The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  And I didn’t know that with Andrew’s help, I’d learn about a professional tennis player, a Harvard golden boy himself, who had broken his neck and was now making a comeback. I didn’t know that in order to talk with him, I’d decide to write an article, and that in doing the interviews, I’d find that being able to listen, to picture what people were saying, really did have a place in modern life, that there was something I could offer: in the right context, people yearned to be heard and to be seen. And I didn’t know that the confidence the article would give me would help me on my way to grad school, and even to having a girlfriend again—a reticent, deeply insightful poet from Missouri. And I didn’t know that after the article came out, an editor would contact me about writing a book, wondering if there were any human interest stories I might know of and want to tell. A conversation that would lead me to consider my own story—my eye accident, my years in the woods, and my long, strange search to get the world, and my place in it, back into perspective.

  The three raps came again. It was probably an emergency, someone was probably in need. Smoke was rising from my chimney. Candlelight spilled out onto the snow. There really wasn’t much of a choice. I stepped into my moccasins, crossed the plywood mudroom floor, and opened the door.

  A woman stood on the frozen doormat—probably in her midforties, bundled in a long green parka, cheeks faintly red from the cold. In one mittened hand she held a clipboard. “Sorry to disturb you,” she said, her breath smoking in the doorway. “Just a few questions. Two thousand senses.”

  I was confused. I glanced at the form on her clipboard, the number and word in large blocky print. 2000 Census.

  “It won’t take long,” she said. “Missed a few folks last year. Just trying to get the numbers right.”

  I asked her in, not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed.

  She followed me through the mudroom, and, leaving on her parka, she angled a chair from the table towards the woodstove. Trying to regain my composure, I offered her a cup of tea. She shook her head with the same tight rhythm as her knocking. Apparently, the house’s minimalist decor made her more nervous than the darkened roads outside.

  “Just a few questions,” she said. “You live alone here?”

  The answer seemed obvious enough.

  “And you have no kids here?”

  I only looked at her.

  “I do have to ask.”

  The woodstove was throwing a great deal of heat. I felt too skinny in my t-shirt, all collarbone and ribs. “No kids.”

  “Name?”

  I told her the house’s owner was Lev Weissman.

  “The form only asks about you. Your information.” She unzipped her parka, revealing a sweatshirt underneath, and let out a discreet sigh. Against the dark gray, her eyes became deeper blue.

  “Problem?” she said.

  I was probably staring like a child. Nothing seemed particularly noteworthy about her, but her details were human details—the pudginess of her fingers at the clipboard’s edge, the fading, mottled red in her cheeks.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “The Census only needs your name. Your birthdate. Your basic information.”

  Maybe I was the last stop of her night. Maybe someone was waiting for her at home. I imagined the television light flickering in the curtains of a well-kept house, her husband on the couch, soup simmering on the stove. It struck me as a wonder—as something impressive and mysterious. There was some life that she came from.

  “Your name?” she said.

  The whole house seemed to be listening. A log popped and shifted in the woodstove. The sound of my name in my head felt strange to me. But she was waiting, pencil poised. And the quiet felt different now, like there was an opening in it.

  So I spoke my own name. The shapes rusty in my mouth. It almost hurt, like running into an old friend on the street, someone who makes you slightly uneasy because he remembers more about you than you do about him.

  “Could you spell it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you?”

  And I did.

  It was a clear May morning, the field still ankle-deep with mud. As the car rode the ruts, the puddles plashing under the tires, I felt myself saying good-bye to everything—to the apple trees in the meadow, to the trail into the woods, to the chickadees, to the field and all the nights and mornings I’d walked beside it, to the very smell of the air. It was childish, but something in me felt like a child, or, really, like a young man setting out from home for the first time. I didn’t know what lay ahead of me, but I felt prepared. There was solid ground inside me now—not answers to any specific questions, but a physical understanding that I needed surfaces, however false, however temporary, to get down to the truth beneath them, an understanding that while I wasn’t only who I was to other people, without other people it would be nearly impossible to get down to what else I might be. These woods had given me a second chance, a way to learn to see again, and now I was leaving their embrace, like an animal shoved by its mother out of the den. But I was also the mother aware that it was weaning time, aware that if the young didn’t leave now, he might never leave and might never have the chance again.

  I passed Nat’s trailer and said a silent prayer for him, passed the cows on the hillside and the outbuildings of the Mooreland farm, and felt the hard catch of pavement under my tires on the road. I headed up the hill to pick up my last mail at the Lake Parker General Store. There was no mail for me, but as I walked out onto the dusty slats of the porch, nothing more to do before turning the car south, I felt as though I’d just received a very long letter, one I’d written to myself, one it would take me years and years to read. It told of trees and snow and wind, of silences and open spaces, of the fundamental compromise and glory of being a human being, and of other things I hadn’t understood at the time, and perhaps would only be able to understand later, in the years to come.

  I drove through Barton once more, just to pass the C&C, and the café, still closed, and then I followed the road back to the highway, turned onto the ramp heading south, and allowed myself, not without a mixture of relief and regret, to pick up speed.

  Acknowledgments

  Gratitude is the happiest form of debt—the accounts are incalculable, and the only way to square them is by trying to do good work and by trying to be generous in the ways others have been generous to you. In other words, I will forever be working to repay:

  My family: Mom, Dad, and Matt, all of whom supported this book without knowing what was in it, which means, really, that they supported me. The years the book contains, and the years it took to write, weren’t easy on any of us, and their love helped me more than I can say.

  My early mentors: Robert Coles and Ron Carlson—for their examples, their profound decency, and their encouragement. Thanks also to Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jane Miller, Steve Orlen, Boyer Rickel, and everyone at the University of Arizona MFA program.

  The residencies where I wrote so much of the book: Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson, the Anderson Center, the Norman Mailer Center, Hambidge, and the Vermont Studio Center. Special thanks to Harriet Barlow, Ben Strader, Ruth Salvatore, Sharon Dynak, and Gary Clark.

  My early readers, for their insights and their belief in the project: Susan Choi, David Ebershoff, Albert LaFarge, Caryn Cardello, Julie Bloemeke, Cornelius Howland, Jill Gallenstein, Aaron Goldberg, Leah Gillis, Peter Derby, Chris Boucher, Katherine Cohen, and Aaron Richmond.

  My later readers: Tanya Larkin, Helena de Bres, and Mary Marbourg, for their keen intellectual responses to the ideas and their deeply felt personal responses to the emotions.

  The community: everyone at Grub Street, especially Chip Cheek, Chris Castellani, Sonya Larson, Alison Murphy, Sean Van Deuren, Lauren Rheaume, and to James Scott for bringing me into the fold. To my memoir students, who, through their own writing, reminded me of what memoir can do. And to my students at the University of Arizona, We
ntworth Institute of Technology, and Framingham State, whose questions about the book helped me understand the story I was telling. And to my WIT colleagues: Devon Sprague, Max Grinnell, and Loren Sparling.

  For behind-the-scenes understanding and guidance: Linda Madoff, Jami Axelrod, Alicia Pritt, Jodi Heyman, Shuchi Saraswat, Jaime Clark, Mary Cotton, Bill McKibben, Wendy Wakeman, Vicki Kennedy, Doris Cooper, Katherine Fausset, Leslie Jamison, Adelle Waldman, David Macmillan, and Bill Hayes. And to Sophie Barbasch, for the photograph and for all the great cartoons.

  A special thank-you to Anne LeClaire, for reading an early draft and believing in it enough to introduce me to her agent, Deborah Schneider, and to Bella Pollen, for being such a kind and generous reader.

  And to Oliver Sacks, for his insight, his kindness, and for giving the book the highest compliment it could possibly receive.

  To Charles Bock, for guiding me through every stage, including that talk in Central Park before my meetings with agents and for being such a smart and abiding friend. A mensch in every possible way.

  To Deborah Schneider, my superhero agent, who saw the book I was writing even when I couldn’t and who always knew how and when to fight. She was the fearless advocate this project needed, and she earned my trust in hundreds of ways. Thanks also to Victoria Marini and to everyone at Gelfman Schneider/ICM Partners and Curtis Brown in London.

  To Alexis Rizzuto, my editor, for her immediate and intuitive understanding of the book and for her tireless attention to detail. Also, to Helene Atwan, Tom Hallock, Rob Arnold, Will Myers, and the whole team at Beacon Press. I’m so proud to be on the Beacon list.

  To Ray Hearey, who I thought of so often while writing and whose friendship was always with me, even from across the country.

  To Andrew Rueb, a true friend through everything. For all the dinners, all the talks, all the faith. And for all the understanding, without needing to read a word.

  And, lastly, one more thank-you to my parents. This book, in so many ways, is for you.

  Beacon Press

  Boston, Massachusetts

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books

  are published under the auspices of

  the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  © 2015 by Howard Axelrod

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 17 16 15 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Text design and composition by Wilsted & Taylor

  Some names and identifying characteristics of people mentioned in this work have been changed to protect their identities.

  Tomas Tranströmer, excerpt from “Preludes,” translated by Robert Bly, from The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer. Copyright © 2001 by Tomas Tranströmer. Translation copyright © 2001 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN, http://www.graywolfpress.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Axelrod, Howard.

  The point of vanishing : a memoir of two years in solitude / Howard Axelrod.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8070-7546-3 (paperback : acid-free paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8070-7547-0 (ebook)

  1. Axelrod, Howard, 1973– 2. Young men—United States—Biography. 3. People with visual disabilities—United States—Biography. 4. Eye—Wounds and injuries—Patients—United States—Biography. 5. Vision, Monocular—Psychological aspects. 6. Axelrod, Howard, 1973—Homes and haunts—Vermont. 7. Solitude—Psychological aspects. 8. Visual perception. 9. Self-perception. 10. Vermont—Biography. I. Title.

  CT275.A95245A3 2015

  614.5′997092—dc23

  [B]

  2015004216