by Reed Karaim
So Anna did her work and in the beginning I left her to it, not even sure what it amounted to. We sat five feet apart and did our separate things. The exception was Thursday nights, when we laid out the paper together.
• • •
THE DAY STARTED with the paper as busy as it ever was—Anna, Edith, and I finishing up our copy in the morning, the part-time typesetters working furiously in the afternoon while I printed the final photos in the darkroom, Todd and Paul hurrying to get other press runs out of the way while Art and Louise fretted about, then Anna and I working on the layout at the glass-topped light tables in the back.
There came a time, after dinner, when we were usually alone. Either Todd or Paul would come back to run the presses when we were finished, but until then, it was just the two of us laying out the pages, running strips of copy through the waxing machine and placing them on the empty broadsheets with their faint blue lines illuminated by the tables.
The back shop was industrial: high I-beamed ceiling, concrete floors, the skeletal frame of the main printing press hovering in the shadows like the desiccated remains of a dinosaur. Odd pieces of machinery were scattered about, including an old hand-set letterpress with a giant metal wheel straight out of Dickens that Art still loved to use whenever he could find an excuse. We had a radio we tuned to the local station, which played a mix of sixties rock and forlorn country, but we kept it low. The lights, too, were turned down so we could see the blue lines shining through the pages.
The atmosphere was gloomy and intimate, a cross between an abandoned factory and a gone-to-seed museum. The work was exacting—you needed to make sure everything was in the right place and perfectly straight—but also restful, like working on a familiar jigsaw puzzle. It took one part of your attention, but not another. So we talked. We had hours and we talked. We had many Thursday nights over many weeks and months, and we talked.
Okay, mostly I talked. I was twenty and quite pleased with the depth and dimension of my own thoughts—thoughts on politics, history, sports, literature, movies, television, how to solve global hunger, end war, time travel, raise children, and discipline pets.
“Vietnam was the end,” I remember saying one of our first nights together. A story about the war, which was not so far past then, had been in the news. “There’ll never be another war. Not for the United States.”
Anna’s eyes remained focused on her page.
“You think so?”
“Sure, we got our butts kicked. We’re not going to make that mistake again. Besides, who else is there to fight, really? The Russians? That would be the end of everything.”
“People find a reason to fight.”
“It’s not going to happen. The only wars left are little wars, and we’ve learned our lesson.” I could see all of human history laid out in front of me as clearly as the columns on my layout sheet. America had turned a page. We would have no more wars.
“We’ve learned,” I said. “No more wars.”
“Well, then. That’s good. I’ve been waiting for the moment when human nature changes.”
The woman in partial silhouette beside me seemed to be smiling ever so slightly; it could simply have been with satisfaction at the page she had finished and was sliding to the side.
“Oh, okay,” I said. “But I really think we’re done. History marches on.”
She was searching for her X-Acto knife, which I had picked up. When I handed it back to her I could see her half-hidden amusement.
“It does,” I insisted.
“Really?”
“Yes. You don’t think so?”
Anna carefully took the knife from my hand.
“I would say history hangs around, Eric.”
Not only did I seem to be losing an argument, when I knew I was right, but she was somehow getting twice as much work done as I was. It was all annoying. I focused on my own half-finished page, which made the rest of the room recede into shadow.
“Yes, okay. Humans are humans. Sure. But there’s progress. Look at medicine. CAT scans. Heart transplants. You can’t say things haven’t changed.”
“You can’t.”
I saw I had forgotten to put a border around the photograph. I searched the edges of the table for the tape.
“That’s right,” I said. “Progress.”
“Progress.”
“Progress. Someday we’ll look back at this era of medicine and it’ll seem closer to bloodletting with leaches than real science.”
Anna handed me the border tape.
“Someday?”
Now I knew I was being teased.
“Yes, because science—”
“Marches on?”
“Yes!”
I pointed to the old cast-iron letterpress, with its gigantic hand wheel, and the shining steel bus-sized modern press with its hundred electric motors behind us. “You can’t say science—technology—doesn’t march on.”
“You sure can’t.”
“There!”
I stepped back in triumph to consider my page, which I thought was also now successfully concluded, until I realized the bottom of the picture still needed to be trimmed. I looked around for the scissors.
Anna retrieved them from behind the coffeepot, where I had left them just minutes earlier.
“But maybe people move a little more in circles.”
Many years later I was writing a story on the gap between academic achievement and self-regard—a study had found that the less students knew, the more likely they were to rate their level of knowledge highly—and the expert I was interviewing observed, “You have to know something before you can see how much you really have to learn.” The satisfied sound of my voice, as hollow as the sound from a pennywhistle, echoes back across the years, and I cringe a little.
But at that moment, standing with my hand outstretched for the scissors, our eyes met. I expected to see triumph or even mockery, but I still remember how Anna’s held a bemused delight, as if I’d brought something new and unexpected into the day, even if I was clearly, hopelessly wrong.
And suddenly I was laughing at myself, which is never a bad thing for a twenty-year-old.
Chapter 5
WAS IT THE NEXT THURSDAY, or was it a week or two later, when she began to tell me about her past? I don’t know. Those early nights in the back shop, moving in and out of the Gothic shadows, moving in out of the rectangles of blue light, float in my memory like one long night. Hours and hours of the two of us together, talking. The Anna dialogues.
She had that cigarette-stained voice and she almost always spoke softly, so much so she was hard to hear if she was looking down, focused on her work. Yet there was also a precision to her cadence, a clarity. She didn’t speak slowly; she spoke carefully, as if each word had been given an extra moment to set in some clear, clean space in Anna’s head, just to see how it stood up. This was true except in those moments when an odd thing I had said made her laugh, or caught her fancy in some other way, and then she could respond in a slightly breathless rush, her words rising at the end of sentences so she sounded unexpectedly girlish. Unexpected to a twenty-year-old. She was really not so old, after all.
I spend so much time on Anna’s voice because it remains so alive in my memory, woven in and out of the half darkness and the tin sound of the radio turned low in that quiet, echoing room.
On this night, we had been talking about the possibility of life on other planets. A Mars lander some years earlier had done tests that had yielded mixed signals. I wanted to believe, but Anna was quietly dubious.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I think we would know.”
Maybe was a word with multiple lives when spoken by Anna. It could stand as a kindhearted policeman, signaling disagreement or correction, but it could also take the bench as a magistrate, reserving judgment until all the facts were in, or as the keeper of the keys, guarding the private rooms of other lives. This maybe was a polite no, which annoyed me.
“How would we k
now?” I said. “It’s on other planets.”
“Yes,” Anna said, which was really a slightly firmer no.
“Come on . . . Other planets! Mars. Far away. Little dot. Used to think it had canals, Martians, little green guys with death rays.”
Her eyes remained fastened on her light table, but she smiled.
“Oh, if they’d found little green guys with death rays, I’d believe that.”
“But not bacteria or, like, single-cell organisms?”
“Nope.”
“All right.”
“If life was there, I just don’t think we’d have to hunt for it so hard,” Anna said. “I think it would be more than a few bacteria in the soil. If life exists, it finds a way.”
I realized, with a mild feeling of discouragement, that this made too much sense for a blithe retort. “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors came on the radio, the wash of rain and thunder that opens the song sounding oddly real through the cheap speaker.
“I didn’t know you were a biologist,” I said finally, trying to sound sarcastic but more or less nailing peevish.
Anna laughed. “I’m a naturalist of all sorts. I grew up surrounded by nothing but plant life and cows.”
“I thought there were unicorns.”
She turned to look at me, smiling but confused.
“Unicorn ranching. You brought it up one day when I picked you up.”
“Oh, yes. Well, they were free-range. They hardly ever came by the house.”
I was working on something clever to say when Anna said, “I love this song. I used to love it when it came on the radio. At night. I loved it. I loved it best when it was really raining, or if there was lightning on the horizon. I loved the way the world and the song melted together.”
Those words, coming in a tumble, cracked open the door into her past. I could see a girl lying in bed, listening to that song, a flash of lightning across the flat western sky, and I was curious, intensely curious, about that girl who had somehow turned into this woman who had a weird gift for keeping me off balance.
“It was a quiet life,” Anna said, half embarrassed.
“But you grew up on a ranch?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“A ranch might be an exaggeration, Eric. It was a kind of a small farm.”
“But out West, the western part of the state, the badlands—” I waved my hand to indicate someplace very far away and distant.
Anna was leaning against her light table now, her arms crossed across her chest. She shook her head in a combination of exasperation and amusement.
“On the edge of the badlands, yes. There were rumors of little green men with death rays.”
“No, seriously. What was it like?”
She turned back to the page on her table, staring down into the light, hesitant, but pleased also, I thought, to be asked.
“It was quiet . . .” Anna said again, and that was the start. Over many nights, in fragments, she told me her story. The effect was like turning something broken over in your hand and trying to imagine it whole. Still, across those hours, bent over our boxed-up miniature suns, carefully placing the words we had written on the glowing paper, the girl listening to the radio in her bedroom came to life. If I found out later she had left things out, if I came to see how the things we leave out are often the painfully unsorted heart of the story, I would forgive her for that because I was somehow aware, from the beginning, of the trust she was placing in me.
Chapter 6
SHE REMEMBERED HER CHILDHOOD HOME as empty. Her father always out working. Her mother present but silent, busy with household tasks she attended to without asking for or needing help. They were not unhappy, her parents. She never had a sense they were unhappy but for the wearying, never-ending desperation of not having enough money, of having to weigh every single expenditure of every single cent as if it included some vast and incalculable moral judgment. I do this and tomorrow I shall be found wanting and I will have failed those I love. They were not unhappy with who they were, or even with what they had most of the time, but they were tired and it had rendered them timid and sad in some less essential, but still all-encompassing way.
The problem was simply that they didn’t have enough land. In western North Dakota you need a lot of land before you have enough land for it to mean anything. There was oil in the area and later some families got very rich, but Anna’s family was forever in the wrong spot when it came to good fortune.
She was their only child and they seemed not to know quite what to do with her. She came late and their habits had all been established. They were not the type to ask for help and it didn’t occur to them that asking their own daughter to pitch in was different. Still, she inherited their dutifulness and tried to make herself useful. A set of chores eventually evolved that she tended to, helping her mother deal with the unending dust and mud, feeding the dog and pretending to feed the cats, who actually lived on mice in the lean-to shed they called a barn. They had a windmill that turned the pump that filled the water trough near the barn, but the gears stuck, and by the time she was twelve, she was the member of the family who climbed the rusting metal frame to tug the chain back into motion.
It was her favorite chore, balanced high in the air, holding on with one hand while she leaned back into the wind to reach the gears. Her hair blew in her eyes and the wild, empty country tilted around her and she could see forever. The autumnal prairie and the light caught in the tangle of her hair were the same golden color and she both floated above and felt part of the land as the pump chugged back to life. I can picture her there, a skinny, beautiful girl, a fiercely carved figure on the prow of a ship, ready to set sail.
She had hours on her own. They lived too far from town for her to go in casually, even later when she was a teenager. During the school year the bus arrived at the end of their long and badly kept farm road, took her off, and brought her back eight hours later. But that left endless time, time as deep and shadowed as a German forest, time for her mind to go anywhere. At school they visited the public library every Friday afternoon and so she always had books and, at home, plenty of time to read. There was nothing much else to do. She read and, although she never told me this, never boasted once that I can remember, I am sure got excellent grades at school and sat bored and dreaming in the back of the classroom half the time. The Great Plains make dreamers the way New York makes hustlers, and Anna was another one of them, another quiet girl in the back of the class in a faded dress with her mind a thousand miles from the only place she knew.
The badlands in western North Dakota are striped with veins of lignite, which are sometimes ignited by lightning. They can burn for weeks, months, or even years, and that was Anna’s first memory: a line of fire on the rim of the night sky visible from her bedroom window. The fires came and went when she was a child, but by the time she was thirteen one had come to haunt her. She lay in bed and the bent and narrow flame floating just below the stars was an umbilical cord pulling her toward some spark of life. She watched the colors shift, assume harlequin forms in the narrow furnace, and she was filled with a longing as elusive as the figures that rose and dissolved in the flames.
Of course, it was only a matter of time until she met a boy.
• • •
HE WORKED ON AN OIL RIG. He was from somewhere else. He had a shock of blond hair like a flare of sun and a face that was all perfect angles smudged with the greasy war paint of his adventure. He wore Levi’s that were a little too tight and T-shirts that were a little too large and his black Pontiac Firebird flew across the hills trailing a plume of dust that rose into the prairie sunset.
I never heard his name. In all those hours we spent together she never said it. In fact, she almost never referred to him directly. He was the figure in the story whose outline you could only trace by the way the others moved around his unseen presence. So here the story departs from Anna’s own hesitant, fractured narration. Here the story is p
icked up by Christina, the waitress at the café whom Anna had confided in at some desolate moment in the past, and who told me all she knew one night after too many drinks in the Buffalo Bar.
Anna was sixteen. She had been to a dance at the high school and had asked the friend who was driving her home to drop her off at the turn a mile from her house. Her heart was overfull with music and dancing and the confused longing in the eyes of the boys who stood on the far side of the gym working up their courage. She wanted to walk to settle her thoughts. It never occurred to her to worry about being alone in the country. This was her home and it was empty but for the brilliant stars and the shadows of the hills and the moon already distant on the far side of the sky.
She saw the car coming from a long ways away. No one came down this road but her own family and the old couple that lived another five miles farther west, and they never drove this fast. She stood on the shoulder of the asphalt, watching the car race toward her, and at the last moment she realized she was too close, she should step down into the ditch, make herself safe and invisible, but the car was already upon her, headlights on bright, a tunnel of light that swallowed Anna, tore her soul briefly loose from her body, and then passed, leaving her windswept, tasting dust, staring dazed at receding red taillights.
The car braked to a sliding stop and made a precise three-point turn. The window rolled down and she saw the silhouette of a man or a boy.
“You lost?” The voice was still indeterminate, although it had a lilt. Southern.
“No.”
“Good. Because I am. I’m trying to get to Haversford.”
“You haven’t come to the turn. It’s about half a mile up.”
“Cool.”
A boy.
“You go right. It’s about five miles.”
He leaned forward and the dashboard filled the startling hollows of his face with green light.
“That’s great. Thank you.”
“Okay.”
She started to walk and saw the car was trailing along beside her.