A Ship Made of Paper (44 page)
Yet now that he is with Iris, Daniel has become
one of those people
. Since the night of the October snow, he is a connoisseur of sex, and if there were anyone in the world with whom he could share his newly found joy, he would have become a proselytizer for the holy church of physical love.
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
For one thing, he is finally able to make love while positioned on top, which he has not been able to do since getting kicked down the stairs back on Perry Street. The long fall left him with a strained lower back, a pro-clivity toward muscle spasms, and a sciatic nerve that was like the third rail in a subway tunnel, humming with pain. It also left him unable to do what the missionary position requires, and so, week by week, and then month by month, Kate mounted Daniel and, in her words, “did all the work.” But now the pain is gone and its absence is fantastically rejuvenat-ing to him. Daniel is restored to his youthful self, shot through with the vigor and flexibility of a man in his twenties, but a chastened, wised-up man in his twenties, one who will not waste his youth.
It is night and Daniel hovers a mere fifty feet above the town, sitting in the air just as comfortably as if it were a chair, his legs crossed, his hands folded in his lap, his thumbs tapping each other.The first couple of times he became airborne, he expended absurd amounts of effort moving around, or just staying aloft. He would thrust his arms in front of him because this is how Superman made himself aerodynamic in the movies.
Then, after a while, in a moment of irritation and exhaustion, he thought to himself:
I don’t really mind if I come crashing down,
and he gave up, he simply offered himself to the elements like a swimmer succumbing to the sea, and it was fine. His presence there is as easy and uncontested as his presence on earth. He has already flown over the entire town, beaming down his prayers of love and happiness to all who are sleeping, and to all whom sleep eludes.
Now, rocking back and forth on the currents of night air, able to move himself from here to there on the power of thought, he hovers protectively over Iris’s house, feeling all the ferocious animal longing for her that he once felt when touching her was but a dream, feeling, in fact, more desire for the Iris who he has come to know than he had ever felt for the phantom Iris.The Iris he has come to know, the Iris who he has kissed, the Iris he has is not exactly the Iris for whom he once longed.That Iris was cast into the shadows when Hampton had his stroke. None of the changes that have come over her are really what he would have once hoped for. The Iris he
[ 303 ]
once so deliriously craved was languid, while the Iris he knows now is exhausted, the Iris he courted wanted to be amused, and the Iris he has achieved wants to be comforted. And not necessarily by him.
And then, as he floats back and forth, just a few feet above her roof, but unable to enter her house even as a specter, Daniel first learns that he is not alone in the nightlife of the skies over Leyden. At first, he thinks he has seen an owl or some other nocturnal bird of prey, and his second thought is that some small object has fallen from space, a meteorite, a scrap of cosmic garbage. He turns and sees, of all people, Derek Pabst flying rapidly, wildly due west, dressed in a pair of dark-blue boxer shorts and a Boston Red Sox T-shirt. Derek seems not to have noticed Daniel, and though Daniel has no desire to speak to Derek, some instinct of camaraderie overtakes him and he calls out to his old friend. Derek, a look of great anxiety on his face, turns toward the sound of Daniel’s voice, fails to see him, and then begins to tumble head over heel, zoom-ing out toward the outskirts of the village like a ball of lightning.
When he turns to resume his watch over Iris’s house, she is there, facing him. She is only inches away, her nightgown streaming behind her, a look of wonder and bewilderment on her face.
“Am I dreaming?” she asks. She starts to drift away and he catches her by the wrist, pulls her close to him.
“You’re awake.”
“I’ve had a terrible night, such a terrible, terrible night.”
“Hampton?”
“When you spend all this time with someone who cannot speak, it forces you down into yourself, but in the worst way.We’re not meant to be silent, but to him words have no meaning. So I sit there with him, and I think about you, and if there’s no one else around . . .” She stops herself, looks down. She starts to lose altitude and Daniel catches her again. She presses her lips to his palm and then places it on her breast. Her breath comes in broken pieces, as if it must turn at right angles to escape her. “If there’s no one around,” she says, “I just say what I’m thinking. I say, ‘Hampton, I’m in love. I’m in love with a man who thinks I’m smart and beautiful.”
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
“Everyone thinks you’re smart and beautiful, Iris.”
“I stopped loving him, Daniel. Long ago. Being with someone so broken—even if you love them, it takes everything. How do you do it when you already stopped loving them? When you already felt trapped. When your heart is . . . elsewhere. He’s grotesque now. He’s frightened, he cries, and every day he gets physically stronger. But how can I leave him?”
A sudden wind comes off the river and pushes her closer to Daniel.
“Everything in the world is telling us we don’t belong together,” he says miserably.
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Of course I do. But it doesn’t have anything to do with that, not now. How much can love do? It’s buried.”
“I don’t feel buried. I used to, but not now. Look at me!” She spreads her arms and then raises them above her and begins to gain altitude, slowly at first, and then she soars.
“I want to see him!” Daniel shouts after her, but if she hears him she gives no sign of it, she continues to rise. Unnerved, Daniel returns to his own bed.
He switches on the light on his bedside table.The lamp is shaped like a calla lily; he bought it in town, thinking that it was an iris, and that Iris would be touched by it, or at least like it. But no matter how many times she has come to this room, she seems never to notice the lamp. Nor has she mentioned the expensive brass bed he’s installed, or the five-hundred-dollar goose down comforter, or the black lacquered end tables, or the Navaho rug, or the Parisian jazz club poster, with a piano keyboard curling across it like a black-and-white woolen scarf. It all seems like a miscalculation, the fancy boudoir accoutrements. He props a pillow against the chilly brass bars of the bed’s headboard, picks up the book he’s been reading. He remains on his back, turns the page, and then switches to his side, propping up his head with one hand.The hand covers his right eye and the world instantly disappears. He sits bolt upright, his heart racing; as soon as he removes the heel of his hand from his right eye the world returns. He covers the eye again. Darkness. He is blind in one eye.
Daniel is learning how to live with one sighted eye, learning to cope with the peculiar flatness of the world, the odd augmentation of sound, the unnerving momentary losses of balance, the trepidation before stairways, the sense of plunging while merely stepping off a curb, and he is even learning to live with the pervasive feeling that there is something or someone just behind him, or just to the side of him, a threatening presence that is out of range of his reduced arc of vision, and that this peripheral, punishing phantom is about to pounce, grab, push, stab, or shoot him.What he is still having particular trouble with is keeping the secret of his sudden infirmity. He wants to talk about it, he wants help, he wants a little credit for how well he’s coping; concealment is against his nature, and now he must add the arrival of this partial blindness to his stockpile of secrets.
Finally, however, Daniel submits to a series of tests, under the aegis of Bruce McFadden. First, Bruce conducts his own examinations, and then, finding nothing amiss, he sends Daniel to Windsor Imaging, for an MRI and then a CAT scan, and when all the results are in he sits with Daniel in his office to go over them. Among the other decorations in McFadden’s office—and it’s an eccentric old space, filled with angles and oddities—
are framed black-and-white photographs of some of his favorite blind musicians: Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Roland Kirk, Al Hibler, Ivory Joe a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Hunter, Blind Willie McTell, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi
and
the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, together in the same photo, which makes it an artifact of unusual distinction, and the English jazz pianist George Shearing, the one white face in the lot.
“It’s the old joke,” Bruce says, tilted back in his Swedish orthopedic chair, with its childishly bright-blue upholstery and its brilliant chrome hardware, “the one that goes, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news.’ ” His feet are on the desk, he has knit his fingers behind his neck. “But the good news is good enough, maybe you won’t even care about the bad. There’s nothing wrong with your eye, Daniel. The retina, the cornea, the optic nerve, everything’s shipshape. In fact, you’ve got the ocular vigor of a teenager.You don’t even need glasses.”
“Except that I can’t see,” Daniel says.
“Yes, well, that’s the bad news,” Bruce says. “We’re going to have to explore the possibility that the origin of your difficulty is not physical.”
“Meaning?” Daniel asks, though an instant later the question answers itself.
“Your eye is fine.Your vision will most likely come back. After your life—”
“You think my
life
has made me blind?”
“I don’t know what’s made you blind, Daniel. All I can tell you is what the tests say. And they all say your eye is healthy.”
Daniel falls silent. He hears a sound, turns toward it.The branch of a maple tree, its leaves large as hands, blows in the breeze, scraping against the outside of the window.
“Guilt’s a bitch,” Bruce says. He sits forward, folds his hands, he’s coming to the end of the time allotted.
“I don’t feel guilty. How could I? I’ve turned a blind eye to everything.”
Bruce smiles, he looks relieved. “It may turn out to be as simple as that,” he says.
“I’m
joking,
Bruce.” Daniel’s chin juts forward, he widens his eyes. “Jesus.”
“I feel sorry for you, Daniel. I really do.You’re under a lot of pressure.”
Daniel tries to smile, but then, failing that, he tries to compose
[ 307 ]
himself into a sort of manly grimace, but even that will not hold. He feels his lips quiver and he feels the surge of tears. He takes a deep breath, covers his eyes. There are certain things he has not been able to say, not even to Iris. She, into whose consciousness he has wanted to pour himself since first meeting her, she turns out to be perhaps the last person to whom he can reveal the remorse he feels over Hampton, over Ruby, over Kate. She already has a broken man in her life. Every step he has taken into the light of Iris’s love seems to have ushered him along on an equal journey into, if not the heart of darkness, then, at least, the darkness of the heart. It is not what he had expected. What happened to the world opening wide, what happened to joy? How could the achievement of all that he has desired cast him into such withering isolation?
“I don’t think this needs to be said, Daniel,” Bruce says. “But nobody blames you.You realize that, don’t you?”
Daniel reaches across the desk and clasps Bruce’s hand. “Oh my God,” he says. “I can see! I can see!”
For a moment, Bruce looks confused, as if he is about to believe some kind of miracle has occurred. But then, he regains his composure. “Very funny,” he says. “Ha ha ha.”
Even with the appalling evidence of Hampton’s ruination an inch or two from her face, the reality of what has befallen him, her, all of them, remains elusive to Iris.The waking dream of everyday life obscures his injury, there is so much else to do, so many people, so much work—dishes to be washed, clothes to be folded, tunes hummed, a minute goes by, ten, and the space in her mind labeled “Hampton” will, without her governance, be silently, unconsciously occupied by the familiar man to whom she once swore allegiance and then betrayed, that infuriating, belittling presence.
And the parade of people who march in and out of her house. It’s like Memorial Day. Here come the fire trucks, here comes the Little League, here come the Elks. Iris has kept a journal, meant at first to be a recepta-cle for her pain, for the remorse, the guilt she must share for what has a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
happened to Hampton, and a place to map and describe the dark sea of sex and happiness in which she is sometimes swimming, sometimes sailing, and sometimes sinking—but little of that ever makes it into the diary. It is crowded out, eclipsed, and then obliterated by a constantly expanding cast of characters, the people who come in and out of the life of the house.
There are the doctors, the nurses, the medical technicians, all with names, all with stories, one has a limp, one is diabetic, one lost three fingers to frostbite in the peacetime Polish Army, one smokes clove cigarettes, one is a Sufi, one sang backup for Paula Abdul, each and every one of them stakes a separate claim on her attention.
And then: family. There are pages and pages in her journal about the comings and goings of her family, and Hampton’s family. They have all risen to the occasion. Iris’s sister Carol is a constant presence. Of the first ninety days of Hampton’s convalescence—though that perhaps is the wrong word for it, convalescence implies a process, an end point, and Hampton’s global aphasia is permanent—Carol was living with them more than half the time. But not counting Carol, the first to arrive was Hampton’s mother, who descended into the hell of Juniper Street in her dark-blue suit and wavy silver hair, wearing orange lipstick and a large diamond ring, and seemed to think that if she taught Hampton to speak once she can do it again. Then came Hampton’s brother James, who for all his hippy ways, his bewildering openness to spiritual margi-nalia, could do nothing useful; he sobbed and wailed, in a frenzy until finally it fell to Iris to comfort him. Then arrived Hampton’s oldest brother, Jordan, a Congregationalist minister in Bethesda, gaunt, widowed, and remote, who, when Iris asked if he was going to pray over Hampton, looked at her as if she had asked if he handled snakes or rolled on the floor speaking in tongues. Next came her two favorite brothers, Louis and Raymond, in business together back home, getting rich selling BMWs (LouRay Motors) and speculating in real estate (Davenport Development, Inc.).Then her father arrived, a month after the accident, as if waiting for the smoke to clear so he could set matters straight, strolling into the ruination like Yojimbo, somehow carrying with him the
