The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  “But you have other sheets?”

  “Yes. Milena?”

  “They are here. They just opened the door. They are here.”

  “They?”

  “Otto and my father. They came on the train.”

  The plan was for her father to come for the weekend. Her father. That was the plan. We had celebrated her birthday together the night before, and today her father would arrive.

  “My father brought him as a surprise. As a present.” She was standing still now, looking right at me, but I could feel both of us moving. The moment was collapsing. There was too much weight pressing in on us from upstairs.

  Juan Ignacio had warned me. Slouching in the kitchen doorway the morning of the picnic, apparently fatigued by the obviousness of it, he’d said, “C’mon, man, a woman like that, you don’t think she has a man in Vienna?” And then, the first night we’d made love, she had confessed it herself. “This is a problem,” she’d said, her hand still on my chest. “I should not like you this way. This should not happen.” What she didn’t want to happen, I was certain, was love. And so I’d trusted her hand, warm on my chest, rather than her words. I’d trusted the current between us. I realized that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or you must not reason at all. It was one of the quotations we slept below every night; it was what we were living by. We’ll figure it out, I’d told her. And in the following nights, wordlessly, it seemed we had. We didn’t talk about Otto. I didn’t ask, she didn’t offer. He existed only in the background of her stories from Vienna. They’d been classmates in law school, their families were friends; beyond that, all I knew was her pet name for him was The Chinaman: he had little body hair, was shorter than she was. She said his actual name, Otto, with deep respect, almost with fear. I didn’t like how the pictures in my mind changed when she said it, how he had trouble remaining in the background as part of the group. But I knew her life with him wasn’t like her nights with me. Not the way her fingers clawed into my back. Not the way she’d steal looks at me afterwards, as though she’d just been introduced to herself. It wasn’t a competition between me and him. It was a competition inside of her: the life she’d been raised to live versus the life she might make on her own. She was at the same crossroads as I was, I was sure of it. And if I could just take her far enough down the path with me, far enough to see how beautiful it was, we’d make the same decision together.

  “For how long? How long do they stay?” I said.

  “It is only three days.”

  “Only?”

  She said nothing. She looked more agitated than I’d ever seen her.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Naya, I do not know. But I must go.”

  Her opera CDs were still on the bedside table. Stupidly, I remembered we had only made it to Act III of The Marriage of Figaro. The sheets cradled in her arms looked disposable, all our nights gathered up and ready to be washed away.

  “I come find you when they go.”

  “Will you tell him?”

  Her eyes pleaded.

  Then she was moving by me, the hallway overly bright with sunlight behind her, the sound of her footsteps hurrying down the corridor very loud and terribly thin.

  I didn’t chase after her. I only imagined running up the stone stairwell and making a scene: her father looking on stunned, her eyes begging me to stop, and Otto a very real person, with leather shoes and a high forehead, with a clean shirt he had picked out for the trip, the happiness of his birthday surprise draining from his face. The scene, I realized, was silent. Or maybe they muttered a few words of German, but English had no place. The result would be the same no matter what I said.

  The stripped mattress sickened me, the La Bohème CD cover on the bedside table, the handsome Rodolfo with his mouth open in song. Everything I’d been so confident of was contracting. Vienna, the real Vienna, with its clean streets and dark wood bars, seemed to be invading my room. The cathedrals, the apartments, the cafés with newspapers on sticks. Her stories weren’t just stories—they connected to her life, to her family, which meant to obligations, to responsibilities. The very thing I’d wanted to forget in my own life she had not forgotten in hers. How could I have been so blind? I was the one who saw every approaching car before it turned the corner, the one who heard every last pigeon cooing down the street. But I hadn’t listened, hadn’t seen. Not paying attention. It was the one consolation prize I was supposed to have: heightened attention was mine forever. But I hadn’t used it. And now there was the chance that what I’d hidden for so long, the me she’d helped me to come home to, wouldn’t be enough. She might not return. She’d left all of us—Rodolfo and Mimi, and John Grady Cole and Alejandra, and all the quotes above the desk. She’d guided me into this realm, and now she’d popped back out through a hole in the hedgerow, and gone back to her real life.

  I hurried down the stairwell and slipped outside, the late April morning strangely humid. Laundry hung heavy on the lines; the heat off the parked cars wound around my ankles. I hurried down Via Mascarella, then Via Zamboni, not sure where I was going, only needing to move, hoping I would run into them, dreading I would run into them, my mind a blur of things she’d said, things she hadn’t said, the smell of her still on my fingers from the night before. There was blue between the clouds, but the day had too much weight, too much quiet—it was almost noon and why weren’t more people on their way to lunch? Where were the familiar patterns that were supposed to prop everyone up? Or maybe I’d forfeited my admission ticket to normalcy, maybe there was no opening in the hedgerow for me to pop back through.

  I needed to keep moving, past the university, past the Feltrinelli bookstore, past the café with the red chairs—my chest was beginning to feel horribly tight, and to sit would be to allow something to catch up to me, the ache, the invisibility, the anger, and I avoided the Osteria del Orso where we’d sat over a bottle of red wine, avoided Piazza Maggiore, doubled back to avoid the side street that led into the hills. We’d made our map of Bologna together. Everything between us had carried into the streets, the porticoes, the cobblestones. Her leaving me was everywhere. Bologna was no longer mine. The streets felt like they were her friends, like they’d taken her side, and they were only humoring me. No one knew who I was, no one could keep me from being invisible. No one was sitting at mission control, maintaining contact with the watchman in the night. I’d lost the new map to myself. A way of seeing that could be a way of being—a way of living for which I could be loved. Just as I’d gotten the world solid again, with a sense of myself that actually felt true, the mirror had cracked.

  I found myself hurrying towards the train station. It wasn’t until the train was clicking past the cindery apartment buildings, the shadows ripping obliquely away, that I understood. It didn’t matter where the train was going. It didn’t matter where I slept the next three nights. I just needed to be someplace new, in some other city, beneath some other sky. Someplace where it would feel right to be lost.

  The snowbanks were higher than the truck, but I could see the plumes of white powder billowing up in waves, could hear the muffled throb of the engine. It was midafternoon. I didn’t know what day or what month, but I’d been down to one meal a day for too long. I hadn’t been able to make it to town, had begun foraging in the bomb shelter. My snowpants didn’t stay on my hips. I longed for orange juice, imagined its brightness in a glass, that first pop of sugar on my tongue—wondered if I could get scurvy, what that would mean. Elsewhere, in more southern latitudes, it was probably the middle of March. But with no promise of spring in the woods, time had turned strange. It had stalled. When the phone rang, I didn’t answer. I hadn’t seen Bella and Linda for more than a month. They now seemed more a dream than actual people. I hadn’t told Lev whether I’d stay another year, hadn’t felt capable of thinking about it. Time wasn’t marching forward. Days sl
ipped into yesterday, tomorrow. The sun wasn’t arcing any higher above the trees. Some days I couldn’t remember anything about the day before other than the food. With the sky gone livid and skyless, the snow still falling, it was the clearest way of marking time. I’d burned through the wood supply on one side of the garage, the wall’s wood slats strangely barren. Sometimes, gathering logs for the morning fire, I felt like I was seeing inside my own stomach, fuel stores running down.

  I snowshoed across the meadow towards the plumes of powder, but as I pushed down the edge of the snowbank, something strange happened. I fell into a kind of time warp. Nat’s head inside the cab was a bowl of sandy hair, the skin by his eyes unlined. His cigarette dangled above the steering wheel, but his face was harder. Which suddenly made me feel older—or, really, like I could be any age, like time had become the time win a dream. Then he glanced at me, scowled as he raised one hand, and I realized it was Nat’s son. I wasn’t sure if I preferred the dream. The son looked like Nat minus the wisdom, minus the humor. I came closer, waited, wanted to ask if Nat was in the hospital. I wanted to know when he would return. But his son wasn’t interested in stopping. He slammed forward, slammed back. Muffled guitars blared from his radio, his window closed. Then he raised just a finger, quickly, as though I might be contagious, and headed back out towards the road.

  He hadn’t done as clean a job of it as his father would have, but the road was functional, there was passage, a bobsled run for a car. It was probably April. There was a decent chance the last big snows had passed, that I’d made it to the threshold of spring. I would soon be able to come and go freely. I could get orange juice. And frozen pizza. The bizarre party in the aisles of the C&C would welcome me back. Maybe I’d even visit Linda and Bella at the café.

  But as I clomped into the cleared lane on my snowshoes, the ground frozen hard beneath me, I turned towards the house. The smooth white alley trailed off into the deep snow past my car, into my own snowshoe prints going back and forth. That was the direction I knew. That was where I was comfortable. I didn’t want to admit it, but I could feel it in my body. There was a bird-like lightness in my bones. I was still as insubstantial as the way I saw. My sense of myself was still too fragile. There was something I’d found here, something in the silence, but I didn’t know how to offer it to anyone. And I didn’t know how to receive anything from anyone either. I didn’t know how to return. And I couldn’t help seeing the cleared lane as leading farther into the woods, and deeper into winter, rather than back into town.

  That afternoon I called Lev and told him I would stay.

  PART III

  The Point of Vanishing

  8

  Summer was an escape route, a perfectly open window, an excuse to leave if I wanted one. But the world had turned green again. The dirt roads were dirt roads: dusty and solid, swarmed on either side by leafy ferns, wild flowers, high swatches of grass, the grass itself swarming and clicking with legions of dragon flies, grasshoppers, mosquitoes. Deer stole through the trees. Red-winged blackbirds sang from the fenceposts. Ghost-white butterflies flitted in the heat. The green was a revelation, a prodigal son—a color that had once existed, gone missing in the snows, and miraculously returned. It opened itself through the hazed meadows, through the blue-green hills, through the reflections in the pewter green ponds; it deepened the blue in the pines, gilded the light off the streams, and relented only towards dusk, yielding to the slow antics of the fireflies, to the stars overhead, to flashes that felt like after-shimmers of the green, green days.

  It made staying feel like a conviction. The surrounding promise that had tormented me during mud season—the purple branchlets of the birches, the pointed, brick-brown buds of the sugar maples, the scent of the wet earth returning to the air, every tree pushing into itself, into particular branches, into particular leaves, saying here and here and here—had finally come true. To stand and breathe amid that force, to feel it fighting into life all around me, had been quietly terrifying in May, as though I were falling behind while everything around me pushed ahead. As though the woods were planning a grand excursion, but I’d failed to do the necessary work to join, as though I’d been preparing nothing, while all winter the trees had been secretly storing up strength, making plans. It wasn’t that I’d exactly caught up now. There were no leaves suddenly springing from my mouth, from my hands. But somehow every view in the woods had become interior. There were no sight lines through the trees; the foliage was far too thick. There was no more far away. No more complexity of depth perception, of inner and outer, of where I fit in. The world was leafy, palpable, and the fragrance of the sun on the pine needles gave shape to the air. It had a density that held me in place. The sunlight charged through my blood. I was barefoot again, wild, and some days I didn’t wear clothes at all. My legs bore red lashes from the nettles. My feet were the color of the earth. I stopped using the bathroom in the house. Leaves and twigs nested in my hair. This was progress. I was becoming more fertile. My body was becoming strong. The earth was rising into me. I found myself doing push-ups, sit-ups, and I’d lie back in the meadow soaked with sweat. In winter, I’d felt almost no sex drive, but sometimes now it filled me to my very toes, a thrumming, a light inside my body, especially early in the morning, and I’d hurry outside, as though to a lover, the dewy grass cold and sharp on my back. When I exploded, my whole body flooded into the day. As I crossed the meadow back to the house, thick grass would grasp at my calves. The world was reaching for me—and I could feel myself reaching back.

  But now it was October again. The green was mostly gone. Even the high grasses along the dirt road had dulled, stooping with age. The autumnal winds rinsed through the leaves, shaking the yellow birches like castanets, the air taut and crisp, as though wires connected to the sun had tightened their hold on the earth. And beneath the winds, beneath the diversionary scuffle, the land had grown quiet. No more hum and whine of insects, no more birdsong drifting through the sunlit ferns. It was like the dense quiet of a library, every occupant huddled over his own preparations, not to be disturbed. The obsessive woodpecker hammering for grubs, the squirrel gathering his winter cache. Even the quiet in the house felt different. The way the sun angled across the floorboards. The ashy breath of the woodstove. The air was too still, like a sickroom. The year before, everything had been new. My search was underway. The great epiphany felt possible, close at hand. The seasons were lining up to deliver their unforeseeable presents—the white expanse of winter, the muddy fight into spring, the glorious green summer. But now the carousel had gone round a full turn. And there was no magic billboard halfway around with an answer inscribed in luminous letters. I wondered if my search was nothing but an escape. Not an unrelenting drive to get down to the bottom of things, to some truth beyond which there was nothing greater, but simply an enormous white flag in disguise. Maybe it was a forfeit. A way to never have to speak. Not a constant prayer. Not a miracle in slow motion, but a slow-motion death.

  And yet, as the nights grew chill and the approach of winter became a rumor in the air, there were signs of progress. Or, to be more precise, one sign. It came in a phone call late on a Sunday afternoon. Outside, a cold drizzle was peppering the leaves. The sound of the refrigerator humming on, humming off, had already been a full conversation. I sat waiting, as though if I sat still enough, the ringing wouldn’t see me. I didn’t want to interrupt my meal. The textures had become spatial in my mouth, a village I was visiting—the grains of the bread were low stone walls, the honey glimmers of sunlight off a stream.

  The phone stopped ringing, then started up again. My village withered into a hill town in an old postcard, a memory I couldn’t quite recollect. It was a ghost town now, the ringing a plague that had driven everyone away.

  “Hello.”

  “May I speak with Howie, please?”

  “Ray, it’s me. Who else would it be?”

  I was already settling myself on the daybed beside the phone. It was a wooden benc
h with a thin mattress, which was covered by a green flannel sheet. I sat cross-legged, my back against the wall, the high long windows to the woods in front of me. The phone hummed. I forgot I was supposed to speak. I was just looking at Ray in my mind, getting used to the pleasure of being with him.

  “How’s the weather up there?” he said.

  It wasn’t small talk. Ray had spent summers during college as a camp counselor in New Hampshire, only about ten miles from Camp Walt Whitman. We’d hiked the same mountains, camped at the same campgrounds, known the same pine trees and mosquitoes and lakes. But Ray had grown up in the hills outside San Francisco, in Lafayette—with the grass turning to straw in summer, with regular hikes among the redwoods in Muir Woods, with the ocean meaning the Pacific. As much as he’d enjoyed his summers in the White Mountains, the vistas there weren’t his vistas—not the palette, not the scale, not the smell of the air. And since graduation it had been on his mind. Nearly all his college and med school friends lived on the east coast, most of them in New York City. How much did your hometown, he often seemed to be asking, the place where your senses first gripped the world, really matter? And, though he didn’t quite put it this way, how much did your friends?

  I told him about the leaves changing, their colors in the different weathers. I told him about my walk that morning in the rain, the mist rising from the meadow. I had the feeling I was telling him something personal. But as my mind passed by the stump from the pine sapling I’d cut for Linda and Bella, I didn’t mention it. How could I explain, and to my most moral friend, that I felt virtuous for ignoring a seventeen-year-old girl and her mother? In August, I’d seen a flyer at the C&C for a jazz concert in Burlington, and I’d asked Bella if she wanted to go. I’d told myself I was asking her for the right reasons, as a kind of educational field trip, a summer celebration, and not because I was nervous to go alone, or because of the way she looked in her jean shorts and halter shirt, or because my desire for the early morning meadow was spilling over into town. Linda had said she needed Bella at the café, there was too much work, and when Bella pointed out that some afternoons they had no customers at all, Linda, her mouth twisted between anger and a terrible instinct to please, simply said, “Case closed.” In my mind, ceasing to visit the restaurant had been to my credit, but just the prospect of mentioning it to Ray made me uneasy. Something didn’t add up. Some unseen evidence was assembled against me. Even in my mind, it was becoming harder to articulate what I was searching for, and how I might succeed. It had something to do with the question of instincts—the right ones to follow, the right ones to ignore.