The Point of Vanishing (19 page)

“Just taking a rest, buddy?”

Without knowing why, I'd sat down on the sidewalk. Her skin in the sunlight, the open friendliness of her face. It was something in her ease, her vitality. Even the dog had seemed beautiful. I looked up at Andrew. “Did you see her?”

“Yes.”

My instinct had been to absorb the feeling, as though I'd just seen a deer bounding with impossible grace through knee-high snow. But she wasn't a deer.
She was what I was.

“Everything OK there?”

I made myself stand up. “You saw her?”

“Pretty sure.”

“She was
very
attractive,” I said.

“Wasn't bad.”

Andrew glanced at me, then started walking again at the same speed, which seemed very fast. I struggled to keep up, but this was my morning walk, and maybe from practice my eyes felt almost as slow as they did in the woods. Everything was entering me deeply again. I looked over at Andrew. It struck me how healthy he was, how vital. The glossiness of his dark hair, the stubble on his jaw. He moved effortlessly. He cut through the air more easily than I did, like he was more aerodynamic. As with the jogger, I could see the wonder of his existence.

“How you doing, Duck?”

“There's so much beauty,” I said.

He coughed. “You sound a little like Uncle Walt. Miracles everywhere. You read
Leaves of Grass
 ”

“No.”

“You should, dude. Absolutely.”

I nodded, noticing another woman on the opposite side of the street. She had short black hair, a bright turquoise scarf around her neck. She walked as though pushing through oncoming waves—so solid, so purposeful, so alive.

“Then again, maybe not. We've got to get you back in training. Back up to speed. You've been in the Sahara.”

“The Sahara?”

“The desert, dude. The metaphorical desert. You've got to pace yourself. Can't drink too much at one time. We run into a really hot girl, she's liable to strike you dead.”

I saw the jogger again in my mind. She was naked, her breasts and golden hair like so much sunlight washing over me. It didn't seem the worst way to go.

I kept falling behind. Even when I caught up, Andrew stayed a step or two ahead, as though his shoulder were my companion. Had he grown even more athletic on the tennis tour, or was I just terribly out of shape? I wondered if maybe I should shave my beard. And then a painful thought popped into my head. I wondered if Andrew was embarrassed to be seen with me.

Suddenly, there was a dull roar, an engulfing vibration. There had been no breeze, no warning, nothing but the smell of the sunlight, the brick sidewalk, the leaves. But the bus—it was a city bus racing down Mass. Ave.—swallowed everything, its wake of wind covering the street like an ocean wave.

Andrew didn't notice. I tried to relax, to breathe slowly. I remembered the cool under the brick archway entrance to the Yard. I remembered how I'd always liked that feeling, a kind of ritual bath every morning before moving into the realm of
learning. But as we approached the archway, a high-pitched screeching pierced the air behind us. It sounded like a carousel being put through a shredder—so many painted metal ponies grinding under the blades. My fingers in my ears, I turned in horror. There was just a white Cambridge cab, a green shamrock on its door, pulling over by Bartley's Burgers. The door opened and a well-dressed woman got out. She thanked the driver. No pedestrian rushed to check under the hood. No painted ponies were extracted from beneath the tires. The cab eased back into the flow of traffic.

“You all right, Duck?”

Embarrassed, I pulled my fingers from my ears.

“The brakes a little loud for you?”

I looked down Mass. Ave. towards Central Square, angry, assaulted, scouting for more cabs, more buses, more possible offenders.

“You've probably got to adjust your equalizer a little bit.”

The air around me still felt blurry. “My what?”

“Your equalizer. You know—how much beauty you see, how much bus. Maybe you've got to filter some things out.”

I didn't know why he was talking to me here. I just wanted to get inside the cool brick archway, away from the street.

“You know, maybe you could be a little less sensitive. Maybe there's some middle ground.” He was nodding as he spoke, as though being very patient with a child.

“Is that what Uncle Walt says? The Middle Ground? Is that one of his poems?”

We stood in front of the archway. My tone was not nice. Andrew knew exactly what I was saying.

“Listen, I'm just—”

“Maybe I'm not like you. Back from your adventures with a pair of leather sandals from India. Back with some seashells on your desk.”

He crossed his arms, looked down at his feet. He absorbed the blow. Everything around us was on his side and he knew it. “Your call, dude.”

We passed silently through the shadow under the archway, and stopped as we came into the quadrangle of Tercentenary Theater, the paths criss-crossing under the oaks. Our graduation ceremony had been held here just five years earlier. Crimson banners riffling in the June sunlight, rows and rows of proud parents arrayed beneath the massive columns of Widener Library. The quad was nearly empty now. Andrew shifted his backpack on his shoulder. He was getting his study-face ready, preparing to go face his competition. He'd wanted to help me, but the quarters were getting too close, and maybe a little too strange. He had his own life to worry about, his own changes. He glanced at his watch. No one said anything. I hated feeling needy, especially as I didn't know what I needed. Only three years earlier, on a hike in northern New Hampshire, Andrew had grabbed my hand. He'd asked a few nervous questions about bears before we started, and half a mile up the trail, there was a crackling boom behind us, a great rustling of leaves. A hand was suddenly holding mine, Andrew's face utterly still. I said it was a large tree branch falling—not a bear, a bear wouldn't make that much noise. Slowly, Andrew had loosened his grip.

He shifted his backpack again, looked down at his feet. I was the one afraid now of noises, the one overwhelmed by his surroundings. The one who might have reached for his best friend's hand.

“What happened to miracles everywhere?” I said. “What happened to letting go of the governor?”

“Listen, you want to be able walk down the street like a normal human being, or don't you?”

The answer was supposed to be obvious. But I didn't want to haze my eyes, my ears. Not after everything I'd been through
to learn how to see again. If I tried to turn down my senses to allow for the taxis and the buses, for all the images that didn't make sense, wouldn't I lose the chickadees, too? Wouldn't I lose everything—the ability to know where I was and who I was? Besides, I didn't know if I could do it anymore, even if I wanted to, if there was any way to reverse course.

As we came alongside the front of Widener, its massive columns more imposing and more meaningless than ever, I could feel Andrew looking at me. He was still waiting for my answer. Senior year, when a sound had startled me, I would recover far more quickly. He would go on talking, I would listen gratefully, and our conversation would pull away from my discomfort. But our old patterns weren't enough now. I was worse off than both of us had thought.

“Tell me,” he said, “don't you want to be comfortable here? Don't you want to be able to come back?”

I didn't know how to explain. I didn't know where to start. “I don't know,” I said. “Maybe not.”

Winter wasn't shy. It didn't care that I'd been away. Before my trip, the snow had just been learning the shape of things—lining the black branches of the apple trees in the meadow, tracing the circular grain on top of the fenceposts, as though uncovering map after map of some distant world. But now the snow knew where to fall. It wasn't overzealous, but it kept coming. And I didn't resist the seduction, the welcome home.

My snowshoeing jaunts grew longer, the trails less and less clear through the trees, less and less necessary. There was so much to explore: the heavier feel of the cold in the shadows of the pine and spruce, the thin, ice-cold brooks rimmed with ice, the hidden copses of silver birch, their enclaves turning enchanted in the afternoon sun. I crossed fences that had been dwarfed by the snowfall, their barbed wire reduced to hieroglyphics peeking above the ground. I took off my snowshoes and forded creeks. All of it felt like home—not so much my land as land I belonged to, land where nothing could go wrong. And when something did, as when I came upon a house a few miles to the west and saw what appeared to be a human body hanging from the front porch, then hurried closer to find it was a black bear hanging from a noose, I ignored it, turned around, and snowshoed home. Omens did not interest me. At least not omens that came from other people. Hunters, distant neighbors, the headlines at the C&C—it was all the same. Communication that didn't come from the sky, or the snow, or the bears themselves had nothing to do with me.

My daily rituals remained the same. Tending the fire in the woodstove, making mint tea, taking long walks. The constant effort at opening the eyes of my eyes, the ears of my ears. Linda posted a sign in the café window politely informing her patrons the café would be closed until May due to heating costs. My trips to the C&C became less frequent, usually with no words spoken. But I did feel a new need to establish my own voice among the woods—or not really my own voice but a voice that would allow the silence around me to take form. This way I might play a role, the way everything in the woods played a role; I would become part of the ecosystem, even if it wasn't exactly clear what my poems were feeding. And, perhaps, I could eventually turn them into a book, could use the money I earned to keep living here, to make this way of living into my way of life.

It seemed a solid plan. The poems came to me as I shoveled the roof at night, or as I carried logs in for the woodstove, or as I washed my hands at the sink. I'd play with the words in my mind, count the syllables, try different ways of breaking the lines. After my walk the next morning, I'd mount the steep stairs to the bedroom, then go up the extra two stairs to the desk, and write the poems on individual pieces of blank white paper, my hand long and loose. Every morning there was another one or two to transcribe from the day before.

As the snow bowed the wooden railing outside the window, and the drifts deepened on the deck like waves washing up onto a ship, there were fewer and fewer words on the page, as though my voice itself was beginning to vanish under the snow. Sometimes the words felt like footprints, harder and harder to find. But the stack grew beside me on the desk, proof of my existence, of time passing. And maybe the blank lines and the growing quiet of the poems were a sign of progress. After all, I wasn't searching for my own reflection or my own personal voice but for the voice that would remain when my own reflection ceased
to be.

Nat's son was showing up to plow more than necessary. Even when there were only five or six new inches, snow I easily could have driven through, his father's truck emerged out of the trees at the far end of the field. In the fall, Nat Jr. had delivered wood—a heap left by the garage, like a giant's matchsticks spilled from a box—and I'd seen him driving out. Yes, he said, his dad was in the hospital but nothing to be worried about, the old man had more fight than a chainsaw. After the first major nor'easter, Nat Jr. didn't come for a week, but now every time the snow fell he appeared like part of the weather. He never stopped to talk. Sometimes he raised one finger from the wheel, the way his father had.

Which is how, one slate-gray afternoon, I realized it. His coming wasn't a good sign. There could be only one explanation for why he made the half-hour drive from Newport when there wasn't any need. It was a way of doing something for his father, even if his father never knew. It was a way of caring for him. The frequent intrusion began to annoy me, and I figured with Nat's recovery the visits would taper off. But as January slipped into February, nothing changed, and I knew part of my annoyance at Nat Jr. was really my annoyance with myself, with my own inaction. I'd done nothing for Nat, nothing to see how he was. I became determined to talk to his son, to ask for an update, but he never stopped the truck, not even when I signaled him. Maybe the music inside the cab was too loud. Or maybe he knew what I would ask, and he didn't want to answer.

That night, I imagined driving to the hospital, lying to the nurse, saying I was family. There had to be a way to see him.
And then what? I'd sit by his bedside
,
hold his hand
,
tell him how much his snowplowing meant to me?
Something about my need for Nat didn't make sense. We barely knew each other. The desire to see
him, I thought, was a weakness. I wouldn't be going to the hospital for him, I'd be going for me—for some kind of emotional handhold, even if Nat didn't say a word. In my mind, I saw a well, tiny branches sticking out from the icy wall, and instead of just letting myself fall, instead of trusting that I could survive whatever was at the bottom, I was grasping for something midway down. I didn't want that need. I didn't want any personal connection holding me up. That branch would just strain and snap under real weight. I needed to let go and trust in the bottom of the well. Only once I touched bottom, felt my feet and hands on something solid, something beyond which there was nothing else, would I know what to trust—and how to begin again.

A few afternoons later, the phone rang. I thought it might be the hospital, even though no one there had my number, or maybe it was Nat Jr.—so I picked up. It was Mom. Her voice was so loud but so far away. She said they'd found a direct flight from Burlington to Fort Lauderdale for me. Everyone was going to be at Nanny's party, even Susan and Dirk, who would be flying back from Italy. The snow was falling in large, desultory flakes, a kind of afterimage of the storm from the night before. I'd just come back in from shoveling the roof, was still in my snowpants. I sat down in my phone position. “I can't do it,” I said.

“You need an afternoon flight? There is an afternoon flight. Hold on, let me get Dad on the line, too.”

I waited. The woods seemed to go on for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

“Howie, you there? So I've got the flight times here.”

“I'm sorry. I can't make that trip.”

The line fell silent. “What do you mean you can't make
that trip
?”

“It's your grandmother's eighty-fifth birthday,” Mom said.
“Everyone is coming. The whole family is coming. We talked about this. Susan and Dirk are coming back from Italy, for God's sake. We'll pay for the flight. We're more than happy to pay.”

I said nothing.

“We understand spending time with the family might be hard for you,” Dad said, his voice calm again, lawyerly. “Sometimes it's hard for me or your mother to take time, but sometimes you have to subordinate your own interests. That's what being part of a family means.”

“I tried at Thanksgiving.”

“You do understand occasionally making a sacrifice for someone else. Don't you care enough about your mother and your family to do that? To sacrifice a few days?”

I pictured myself as an effigy, burning on a chaise lounge by the pool.

“I don't understand,” Mom said, less to me than to whoever had captured her son. “I don't understand how this is possible.”

“I wish I could explain.”

“Carl, hang up the phone,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Hang up!” There was a cough, a scuffling noise, and then the line was clear. “I will not promise you a second chance,” she said. “Do you understand me?” I could see her, on the phone in the kitchen, glaring at me as though I'd become a perfect stranger, her eyes a one-way trip past all the years I'd been her son, past whatever she had believed she knew of me.

“This doesn't have to do with you, Mom.”

“Of course it has to do with me!”

After she hung up, the snow kept falling. It had been falling for days. The light on the floorboards below the windows was gray, dense with silence. The room was an emptiness and fullness at the same time. There was a thickness in the air, a density that filled the room, that filled all of me, right up to my teeth.
As though the house were showing me a glimpse of my remains.

The truck's sound shouldered into the gathering dusk. I'd been walking alongside the open field, watching the pockets of blue in the snow, trying to catch the moment as they dissolved into black. Beyond the field, streaks of purple rode stowaway in the keels of the clouds.

Nat Jr. slowed to a halt alongside me, the snow creaking under the tires, and he rolled down the window. The engine ran, but no music played from the radio. He was holding a cigarette. He looked up at me after he lit it. “Thought you'd want to know,” he said.

I couldn't catch up to the words, to their meaning. They seemed to run out ahead of me into the field.

“Passed a few nights ago.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, then glared down at it, as though its taste was disappointing.

“I'm so sorry.”

“Life's a bitch and then you die, right?” The blond hair at his collar trembled with the vibration of the truck. His eyelids looked pink, slightly swollen.

“I should have seen him in the hospital.”

He exhaled a long plume of smoke. He stared at the glowing lights of dashboard, one hand still on the wheel, as though for indication of what had gone wrong. “Well, I guess that little crush of yours was mutual. He talked about you whenever he came down here. Mom said it was like you was some version of himself he never got to be.”

I was stunned. I didn't feel like a version of anything.

“Your father was a good man,” I said.

“What would you know about it?”

I didn't want to take my hand off the truck door. It was the closest, I realized, I would ever come to touching Nat again. “I
appreciate your coming down here.”

“Nothing else to do.”

“When's the funeral?”

“All taken care of.”

“You mean the arrangements?”

“All taken care of,” he said. He leaned towards me, rolled the window back up. Then he raised one finger in parting, threw the truck into reverse, backed at alarming speed into the field, and drove off towards town.

The blue had fled from the field. It seemed I could hear the truck for a long time through the trees. I had the urge to whisper to Nat Jr. that he was jealous of a ghost, of a product of his father's imagination. The truth was I was jealous of that ghost, too—the eager young man who'd stacked wood that first fall, the real backwoodsman, his search underway.

The border of pines at the far end of the field was a silhouette of spires. I wondered what Nat would say if I walked towards it now, that dark church—whether, now that he was gone, he would understand.

The firelight played through the grates. I tried the visualization game, but no clear pictures were coming—there was too much static. The only thing I could focus on was the fire. I could make my vision alternate, back and forth, first seeing it as throwing light into the room, then seeing it as drawing light from the room. The first way, the room grew lighter, the orange glow fanning across the floorboards from the wood burning in the stove; the second way, the room grew darker, the fire feeding on the last bits of light hidden under the table, the last bits of light hidden inside of me. It wasn't a new game, but it made me uneasy now. It was just a seesaw of vision, of mind, but I could feel the question at its fulcrum.
How much more light could I absorb
from the woods before the woods absorbed all the light from me?

I didn't want to go upstairs to bed, didn't trust my mind to be quiet. I needed to talk to someone. Not to Andrew. Definitely not to my parents. It took me awhile, but then I thought of Ray. Not to say anything necessarily, but just to make the room a little more solid with his voice.

I sat down on the daybed and dialed his number. I saw the Hudson River and the New York City night out his window. He picked up on the third ring.

“Howie, I've been thinking about you.”

The possibility astounded me. “You were?”

“It's late for you, isn't it?”

“I think so.”

“We've got an exam tomorrow, so my mind keeps jumping to more desirable duties.”

Maybe it had been a mistake to call.

“You study this stuff long enough, it starts to induce some of the symptoms. Anyway, I needed to call you. I have a story. I've only got ten minutes, but I'll try to be quick.”

“Please,” I said. “Go ahead.”

He described a woman he'd met at a party, how he'd eventually asked her out, and how the previous weekend they'd gone out for coffee. His preamble was a comfort. I didn't care where the story was going. It was a relief to listen to his voice, to hear about a life that was drawn inside clear lines, a life that made sense to its owner. “So we're at this café on the Upper West Side, things are going well, and I notice an attractive woman walk in the door. She's with a man, and they're seated at the table next to us. They're speaking German. She looks familiar, but I'm paying attention to my date, and it's not until I get up to use the bathroom that it hits me.”