Above Us Only Sky (24 page)

“He's gone,” the nurse says.
Wait
, I think. I want to keep listening. She repeats, “He's gone,” and I'm wondering where. I'm like the innocent child tugging at the priest's robe, looking for Jesus on the altar. If that's his body and that's his blood, why can't I see him? Everyone is talking about him, saying that he's here with us. Where?

The Old Man is gone. It seems that the deadbeat has let him off the ride. Gone but not forgotten. It's too cliché, too small and too stupid.

A doctor has come into the room. The fly is belly-up on the window's ledge, his green luminescence fading.

Just last week, the Old Man ate Pat's Deli sausage links and made speeches. He'd been sick for the better part of a year, but my Oma was under strict orders not to tell anyone.

Before he was hospitalized, he spoke to Daina every day. He was jubilant three hundred and sixty-five days, and then on the three hundredth and sixty-sixth day, he was dying. He could not breathe. No bullet to the brain for him. Just a great sigh, a submission of sorts that he was done. It had been a good fight. How many years did we have together? Sixteen. Half my short life. Last week, he stroked his beard and told my Oma that it would be hard for her to get along without him. She laughed. Then she cried. He scolded, “I can't leave if you will blubber.”

“Then don't leave.”

He told my Oma, “You are as beautiful as the day I met you.”

“Don't start acting sweet now, Old Man.”

28

Wheaton

June 2005

W
hen I pulled the chain that opened and closed the wings, the motion produced a guttural sound. I looped the canvas straps over my shoulders and galloped through the warehouse, the noise like a dying lawn mower. It was my first semester at Saint Mark's College: 1991. I took up creative space and residence in a warehouse, majoring in painting and printmaking but working with metal and fire, constructing massive wings and smaller things. Heating the metal with my torch, turning forks into ballerinas and waffle irons into skyscrapers, building other wonders for the ballerina to gaze upon. I worked small except for the wings, which grew larger and less manageable.

I'd bought a WWII flying helmet at an antiques shop and wore it as I hurtled across the warehouse, pulling on my chain. I should paint a foolish picture of a young man constructing the heaviest, most cumbersome machine with thoughts of flying. I have.

The last time I spoke to Prudence was October of 1991, when I told her, “I will never be the leading man.” I can't remember what she said in response. It did not matter. The statement was shy one syllable of the ten I needed, representative of our relationship. Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was whole in 1991, and I was like one of my flying machines, noisy and useless. The voices that had once overwhelmed me spoke to me now of men with work unfinished. Hugo Valentine, who'd built half a parking deck attached to a sand heap in Boston, Massachusetts. Ban Bulawayo of Harare, Zimbabwe, who'd planted fifty acres of crops, his farm burned before the first harvest. I heard the voice of my father.
The next idea will be better. Genius is never recognized in its own lifetime.

I made wings with paper clips and glue. I made them with Post-it notes and glossy potato chip bags. I pinned them to my corkboard with multicolored pushpins, and the irony of pinning wings to hold them in place was not lost on me. When I built the wings bigger, with carpet remnants and Styrofoam, my art instructors were intrigued, making mention of Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, how everything seemed dissected, surgically rendered with precision. With each scrape of my putty knife, the wings became less real. With each brushstroke and smatter of ink, less willful. With each pounding and beating, I made wings less like wings. No matter what medium I used or how many forms I mixed, my wings were sterile. As I began working with sheet metal, I understood my own failings, knew that I would never fly. These wings with rivets and wires for opening and closing made a creaky metal sound. I imagined jumping off a cliff with them. Not to die. Just to see. My roommate reported that I stayed up all night, kept him awake, talked to myself in five-syllable phrases.

There was talk among the professors that my eye was not my own, that I was a forger, a cheat, a copycat, and then there was a flimsy book, pages dog-eared and water-damaged, produced as evidence. I sat across from my academic adviser, the book between us. Already I had gently, painlessly, like a clean splinter, removed myself from Prudence's life. I hardly wrote to her. She hardly noticed. I was going elsewhere. Doing something on my own.

The book presented as evidence was a paperback titled
Wings
, a book of black-and-white photographs, of metal and bird wings, of girl wings and scars. “Have you been copying this man, Blasczkiewicz?” the adviser asked.

I flipped through the self-published book.
Never.
“I'm not.” The adviser did not believe me. I had never seen the book. Looking through the photographs, I did not recognize the two scars that belonged to Prudence Vilkas. How would I know? It was too strange to fathom.

“You're allowed to be inspired. You're expected to draw from the work of others.”

“I haven't.”

Sitting in that cramped office, I dropped my fingers like mallets striking a xylophone, hearing
I need to be where somebody loves me,
picturing a girl from an old black-and-white film twirling and skidding across a waxy dance floor. White knickers in bloom. Five neat syllables. Another five. I wanted a cigarette. When I held her in my arms, I smelled vodka on her breath and wanted to inhale her.

My eyes had turned white.

It was not my intention to disappear on that warm October afternoon in 1991. I remember my adviser sitting there across from my teacher, Mr. Wilkie, who was summoned to give his opinion on the matter.

I was remembering what Prudence had said to me just three years before. She said, “Wheaton, this has nothing to do with you.” She meant her family and her wings. And I had stopped asking her questions, limiting my sight to as little as possible. I twirled across the dance floor with the girl in white knickers, her face unreal, her hands like phantoms in mine. Something would have to change. Mr. Wilkie thought it would be important to take this evidence to the dean of the arts program. The adviser, whose name I can't recall, agreed with him. They would need another opinion, one greater, more important than theirs. “There's a similar sensibility in their work,” Mr. Wilkie noted, “but nothing to imply theft.”

I was not going to meet with the dean of the arts program.

In November 1991, Lukas was expecting me. I handed him a photograph of my metal bird and he sighed, opening the door wider, the early-winter sun glinting off the wings strung from the ceiling. His hands were like willow branches with leaves long and spindly enough to count multisyllabic strings, like beads of sound. Face-to-face, his ears were the size of cauliflowers, his head big enough for any number of voices. And his heart was not on his sleeve but worn like a cloak, how I've seen a man's aura. He spoke to me without words. He spoke with emotions, specifically assurances that I had found my home. When I produced his book from my knapsack, he took it from my hands like he'd been expecting it, and as it disappeared somewhere between the sunlight and his black stride, I followed him inside. Imitation is tribute, but I hadn't been imitating. I'd been making art, my art, my sight, my wings. The clunky monstrosities of my birth. They weren't for flight. They weren't Prudence's wings. They weren't for dreams. My wings were for weight, to hold me down, keep me safe. They were my mother's arms, the ones that had been taken. They were my father's arms, the ones that had never held me, fumbling with plastic typewriter keys. My wings were a behemoth. What else would they be? Assurances. Setting the metal down. Letting the hammer fall. Nothing needed soldering, not anymore. I could be still somewhere without a pushpin or paper clip, without the memory of my father's typewriter, how everything he wanted had nothing to do with me.

I was home.

It's June 2005, and I can remember my 1991 homecoming with the greatest clarity. Lukas has sharpened my sight. I can also remember another June, in 1989, when I stood useless on Prudence Vilkas's lawn, not understanding or knowing then that despite all appearances and efforts to the contrary, I was tied to her. Whether she loved me or not, there would always be a tether stringing her to me and me to her.

I apprenticed under Lukas for six months before my eyes were opened wide enough to see the obvious: the scars from the book
Wings
belonged to Prudence. Even then, I did not speak up. I did not want Prudence because I did not think she wanted me. I remember that in October of 1992, she and her grandparents came to see Lukas. I slipped out the back just as they came through the front door, the sound of the bell tinkling corresponding with the gasp of the back door opening. I could not face her.

Back then, I needed a father, and Lukas needed a son. I am not a copycat, or a thief of any man's life or art.

I am thirty-two this year, a bit of a local celebrity—the American with snowy eyes in Lithuania. My paintings have been displayed alongside Lukas's in local museums and restaurants. We throw parties and headline parades. Lukas is the stilt walker without stilts and I am the swami. We churn ice cream. I swirl pink sugar around paper wands and tell futures. I think we've attended every birthday party in Vilnius, my fingers sticky with cotton candy, the children yelling excitedly, tugging at Lukas's long pants. They beg him to send another metal bird soaring above the lawn.

The children want to know their futures, and I try to tell them, centering my silk turban over my curls, but the visions and voices hardly come anymore. They have been replaced by the immediacy of living, of building, of gleeful shouting. Even my fingers are too sticky sometimes for counting.

Last night, Daina Valetkiene telephoned Lukas to tell him that her brother the Old Man is dead. Only Lukas knows that I am an old friend of Prudence's. Only Lukas knows that I knew the Old Man. For fourteen years, this is how it has been, but then last night, I did not sleep. I thought about my old friend Prudence. I distinctly felt the absence of her hand in mine and realized that although I had belonged here with Lukas Blasczkiewicz, I might also belong elsewhere.

I rose before the sun. Lukas was already awake. He knows that I'm going. When the birds were only beginning to sing, we pulled my paintings from the beams and rafters, replacing them with blank sheets of canvas, creamy shades of nothingness, speckled fabric bleeding white and brown.

I love the Old Man. This truth is not in past tense.

I love Prudence. This truth is not in past tense.

For the fourteen years I have apprenticed with Lukas Blasczkiewicz, I have quieted the voices of men with lives left unlived. I have made all manner of flying objects, including wind-up angels with eyes blue like the sky. They hover for seconds and fall into the hands of waiting children, who press them to the breast. I have danced and sung, letting my fingers count sleek black and white piano keys. I have climbed high steeples and never thought of jumping.

I am wrapping the slick polyester of a secondhand necktie over and under and anticipating a long flight and drive. I do not know what else the future holds. Lukas, who has no gray hair, reminds me that there is no death, only a passing over. He closes my eyes with his long fingers and keeps me still, my mind clear. There are too many canvases left unfinished in this short life I have chosen and dubbed mine. My canvas, I realize, is among them.