by Ben Greenman
Just then a woman gasped and pointed; the crowd turned, almost in unison. A man was going across the far edge of the meadow—at least William thought it was a man. It was a plume of fire with a dark core, and it was making a noise that was not quite a shriek but not quite a word: a high note, eerily pure. “Andy,” a woman said. The figure lurched forward a few more steps and then collapsed onto the grass. Another man appeared from the building and started hitting at the fire with his coat. “Is it Andy?” another woman said. Paramedics rushed toward the middle of the field like water to a drain.
Louisa’s friend Mary liked to say that there were two kinds of people: those who couldn’t stand to see people fresh from an accident, all busted up, and those who couldn’t stand to see people who were terminal, slowly withering on the inside. Louisa had announced she was the second type and waited expectantly; William said nothing, but they both knew he was the first. A few years earlier, Louisa, who never complained of pain, had felt a stabbing in her belly. Bleeding had followed. The doctor ran tests, and in the days of waiting, as William worried over every terrible possibility, he wanted nothing more than to escape, to get in the car and drive north as fast and far as he could. The tests came back, and the doctor explained what had happened, pointing to pink areas on a chart of the female anatomy. Louisa wept. A pamphlet outlining fertility treatments was pressed into William’s hands by an overeager nurse. On the drive home from the doctor’s office, Louisa stopped crying, and William made his peace with the almost lunar silence that followed.
Now, with the paramedics still on the burning man, William took out his keys and opened the car door. “What?” Tom said. “We’re not leaving, are we?” They could see the burned man’s legs, clothes in shreds, in the gaps between the paramedics. The man moved for a little while on the ground and then stopped moving. Orders were shouted, skin was wrapped, a stretcher procured, the body hoisted. There must have been sirens, but William did not hear them.
The coffee shop, the Bean Counter, was the small dream of a pair of married accountants. They had been fixtures in the place, greeting guests and always finishing each other’s sentences, until something snagged after a year or so and they split up. People now called it Grounds for Divorce, with not a little sadness. William and Tom ordered from a stringy young man with a faint caterpillar of a mustache and carried the cups to a table by the front. A pair of women fake-hugged another pair of women they didn’t seem happy to see. Three five-year-old boys were banging hell by the counter.
“You know what I was thinking about when we were by the fire?” Tom said. William shook his head. “I was thinking about the man who was running across the field.”
“That’s understandable,” William said.
“But not about his pain, or his misfortune, or anything like that. I was thinking about the physics of it.” Tom bent his head, dug a thumb into the hinge of his jaw. It was a gesture William had seen on Louisa. “You know Aristotelian physics? He said that certain elements seek certain locations. It’s in their essential nature. Earth moves toward the center, or down. Fire moves toward the sky, or up. By his reckoning, a man who’s mostly fire would fly away, but that man went down to the earth. I wondered what Aristotle, or someone who believed his philosophy, would have thought as he watched the man go down. He might have wondered, suddenly, if he knew anything at all. But people can’t really entertain that idea, because that’s when the slippage starts.”
William nodded and said yes, the slippery slope, and Tom interrupted him right back. “No,” he said. “The slippery slope is for politicians and propagandists. The slippage is a specific thing. It’s the moment when you start to lose your footing.” He held up a hand, rigid and horizontal, to represent the X-axis of some invisible graph. “See,” he said, “any graph is a set of expectations. It tells you what’s normal and what’s exceptional, where there are gains and losses. But what if you suddenly find that you’re plotting all your data on a graph that’s coming loose? What if the graph itself is unmoored, if you no longer know where you’re standing in relation to it?” The hand flipped so that the thumb and fingers switched positions. “Is the hand reversed now? Is it even the same hand? You don’t know if you can trust the graph, not because of its inaccuracy, but because of your disorientation. The slippage isn’t the moment when a graph turns upward or downward. It’s the moment when it turns on you.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
Tom rapped on the tabletop. “Well, then,” he said. “You’re halfway there.” He blinked fiercely. The right hand, the one that had been the baseline, fell into his lap. The performance had not gone unnoticed by those around them. The quartet of women snickered among themselves.
FOUR
William woke. He rolled to his right and nearly turned an ankle standing up. The darkness was smooth, the visual equivalent of silence. He could see the outline of the dog sleeping near the entrance to the bathroom. When he was a child, he would sometimes stand in the hallway in the middle of the night and wonder if perhaps he had died. “You awake?” he said to Louisa, but Louisa wasn’t there.
He found her in their rarely used living room, sitting with her legs folded under her. The television was on, but not the volume. “Hey,” she said.
“What time is it?”
“Ten thirty? Maybe not quite. When I got home you were zonked out in bed with all your clothes on.”
“I had quite an afternoon. Long day at work, and then guess what happened.” He set the scene dramatically, starting with the color-coded graph in Tom’s studio and the gray bars on the wall. “They’re like teleporters,” he said. Louisa didn’t seem to be listening. She was holding a tube of lipstick in her hands, swiveling it up and down, and William started to feel transfixed by the way it always went back where it came from. When he got to the part where the first man had made his shaky way across the field, Louisa didn’t even look up at him. Now he was sure she wasn’t listening.
Suddenly, Louisa stood. “I need to talk to you.” She wielded the lipstick.
“Okay,” he said. “What about?”
“I need you to tell me that there’s a next step in all of this.”
“In the story? I just got to the fire.”
“I mean the land,” she said. “Our land.”
And then it came to William, all at once; he was like an explorer in a jungle at the moment the vegetation cleared. “Oh,” he said. “You want a new house.”
“I do,” she said, like she was making vows.
“But there’s no house on that land,” he said.
“Right. So we build one.”
“Build?” It was an idiot’s echo.
“I’ll make it worth your while.” She shifted so that her sweatshirt slid off one shoulder, exposing the swell of a breast.
“Come on,” he said, and she covered up, frowning. “Are you serious? You think we should build a new house?”
“People do it all the time. I told you: I peeked into one that’s just going up.”
“Right,” he said. “Because we have all the time and money in the world.”
“Is that what we need?” she said. “All the time and money in the world?”
“Can’t we redo a room here? Is it change you want?”
Her frown hadn’t lifted. “I just want to know for sure that life is moving forward.”
“What’s the alternative?”
Louisa stood, smoothed her shirt in front, and turned away, murmuring something he couldn’t quite hear.
“What?” he said.
“There’s nothing here for me.” She headed down the hall.
“So that’s it? That’s our evening?”
“It’s a bed you made,” she said in a gratified way. “Lie in it. I can’t stay out here with you when you’re being a child.” She forced capital letters onto the last few words.
Blondie lolled beneath one of the front windows and William went to pet her. Kneeling there, he took a measure of the night sky. There was a
nearly full moon, a coin no one could spend, and he moved side to side to hang it in the center of the pane. He had read recently that Earth might have a second moon, invisible to the naked eye. The scope of it all disconcerted him. He couldn’t even really get a grasp on the minuscule portion of existence in his window. William was increasingly convinced that he was a man of limits.
William usually treasured his weekend mornings, grateful for the extra hours in bed, but the image of the man coming across the field was still high in his mind, and he got to the shower by eight, grateful for the water. The late news had furnished some details, and more were on the radio in the morning. The man was not Andy. His name was Karim and he had been one of the security guards at the building. He had been rushed to the hospital, only to be pronounced dead a few minutes later.
The deck was the most reliable place of comfort William knew, and he sat there, the dog at his feet. The sky was filled with dark clouds in strange shapes, and the sun coming through them gave the tubs the look of old bone. “Garcia,” the radio said, calling the security guard by his last name, “is survived by one son, age fifteen. His wife was killed last year in a car accident.”
William’s parents had died at either end of his twenties, both uneventfully, if such a thing was possible. His father’s death had come as a sorrow but not a surprise; he was a cancer survivor by the time William was born, a young man who moved like someone much older. William remembered him as pale, precise, and almost pathologically quiet, as if he were hiding from something and worried that the smallest noise would reveal his location. Maybe he was: between William’s junior and senior years in college, the cancer had returned with new ferocity. William, home for the summer, visited him frequently in the hospital, unsure what to say to the silent figure stretched out on the bed. He did not know how he had come from the man, who hardly seemed to have enough energy to produce a sentence, let alone a child. On the day before William went back to school, his father clasped one of William’s nervous hands between both of his papery ones. “Thank you,” he said, his voice filled with emotionlessness. It was a humiliation William would never forget and almost all he could remember at the funeral a month later.
His mother had been quiet in life as well, but when she was widowed, a dam within her opened, and judgments poured forth: the art on the wall of the lawyer’s office was depressing (William agreed), the waitress at lunch dressed like a streetwalker (William disagreed), the oceans had been polluted beyond repair by the shortsighted greed of the human species (William felt the matter needed more study).
Then she fell ill, with a different cancer from the one that had killed his father. The treatment took her hair and gave her the look of a fortune-teller, scarf wrapped around a head that seemed larger than ever, and that lent her pronouncements a dramatic weight. When she visited his apartment, she stood in the front doorway and said that it was no place for him if he wanted to be consequential in the world. “Get yourself a house,” she said. “Don’t be a coward.”
He flew out for her funeral within the year, made remarks at her graveside to no real effect, and put a bid in on a house—a modest one-bedroom with a small screened porch on the north side of town. When the Realtor called him to tell him the place was his, he was at his desk at the advertising agency where he worked as a copywriter, and he went to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror.
His first night there, he brought a girl over to help him christen the place. The girl was Karla, and she lay down on an air mattress, which was all he had, in her underwear, which was all she had. “Certificate of occupancy,” he said, pointing at the deed, and she laughed and bucked up her hips rakishly. “You may own the house,” she said, “but you’re a renter here.”
Then Louisa, returning to him, had taken him away from all that, into what she insisted was his first true home. He found himself agreeing without feeling any inner snag or catch. Was that love? Now, in the dim afternoon light beneath the clouds that would not rain, she came outside, having forgiven him for the fight of the night before, carrying mugs in both hands as proof.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” she said. “It’s not very good coffee.” She leaned on the rail. “Looks like the people who bought the Johnson place are finally moving in,” she said. “I saw a man the other day. About our age, short, hairy.”
“A caveman?” he said. “In that case, I would definitely consider getting out of here. Drives down property values.”
“Funny, but not so funny,” she said. “Let me read you something. I was going to read this out at the lot the other day, but I lost my nerve.” She took a piece of paper out of her pocket. “‘We make a pact with another person to follow as far as they go, but we do not really mean it. We mean that we will follow so long as we do not start to feel lost. Love, or what passes for it, is about believing that we are never truly lost.’”
“That’s nice. Who wrote that?”
“I did, in college. I found it the other day during the party.”
“I’m glad you were keeping busy.”
Louisa turned, the paper still in her hand, and he thought she was going to start in on the idea of a new house again. But speculation was running ahead of evidence. She sat down without a word. Adjacent yards supplied the sounds of children.
The next day, he woke early, kissed Louisa good-bye, and made like he was going to work. Instead he drove to the triangular park on the corner of Keeler and Martin, where he sat and watched knives of light pierce the surface of a small lake.
Louisa and William had come to this lake during their first try at love, twenty years before. They passed the time naming ducks, or rather William did, mostly for historical figures. The one in front of the line, looking around imperiously: Churchill. The one in the water, flapping its wings: Archimedes. The one off to the side, tilting its head and considering a family at a picnic table: Albert Einstein. Louisa named them all Duck, and every once in a while pointed excitedly into the middle of the pack and shouted, “Goose!”
He had crisscrossed the town hundreds of times over the years, never with any particular emotion, but now it contained the possibility of loss—or, rather, he saw the possibility of loss that had always been there—and it made him sad. That was the apartment building where, twenty years before, he and Louisa had considered renting a place. That was the tree where he had pretended to carve their initials. That was the Italian restaurant where he had thought to take her during their first relationship, but she had broken up with him and he had never been able to work up the courage. Most of these, he conceded, were somewhat abstract.
He crossed back through town in search of more concrete examples. There was a park bench where Louisa had kissed him roughly. There was a canal where William had, half in jest, thrown a pebble he pretended was his wedding ring. There was the pig on a pole, presiding over discount retail. The theater on Loomis and Bell contained a longer story. A few months after their second first date, he had taken Louisa to see an old film about a young woman from a small town in the Upper Midwest. She took training as a singer, made a striking entrance in a big-city nightclub, fell in love with both a waiter and a captain of industry. Two of the sides of the triangle were shot to death.
Afterward, out on the sidewalk, William seized Louisa’s hand. She wore gloves, which he mocked as an affectation but secretly admired. “What?” she said.
“I have a question,” he said. “You don’t have to answer right away.”
“What is it?”
“Well, you know how you start life alongside everyone else and then, when you’re young, detach from the mainland? You drift out on your little floe. At first it’s exciting. Then it’s scary. Then you look and see that all around you there are other people on floes of their own. They look close to each other, because they’re far from you. If you could get close enough, you would see that they’re all feeling the same terror. But you can’t get close enough.”
“I wish your mouth wo
uld shut sometimes,” Louisa said, but when she covered it with hers she made sure it stayed wide open. He woke in the morning to find her sitting on a chair beside his bed, already fully dressed, even down to the gloves, and the morning breeze slowly ballooning the curtains in the bedroom.
“I can’t believe you remembered all that,” Louisa said. She had coaxed him out onto the deck with a bottle of red left over from the party. The sun had just disappeared behind the rear fence, but she had lined up the wrought-iron lanterns on the railing. A big-band song, clarinet in prominence, sailed in from a radio in a neighboring yard. “Who would pick a girl who wears gloves?”
“I would,” he said. “I did.”
“Come here,” she said, but she pulled her chair closer to him. She hid her head in the space beneath his chin and he smelled her hair, now a sugary vanilla, and when she sighed and blew hot breath against his neck he understood that he had miscalculated by telling her about the drive through town. He had wanted it to ignite the same fire in her, but it lit the wrong wick. It had put her in mind of his love for her, not for the neighborhood.
She kissed him on the side of the face, and then on the lips. “I’m heading off.”
William went from deck to garage, tried to exercise a little, stood with barbells in his hands and his full weight pressing down on the soles of his feet. He picked up his guitar, ran his fingers over the body and the neck. There was a scar near the bridge that he wished he had the story for, but it had been there when he bought the thing. So much in the world had happened before he arrived.
Coming through the kitchen, he was stopped by a flicker in the corner of his eye. It was another white plastic bag, handles tied, belly full, in the center of the counter. He dumped the contents out. The first bag, the one in the junk room, had contained June’s mail; the bag in the garage had been May. This had everything they had and then some: notices from professional associations, postcards announcing special offers at local stores, catch-up chronicles from friends they hadn’t seen in years. The invitation to the Kenners’ cocktail party was in there. There were no bills or checks or even subscription renewals—anything of consequence had been removed—but along with the mail there was a strange assortment of objects: a spare key for his car; a baseball cap he had thought was lost forever; a bottle cap that, upon closer inspection, appeared to have been saved from the party they’d thrown for Tom. The collection was at once curated and entirely haphazard.