by Reed Karaim
Even then, even as a young man, I was the kind of person who liked to know where he stood, and it would have been intolerable to me earlier—it had been intolerable to me, finally, in college, the hollowness of our hold on each other—but now I couldn’t seem to care. I drifted through the summer with a sense of being half awake, sliding in and out of the lassitude that hangs on the edge of a dream during a restless night. The odd thing was, after a lifetime of insomnia, I had no sense of lying awake at night. But then, I had very little sense of being awake during the day.
We did drive out into the country together at least one Sunday afternoon. I remember that the state’s senior U.S. senator had come through Shannon for a ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of the bomb factory, and I’d had a chance to interview him at the end. He was a very old man, a shambling wreck with badly blotched skin and wisps of hair standing up like wind-whipped snow, but still tall, broad-shouldered, a former college football star who had once blocked for Bronko Nagurski. He only wanted to talk about the local high school teams. “You played the game, Dick?” he’d asked, and when I’d confessed that I hadn’t, a light had gone out of his eyes.
I told Emily the story as we drove past a threadbare farm tucked in a grove of trees. I finished with the senator calling me “Dick,” and waited.
“He was the mayor?” she asked, staring out the window.
“A senator.”
“That must have been nice for you, Ricky.”
“No, it was . . . ” But it was too much trouble to start over.
Emily nodded, as if I had explained. Her feet were up on the dash—she never seemed to know what to do with her limbs—and she was slumped so her chin was just above the bottom of her window. She told me once her mother took all the soft pillows out of the couches and chairs in their house to make sure she sat up straight as a little girl, and she’d decided then she’d never sit with her two feet on the floor and her hands in her lap again. It was one of the few things I knew about her childhood, except that her family had a lot of money; her father did something in banking while her mother worked on straightening spines. Seeing the soft curve of her against the seat, my familiarity with her body, with the way she moved, how it felt to have her close at night, stole over me, and I wondered if we might have a future after all. I wanted it to be so, or I wanted to want it to be so, and they felt like the same thing to me suddenly, as if in every desire what really mattered was the buried longing for feeling itself.
Emily peered out of the car window, her eyes barely above the glass.
“The people who live out here,” she said, “do you think this is where they really wanted to be, or did they just end up here?”
“I don’t know. Some of them. Ranchers and farmers. People who like cows . . . or wheat.”
“What do you think they do?”
“What do you mean? They work. Just like everybody.”
“I mean, besides that. What do they do with the rest of the day?”
“I don’t know. The same things as everybody. Watch TV, read books, have hobbies. Why, you thinking of taking up ranching?”
But Emily had stopped listening again, her eyes tracking a yellow yield sign riddled with bullet holes as we crossed another deserted country road.
Chapter 19
ART HAD LONG AGO RETURNED from his trip out of town with a friend, but he and Louise had been keeping separate hours in the office. You hardly saw them together. At first, when Art was in, I found myself watching him more closely—previously, it had always been Louise who burned up the oxygen in the room—trying to find something that would help me understand the duality of his life. But there was nothing I could see, and very soon I stopped paying attention and he was just benignly smiling, rotund, slightly nervous Art, and it was only when his office sat empty after lunch and the front office had that strangely vacant air of expectancy, as we waited for Louise to appear, that I sometimes briefly thought about it all.
The UPS man arrived with several oversized boxes late one morning. A half hour or so later, Art emerged from his office, beaming.
“Everyone,” he said. “I have something I want you to see.”
It was a quiet day, with only Anna, Edith, and me out front. Art stepped through the door to the back shop and repeated the invitation. Todd appeared, rubbing ink off the back of his hand and shooting me a curious look.
Art opened the door to his office and stepped to the side, as if revealing the grand prize in a game show. We all crowded in. There was a moment of silence.
“What is it?” Edith asked.
“It’s a computer,” Todd said, the awe clear in his voice. “An Apple II computer.”
Art had relocated a large pile of papers onto the floor and cleared a space at a credenza for a collection of beige boxes: keyboard, floppy drives, and cathode ray monitor. A green cursor quietly blinked its invitation.
“A computer,” Edith said, as if someone had just told her Art had purchased a solid gold canoe. “What in the world are we going to do with a computer?”
Art squeezed around us. He placed his hands carefully and gently on the keyboard, pressed a key, and columns of green numbers blinked into existence.
“You can use it to do spreadsheets,” he said. “Look.”
“Wow,” Todd said.
“A computer,” Edith said again. “I suppose we’ll get a rocket ship next.”
The door opened and shut out in the front office, and after a second Louise filled the doorway. She looked at the boxes on the credenza, the blinking screen.
“It’s here,” she said to Art, smiling slowly at him with the slightly embarrassed pride of two people who have decided on an extravagance.
He smiled back. “It is.”
We shuffled over and she slid into the room by his side. She reached up and squeezed his shoulder, and for the briefest of moments he leaned in to her. “Fantastic,” Louise said.
“Yeah,” Todd said, “these things are going to take over. We’ll all be using them someday.”
Edith scoffed. “What would I ever use a computer for?”
“To type up your notices,” Todd said, “and the recipes for Kitchen Korner.”
“A computer for typing up recipes?” Edith laughed. “I hardly need an electric typewriter.”
“I don’t know if it’ll ever replace the typewriter, but it could be useful for . . .” Louise gestured airily into the future. The cursor blinked at us. Anna and I glanced at each other. She shrugged. I look back, and the typewriters on our desks, the hulking printing press in the backroom, the hay-bale-sized rolls of newsprint stacked against the wall, were already growing fainter with every blink. But none of us, except Todd, the printer who worked in the middle of machines, could see it. My own thoughts were on Art and Louise, now leaning happily against each other, wondering why the sight of them like this filled me with such sadness.
• • •
THERE WAS THIS quiet contest among the farmers in the county to be the first to harvest a field of wheat. It struck me as faintly ridiculous, since the next guy usually started just a day or two later. But, still, in the middle of August in the middle of North Dakota, news is what it is, so Anna and I were both present as the combine took its first swath across a rippling field of burnished gold, tossing a gray-gold spray of dust into the air that meant it traveled in its own small cloud.
I had already interviewed the farmer, a young guy with a barely there mustache. I watched Anna, crouched in the wheat stubble, shoot a few shots of the combine heading down the field before she trudged back to join me by my car.
“I need another pass when he comes back, I think,” she said.
I nodded. We leaned against the fender of the Camaro and watched the combine sailing down the flat gold sea. North Dakota’s fields all seemed to run right off the edge of the earth. The fields in my part of Minnesota were held closer, bound by lines of trees, creeks or small lakes, ragged at the edges, the original wild country holding its cont
ours despite generations of human effort to subdue it. My father liked to take Sunday drives and we were always piling into the car and rambling down state highways through this country. I remembered the way he slowed down when we came to an unexpected glade of trees tangled around a creek or when a windbreak of pines parted to reveal the glinting scimitar of a pond in the late light.
He loved the fall; it was his favorite season, and, leaning against the car with Anna, I was suddenly taken with a memory of wandering out into a field much like the one before us, shaved wheat stubble scraping our ankles as we tried to get a better look at a pile of white stones some farmer had arranged in the shape of a miniature castle.
The sun had been falling just like this and the field had the same ripe smell of grain dust and black earth. My father stopped, my mother beside him, not wanting to get too close and spoil the illusion, not wanting to see the imperfections that would inevitably be revealed in this small homemade creation. The smile they shared as they stood together, a smile I noticed only barely then—before all three of their kids whooped down the field to get a better look at the castle—but now could see so clearly, seemed the center of that half-forgotten day.
I had to look away from the field being combined. It was suddenly too bright and gold.
“Your husband. What was he like?”
Anna had been watching something move across the sky. A hawk. Her face didn’t turn my way but I saw her eyes lose their focus.
“Really. I know it didn’t work out. But there must have been something. At first.”
“I am done—”
“With men. I know. But, really, at the beginning.”
“Eric.”
“I know. I just. I mean, there must have been something.”
“I was young,” Anna said. “Too young to know better.”
The hawk was in a long glide toward a corner of the field, where it dropped the last few feet in a wings-arrested plummet.
“Poor mouse,” Anna said.
“I know it was a mistake,” I said. “I know he was . . . not nice—”
She laughed the way you laugh when something is very much not funny.
“Okay,” I said, “but my father used to drive my mother crazy with these things he would do. He traded away her car one time without asking her because he was sure she’d love a Volkswagen beetle, but she hated driving a manual transmission. She didn’t really have her own car after that. He spent half their savings once on this crazy modern sculpture he thought she’d love. Sometimes when I was a kid, I didn’t understand why they were even together, but then there’d be these other moments. I was watching Art and Louise today and I just . . . ”
Anna kept her attention on the field, camera at the ready. But she was blinking rapidly and, when she stole a glance at me, I could see something in my question was harder for her than I understood.
“I don’t know, Eric. It wasn’t anything like that for me. I don’t know. But people aren’t perfect, you know. People aren’t perfect. But some are worse.”
At the far end of the field the combine had turned a corner and was headed back our way. It looked more than ever like a squat green galleon sailing through the windswept grain. I didn’t even know what I was trying to ask, or why it felt so important.
“Okay,” I said. “Yeah.”
Anna stared blankly into the sky.
“He came from the South. He had a drawl. And a way. A Southern way, cocky and shy at the same time. This kind of smile. And these great cheekbones. I thought he knew about the world. But he didn’t. That’s all, Eric. I never think about him anymore. He is a blank spot in my life. He is not there.”
“But you thought you loved him? I mean, at first?”
“Eric.”
“Sorry. Forget it.”
The combine thrummed as it approached, the sound sorting itself out into a diesel roar, the mechanical crunch of the head sweeping up the wheat stalks, and the tumult of threshed grain tumbling into the back. Anna said something I couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Anna said. “Look at this. This is the moment.” She gestured toward the machine heading our way and, as it crested a slight ridge in the field, it seemed immense, framed against the blue sky, with the distant water tower of Shannon visible off its left shoulder, a briefly perfect frame on an unexceptional subject. I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
Chapter 20
EARLY SEPTEMBER, THE KIDS BACK IN SCHOOL, the farmers deep into harvest. I was perched on an uncomfortable chair in the narrow living room of an old man who sat on a recliner covered in a corduroyish material once embossed with a British hunting scene, faded dogs and flushed birds peeking out behind his bony shoulders.
The walls were filled with shelves, and the shelves were filled with liquor bottles and small statues, and the liquor bottles and small statues were all in the shape of Elvis: Young Elvis, Hollywood Elvis, Army Elvis, Hawaii Elvis, Cowboy Elvis, Vegas Elvis, Comeback Elvis, Post-Comeback Elvis. Some were just heads. Some were Romanesque busts. Some, the full Elvisian form. Elvis wore black leather, white leather, jeans, an army uniform, a swimsuit, denim shirt, six-gun cowboy hat jumpsuit martial-arts-robe-toga-sort-of-thing. In some he held a guitar; in some he danced; in at least two he wore sunglasses. Some were porcelain. Some were glass. All were Elvis.
I held my notebook in front of me. This was our human-interest feature for the week.
“So,” I said. “You must really like Elvis.”
The old man nodded, his eyes unnaturally bright.
“Not really.”
“Great. Wait. Not really?”
“Nope.”
“Okay . . . Then why do you have all these?”
The old man was a little too thin and his hair had started to recede in a way that gave him the aspect of a slightly deranged, crested bird. He grinned cheerfully at me from the faded meadow of his recliner.
“I’m seventy-four years old,” he said. “I have to do something.”
I was back in the office, standing beside Anna’s desk, telling her the story. “‘I have to do something,’” I said, waiting for her to laugh, or at least smile, and then I was crying, staring above her head at the blurred blue-green day beyond the window and crying, tears running down my face I could feel and only Anna could see.
“I have to do something,” I said again, believing I hadn’t quite managed to deliver the punch line.
“It’s a good story,” Anna said. “What do you have to do next?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Let’s go out to the lake. They’re having some sort of sailboat race. I could use your help with the pictures.”
• • •
THE SAILBOATS WERE ALL small training boats, their neon sails creased against the green bank on the far side of the water. We stood on the bluffs of a small island that could be reached by a bridge, and Anna shot with a long telephoto lens as they passed. The wind blew her hair across the camera and without thinking I reached up and held it back as she shot.
“Thank you,” she said, after a brief but visible stiffness in her shoulders.
She lowered the camera from her eyes.
“I think that’s enough from here.”
The short ride out to the lake had been silent. I’d brushed the tears away before turning to face the office, but in the car I could still feel their dried tracks stitched down my cheeks like threads holding me together.
“Maybe a few more down by the dock as they come in,” Anna said, staring at the dam that ran like a gray chalk line at the north side of the lake. “But that won’t be for a while.”
I nodded. She didn’t need my help at all, really. There was only one camera and she had the better eye. We sat down on a bench a few feet from the edge of the bluff and let the sky envelop us. Everything below us was fake, the lake, the island, which had been made by dredging a channel to cut off a promontory, even the beach to the right, sand dragged in from some gravel pit.
But it didn’t matter, the light was soft, scattered by canvas clouds, and all the colors of the day had a gentle clarity.
“So,” Anna said.
“Yeah. I don’t know.”
“Sure you do, Eric.”
“Not really, I mean, sure. Yes. But not really. Nothing I feel seems to have anything to do with anything, with anything that’s actually going on right then. I just—”
But there was no just, or if there was, I had no idea what it was. We watched the sailboats make an awkward shuffling turn near the dam, sails luffing, hulls bobbing as the sound of laughter and someone exhorting them to clearer action drifted up off the surface of the water.
“The guy has like ten thousand Elvis bottles,” I said. “Can you think of a stupider waste of time?”
“Oh, I can. I can think of lots of worse things.”
“But Elvis. Elvis with a lei around in his neck, wearing a white jumpsuit in a painted green ceramic bottle. I mean, that’s not even historically accurate. Hawaii Elvis and Vegas Elvis are two completely different Elvi. You can’t mix them up like that! It’s just . . . wrong.”
Anna was silent.
“Elvi?”
And I felt myself crying again, helplessly.
“I believe the OED lists the accepted plural form as Elvi.”
“Well. The OED.”
The sailboats were passing the island again, tacking against the wind, less organized as they angled to keep their sails taut. I could make out the figures more clearly in the shallow hulls, hunched forward as if propelling themselves into the breeze. White and blue hulls. White- and yellow- and blue- and green-striped sails. I felt like I could sit on the bench and watch them pass for the rest of my life.
I heard the camera click beside me and click again. I turned and Anna was putting it down. I had the sense she hadn’t been focused on the sailboats, but me. I brushed my cheeks but the tears had blown dry.
“I collected fossils when I was a little girl,” she said, “out in the hills around our farm. I collected all these little pieces I found. I told myself I was going to be a paleontologist. Go all over the world and discover new dinosaurs. I even made up names for them. The Hopasaurus. Stridasaurus Rex. Megasaur.”