Mr. Splitfoot (37 page)

Ruth goes to Mr. Bell. She inspects the wound, imagining she’ll look through his body straight into the lake and all the way down, one thousand feet in dark liquid. His blood makes a mist in the cold air. “Are you OK?”

“I’m so sorry.” Mr. Bell breathes heavily. “Believe me. Please.”

She ministers to him. Her mouth is open. “Shh.” She swabs blood with her shirt and some spit, some of the freezing lake slush.

“Believe me,” he says again.

She strokes his face. “I think I’m done believing.” Ruth sits on the ice, cross-legged, freezing, wasted. She drops her arms open so Mr. Bell can rest in her lap. “Come,” she pulls his head into the cradle of her legs, and there she curves her body over to protect him, looking to the darkness between them. She sees stars. She sees Nat. She sees Mr. Splitfoot. Help us, she asks them all, asks them hard. Help us, Nat. Her shoulders curl. She covers Mr. Bell with what she feels, grave love, a synapse. He is hers. He breathes into her damply, through her, as if they could fall into one another. The lake takes on the heat between them, between the distant planets. Steam and stew. You, it says, and you, activating a crack as swift as any gunshot, as swift as, say, a meteor that traveled across time and space to crash into this remote, accidental mountaintop lake in the Adirondacks. The ice opens up. The lake swallows two humans in love without knowing or caring, loathing judgment if the lake could loathe, if the lake could judge.

Underwater Ruth’s lungs despise the cold. They spasm. She screams for Nat to help her, but something happens to sound underwater.

If Zeke, alone now, stunned far further than stupid, calls for them, pleads mercy, they don’t hear it. If he drives the Father’s absurd truck like a blind maniac down the twisted, snow-covered road, crossing the river chasm or maybe plunging into it, they don’t hear because under the water the sky is ice, darkening with their descent blue to black and places beyond.

Mr. Bell holds her in his good arm, fighting for the surface using all the life he has inside to continue living. And Ruth holds Mr. Bell. They fall. The water is frigid and Ruth never could swim. Down, down, his boots, her hair tangled in his. The deepest lake in the Adirondacks is made by men and full of enough mystery to betray all humankind. There’s water in their lungs. Mr. Bell holds her now and afterward. There’s water in their ears and a voice warm as a mother’s should be. They fall toward the voice, through the deepest lake in the Adirondacks. “When you were a baby,” the voice says, “you used to point at birds.” The gesture of their hands entwined, reaching up through their descent, clawing for the disappearing surface, could be misconstrued as fingers pointing out a goldfinch on a branch, a red cardinal nosing the grass for some seeds.

Later that night the lake freezes, sealing the scar under a dusting of snow.

Later still, days, maybe weeks, two crows fly past without even stopping. They were living. They are dead. We will change them into cedars. We know that this is impossible.

I
T’S A SHORT SONG.
Chuck Berry finishes and the contraction releases me.

“Time to go,” Nat says.

“Where?”

“Whatever you want, Cora. A movie? A baby?” Nat helps me move slowly down the attic stairs, down the main stairs. He speaks softly in my ear. “It’s going to be fine. A healthy, beautiful baby.”

Nat is the first person to tell me that. He holds my hand. He grabs the box of money and car keys. He carries the box with us as if it were the suitcase he and I had carefully packed and planned for over nine months, nine years, ninety decades, and life, happy, happy life, is about to begin for us here on Earth.

Upstairs the golden record is still spinning, sending messages off to Mars, to M82, M87, and the Magellanic Bridge.

I readjust my grip on Nat, braiding our fingers. “Ready?” he asks again.

“Yeah.”

We step outside and there she is. Standing by the edge of the lake, Ruth looks out across the water, her long dark hair.

“Ruth,” he calls, and she turns. Nat sees her again, his sister. All the years he thought Ruth was dead. Now he knows she is because she lifts one hand to us, a wave hello, goodbye, gentle, like a window thrown open onto everything kind and good that Ruth always was.

Her other hand holds a box, the same box Nat is holding, weathered old cardboard. Her box is a twin, a sister, only hers is empty now. She smiles, so pleased to see Nat and me together at the end. She lifts the sun off the water, all of it. She gives Nat the things they once had to share, breath, life. She doesn’t need those things anymore.

“Ruth,” I call, as if I could stop her now, keep her here for myself. She smiles and her raised hand strikes a blinding flash, a brilliant light, bright enough to fool us into thinking it’s a trick of the sun off the water. In that flash we lose sight of her for a moment, and when we see her again, Ruth is walking into the lake, returning to the water forever this time. She starts death again at the place where she died, this highest lake that runs down so many mountains into so many streams and rivers and seas, the great network, the water that brings her back to us. The box Ruth holds fills with the deepest lake in the Adirondacks.

“Ruth,” Nat says again, but the flash clears and Ruth is gone back to Bell and the lovely depths, delighted by every star twinkling around her. Ruth was living. Ruth was gone. Ruth came back because she loved us. We make our way down to the shoreline. The hoodie Ruth borrowed from me so long ago, a world away, is on the sand of the bank, half buried, half in the water, because every story is a ghost story, even mine. Tiny waves rock the shore. We stare out at the place where Ruth disappeared, and in the lake I see the underwater path, the barely road of stones and bones the dead sometimes follow.

Something is happening inside. I kneel in the shallow water, splashing Ruth onto this child as if I might collect all of her, a book of everything. Twenty-six letters, twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, one hundred eighteen elements so far. I splash the water onto my baby. I collect this world. “Hello,” the record says upstairs. “Hello from the children of planet Earth. Hello. Hello?” The beats and static, the clicks and clacks of a woman thinking hard about falling in love across space and time, across death. The way a mother whispers to her child. The way an old man sings, a record of lives lived. Nat holds on to me, kneels beside me. The Earth moves a thousand, a million miles per hour through space. “Cora,” he says my name. We look out at the deep lake long enough for me to see what it took a journey to see. Ruth came back because the living need the dead. My belly squeezes. Nat tightens his fingers in mine, and for now I sweat human things, mysterious human things I don’t understand. I feel her go. I feel what I don’t even believe in: astonishing eyeballs, fearful symmetries, fingernails, ghosts, babies. I feel this life about to begin, this little girl, this little boy. Hello. Hello. Hello.

With grateful acknowledgment to the intelligent and loving women who helped take care of my children while I wrote this book: Virginia Mendez, Cindy Kubik, and Norma Borgen. Thank you, PJ Mark and Jenna Johnson for your encouragement and wisdom. Thank you to Bard College, Pratt Institute, the MacDowell Colony, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Thank you, all Hunts and Hagans. TLA, Rosa, Marie, Juliet, and Joe.

L
IGHTNING FIRST
, then the thunder. And in between the two I’m reminded of a secret. I was a boy and there was a storm. The storm said something muffled. Try and catch me, perhaps, and then it bent down close to my ear in the very same way my brother Dane used to do. Whispering. A hot, damp breath, a tunnel between his mouth and my ear. The storm began to speak. You want to know what the storm said? Listen.

Things like that, talking storms, happen to me frequently. Take for example the dust here in my hotel room. Each particle says something as it drifts through the last rays of sunlight, pale blades that have cut their way past my closed curtains. Look at this dust. It is everywhere. Here is the tiniest bit of a woman from Bath Beach who had her hair styled two days ago, loosening a few small flakes of scalp in the process. Two days it took her to arrive, but here she is at last. She had to come because the hotel where I live is like the sticky tongue of a frog jutting out high above Manhattan, collecting the city particle by wandering particle. Here is some chimney ash. Here is some buckwheat flour blown in from a Portuguese bakery on Minetta Lane and a pellicle of curled felt belonging to the haberdashery around the corner. Here is a speck of evidence from a shy graft inspector. Maybe he lived in the borough of Queens. Maybe a respiratory influenza killed him off in 1897. So many maybes, and yet he is still here. And, of course, so am I. Nikola Tesla, Serbian, world-famous inventor, once celebrated, once visited by kings, authors and artists, welterweight pugilists, scientists of all stripes, journalists with their prestigious awards, ambassadors, mezzo-sopranos, and ballerinas. And I would shout down to the dining hall captain for a feast to be assembled. “Quickly! Bring us the Stuffed Saddle of Spring Lamb. Bring us the Mousse of Lemon Sole and the Shad Roe Belle Meunière! Potatoes Raclette! String Bean Sauté! Macadamia nuts! A nice bourbon, some tonic, some pear nectar, coffees, teas, and please, please make it fast!”

That was some time ago. Now, more regularly, no one visits. I sip at my vegetable broth listening for a knock on the door or even footsteps approaching down the hallway. Most often it turns out to be a chambermaid on her rounds. I’ve been forgotten here. Left alone talking to lightning storms, studying the mysterious patterns the dust of dead people makes as it floats through the last light of day.

Now that I have lived in the Hotel New Yorker far longer than any of the tourists or businessmen in town for a meeting, the homogeneity of my room, a quality most important to any hotel décor, has all but worn off. Ten years ago, when I first moved in, I constructed a wall of shelves. It still spans floor to ceiling. The wall consists of seventy-seven fifteen-inch-tall drawers as well as a number of smaller cubbyholes to fill up the odd spaces. The top drawers are so high off the ground that even I, at over six feet tall, am forced to keep a wooden step stool behind the closet door to access them. Each drawer is stained a deep brown and is differentiated from the others by a small card of identification taped to the front. The labels have yellowed under the adhesive.
COPPER WIRE. CORRESPONDENCE. MAGNETS. PERPETUAL MOTION. MISC
.

Drawer #42. It sticks and creaks with the weather. This is the drawer where I once thought I’d keep all my best ideas. It contains only some cracked peanut shells. It is too dangerous to write my best ideas down. “Whoops. Wrong drawer. Whoops.” I repeat the word. It’s one of my favorites. If it were possible I’d store “Whoops” in the safe by my bed, along with “OK” and “Sure thing” and the documents that prove that I am officially an American citizen.

Drawer #53 is empty, though inside I detect the slightest odor of ozone. I sniff the drawer, inhaling deeply. Ozone is not what I am looking for. I close #53 and open #26. Inside there is a press clipping, something somebody once said about my work: “Humanity will be like an antheap stirred up with a stick. See the excitement coming!” The excitement, apparently, already came and went.

That is not what I’m looking for.

Somewhere in one of the seventy-seven drawers I have a clipping from an article published in the
New York Times.
The article includes a photo of the inventor Guglielmo Marconi riding on the shoulders of men, a loose white scarf held in his raised left hand, flagging the breeze. All day thoughts of Marconi have been poking me in the ribs. They often do whenever I feel particularly low or lonely or poorly financed. I’ll shut my eyes and concentrate on sending Marconi a message. The message is, “Marconi, you are a thief.” I focus with great concentration until I can mentally access the radio waves. As the invisible waves advance through my head I attach a few words to each—“donkey,” and “worm,” and “limacine,” which is an adjective that I only recently acquired the meaning of,
like a slug.
When I’m certain that the words are fixed to the radio waves I’ll send the words off toward Marconi, because he has stolen my patents. He has stolen my invention of radio. He has stolen my notoriety. Not that either of us deserved it. Invention is nothing a man can own.