The View From the Seventh Layer

by Kevin Brockmeier

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  If you head for the McDonald's across the street,

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  The drawing you did has left an ink contusion on your little finger, and before you leave, you go upstairs to wash it off. Some bird or frog is in the tree outside your bedroom, croaking with a noise like ball bearings rattling in a tin can. You listen to the fan spinning and the lightbulb humming, to the hot water tank replenishing itself. You open your mouth as wide as you can to see if the sounds will become any clearer, but they are already as loud as thunder in your ears. Nothing you do makes any difference.

  The sun has passed from the window above the stairwell. On your way back down you watch a squirrel graze up against the opening, perching its front paws on the sill and fastidiously lowering its head to the glass. You could swear that it is looking inside, but by the time you reach the porch and have a straight view of the roof, it has gone, leaping onto a tree branch or a telephone wire. You see a crow wheeling in the sky. You smell the match scent of a wood-burning grill. When did the breeze begin to blow? Just an hour ago the weather seemed almost perfectly still, and now the grass by the fence, so long and slender, is whipsawing around with every breath of air.

  A creek runs behind the houses on the other side of the street, a freshet of colorless water no wider than an arm unless it has been raining, and you decide to take a walk along the bank. It is not unusual to find minnows swimming in the current. Today there are nearly a dozen of them, quivering in and out of the shade of a rock in tight silver curves.

  A green leaf floats by, its stem ranging out in front of it like a bowsprit. A car honks its horn, and a door slams somewhere. It is a sad, beautiful, ordinary day.

  Every September you resolve to schedule a vacation for this time of year, a whole month or two so that you can just sit back and appreciate the change of the seasons, but you are always too busy.

  Next year, you tell yourself. Next year maybe you'll actually do it.

  You sit down on the grass and dangle your legs over the bank, allowing your shoes to brush the water. You close your eyes for a few seconds and listen to the trickling sound, and when you open them again, you are staring directly into the stream. The sun is scrambled into a mass of loops and wires. It seems as if the light is fabricating the water, rather than merely uncovering it. The sight is mesmerizing. You would barely notice you were there at all if not for the pain that suddenly overcomes you, a million steel spokes radiating out from your heart.

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  For as long as you can remember, you have been fascinated by Rube Goldberg devices. When you were little, you had a neighbor who owned the board game Mouse Trap, and you used to lie on your stomach as she pieced the game together and set it into operation, watching the shining silver marble roll through its system of slides, buckets, and cages with all the screwy accuracy of a circus performance. Sometimes, when you have trouble falling asleep, you like to pretend that you are designing such a device for yourself. You have to crack an egg, so you pull a cord, which lifts a curtain from around a carrot, which causes a rabbit to start racing around inside a wheel. The friction from the wheel lights a match, and the match lights a candle, and the candle burns through a string, which causes a weight to drop from the ceiling and land on a teeter-totter. At the other end of the teeter-totter is a ball. The ball bounces across the floor onto a table, where it knocks over a box of pins, and one of the pins pops a balloon. The noise of the balloon causes a dog to start barking and straining forward on its leash, which is tied to a door, on top of which is a ball-peen hammer knotted to a small silk parachute. When the door swings open, the hammer topples off and parachutes slowly to the kitchen counter, where it taps against the egg, and, finally, cracks it into a bowl—though by this time, if you are lucky, you will have floated out of your own awareness and will no longer be there to see it.

  You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul. You imagine yourself tumbling into the world like a marble, rolling with an easy momentum over the chutes and ramps of your childhood, falling through traps here and there, sailing over various hills and loop-the-loops, then flying like a shot from the cannon of your adolescence and landing with an ungoverned bounce on the other side, where you progress through all the vacuum tubes and trampolines and merry-go-rounds of your adulthood—your job and your family, your hobbies and your lovers, the withering of certain friendships, the blossoming of others, the birth of your children and the death of your parents, the softening of your body and the hardening of your habits—plummeting sometimes into the sinkholes of accident and disease and at other times thinly escaping them, and all the while changing, changing at every moment, because of the decisions you make and those that fate makes for you, until finally, with your dying breath, you emerge from the mouth of the machine and roll to a stop, as motionless as you were before you began, but scarred and colored and burnished now with the markings you will carry with you through an eternity.

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  “I don't know. I hope I'm not. What I would really say is that the two of us have very different lamp philosophies. I'm pro-same, and you're pro-different. Or I'm pro-old, and you're pro-new.”

  “And pro-new is wrong?” she asks.

  What is it about her voice that tells you she is irritated? There is a tightness to it, an edge of eager muscularity, so that in truth it almost sounds as if she is smiling. You try to make a joke out of the argument, pretending to confuse pro-new with pro-gnu, pronouncing the hard g in a deliberate effort to ruin the pun. It is the kind of vapid absurdity she would ordinarily play along with, but instead she just says, “Listen, I really need to take care of this computer thing now, so . . .”

  “So.”

  “So I'll talk to you soon, okay?” And to make certain you know her bad humor is only temporary, she adds, “And you have no reason to feel guilty about that phone call you got. None. I mean it.”

  “I'll try not to.”

  There are people who hurt themselves by saying too little and people who hurt themselves by saying too much. You have always thought of yourself as falling squarely in the former camp—the people who hurt themselves by saying too little—but it could be that you are mistaken. Usually, when you find yourself making some fiery statement or another, it is only because you are playing a role, or, if not playing a role, because you are skimming the thinnest layer of what you actually believe off the top of all your doubts and contradictory hunches. You presume that people will understand your intentions, but when they don't, you rarely bother to explain yourself. So is that saying too much or saying too little?

  After you hang up, you take some time to straighten the magazines on your coffee table. You hear a fire engine starting its siren up a few blocks away. Who was it who said that fire engines always sound as if they're running away from a fire rather than toward one, like enormous beasts fleeing through the city in a panic?

  Laurie Anderson?

  Andrei Codrescu?

  You can't remember. But whenever the trucks go howling down the streets of your neighborhood, the thought passes reliably through your mind.

  Your last trip to the grocery store was just an early-morning dash to buy some milk, so there isn't much to eat in your kitchen, but you find a box of granola bars and unwrap one. When you have finished the last bite, you pour yourself a glass of water. You upend it, then put the glass in the sink. Suddenly, and to your wonder, you feel the need to make something out of your day.

  If you decide to do a little grocery shopping,

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  If you decide to clean the bathroom mirror,

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  You look through the cabinets and the refrigerator, but find only a few boxes of snack food, a tomato, and half a package of bagels—nothing you feel like eating. Obviously
it is time for you to do some grocery shopping. For now, though, you decide to phone the Chinese restaurant around the corner, New Fun Ree, and place your usual takeout order.

  “I'd like item number twenty-four, the mixed vegetables with snow peas, and a side of egg drop soup.”

  “Okay. Ten minutes. Bye.”

  This might be what you like best about such inexpensive little pigeonhole restaurants, the way all notions of hospitality are thrown over in favor of a simple curt proficiency. The cooks and counter clerks are like the mechanics you have sometimes met at the gas stations between small towns: craftsmen who would rather finish their work as efficiently as possible than shanghai you into liking them.

  You put your shoes on, then head for the restaurant. The sun is shining down from the middle of the sky. The reflectors in the street pop on and off like lightbulbs as you walk past them. New Fun Ree is nearly empty, just the same limp-haired boy who's always standing at the cash register, sketching on a place mat with a blue ballpoint pen.

  You sit down at one of the tables, running your fingers over the bamboo surface and waiting for him to call your order. After a minute or two, he shouts out, “Mix vegetable snow pea? Egg drop soup?” Your wallet is open by the time you reach the counter.

  The boy bags your food and hands it to you. “Five-seven-three,” he says.

  “How much?”

  “Five-seven-three,” he repeats, “five-seven-three,” proclaiming the numbers with a strange insistency, like a quarterback announcing a change in play.

  As you walk home, your neighbor passes you in his freshly polished car, giving a friendly double tap of his horn. A dog scampers over to you from across the street, nudging your wrist with his nose. He stares up at you as though waiting for you to do something extraordinary, then scampers away at the sound of his owner's whistle. Your left arm has begun to tingle. You give it a shake to restore the blood flow. All at once you lose sensation in your fingers.

  You drop the bag of Chinese food. One of the containers splits open, and a long flare of steamed rice spills out—hundreds of white grains against the yellow-green grass. You ought to clean it up, you think; you really shouldn't leave it there. But before you can bend over, you are lying on the ground beside it.

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  The air is beginning to warm up. You decide to take the oblique route home, making a loop through the plant nursery at the west end of the plaza. Many of the trees there are only a little taller than you are, and you feel like a giant lumbering through their ranks, paddling your hands through their spires as easily as if you were smacking a row of parking meters. By the time you reach the end of the lane, one of your palms is coated with the scent of magnolia, the other with the scent of pine. Your lungs are full, your hairline slick with sweat. You watch a pair of robins land on the lip of a stone basin, offering faint subliminal muttering noises to each other. You watch a little boy throwing pebbles at the trunk of an ash sapling.

  A song has broken out on your tongue. It takes you a moment to recognize it as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—not the standard Judy Garland version, but the Israel Kamakawiwo'ole rendition, with the soft, drawn-out oohs at the beginning and the melody that floats effortlessly out over the strum of the ukelele. It is a song you love, so simple and pretty that it is hard for you to imagine the person who would dislike it, but why are you singing it now? Did David say something to you about rainbows, or dreams, or bluebirds? Did you overhear one of the customers in the coffeehouse laying a stress on the word somewhere?

  You are puzzling it over when you realize: the meter of the song matches the pace at which you have been walking. Undoubtedly that's where it came from.

  This has happened to you before: you will find yourself rehearsing a particular run of lyrics for days on end, with no idea why, until eventually you will discover that the tempo of the steps you are taking between, say, the couch and the refrigerator exactly duplicates the cadence of the song in your head. Everything has a rhythm, you sometimes think. Everything, given the possibility, would choose to be a song.

  The gate of the nursery, swinging gently about on its hinges, would be a dance hall waltz.

  The squirrel sprinting across the grass would be a ragtime tune played on an upright piano.

  The sprinkler dousing the flowers would be an old gospel hymn.

  You are walking past the dogwoods when a thrill of pain in your chest makes you drop to your knees. Your heart, too, has a rhythm, one that catches, stutters, and comes to a halt. It would be the slowest song in the world if it were a song at all.

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  Though the coffeehouse is busy, you find an empty armchair in the well beneath the staircase. The seat gives you a good view of the plaza, a low table of chocolate-brick paving interrupted by trash barrels and brackets of wrought-iron benches. You order a large chai tea, drinking a glass of water as you wait for it to arrive and crunching the ice between your teeth as your father used to do. A teenage girl sweeps past the window, angling her body forward as if she is trying to pierce a heavy gale. A man in a business suit walks by wheeling a ten-speed bicycle, a leather briefcase jammed into its basket. At the far end of the plaza, a father swings his son around by the arms, tracing low-dipping circles in the air. Sometimes, watching people through the flat silence of a window, you feel that you are on the verge of understanding a human mystery that has managed to evade you your whole life, but that is where you always remain: on the verge.

  You spot the barista coming with your order. She must be a new hire, because you don't recognize her. On the wall beside your chair is an M. C. Escher illustration of a grid of triangles evolving gradually into a flock of black and white birds. As you sip your chai, you catch yourself staring right through it, slipping into a mindless reverie of shapes and colors. You think about a black leaf you once saw pasted to a window during a rainstorm. You think about the shifting brown tones of a southern creek.

  “See, first you've got your triangles and then you've got your birds,” a voice says. You look up to see David, your favorite waiter at Sufficient Grounds, his eyes hooded in a mystic burnout routine. “What it is is a map of the development of being, man. If you keep following the pattern, you'll find airplanes, then spaceships, then angels, then God, and then triangles again. Triangles are always at the top. No one knows why.”

  You give his arm an amiable nudge, and he abandons the performance. “How are you doing, David?”

  “Not bad, not bad.” He strokes his mustache. “Rhonda ditched me, though. Moved out and everything.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well, me too. But I think we both saw it coming. I'm just relieved I've got the whole thing in the rearview now. Waiting for it was worse than living through it.”

  “Then you're happy with the way things turned out?”

  “Happy?” he says. “Well—no.”

  He shrugs and laughs, lets off a wilting smile.

  “But who's ever really been happy?”

  If you have ever really been happy,

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  If you haven't,

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  You head toward the redbrick warehouse that used to house the brewery. Only a few years ago the bottling carousel operated seven days a week, even on major holidays, like a hospital or a fire station, but now the only human activity at the building is a small Toyota running in cautious circles through the parking lot, halting every so often and then starting back up again.

  You can still smell the wheat soap in the air as you pass the loading dock.

  A paper bag drifts down the alley. The wind steals through the windows in a low sigh.

  It has been a while since you took this particular side street, and a homeless encampment has taken hold beneath the bridge: a gas-powered generator, some shopping carts, and a dozen pup tents strung together out of bedsheets and fishing wire. You see a group of men sitting together on a sprung mattress, engrossed in conversatio
n.

  Is it possible, you wonder, to expend the last of your luck? Once, you were driving along a narrow stretch of highway when you got trapped behind a string of trailers. You tacked into the facing lane to pass them, but the line was longer than you had expected it to be, and before you were able to clear it, you saw a pickup truck barreling toward you. You did the only thing you could think to do—swerved onto the shoulder, threading the needle between the truck and the curb at sixty miles an hour and hoping the other driver would stay in his lane. The rumble strips made your car vibrate with a terrific chattering noise. Your legs turned to liquid. You drifted to a stop and watched the trailers disappear.

  You can still see the image in your windshield: a single lane of sun-beaten concrete curving past white frame houses and billboards with pictures of Jesus on them. The sky was bruised with rain in the distance. The driveways of the houses looked like black pudding poured directly onto the grass. And you remember thinking that whatever luck had been allotted to you at your birth was now used up, spent, and that the rest of your life would pass in misfortune.

  It did not turn out that way for you, but maybe it did for the men beneath the bridge. Maybe they made one foolish mistake and had just enough fortune to carry them through to the other side, but not enough to take them any further. Maybe some truck nicked them at the corner and sent them spinning off the edge of the road. Lives fall apart in all sorts of ways.

  You duck between the legs of a street sign. There is a convenience store standing on the corner, the light above its door flickering on and off. You taste the tang of gasoline in your mouth from the leaking pump out front. Something seems to grip your chest. You lose your breath and fall to your knees. There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.