The View From the Seventh Layer

by Kevin Brockmeier

  She gave no response, but he could tell what she was thinking just the same. Her grief and her longing reached out to him from across the room.

  Are you going to be all right? he wanted to know.

  Again she refused to speak. He listened to the melting sound as she drifted away from the wall, wondering when she was going to answer him, what she was going to say.

  Within seconds, she was standing at the foot of his bed, she was floating in midair, she was lingering at his pillow. And then she was under the blankets, and inside his clothing, and covering him like a sheet of thick, flowing oil. And it felt so nice, and he was so nearly asleep, that it would have been easy to accept it all like a dream, a dream of rising slowly toward the sun, its yellow glow and cells of fire, simply giving himself over to it until he woke in the innocence of the morning and wondered whether anything had happened at all. But he had made a promise before God and the Church, and he would not allow himself to abandon it.

  He screwed his eyes shut and twisted out from under the covers, falling onto the floor. He backed away on his elbows. I can't help you, he said to her. Get away from me.

  Amy Elizabeth billowed toward him like a wave, and he repeated it: I can't help you, Amy Elizabeth. Go away. Go away now and leave me alone.

  And that was where he was, propped on his back on the carpet, as the determination that held her together weakened and came apart in a mist of confusion and sorrow. He listened to the rustling noise as she disappeared from there to everywhere.

  He had almost forgotten how empty a building could feel.

  He failed to sleep that night—or if he did sleep, he failed to recognize it—and by the time he took the pulpit the next day the church shone in his eyes with a brilliant insomniac clarity. The columns at the end of the aisles were like spotlights aimed straight at the floor. The cross was like a stencil placed over a lantern. His parishioners filled every seat and their faces seemed to burn from the inside.

  After the announcement of the Gospel, he cleared his throat and spoke. My children, St. Paul had this to say of strangers.

  They were the first words of his sermon, and behind them lay all the others, but no one was listening to him with any special attention, and he could not remember what he was meant to say next.

  My children, he began again. My children, St. Paul had this to say of strangers.

  He felt a fluttering sensation inside him—the feeling of every word he had ever been given being taken away like a stack of loose paper caught by the wind. In the back of the church a baby began to gurgle. Someone tried to stifle a cough and sneezed instead. The bishop stared up at Father Melby from the corner of the first row, his eyes glowing with that look of fulfilled expectation. Though the pews were full, the sanctuary was empty, the ghost of Amy Elizabeth was nowhere to be found, and as Father John Melby stood before his congregation, waiting without hope for his mind to yield up the rest of his sermon, he knew that he had been damned by the purity of his devotion.

  THE HUMAN SOUL AS A RUBE GOLDBERG DEVICE: A CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE STORY

  You are returning the milk to the refrigerator when your head begins to swim. Red shapes like semitransparent scarves flare open in your vision, brimming over with light before they dwindle away. For a moment you think you are going to collapse. You put your hand on the counter to steady yourself. Your heart ticks down the seconds like a bomb. Then the sensation passes, and it is an ordinary day again.

  It is the sort of thing that used to happen to you all the time: you would stand up too quickly from a chair, and the whole room would pitch to one side as the blood rushed to your head. The first time you heard this expression you were seven years old. You stumbled getting up to take your turn at the chalkboard, and your teacher asked, “What's wrong? Is the blood rushing to your head?”

  The phrase was confusing to you. You imagined your face turning an exotic, beetlike red, like the picture on the cover of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

  Mrs. Pritchard—that was your teacher's name.

  You remember how surprised you were when she moved away with her husband over the summer, the first of who knows how many people you never imagined you would never see again.

  It is a clear Saturday in late September, with insects stitching patterns over the grass and an invisible jet etching a narrow trail in the sky. For once you have no work to catch up on, no chores to finish, no errands to run. You head upstairs to the bathroom, where you brush your teeth and comb your hair. There is a tree outside your window swaying slightly as the air filters through its branches, like a dancer who can't keep still no matter how hard she tries.

  You think about the cool silence of a concert hall before the first note falls over the audience.

  You think about a woman you once saw lifting her skirt up to her knees as she waded into the green water of a river.

  If you decide to put your shoes on and go out for a walk,

  turn to page.

  If you would rather spend a quiet morning at home,

  turn to page.

  The bricks covering the plaza are a deep chocolate brown. They seem to absorb every trace of sunlight, magnify every trace of sound, and you play the same game you have played a hundred times before, walking so that your footsteps fall parallel with them. You make it almost as far as the coffeehouse before you begin to feel a restlessness in your joints and have to quit. You veer off toward the public library. Chestnut saplings have been planted in gaps in the paving, and you approach one of them from between a pair of benches, ducking beneath a little elastic suspension of its leaves. An ambulance starts racing its siren. You step out from under the branches just in time to watch it tear away, a big white box that takes the corner with improbable speed.

  A cluster of blackbirds goes beating into the air as you approach, scattering across the roofs of the buildings and reconverging in the arms of a willow. A bicyclist pumps his way slowly up the hill that runs past the Methodist church, his legs moving in a kind of exultant midair parade march.

  Your left shoe is beginning to float free of your heel, so you prop your foot on the ledge of a low window to tighten the laces. You look up to see a girl stepping into the bead store. She is wearing a shirt the color of Dijon mustard. You are just close enough to read the message printed across the back: LIFE IS A BEDTIME STORY.

  If life is a bedtime story, then what kind of story is death, you want to ask her? A horror story? A fairy tale? Or simply a mystery?

  There is a loud crack, and you jerk your head around. A kid whose skateboard has come out from under him stands up from the bricks. It looks as if he fell trying to skim along the top of a bike rack, but he does not appear to be hurt. He levers the board up with his foot and backs up to try again.

  You, on the other hand, have suddenly become dizzy. You lean against the window and wait for your vision to stop spinning. When did you became so fragile that merely twisting your head around could make you feel as if you were about to collapse? you wonder.

  A man walks by with his son, a boy no older than seven, who says, “I would be awesome at that. I want a skateboard. Can I have a skateboard?”

  “You can have a soccer ball, or you can have an Xbox game, but you can't have a skateboard.”

  The boy gives the pavement a scuff of his sneaker. “Soccer is boring. Xbox is boring. I never get to do anything awesome.”

  And his father answers, “When you're older, you can buy yourself all the skateboards you want.”

  Is your adult life anything like you thought it would be?

  If so, turn to page.

  If not, turn to page.

  Susannah answers her phone on the third ring. As always, for the first few steps of the conversation, her voice sounds flat and exhausted. It begins to take on vigor, though, as the two of you settle into your familiar rhythm of jokes and questions, trial anecdotes, split-second pauses. She tells you about her computer, which has been, as she puts it, backsliding. “It's been—what? Three month
s? And already I've got another virus. This time what happens is the screen will lock up for a minute, and when it comes back on, the cursor will just stick there. Motionless. Like a lump. Of gum. When I try to move it, it only selects everything. I was just getting ready to unplug it and take it into the computer place when the phone rang. Speaking of which, what's up with you?”

  “Well, I had an unusual conversation this morning,” you say, and you tell her about the wrong-number call and how the man's voice seemed to weaken and grow ragged the moment you told him who you were. “Or told him who I wasn't, I guess I should say. To be honest, I felt kind of bad for him. Guilty, if you can believe it.”

  “It sounds to me like he was having a hard day, and the pressure of it finally got to him. Maybe you should feel bad for him. That doesn't mean you did anything wrong.”

  “I know, I know. But still—”

  She has known you for so long that you don't even have to finish the thought. A muffled noise of understanding escapes from her throat, just loud enough for you to hear. Outside a pair of boys are tossing a soccer ball back and forth as they walk down the street. One of them hunkers down over the ball, dribbling it off to the curb in a diagonal, then swivels around and backboards it off the side of the other's head, giving the sign for two points. The second boy throws his arm out and says, “You're an asshole, Morganbarron.”

  You think about the poster of Michael Jordan you used to see in the window of every shoe store.

  You think about the fragrance of freshly mown grass, a smell of shock and abundance.

  Susannah allows the silence to fill its own time. “So I'm wondering if I should replace the lamp in my bedroom. It's got this straight-angled, the-future-is-now look I'm not so sure I like anymore.”

  “Does it still give off light? Is it still standing upright? If so, you shouldn't replace it. See, I hate this idea that everything needs to be traded in for something else. I can't imagine a better way to waste a life.”

  It is a declaration, not a question, what she says next. You can hear a hint of half-amused peevishness in her voice. “So you'd say that you're not wasting your life.”

  Would you say that you're not wasting your life?

  If so, turn to page.

  Would you say that you are?

  If so, turn to page.

  You have organized your books by genre, with all the science fiction in one area and all the mysteries in another, all the contemporary fiction over here and all the classics over there, with special recesses set aside for poetry and plays, criticism and nature writing, memoirs and graphic novels. Here is the problem, though: you are not sure whether The Baron in the Trees should be shelved with the literary fiction or the fantasies—or even with the slender pocket of historical fiction you haven't quite gotten around to reading yet.

  You let your eyes pass over the titles. Maybe you are tired, because for a few seconds all you see is a peacock smear of colors blurring out to either side of you. Then your vision clears and all the pieces fit back together again.

  You are staring at an old Alfred Bester novel. Recently you have been toying with a certain thought about science fiction, a thought you find yourself rehearsing again. It seems to you that all the classic science fiction writers—or at least the best and most stirring ones: Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke—practice literature as a form of nostalgia. With all their alien vessels and technological wonders, what they're really doing is running their stories through the gears of a consciousness that no longer quite belongs to them, casting their minds back to their own childhood, a time when the future seemed limitless and there were a million possible stories to be told. This is why their books contain such a strong current of melancholy tangled together with such a strong current of enthusiasm: they are gazing into the future as a way of recapturing the past.

  You decide to sandwich the Calvino novel between Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England and Walter Tevis's Mockingbird, on the border separating the literary fiction from the fantasy, so that anybody who looks at your bookshelves will be able to make up his own mind which side of the divide it is meant to lie on. You square the books' edges. You see a speck of dust on the wood and press it away with the pad of your finger.

  You think again, with a quality of sudden disclosure, about the wrong-number call you received, the way the man's words came pouring into your ear, the fierce emotion in his voice as he said, “Oh God, I didn't mean to trouble you.” At first, when the ember flares open in your chest, you imagine it is your conscience bothering you. But what, you wonder, did you do wrong?

  You stagger and throw your arm against the bookcase, taking just enough care to keep the books from overturning as your legs buckle beneath you.

  Go on to page.

  Maybe the boy has nothing more to say to his father, or maybe he is just salting his counterargument away for another time. Whatever the case, the two of them fall silent as they pass in front of you. You wait by the window until there is no danger that you will stumble into them, then take a couple of swaying steps to the bench by the chestnut sapling and sit down. You lay your head in your lap, letting the dizziness roll straight through you, a giant wave that makes your ears ring and your skin grow warm.

  The fog clears from your mind in a sudden rush of white noise. You look up to see the skateboarder crouching over the deck of his board, the chestnut leaves forming patterns of shadow lace on the bricks, a yellow jacket orbiting a trash barrel. The old Greek man who runs the secondhand clothing store is staring at you from his window, an expression of concern etched on his face. “I'm all right,” you mouth to him. He makes a gesture you do not understand, tapping the glass a few times with the beak shape of his fingers, then shakes his head and turns back into his store.

  You gain your feet again and begin walking. These episodes of light-headedness have been happening a lot to you lately, and you worry sometimes that your health is on the verge of abandoning you, but then you reflect that it has been this way your whole life. For as long as you can remember, every toothache and stomach cramp has presented itself to you as the usher of some irreversible decline. You have always gotten better, though, and you are sure you will again. You will wake up one morning flush with health and energy. Your mind will be sharp, your muscles strong, and you will be able to live as though you have never known the slightest trouble.

  You catch sight of your image in a window, straighten your gig line, smooth a cowlick back from your temple. You swat at an insect hovering by your ear.

  You have ordered a table lamp from the furniture shop a few doors down, and you stop inside to see if it has arrived. The sales assistant taps a couple of keys on his computer. “It's set to ship from our warehouse on the first of October,” he tells you. “We've already got your phone number in the system. You have my word, we'll call you the moment it comes over the transom.”

  Is he using the word transom correctly? You're not sure. You repeat the word to yourself so that you won't forget to look it up in the dictionary when you get home. Transom. Transom. Transom. It is at that moment, on the last closed m of the third repetition, that you lose your balance. You feel something inside you becoming infinitely fine and subtle. Your heart seems to drift right through you, and it diffuses into the open air.

  Turn to page.

  The day is beautiful, with only a few horsetails of cloud brushing the sky at the horizon. Two sparrows are singing to each other from the gutters of the house across the street, a squirrel crawling over the brickwork in fitful little snatches of motion. Your phone begins to ring as you lock the door, but you decide to let the answering machine take the call.

  Your neighbor is washing his car, his ears cushioned behind an old pair of headphones, and as you pass him, you catch a few beats of the same music you occasionally hear pouring like a river through the walls of his house: REO Speedwagon's “Take It on the Run.”

  Instinctively, you begin walking toward the shopping plaza two bloc
ks down from you and one block over. At the corner, a couple of boys are playing soccer in their front yard—or rather, you realize as you get closer, pretending to play soccer, one of them narrating an imaginary game as the other boots the hard white ball over the grass. “Morganbarron takes it to the goal. He fakes to the left, he fakes to the right. He fakes up. He fakes down. He fakes in a circle. He fakes in a square.” When the ball comes bouncing into the street, you block it with your shin and kick it back to them. The boy doing the play-by-play bows to you and says, “You have done us an act of great kindness, and we thank you.”

  All this nervy kidding around, half-sophisticated and half-naïve—it makes you happy just to see it. You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core.

  Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C. S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf ? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

  You should get more exercise than you do—you know that—but you didn't anticipate how winded a simple walk would make you. By the time you reach the shopping plaza, you are gulping at the air like a fish. You feel as if you could sit down and drink for a solid hour. Your favorite coffeehouse, Sufficient Grounds, is just on the other side of the wrought-iron benches. The waiters there know you well, but there are days when you enjoy being recognized and days when you don't, when you want nothing more than the simple curt reactiveness of a stranger.

  If you decide to stop for a while at the coffeehouse,