“Dad? Something back there?”
“No, I–” He laughed softly. “I just had a strange notion. For some reason I expected to see someone sitting there. Now, I hasten to add I did not see anyone sitting there. I’m not crazy you know. But for some reason I expected it. It’s like sometimes you don’t expect to see someone in a place, but then there they are. But sometimes, I think, there’s this empty place, there’s no one there, but for some reason you expect someone to be there. And because they’re not there, you miss them. I’m not making any sense, am I?”
She didn’t know what to say. “I was never good with philosophy, you know.”
“You’re good at living your life. I think that’s all you need. Do you remember your first day of third grade? Your mom and I, we decided you’d take the school bus that year, so I drove you to the stop. I wasn’t so sure. Hell, I almost went on the school bus with you. I would’ve sat in the class room with you if they’d let me. But your mom said this would be good for you, and she was usually right about those things.
“I remember standing there and holding your hand, waiting. You trembled so. And if I hadn’t been scared of what your mother would say, I would have left my car parked there, and I would’ve gotten on that bus.”
Jewel smiled, even though she’d heard this story a hundred times before. “That was almost a year before she died, wasn’t it? By the time I started fourth grade she was gone.”
“Yep.”
“She was right, you know–it was good that I learned early on how to ride the bus.”
“She was always right.” She saw him start to look into the back seat again, but he stopped himself.
“Dad, did you not remarry because you had me to take care of? Because you could have, you know?”
He was quiet for a while, fidgeting. He looked out the passenger window a few times. She almost thought he’d forgotten the question when he said, “Don’t blame yourself for that. I certainly could have. I’m not even sure why I didn’t.
“It’s just that there’s this world full of people, people everywhere you look, leading their complicated lives, because every life is more complicated than it looks. And then there is this world of those who have passed, not ghosts exactly, but their remembered presence, and those memories, well, they’re everywhere, and if you multiply that by this factor that we all see things differently, that people may remember a person a hundred different ways in a hundred different places, then it’s just staggering, isn’t it? The sheer numbers, the spaces occupied both in your surroundings and in your head.
“Some afternoons I swear you can hear people thrumming, the vibrations of their lives, the emotion left by their passage, shaking the ground, filling the air with waves of sound and movement.
“The first few years after your mother died I was so shaken, so filled with grief, that I stepped away from all that. I just, stepped away. I had no idea how to raise a child without her, so I read and I studied and I asked so many questions of the other parents in your school, in the neighborhood, anyone I ran into, really. And once I learned enough, well, I found I liked the simplicity of it, the clarity. You needed certain things–clothes, food, education, entertainment–I applied myself to that, and it was fulfilling. It made sense to me. Nothing else did.
“Sometimes I imagined myself dating a woman. I imagined myself being married again. I could see all that in my head. I thought a new mother would even be good for you. But it would mean blending my life into someone else’s again. My life with you worked. But this would mean going somewhere where I wasn’t sure anything would work. It would mean entering into all that complication again, all that busyness, that noise and vibration, all those presences, all those absences that fill the world, simply a matter of a step in a new direction, and I found I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t, sweetheart.”
She didn’t know what to say. Maybe he was ill, maybe something had gone wrong with him. But she didn’t think so. And so she just said, “I know, Dad. I know.” Even though she didn’t. She just said that and drove.
Her dad’s new house was in a quiet neighborhood of winding streets a few blocks from a major shopping mall. He would have hated that in the old days but now he said he looked forward to the convenience. The ranch style was also not to his usual taste, but they’d hoped it would be kinder to his arthritis and he said it seemed easy and comfortable. This wasn’t anything like the house she grew up in, but she would have loved it here as a little girl.
He’d hired some ladies to help him arrange the furniture, but this would be his first night sleeping here. And this would be the first time Jewel had been here with it completely furnished.
He led her in slowly. He was so cute, he seemed so proud. But she couldn’t say that. “It looks wonderful,” she said from the entrance, and he guided her through the floor plan telling her what room in the old house each piece had come from, which of course she already knew, and why he had chosen the new placement, which mostly she could not follow.
“I put the sideboard here because this space reminds me of both a dining room and a living room even though I plan to use this for neither. When the new bookshelves come they’ll go in here and the sideboard will be used to store mail, which seems logical when you think about it.”
She said “that’s great, Dad.” The walls of one bedroom were covered with probably every photograph ever taken of her,arranged in great swirls and flowing patterns that must have taken those women hours to do while her dad directed them. The display embarrassed her terribly, but still moved her to tears.
He was focused enough as he conducted the tour, but now and again he would stop and stare a little too long at something, sometimes lowering his glasses to do so. Shadowed corners seemed to distract him, so every time he noticed one he apparently had to stop and get his bearings again, as if the angles at which the walls came together to make these corners bothered him, or as if something were standing there inside the corner that made no sense.
Sometimes when they passed through a doorway he would back out again, glance left or right, and go back through to the other side, and likewise look left or right, as if comparing things on both sides of the wall. The most unsettling thing was that he wouldn’t say what he was doing or why, just introduce his odd interludes with an “excuse me,” and ending them with, “sorry, let’s go on.”
They were in the back yard now and the sunset was beautiful, and so many of the plants beginning to bloom. “The real estate agent told me the former owners were gardeners,” she said. “Out here there are forty different flowering plants. Can you imagine?”
But Dad was looking back at the house, shading his eyes with his hand as if trying to make something out. “I think there are lights out here, for at night? I believe you told me there are lights out here,” he said.
“The switch is by the door. You look so tired. Should I go so you can rest, or should I stay awhile?”
He turned and smiled at her. “It’s a really lovely place.”
“Yes, it is, Dad.”
“I’m going to be happy here, I think. It’s just so great. You know, it’s like living in the afterlife.”
****
He didn’t sleep much that first night. It wasn’t as if there were noises that disturbed him. There were hardly any noises at all. But it was like in the car that day. It seemed he was expecting something, someone. And when whatever it was failed to arrive he didn’t quite know what to make of it. He woke up tired and gritty-eyed and too anxious to stay in bed.
Before buying the house he’d rarely been in this part of the city. Except before, when he was a child. This had been mostly farms down here when he was just a young boy, with great stretches of sparse development in between. His grandfather had had a small farm with a vegetable garden and some chickens. He’d spent several summers chasing the chickens and running over the small hills swollen with tall grasses. Sometimes he’d find old wagon parts in the grass, or a curved piece of barrel. Sometimes he
’d find arrowheads in the freshly plowed fields.
It was a warm morning so he decided to go for a walk. His legs had been better, but he brought his cane anyway in case they started feeling like two broken sticks. He was pleased when several neighbors waved to him, and when one commented that she’d seen him move in. Someone driving by, he supposed a neighbor, stuck his head out the window and asked him if he’d like a ride to wherever he was going. He supposed the fellow had seen his cane, noticed his age. He told him no thanks. He didn’t want people looking at him like he was some old man needing a ride.
He crossed several streets then headed up the long curving road that bordered the large oval of concrete and asphalt of the shopping mall. He could see a movie theater, several restaurants, and a book store he’d have to check out. It wasn’t the old neighborhood, but he could certainly make it do.
What he wanted was to find where his grandfather’s house had been. He knew the old road had turned into an east/west highway where the mall lay now, and his grandfather’s place had been on a rise just beyond that. The view had been remarkable–you could see clear through to the foothills of the Rockies simply by turning your head west. From his granddad’s front door you could see the distant, and then much smaller, downtown. “Million dollar view,” Granddad had called it, with no exaggeration. The boy he’d been, whose life he remembered as being close and heated and small, had felt like the crown prince when he’d stayed there, surveying his kingdom.
The day he found the stone pile out behind his granddad’s house had been one of those bright days, a warm breeze coming off the fields. He’d been running through the tall grass, pretending it was a giant dry ocean, his eyes almost closed, feeling the stems slap against his open palms until they were almost painful, but not quite. His toe hit the first stone and he almost tumbled into the pile. He stared. The tall grass had been cleared slightly away from this one spot, where there was a pile of rocks both jagged and rounded on the corners. The bottom ones were mostly buried in the ground, and the row above that had ground between the rocks like mortar, and the ones on top were looser and had space in between. And at the very top an old tarnished belt buckle had been jammed between two of them. It was scratched up and stained. He went to get it out.
“I wouldn’t climb on them rocks if I was you,” his granddad’s voice said behind him.
He turned around and had to hide his eyes from the sun. His granddad’s head was this dark shape against the sky. His granddad was the tallest man he’d ever seen. “Why not?”
“I seen snakes in that pile last summer.”
He went to his granddad’s side, terrified. “Are those from an old building?”
“No, I reckon it’s a grave. Pioneer most likely. Or it coulda been an Indian–I don’t know what their customs were back then. Whoever it was must’ve died out here, and friends buried the poor soul, using that buckle to at least give it a little show, then they must’ve moved on.”
He’d stared at it a different way then, like it marked the loneliest spot on the earth. “How long has it been here?”
“No idea–it was here when I built this house.”
“Did you tell anybody?”
“No, and I’d be obliged if you didn’t, either. A grave like that should be left alone, and people now, well, they could be more respectful than they are.”
He stared at it a long time, afraid he might start crying, until his granddad laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay to be soft about it, Jim. Don’t let nobody tell you different. I know you always take things hard. And that’s a hard row to hoe.”
He saw the grave on a few visits after that, but mostly he just avoided it. And by the time he was a teenager he forgot about it for a few years.
Finding the spot where Granddad’s farm had been proved impossible. The ground had been rearranged, sculpted, no doubt a half-dozen times since then. There was no rising hill anymore. It leveled out, and then there was a wide, shallow valley behind the mall that hadn’t been there before, full of trees and houses. That old road that used to lead out to this part of the country had just been scraped out and paved, and a ditch dug out alongside it. The easiest thing for the highway builders would have been just to follow the terrain. He remembered how it seemed they’d had to go up and down over every little hill to get here. Now, well, they had giant machines that could move tons at a time, and make practically any landscape you wanted. No doubt the pieces of Granddad’s farm were now scattered all over. And that grave. Not just here, but the whole world was a rearrangement.
But here and there were what looked to be old strips of prairie: between two sidewalks, along a road, behind that fence, and between this sidewalk and the mall. Slices and peels of it. The grass wasn’t as tall as he remembered, but it looked related, and it bent the same way in the wind.
He found one of those strips, and he eased himself down to the ground. Jewel would have told him he was making himself sick–what if he couldn’t get up again?–but Jewel wasn’t here.
From this vantage the ground appeared uneven, the prairie sections the worst, but the other grassy parts as well, even the stretches of concrete and asphalt. You wouldn’t necessarily see them when standing up, and even if you saw one, some cool spot making the simmering heat around it appear even hotter, it might not register. People had grown accustomed to shadow and mirage.
He’d thought about that grave for days, wondering how many more there were in the world like that, marked and unmarked, places where you tucked away a loved one and then moved on. How many people had come and gone from the world and lay stretched out or curled up in the ground. How many folk you talked about a little bit less every day until even their names, unimportant to history, were gone? He could not bear the math of it, could not sort the figures out in his head, and so he’d gotten little sleep and walked about dazed that last week of summer, and his granddad had sent him home, thinking him ill.
He’d wanted to tell his granddad what was really bothering him but just couldn’t bring himself to say out loud the words. Even now, an old man, he wasn’t sure he really understood the nature of it. How many lives, how many bodies, how many memories, how much grief could one world hold? Was it possible they’d one day fill it up and be forced to leave rather than live in a graveyard?
He’d never talked to his daughter about it, because he would have imagined her particular death, and he could not do that.
Something was standing a few yards back on his left. He hadn’t noticed it before, and now noticed only its shadow. At first he thought it was a tree, even though there were no trees in the vicinity, just a few narrow saplings. He turned his head slowly in that direction.
There appeared to be a vertical tear in reality, a flaw in the fabric of the atmosphere, although he doubted such flaws were possible. It was so like a tear, with something peeking through from the other side, and the flaps created by the tear turning inside out and showing. It appeared to be a woman, or her shadow, because it was gray, and of reduced opacity.
Maybe his retina was tearing, as much as he read, as much as he simply looked at things, so intently, afraid to miss anything. He’d seen things, or anticipated seeing things, for weeks now. He’d had that sensation on his final visit to the old house–that was why he had waited outside for Jewel.
Then there in the back seat of the car, and in the new house as well, as if memory had reached its maximal limits, and were bursting through into immediacy.
He looked away from the gray figure standing so still there, so like a statue, but saw that it was happening all over the hillside, and down into the shallow asphalt and concrete saucer of mall: these vertical tears, and the shadowed statues slipping through, motionless and quiet as they stared out at what the world had become.
He struggled to his feet, afraid he might not make it, his arm and the cane shaking with his effort. He headed down the sidewalk as quickly as possible toward his new home, that warm and comfortable place where things were apt to be
better and he could listen to music and read.
But he kept saying “excuse me,” because he’d been raised that way. When bumping into people you said excuse me, even if they were statues or shadows or dead. Because they filled the sidewalk now, so thickly like a forest jammed with dead and unharvested trees, and he could not move without bumping into one. They were suddenly everywhere, at last beginning to move, milling about as if they had no idea where they were going or even what they were, just so many shadows filling the sidewalks and the world and obscuring whatever color might have been left for him.
They were waiting at the house, so many of them, but he had things to do, dinner to make and then the music and the reading, all the things he’d planned out for his remaining years. And so he lived with them as best he could, saying “excuse me” a bit less as time wore on, because manners were exhausting when so frequently applied. But some days they left almost no room for him. And some days with their numbers he could hardly breathe.
****
Jewel spent a couple of weeks closing up her father’s house. She could have done it more quickly, but she wanted to take her time going through things, remembering what he’d valued and loved, and trying to find some suitable home for it all. She had bookish friends who appreciated his library, and there were charities for the clothes and some of the other things. She would take very little for herself both because they hadn’t much room and because her father wouldn’t have wanted her to take on more than she could handle.
Alec was a great help, leaving her alone when she needed it, and hauling box after box to where they needed to go. He wanted a couple of the nicer books for himself because they reminded him of her father.
There had been no deterioration his last year, unless he’d hidden it from her. But there had been an increase in his distraction, a more intense version of what she’d seen that day in the car and at the new house. Now and then he’d say “excuse me,” as if apologizing to her for it. She’d kept assuring him it was okay, and there was no need to apologize. But then he’d look at her with this puzzled expression, and the apologies would continue, usually softly, or under his breath, like a constant mantra he used to relax himself.
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 15