“How’s New York City?” I said, finally. “What do you see out your window?”
“I’m looking at the Hudson. That’s kind of nature, isn’t it? The sun sets over New Jersey and the water picks up the light. But my window is dirty, and it doesn’t open—so there’s no way to clean it.”
I wondered about myself, about being a window not opening. I wondered about what I wasn’t letting in.
“I did go for a long walk a few weeks ago around Central Park. It was a clear fall day, lots of people out walking and jogging. There had to be twenty thousand people in the park. Anyway, walking back I couldn’t help noticing all the dog shit on the sidewalk on Amsterdam and the smell of urine. The dogs have to go somewhere, but the urine just sits there until it rains, or until it’s absorbed into the sidewalk. It’s really kind of gross. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
I’d been picturing the grime on his window, the sunset over the river, the brown stone wall around Central Park, the grass and roller skaters and joggers and pretzel vendors, and the sidewalk on Amsterdam, a street I didn’t know but pictured all the same, a narrow canyon below skyscrapers. I just wanted him to keep on talking. “Go ahead,” I said.
Ray exhaled deeply. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
I’d forgotten about his notorious preambles. Sometimes when we were playing cards and Ray began a story, Alexis would point an imaginary remote control at him and mime fast-forwarding to the point. “You’re not worried about me again, are you?”
“I don’t know where all that came from.” He’d given me a phone lecture during the summer about the need to contribute to society. He’d cited sources. “I think that had more to do with my doubts than it had to do with you.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“That’s OK.”
“But I guess that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Your doubts?”
“Sort of.”
“Go ahead, Ray. I’m listening.”
“Well, we have gross anatomy lab on Thursday. It’s a mandatory class. The lab is up on the fourteenth floor, and through the windows you can see people waiting at the bus stop for the cross-town bus, pedestrians going to lunch. So my group has an obese middle-aged woman. We were on her hand. It shouldn’t have been anything strange. We’ve been dissecting her for weeks. We’ve done the back and the spine and the thorax. We’ve done the brain and the face. I’ve had hard days, but for the most part you just go over to this other side. It’s a fascinating machine, the body, and it’s easy to see it that way.” He paused. “But for some reason the hand—it was her hand, a woman’s hand. And I just started to feel nauseated. I had to excuse myself. At the water fountain in the hall, my autonomic nervous system was going crazy. I remembered a fetus starts with its fingers webbed, and cells have to die for the hand to individuate into fingers. I remembered how I kept looking at people’s hands after learning that. I felt like I wanted to get on my knees and apologize for something. I don’t even really know for what.”
Ray fell quiet. The line went on buzzing. I felt a vestige of the instinct to say something, to reassure him, but the instinct was too far away. I’d been picturing everything he was saying—picturing him there among the cadavers in his white lab coat, the city going on outside with buses and people fourteen stories below. I stared at the birch tree out the window, a sodden feather of bark tattering in the wind. It seemed a reminder of the chickadees—a reminder not to hunt for what Ray was saying but just to let my mind’s eye go soft, to wait until there was movement in the picture. Then I noticed something. The cadavers and the students in white coats had one kind of light on them, and the buses and pedestrians and Ray had another. It wasn’t that Ray was standing in bright sunlight, nothing heavenly or weird, but just as though some movie director had been shooting the whole scene with Ray in a more natural light than the anatomy lab, shooting him according to the feeling in his voice. And the obese woman’s hand—it was lit with the sunlight, too, puffy and human, but the rest of her body, which was dried and purplish, didn’t look human at all.
“It sounds like two different worlds,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I told him what I was picturing.
“That’s it,” he said. Then he added, “You know, when I walk around the city, sometimes I feel there are different sets of rules everywhere. Sometimes even block to block. I know this sounds weird, but the city can feel like a science fiction movie. All these different dimensions. With the upscale stores on Fifth Avenue and the homeless people in garbage bags. The Upper West Side matrons and the cab drivers from Bangladesh. It just keeps changing. And changing. The values, the expectations. It makes me think of portals and worm holes, except you just have to walk and you keep passing through them. And the rules keep changing as you do. You can feel it. And I don’t know which rules are mine.”
I was still looking out the window at the birch tree, the rain slanting in the wind, but it felt like Ray and I were somewhere together—on those throbbing and changing streets but also suspended somewhere beyond them, in a realm where the rules didn’t change, where they were universal instead of relative. Where the people and restaurants and stores still changed block to block, but where you couldn’t help recognizing, where everyone couldn’t help recognizing, the stars wheeling overhead, and the seasons following one after the next, and some center inside all of it abiding, enduring, staying the same.
“So, any advice for a poor city dweller? I mean, what have you found up there?”
I glanced at my plate on the table, my city of honeyed streams and multigrain walls. I wasn’t sure if I was a fool or a prophet. “I wish I could answer, Ray.”
“Nothing?”
“Really, I wish I could translate it. But I don’t know how.”
“Maybe once you get back,” he said gently.
“Maybe,” I said. And for the first time in a long time, I believed it. The rain and the glistening leaves out the window weren’t just filled with shadow. I really was learning something—how to see, how to listen. I was learning how to move from the visible world to the invisible, and back again, which wasn’t a helpful skill just with chickadees but with people. I’d heard something profound in Ray—his loneliness, his lostness—and my own loneliness and lostness didn’t feel so strange.
“Good talking to you,” Ray said before we hung up.
“Good talking to you, too.”
The phone calls had grown quietly desperate. The children of Mom and Dad’s friends were off to law school and new jobs, off to roommates and new cities. Phases weren’t supposed to last more than a year. Dad wasn’t just asking about the Honda anymore. He wanted to know about money, about plans, about my future—questions, it was clear, he’d been holding in for a very long time. My answers set new marks for evasiveness. Mom just pleaded for a visit. Family meant showing up, she said. Thanksgiving was coming. I hadn’t come last year on the annual pilgrimage to Newburgh. Everyone was asking for me. My cousins Susan and Melissa. My aunt Betty. Matt. It would mean the world to Mom, just the world. She’d make the forest torte cake, just like always. I thought she was making a pun about the forest—the picture in my mind was of a cake studded with pine trees, their needles sparkling festively. But she said no, your favorite cake, the forest torte, the cake you love.
On the November night I called to say yes, expecting to receive a warm hug from Mom’s voice, she responded with a stampede of questions: “Should I pick up an extra dozen bagels at Rein’s? You want a frozen chocolate chip sour cream cake? You have good shoes? Dad could pack an extra pair. He could pack a tie. We’ll have enough ruggelach to sink a ship, so what does it matter a few more things? As long as Dad remembers to pack them. So you have a belt? You have a comb?”
I felt as though she’d backed her car in through the woods, pushed the table out of the way, and emptied the contents of a thousand closets onto the floor. I was seeing too much, seeing things I didn’t
know how to see. The frame was all wrong.
But in the chill, rainy days after our call, I knew it would be different in person. In person, she’d see my eyes, she’d feel the love coming out of me. My quiet would help quiet her. I took long walks beneath the barren trees with imaginary, beautiful conversations running through my mind, conversations filled with deep understanding. Jokes with my cousin Scott; earnest questions from Melissa by the fire; maybe a football toss with Matt, the ball carrying things between us that we couldn’t say. Everything I’d learned over the winter, and everything I’d felt during the summer, all that silence and vitality and love, would be like a green medallion glowing from my chest. It would emanate from my eyes. They would feel it even in my silence as I stood by the sink, or as I brought someone a piece of pie. That green glowing light would bring out a similar glow from them, and we’d bathe together in it as though in firelight. I’d always loved Thanksgiving. That feeling that there was no other place anyone in the family was supposed to be.
Leaving the house meant draining the pipes of water, pouring antifreeze into the toilet bowl. It meant finding the key so I could lock the door. It meant the excitement of travel, of going far away. Which meant packing my old duffel bag, the same bag I’d packed again and again as I’d driven around the country.
As I pulled the heavy green canvas down from the plywood shelf in my room, its musty smell carried a familiar promise. The year after Bologna, when I was desperate for some town or vista that might feel like home, it had been my faithful companion. The letters from Milena, which initially had seemed to offer a second chance, had stopped coming. Her grandmother died that July; her family needed her. I stood on a kitchen chair in my Cambridge apartment during our last phone conversation, then on the kitchen table, as though I might climb high enough to be heard. I charmed, I cajoled, I pleaded. After Otto’s visit in Bologna, we’d spent one more month together, arguing, always arguing. She’d said she could not invent her life; I’d said her life in Vienna was an invention. There were tears, there were apologies. There was staggering sex. One night, we even drove to her grandmother’s house in Austria. She had borrowed a car, and we drove in the night past Verona, Venezia, across the border, then up into the mountains, through tunnels and forests, until we were there by the lake where she had read Narcissus and Goldmund as a girl. Her grandmother was in Vienna, there was a key hidden above the lintel in the garden shed. After sleeping until midday, eating lunch, and talking very little, we started back to Bologna, but she asked me to pull over at one of the switchbacks leading down from her grandmother’s house. It was a tiny church. The gravel crunched under our feet. We were not holding hands. To the left of her grandfather’s tombstone was a black marble plaque. There were swastikas at the two corners, where decorative roses might have been. Our reflections were dimly visible over the names.
“My great-uncle is there,” she said. “Many men from his village were taken into the war.”
I had never thought of Nazis dying.
“His unit was sent to the Russian front. Within two months he was killed. His picture was on the piano when I was a girl. A handsome young man. But I am sorry. Your family. I did not think.”
I didn’t say anything. I was aware of the space between our hands. I didn’t know whether to trust her or whether she’d brought me here to make a point. But it hardly mattered: she was right. She came from somewhere and it was not where I came from. Our pasts and our families were part of us. She could not leave hers and I could not leave mine. I looked at the names on the hard black plaque, so many names written across our bodies and our faces. That history was a part of who we were, but it horrified me to think that it was only who we were, that it determined everything.
The fall after my return from Bologna, Milena took a job at the United Nations in New York City. All summer I’d written her long, unfortunate love letters, pleading with her, citing Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, quoting Chekhov’s stories, writing her that we needed to follow our love, telling her it dwarfed our families, our histories, every line that surrounded us. She wrote back with more and more German in her letters, as if to share more of herself and offer less of herself at the same time. Vielleicht in ein anderen leben. Trotz allem, hast du keine ahnung was es fur mich bedeutet dich fer kennen. I went to the public library to look up the German, to have my heart broken again, piece by piece, by the yellowed pages of the dictionary. Perhaps in another life. In spite of everything, you have no idea what it means for me to know you. She’d even flown to meet me in Arizona on my drive west, and implored me, as we said good-bye in the airport, not to change, she could not follow me, but please, to live this way for both of us. When I visited her in New York City, in an effort to convince her I had more to offer than just books and opera and hikes in the desert, we went with Ray one night to the Carnegie Deli. But it changed nothing. Nothing worked.
And nothing from my old life was working either. Everything in Cambridge, where I’d taken a job as a teaching fellow, had turned foreign. The meetings with the khakis and the niceties and the proposed topics for discussion. The grad students who read every book as an argument for or against their pet theories. The family restaurants in the Square that had been overtaken by chains. The ads on the subway kiosk that featured life-size photographs of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, the words think different emblazoned beside a little white apple, as though Einstein and Picasso had time-traveled to 1999 and derived their genius from a computer, as though the gateway to a unique way of seeing was looking at the world through a screen. I felt like a wild animal who’d mistakenly wandered into the zoo. A born believer who’d wandered into a culture of heretics.
So, after saving enough money, I’d criss-crossed the country twice, living for a few months in New Mexico, in Idaho, in Montana. I’d lived in a trailer, in cabins, in my tent. I’d woken to different trees, different campgrounds. The land kept unscrolling, the road led out to distant colors, and the big sky promised enough space for me to heal. I’d assumed visibility would have to get better—I’d find a reflection of myself in that sky, in the land, a reflection that couldn’t be broken. But nothing became any clearer. Between my two cross-country drives, I returned to Harvard to work again, to cover my expenses. Mom and Dad were still proud. The golden boy trajectory appeared intact. Outwardly, I was still living that life—and my “drives” could be forgiven as eccentricity. But they were the only part of my life that felt real. Back in my apartment on Ellery Street, I was miserable, unbearable to myself. I was still leading a double life. I was impersonating my former self and not even doing a good job of it.
But now, as I packed my green duffel, I was confident I’d put in the time, endured the solitude. I’d sat with myself day after day, night after night, alone. I could already feel the green medallion glowing in my chest. I could already feel the love I would share with my family. I wasn’t packing to run across the country, to search for some new horizon, but to have a preview of my return. To test what I’d learned—and what I might be able to offer.
The first cop pulled me over before I was out of Vermont. Or, really, I should say pulled up behind me, as I was already pulled over and already out of my car. I was at a rest stop, standing on the skirt of grass by the angled parking spaces, facing the granite wall that had been dynamited to make the highway. The rest stop had no restrooms. It had no access to the woods. From my posture—feet shoulder-width apart, hands in front of me—my reason for taking in the scenery was fairly obvious. I’d heard a car pull up, a door opening and closing, followed by a lack of footsteps. I finished, zipped up, and turned around.
“This isn’t a public restroom.”
It sure didn’t feel very private.
“Women and children stop here sometimes. They don’t want to see that.”
Did he want to see that? Is that why his fender had almost hit my calves?
“Do you hear what I’m saying to you? Respond verbally if you can.”
He looked
to be about twenty. The only shadow on his jaw was from the brim of his trooper’s hat worn low over his eyes. “I can hear you just fine,” I said.
“When was the last time you did drugs?”
“Sir?”
“The last time you did drugs. Are you on drugs right now?” He shifted his weight. He was staring at my eyes. It felt like a sucker punch. A migraine was thickening behind my right eyeball.
“Not since I was in college.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I’m sure.”
“And you’re feeling OK?”
“Sir?”
“Are you feeling OK? Are you sick?”
“I have a headache.”
“And what’s that from?”
“Sir?”
“The headache. What’s that from?”
The Point of Vanishing Page 15