Everything Solid has a Shadow
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Having lived in Buenos Aires only from age eight to twelve, I’m about as Americanized and un-Argentine as anyone I know, so everyone except my parents calls me Charlie instead of Carlos. I’m a junior partner in a Chicago integrated marketing communications consulting agency, I speak hardly any Spanish at all these days, I love to travel, and of course I love music, though I’ve long since given up any hopes of being a professional musician beyond my weekly gigs at Berto’s. I’ve got a mild case of irritable bowel syndrome, but on the other hand I’ve got great hair, which shouldn’t be a big deal for a twenty-eight-year-old, but I have friends my age in the agency business and even more friends in the music business who are already losing theirs. (I associate hair loss with heavy marijuana use, for some reason, and I hardly ever touch the stuff myself.) My hair is very straight and floppy and so deep brown it’s almost black, and occasionally when I’m playing guitar I’ll wear a funky little headband to keep it out of my eyes. I’ve got very pale skin, like a lot of Chicagoans who hibernate all winter, and an unfortunate little chin that gives up the ghost just when it should be getting started, and a permanent shaving rash over my Adam’s apple. I’m skinny edging toward scrawny, and my shoulders hunch, probably from all that bending over my guitar to pick out notes, and bending over my laptop to write marketing proposals, but I’ve been told that, even with the weak chin and hunched shoulders and all, I’m pretty good-looking. I can’t really see it myself, but I have very dark brown eyes that, with my almost-black hair, make a nice contrast with my pale skin. I guess it makes me look “sensitive,” which, for a singer/songwriter, is a good thing, though in the agency world it’s not a good thing at all, and that kind of sums up my life dilemma, or at least one of them, right there.
And one other thing about the way I look: My wardrobe changes depending on my girlfriend at the time. They all seem to like to tell me how to dress—one favored the lumberjack look, so I invested in a lot of flannel shirts and corduroy pants and hiking boots, and right after that another girlfriend who detested grunge made me dump the whole closet full of flannel and buy an upsettingly expensive preppie wardrobe. My guy friends have told me I’m too suggestible and too easily swayed (they use more colorful terms than that), but I couldn’t tell them—because I hardly understood it myself—that ever since I was eight years old, I have been terrified of a woman’s disapproval.
My dad is a taxi driver, an inveterate gambler, and an amateur Henry Moore–style sculptor of no repute in Buenos Aires or anywhere else, and my mom mostly putters around. I fly down to that glittering city of immense boulevards and dangerous little dives whenever I can afford it, and I take my parents out for dinner along the Puerto Madera docklands, where they would otherwise never think to go on their own. “Oh, it’s too expensive,” “oh, it’s too far away,” that sort of thing, but after dinner every time, they seem really happy and pleased to have me as their generous and successful son. They’re good people, but I know for a fact that my father keeps a bottle of red wine in the seat next to him when he’s driving his taxi, like it’s his favorite passenger, and takes swigs whenever he’s just dropped off some tourist at the San Telmo market and is waiting for the next fare to come along. And then when the next fare does come along, my father drives with his left hand and now and again pets with his right the bottle’s rounded shoulders, as if to assure himself that it isn’t going anywhere.
And when he’s in his workshop or at the kiln, it’s the same story—he sculpts these faceless reclining figures with holes in their chests or bellies and no discernible gender, and it’s like he has a hole of his own he’s never going to fill. There’s a great old Ray Bradbury story about a man who hears a continual mysterious “clink” coming from the darkened house next to his. All night long, in thirty-minute intervals, he’ll hear clink, clink, clink. Nothing else, no TV, no talking, no arguing. So one day, he sneaks over to his neighbors’ window and looks inside and sees this old husband and wife sitting side by side in kitchen chairs drinking cheap red wine, not saying a single word to one another, and every time they polish off a bottle they just drop it to the tile floor with a clink and open another.
That’s my parents: clink, clink, clink.
And it’s all my fault.
I made them into alcoholics because of what I did when I was eight years old.
Because I allowed, albeit not directly or deliberately so, a little girl in my care to fall between the bed and sea-green wall and die of suffocation.
So now there’s something else about me you need to know, beside the fact that I have floppy hair and play the guitar. I love children but cannot have any. Not because I ever got into any legal trouble as a result of Elizabeth’s death—I was eight years old, for God’s sake!— but because I am afraid to. I am afraid that if my girlfriend or a future wife gets pregnant and bears a child, I will unthinkingly commit some act of omission that causes our child to die. And that, I cannot bear.
This is of course not something that occurred to me when I was eight, but it did when I was eighteen, when I started having sex with my first girlfriend. In one sense, it wasn’t any big deal. I was the opposite of many young men you hear about who spread their seed indiscriminately; by contrast, I was excessively choosy about my girlfriends and fanatically careful about birth control. But even so, the prospect of pregnancy, and my fear of being unable to take care of the child that would result, has cast a shadow over my life ever since.
Just to be clear, MariAngela was not my girlfriend. I never told her that my parents were alcoholics, and I never told her what had happened to me and Willa when we were eight years old. And why would I? MariAngela and I were only casual friends, and I would see her only at work, not counting the times I was reminded of her by that woman on the train and that other woman hobbling along the pavement in Galena.
To be equally clear, I am not otherwise lacking in female companionship. A shadow is just a shadow, as I like to say. Having stayed behind in Chicago when my parents moved back to Buenos Aires for good, I managed to assemble a life that was every bit as good as any urban dweller of my acquaintance. I never developed an unnatural affection for alcohol, unlike my parents, or for gambling or for fruitless artistic pursuits, unless one counts the guitar. I had a great job in marketing, pretty and athletic girlfriends with legs built for chasing down backhands, a brand-new Lexus, and the joyless, steely sort of normalcy that is the hallmark of someone with a lot of guilt to repress and a lot of strength to repress it—though no strength whatsoever for either facing that guilt or attempting to peel back the infinite layers of equivocation and pluck out the heart of what actually had occurred.
MariAngela caught up with me later that evening and picked up our conversation right where we’d left off, but with a distinctly lighter tone. “So, anyway,” she continued, “I forgot all about telling you, not that it matters anymore because of your weird dream, because I had other things on my mind, especially spending like a thousand hours on the Internet and eating a pint of coffee ice cream researching the horrible ways in which I’m going to die, and so naturally I couldn’t get to sleep between staring at a screen all evening and worrying about dying, and, you know, the actual fucking disease itself which has been making me really kind of shaky and fatigued—which is why I went to the doctor in the first place. So anyway I’m lying there at 3:00 in the fucking morning staring at the ceiling, and I’m thinking, Wasn’t there something important I was supposed to do today? And it wasn’t until that moment that I remembered that I was planning to tell you about my, you know, disease.” She enunciated this last word with a meticulous distaste in her tone, as if holding up for inspection between a blood-stained thumb and forefinger a nasty little orange-eyed insect she had just pinched.
“So this was at about 3:00 a.m. when you were thinking of telling me?”
“Yeah.”
I took a moment before responding.
“I know.” She smiled for the first time. “You don’t have to say it. But let’s get something straight right from the gecko, Charlie….”
“Yeah?”
“There is no prognosis. You know? My neurologist says they’ve recently tracked down what causes ALS, but it’s one of those diseases that is”—and here she lowered her voice to sound comically portentous, like she was narrating a documentary about her own life—“intractable, untreatable, and incurable.” She shrugged. “No one ever recovers from ALS. It’s a rollercoaster ride, but with only the part that shoots straight down, and it’s real fast, and you’re out of control and can’t even steer, and then you just choke to death on your spit and you’re dead.”
“They’re sure? I mean, that what you have is ALS and not something else like MS or something?”
“Totally sure. My calves kept on quivering when I was bringing plates of lasagna to people. Then it was my thumb so I was having trouble gripping the plates and was slopping primavera all over my wrists. And I was really fatigued, you know, the kind of tired where your bones feel almost hollow. I figured it was stress or something, but I went to this neurologist and after he ran some tests he said, ‘You know, people come to me with severe headaches and they’re always sure it’s a brain tumor, but 90 percent of the time it’s just migraines or something benign like that. But a young person comes to me with sudden unexplained weakness in the muscles, and they always assume the opposite, I mean that it’s just stress or too much caffeine or something, but I get a sinking feeling ’cause I know what these cases look like, and then after I run the tests it’s really hard to deliver the news because it’s far, far worse than anything they could have imagined.’ ”
“I know you probably don’t want to talk about this, but what exactly happens? I mean, when you get really sick?”
“You know, trapped in your fucking fucked-up body. The mind works just fine all the way until the end, but you get weaker and more paralyzed until you start shitting yourself and can’t talk anymore, and then you’re in a high-tech wheelchair, and then you choke on your spit like I said or choke on your food, or suffocate, or some combination of all three. So you can watch it all happening to yourself and you don’t even have the…the…you know, luxury, of being fucking unconscious or demented or shit. You know, it’s like, whatever.” She had tears in her eyes.
“I’m really sorry.” I kept on thinking about how MariAngela had just said “right from the gecko” instead of “right from the get-go,” and it was so cute and so typical of her that I couldn’t get my mind around what she was saying.
She broke the silence. “Listen, Charlie, I know this is already pretty weird, but what time did you have your dream about me?”
“You mean could it have been 3:00 a.m.?”
“Yeah, I mean, of course that’s what I mean.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. It’s not like in bad TV where you have a nightmare and you sit bolt upright in bed and then you look at your phone or clock or whatever so the audience can see what time it is. It was one of, you know, a dozen dreams I probably had last night. I happened to remember it because it was strange and because it was about you. There’s no way I could tell you if I had it the same time you were thinking about telling me.”
But she knew, and I knew, that it didn’t matter. That night, she had been inside my skull, speaking to me.
4
So now you know about the two big things that slammed into my otherwise unremarkable existence like a rotted tree crashing into the roof of a house followed, years later, by another tree smashing through the rafters again—one when I was eight years old, and one just now. First was the “incident,” as my mother called it, with little Elizabeth that caused me to be afraid to have children of my own, and, second, the inexplicable nighttime visitation of MariAngela.
There’s one other item of note before I can get on with the story of what happened to Willa and my parents and me after Elizabeth’s death; the other story, equally consequential, of why MariAngela came to me in a dream and told me she was going to die soon; and the utterly unexpected way in which these two life events turned out to be connected.
The other item is a very strange sight (I can’t call it either an image or an object, as it isn’t exactly either one of those) that I encountered in the house that I’m renting.
The thing is, not long after I moved in, I discovered a shadow that’d been left by what once had been a child’s dollhouse against the wall of a small dormer room located at the very back of the top floor of my rental house. It isn’t actually a shadow, of course, but rather the outline, in dusty and faded buttercream-yellow paint, of what the dollhouse in vertical cross-section had once looked like. It was a classic dollhouse shape, with a big, more-or-less-square, undifferentiated room on the left, a simplified chimney shape on top, and two smaller rooms, one on top of the other, on the right. It looked nothing at all like the real house in which it could be found.
Apparently (because I never actually saw the dollhouse itself) the open back of the dollhouse had been attached by five screws through minuscule projecting flanges to the drywall in the dormer wall, which then must have doubled as the dollhouse’s own “back wall.” I know this because, to this day, the sharp buttercream-colored edges of the shadow are “pinned” to the dormer wall by screw holes, each of which is still filled with the intimate, soft white dust that had been left when the screws had been unscrewed from the little flanges and the dollhouse thus removed. There was one screw hole at the top of the “chimney”; two at the left edge of the house, where the downstairs living room and master bedroom must have been (assuming the children in charge had possessed a classic sense of design); and two more at the much-smaller right side of the house where, I imagined, the top floor had served as the children’s bedroom and the bottom floor as the kitchen.
Or maybe the top floor on the right-hand side had been a lunar observatory and the bottom floor an ice cream parlor, and perhaps the left-hand side had been filled with a tangle of plastic farm animals, hooves to heads to hindquarters, or out-of-scale tables and chairs. It was a dollhouse, after all, and the children could put whatever they wanted in it, wherever they wanted to.
As I said, the dollhouse itself was gone, and so were the ill-matched accoutrements that had undoubtedly jumbled up its rooms, and so were the children who played with it. All that was left was the shape that had been created accidentally when someone painted around it with a coat of fresh sea-green paint—and yes, that, quite coincidentally, was the same color as the walls in Willa’s house that I remember all too well. The owners of my rental house probably insisted on unscrewing the dollhouse to complete the paint job, and the children must have insisted on keeping it in place, and the children must have won, and so the dollhouse had stayed in place until the family had moved—so only the buttercream-colored shadow of the dollhouse remained.
Only the shadow and, more or less in the middle of the “big” room that constituted the left-hand portion of the shadow, an actual pair of miniature wooden shutters.
These were approximating real French window shutters that opened inward, but of course they were Lilliputian in size and made from a fragile wood that probably was balsa, though with a single, slend
er brushstroke of light varnish to stiffen them a bit, and there they were, whole and complete in the middle of the buttercream-yellow shadow in the middle of the blank sea-green wall. The shutters were no bigger from top to bottom than a quarter, and each one no wider than a child’s thumb, and they were attached on either side to the miniature “window” in the wall by a delicate hinge assembled with a Swiss watchmaker’s skill.
The flat wall of the dormer room faced the street, and the clever adult who’d built the dollhouse and affixed it to the wall had also had the wonderful notion to cut through the drywall and brick and create a window that his children could open or close at will. For the marvelous thing was, when you slipped your fingernail under one of the shutters and then pried them both open with your fingertips, a diffuse beam of actual peachy sunlight appeared in the gloomy dormer room. The opposing wall of the dormer sloped, and the sea-green paint was covered with old crayon scribbles involving abstract loops and awkward stick figures. When the shutters were opened, the peach-colored light illuminated a sloping section of very old yellow crayon marks, and the buttercream yellow of the dollhouse shadow and the yellow of the crayon seemed to be winking at each other, as if they shared a kinship in what was otherwise a sea of green.