by John Klima
“Laura?” I said and stopped. I had the high voice of a young child.
Laura stopped screaming and started breathing in small gasps. When I stepped forward she stepped backward, falling over a stool and then pressing herself against the housing of the sink.
“What are you?”
“Robin!” I squeaked.
“You can’t be.”
But I couldn’t think of a way to prove it to her.
She swept wildly around the house looking for me, ignoring my assurances that I was in fact standing in front of her.
“What have you done with him?” she asked at last.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing. I’m here, woman, listen to me!”
She looked at me with her eyes narrowed.
“I’m Melissa’s brother.”
“How do I know that?”
“I pasted the Coeur de Lys wallpaper on upside down in your flat.”
She sat down, finally convinced. Her hands were shaking. “What’s happened?”
I could think of nothing else to tell her but the truth.
She looked at me with round eyes, panted slightly, and then burst into tears. Her glasses steamed up. I went over to her and patted her head with my child’s hand but she brushed me away.
“Stop it, go away.”
When I didn’t go, she looked up. “I mean it,” she said. “Go away.”
So for a few hours I did. I found an old pair of shorts that were only a little too big, and borrowed a T-shirt and a pair of sandals from Laura’s wardrobe. Then I walked up and down outside the house until I felt a strong sudden urge to investigate a small brook that ran alongside the edge of the park. When I returned to our house I was covered in mud—and Laura was packing.
“I don’t understand what’s happened—” She held up her hand when I started to explain. “And I don’t want to understand. All I know is I can’t live with a five-year-old stranger.”
“But I’m your boyfriend!”
“Don’t say that, it’s sick.”
“But I am!”
“Be quiet,” she snapped. “I’m thinking.”
I went to stand near her and realized with a start that they were my clothes she was packing. It was my house and she was throwing me out. I stepped backward. She looked so large. Her face was red, and she had taken her glasses off to polish them. Without them she looked different, slightly piglike. When she put them back on she looked at me with her nose wrinkled, glaring at me as if she didn’t know me—and I realized then that we were strangers. She had never known me and I had never known her—and in fact I had never known anyone, not even Melissa. I was alone in this world and always would be. Something dropped away inside me and I remembered the young crow’s hand. I wished I could feel it still. Sister, I thought, my real sister.
Laura sat still for a few moments staring at me, then suddenly got up, reached up to the hook on the wall for her keys, grabbed me by the arm, and marched me out to her car. “There’s places for people like you,” she said. “And they’re nowhere near me.”
After she had deposited me with a fat, kind woman at the social services department of the council she went on to the police station to report the fact that her boyfriend was missing. Of course I was never found—they were looking in the wrong place. Even though I protested in my highest, loudest voice that I was Robin Chandler, no one believed me.
So I had to go through childhood again. It was not pleasant the first time and it is even worse now. You have no voice and most of the time you are invisible. In the place where I live now there are ridiculous rules: I have to go to sleep while it is still light and when I ask for a little beer to help me sleep everyone laughs. I am expected to eat all the food—mainly slush—that is put in front of me and I am expected to listen quietly to every damn-fool thing everyone says to me. I am not allowed to tell them to go to hell and my access to anything of interest is curtailed. It took me less than a week to decide to run away but it is a month before I find the opportunity. Of course I know exactly where to go.
As I approach the quarry I find myself holding my breath: what if the footprints are gone? What if I can’t find them? What if there are people around and I can’t get near them? But the footprints are still there. I breathe in deeply and evenly. They are just like I remembered but filled in with a little water now because it has just been raining. The mist is higher up the side, it will only take a few paces before I am swallowed by it and that thought comforts me; maybe it will hasten my journey. I place one of my feet into the first footprint. Of course my foot is too small. I have to stretch my legs out as far as they will go in order to reach the next footprint with my other foot, and in doing so almost fall sideways. I give a little hop to steady myself, but then I have stepped out of the prints. I place my foot in the next footprint and almost fall again. They seem to be getting farther and farther apart. I stand and remember the youngest crow’s words about the pace. Of course the footprints get farther and farther apart as the person that made them started to run. It is impossible.
As a child it is acceptable to cry. In fact it is expected.
“Hey!” There is a man in the distance with a dog.
I start to run, my feet hitting some footprints but missing the rest. The mist is closer now, swirling around, grey and then red. But my feet keep missing the footprints. Behind me the dog starts to bark, so I run a little faster. As if my life depends on it.
* * *
S•A•C•R•I•L•E•G•E
sac·ri·lege 'sa-kre-lij
noun
1: a technical and not necessarily intrinsically outrageous violation (as improper reception of a sacrament) of what is sacred because consecrated to God
2: gross irreverence toward a hallowed person, place, or thing
S•E•M•A•P•H•O•R•E
sem·a·phore 'se-me-'for
noun
1: an apparatus for visual signaling (as by the position of one or more movable arms)
2: a system of visual signaling by two flags held one in each hand
verb
: to convey (information) by or as if by semaphore
verb intransitive
: to send signals by or as if by semaphore
* * *
Semaphore
ALEX IRVINE
WHEN MY UNCLE MIKE died, at the ripe old age of ninety-seven, I had the belated realization that I had at some point come to believe him immortal. Of all the people I ever knew, Uncle Mike was the most able to laugh at death. I wonder if he lost his sense of humor and died of the loss.
Every boy at some point worships his father. Unlike them, I had twin idols: my brother Daniel and my uncle Mike. Because I worshipped the ground Uncle Mike walked on, I tried his gallows humor on for size; but because I acquired the habit during World War II, while the world stood around watching the extinction of our extended family and the rest of European Jewry, I found that my early efforts were a little tone-deaf. Like many eleven-or twelve-year-olds, I figured out how to be callous before I learned about reflection. This tendency, like a number of others more or less salutary, I absorbed from Daniel…but he has been gone long enough that I can no longer mourn him, and Uncle Mike’s passing is fresh in my mind.
I’m an old man now, or at least the approach of my seventieth birthday makes me feel old, and like many old men I am trying to figure out why I was the kind of young man that I was. Trying to put in order my understanding of my previous self, as you put your worldly affairs in order when you realize that you’re closer to death than birth. The answer has to do with Uncle Mike, but more importantly with my brother Daniel, who in February of 1942 shocked the entire family by not only entering the PS 319 spelling bee but winning it—and this as a fifteen-year-old eighth grader of no academic distinction whatsoever. Because he hadn’t turned sixteen or started high school, he was going to be eligible for the national tournament if he got through the regional that spring. The mystification of the Rose
nthal family of 327 South Fifth, Williamsburg, was complete. None of us even knew Daniel could spell. His grades had sure never given any sign, and I don’t think I’d ever seen him read a book in his life. God is mysterious that way.
Daniel, I think, was just as surprised and discombobulated as the rest of us, and as it turned out, he had his own plan for avoiding the frightening possibility that he might be exposed as something other than a garden-variety South Williamsburg truant. He got someone to sign his papers—none of us ever figured out who—and he enlisted in the Army three days before regionals. His best friend, Howard Klinkowitz, who was a year older, joined with him. The Klinkowitzes had gotten out of Leipzig in 1936; Howard, who was born there, got the nickname Klinkojoke after telling Daniel that Witz meant joke in German, but the one time I called him that he hit me on the arm so hard I had a knot for a week. After basic, Daniel was assigned to the Signal Corps. Five months later, and a month after the remaining Rosenthal clan turned out to watch the battleship Iowa launch from the Navy Yard, he drowned when a U-boat sank his troop transport at the approach to the Straits of Gibraltar.
The word that won the spelling bee that summer was “sacrilegious.”
God is mysterious that way.
I was four years younger than Daniel, and two years behind him in school. He was my only brother. The only way I can describe the effect of his death on my four sisters is by comparing it to what happens when you take a crayon and color something as rich and as deep as the paper will hold, then you take your fingernail and scratch away the thickness of the color. My sisters were thinned out somehow. They seemed less real. Same with my father, and all I can say about my mother is that she was always strong enough to keep herself together no matter what life threw at her. The Germans got him, she muttered under her breath. The Germans got him.
Me, I had never felt more real in my life. It sounds ghoulish now, but it didn’t feel that way then. Something inside me was born, or came into itself, when Daniel died. And something else fell away, which in retrospect I can identify as belief. If before I had been religious in a diffuse, osmotic kind of way, after Daniel’s death I balanced my psychological scales by telling God that if he was going to take my brother away from me, I was going to take myself away from him. Not that I could have articulated any of it at the time, and in the course of events I would partially reverse this decision, reopening a space in my mind for the idea of God without giving myself any responsibility for worship or real belief. Belief—real belief—came later, with the ability to reflect. Reflection: from the Latin for “bending back.” I indulge in puns once in a while, now that I’m too old for anyone to complain about it, and I can say without the least irony that I bent over backwards to avoid reflection through the awful years of the war.
I told my sister Miriam once—she was closest to me in age, so became my sibling confidant after Daniel died—about how strangely alive I felt even though I spent most of my days with my mind split on parallel tracks of grief and anger. This would have been just before Halloween in 1942, while we were all still stumbling around in shock. Miriam looked at me and said, “It’s a dybbuk. It’s Daniel’s dybbuk.”
Which it wasn’t, but that was the kind of superficial explanation we were all grasping for. Miriam perhaps more than most; a dreamy girl, she reeled away from the news of Daniel’s death, beginning a long descent into loony mysticism which culminated in her turning into a kind of den mother for a group of beatnik poets and jazz musicians holed up on Minetta Lane in the Village, and then dying of drugs and cancer and heartbreak in 1960. The world was full of dybbuks to her, with all of these boys leaving New York, so many of them returning as names spoken in regretful voices, wails that riffled the laundry strung out the back windows of Williamsburg.
The conversation spooked me, even though I didn’t believe in dybbuks. Or God, really. Especially once I started to dream about Daniel. There’s no such thing as dybbuks, you dumb shit, he said.
Well, I thought to myself in the dream, you would know.
Yeah, he said. I would. Then he said, Yoo-hoo will help.
What?
I woke up. The hordes in the basement were already crashing around. Children hollered, adults hollered back. I think they were speaking Polish, but I heard words I recognized as Yiddish too. It was barely dawn. I cursed all immigrants, especially those that crammed into the basement below our garden-level apartment. It was a cave down there, and now it was a cave bursting with haunted-looking people who didn’t speak English and served for my parents as object lessons in why my sisters and I should feel fortunate. Occasionally this worked for a minute, but not when it was the crack of dawn and I’d just been rousted from uneasy sleep. Bad enough that my brother was dead and Hitler was taking over the world; why should I have to be woken up by screaming foreigners?
Simplicity, like I said. In retrospect it seems glib to the point of sacrilege, but in the midst of heavy emotional aftershocks, you (by which I mean me) boil things down into primary colors and the most selfish emotions. So I got out of bed, even before my father and mother had stirred in the big front bedroom and long before any of my sisters had cracked an eye in the little back room next to the kitchen, where they were compensated for the cramped arrangement by at least having a view of the garden. I slept in the room between, on the couch. It was Daniel’s bed; before he left, I had been relegated to a pile of blankets on the floor. I thought of him every morning when I woke up, because the broken-down couch cushions seemed molded to his long, rawboned frame; I began every day conscious of the ways in which he was larger than I was, and of the way in which I had begun to struggle with the size and shape of his absence.
Grasping at the fading memory of the dream, I thought: Yoo-hoo?
That afternoon—it was a Wednesday, I remember, I think sometime in November—I scraped up a nickel and bought myself a Yoo-hoo. Daniel was right. It did help. I was cutting school that day, rationalizing the act as a small homage to my brother, and with my bottle of Yoo-hoo I walked brazenly up Keap within a block of PS 319 and jumped the turnstile onto the Fourteenth Street-Canarsie Line, headed for Manhattan. In the tunnel under the river, I became suddenly conscious of the water over my head, and I started to think of Daniel. Full fathom five my brother lies, those are pearls that were his eyes…I started to cry, and just like that the Yoo-hoo wasn’t helping anymore. I got up and shoved my way out of the car to stand on the coupling until the train clacked into Union Square and I’d gotten myself under control again.
Had Daniel died quickly? My imagination boomed with the impact of the torpedo, the rolling wall of fire engulfing the passages belowdecks. I saw pieces of steel curling and tumbling through the gradations of light below the surface, finally lost in the pelagic darkness—and wondered if pieces of my brother Daniel might have danced among those fragments of his ship, until they came to rest together on the seafloor. Epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, hadopelagic. Already I was absorbing words, letting them pour into me as if Daniel’s death had ruptured me and a sea of language was drawing me into its depths. Walking past the few lonely theatergoers, I knew what I would do.
Or had he survived the initial impact, and felt the ship tilt, spilling him out of his bunk onto the angled steel floor? When the lights went out, had he known how to get out? After fire, water—had Daniel spent his last moments clawing at the ceiling of the ship’s hold, looking for the hatch he knew must be there while around him the transport groaned and boomed its way down? I closed my eyes, to feel the darkness of drowning. I imagined that Daniel had somehow survived until the ship had come to rest on the ocean floor, and that he had had time to write a letter in the blackness, with the water slowly leaking past the stressed rivets to rise icily over his feet. At last the room, filled with water, would have been completely silent, with the letter he had written drifting loosely away from his lifeless fingers, the slow action of the water loosing graphite from paper until his last thoughts were diffused into th
e cold and dark.
Dear Josh, Daniel is reading in my dream. The paper crinkles in his hands, and I don’t look at his face. Stop being such a shithead. I am dead. It doesn’t matter how.
Drip, drip, drip, of seawater from the paper. It crinkles anyway. I smell mud.
Danny, I start to say.
Cut it out, he says. Listen. You want to do something? Fine. Quit with the torpedo and the ship and fire and smoke. How many times are you gonna play that little movie in your head? Enough already. So you got an imagination, that’s great, but use it. Or don’t, but anyway quit.
What do you want me to do?
You’re already doing it, he says. I mean, abyssopelagic ?
And I woke to the uproar of the refugees in the basement. Refugee: from the French réfugier, to take shelter or protect, first used in reference to the Huguenots; all the way back to the Latin refugium, and all the way back before that to that long-lost moment when all of the little phonemes and graphemes came gasping and creeping up onto the beach of language, leaving behind them the undifferentiated ocean of sound. This is what you did to me, Danny, I thought.
At breakfast I started spelling words out loud. My sisters got into it. They collected newspapers and hit me with whatever they could find, and then it turned into a game they played among themselves. Each of them focused on words that began with the same letter as their first names: Miriam, Eva, Ruth, Deborah. After a month of this I was convinced that I knew every word in the language that began with those four letters. Mnemonic, elegiac, rotisserie, diverticulitis. Malevolent, esoterica, rubicon, demesne. And I think I knew every word in the language that began with a combination of those letters. Dermatology? Forget it. I give you dermanyssidae, which is a family of mites that infest birds and lizards and whatever else. I think my favorite of all of them was merdivorous, which means exactly what you think it might. Synonym coprophagous. A merdivorous grin.