Are We There Yet? (8 page)

They walk for some time without speaking. But this is a different non-speaking than it was before. Danny is still deep in his thoughts, and Elijah is letting him stay there.

Finally, Danny speaks, and what he says is, “It's incredible, really.” Then he stops and points back to the synagogue and says he can't imagine. He just can't imagine. Elijah listens as Danny wonders how such things can happen, what lesson could possibly be learned.

“I don't know,” Elijah says. He thinks of their parents, and how they'd be glad that their sons were here, thinking about it.

“All this history …,” Danny says, then trails off. Lost in it. Feeling it connect. Realizing the weight of the world comes largely from its past.

Although it is such a singular word, there are many variations of
alone.
There is the alone of an empty beach at twilight. There is the alone of an empty hotel room. There is the alone of being caught in a throng of people. There is the alone of missing a particular person. And there is the alone of being with a particular person and realizing you are still alone.

Elijah parts with Danny in St. Mark's Square and is at first disoriented. The courtyard is filled with thousands of people, speaking what seem to be thousands of languages. People are moving in such an everywhere direction that there is simply nowhere to go without firm resolution. Elijah's first instinct is to steal a quiet corner, to purchase a postcard from a hundred-lire stall and write to Cal about all the people and the birds and the way tourists stop to check their watches every time the bell tolls. He would sign the postcard
Wish you were here
, and he would mean it—because that would be his big threepenny wishingwell birthday-candle wish, if one were granted by a passerby. Cal would make him smile, and Cal would make him laugh, and Cal would take his hand so they could waltz where there was no space to waltz and run where there was no room to run. He thinks about her all the time.

Elijah finds a postcard and sits down to write, drawing a picture of the basilica above Cal's address. Then he files the postcard in his pocket for future delivery and wonders what to do. The alleys leave little room to think. So Elijah makes a decision not to decide. He steps into the crowd and gives in.

It is Elijah's rare talent—a talent he doesn't realize—to be
surrounded by strangers and not feel alone. As soon as he steps into the rush of people, he is engaged. He is amazed through the power of watching, bewitched by the searching. As he is led from St. Mark's to the walk beside the canal, he scans the crowd for beautiful people he will never know. He smiles as large groups struggle to stay together. Young children swoop beside his legs as old men lazily push strollers. Vendors sell the same cheap T-shirts at five-foot intervals. A band from a canal-side hotel plays, and mothers call their daughters away from the sea.

If you wanted to reassemble Elijah's afternoon, you probably could do it by stringing together all the photographs and all of the frames of videotape that he walks into. Always a passerby, he is immortalized and unknown.

Farther from St. Mark's, the people fall away and the noise dies down. Strange sculptures appear—enormous anchors and acrobatic steel beams. Elijah figures these are just part of the landscape—the New City's wink at the Old City.

And then he finds the Biennial.

One night, deep in December, Cal had asked:
“Do you wonder why we wander?”

The answer, Elijah now realizes, is:
Discovery.

In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual to find a situation that appears without word, or a place that was not known to be on the road.

As Elijah buys his ticket and enters the Biennial exhibition, he feels not only discovery but also a discovery of discovery. It's a spiritual rush, and it leaves him buoyant. He feels the antithesis of alone, because he is in the company of circumstance.

This is so cool
, he thinks—this is his vocabulary of rhapsody. He has entered (for lack of a better reference) an Art World EPCOT Center, each country's pavilion beckoning him forward. The afternoon is growing late, and the crowd has thinned out to a devoutly quiet core.

Elijah walks into the Spanish pavilion and stands before an abstract angel made from golden wire. Even though it doesn't move, Elijah can feel the angel lift. Serendipity is a narcotic, and Elijah is under its sway. He stares at the angel until he can feel it watermark his memory of the day. Then, giddy and awed, he moves on.

Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining. Within its elaborately constructed pavilions, the Biennial demonstrates this appropriately. In Belgium, Elijah finds a series of open white (plaster?) containers.
Luxembourg is populated by lawn chairs with the word “SAMPLE” placed in the corner (
perhaps
, Elijah thinks too easily,
they were desperate for artists from Luxembourg
). Holland features films of a girl flipping off a wall (her bloomers show) and of a man showering gratuitously. In addition, lightbulbs with nipples (there's no better way to describe them) litter the floor.

Elijah finds this more amusing than any so-called amusement park. Then he enters the strange world of the Japanese exhibit. Its lower level is devoted to repetitive photos of black-and-white cells. Elijah walks upstairs, and there is a burst of color—brilliant spectrum cellscapes viewed from a wooden walkway on the outskirts of an inner lake. Elijah is dazzled. He goes through three times and then makes his way to the French pavilion, which is filled with smashed auto cubes.

Elijah wants to call Danny, because he feels it's near criminal to allow his brother to miss such a strangely magical place. But Elijah doesn't know the phone number of the hotel—he doesn't even know how to make a call from an Italian phone booth. So he vows to make Danny come tomorrow, and even decides to accompany him, if need be.

The epigram for the Russian exhibit is “Reason is something the world must obtain whether it wants to or not.” At the center of the pavilion is a container (large, metal) with a hole in it—the sign above it reads,
Donate for artificial reason
. Elijah reaches into his wallet and pulls out a crumpled American dollar. Then he moves on—to delicate paintings of violent acts and sculptured mazes scored by ominous music.

The narcotic of serendipity numbs his sense of time. The afternoon is over before Elijah has a chance to recognize it. An announcement is made in five languages—the exhibition will
soon be closing. Elijah wanders to the gift shop and buys a few more postcards for Cal. Then he steps through the gate, back into the expected world. He looks to the exhibition sign and learns that the Biennial is closed tomorrow. Danny is out of luck. Elijah is disappointed. And at the same time, he is relieved. Not because the experience will solely be his (really, he wants Danny to see it). But instead because he knows deep in his heart that it would be foolish to return.

Discovery cannot be revisited.

“Do you wonder why we wander?” Cal had asked.

It was the night of the first snow; you could hear the branches bending and the icicles falling outside the window, beyond the wall.

They were warmth together. They were hot breath and blankets and wrapping themselves close.

And Elijah had thought,
I wonder why I never kiss you. I wonder what would happen.

But he didn't say anything out loud.

Danny and Elijah had been walking the back way to school—even though Danny's first bell rang twenty minutes earlier than Elijah's, they usually walked together, with Danny dropping Elijah off at the playground before heading to middle school.

The back way went by the brook, by the strand of trees that the boys could call a forest without feeling any doubt. Sometimes along the way they found signs of trespass—teenage beer cans, hand-smashed or misplaced intact; gum wrappers folded into the ground; once, a high-heeled shoe.

That morning, they found a large spool of red twine. Elijah picked it up, the twine end pointing out like a tail.

“Let's tie the trees together,” he suggested.

And Danny said, “Sure.”

They tied the tail end to a branch—Elijah looping it like a shoelace, Danny double-knotting so it would hold. Then they ran randomly from tree to tree, sometimes throwing the spool high to get a branch that was just out of reach, other times dipping low to let the lowest of bushes in on the action.

They laughed, they looped, they were hopelessly late for school.

There was no way to explain it, so neither of them tried.

As Elijah wanders through the Biennial, Danny is in another part of town, altering his concept of nationality. At first, he thought he had it figured out: the American tourists were the loud walkers with Chicago Bulls T-shirts, and the Europeans were the teeter-walkers with an unfortunate propensity toward dark socks. But no. That was not the case at all.