I felt the primal surge now, a readiness to fight, and, below it, a shadow feeling of having been violated. Stupid Lev, lonely troll, why didn’t you fucking warn me about the ramshackle carpentry? But, hearing my thoughts ricochet in the empty house, I knew I was being absurd. Completely my idea to move the mattress, completely my execution. I stood by the window foolishly. The rain kept whispering into the dark trees. There was no one for miles to blame. Maybe it was the first lesson of solitude: everything really is your fault.
In the bedroom, I dropped the futon with a loud slap on the floor. The blood continued to fork down my forearm, two jagged trails. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. I finally managed a grim smile. This was just part of settling in, just start-up costs, and from now on, I reassured myself, things would go more smoothly.
But later in the night, the rain drumming on the roof and the pitched deck above the mattress, the noise of my own mind surrounded me. I started thinking about how the house made no sense. Three roofs, two of them flat, bound to be buried in snow. A front door, at the bottom of a steep pitch, bound to be buried, too. The triptych windows to the woods—beautiful but ideal for losing heat. The house clearly hadn’t been designed by a Vermonter. Or even by a person capable of envisioning snow. I tried not to think about how my plan, if it even was a plan, was just as haphazardly formed. I tried not to think about Ray and Alexis in med school in New York City, not to think about my parents, not to think about other places I might have been. And then there were the undercurrents, the background thoughts, the ones that had become a part of my mind’s weather—the ones I didn’t need to think about to feel. If only the basketball had come off the rim differently, if only I’d left the gym after the first game. And, of course, Milena. There was always Milena. Just the cool echo of her name, from those dark woods of not-thinking, carried the scent of my room in Bologna, of the thin blue blanket on the mattress, carried the sound of her voice, so foreign and so familiar in my ear. I couldn’t allow myself to think about her. Couldn’t allow the thought that she had punched my ticket to the woods as much as the accident had. That year in Italy after college had made it so hard to return to Boston, so easy to get in the car and head west, so easy to begin the descent into solitude. It was the two together, a delayed chemical reaction, an exponential loss.
But pushed from the room, my non-thoughts just slipped into the rain, and they gusted against the walls with tremendous force. The beams creaked. The floor seemed to pitch and yaw. The rain lashed at the window above my head. I imagined the morning sun finding me far out in the Atlantic, quietly bobbing, clutching a floorboard to my chest.
I lay awake, trying not to listen, the pillow over my ear. So much for opening my senses, for expanding and slowing down. So much for using my extra sensitivity as a new compass, as a way to get down to something real.
I wondered if I’d made a horrible mistake.
The only timeline I can be certain of is this: Peter’s finger went into my eye around four in the afternoon; I left the hospital around two in the morning. Maybe with my sense of space gone uncertain, time had gone uncertain, too. Sometimes I rotated examining rooms, sometimes the doctors rotated to see me. Sometimes the wait was minutes, sometimes it seemed hours. Sometimes the waiting was a relief, sometimes it felt unendurable.
The only doctor I remember clearly was a young Pakistani man, probably just a resident. The small examining room was rinsed with air-conditioning. The doctor introduced himself in a soft voice and extracted magnifying lenses from a case lined with red velvet. His fingers were gentle on my cheekbone. He took his time peering into my eye. Given the amount of blood, he explained, getting a clear view was difficult. Then he pivoted the large examining apparatus, which looked like a periscope, so it was in front of me. “Chin on the bar, forehead against the curved plastic band.”
I pushed forward.
“Come forward, please.”
I pushed forward again. My eye was a peep show for his bright lights: pale blue concentric circles of light—that was to check my eye pressure. The terribly bright white light, like the headlamp of an oncoming train—that was to see in more detail. The doctor held my swollen eyelids open. It was impossible not to back away blinking. But the doctor waited. His manner calmed me some—an answer, it seemed, would be found. Then he brought out his penlight. He turned off the room light and had me cover my left eye with the palm of my hand. Again, he held open the swollen lids of my right eye.
“I want you to tell me if you see anything,” he said into the darkness. “If you can tell when the light is on. Do you see anything?”
I could hear his breathing and the very faint rustle of his white coat. I could hear the clicking of his penlight, strangely loud, as though a whole auditorium’s lights were being thrown on and off.
“Anything? Tell me when the light is on.”
His accent was faintly British, his breath mildly freshened by gum. I could picture him standing there, could picture the look in his gentle brown eyes, as he watched my eye, as he waited for an answer. But in front of my open eye, there was just darkness—a dark tunnel, night in the darkest forest. I tried to focus closer, then farther away, but there was no closer, no farther away. It was the same kind of darkness I’d tried to imagine as a child before falling asleep—a kind of deep space, which for some reason I’d assumed would be relaxing, but then the darkness would usually turn into a blackboard, and random words would start appearing in chalk.
“Anything?”
The doctor was waggling the penlight back and forth—I was almost sure, from the rustling of his sleeve.
“Anything?” His voice bounced off the chair, off the floor, off the walls. I had the sensation of being a witness, but a witness who had lost the authority to speak. I heard his penlight, his sleeve, I saw them. But it was as though, without the right type of evidence, my testimony no longer mattered. I’d fallen somewhere below the visual, somewhere that couldn’t be trusted.
“Nothing?” he said.
His sleeve had stopped moving. The penlight had clicked off.
“Nothing,” I said.
After a moment, the doctor flipped the overhead light back on; he wheeled his stool over to my left-hand side. He explained that the retina of my right eye was detached and that my cornea was badly scratched. Normally, these were problems that could be fixed. But the real problem, he was sorry to say, was that the optic nerve behind my eye had been severed. Peter’s finger had gone in past the knuckle and curved behind my eyeball, his fingernail slicing the nerve. The doctor showed me this on his own finger, pointing to his gold wedding band, which was a bit more information than I needed. Without an intact optic nerve, he explained, no information could be carried from my eye to my brain. Medical science did not yet know how to regenerate the optic nerve. Given the severity of the injury, he said, there was nothing that could be done.
“Do you have any questions?”
I did, but it seemed they weren’t in my head, just as what I’d seen of his penlight hadn’t been in my eyes.
“Anything?” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re sure now?”
I felt a kind of vertigo. “No questions.”
“We’ll need to run a few tests. Do a CT scan to make sure there’s no blood in your brain. But there shouldn’t be anything else to worry about.”
Nothing else to worry about.
I thanked him for his explanation, grateful for etiquette for the first time in my life—for its small dignity when there was nothing else to say.
2
Something was pressing into the bright stillness, a kind of approaching blur. Instinctively, I slipped through the tall grass to stand behind one of the apple trees. It was a mild day, the blond October sun touching off the loamy scent of the leaves, and I was barefoot—the grass cool and sharp in the shade. The truck noise interrupted the meadow first, its own cavalry of warning, and then the truck itself rounded the bend, a flatbed
with wood slats on the sides. It jounced along the ruts, dirt rising in a slow cloud behind it. Watching from behind the tree, I felt my heart pounding, unsure why my instinct was to hide. I knew who it was. Four days earlier, I’d called Nat from Newport, his name and number listed on the back page of Lev’s manual. The snow was probably still another month off, and Lev had sold me the two cords of firewood stacked in the garage, but it seemed a good idea to lay in the additional four cords I’d need to make it through the winter. Nat hadn’t been home. I’d left a message with his son. “Any time would be fine,” I said, trying to make a joke, “I’m not going anywhere.”
The driver, his arm slung over the door of his truck, looked into the meadow with mild curiosity. Feeling foolish, I took a step out into the open. The truck slowed almost to a stop. The man, who could only be Nat, peered in my direction from under his baseball cap. I slipped back behind the tree. My heart was racing. The gnarled bark was cool to the touch. The leaves were a pattern of light and shadow. I couldn’t help it. My instinct was to stay hidden. It was oddly thrilling, oddly advantageous, to be invisible. It wasn’t a game. It felt primal. I slid my left eye to a gap in the dense tangle of apples and leaves. The man scanned the meadow once more, then drove on, down the steep grade towards the house.
A word of explanation. The idea of my morning walk was to walk as slowly as was humanly comfortable and to see and hear as much as I could see and hear. If the front door’s glass pane glowed with sunlight, I’d step outside barefoot and wander up into the pasture. The apples were ready for eating, green flushed here and there with red, and marked with blemishes, like small patches of burlap. By the second week, I’d learned to choose not based on size or beauty—they weren’t supermarket apples—but by ripeness, by how easily an apple gave itself to my hand. Most resisted, played coy, and I’d court them for days, the branch pulling back, the leaves rustling and chattering like so many protective sisters. The first bite was like walking outside all over again—the explosion of taste not like wading into the morning but like diving: the sunlight brighter, my skin more alive. If I ate slowly, it seemed I could taste the chill of fall nights, the warmth of late summer afternoons above the grasses. Then I’d continue on the thin trail of mud past the apple trees, past the old tiller on its side with rusting teeth, past the crumbling stone wall, and follow the trail as it began to climb. The forest was mostly maple and birch, with a high canopy that wasn’t too dense, and about half a mile up, the dirt trail dissolved like a broken thought into nettles and fallen leaves. Here I had to go slowly if I was barefoot—the nettles stung so badly they left little red slashes on my calves—but the softness of the dirt was too pleasurable to pass up. I’d chart a path by looking up the hill to the space of sky where the trees opened. There was a shelf of land there, perched atop a steep meadow. A log cabin sat at the bottom whose owners must have lived far away—there was never smoke rising from the chimney—and beyond the valley the uninhabited hills rose again, leading out to a few distant peaks faint blue in the distance.
As I walked, I found myself trying to move through the woods without snapping any branches, with no sound beneath my feet. If my mind made any rustling sounds, I’d wait until it was quiet, too. There was no reason not to wait. Sometimes my mind would start back up, but I began to listen less and less. I didn’t want to block myself from the morning in any way. And those first weeks, when I did manage to be slow and quiet, the woods made me feel as though I’d passed through a canvas, somehow passed through a curtain into the backstage of a painting, into the very source of its light. It was a realm where nothing could be translated. It was a realm I didn’t want to come out of, a way of being I didn’t want to leave. It felt like there was nothing I couldn’t see. The first step back onto the soft dirt ruts leading down to the house often came tinged with a surprising sadness. The voice in my head, like a faithful dog, seemed to wait for me there.
So maybe that’s why my instinct was to hide when I heard the truck coming. Being able to see so much made me feel like everything about me could be seen. A door that had opened to the day had also opened inside of me—and it wasn’t a door you were supposed to leave open with other people.
“Wasn’t sure if I saw you there,” the man said, when I came down and joined him on the dirt outside the garage. “You was kind of like a deer in the fol-yage. There and not there.”
His accent was a rustic version of the Kennedys’—deer more like deahya, there more like theyah. His skin had the papery look of old newspaper, a few age spots on his cheek. He was a few inches shorter than me. “Nat,” he said.
We shook hands, and it felt like I was grasping an animal hide, my own hand suddenly soft as cotton. His shoulders looked sturdy beneath his jacket. “Real backwoods place here,” he said looking behind him into the trees. “Nice.”
I nodded.
“Always wondered what was at the end of this road.”
Something in my body was still on edge, though he seemed to have already forgotten about my hiding in the meadow. I’d only been in solitude two weeks, but already I felt as alert as a wild animal. I was glad I didn’t sniff him or suddenly go bounding off into the trees.
“I should put some shoes on,” I said.
“Good idea. Wouldn’t want to catch a splinter.”
When I came back outside in my hiking boots, Nat had already begun unloading the wood from the truck, pitching log after log onto the ground. He seemed in no hurry—he stood on the flatbed, the wood piled higher than his waist, turning and pitching. As I climbed up on the truck and joined him, his pace stayed exactly the same.
“Nice day,” he said.
“Nice day.”
The logs were of varying width, roughly split, mostly beech, red maple, and yellow birch. I didn’t know the maple from the beech, but Nat showed me the difference in the bark—the beech smooth, almost shaved looking, the maple rough and housing patches of moss in its ridges.
“Pretty simple to see,” he said.
Easy for him to say. I knew birch from summers at camp, from using the little scrolls of papery white bark for kindling, but maples I could recognize only by their leaves, like the giant red one on the Canadian flag. Beyond that it just got worse. Oaks had acorns, pines had pinecones, and evergreens stayed green in winter. That was the grand sum of my arboreal knowledge. Studying the beech bark now, trying to picture a beech leaf on its stem, my mind felt like it was straining to sound out a word. Was it oblong, did it have lines that looked like ribs? I’d already grown proud that I knew the sun would rise every morning where the steep dirt tracks led down to the house, that it would set every evening in the hills beyond the weather-beaten deck. No information packet with a color-coded map, no guided tour given by an overeager voice walking backwards—my own slower kind of orientation was under way. But now I took a quick glance at the woods surrounding the house, and the hidden darkness under the trees daunted me. So many mysteries of bark and foliage, so many unseen realms of plants and insects. What had I been thinking, imagining there was nothing I couldn’t see?
Nat flipped a log over with one hand, as though holding a large fish by the tail, and ran his finger along the grain of the wood. “Hardwoods burn hot,” he said. “You’ll stay nice and warm with these.”
“They burn hot.”
“Sure do.”
Not wanting to look any more ignorant, I didn’t ask why some wood might burn cool.
As we worked, I could hear a low wheeze in his chest. But he didn’t bother resting. I wanted to say something, to suggest a break, but I didn’t want to insult him. And I didn’t want to look any more of a flatlander than I already did.
“Need help stacking?” he said when we were done.
I hesitated.
“Don’t be a hero. I don’t mind.”
It was something I’d imagined doing myself, a small amends for having not chopped the wood—if I was a forest illiterate, the least I could do was earn my place here through a little physic
al labor. But Nat seemed more intent on exercising his vigor than I was on proving mine. And I suddenly didn’t want to lose his company. In two weeks, I’d had no conversation that had lasted more than thirty seconds. With Tom Mooreland, who I had passed on his tractor on the farm down at the end of the dirt road, my instinct was to talk very little, to keep my distance. A part of me flickered with curiosity about his life—I wanted to know about the cows, the calves, how the milk was stored and shipped, how long his family had owned the farm, if he’d ever thought of living somewhere else. But I feared that if we talked too much, I’d begin to feel the farm down the road on my walks, which would lead me to feeling the road beyond the farm, and the interstate beyond that, and to everyone and everything I had left. But with Nat, the conversation seemed to pose no danger of moving beyond the forest. And it seemed important to absorb from him what I could—not by questions so much but by some osmosis of how he moved and looked and considered. He was at home here. This was country he knew.
We slid down off the truck and set to toting the logs into the airy coolness of the garage, stacking them waist high along the wall. Lev’s two cords from the previous winter were intricately cobwebbed, and we worked on top of that. Nat’s breathing riffled and purred beside me. My wool sweater quickly became a Rorschach test of clinging bark and sawdust, my fingers like a pin cushion for splinters.
The Point of Vanishing Page 3