Her name was Patricia but everyone called her Pip, something that often happened in WASP families, she explained, the names that had been in the family for years getting replaced in childhood by sporty nicknames, Apple or Kit or Kat. Like Kathleen Kennedy, who of course wasn’t Protestant, but in the same spirit was called Kick. Punchy names that rang of a certain brawn, of the ruddiness of coming back from a football game in the early dark, cheeks flushed with autumn and cheer. Pip and Kick and Apple and Snap and Crackle and Pop, Samson added mentally. And Chip and Pebble, Pip went on, like the members of a corny seventies band.
Minutes passed in which they said nothing. Pip drummed her fingers against the window, leaving smudges on the glass. Samson wanted to press her on. He wanted as much from her as she would give.
“Pip,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It’s nice.”
“It’s all right.”
She’d changed it a few times. For a while she’d called herself Pippalada after the sage who, in the Upanishads, says practice austerity, continence, faith for a year, then ask what questions you wish. When the year was up she changed her name to Laura, after a girl from Minneapolis who’d died in a bus that went over the side of a mountain. This was near Manali, in the north of India. Tibetan monks, refugees in saffron robes, appeared through crevices in the cold, white peaks. Months later, when she walked into her childhood bedroom for the first time in two years, she cried when she saw the framed macramé with the letters P-I-P above her bed.
Outside, the desert was brutal, the light high-density. The bus made a pit stop and everyone filed out into the absurd heat. Samson bought two Cokes from a machine and gave one to Pip. He took a few pictures of her leaning up against the bus, as if they were tourists together. She was at ease in front of the camera; probably she had been photographed often as a child.
“I used to take pictures. When I first started traveling I took pictures of everything,” she explained.
“And now?”
“I don’t know. I guess I lost my camera at some point.”
She shrugged and twisted the tab on her can back and forth, reciting the letters of the alphabet. It broke off on K.
“K? Who’s K? I’m going to fall in love with a person whose name begins with a K.” She paused, pressing the frosted can to her forehead. “I don’t even know your name,” she said. He told her. “Really? You’re not making that up?”
“Why would I make it up?”
“I don’t know; it’s an unusual name. You know the story about Samson, I guess? From the Book of Judges?”
His mother had once told it to him, a man with long hair and great strength. The hair was the secret to his strength, but the woman he loved betrayed him, cutting it as he slept. At the time, the story had not deeply affected him, the young unbiblical Samson.
They climbed back aboard the bus and Pip took out the Bible.
“Tremendous violence,” she said. She didn’t open the book, just held it in her palm as if testing its weight. It was all inside her head. In grade school she had been an excellent student, she told him. She could read something twice and recite it back. At her parents’ cocktail parties she was asked to perform.
“It’s in the Book of Judges. Samson judged Israel for twenty years. First he killed a lion. Then he killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. The spirit of the Lord rushed on him. That’s how the passage goes: it rushed on him,” she said. “His long hair was the symbol of his vows to God, and God was on his side.” She looked out the window. “Tremendous violence,” she repeated, staring at the alkali flats, the remains of an ocean as old as the Great Flood. “He fell in love with a woman. Delilah, remember?”
Samson nodded. He was feeling edgy, as if something was welling up in him, threatening to spill over.
“Delilah, of course,” he said.
“He fell in love with her and she betrayed him.”
She could have been telling the story of an Indian soap opera. She could have been a small precocious girl burdened with the gift of recollection, orating the story to her parents’ friends, people named Chip and Pebble who laughed and held aloft their dry martinis to toast her. “She cut off his hair,” she continued, visibly moved, though Samson wondered if perhaps she was performing now. She recited: “The Philistines are upon you! Delilah said. When Samson awoke from his sleep, he thought, I will go out as at other times, and shake myself free. But he did not know the Lord had left him. That’s how it goes. And then the Philistines storm in and gouge out his eyes.”
It was thrilling, the awful violence, the sheer injustice. Samson could only barely contain the urge he had to let rip a savage shriek, to leap up and run up and down the aisle smacking the heads of each passenger to rouse them from their stupor.
“They gouge out his eyes?” he asked, pitching forward.
Pip tipped her head back.
“They gouge them out and tie him up and throw him in prison.” Her empty hand hovered in the air between them, the fingers slightly arched as if in a question. “When his hair grows back again he asks the Lord to grant him one more act of strength. And when the Philistines bring him out to entertain them he grabs the pillars of the banquet hall and pulls them down. The roof falls, killing everyone, including Samson. And those he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life.”
Samson—the latter-day Samson hailing through the desert on his way to Santa Cruz—raised his eyebrows. He wondered if it was a sign, if there was a fate to his name that he should more carefully consider. Pip shifted her eyes away and he thought he saw a fleeting smile, but when she turned back her face was serious.
She was on her way to a mass baptism in the Pacific. She’d heard about it while she’d been at home—convalescing, as her mother an nounced in a loud whisper when anyone called on the phone. At night Pip would go out, saying she was meeting her friend Dina, a dull, unambitious girl she knew from high school who worked at the ice cream shop in town. Instead, Pip drove along the back roads to the Calvary Chapel Fellowship meetings in Boston. One night someone brought pictures in from Life magazine. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people gathered on the beach, clapping and singing. Some held tambourines or small, grubby children. A line snaked to the water’s edge where a man had just been plunged under and pulled up again, his hands in the air, fists clenched, his head thrown back like a boxer who’d just been hit. It was hard to tell if he was laughing or crying. Small rivulets of water streamed down his face, the sun glinted off him. The man who stood beside him was the preacher whose voice Pip had listened to for three weeks straight before she left India. Behind them the wide-angle ocean expanded, remote and ominous, toward the horizon.
Pip described how after the meeting she’d driven back on the dark roads. As she talked Samson fanatically imagined the scenes, adding details of his own, like her headlights sweeping across the trees. She stopped in town and picked up a pint of ice cream that Dina handed across the counter in a silver insulated bag. At home she put it in the freezer with the others and went up to bed. But she couldn’t shake the image of the baptism from her head. The next day she made some inquiries, and a week later she was saying good-bye to her parents again, her mother averting her eyes from the crucified Christ she’d taken to wearing around her neck. Her father, who couldn’t hide his disgust, asked if she’d packed her hair shirt. By five that afternoon he would be having drinks at the club, relieved to be able to return to the vision of his daughter bounding across the commons of a New England college to meet a young man with a strong jaw and firm handshake and a name like Pierce.
“Who did you say I remind you of?” she asked, turning away as if she’d already lost interest in the answer. It was enough that they cut off his hair, but to gouge out his eyes? Gently he slid his hand into hers. She seemed to take no offense, at ease with the intimacy that from time to time arises between strangers who have no claim on each other.
They emerged from the de
sert into the vast system of tract housing. Her long fingers twitched, the cuticles were ragged. The sun shone through the dusty window.
She fell asleep, her head slumped forward on her chest and the Bible lodged between her knees. Samson took the slides out of his jacket pocket. He breathed on them and rubbed out the smudges with the corner of his shirt. The delicate samples of tissue were like the fingerprints of the hand of fate. His great-uncle Max had been an amateur artist whose obsession was an Italian city that he drew from an aerial view. Although Max was from Germany, as a young man he had lived in Italy for a year. Twice or three times he had taken a hot-air-balloon ride there. Years later he began to draw the city he’d lived in, reconstructing it from memory—the streets, churches, and squares rendered with mathematical precision. Samson had admired these drawings as a child, and somehow the specimens with their intricate net of crosshatches reminded him of them.
He studied the flecks of tissue, matter produced by his own brain. There was something uncanny and miraculous about it, he thought now: the dimensionless mind breeding dimension. A year ago he had tumbled down a hole, a trapdoor into a place that seemed to have depth and width, distance and perspective—that seemed habitable. He had stumbled and landed in the immaculate geography of the mind. But from the beginning memories had assaulted the emptiness, forcing him back into the world. His mind had filled with the detritus of recollection, and then, as a final humiliation, it had been broken into and vandalized. What Ray had refused to see was that no matter how great the desire is to be understood, the mind cannot abide any presence but its own. To enter another’s consciousness and stake a flag there was to break the law of absolute solitude on which that consciousness depends. It was to threaten, and perhaps irrevocably damage, the essential remoteness of the self. This transgression was unforgivable.
Pip stirred in her sleep.
And yet what else does it mean to be loved, Samson wondered, than to be understood? What else but to be profoundly touched by another? He thought about who he had been before the tumor, telling himself the story of his old life like a sad tale. Once there had been a woman he loved whose body he had taken into his own hands, maybe amazed that such touching left no impression. Turning on the bedside lamp, he had found her unmarked. Her name was a sound you could go through, coming out the other side onto an identical place, Anna, a mirror image, a double echo in which there was nothing to grasp onto. Maybe he had loved her too much, feeling he was unable to get her close enough; that so long as she remained a separate person, he could get to know her only so well. And because the core of her would always remain elusive, threatening to slip away, he’d switched course and faded away to protect himself from the loss, his voice breaking up, over and out, like a pilot’s adrift in space.
Or maybe the story had happened differently. Perhaps his love for her had frustrated him, the impossibility of ever getting through. Maybe they had taken drives out of the city, crossing delicate bridges whose steel fibers hummed and swayed imperceptibly in the wind. They traveled north into the country where they imagined a future, passing through small towns with steeples and weather vanes. Anna would take off her shoes and draw her feet up under her. December, a faint snow on the ground, they would come to a crossroads and the dying yellow light would glow under the sky’s dark hem. She would be silent, her head tipped against the glass. Then suddenly she would look up, her mouth open, her face changed by an expression he’d never seen before and that made her seem unrecognizable. Maybe he had wanted to rage out against such changes, against the fact that he could not account for her.
Or maybe even before the tumor developed, it was he who had tired of being bound to her. Maybe he had just wanted to get free, having outgrown the person that all along he’d been to her, on whom she depended. How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself? If Anna was right, if a person was no more than a collection of habits, perhaps the habits were maintained only so as not to disappoint the lover that one slept beside each night. But what chance did that leave for becoming, one fine day, a wholly different being? Maybe it was he, after all, who had not been able to abide being accounted for, who had no longer wanted to be reached.
Once there was a woman he loved. That was how it had begun. But from there the story might have unfolded any number of ways. Only the end was always the same: he had emptied himself of the ballast of memory and lunged weightless into the future. Alone and astonished, attempting to take with him not even a trace. In the end he had betrayed the woman he loved, and who was there who would not judge him for that?
Anna, backward or forward, the name a ghost of itself. If he called her, if he could reach her now, what would there be to say?
Pip gently snored at his side, the sweet, strangled inhalations of a baby. He imagined her as a child at six or seven, her jaw jutting forward and her tongue touching her upper lip in cool defiance. By her side her mother, practically a child herself, her hair parted in the middle and falling loosely over her shoulders, not yet cut, primped, and permed into the unattractive helmet of middle age. Her skin yet unlined by misfortune, by the antics of a daughter who grew up to prefer squalor to her own comfortable home, whose lack of inner peace drove her across the world to be touched by the hands of filthy men in the name of one god, only to return again to be dunked in the Pacific in the name of another. Her heart not yet broken by the lost child.
Samson wondered now whether he and Anna had spoken about children, whether a child of their own with Anna’s eyes and his countenance had been waiting up the road in the future that was now lost to them. The thought of it made his heart quake with sorrow and love.
Pip’s mother, her days spent in a room with the blinds half-drawn, smoking cigarettes and drinking diet sodas, longing for so many lost things, among them that six-year-old girl, christened Patricia, who so brilliantly entered the world of cocktail glasses under the hearty name of Pip. Ray was right: the misery of others was only an abstraction. And because it is impossible to contemplate, to actually feel the suffering of another without reference to one’s own, Samson was naturally moved to think of Anna, and then, finally, his own mother. He knew almost nothing of the last twenty years of her life. He could not bear the thought of her having lived out her days alone, perhaps having drawn her own blinds and sat staring into space. Whoever the son was that observed his mother slowly enter middle age; who grew up, left for college, and called her regularly; who moved away and returned from time to time to visit, to register with compassion the small humiliations of old age; who received the phone call that she was ill and flew out to sit by her side and watch as the cancer quickly advanced; whoever it was that saw his mother out of the world and buried her was now as unreachable as she.
And what is a life, Samson wondered now, without a witness?
He felt an overwhelming desire to be close to his mother. He wondered where she was buried. How could he not know where his own mother lay six feet under? She’d never moved from the house he’d grown up in; that much Samson had gathered from Anna. Presumably he’d buried her in a cemetery nearby. How difficult could it be to find her? Were there not records of these things, the grassy plots sons stake out to bury the women who brought them tooth and nail into the world? He would find her grave and when he found it, flesh of her flesh, he would fall to his knees and grieve for her. He would lie down and close his eyes, and pressing his body to the ground, he would bear last witness.
The bus route terminated in a parking lot near the beach. Gulls perched on rusted metal posts, heavyset and unflappable. Samson nudged Pip awake. Her head rolled back and she opened her eyes. He felt the restless fervor of a man who’d been locked up for years, whose recurrent fantasy had been nothing more than an unobstructed view. He wanted to grab Pip and haul her over his head, to jog her down to the ocean and plunge them both under in a briny baptism. Instead he reached out and unceremoniously brushed the hair out of her eyes, tuc
king it behind one ear. Pip narrowed her eyes but didn’t protest.
Outside in the parking lot, they stood blinking in the light, inhaling the coastal, arboreal smell of California, the bracing Pacific where soon Pip would be washed clean of everything but the love of God. From then on she would be called Patricia. The past would live under a different name.
There was someone waiting for her, a woman with graying pigtails sent by the Chapel. She stood waving in front of a van whose bumper sticker said I Brake for Miracles. As a parting gift Pip handed him the Bible, folding down the pages about Samson. The camera was still around his neck, and he took it off and hung it around hers. She smiled and he smiled back, and for a few moments they searched each other’s face with the awkward shyness of people suddenly reminded of how little they know one another. Part of him didn’t want to let her go, wanted to accompany her, to watch over her sleep and protect her from harm as he had failed to do for Anna. He wanted to take her small-boned body in his arms and carry her safely into a new life.
But he didn’t, and finally Pip shrugged and walked to the van. The woman embraced her as if they were old friends. Pip endured the hug, then threw her backpack into the car and climbed in after it. As they pulled away she turned and waved through the window, and Samson lifted his hand in a salute.
THERE WAS A THING he liked to do that comforted him when he was a child. Lying in his bed, he would imagine what other people were doing at the same instant. He would allow his mind to drift out the window and down the street, floating above the trees and rooftops as his great-uncle Max had once floated, in his youth, above the Italian city. He would pause outside the upstairs window of the house next door where Mr. Shreiner practiced his golf swing bathed in the blue glow of the television. He would continue down the street, past the Sargents, whose oldest son, Chuck, came home from college one winter under mysterious circumstances. Mrs. Sargent told people he was writing a play, and Samson would look into Chuck’s bedroom to see him in his mother’s bathrobe, hunched over a typewriter, his hair freakishly unkempt. Samson would drift through yards that emitted an odor of rotting sweetness. He would linger in front of Jollie Lambird’s house, watching as she slept. In his silent sentry Samson would float over the trim lawns and still swimming pools, through the faint blue night of suburbia. He’d sail over the humped foothills with their mossy oaks. His mother would be out on a date, and he would find her wearing her red dress and the black pumps that pinched her toes, laughing like a gypsy with her head thrown back, leaning into the man she was dancing with. Who the man was hardly mattered, a suitor stepped into the spotlight of his mother’s attention before receding into obscurity, someone she might have met at a rally, a divorced dentist, a moony artist. His mother never appeared to be deeply affected by the comings or goings of these admirers. Sometimes it seemed to Samson—and maybe also to the men on whom she leaned as she limped up the driveway in her pumps at the end of the night—that she was only biding her time.
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