The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  Nat Jr. slowed to a halt alongside me, the snow creaking under the tires, and he rolled down the window. The engine ran, but no music played from the radio. He was holding a cigarette. He looked up at me after he lit it. “Thought you’d want to know,” he said.

  I couldn’t catch up to the words, to their meaning. They seemed to run out ahead of me into the field.

  “Passed a few nights ago.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, then glared down at it, as though its taste was disappointing.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Life’s a bitch and then you die, right?” The blond hair at his collar trembled with the vibration of the truck. His eyelids looked pink, slightly swollen.

  “I should have seen him in the hospital.”

  He exhaled a long plume of smoke. He stared at the glowing lights of dashboard, one hand still on the wheel, as though for indication of what had gone wrong. “Well, I guess that little crush of yours was mutual. He talked about you whenever he came down here. Mom said it was like you was some version of himself he never got to be.”

  I was stunned. I didn’t feel like a version of anything.

  “Your father was a good man,” I said.

  “What would you know about it?”

  I didn’t want to take my hand off the truck door. It was the closest, I realized, I would ever come to touching Nat again. “I appreciate your coming down here.”

  “Nothing else to do.”

  “When’s the funeral?”

  “All taken care of.”

  “You mean the arrangements?”

  “All taken care of,” he said. He leaned towards me, rolled the window back up. Then he raised one finger in parting, threw the truck into reverse, backed at alarming speed into the field, and drove off towards town.

  The blue had fled from the field. It seemed I could hear the truck for a long time through the trees. I had the urge to whisper to Nat Jr. that he was jealous of a ghost, of a product of his father’s imagination. The truth was I was jealous of that ghost, too—the eager young man who’d stacked wood that first fall, the real backwoodsman, his search underway.

  The border of pines at the far end of the field was a silhouette of spires. I wondered what Nat would say if I walked towards it now, that dark church—whether, now that he was gone, he would understand.

  The firelight played through the grates. I tried the visualization game, but no clear pictures were coming—there was too much static. The only thing I could focus on was the fire. I could make my vision alternate, back and forth, first seeing it as throwing light into the room, then seeing it as drawing light from the room. The first way, the room grew lighter, the orange glow fanning across the floorboards from the wood burning in the stove; the second way, the room grew darker, the fire feeding on the last bits of light hidden under the table, the last bits of light hidden inside of me. It wasn’t a new game, but it made me uneasy now. It was just a seesaw of vision, of mind, but I could feel the question at its fulcrum. How much more light could I absorb from the woods before the woods absorbed all the light from me?

  I didn’t want to go upstairs to bed, didn’t trust my mind to be quiet. I needed to talk to someone. Not to Andrew. Definitely not to my parents. It took me awhile, but then I thought of Ray. Not to say anything necessarily, but just to make the room a little more solid with his voice.

  I sat down on the daybed and dialed his number. I saw the Hudson River and the New York City night out his window. He picked up on the third ring.

  “Howie, I’ve been thinking about you.”

  The possibility astounded me. “You were?”

  “It’s late for you, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “We’ve got an exam tomorrow, so my mind keeps jumping to more desirable duties.”

  Maybe it had been a mistake to call.

  “You study this stuff long enough, it starts to induce some of the symptoms. Anyway, I needed to call you. I have a story. I’ve only got ten minutes, but I’ll try to be quick.”

  “Please,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  He described a woman he’d met at a party, how he’d eventually asked her out, and how the previous weekend they’d gone out for coffee. His preamble was a comfort. I didn’t care where the story was going. It was a relief to listen to his voice, to hear about a life that was drawn inside clear lines, a life that made sense to its owner. “So we’re at this café on the Upper West Side, things are going well, and I notice an attractive woman walk in the door. She’s with a man, and they’re seated at the table next to us. They’re speaking German. She looks familiar, but I’m paying attention to my date, and it’s not until I get up to use the bathroom that it hits me.”

  “What?”

  “Milena,” he said. “It was Milena.”

  The firelight wavered and shimmered on the floorboards. It took a few seconds for me to find my voice. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. I remembered her from that night at the deli.”

  It was strange—I’d almost forgotten that they’d met. “Did she say anything to you?”

  “So I come back from the bathroom, and her date isn’t there, and I think to say something. But before I can, he comes back and sits down.”

  “You didn’t talk to her?”

  “She looked at me as we left, really looked at me, but we didn’t speak.”

  “Jesus, Ray.”

  “But listen. I’m walking with Deb, my date, outside, and she says to me, ‘The strangest thing happened while you were in the bathroom. That woman at the table beside us, as soon as her date went to the bathroom, she started telling me all these things. She told me they were married, and she’s pregnant, and they live on the Upper West Side. And then she said something really strange. She said they were happy, but there are always parts of your past you wonder about.’ Deb said it was like this woman was giving her a message, like she was trying to get it all out before her husband returned.”

  I was picturing the café, the cups and saucers on the table, picturing Milena urgently saying all this to a woman she did not know.

  “It was for you. I’m almost sure. Maybe she promised her husband she’d never be in touch with you again, and this was just her way.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you OK? You sound kind of strange.”

  “Was he short?”

  “Who?”

  “The husband. Was he shorter than her when they came in?”

  “I think so. Why? That was the guy from Vienna?”

  I needed to get off the phone. I could feel the firelight pulling on me, and I didn’t want Ray to hear it. Milena had made a life, a life not without regrets, but with a child on the way, with a future. For her, for what she needed, she had been right. She had made the right decision. And I wondered, for what I needed, if I had been right, too. I wondered why I’d made the choices I’d made. I wondered why my choices didn’t seem to lead to any future. I wondered if this house, and these woods, were the only place I could have come.

  After a brief reprieve, the snow had begun falling again—falling in the long windows to the woods, falling above my bed and above my desk, and it seemed I was falling with it. My body was falling and filling with the drifting snow, filling and falling with the changing wind. There was no bottom to the falling, no rock bottom where my feet became solid beneath me, but that didn’t matter because the falling was everything. There were only the icicles hanging from the eaves, the night dazzle of the falling snow, the curled corpse of a mouse one morning in the mud-room. Reality, it seemed, had entered my bones. I suffered no visions. No voices. The day itself had become the vision and the voice. There was no further surface to peel away, no more scrim to mistrust, nothing larger to belong to. I had never breathed with so much size—never felt so vast and so tiny at the same time, as though my body had become an open doorway without a house, a doorway that was just a means of awareness for everything passing through it. I no longer spoke. No longer thoug
ht, other than in a kind of humming. Images drifted through me the way the reflections of migrating birds drift across a pond—just geometry, a part of the weather. The past and the future no longer occurred. There was only an ever-expanding present. It seemed the day was making itself aware of itself through me. That was all.

  The only disturbance, which came especially late in the afternoons, was a recurring migraine, like the one that had surfaced on my drive to Newburgh. It pushed from behind my eye, pushed like a hand reaching for me from out of my past. Ever since the accident, I’d regarded migraines as warnings, as my body’s helpful indicator that I was drifting into danger. Too much anxiety, too much confidence, too much anything—a migraine waved its black flag. But now the thunder behind my eye just seemed a final test, some last vestige of myself I had to transcend, even on the days it forced me to crawl out into the snow, overtaken by nausea.

  Which is what brought me to the field that night. The pain had wired shut my jaw, made it difficult to eat. The back of my neck had become two taut steel cords, my right shoulder blade rigid through the back of my skull and into my eye. It was dusk, the sky deepening above the trees. I just needed to walk, to keep walking until my eye didn’t feel so thick, until it stopped pulsing, until the sharp air granted some relief. But the walking was only spreading the pain. It was my whole body now. I veered off the road into the field. The vomit came on its own, a thin trickle of bile and tea. Tears sprang to my eyes. The heaving kept going, even though there was nothing left. It made me want to surrender, to apologize for things I couldn’t explain—to break open whatever buried rooms I’d forgotten. The cold came hot on my face. Eventually I washed my mouth out with snow, rolled onto my back. I could see the North Star, the bow and belt of Orion. The snow was solid under my back. I could feel the cold seeping into my skin, seeping through my snowpants. It was the large hand of the earth resting on my back, holding me as I continued to fall, as the stars appeared overhead. The whole sky seemed the opening of a vast well, and I was down below, looking up at everything. The bottom of the well was cold, so cold, but it was also warm, also burning, and I lay there until I couldn’t tell what it was and my eyes closed.

  Then I was dreaming. I was in the back stairwell of Roxbury Latin, the stairs abandoned, everyone in class. My mind wasn’t entirely clear, but I knew I had killed someone. I couldn’t remember my victim or my motive or any of the details. But as I climbed the stairs, my only concern was that the body stay hidden. The door to the Latin classroom was ajar, and my classmates, now in their midtwenties, were translating lines from The Aeneid. Their faces were the same as when we were young. I’d stashed the body, I was fairly sure, in the small office on the far side of the classroom. Mr. Brennan took no notice of me. I passed behind his desk, and my classmates took no notice either. I turned the knob on the office door. The low ceiling slanted over me. I closed the door to the classroom. There were three metal lockers. The Latin murmured through the wall. Slowly, I opened the locker on the right. Leaves blew out at me, then wisps of snow. The air inside was dark and cold. Whatever lurked inside was farther back, and just as I caught a glimpse of my corpse, my face frozen white, my eyes open forever, I woke up.

  The field was silent. Nothing moved on the snow. The dream swept by me in its entirety, in one long stream. The feeling was all around me, a part of the night, and I could feel myself trying to retreat from it, like from the wreckage of some grisly accident I should never have seen. Was that what I was doing living this way—killing myself and trying to hide the body?

  My stomach seized. The sky was black. It was hard to move my fingers, my toes. My legs belonged more to the field than to me. My face felt as though the cold had stamped it there, as punishment, as reminder: you are human. Slowly, slowly, I assembled myself into an upright creature. Streaks of pain ran like lightning through my feet. I wondered if I should try crawling. But it would take too long. I trudged. I was carrying my own body, struggling under its weight. The black trees lined the dim road, indifferent. If I fell and could not go on, nothing would change. Not the temperature, not the direction of the wind. Not the stars and their movements in the sky. The snow would drift easily around me. A crow’s harsh call would greet the morning just the same. I’d be no different than a fallen branch, a fallen fencepost. Small icicles might curl from my nostrils. My death would mean nothing here. I meant nothing here—except to myself. The thought horrified me, urged me forward. It felt like a betrayal. The woods did not care. My throat filled with the thick silence of terror, with the knowledge that no one would hear me if I screamed.

  Finally, there was the house, the smell of woodsmoke from the chimney. I trudged past the wood in the garage, past the mudroom, and I was beginning to cry. I didn’t know how I would take off my boots without my feet coming off with them. I went to the woodstove, the snow puddling on the floor. My face and hands were burning with the thaw, cracking like plaster casts, like the bottom layer of a mask no human could afford to lose. I did not want to lose my body. My hands were bone white, terrifyingly white, but they worked as blunt objects, and in the bathroom I set the shower to warm. The shaking was bad. I couldn’t take off my jacket, my snowpants. I ran my hands under lukewarm water at the sink, and when they moved, they ignored all zippers and pulled my jacket over my head like a straitjacket, and pushed off my socks, which were frozen solid inside my boots, my toes marble white, so white, just like my fingers.

  In the shower, I was afraid of falling. The water was thousands of tiny arrows piercing my skin. I knelt down on all fours, the water streaming down my back, down my haunches. My body rattled violently. Mom and Dad’s faces appeared in front of me in the pebbled water. Their eyes were soft, luminous. I looked at them more deeply than I ever had in real life. I told my mom I loved her. I told my dad I loved him. I apologized to them for everything I had put them through. They looked back at me, looked right back in my eyes, and I had the unmistakable feeling of being seen, of being visible. I had the feeling of being forgiven. They did not need to know what had driven me here, they only wanted me back. And not the golden boy version of me or the shamed prodigal son, not some version they even particularly understood. Their love was simply a matter of faith. They loved me with the same love I’d found in the woods, a love below all surfaces—it just wasn’t anything they could express, just as it wasn’t anything I could express. But I knew, had always known, it was inside them, too.

  The water drummed around me, the hard floor dug into my knees. There was no other bottom of the well. There was no other rock bottom. I needed to feel myself against surfaces, to find the shape of what was inside me against something outside me. I needed people, I needed love. I’d wanted to see through all surfaces and to see through myself, but I wasn’t a transparent thing. I was bone, sinew, skin. If I lost depth perception when it came to life, if I removed every line so there was no difference between near and far, I’d never survive—maybe as a ghost or as a cipher but not as a human being.

  The shaking slowed down, and I felt impossibly lighter, fatigued, almost nothing but bones. I stood up in the shower, made the water hotter. Feeling was coming back in my feet, in my hands. My blood was running like it hadn’t for a long time. The vulnerability, the openness, was almost voluptuous. I’d always assumed returning would only be possible under two circumstances—the first was that I no longer needed human love at all, all the love I needed carried inside of me, and the second was that I’d failed miserably and had to return as some broken-down version of the boy I’d been. But there was a third way—to return simply as what I was: a twenty-seven-year-old man, flawed, limited, who was ready to wrestle with his instinct for love, with how horribly vulnerable it would make him. Knowing that no orientation in the world, for anyone, could ever be permanent. Knowing that how I saw would always be changing, depending on who I loved and what I feared.

  Later, after I’d dressed in my warmest clothes, I carried the wool blanket from the bed downstairs and lay down in front
of the fire. By morning, it had burned down to embers, just a few glowing coals hidden under ash. But I was still there. With the morning light on the floorboards, the snow falling outside. And I felt something I hadn’t felt for a long time. A desire for the future. A feeling that good days might be ahead, days with other people, days to look forward to. Days I might allow myself to trust.

  11

  It was a few weeks later that the knock came at the door. Each rap sounded alarmingly inside the house, hardening the posts and beams into place with me inside them. I felt sharp flashes, as though I was underwater and something was bobbing on the surface far above me. The blue candle guttered on the table. In the darkened windows to the woods, the reflection of my dinner flickered soft and shadowy, more the idea of a dinner than anything solid. And my image flickered just the same.

  In the weeks since my night in the field, I’d understood I was going to leave. I’d told Lev over the phone. I’d told my parents. I didn’t know what I would do in Boston, how I would manage—not in the larger sense of the word, not even day to day. I couldn’t picture my life there, but I knew I needed to try, knew I needed to start bringing furniture back into the empty room of my life. I understood the months and years ahead would be difficult, but I had no idea just how difficult. I didn’t know then that the first doctor I saw in Boston would tell me I weighed 120 pounds, not the 155 pounds I’d written on the form. I didn’t know the physical therapist he sent me to would inform me I had the musculature of an eighty-year-old. I didn’t know how difficult it would be to get strong again, to resume occupancy in my body. I didn’t know that the city, as technology boomed, would only become louder. I didn’t know that there would be a terrorist attack on American soil that September, that televisions would appear in almost every restaurant and bar, that there would a constant buzz of information and anxiety. I didn’t know that for almost two years straight I’d need to wear earplugs on the street and that with them in my ears I wouldn’t see as sharply—the whole day unpleasantly muted, as though I was wearing sunglasses. I didn’t know that the sidewalk itself would change. Before going to the woods, I’d overheard an occasional businessman as he stepped out of a taxi, or a stylish young woman broadcasting romantic outrage in front of Au Bon Pain, but in 2001 cell phones were suddenly everywhere, as though another stage of evolution had set in: one hand held to the ear was how humans walked. I didn’t know how frightened it would make me—person after person talking into their hands, somewhere else, blind to the day around them. I didn’t know I’d feel like Rip Van Winkle, asleep for twenty years, returned to what was functionally a ghost town: a coffee shop full of people, but only the sound of insects in the walls, which weren’t insects but fingers typing, typing, burrowing away at the dimensions of time and space, at the human need for being here and now. I didn’t know everyone would suddenly have so much to say. I didn’t know everyone would suddenly have so little time to listen. I didn’t know that just at the time I had learned to slow down, the world would learn to speed up.