The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  “Driving. I’m driving to New York. I guess I’m nervous to see my family.”

  His eyes locked onto mine again. He’d probably watched too many cop shows. Had my eye, which was probably a little bloodshot, issued him a search warrant?

  He glanced down, adjusted the brim of his trooper’s hat. “Family makes me nervous, too. That’s understandable.”

  I waited. His car was still running.

  “Well, happy Thanksgiving. And next time make sure you find the appropriate facilities.”

  After he pulled out, I got back in the car and sat for a few minutes. Then I drove very slowly south towards the Massachusetts border, past the highway farms, the blue silos and fields, as though reduced speed might put the world in order. Did my eye really look that weird? Granted, it had been through some changes. First there was the accident, and the strangeness of my eye looking the same as it always had; then my pupil dilated permanently while I was in Bologna; then there were calcium deposits that flaked off on my second drive West. My eye teared through Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and by the time I hit the Badlands of South Dakota, it was watering steadily. I was driving with a tissue in my hand, like a woman weeping, and given the otherworldly sandstone spires, the blinding blue sky, I could have passed for a character in a sci-fi movie, a survivor of an earth destroyed. The irritation, I learned from a doctor in Minnesota, was caused by calcium deposits. “They formed on your iris there. Little pieces are flaking into the eye. Kind of like paint peeling off a fence. That’s why you’ve got the irritation, the crying. Unless those bands are surgically removed, you can bet that irritation’s going to persist.” Back in Boston, I returned to Mass Eye and Ear, and a surgeon put me under general anaesthetic and chipped away, as though my eye were an ill-formed statue. The pain waited until the next morning. Beneath the bandage, which was a large white patch taped to my forehead, my eye razored with every blink, as if the red string on a Band-Aid had been dangling from my iris and someone had pulled. I was back in my childhood bedroom, below the basketball posters and the trophies, back where I’d been the morning after the accident. I knew I had to do something. I knew I had to change. No more looking for some beautiful woman or some beautiful town to save me. I needed to go far enough back so there would be nothing else waiting behind. No further layer that was just a scrim, no more version of reality that was only provisional. I had to touch the hard edge of reality, and begin from there. A few weeks later, as if to make sure I’d gotten the message, a cataract started to form on my right eye. A pearly shine, like the glint in an animated character’s eye. A few months after that, I was in northern Vermont, posting my handwritten signs on the bulletin board outside the C&C. Wanted: a cabin or house set in the woods, with good light, very solitary.

  Maybe I’d have to keep dealing with people like the cop, maybe my eye had become its own carnival attraction. I hadn’t looked at a mirror in more than a year. A reflection slid over the car windows in the C&C parking lot, it loomed up in the freezer doors, it hovered in the mirror above the sink. But I had no idea how I looked, no idea what my family might see. The rearview mirror was right there, right beside me, its narrow, impartial eye open and ready, but the prospect frightened me. It had taken so long to live without a face, to live without anyone to put on a face for, and the slim mirror threatened like a cage. I didn’t want to resign that freedom. I didn’t want to start fitting whatever waited in the mirror into a mask.

  The fist tightened behind my eye as I drove through western Massachusetts, dropped into Connecticut, and then was funneled through the narrow highway lanes of Hartford, shunted along like a bottle on an assembly line. Billboards with enormous faces of newscasters swarmed above me, their smiles desperate with dependability, one woman’s glossy red lipstick strangely pornographic. The buildings kept multiplying, their regimented windows like the multifaceted eyes of insects. The colors did not make sense. The geometry was all wrong. Seeing this way reminded me of my drive west, the way cities would rise out of the desert like alien encampments, except now I wasn’t a traveler from afar, not a stranger in a strange land. I’d driven this stretch of road so many times before, but it seemed the distance had become a part of my vision—it traveled with me now.

  As I crossed the border into New York—Welcome to the Empire State—I tried to remind myself of how much I’d always enjoyed Thanksgiving. As a kid, going to Newburgh had felt like returning to the motherland. All Mom and Dad’s stories took place there. Every house was a house where something had happened, every street a street that led into the past. On our annual pilgrimage, we’d troll the neighborhoods, Mom reeling up memory after memory, pointing out the house her father built on Liberty Street—he knew where every nail was in that house—and the house where Poppa had stood guard at the intersection, so she and her sister could sled down the street, and where she’d fallen off the front step one day and bumped her head. She’d turn in the passenger seat and show Matt and me the small bump just below her hairline, and she’d take my hand and run my two fingers over it so I could feel it. It always astounded me—looking at those concrete steps and feeling that bump on Mom’s forehead, feeling time right there under my fingertips, the way something that had happened decades ago was still a part of Mom’s face, still a part of who she was. “Every door was open to me,” Mom would go on. “At lunch I could walk in any door—the Levinsons’, or Aunt May’s, or the Siegels’—and someone would be there to give me a BLT.” Dad would steer the car slowly. Sometimes Mom would start to cry. “It was just different then.” Dad would pat her on the knee. They never seemed as in love as they did on those drives. And I loved being part of that feeling, even if it was only from the backseat. I loved feeling that those streets and houses mattered, and that we belonged to them, or that at least Mom and Dad once had. We couldn’t go into the diner without being treated like minor celebrities. Before the waitress had delivered the commandment-size menus, Mom would explain: “That woman with the blue eye-shadow, she had a crush on Dad in high school; that kind old man at the counter, he was Dad’s basketball coach at the JCC; remember the story Poppa told about his teacher with the dead arm?”—then she’d imitate it, holding her arm, swinging it, “Friedman, out of here”—“That woman who was at the door, she’s his daughter.”

  Of course, this year Thanksgiving wasn’t being held in Newburgh. There’d been a change of plans. We were all going to Armonk, to my cousin Susan’s house. Mom had withheld the information until our last phone conversation. Susan and Dirk’s house had so much more room, she said.

  “Armonk, this is the house with the twenty-two TVs?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Do they have twenty-two rooms?”

  “We’ll sleep in Newburgh. It’ll be fine. Everyone’s so excited you’re coming!”

  Off the highway, I followed beneath the skeletal November trees into the dark heart of the suburbs. Armonk had street signs on every corner, traffic lights overhead, boutique stores with clever names. The crosswalks blazed with precision. The sidewalk was immaculate. I wondered if people were nervous to walk there for fear of feeling like blemishes. Nothing was accidental, or if it was, it was because someone hadn’t done his job. A mother and daughter crossed at a perfect right angle to the car at a determined jog/walk pace—the girl in a short black dress, the mother in a pink warm-up suit. Maybe as a joke they’d limited themselves to each other’s closets. Beyond them, the street was empty, everyone probably already with their families. I appreciated the quiet. There were so many pizza places. Fresh Delicious Pizza! And Chinese restaurants. Daily Lunch Buffet! Despite myself, my mouth was beginning to water. Enjoy Coca-Cola!

  Off the main road, the houses retreated deeper and deeper on their lawns, a patch of trees adorning them here and there like a sprig of parsley. It looked make-believe—the driveways, the hedges, the box lawns—as though I was driving down a black crayon road in a child’s drawing. But as the land opened beyond the first clusters of houses,
it was beautiful: rolling hills thick with massive oaks, the narrow road curving sharply around jutting pudding stone. I told myself to keep seeing it that way, to keep seeing the land below everything—and to remember to do that with my family, too, to look for what glowed inside each of them, below the jewelry, the makeup, the small talk about football or the stock market. I told myself the subtext below every conversation, whatever the words were, was really love. I told myself to remember that—to bring the love I’d felt in the woods to them, to bring it in human form. My migraine was burning off. I was remembering why I had come. Granted, a nervous static was making the green medallion inside my chest hard to feel, but I trusted it was only static.

  After a series of turns, I came to what Mom had described as a new development. Enormous houses followed a long horseshoe curve. Most of the oaks and elms had been cut down, leaving the street strangely airy. Each house had a security gate, an intercom device, a long flat driveway. There were no cars on the road, no children, nobody on the football-field size lawns. It seemed like a museum of houses. Some had two chimneys, others had three. Some were all brick, others a combination of brick and wood. One house, clearly the rebel, was canary yellow. As I kept driving, everything so new—newly painted, newly masoned, newly mown—the neighborhood began to look more like a catalogue. At the bottom right of every immense lawn, there might have been little bars suggesting other available options. I drove at a walking pace, hoping the extra time would help me acclimate, hoping it would diminish whatever bafflement was behind my eyes.

  The security gate was open, and I drove down the long driveway, pulled in beside Dad’s black Acura. Seeing it unhinged something in my chest. It was so familiar. A hanger with cellophane wrap from the Chestnut Hill Cleaners hung in the backseat. A Harvard decal still adorned the back window. It had carried them here. Mom and Dad were inside the house. Matt and Jami’s car was there, too. I would walk up the front walk, someone would open the door, and they would all be inside. My chest felt fluttery, my arms and legs overly alert. As though I were about to walk onto a brightly lit stage, as though thousands of eyes were about to see me.

  I’d hardly pressed the doorbell when the white door swung open. Everyone was gathered in the foyer. The house was so cavernous maybe no one had wanted to get lost. Or maybe Matt and Jami had just arrived. The floor was black and white marble squares, everyone a chess piece. Behind them, a bronze urn of spiky flowers sat on a pedestal. A spiral staircase swept up towards unknown splendor. My cousin Scott had opened the door. In high school we’d looked alike, and he’d struck me as a more normal version of myself. He’d given me my first fake ID, taken me to my first bar, made sure I had a bottle of beer in my hand.

  “Look, everyone,” he said, announcing me, “it’s the Unabomber!”

  Smiles were slightly blurred. Mom stepped forward, kissed me on the cheek, then touched my face, as though to make sure it was real. There wasn’t enough room behind me to step away.

  “So hairy,” she said.

  Dad patted me on the back, stood too close, asked about the traffic. Matt’s eyes were like a dog brushing at my pantlegs, trying to herd me back into the person he recognized. Everyone was still waiting for a clever response, a reassuring response.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” I said, but my voice sounded underwater. Everyone else stood on dry land, far above me, in a greenish wavering light. More hugs followed. I was a mystery package to be held, shaken, assayed, so they might guess what was inside. Even my cousin Melissa, who came up only to my shoulder, felt too big, too close, her skin and clothing overly fragrant. Dirk’s arms were as thick as a bear’s. Susan’s high heels sounded like gunshots down the corridor. These were woods I didn’t understand. At the first chance that presented itself, I retreated to the bathroom.

  It was like eating inside a pinball machine, the metallic ball shooting and ricocheting, signs lighting up and spinning for reasons I didn’t understand. I was still picturing myself in front of the woodstove and trying to answer Scott’s question about missing television, and then there was another question, then another. Everyone’s plates filled and emptied and filled again. They all seemed to have ten minds and ten arms, the cranberry sauce and stuffing and sweet potatoes shuttled this way and that, the conversation jumping from the Wall Street Journal to a football game to something about fashion. They were a bunch of demigods, capable of doing a thousand things at once. I hadn’t spoken and eaten at the same time in nearly a year. Even at the café, I never ate until Bella and Linda had returned to the kitchen. I could talk slowly, and I could eat slowly—but not at the same time. My family’s words and stories kept coming, switching directions. Often, as much as I wanted to join in, my mouth felt like an empty tunnel, filled with the possibility of passage but with no cars passing through. Spoken English, apparently, had become a second language to me. Everything they said I saw in pictures, and the pictures became confusing—it was hard to translate what they were saying into something I could understand.

  “So what’s the takeaway?” Dirk said to me as we stood at the dessert buffet. The selection was overwhelming: Apple pie. Key lime pie. Boston cream pie. Blueberry pie. Mom’s forest torte. Haagen Dazs. Fresh raspberries. Peanut butter cookies. Brussels cookies. Milanos. Brownies. Fresh whipped cream.

  “The takeaway?”

  “You know. From your life in the woods.”

  The takeaway. What I saw in my mind was a pizza box—the pizza inside topped with evergreens, a driving snow, mountains in the distance. “I’m sorry?”

  He stepped closer. He was a former college football player, solidly built, his venture capital business highly successful. He was accustomed to getting answers to his questions. “Say you’re giving a three-minute PowerPoint to the board. To some group that’s going to fund solitude projects for other kids. What’s the takeaway?”

  I tried to picture power point, but that didn’t help much either. And why would anyone fund kids to do what I was doing? His questions seemed slightly crazy. But this was his house, I was his guest. I wanted to oblige. Besides, I’d always liked Dirk. His hunger couldn’t have been more different from mine, but he was always hungry—for the newest, for the latest, for the best. And now he had sniffed out something in me; he was hard on the trail.

  “He wants the answers,” Susan said, handing Dirk a glass of wine, nudging him playfully.

  “Not the answers, exactly. Just the lesson,” he said, in a voice suitable for conveying a lesson.

  No lessons came to mind. I could hear the football game playing in the room behind us. Someone had just scored a touchdown. Susan suddenly grabbed my arm. “You’re like a modern Thoreau. Like that kid from Into the Wild. Except you’re still living, of course. Important distinction.”

  I tried to smile. To play along. I was sorry about it, I wanted to be able to say something, but there was no way to give the pictures in my mind—the way the woods looked behind the house, the way the chickadees darted branch to branch, the way the far mountains looked from the vista. “That’s better than the Unabomber, I guess.”

  Susan broke into a desperate smile. “There’s the old Howie,” she said. “Witty. Fun.” She squeezed my arm, as though to dispense more of the old me.

  I nodded politely, stepped away, and helped myself to a piece of the apple pie. But I knew what she’d meant. As the words had emerged from my mouth, I’d felt a soft pain by my cheek, a wing-beat, a familiar shadow. And I hadn’t entirely minded it.

  The second cop stopped me the following morning. Accommodations at my aunt and uncle’s house in Newburgh were tight, and under the pretext of giving everyone more room, I camped in the backyard in my tent. I needed to be alone. I needed to breathe. There’d been almost no moments, apart from the conversation with Susan, where I’d felt close to anyone. The headache had fought its way back into my neck, into my eye. Mom pleaded against the backyard. She seemed to fear losing me in the hedge, in the weeping willow. Aunt Betty didn’t like the idea either:
this was her domain, and never in twenty-five years had anyone slept back there. There were dangers—deer, skunks, raccoons. But no one really wanted to argue with me.

  The temperature dropped below freezing, but my sleeping bag worked fine, and at daybreak, as always, I rose and went for a walk. The grass was hoary with frost, the street was silent, the morning air bracing. There was the tight, vinegary scent of frozen crab apples, mixed with the scents of the dead leaves. The sky was beginning to lighten. Not a quarter mile away, I came to the Desmond Estate, which had been converted into a campus for a local college. Its broad lawns displayed massive, gnarled trees with black name tags. I ignored the paved paths and drifted across the grass, the sides of my boots darkening with the melting frost. The steel-gray river, which I’d glimpsed from the brow of a hill, was now a single glinting snake in the morning sun. The morning was beautiful. The whole Hudson River Valley was beautiful. I thought of the last page of The Great Gatsby, the green land flowering before the Dutch sailors’ eyes, that last moment, Fitzgerald wrote, when man was face to face with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder. I thought of Dirk’s inadvertent similarity to Gatsby—the unused rooms of his house, the twenty-two televisions, which were maybe the convenient, modern stand-in for glittering parties, and I wondered what part of the past he was trying to recapture. I wondered if it was similar to the feeling of community my parents were trying to recapture every time they drove through Newburgh. And I wondered if it was similar to what I was trying to recapture by living in the woods, just in my own solitary way.

  When I came out of the estate, I followed the low stone wall beside the road. A large bird, a hawk of some kind, perched atop a dead tree. The tree had been hit by lightning, the top of it just a blackened shard, a spire towards the sky. Gazing up at the hawk, I heard a car approaching from behind me. I didn’t turn. Then a car door groaned open, closed, and there were slow footsteps. Not again. I turned to see a police officer, one hand resting on his billy club.