Glaciers (3 page)

She fills her cup with hot water from the spout on the water cooler, spoons honey at the counter and waits. She feels the hairs on the back of her neck and the ungainly reach of her limbs. She stirs, puts the hot spoon into her mouth, the metal and sweetness burning her tongue.

They have worked together for a year, since Spoke got out of the war. This fact—that he was a soldier—made them all nervous at first, having heard stories of trauma leaving people unhinged. Like a screen door slapping the side of a house until it finally flies off in a gale.

Spoke was not like that. Or any of the other images Isabel might have conjured for the word
soldier
. Meat. Packaged meat. The grill of a truck. Cinder blocks. All vaguely unpleasant but ubiquitous things. All symbols for things Isabel would rather not explore in detail: the vicissitudes of war and its byproducts. But no: there was Spoke on his first day, bike helmet in one hand, offering the other to everybody in turn. Old button-down shirt and beaten jeans, rolled up at one ankle, in the cyclists' way, revealing a striped sock. Glasses slightly out of style. Everything slightly out of style, as if he had been away awhile.

Isabel was familiar with this condition, present in people who have been living abroad or off the grid. In Alaska the popular trends arrived slowly, if they ever made it at all. So that when her family moved to the States, her middle school classmates thought her anachronistic—a remnant of two or three years past. This, she thinks, probably determined her taste in clothes for the rest of her life.

In a similar way, Spoke was a curiosity for everyone at the library. He had lived somewhere foreign, in circumstances they barely sketched in their minds (with disproportionate emphasis on dramatic weather). Molly, who works across the hall from Isabel, once said that Spoke seemed
not quite present
. For Isabel it is more that his presence calls to mind a time
before
. Before
what
? she thinks. Before the war, maybe. Or more likely some in-between time, when the war existed, was taking
place, but everyone thought (or hoped) it would be over swiftly. It was a time of breath holding.

When she turns back to the table, he picks up a spoon and stirs his coffee. She cups her tea in both hands, fingers wrapping around the cup and meeting on the other side. He taps the spoon against the glass rim. He closes his eyes and inhales coffee vapor.

Now she can't imagine a soldier unlike Spoke.

She seats herself and takes measured sips from her cup.

What's new in the world? she asks, shuffling the paper, glancing at the headlines.

They regard each other across the table.

Do you want the good news or the bad? he asks.

There's good news? she brightens.

He smiles with one half of his mouth.

He refolds the Metro page and hands it to her, and picks up the Arts. They both read. He hums a little louder, the same four bars.

She listens. They read. The sounds of paper between them as they turn and crease and carefully avoid touching each other. Then, sounds of their coworkers arriving, doors unlatching and footfalls. Their morning ending.

Time to wake up, she thinks. She closes her eyes and breathes all the way to the bottom of her lungs.

She wants him to want to be looking at her.

Lungs

Before Isabel could read, she loved books. They had one bookshelf in the homestead, and if she were left alone too long as a baby or toddler, she would pull every book from the low wooden shelves. She remembers the weight of them heaped over her small legs, the coolness of them on her bare skin. She loved to find the pages of the
Fannie Farmer Cookbook
that had smudges of batter and saucy fingerprints, and to gaze at the Garth Williams illustrations in
Little House in the Big Woods
, from which her parents read a chapter aloud every night the winter she turned four.

She remembers sitting in an armchair with Agnes reading the nature encyclopedia, screaming over and over again, first with fright, then glee, when they turned to the magnified pictures of spiders. Her sister read that spiders have
book lungs
, which fold in and out over themselves like pages. This pleased Isabel immensely. When she learned later that humans do not also have book lungs, she was disappointed. Book lungs. It made complete sense to her. This way breath, this way life:
through here
.

 

Leo, her best friend since middle school, wrote his name in every book he checked out from the library the whole time he was a teenager. The first was
Giovanni's Room
. It was his form of tagging. He chose the pages carefully, to exact the most symbolic significance. Thus the small, all-caps black lettering, LEO, adjacent the gayest of passages in every book. Other books he marked:
Our Lady of the Flowers
,
Apartment in Athens
,
The Good Soldier
. When he revealed his habit to Isabel, she scolded him.

Those are library books, asshole, not men's room stalls, she said. Why don't you just steal gay books from Powell's like a normal juvenile delinquent?

A decade later, when she started working at the library, she wondered if one of Leo's books would find her. It was a shock when one finally appeared. She had almost forgotten. It was a copy of Elizabeth Hardwick's
Sleepless Nights
. As she pulled the book from her cart, it bloomed open in her two hands. With an exhausted, papery sigh, the pages fell out one by one and drifted to the floor. Isabel bent down to pick up the pages, and there was Leo's name, on page ninety-seven, next to a passage about “the travels of youth, the cheapness of things,” and Amsterdam.

After work that day, she went to a barbeque at a coworker's house. Spoke was there, too, though
he was new to the library then. When Isabel saw him sitting alone at the kitchen table, she quickly took the seat across from him. After hellos, they sat in silence, watching others. A band was setting up outside, under the carport. People positioned lawn chairs and laid out blankets on the scrappy patch of grass. The summer light was fading and there was a lightness in the air, so that voices seemed to float in the window several seconds after they were spoken. Someone plugged in a string of Christmas lights, and folks let out a cheer.

Isabel and Spoke both smiled at the sound.

Then there was small talk. She asked how he was settling in to the job. He talked about getting used to new people, new routines. Then he asked her about her day.

Isabel started to give a rote reply, then she remembered Leo's book. She told Spoke about the book falling apart in her hands, finding Leo's name,
how improbable it was that she should find that page in that book. She had tacked it to the wall by her desk.

He asked about Leo.

We met in sixth grade homeroom, she said. She wiped the condensation from her bottle of beer as she talked.

I call him Loon. He had a high-pitched, wavering voice that the other boys made fun of. The first time I heard it, during roll call, it reminded me of the loons we used to hear on Skilak Lake in Alaska.

She took a long drink and Spoke took a long drink and they set their bottles down at the same time.

What's your story? she asked.

My story?

You were in Iraq, right? Isn't that where you got your nickname?

He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms behind his head and clasped his hands
behind his skull. He was wearing a worn T-shirt with the image of U2's
Boy
, and for a moment his pose mirrored the one of the little boy on the shirt. He looked curiously at Isabel, and she felt he was measuring her in some way. Not physically, not for prettiness; not for intelligence, even. Then he put his elbows back on the table.

Well, he began, since we're talking about books, there
is
a book in my story.

He told her about a copy of
Dhalgren
he took with him to Iraq and kept in his vest pocket sometimes. He read a lot of science fiction then. He had just finished
The Stars My Destination
, and someone recommended Samuel Delaney for something different. He picked
Dhalgren
because he liked the weight of it and it looked long enough to last him a while.

He paused, and seemed to be done with his story. He took another drink and looked out into
the room. Isabel leaned closer. She got the feeling he was talking to her like she was a woman—or no, maybe just a naïve, liberal civilian—he was censoring himself, choosing his words deliberately, when the words he might naturally choose would be profane.

Do you really want to hear this? he asked.

Only if you want to tell me, she said.

He seemed to weigh this, then shrugged.

He fixed machines in Iraq. Armored vehicles and tanks, mostly, but also radios, flashlights, and the personal electronic devices of his friends. He fixed everything that crossed his path—even things that didn't seem to need fixing—they all worked a little better after he'd tinkered with them. He got a reputation as
the fix-it guy
.

So when did you meet the bicycle? Isabel asked. He looked her in the eye for a long time, wondering, she imagined, whether he should laugh
and jokingly tell her to fuck off, then end the story. But he liked her, she could tell, and this made her brave enough to ask and look right back at him without demurring.

How do you know there's a bicycle? he asked.

There must be a bicycle in this story, or we'd be calling you Transmission. Or Headphones.

He smiled, shaking his head.

I'd take Headphones, he said.

She softened then, realizing how close she was to an experience she had no right to be glib about.

He took another drink.

We were outside Haditha, he said. There had just been a lot of trouble with insurgents there, but it seemed to be dying down. Where we were, near this village on the Euphrates, things were calm. We were waiting for something. Those times can be worse than being in the fray, in a strange way. You start to remember what normal is like. You see or
hear something that reminds you of home—it can be anything, a dog loping along a ditch, a whistled tune, anything—and then you get this yearning . . .

That day I saw something: a couple of kids—boys, ten or twelve years old—trying to ride a busted bicycle down this pitted dirt road. It was ancient—who knows where they got it? The frame was bent, the chain kept slipping off. It was too big for these kids and one of them crashed, just bit the dust. And just like that I was back in Wisconsin, watching the neighbor kid fall off his bike outside our house, crying over his scraped-up knee, then climbing back up on the seat and pedaling home, snot running down his face.

I guess I was staring at them for a long time. I was with my sergeant and a few guys at the time.

My sergeant slapped me on the back and said: Dahl, why don't you go over there and fix that bike?

He thought it was funny. I'm always fixing shit. I walked over and gestured to the bike. The
kids didn't run away—they were used to us by then—they just handed it over and stood back. I monkeyed with the chain—I didn't have tools on me, just a utility knife. My sergeant and the other guys thought it was fucking hilarious. They were about twenty yards away, across the road, grinning and talking shit. The kids just watched over my shoulder. I finally got it fixed so the chain wouldn't slip off, so I gestured to the kids, but they wouldn't try it. They were shaking their heads like, No way, man, you first.

I thought, Fuck it. Give 'em a show. So I sat on the seat—jammed way down, knees up around my elbows—and I rode that thing around in circles in the dirt. My sergeant was shaking his head, and the guys and the kids are laughing and hooting. I looked ridiculous, I'm sure.

The last thing I remember is the face of the kid who fell in the dirt—he just stopped laughing all
of a sudden. A Humvee about a hundred and fifty meters or so to my left was approaching a donkey cart—

He paused, looking out into the yard as two guys hauled a cooler over to the carport.

—and the donkey exploded.

What?

There was an IED on the donkey, or the cart, or maybe on some trash in the road. They put them in anything innocuous—soda cans, women—or repellent, like dead dogs. The donkey, the cart, and everything in and around it blew. We were just at the edge of the blast's radius—the kids, me, the bike—we all got hit.

When I woke up, there was a spoke in my ribcage.

Isabel winced.

It pierced my right lung—I landed on it, actually. I woke up long enough to know I was hurt, then
passed out again. I was lucky—no head trauma, no other major organs hit, just a few burns, some hearing loss. One of the kids died from shrapnel, I don't know which one. I just picture the kid who fell off the bike. In my dreams sometimes he's the neighbor kid from my childhood. And sometimes he's a ten-year-old me.

He paused. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled out his mouth. He looked at her and his body relaxed, his shoulders released.

The weird thing, he said, is that the spoke hit my lung but missed the copy of
Dhalgren
in my vest pocket. It scraped past the bottom pages, left a little scar on it, but the words were untouched. I read it in the hospital. More than once.

Do you still have the book? she asked.

He nodded.

Will you ever read it again?

No.

Loon

She closes her office door, picks up the phone and calls Leo. She listens to the ringing on the line and glances over at the page from
Sleepless Nights
tacked to the wall with Leo's name etched into it. The coincidence strikes her—how Leo wrote his name, all those years ago, on the page about going to Amsterdam, and how she was thinking of Amsterdam and the lovers, now, because of the postcard, at home, tacked to her wall.