The Point of Vanishing (20 page)

“What?”

“Milena,” he said. “It was Milena.”

The firelight wavered and shimmered on the floorboards. It took a few seconds for me to find my voice. “Are you sure?”

“I'm sure. I remembered her from that night at the deli.”

It was strange—I'd almost forgotten that they'd met. “Did she say anything to you?”

“So I come back from the bathroom, and her date isn't there, and I think to say something. But before I can, he comes back and sits down.”

“You didn't talk to her?”

“She looked at me as we left, really looked at me, but we didn't speak.”

“Jesus, Ray.”

“But listen. I'm walking with Deb, my date, outside, and she says to me, ‘The strangest thing happened while you were in the bathroom. That woman at the table beside us, as soon as her date went to the bathroom, she started telling me all these things. She told me they were married, and she's pregnant, and they live on the Upper West Side. And then she said something really strange. She said they were happy, but there are always parts of your past you wonder about.' Deb said it was like this woman was giving her a message, like she was trying to get it all out before her husband returned.”

I was picturing the café, the cups and saucers on the table, picturing Milena urgently saying all this to a woman she did not know.

“It was for you. I'm almost sure. Maybe she promised her husband she'd never be in touch with you again, and this was just her way.”

“Maybe.”

“Are you OK? You sound kind of strange.”

“Was he short?”

“Who?”

“The husband. Was he shorter than her when they came in?”

“I think so. Why? That was the guy from Vienna?”

I needed to get off the phone. I could feel the firelight pulling on me, and I didn't want Ray to hear it. Milena had made a life, a life not without regrets, but with a child on the way, with a future. For her, for what she needed, she had been right. She had made the right decision. And I wondered, for what I needed, if I had been right, too. I wondered why I'd made the choices I'd made. I wondered why my choices didn't seem to lead to any future. I wondered if this house, and these woods, were the only place I could have come.

After a brief reprieve, the snow had begun falling again—falling in the long windows to the woods, falling above my bed and above my desk, and it seemed I was falling with it. My body was falling and filling with the drifting snow, filling and falling with the changing wind. There was no bottom to the falling, no rock bottom where my feet became solid beneath me, but that didn't matter because the falling was everything. There were only the icicles hanging from the eaves, the night dazzle of the falling snow, the curled corpse of a mouse one morning in the mud-room. Reality, it seemed, had entered my bones. I suffered no visions. No voices. The day itself had become the vision and the voice. There was no further surface to peel away, no more scrim to mistrust, nothing larger to belong to. I had never breathed with so much size—never felt so vast and so tiny at the same time, as though my body had become an open doorway without a house, a doorway that was just a means of awareness for everything passing through it. I no longer spoke. No longer thought, other than in a kind of humming. Images drifted through me the way the reflections of migrating birds drift across a pond—just geometry, a part of the weather. The past and the future no
longer occurred. There was only an ever-expanding present. It seemed the day was making itself aware of itself through me. That was all.

The only disturbance, which came especially late in the afternoons, was a recurring migraine, like the one that had surfaced on my drive to Newburgh. It pushed from behind my eye, pushed like a hand reaching for me from out of my past. Ever since the accident, I'd regarded migraines as warnings, as my body's helpful indicator that I was drifting into danger. Too much anxiety, too much confidence, too much anything—a migraine waved its black flag. But now the thunder behind my eye just seemed a final test, some last vestige of myself I had to transcend, even on the days it forced me to crawl out into the snow, overtaken by nausea.

Which is what brought me to the field that night. The pain had wired shut my jaw, made it difficult to eat. The back of my neck had become two taut steel cords, my right shoulder blade rigid through the back of my skull and into my eye. It was dusk, the sky deepening above the trees. I just needed to walk, to keep walking until my eye didn't feel so thick, until it stopped pulsing, until the sharp air granted some relief. But the walking was only spreading the pain. It was my whole body now. I veered off the road into the field. The vomit came on its own, a thin trickle of bile and tea. Tears sprang to my eyes. The heaving kept going, even though there was nothing left. It made me want to surrender, to apologize for things I couldn't explain—to break open whatever buried rooms I'd forgotten. The cold came hot on my face. Eventually I washed my mouth out with snow, rolled onto my back. I could see the North Star, the bow and belt of Orion. The snow was solid under my back. I could feel the cold seeping into my skin, seeping through my snowpants. It was the large hand of the earth resting on my back, holding me as I continued to fall, as the stars appeared overhead. The
whole sky seemed the opening of a vast well, and I was down below, looking up at everything. The bottom of the well was cold, so cold, but it was also warm, also burning, and I lay there until I couldn't tell what it was and my eyes closed.

Then I was dreaming. I was in the back stairwell of Roxbury Latin, the stairs abandoned, everyone in class. My mind wasn't entirely clear, but I knew I had killed someone. I couldn't remember my victim or my motive or any of the details. But as I climbed the stairs, my only concern was that the body stay hidden. The door to the Latin classroom was ajar, and my classmates, now in their midtwenties, were translating lines from
The Aeneid.
Their faces were the same as when we were young. I'd stashed the body, I was fairly sure, in the small office on the far side of the classroom. Mr. Brennan took no notice of me. I passed behind his desk, and my classmates took no notice either. I turned the knob on the office door. The low ceiling slanted over me. I closed the door to the classroom. There were three metal lockers. The Latin murmured through the wall. Slowly, I opened the locker on the right. Leaves blew out at me, then wisps of snow. The air inside was dark and cold. Whatever lurked inside was farther back, and just as I caught a glimpse of my corpse, my face frozen white, my eyes open forever, I woke up.

The field was silent. Nothing moved on the snow. The dream swept by me in its entirety, in one long stream. The feeling was all around me, a part of the night, and I could feel myself trying to retreat from it, like from the wreckage of some grisly accident I should never have seen.
Was that what I was doing living this way—killing myself and trying to hide the body?

My stomach seized. The sky was black. It was hard to move my fingers, my toes. My legs belonged more to the field than to me. My face felt as though the cold had stamped it there, as punishment, as reminder:
you are human.
Slowly, slowly, I
assembled myself into an upright creature. Streaks of pain ran like lightning through my feet. I wondered if I should try crawling. But it would take too long. I trudged. I was carrying my own body, struggling under its weight. The black trees lined the dim road, indifferent. If I fell and could not go on, nothing would change. Not the temperature, not the direction of the wind. Not the stars and their movements in the sky. The snow would drift easily around me. A crow's harsh call would greet the morning just the same. I'd be no different than a fallen branch, a fallen fencepost. Small icicles might curl from my nostrils. My death would mean nothing here. I meant nothing here—except to myself. The thought horrified me, urged me forward. It felt like a betrayal. The woods did not care. My throat filled with the thick silence of terror, with the knowledge that no one would hear me if I screamed.

Finally, there was the house, the smell of woodsmoke from the chimney. I trudged past the wood in the garage, past the mudroom, and I was beginning to cry. I didn't know how I would take off my boots without my feet coming off with them. I went to the woodstove, the snow puddling on the floor. My face and hands were burning with the thaw, cracking like plaster casts, like the bottom layer of a mask no human could afford to lose.
I did not want to lose my body.
My hands were bone white, terrifyingly white, but they worked as blunt objects, and in the bathroom I set the shower to warm. The shaking was bad. I couldn't take off my jacket, my snowpants. I ran my hands under lukewarm water at the sink, and when they moved, they ignored all zippers and pulled my jacket over my head like a straitjacket, and pushed off my socks, which were frozen solid inside my boots, my toes marble white, so white, just like my fingers.

In the shower, I was afraid of falling. The water was thousands of tiny arrows piercing my skin. I knelt down on all fours, the water streaming down my back, down my haunches. My
body rattled violently. Mom and Dad's faces appeared in front of me in the pebbled water. Their eyes were soft, luminous. I looked at them more deeply than I ever had in real life. I told my mom I loved her. I told my dad I loved him. I apologized to them for everything I had put them through. They looked back at me, looked right back in my eyes, and I had the unmistakable feeling of being seen, of being visible. I had the feeling of being forgiven.
They did not need to know what had driven me here
,
they only wanted me back.
And not the golden boy version of me or the shamed prodigal son, not some version they even particularly understood. Their love was simply a matter of faith. They loved me with the same love I'd found in the woods, a love below all surfaces—it just wasn't anything they could express, just as it wasn't anything I could express. But I knew, had always known, it was inside them, too.

The water drummed around me, the hard floor dug into my knees. There was no other bottom of the well. There was no other rock bottom. I needed to feel myself against surfaces, to find the shape of what was inside me against something outside me. I needed people, I needed love. I'd wanted to see through all surfaces and to see through myself, but I wasn't a transparent thing. I was bone, sinew, skin. If I lost depth perception when it came to life, if I removed every line so there was no difference between near and far, I'd never survive—maybe as a ghost or as a cipher but not as a human being.

The shaking slowed down, and I felt impossibly lighter, fatigued, almost nothing but bones. I stood up in the shower, made the water hotter. Feeling was coming back in my feet, in my hands. My blood was running like it hadn't for a long time. The vulnerability, the openness, was almost voluptuous. I'd always assumed returning would only be possible under two circumstances—the first was that I no longer needed human love at all, all the love I needed carried inside of me, and the second
was that I'd failed miserably and had to return as some broken-down version of the boy I'd been. But there was a third way—to return simply as what I was: a twenty-seven-year-old man, flawed, limited, who was ready to wrestle with his instinct for love, with how horribly vulnerable it would make him. Knowing that no orientation in the world, for anyone, could ever be permanent. Knowing that how I saw would always be changing, depending on who I loved and what I feared.

Later, after I'd dressed in my warmest clothes, I carried the wool blanket from the bed downstairs and lay down in front of the fire. By morning, it had burned down to embers, just a few glowing coals hidden under ash. But I was still there. With the morning light on the floorboards, the snow falling outside. And I felt something I hadn't felt for a long time. A desire for the future. A feeling that good days might be ahead, days with other people, days to look forward to. Days I might allow myself to trust.

It was a few weeks later that the knock came at the door. Each rap sounded alarmingly inside the house, hardening the posts and beams into place with me inside them. I felt sharp flashes, as though I was underwater and something was bobbing on the surface far above me. The blue candle guttered on the table. In the darkened windows to the woods, the reflection of my dinner flickered soft and shadowy, more the idea of a dinner than anything solid. And my image flickered just the same.

In the weeks since my night in the field, I'd understood I was going to leave. I'd told Lev over the phone. I'd told my parents. I didn't know what I would do in Boston, how I would manage—not in the larger sense of the word, not even day to day. I couldn't picture my life there, but I knew I needed to try, knew I needed to start bringing furniture back into the empty room of my life. I understood the months and years ahead would be difficult, but I had no idea just how difficult. I didn't know then that the first doctor I saw in Boston would tell me I weighed 120 pounds, not the 155 pounds I'd written on the form. I didn't know the physical therapist he sent me to would inform me I had the musculature of an eighty-year-old. I didn't know how difficult it would be to get strong again, to resume occupancy in my body. I didn't know that the city, as technology boomed, would only become louder. I didn't know that there would be a terrorist attack on American soil that September, that televisions would appear in almost every restaurant and bar, that there would a constant buzz of information and anxiety. I didn't
know that for almost two years straight I'd need to wear earplugs on the street and that with them in my ears I wouldn't see as sharply—the whole day unpleasantly muted, as though I was wearing sunglasses. I didn't know that the sidewalk itself would change. Before going to the woods, I'd overheard an occasional businessman as he stepped out of a taxi, or a stylish young woman broadcasting romantic outrage in front of Au Bon Pain, but in 2001 cell phones were suddenly everywhere, as though another stage of evolution had set in: one hand held to the ear was how humans walked. I didn't know how frightened it would make me—person after person talking into their hands, somewhere else, blind to the day around them. I didn't know I'd feel like Rip Van Winkle, asleep for twenty years, returned to what was functionally a ghost town: a coffee shop full of people, but only the sound of insects in the walls, which weren't insects but fingers typing, typing, burrowing away at the dimensions of time and space, at the human need for being here and now. I didn't know everyone would suddenly have so much to say. I didn't know everyone would suddenly have so little time to listen. I didn't know that just at the time I had learned to slow down, the world would learn to speed up.

And I didn't know that with Andrew's help, I'd learn about a professional tennis player, a Harvard golden boy himself, who had broken his neck and was now making a comeback. I didn't know that in order to talk with him, I'd decide to write an article, and that in doing the interviews, I'd find that being able to listen, to picture what people were saying, really did have a place in modern life, that there was something I could offer: in the right context, people yearned to be heard and to be seen. And I didn't know that the confidence the article would give me would help me on my way to grad school, and even to having a girlfriend again—a reticent, deeply insightful poet from Missouri. And I didn't know that after the article came out, an editor
would contact me about writing a book, wondering if there were any human interest stories I might know of and want to tell. A conversation that would lead me to consider my own story—my eye accident, my years in the woods, and my long, strange search to get the world, and my place in it, back into perspective.

The three raps came again. It was probably an emergency, someone was probably in need. Smoke was rising from my chimney. Candlelight spilled out onto the snow. There really wasn't much of a choice. I stepped into my moccasins, crossed the plywood mudroom floor, and opened the door.

A woman stood on the frozen doormat—probably in her midforties, bundled in a long green parka, cheeks faintly red from the cold. In one mittened hand she held a clipboard. “Sorry to disturb you,” she said, her breath smoking in the doorway. “Just a few questions. Two thousand senses.”

I was confused. I glanced at the form on her clipboard, the number and word in large blocky print.
2000 Census.

“It won't take long,” she said. “Missed a few folks last year. Just trying to get the numbers right.”

I asked her in, not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed.

She followed me through the mudroom, and, leaving on her parka, she angled a chair from the table towards the woodstove. Trying to regain my composure, I offered her a cup of tea. She shook her head with the same tight rhythm as her knocking. Apparently, the house's minimalist decor made her more nervous than the darkened roads outside.

“Just a few questions,” she said. “You live alone here?”

The answer seemed obvious enough.

“And you have no kids here?”

I only looked at her.

“I do have to ask.”

The woodstove was throwing a great deal of heat. I felt too skinny in my t-shirt, all collarbone and ribs. “No kids.”

“Name?”

I told her the house's owner was Lev Weissman.

“The form only asks about you. Your information.” She unzipped her parka, revealing a sweatshirt underneath, and let out a discreet sigh. Against the dark gray, her eyes became deeper blue.

“Problem?” she said.

I was probably staring like a child. Nothing seemed particularly noteworthy about her, but her details were human details—the pudginess of her fingers at the clipboard's edge, the fading, mottled red in her cheeks.

“Sorry,” I said.

“The Census only needs your name. Your birthdate. Your basic information.”

Maybe I was the last stop of her night. Maybe someone was waiting for her at home. I imagined the television light flickering in the curtains of a well-kept house, her husband on the couch, soup simmering on the stove. It struck me as a wonder—as something impressive and mysterious. There was some life that she came from.

“Your name?” she said.

The whole house seemed to be listening. A log popped and shifted in the woodstove. The sound of my name in my head felt strange to me. But she was waiting, pencil poised. And the quiet felt different now, like there was an opening in it.

So I spoke my own name. The shapes rusty in my mouth. It almost hurt, like running into an old friend on the street, someone who makes you slightly uneasy because he remembers more about you than you do about him.

“Could you spell it?”

“Yes.”

“Would you?”

And I did.

It was a clear May morning, the field still ankle-deep with mud. As the car rode the ruts, the puddles plashing under the tires, I felt myself saying good-bye to everything—to the apple trees in the meadow, to the trail into the woods, to the chickadees, to the field and all the nights and mornings I'd walked beside it, to the very smell of the air. It was childish, but something in me felt like a child, or, really, like a young man setting out from home for the first time. I didn't know what lay ahead of me, but I felt prepared. There was solid ground inside me now—not answers to any specific questions, but a physical understanding that I needed surfaces, however false, however temporary, to get down to the truth beneath them, an understanding that while I wasn't only who I was to other people, without other people it would be nearly impossible to get down to what else I might be. These woods had given me a second chance, a way to learn to see again, and now I was leaving their embrace, like an animal shoved by its mother out of the den. But I was also the mother aware that it was weaning time, aware that if the young didn't leave now, he might never leave and might never have the chance again.

I passed Nat's trailer and said a silent prayer for him, passed the cows on the hillside and the outbuildings of the Mooreland farm, and felt the hard catch of pavement under my tires on the road. I headed up the hill to pick up my last mail at the Lake Parker General Store. There was no mail for me, but as I walked out onto the dusty slats of the porch, nothing more to do before turning the car south, I felt as though I'd just received a very long letter, one I'd written to myself, one it would take me years and years to read. It told of trees and snow and wind, of silences and open spaces, of the fundamental compromise and glory of being a human being, and of other things I hadn't understood at the time, and perhaps would only be able to understand later, in the years to come.

I drove through Barton once more, just to pass the C&C, and the café, still closed, and then I followed the road back to the highway, turned onto the ramp heading south, and allowed myself, not without a mixture of relief and regret, to pick up speed.