The View From the Seventh Layer

by Kevin Brockmeier

  The town library stood next to the repertory theater, which stood next to a bed and breakfast, which stood next to the eyebrow house with the white picket fence and the ornate floral scrollwork around the porches. It had been a long time since she had read a book, but sometimes, in the evening, she still liked to sit in the New Acquisitions room behind the library's front counter and watch the people come and go. The leather chairs there were deep and comfortable, and the various readers were always poised and quiet. The wallpaper was decorated with seventy-eight hand-painted birds that the notable painter had brushed into place almost eighty years ago. If the bookshelves were the conscience of a house, Olivia thought, then surely the library was the conscience of the island. And the marina was the face, she supposed, and the shopping lanes were the appetite, and the grassy rise of Norfolk pines was that small peaceful place where it could forget what it was feeling for a while. Olivia approved wholeheartedly of people who read Carson McCullers—their open nerves and their beaten glances. She did not believe she would ever be capable of understanding people who read James Patterson. In Nathan Wilcox's yearbook she wrote: I'm sorry I never got to know you very well. In Indy Carmichael's she wrote: I'm sure that things will be better for you someday. The library had two sliding glass doors in front, one on either side of the lobby, and whenever both of them were opened at the same time, the air in the New Acquisitions room fell completely still for a few seconds. This happened once or twice an hour. There was something about that quickly passing perfect stillness that reminded her of the way she had felt in the presence of the Entity, the amazement and dazzled well-being that were so unlike anything she had known before.

  In addition to the mayflies, spiders, beetles, wasps, silverfish, dragonflies, and bumblebees Olivia had helped the widow Lorenzen evict from her house, she had also been summoned to remove any number of mosquitoes and fireflies, as well as a pair of brown moths, a single green katydid, and a small mottled gecko that had suctioned itself to the glass front of her grandfather clock. Her husband had died almost ten years ago, the widow said, after a lingering emphysema that had confined him to the house for more than two years, and since that day the insects had never stopped coming. She told Olivia that she used to imagine she had gotten over him and had finally moved on with her life, but lately, when she was not thinking about anything in particular, she would suddenly hear him whistling the old Sinatra songs he loved or catch the aroma of his Benson & Hedges Gold 100's, and she would wander into the other room fully expecting to see him sitting in his favorite chair with a crossword puzzle open on his lap. She was starting to worry about herself. On her coffee table was the video case for a movie starring Roddy McDowall and Paula Prentiss called It Must Have Been a Nightmare. When Olivia read the title out loud, the widow nodded her head and answered, “It still is.” She had pale freckled skin that allowed a tracery of veins to show through the backs of her hands. Once, Olivia was trying to coax a wasp through the house and the widow was following along behind her with a Debbie cake when the wasp bobbed up toward the ceiling and the two of them had to wait for it to descend. They paused before the portrait in the parlor. Olivia told the widow, “Your husband was a striking man,” and the widow gave her a look of squinting amusement and said, “That's not my husband.” “Then who is it?” Olivia asked, and she answered, “It's Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.”

  The island was shaped like a sneaker with a missing toe. The waves were strongest on the south side, where the sole would have been. There were so many undercurrents and slack areas in the water there, though, that the entire length of ocean had been restricted from recreational use. The waves on the north side were slower and heavier, and on any given day, Olivia could look past the boats in the marina and see them rolling deliberatively into shore. There were surfers who paddled their boards out to sea and tried to ride them back onto the beach, but they quickly discovered that it was no good. It was like trying to surf a supermarket conveyor belt, she had heard one of them say: you didn't feel invigorated, you just felt conspicuous. Sometimes, when she was in a particular sort of mood, she would purchase a few of the discarded umbrellas from the children who had collected them, paying half the original sale price. Some of the children spent the money on candy. Some of them used it to buy Black Cats and bottle rockets. Some of them saved it for the air hockey tables in the lobby of the movie theater. Olivia allowed the umbrellas to dry overnight, then restickered and sold them again. The perspiration on the Entity's skin (if that's what it was—perspiration) had drawn together in hundreds of quivering beads that looked to Olivia like the rain on a freshly waxed car. There were days when the sky was so spotlessly clear that the clouds never came to cast their shadows on the water at all. “We must be like insects to you,” Olivia had said to the Entity, and it had smiled, closed its warm black eyes, and answered, “Yes, you are all like insects to me. But I am like an insect to myself.”

  The walls of the cottage were wood, and the palm trees at the edge of the yard were wood, and the summer cabin where her father used to take her camping when she was a girl was wood. Once, when she was thirteen, he had allowed her to invite her friend Katie Gremillion with them for the weekend. The three of them went motor-boating in the deep section of the lake, then hiking on the wilderness trail, then fishing in the lily pads beside the docks. The fish they caught worked their mouths open in astonished circles. Olivia knew what they must be wondering: How had the crickets they swallowed risen up like birds and wrenched them out of the water? She felt so sorry for them that she made her father release them back into the lily pads. On the evening of their second day in the cabin, he showed Olivia and Katie how to arrange a stack of cedar logs in the fireplace, building a teepee of kindling underneath so that the flame would catch and grow. The burning wood filled the cabin with its perfume. Eventually her father said, “It's getting late. You girls should go on back to your room and get some sleep now.” The two of them brushed their teeth with the water from their canteens, and then they went to bed. It was just after midnight when the door to the room they were sharing came open, gliding around on its hinges as if by accident, making hardly a sound as it closed. It was surprising how empty a room could be with three people in it. The next morning Katie's eyes were shot through with red. She would not talk to Olivia. Later, in her yearbook, Olivia wrote: You didn't see what you thought you saw.

  In the evening, just before the stars began to show in the sky, the western end of the island became like a painting. The sun grew larger and larger as it sank toward the horizon, laying an expanding cone of rippling red light across the water. The palm trees turned very slowly to silhouettes. Hundreds of tourists stood along the beach taking snapshots of themselves. Olivia had grown used to seeing them huddled together with their families, smiling and turning their faces to the lens. Their arms were always outstretched to hold their cameras at the proper distance, and it looked to Olivia as if they were trying to flatten something they did not really want to touch. She doubted that any of them would recognize her away from her station behind the counter of the map stand. Olivia had never operated a digital camera in her life. She had never carried a cell phone or owned a PDA. When she walked past a group of Girl Scouts selling cookies from a table in front of the Lutheran church, she closed her eyes for a moment and imagined she was roller-skating.

  Her mother had told her many times about the days when she used to take her grocery shopping, how Olivia would sit in the cart scissoring her legs back and forth and strike up conversations with the people they passed in the aisles: Hi, I'm Olivia. What's your name? I don't like vanilla wafers. Are you buying any Sunkist? Are you buying any root beer? “You were quite the little charmer,” her mother said. “Everybody used to love you,” she insisted. It seemed clear to Olivia that the life she was looking at was one whose meaning lay entirely in the beginning. She had started out strong and beautiful, and she was not sure when she had changed. But surely anything that could change once, and c
hange so dramatically, could swing back around and change again. This was what she told herself as she stalked another honeybee for the widow Lorenzen, or as she lay in bed waiting for the pills to take effect, or as she raised the awning of the map stand in the morning, or as she sat down to lunch in the restaurant at the end of the marina. Minute after minute, hour after hour, she turned her thoughts toward the day when the Entity would come back for her in its vessel. It would whisper to her with its tremendous musical breathing sound. It would burn her with the soft touch of its fingers. It would say her name, and it would carry her into the sky, and the two of them would set out from the island together, driven through the layers of space by a radiant dream of the way things could be.

  THE LIVES OF THE PHILOSOPHERS

  There must have been a window of seconds, after he was seized by his vision of the unknown but before he was awed into silence, when Thomas Aquinas would have been capable of describing what he had seen. He was working alone in his cell when it happened—drafting a sermon on the four cardinal virtues, maybe, or a commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. A tallow candle was burning on his desk. The candles at the friary were not perfumed, so the odor of animal fat must have lingered in the air, but Aquinas would not have noticed that. He paused to blot the ink from his quill. Perhaps he heard the wind filtering through a crack in the shutters. Then he turned his head to follow the quivering motion of a cobweb and was filled with the white light of revelation.

  Jacob can envision the scene down to the smallest detail. He can picture Aquinas hunched over in his wooden chair, his giant's body locked into its writing posture, his oxlike eyes absorbed in concentration. The sleeves of his robe were gathered at his elbows. A grain of sand, caught in the wick of the candle, gave off a tiny spark. He can see it all so clearly, but he cannot cross the threshold of the image and slip inside. He cannot guess what Aquinas was thinking. It is the one surpassing mystery of the great man's life, a mystery that has occupied the attention of the philosophical community for more than seven hundred years. What happened that night in his cell to make him lay aside his pen? What did he understand in that one brief moment before he lost the will or the ability to express himself?

  Aquinas was not yet fifty at the time, though he would die just a few months later. When Friar Reginald asked him why he had abandoned his work, he answered, “I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw.”

  I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw.

  Jacob has printed the words on the back of an envelope which he has tacked to the bulletin board above his desk. He shares his office, a converted classroom on the top level of the Humanities Building, with half a dozen other graduate students, but Bertram College is such a small institution, and the Philosophy Department so lackadaisical, that he often has the space entirely to himself. Sometimes, when he is trying to think through a rough spot in his thesis, he can stay at his desk staring at the words on the envelope until long after midnight, leaving only when he hears the custodian's cart rumbling down the hall, reverberating over the pebbled floor like an oncoming train. There is nothing waiting for him at home and no reason for him to hurry. His girlfriend, Audrey, works the late shift at the college health clinic. Even on her nights off the two of them no longer know what to say to each other.

  It is a Thursday evening in early March when Jacob meets the woman he will later come to think of as the gypsy. He is supposed to be grading student midterms, but instead he has spent the last few hours bookmarking passages in Aquinas's Summa Theologica—searching for clues, as he thinks of it. He has become so engrossed in the project that when a knock comes at the door, he twists around in his chair as though someone has dropped an ice cube down the small of his back.

  It takes a moment for his heart to settle. “The door's unlocked,” he calls out.

  The woman who comes edging into the room looks to be maybe nineteen or twenty. She is wearing a long, loose skirt, a sweater with a neck that reveals the collars of several smaller sweaters, and dreadlocks trussed up in a bright red scarf. “Sorry, man, you were the only light I could find on.”

  Jacob looks at the clock and sees that it is almost midnight. “That's okay. What can I do for you?”

  “I'm having problems with the change machine.”

  She gives the words an unusual emphasis, hovering over them with her voice like a flyswatter before falling dramatically on the final syllable. The change machine? Jacob pictures something straight out of a science fiction novel, an immense apparatus of hatches, levers, and conveyor belts that allows you to step in as one human being and step out as another, in which atheists change into Christians, stock car drivers change into politicians, great beauties change into wallflowers.

  “You know, the one over by the elevators,” she says. “It ate my dollar.”

  “Oh—the change machine. Well, I'm not sure what I can do to help you out there. You'll have to talk to somebody in maintenance, I imagine.”

  “Yeah, I would, but that's the problem. I can't find anybody. And I need that money if I'm going to catch the bus. Is there some sort of refund button I can press, do you think?”

  “I doubt it. But look, here—” He fishes a couple of dollars' worth of change out of his pocket, maneuvering his fingers past his keys, his handkerchief, and a tattered roll of breath mints. “Will this be enough?”

  The woman's manner as she walks across the room, without hesitation, skimming the floor in her long brown skirt, reminds him of a tree in the late days of autumn. It is in the thinness of her limbs, he thinks, and the way that everything about her seems to rustle: her hair, her clothing, even her voice.

  “That's so cool,” she says as she takes the change. “Let me pay you back, man. Here. I know. Are you right-handed or left-handed?”

  “Left-handed.”

  Thomas Aquinas was left-handed too. He had to hold his pen at a crook, writing from below the line to avoid smearing his letters across the page. The few surviving examples of his penmanship are barely legible.

  The gypsy takes a chair out from under the desk next to Jacob's, sits down, and turns his hands palms up. “Okay, that means that your left hand is your active hand and your right hand is your passive one. Most people are right-handed, so for them it's the opposite. Basically how it works is that your passive hand shows you the character you were born with, and your active hand shows you the changes you make to yourself. The passive hand is heredity. The active hand is choice.”

  She leans in to peer at his hands like a jeweler examining a gem for flaws. Her lips are so close that he can feel her breath on his palms. For a moment he imagines that she is going to kiss him. The tips of his fingers give an involuntary twitch.

  “Huh. That's weird. In your case, though, the lines are exactly the same.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She traces each line slowly with the nail of her index finger. “Well, you've got your heart line here at the top. In your case it's got a sharp upward curve to it and a lot of little breaks, which means that you're affectionate but you're going to experience periods of sorrow in love. Then you've got your head line in the middle—a good, sharp line, you see? That means you're intelligent. But there's this bit here at the beginning that shows me you're also kind of cautious. You're a teacher, right? That makes sense. And then this curved line at the bottom is your life line. There's a lot of space between the life line and the thumb in your case, which is good, but you've also got this strange gap here in the middle—not so good. At any rate, the line has a nice fluid curve to it, so all in all what I'm looking at is a pretty decent life. The weird thing, though, and this is what I was telling you, is that the lines on the passive hand and the lines on the active hand are absolutely, one hundred percent identical. I've never seen that before.”