re not moving forward, I’ll need to stop seeing you. It’s becoming that simple for me. I’m sorry to say it so directly.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked down at his hands. “I don’t agree, but I guess I understand.”
“I look forward to hearing from you,” she said, standing.
“I get it. I do.”
“Hey, listen,” she said and gave him a brief hug, which he returned.
“Ooh, illegal touching,” he said. “I’m calling the grievance officer to report you.”
“I’ll fess up to Jennifer, don’t worry. Oh, I did want to ask. Anything more about that trip to Germany?”
“Actually, you know, I think I just might go,” he said, somewhat surprising himself. “It’s a complicated story, but maybe it’s time.”
“Someday, you going to tell me?”
“That’s a whole other thing, but maybe,” he said. “Hey, seriously, thank you. You are the best.”
“Get out of here,” she said. “Go back to your weird research.”
***
After hanging up his dripping jacket, he reached over and lit the candle on his desk to add another layer of authenticity to this now-reduced research time. Open flame was a concrete tie to the academics and thinkers of the millennia before him, as if to summon them as muses and bring some light of knowledge from the “other side.” He embraced technology openly and didn’t try to remember life, or research, before word processors or the web, but the candle now burning cozily on the desk connected him to all those literary greats or thinkers who had sat at desks throughout history doing important work accompanied by any sort of friendly yellow light. That connection allowed him to lend himself an air of legitimacy and timelessness, providing impetus to continue on with the work of the day.
He enjoyed telling people that his work focused mainly on the use of letter forms and words and how typography had been used to rally and inspire and propagandize people in their millions and billions, and how similar endeavors today could be employed from any perspective—good or evil. He also took pleasure in not asking for permission to employ naked fire in the new building. The thick, stout candle was imprinted on the side with the words Himmerod Abbey, Germany, and, mercifully, was touted as smokeless, even though it gave off a slight, sweet beeswax scent.
On his computer, he pulled up a window with some files related to one of the latest manuscripts he was studying and the abbey in Germany that called to him. Tucked up in the verdant Eifel hills with bluffs peeking out from the heights above, the small Salm river sneaking past and the reverberations of 1,000 years of monastic stewardship, their interaction with scriptural writings and attempts at transcendence fascinated him. He could read the ancient Old Testament script with not too much effort, though it was faded and in an ancient Latin.
8 And he put the breastplate upon him: also he put in the breastplate the Urim and the Thummim.
9 And he put the mitre upon his head; also upon the mitre, even upon his forefront, did he put the golden plate, the holy crown; as the Lord commanded Moses.
The conditions outside were exactly as he’d have them, welcoming as many layers of romantic notions as possible. The exterior window was a massive, full ceiling-height and room-width glass sheet. The outside murk matched the institutional wall color, giving him what today appeared to be a fourth solid wall.
The door opened suddenly, and a face peeked in, in an odd combination of nerve and feigned apology.
“You still sticking with that one, I see,” Lina said, pointing to an Arthur Szyk illustration of a caricatured Hitler and his cronies surrounding a globe as skeletons in SS uniforms creep around the world. One of them was spreading out a banner across the Atlantic that read “Nazi Propaganda” and the other a banner that read “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” Some of the other faculty gave him trouble for that one, but effective was effective, he told them.
She dropped into one of his chairs. She wore her black bangs proudly, front and center. They descended only about halfway down her forehead and were trimmed in a perfect line. Shiny indentations on the sides of her nose betrayed the usual presence of reading glasses that he knew from committee meetings to be thin-framed and bright red. She always led that committee on urging and begging the faculty to learn about their differences to somehow bring them closer together. She orchestrated most of her sentences with thin, impossibly white hands and wrists that protruded from long-sleeved shirts that referenced ambiguous world cultures.
“It’s a magazine cover,” he said. “Collier’s 1941. It is creepy, but the illustrator’s style is so effective, isn’t it? You know, we have to remember what happened with the aid of design and propaganda, and I show it in context, of course, like here in a design program. You should attend one of my classes someday.”
“Maybe I will,” she said, smiling. “But probably not.”
“Your loss. So, the one next to it,” Jason said, pointing to a medieval manuscript style large print. It appeared to be straight from a monk’s hand in a style that most people would recognize from their general education. “That one is also by artist Arthur Szyk, who was Jewish and was also a master medieval manuscript-style illuminator of Old Testament. One of my favorites.”
“This one I like. It is absolutely beautiful,” she said. “You kind of imagine nobody being able to do that anymore. I can see why, though, people don’t love everything they see in this office, with Nazis hanging around. We need to get rid of all that crap, but we need to remember. What a conundrum.”
“It does make you wonder, though,” he said. “I keep it so we don’t forget. But how long do we need to remember things? I mean, we don’t want to forget and repeat the past and all that, but what good does it actually do to keep dredging up the ills of history? I wonder what good any of it does that I work on.”
“We should err on the side of remembering,” Lina said as she stood and headed for the door. “Maybe just to keep in mind those who have suffered. Who knows? It’s a question we’ll always deal with.”
“Hey,” he said, catching her before she left. “Remember you said that these DNA tests are basically like astrology?”
“I don’t think I ever said that,” she said. “I don’t know much about them.”
“Huh,” he said. “OK, I thought you had.”
As she exited, he extinguished the Himmerod monastery candle. He’d almost certainly have to find a space off campus or convert a room at home into a better office space if he was to get any cerebral work done in his scholarly explorations. He studied the tiny carved diagram of the buildings and ornate tower of the monastery surrounded by green trees on hills.
“I think it’s time I go to the monastery,” he texted Jennifer. “I’m actually kind of excited about it.”
A quick response came in the form of the exclamation point reaction emoji and then a red heart one. He stood up quickly, locked the door, and headed home.
Tom Hapgood's book is a lot of things. It has history, both twentieth century and prior; it has youth and the coming-of-age; it has, through its characters' situations, a discussion of the health concerns that can encroach as life continues inexorably towards death; and it has the secrets that lurk in the family vault, just waiting to be uncovered and brought to the surface.
And that's where this book starts: with Jason, our protagonist, uncovering a pile of letters in his parents' basement with a note from his mother asking his forgiveness for having kept them hidden from him all these years.
This is also the end point of the book as we are led back to the discovery of the letters, only we now have the knowledge, through having Jason's story revealed, to understand their significance, and the contents of them are made transparent.
The story is told in the third person and we are in both the present and the past, Jason's recollections of his time in Germany and other incidents from his youth told through flashback. These are clearly marked at the chapter openings and the transitions between them are slick and unhindered.
This is a good read. Hapgood's story allows his character to recall how he acted when he was a teenager in Germany. Because of the third person narration, we have the feeling of it being revealed truthfully rather than skewed to how Jason would want us to see it. It has all of the hallmarks of a coming-of-age book in these sections and the excitement and attraction of Silke, the German girl who Jason is beguiled by while his dad is stationed there is palpable - she is unlike anything he has ever known. But Jason already has a strong attraction to a good old American girl - how is that going to play out?
There is also some delving into history, the fact that it is set in Germany providing a hint as to what is its subject. It was an added aspect to a book that was already strong on story but not a distraction, it being threaded through as a subplot.
If I have any criticism, sometimes for me the dialogue was a little "clunky" - some of it read truly but there were other interactions which felt less smooth. But this is a minor flaw in a overall well-written book.