Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  Otherwise she was as weird as me—moody, reclusive. I couldn’t stop thinking about how pointless it was, us living in a gigantic apartment with studio space and a spare bedroom. And also the fourth dimension, which had gotten worse, because it was making more sense, it was starting to explain everything.

  “Like ghosts,” I said, lying on the sofa.

  “What do ghosts have to do with it?” Violet said, taking off her dress in the doorway of the bedroom. She’d heard it all before, but she played along anyway and pretended that she hadn’t.

  “Well, if ghosts are real, then maybe ghosts are just part of the four-dimensional shape of everything,” I said. “Moments so prominent that the moments are visible from other parts of the shape. Or maybe not even prominent moments—just moments somehow connected to your own. Like a comic book character getting a glimpse of the panel on the opposite page when the book has been shut and the panels are pressed together.”

  “Except ghosts aren’t real.” She hung her dress in the closet.

  “Or fortune-tellers, mystics, prophets. Maybe those are just the humans with an especially deep understanding of the four-dimensional shape of everything, humans especially sensitive to the ripples left by past or future events,” I said. “Four-dimensional artists.”

  “Maybe they’re just the people especially talented at scamming other people out of their money.”

  “And what about God?” I said. “Imagine what we’re capable of doing to two-dimensional objects.” I sat up. “Imagine a cartoon stick figure guarding a cartoon safe with a cartoon envelope inside.”

  “Okay,” Violet said, tugging on some sweatpants. “Imagining.”

  “The cartoon man can only see the universe in terms of length and width, so when you use a pencil to erase his gun, he can’t see you do it—the eraser exists beyond his two-dimensional plane, at a different height. All the cartoon man can see is that, first he’s holding his gun, and then he isn’t. It’s gone. Magic.”

  “So?”

  “Well, and it’s not just that. When the cartoon man looks at the safe, all he can see is the front of the safe. But when you look at the safe, you can look both inside and outside of the safe at the same time. You can erase the envelope without opening the safe. You can turn the envelope into a ticking bomb. You can turn the envelope into his pet dog.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “So a four-dimensional creature would have the same abilities when it was looking at our three-dimensional world—it could create a tornado in a parking lot, erase cancer cells from the bones of a baby, anything. And we would never even see its pencil, so to speak, because it would exist beyond our planes.” I leaned back against the arm of the sofa. “But the four-dimensional creature would see us—would see all of us, both inside and outside, all at the same time. It would be everywhere at once and would see everything at once and could change anything at will.”

  “I hate these arranged marriages. My first husband, all he talked about was hockey. Now it’s you and cartoons,” Violet said, walking off toward the kitchen.

  Violet had been alive for nearly fifty years, had a lot of street smarts, might have been able to explain bingo or turbans or the stock market to me, but this—this was not her type of thinking.

  Not that she didn’t have her own issues. She just seemed to be better at controlling her neuroses. For her work served the same purpose that art did for me—she’d spend all night doing chores around the apartment, sweeping dust onto the floor, hanging towels from the hamper, scrubbing bleach from the mold in the bathtub, and then leave for her firm, where she’d work nine, ten, eleven hours a day, before coming home at dawn to crawl back into bed.

  And then, just when we had gotten into a strange sort of rhythm, her working and sleeping, me catatonic or manic, us never touching, then one night she brought in the garbage, and in the bag was a piece of mail that she thought was a bill but that actually turned out to be an official notice from the Department of Health, informing us that our children would be unearthed the following afternoon, a Sunday.

  “Children?” Violet said. “You know about this?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  She showed me the letter.

  “Children, as in, like, more than one?” I said.

  “Don’t ask me,” Violet said, making a face that said that she meant it.

  * * *

  My parents were at the ceremony, along with about a hundred people we didn’t know. We caught up with my parents in the parking lot.

  “Is this where you came from?” Violet asked me.

  “I don’t know, is it?” I said, looking at my parents.

  “The very same cemetery,” my mother said.

  “I came from underground?” I said.

  “Americans almost always do,” my father said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Wait, what happens to people in other countries?”

  “All kinds of things,” my mother said, adjusting her hat. “People spit from the mouths of jackals. People washed up onto shore by tsunamis.”

  “In some places people are grown in fires instead of in earth,” my father said.

  “Or sometimes it’s us,” my mother said. “We’ve been sending soldiers overseas for centuries, bringing people to life all over the world. Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis.”

  “Our planes can bring whole villages to life,” my father said with a smile, giving my shoulder an encouraging squeeze.

  Chipmunks were chirping in the ash trees. A bell tower was tolling. We gathered in a circle around the mounds of dirt in the ground. Somewhere in there, our children had been growing.

  Violet held hands with me as some workers in overalls started to dig. A blank-faced preacher gave a speech while the workers in overalls hauled the caskets out of the ground.

  “Will we have to take the bodies back to the apartment?” I whispered.

  “Usually they’re kept in a funeral home until they’re ready to be born,” Violet whispered.

  “Will they look like us?”

  “Of course,” Violet whispered, then frowned. “Well, probably.”

  Bright leaves shades of crimson and carmine and vermillion were floating from the grass into the trees. The dates on the stones said our children would be born in two months, dead four years later. I realized that some of the people around us were crying, occasionally wiping tears onto their cheeks with tissues or their hands, blinking as the tears streaked up their cheeks into their eyes. Seeing people crying didn’t surprise me. I’d known the ceremonies got emotional. I wanted to feel something too. I felt as depressed as ever. By then even my parents were crying. The preacher went silent, and then the workers in overalls lifted the caskets onto a pair of podiums, and then cracked open the seals, and then took away the bouquets, and we all huddled around as the preacher lifted the lids.

  The caskets were empty.

  * * *

  “What the fuck does this even mean?” I said as we got back on the subway.

  Violet was still too upset to answer.

  * * *

  I gave up on finding a job, gave up on art. We were supposed to have two children but our children were missing. All we had were their names—Elliott, Piper. Violet took me into the bedroom later that morning, dragging a box out of the closet. She’d had the box for fifty years, since the day that she’d been born, but for some reason she’d always avoided opening it. The label on the box read “twins.” We peeled the tape from the lid, cautiously parted the flaps, and then stood there together over the box, staring down at the faces in the photos. Photos that’d be taken on a carousel. Photos that’d be taken at a playground. Our children would already have such short lifetimes, only four years each, and we wouldn’t necessarily even get to meet them as soon as they were born. Typically, Violet said, empty caskets meant some type of abduction.

  Nobody had any idea where the bodies were.

  I had to get out of the apartment.

 
I started taking walks during the night, long meandering hikes alone through the city, smoking, thinking. I’d sometimes walk all the way down to Coney Island, past the colorful lights of the amusement parks along the boardwalk, past the silhouettes with spliffs and cigars fishing from the pier, wandering along the beach until dusk brightened the sky over the bay, or else walk across the bridge into Manhattan, past the distant gleam of ferries passing the Statue of Liberty, past the rats scurrying into alleys between the radiant skyscrapers along Wall Street, past the figures in gowns and fedoras standing in line at jazz clubs in Greenwich, past the figures in neckties and heels stumbling from cabs into cocktail bars in Chelsea, past the shadowy figures in trench coats spilling down the steps of the ancient bathhouse by Alphabet City, past the garden where figures in caps kept watch over songbirds in bamboo cages over on Delancey, past figures keeping time with nodding heads while drumming on overturned buckets at the entrance to Grand Central, through the dazzling canyon of neon advertisements in Times Square, through the endless blur of whirling traffic in Columbus Circle, through the faint glow of the lampposts strung along the shores of the lakes and the ponds in Central Park, sometimes all the way up into Harlem, part of me hoping to get approached by somebody with a knife. I felt like getting knocked around.

  I’d decided that if nobody was going to give me a job, I at least wanted to start volunteering, do something meaningful. At the same time though, I was afraid to commit to anything important. I was terrified of somehow botching it up, freezing during a crucial moment. If that ever happened, I already knew, I’d blame myself forever.

  My parents recommended starting out small. My mother suggested volunteering to visit with the elderly at a nursing home. My father suggested volunteering as a crossing guard for the local elementary school. Violet suggested doing anything other than sitting on the sofa and painting more volcanoes.

  And then one morning dark storm clouds blew in from the ocean, and puddles began forming in the streets, and ripples began shimmering across the puddles, and then raindrops began to leap from the puddles and the pavement and the cars and the roofs and the leaves of the trees, a moody drizzle of rain, and as sharp cracks of thunder rumbled into the sky and white bolts of lightning flashed into the clouds, I went out walking without an umbrella. Street vendors were grilling halal meat on kebabs, drawing rich greasy smells from the air around the carts. Dilapidated trains rushed through tunnels under the sidewalk, drawing faint clattering sounds from the air around the grates. Soft blue light poured from everything toward the sun somewhere beyond the clouds. I stepped between the newborn earthworms already wriggling from the pavement toward the grass in the park. I was worried about dying. I knew it wouldn’t happen for another thirty years, but thinking about it scared me anyway—I kept imagining how uncomfortable it would be to be sucked into my mother’s womb, to be so tiny and helpless, eventually splitting into an egg and sperm, and then into microscopic proteins and hormones, before finally disappearing forever. Violet had described it to me recently in great detail. I couldn’t stop worrying about it now. What it would be like to disappear. At what point would the me stop being me?

  I followed the storm into the Bronx. I wanted a smoke, saw a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, and extended a hand, watching the cigarette leap between my fingers, already smoking at the tip. I stopped in a doorway to get out of the rain. Somebody was sleeping in the doorway under a pile of ratty blankets, overlapping shades of ochre and ecru and bister in damp wool. I kept as quiet as possible, leaning back against the wall.

  And that was when it happened—beyond the wire fences, somebody was making something. A building. Wrecking balls, bulldozers, excavators, humans in chartreuse construction vests, a whole crew. It was early morning, still not quite dawn, and as the rain died off, the cranes began knocking the building into place—swinging the wrecking balls over the rubble until the rubble began to leap from the ground, dust and bricks and wood and plaster and gigantic pillars of concrete that the wrecking balls pounded into the perfect shape, a brick building topped with a rusted water tower decorated with bright graffiti, everything sturdy and shining. The sight made my heart pound.

  Construction appealed to the artist in me—it was like the crew was making a sculpture, working the lumps out of the clay, slipping a new cube into a wrapper. I wanted to build too. I wanted the manual labor. I was going to work the depression out of me, was going to sweat and bleed.

  I walked home and announced all of this to Violet, who had just come home with garbage bags full of toys and clothing for the children we didn’t yet have.

  “You can’t just go out and get a construction job. You need skills. Qualifications,” Violet said, pulling out a purple t-shirt with a cartoon dinosaur.

  But when she saw how my face fell, saw how utterly crushed that my expression was, Violet admitted that she had some coworkers who were volunteering downtown working on a new community center. It was being built on the site of an old park that had been torn out several years before.

  “Would you be interested?” Violet said. “You could at least do that.”

  I was. It would be like a painting, I told her—the crew that had torn out the park had brushed away the fountains, the trash cans, the pathways, the benches. Now we would brush away some of the sky, replace it with building. Okay, okay, she said, rolling her eyes, I’ll talk to somebody. Just no more volcanoes.

  * * *

  It was unbelievable, the amount of raw material required to make a building.

  I rode the subway up to the construction site every evening, bringing an empty thermos in case the need hit me to spit up some goulash or chili or tomato soup. We’d spend all day hauling metal beams to the site, bags of shattered glass and broken ceiling tiles, carefully sweeping the debris into place. Volunteers in dump trucks would drop off loads of garbage—cracked computer monitors, bent window blinds, smashed light bulbs, clock radios with missing cords—and we’d carry the garbage to the designated spot, wherever the architects had instructed our supervisors to instruct us to leave it, sometimes in the street, even, or a nearby churchyard. I even met one volunteer who’d been sent on a special assignment to collect steel from a decommissioned warship to be used in the frame of the building.

  When my mother heard about all of the garbage, she was smug.

  “See?” my mother said. “Just what we’ve been saying. You wouldn’t even believe the rate that we’re emptying our landfills, turning the land into woods and fields.”

  I worked hard, piling blocks of concrete and rebar as cold drops of rain leapt from my skin into the sky, or trickles of sweat that had formed on my neck and my back got absorbed into my skin, or blood that had formed on my skin trickled up into scrapes on my elbows and my knees. Cockroaches scuttled through the rubble. I took breaks with the other volunteers. It was good to talk to people other than my parents and Violet, to other humans also lacking a purpose. Some had been volunteering for months. I at least had an apartment, a spouse to go home to. Many of the volunteers seemed homeless, sleeping in pews at a local chapel, wearing the same dirty clothing day after day, spitting up oatmeal into plastic bowls every morning. Meanwhile, my muscles had become tight and lean from the manual labor. All of the light drawn from my skin by the sun had left a splash of freckles on my face. Violet claimed the freckles were cute.

  But if anything the depression was worse. Instead of feeling empty, I felt actual emotions, but the emotions were intense and horrible and would come in random waves. I felt sad almost all of the time now. A devastating sorrow, just total despair. I’d feel guilty for no reason. I’d suddenly be gripped with fear. I’d thought that doing something meaningful would make me feel better about myself, maybe even make me feel proud or confident, but it didn’t. I felt worthless. I felt helpless. I hated myself as much as ever.

  And soon there would be nothing for me to do. Only a week remained until the inaugural ceremony, during which the architects would bring in the wrecking balls and
the bulldozers and the excavators and finish the job, leaving me stuck back in the apartment with my paintings and my sculptures. And with Violet, who hadn’t been working lately, had taken time off to set up the spare bedroom for the children we couldn’t find, and whose mood had become even more unpredictable, alternating between her wanting to cuddle with me on the sofa and her disappearing into the bathroom with the door locked for days on end. When my volunteer gig ended, everything would go back to exactly the way it was before.

  Except, one night when we woke up, Violet went downstairs and brought up some garbage and inside was a letter from a financial company. A letter addressed to me. I had been awarded an interview for a job. And not just a job, but an actual art job. Not just an art job, but a full-time art job, in the new community center. My interview was on the very day of the inaugural ceremony.

  It was obviously a mistake—an interview meant for somebody with a similar name, or maybe the same name but a different life. I didn’t care if it was a mistake. I planned to capitalize on it. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life.

  I was still obsessed with the fourth dimension, still not great at talking to other people, still would sometimes accidentally refer to them as “humans” rather than “people,” which probably made me seem a little, well, off, but still—I decided that when the morning of the interview came, I would go to the community center and would be well dressed and articulate and friendly and charming, would fool the interviewers into believing that I was happy and normal, at which point the company would have to give me the art job, would have to, just have to.

  Yes, yes, I was nervous. I didn’t sleep for days.

  * * *