Asleep on the couch is a boy just turned three. Gabriel kneels before him as his wife emerges from behind a curtain.
“José sneak it out the back like he say?” his wife asks. Gabriel nods.
The light from the TV flickers across the boy’s face. Gabriel touches the boy’s knee and then shakily unties the string of the box. As the boy rubs his eyes and sits up, Gabriel presents the box to the boy and opens the lid.
“Surprise!” Gabriel and his wife say.
The boy stares at the cake—the skillfully written number three—the thick icing that rounds the cake like a crown and the cream that lazes from the middle. The boy doesn’t touch the cake but covers his face with his hands and peeks at it from behind his small fingers.
SNOW FALLS AND THEN DISAPPEARS
My wife is deaf. Once she asked me if snow made a sound when it fell and I lied. We have been married twelve years today, and I am leaving her.
She is in the bakery on the corner where it is warm and they know her. She will return within an hour to our apartment with a box full of little cakes ordered especially for this day. She will return home and toss her keys into the ceramic ashtray. She will place the cakes in the fridge, where she likes to keep canned goods. She will curse my tardiness. After several hours of my absence she will develop a further deafness.
There is a very small tear in the couch I never noticed until now; a piece of leather hangs off like a tongue. It is a small rip but has ruined the entire couch and thrown the apartment into disarray. The ashtray is empty and tempts me to smoke again. My lungs are hollow and long for the return of weight.
She plays the violin every day, and I am taking it with me. It was made in 1783 in Prague. My bag and the violin sit on the bed, poised for exile. The violin goes out of tune whenever it enters a new environment, as though it loses confidence before a performance. She told me that in the darkness of its body, swimming between the maple ridges, there is a piece of her living secretly, fed by scherzo and allegro. I am taking the violin for this reason. The violin leans against my bag on the bed. Inside, quiet as dust, a part of my wife awaits resurrection.
I have a habit of lying awake between dreams, when there is no traffic and it is very cold outside, so cold that a rough white skin forms across houses and cars. I lie next to her and imagine the vibration of pumping blood reverberating through her ears; a countdown to irremediable deafness.
She is watching the fat baker squeeze icing in the shape of our proverbial hearts onto little cakes that we are supposed to share with our shallow friends tomorrow night. She is not shallow, but deaf and ungovernable. She once told me that she loved me because I was the only thing she could hear. She can feel the vibration of the strings through the carved vessel of her instrument, but I am inside her. I am a song soaked into each bone of her secret body where the world has not been able to wander.
The baker is packing up the cakes into a pink box that he will tie with a pink ribbon. The baker knows her by name and has a tight pad of paper and a pen to write down the cost of her bundle and express his gratitude. I want to leave before she leaves the bakery, otherwise I will be caught and have to wait another year. I have to be on my way to the airport with her violin and my clothes before her keys leave her hand for the ceramic ashtray.
I have already burned all the photographs; they made a crackle and set off the smoke detector, which I promptly smashed. She won’t need it because she is deaf and it gives off only a minute vibration.
I am taking one of her favorite dresses, which I know is a mistake. I remember falling asleep as she laid it out among the tendrils of tomorrow. The dress was a bridge between today and tomorrow. And then together we drifted helplessly into sleep—ice melting through cracks in the floor.
I have written down all the reasons why I am leaving, though I am overcome with a sad strength for the world because I have not spoken to anyone all day. My resignation to being alone is a sea under which I can breathe.
We met in Minnesota, in the lobby of a Days Inn right off the highway. I sat opposite her. When a waiter brought her a tray of coffee, I realized she was deaf and could not hear the cups singing. Their song made me think of my mother, wheeling herself around the kitchen, gliding through steam from the pots and pans on the stove. Many years later when she passed on and I sold her house I noticed the grooves of her chair in the linoleum floor; it was a Braille only I understood—a mother’s geometry.
I am booked on an airplane to Minnesota, where I will rent a car and arrive at the hotel where we first met. There I will sit in the same seat and read the same passage in the same book. There I will wait for her to find me again, so we can step into the direction we left behind and forgot about. It is a canvas unpainted by memory.
My mother was disabled because she was shot in the legs by a Nazi officer in Berlin. In reaction to the linoleum floor forty years later, I wrote a book about her and by accident found a picture of the officer who shot her. His name was Hans.
I have recently hung a blanket across the bathroom window and unscrewed the lightbulb. This was a strange operation induced by the sight of my wife’s toothbrush, which sat bolt upright in a chrome stand. Whenever I washed my hands or bathed, the toothbrush would stare silently at me, challenging my faltering courage.
When a person disappears one day on her walk home from a bakery, the toothbrush becomes a symbol of hope.
I would wake in the night to feel its bristles, to check for wetness. If I am able to see its yellow spine, I’ll have to wait another year. I picture the bakery and the cakes; I can smell the butter and taste each hot mouthful.
The Nazi soldier who disabled my mother was called Hans, he was my father, and they were lovers. That is why she lived and made it to America, because I was inside her. I was her protector, a tiny forbidden inception. I have a picture of him, which I never showed my wife, because she might not have understood why I am proud. I have inherited his stoicism. I have inherited his ability to love. We are united through loss.
The square clapped and crackled with gunfire. Heads fell against wet cobbles. People were separated from their shoes.
My father. His eyes shut. Dispatching round after round into men, women, and children. And then reason suddenly gripping him. He opens his eyes quickly enough to lower his gun.
Although my father snapped the bullets into my mother, I like to think it was his love for her that instinctively deflected them away from her heart.
As people became bodies, indistinguishable from one another, my father scooped up my mother. He took her to the Jewish ghetto and found a doctor whose family was starving. The doctor stopped the bleeding and removed the bullets of my father’s pistol without asking for so much as an apple. Before I imagined deafness, I would lie awake thinking of my mother on the train hurtling across frozen Germany—the mountains dotted with soldiers in heavy coats, smoking and thinking of their wives. I could picture the border guards perusing her papers and wheeling her onto a cold platform, where freight trains stuffed with meat and fruit and wine would trundle lugubriously before people whose stomachs were paralyzed with hunger. My mother had a photo of her mother’s flower garden tucked down her dress that separated me from a torn continent.
It snowed the morning she left Liverpool for New York. That’s how I knew that I would marry the woman drinking coffee—when she asked me if snow made a sound when it fell. She wrote this question on the palm of her hand.
There are some lies that, under the right circumstances, are the only truth.
We slept naked that night in the hotel, a bundle of limbs, an arrangement of muscle and bone held together by fear and newness. Although I knew she would have invited the waiter up to her room had he been sitting where I was and looking at her as I was, I didn’t care. I wanted to stretch into the ridge of her spine and complete her back, as water freezes in the crevice of a rock. The next morning it was snowing, and she asked me. I thought of my mother and said, “Yes.” I wanted to carry her deafne
ss away from the restaurant and lay its marvel in the snow. That night I went to her performance. She played Bach’s Concertos in A Minor and E Major for Violin, and I pictured my mother changing her name at Ellis Island and then making her way to my birthplace.
I learned my wife’s sign language. “Ballet for Fingers” we called it. We never spent one day apart until she disappeared walking home with a box of cakes. I wonder what happened to the cakes, were they ever eaten? By whom? The cakes torture me. And now the bakery is open again, its lights spilling out on to the cold street below the windows of children’s bedrooms.
My father was killed by a seventeen-year-old Polish partisan in the fall of 1943. He was younger than I am now. My mother never spoke much of Europe, though I could picture it through her stories of her father, who sold bicycles until his shop was closed down. Once, I brought a friend home from school. He was born in Switzerland and spoke fluent German. I remember presenting him to her, and as his mouth pressed into the language, my mother began to cry and the boy stopped what he had only just begun.
Sometimes, language is the sound of longing. The small Boeing will be my ship from Liverpool. The violin will be my exit papers.
As the elevator slows to the level of the lobby, the doors separate to reveal a frail Russian named Eda who has lived in the building for sixty years. She puts her hand on my sleeve and looks concerned. She wants to know how I’ve been coping and where I am going with the violin. She wants to know if, after so long, there has been some news. I tell her that my wife is in the bakery buying cakes iced with proverbial hearts, and I have to be in the car heading for the airport before she returns. I tell her it is our anniversary and I am leaving her. This makes her cry and she lets me go, giving me strength—the strength of my father as he carried my mother through the freezing rain, along cobbled streets, between tall dank houses scarred with lines of bullet holes, pushing his way through the nightmare, his face streaked with blood, his heart burning with disgrace. I can picture them clinging to one another, though lost from each other forever. I can see his face as the Jewish doctor feverishly looks for the bullets. I can imagine the night she left and the emptiness that followed him. I imagine his memory of my mother, her falling torso, the smell of her wet hair, the trail of blood through the ghetto, the falling of snow.
THE SHEPHERD ON THE ROCK
I have always been attracted to the idea of heaven, and that’s why John F. Kennedy International Airport seemed like a good place to live out the last of my life.
You can tell who travels often because they have a convenient pocket or special wallet for their passport. The less-traveled forage for their documents, then drag their luggage into the rectangle made up of lines. Every time the line moves, another person joins.
I imagine I am watching the dead ready themselves for ascension into His kingdom, and though I no longer believe in God, the idea of a heaven and hell seems to me quite useful ways of rewarding the good and punishing the bad while they’re still alive.
I’m homeless because I suffer from a madness I am too ashamed to bear responsibly. When I am momentarily free from these terrible feelings, I spend whole days and nights at the airport, sometimes sitting in a plastic chair for several hours and at other times ambling around the food court. When the terrible feelings return and from the base of my spine they stretch through my body like ghosts, I slip away from the terminal and find refuge in a shipping yard where floodlights ensure that day never completely ends.
When the madness comes I wrap myself in blankets and squeeze into this small space under one of the giant rusting containers where I know I’ll be safe. Underneath, I watch the rust spread across the metal like a slow tide of autumn.
An attack begins with amnesia. I suddenly forget things, such as what I’ve eaten for breakfast (if anything) or when I last smoked a cigarette. Then my limbs begin to tremble slightly and my teeth knock (imagine the chattering of plates in a kitchen cabinet moments before an earthquake).
The violent shaking often lasts for several hours, but that’s not the worst of it, because the ghosts trapped in my body have found a small door that leads into my memories, and so for two days and nights, I am taken blindfolded down a path into myself and forced to relive random scenes from my life. Imagine that, forced into your self.
On the morning of the first day of madness, I may be swimming with my father in a cold pond as my mother looks on breathlessly, her apron flapping in the wind like a white wing; then by afternoon I am back at the seminary in Dublin being handed my degree as my hand is shaken vigorously by the cardinal.
I hide myself now so as not to hurt anyone. When the madness passes like a child’s night of terror, I wake up and can barely walk from thirst—I also defecate in my clothes, which is unpleasant, but there’s a homeless shelter two hours’ walk from the container yard, and so I’m able to wash my clothes and take a hot shower. A young woman from Puerto Rico who works at the shelter always gives me a little money and a good meal. She sits down with me sometimes and says, “Whenever you’re ready for a change, Paddy—just tell us.” She calls me Paddy because I’m Irish and she doesn’t know my real name. She often tells me about her life, without asking anything about mine. I like it like that because I wouldn’t want to tell her that I used to be a priest because she wears a gold crucifix—faith is a balancing act.
If there really is a God (I’m not saying there isn’t—I’m just saying that I don’t believe in Him, like a mother who’s given up on her son’s delinquent ways), I hope He helps her find the love of her life as she’s a decent girl and deserves more than a string of no-good boyfriends. I’ve seen a few young men at the airport who I thought might be good for her, but you never know if they’re coming back. Anyway, I pray for her as I walk briskly back to the airport all fresh and without that terrible stench coming from down below. I can sometimes go two full weeks without an attack, but I exist utterly in its shadow.
It was my mother’s idea that I become a priest, but it was my love for people that convinced me she was right. My seminary friends and I never spent evenings at the pub or courting girls on benches by the river Liffey like other students in Dublin at the time. We’d sit around listening to the wireless with tea and toast, or on nights when a heavy rain or the quiet drama of snowfall caused a stir, we’d talk about a love for God and the many incomprehensible sides of His character.
I was a great reader and listener of music. I remember having great admiration for Voltaire, whose belief in God seemed quite secondary to his compassion. He said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” I agree completely. A short time after leaving the priesthood I was feeding pigeons in the park when I met the woman who would become my wife.
That was long ago. I now live at the airport. I know all the different terminals and have spent so much time staring at the Arrival and Departure boards that I could tell you when the next plane is leaving for anywhere.
It’s always nice to know an airplane has been somewhere and is back safe—you can tell this by the flight numbers. When I watch people line up at the check-in desks, I sometimes try and make eye contact with children so when I pray to allay their fears, I can see the pools of their eyes and then drop my prayers into them like coins being dropped into a well.
You might say that praying is useless if I don’t believe in God anymore, but let me tell you my opinion: praying for someone is a way to love them without ever having to know them.
I pity anyone who knows me, because after the trembling—when the ghosts howl at my blood and twist their ethereal limbs about my bone—I’m not myself. I once killed a dog. It was a terrible mess, and I cried for days about the dog’s soul.
The ghosts always find out where I’m hiding and escort me onto the stage of my childhood. The ghosts wait in the wings as characters from my past begin to appear upon the stage. My lines are already written and cannot change; my role is the same and the only member of the audience is my self.
&n
bsp; I try not to talk to anyone at the airport (because they’ll want to know about me, and keeping things from people is a form of deception), but I’m a chatterbox at heart and sometimes get roped into a discussion with a passenger as he or she waits to be called to ascension; this is one thing we have in common.
I remember a nice story that a young pregnant lady told me about how she met her husband. I don’t remember much of what she said, but I remember thinking that inside her belly was the complete soul of an unknown in a vessel the size of a bread loaf. I’ve often wondered at what moment the soul inhabits the cells. I suppose it’s like a light that gets switched on when everything is in place. But don’t ask me who switches it on, because I wouldn’t like to say.
I do enjoy watching people disappear through the doors into a sun-drenched corridor.
On the door it says: ticketed passengers only.
Imagine there were a heaven and getting to it were this easy. You just received your tickets in the mail, and then after several identity checks and a few extra charges, you were on your way.
The damned would have to remain on earth in perpetual doubt.
Once an airplane swings up into the clouds, it may as well be on its way to some celestial paradise. It’s hard for people to say good-bye to their loved ones. I remember an Indian man who went through the doors with several plastic bags of clothes. His children wouldn’t stop crying, and once he’d gone, those he’d left behind strained to see through tiny windows for one last glimpse. This happens often, and on one occasion there were so many people trying to catch glimpses of their loved ones, an airport employee had to intervene.
You may wonder why I haven’t killed myself because living with madness or watching it flood the heart of someone we love is unbearable. Don’t think I haven’t considered it. If I were to do it, it would be when the amnesia starts, before the trembling. I would go to the shipping yard, climb up the side of an oil drum, and toss my body from it. I wouldn’t mind a nice burial—with a service, so I’d probably try and find a dog dollar and then the powers that be might feel compelled to do the honors—how would they know I’d lost my faith?
The Secret Lives of People in Love Page 7