Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  “MariAngela. Diane, she’s asked me to help her die, but I’m not going to do it.”

  “You’re not? Why on earth not?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think of something else, but I have no idea what it is.”

  A couple of days after this conversation, I was in a Starbucks after work, on my way to see MariAngela, when I suddenly felt a terrible throbbing in my left temple. It happened very suddenly, as if a switch had been turned on in my brain. I put my cup of coffee down and walked over to the counter to buy a slice of lemon poppy seed cake, thinking that the rushed lunch I’d had at my desk might’ve brought on the headache. But when I tried to eat the slice of cake, I immediately felt nauseated. And when I looked around the Starbucks for the bathroom in case I became sick, all of the lights bleared in my vision and made me feel disoriented and dizzy.

  I called Ludmilla to tell her I wasn’t visiting that day, staggered home and went to bed, and didn’t get up again until the next afternoon, fortunately a Saturday. I’d been scheduled to go into work anyway—we were that busy—but it wasn’t like missing a workday. I’d never had a migraine before, so I didn’t quite know how to treat it. By the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, after applying cold packs to the back of my neck and warm washcloths to my eyes and popping six or so Advils, I was feeling a bit better.

  It had been MariAngela’s migraine.

  The next day, I downloaded my own copy of the Roman general’s book and read what MariAngela had been reading. There, on my bedside table in the rental house, I’d switched on my iPad, and then it did that thing where the text flipped from horizontal to vertical when I moved it, so I walked around to the other side of the table and read the Roman general’s words, and I could read them just as well upside down as I could right side up.

  And I found another book too, because I needed an answer to what the Roman general had said about focusing on the waking world, and the book contained these words written by a poet from St. Louis:

  And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

  They can tell you, being dead: The communication

  Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

  On Sunday afternoon, I ventured into the dormer room and discovered that the shutters were gone. The drywall was so crumbly that the little hinges had finally broken away, and the shutters, almost as light as butterfly wings, must have tumbled away in the breeze.

  I looked through the now-permanent proscenium in the wall at the little fragment of street that I could glimpse—a bit of concrete stoop, a metal handrail, and a piece of lumpy tree root. It wasn’t the same tree root as the one in my dreams, the one from my childhood street that Willa and I had sat on, but there was more that I couldn’t see, outside of my peripheral vision. I could sense that all of the trees in the city were connected, underground, by their roots. Not just this tree, but Willa’s and mine, and whatever ones had lived beneath the lawn in front of MariAngela’s house on the South Side of Chicago.

  I lowered myself into the dormer room and gazed for a long time at the fragmentary slice of street below. I watched, wide awake, as MariAngela sat down under the tree in a nurse’s uniform, holding a tray of brightly colored test tubes. She looked me in the eyes, searching—for suddenly I was there, under the tree, with her, and her lips moved like Willa’s, and before she spoke, I knew what she was going to say. And I agreed with what she said, and I finally had my answer. We looked back up at the house I had been in a moment before, and though it was very small, we could clearly see the opening where the shutters once had been.

  And at that moment, she turned into me; I was looking at my own face. And I realized that at that moment, I was her, too.

  The next day, I got a call from my mother. She sounded subdued but completely sober.

  “Carlos, my dear, I have some news for you.”

  “Father?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry, my dear. This morning.”

  “I’m sorry too. Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine, my dear. It was not expected. I mean to say, no, it was not ‘unexpected.’ ”

  “So they killed him?”

  “Who is this ‘they,’ dear?”

  “Them. The people he owed money to.”

  “Oh no. He had a double illness. He had an—I looked up the translations of this word in English, so I will sound it out for you—an ‘an-your-ism.’ In the abdomen. The doctors say from the drinking of wine.”

  “Yeah, an abdominal aneurysm. It can happen to alcoholics.”

  “Carlos, I want you to know that I have completely stopped drinking. And then while he was on the operating table, he had a stroke too, and that was the end of it for him.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mother. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “Three days is the funeral from now. Please be here in three days for me.”

  The next day, I visited MariAngela for the first time at her Irving Park apartment, where she’d been moved. It was a contemporary three-story brownstone, with a deck in front of each unit. MariAngela’s deck was hung with potted plants, and they’d flourished unattended all that spring, so that now, at the beginning of summer, the entire deck was screened by green tendrils that grew up and out from under the roof of the deck toward the sun.

  She thankfully was still not in one of those complicated high-tech wheelchairs she’d loathed and feared; instead she sat, albeit a bit stiffly and to one side, in a wicker rocking chair, by an open window, near a writing desk she didn’t use. The curtains were wide open, and the sunlight was streaming in. Her wrists were strapped to the arms of the rocking chair, and her jaw was distended slightly to one side. But her eyes, and her beautiful espresso-colored eyebrows, remained as always.

  Her migraines, blessedly, had faded away. There was an easy chair nearby where Ludmilla sat and knitted. The apartment was warm and comfortable and filled with yet more houseplants that I presumed either Ludmilla or the night nurse watered, and a blue-and-green parakeet they must have fed and talked to that hopped around impatiently in its cage, as if waiting for MariAngela to come and play with it.

  MariAngela smiled at me when I came in. She looked happy.

  I looked at Ludmilla for permission, and she knew what I was asking and nodded her assent. I unstrapped the Velcro straps from MariAngela’s wrists, and then I lifted her up and cradled her in my arms and carried her to the window.

  She sighed. “That breeze feels good.”

  She felt so light that I wanted to carry her back to my house in my arms.

  But then I realized that where she was didn’t really matter now.

  “MariAngela, I understand now what I need to do.”

  “There’s no need to say it, Charlie. I understand it too.”

  “And it doesn’t involve helping you to die.”

  “No, you’re right about that. I have a good year or so left.”

  “Long enough to see him or her.”

  “The doctors would never allow it. It’s unheard of.”

  “But you’re okay with it anyway?”

  “Of course I am, Charlie. And you are too. Because you love me.”

  “I do love you, MariAngela. I’m so sorry that I’m the first person to say it in your life.”

  “But now there’ll be someone else to say it, won’t there, Charlie? Maybe not until I’m gone, but that doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “You’ll just have to hang on long enough.”

  “I will, Charlie, I promise you that.”

  “MariAngela, I have to tell you something. My father just died. I have to go back to Buenos Aires for the funeral, and then I’m bringing my mother back here with me. She’s stopped drinking—I believe her, I think she really has—and she is going to need something to do with her life. This is goi
ng to make her happy, I think, to help us, and it really will help us, too.”

  “I’m sorry about your father, Charlie.”

  “Well, he was a complicated man.”

  “You’ll be back soon?”

  “Of course, in plenty of time. We’ll have plenty of time, I promise.”

  And we did. I came back with my mother as promised, though it took longer than I’d hoped to find an estate agent in order to sell their house. Most of the little profit would go to the men my father owed, but that was fine. My mother was happy to be back in America, and as she had promised, she left the bottles behind. She had another thing to live for now.

  And my pretty, parenthetical little MariAngela? She kept her promise too. She got to see the shadow on the sonogram and that kept her going, and of course she got to see what emerged from out of that shadow for several glorious months.

  I mentioned before the last time she came into my brain when she was living, but it happened again three more times about fifteen months later, after her death.

  In the first dream, she looked exactly as I first remembered seeing her at Berto’s, and, as in my early dreams, she did not shift or change into another person or another version of herself. It was her. I was so excited that I wrenched myself awake, and then I cried out in frustration because I realized that she had come to me and I had let her go.

  A few days later, I had to go visit a client in Boston, and I was afraid the distance would be too great, but as I dropped off to sleep in the Boston Sheraton, there she was, seated under the tree and waiting for me.

  I forced myself to be conscious and yet to remain asleep at the same time. I was terrified that I would lose her again before I asked her the question that was on my mind. And then I remembered, again, to tell myself, “This is a dream. You can do anything you want.” And so I reached out and touched her to make sure she was real, but I “missed.” I don’t know how, exactly, but my hand had failed to touch her. She took pity on me and grabbed my hand and brought it to her cheek, the one I’d stroked while she was still alive, and her skin felt just as warm and real as when she was alive. I asked her, “What is your name?”

  And she looked at me for a moment and she said, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  But it was her, and only her.

  I waited for her to speak. I waited for her to tell me some news from where she was, but she said nothing else.

  So I told myself, “This is just a dream. She can speak to you if you wake yourself up.”

  So in my dream I awakened, and she was still there, sitting under the tree. And this time, before I had a chance to lose her, I kissed her just like I had kissed her the very first time at Berto’s. It was a glancing kiss, not a deep one, but it left me with a little tingle on my lip, and I knew that I would not forget it.

  Then I asked her, finally, the question that Dr. Nemerov had always wanted me to ask. I said, “What do you want, MariAngela?”

  And she replied, “I already have what I want.”

  There my dream ended.

  I’d been to Boston half a dozen times before on business, but as I strolled around Faneuil Hall Marketplace and the Italian neighborhood nearby, the city and its sights trembled with a glorious freshness, as if I were seeing it for the first time, and after a long winter convalescence.

  She came to me again last night, and she snuggled in between the roots of the tree next to me, and we held hands like we were children. I wanted her to say something, and while I waited, I noticed that all around me, everything—the elm tree, and the other trees, and the flowers and the shrubs—cast velvety shadows on the sidewalk.

  Her lips moved, but I could not hear her speak. Instead, I heard an infinitely distant cry, coming from deep in the basement with all the worms and spades and mangles and harrows, but then, thrillingly, rising in volume as it ascended through the house, through the open shutters and out into the street and into the swaying trees, and then I woke up and remembered that it was the cry of someone real, someone in my mother’s arms right next to me as I slept.

  Michael Antman is the author of the novel Cherry Whip (ENC Press, 2004) and the forthcoming memoir Searching for the Seagull Motel, and is a two-time finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. He also is the Global Head of Marketing for a Fortune 500 company.