Back in Dublin as a young man, I was obsessed with a song by Franz Schubert called “The Shepherd on the Rock”—you may have heard of it. I would lie down on the covers of my bed and, half asleep, put the record on, then watch the last of the day drain from my room. The song is about a shepherd who lives in the mountains with his flock. Apart from his sheep, he is completely alone. He dreams of a love far away (I always imagined a distant, flickering village), and then he starts to feel terribly depressed. Just when it seems as if he can’t go on, something happens in the song—a slow unraveling of hope and beauty spreads throughout his rocky province and he is suddenly filled with inexplicable joy. I’ve planned my death so many times, but then, as I’m drifting through an empty terminal like wind, or reading a forgotten magazine in the restroom, I feel a strange sensation, a sense of happiness, and I remember my son and wife.
If only the terrible ghosts would take me to the park on Sunday so I could kick a ball around with my boy like I used to, or sit me back in the hot kitchen with a towel around my shoulders, as my wife set about giving me a haircut.
If there is a heaven, I wonder whether I’ll see them there and whether my madness will remain on earth, like clothes shed before a swim.
A family once sat beside me in the terminal. I shall never forget it. They were en route to London from Minnesota. Only the father had left the country before. There were three of them in total: a father, a mother, and a son.
The boy was in his thirties and wore a special padded head restraint. His face was contorted with an expression of pain, and his clawlike hands were pressed tightly to his chest. His eyes were neither jittery nor vicious, but slow, soft green hillsides upon which he had been trapped for decades.
We couldn’t stop looking at one another, and when his bony limbs erupted in spasms, his mother said, “He has something to tell you—there’s something he’s trying to say to you.”
Like the shepherd from his rock, I thought.
I wonder if in heaven his fingers will uncoil and reach out for his mother’s soft curls. I wonder if he’ll take his father for walks through clouds with pocketfuls of words. I still think about that man and sometimes dream of him naked and beautiful beneath the earth in a dark, slippery cave trying to feel his way into the light.
Two Sundays ago I passed a church that looked like the one where I used to give Mass, and I had something of an epiphany. I realized that it wasn’t God, the Devil, or death that terrified me—but the fact that everything continues on after, as though we’d never existed. I sat on the steps and listened to the singing inside, to the strength of many voices singing as one. Birds swooped down to snatch scraps of food off the roadside.
Last night, I spent the evening watching snow fall onto the runway from a quiet corner of the terminal.
Different-sized trucks were deployed, and they circled the tarmac like characters in a mechanical ballet. As the flakes thickened and lay still, I wondered if my wife could see me from beyond and how ashamed I would be if she could.
And if the snow were never cleared off the runway, it wouldn’t matter, because it would one day disappear of its own accord; then one day return, perhaps accompanied by wind, or by stillness, or by the sound of breathless children pulling sleds.
EVERYTHING IS A BEAUTIFUL TRICK
I am standing along my road. It is early evening, and each house is tucked back into a pocket of vegetation. The only cars are stationary and barely visible through low branches, which hover over the houses and cars like hands.
My wife naps back at our old wooden house—a house so tired its limbs creak as though it is speaking back to the weight of our random movements.
I cannot walk farther because something sweeps through me—something so sad it renders the world broken and perfect all in the same feeling. I can tell that someone very close to me has died—that Magda has been taken away.
My wife was jealous of Magda for many years, even though they had never met.
I have stopped walking beside a house several houses down from my own. There is an old car in the front yard, its doors heavy and tires flat. A skin of pollen has gathered across the windows. The vinyl roof has peeled and flaps in the wind; the promise of a storm.
The windshield wipers are frozen in place halfway across the glass. Coated in pollen, they resemble two arms reaching out from under the hood. Ghosts kiss in the backseat. Memories spill out through a cracked window, melt into the ground between tall grass, and are pushed back up as wildflowers. Somewhere along the street a screen door yawns.
The feeling that Magda is lost fills me, swelling the skin of memory like a balloon being inflated.
Above the car there is a grocery bag caught on a branch stealing mouthfuls of wind.
My father adopted Magda from Poland, from Kraków when I was seven. My mother had left by then. Magda didn’t know her at all. Magda was a long girl with short, unevenly chopped hair. Her left arm was missing at the elbow.
We shared the attic at our small house in Cornwall. We would wake early on Sunday mornings and make breakfast for my father, who would be out surfing. Even in winter, he would paddle through the freezing fog into deeper water.
Some mornings, the sky was so dark and the wind so fierce we would light candles and pretend we lived in a cave.
My father began surfing in storms after my mother decided one day that she wanted to live in Australia with her boss and his children. I was two. I barely remember her, but I am still in love with her ghost.
After setting out a brick of bread and a nest of boiled eggs, Magda and I would keep watch from the staircase, and when we saw the lights of his old Land Rover bouncing up the muddy driveway, we would skip down and open the door. This became a weekend ritual. When he stepped into the warm kitchen, he would laugh at the candles and rub my head with his salty hand. He would give Magda his wet suit, and she would drag it into the bathroom with her only hand, leaving a trail of sand and seawater on the carpet.
Over breakfast he would tell us about the sea and if anything had been washed up. Once, an American airplane from World War II tumbled onto the rocky beach after a terrific storm. My father took us to see it after breakfast. The rain was so fierce that Magda and I shared a garbage bag with holes cut for our heads. We were amazed by the fuselage of the airplane, which lay on its side. Two barrels of a machine gun poked out of a glassed dome. My father said its wings probably broke off when it hit the water. He said they’d probably not be long in coming if the tide was right. Magda and I wanted to go inside, but my father said no in a voice that meant no bargaining. Magda suggested we say a prayer to the sea, and my father said he couldn’t have hoped for a more sensitive daughter. That was one of the best mornings of my life.
As my father told us stories over hot bread and eggs, seawater would sometimes drip from his nose.
When Magda first arrived from Poland and could only communicate with her eyes, we would take long walks together through the village and always stop at the same place to sit and watch old people lawn bowl. Later, when she could speak English, she told me her name for the bench beside the bowling green—niebo. Heaven.
On summer nights when the lingering light blushed and then disappeared, I often mused on how objects kept up with us. How lucky, what magical synchronicity, that soulless things should not only occupy the instant, but travel through time with us at the same speed, as though everything were perched high on the crest of a wave surging forward into the unwritten.
Later, on that same bench before the bowling green, when we were both eighteen years old, I told Magda about the mystery of soulless things keeping up with us, moving through time at the same speed. She laughed intelligently and told me that sometimes it is we who get left behind, anchored to memory. That is why she said she liked watching the old people in white play bowls, because they had slipped from time and hovered above the past.
We were on the verge of separation.
As we sat on the bench, as we often had for twel
ve years, I knew something was being taken from us. We were on the boundary of adulthood: I was leaving for America—a surfing scholarship to a college in California—and she to a prestigious university in Warsaw.
I still imagine Poland through descriptions in her letters she wrote from her university—storks nestling on rooftops, the grassy, minty dullness of marjoram, and the heavy pungency of caraway blowing through the Carpathian Mountains.
It was in silence on the bench beside the bowling green that I knew I would never see Magda again, or that if I did, we would have evolved beyond reconciliation. Without words, we mutually allowed experience to swallow us whole. It was the only way forward. But her absence would haunt me in the same way my mother’s absence haunted my father, and the missing part of Magda’s arm haunted her.
Now that I’m married and living in California with my wife, I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person—a speck in the distance, on some distant ridge—is perpetually waving.
In youth we wave back to the figure on the cliff.
I remember us on the bench together drinking warm Coke from the same bottle, two beings about to plunge into their own lives. How soon would we reach the bottom? While at the university in California my class read The Odyssey. It interested me because it’s not only about the sea but about love and recognition. My father is like Odysseus, but so is my mother. Odysseus is Everyman. All seas lead to one home or another. Every path is the right one. And Magda has disappeared from the earth.
Now, in America, where I have made a home for myself, it is fall, the season of memory. The old car leans to one side. It, too, has strayed from time; it has no designations. It is a car only in name, but in essence it is a sigh.
The sky is beginning to darken. I can imagine my wife napping back at our house. Light spills from a kitchen window on to a patch of flowers.
When my father and I first met Magda at the airport years ago, she was clutching a naked doll with no hair. My father was not expecting a stick-thin girl with one arm, and so he scooped her up and whispered something in her ear. As we twisted our way home along cliffs, Magda looked out at England and then at me, as though I was somehow responsible—as though I had woven everything for her.
Only since becoming an adult have I realized how scared she must have been. She was a child in a place where she could not communicate. Over time her fear became trust and we became a family. When a person is loved, they are granted the strength of all seas.
She never spoke of the violence and abandonment of her early life. It’s amazing she even went back. She bore deep scars but through loving turned them into rivers. For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls. My father once found Magda crying next to a one-thousand-year-old oak tree not far from the house. She had packed a child’s suitcase, though its contents were splayed around her feet. He carried her into the house, and she continued weeping in our room.
That night she admitted her compulsion to escape. She was worried that if my father drowned, or I disappeared, she would be left with nothing. By running away at least she would have the joy of knowing she was missed.
A few days later my father took her on a “father-daughter trip” to London, explaining that he was going to introduce her to our relatives so she might never feel alone. The night they returned after the five-hour drive, we lay in bed together—her hairless doll between us. She explained in broken English how my father had taken her to the monkey cage at London Zoo and introduced her as “Magda the Invincible.”
She once told me how she could feel the missing part of her arm—how she sometimes experienced the sensation of a hand—that it is possible to feel something without its physical presence.
Perhaps love is like this and we are all limbs of one giant intangible body. I can see her chopped black hair upon the pillow and remember kissing her shoulder as she slept.
Night can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it.
Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time.
We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures.
Magda became so worried that my father would drown in a storm that one morning he woke us up as the world was beginning to crack open. With a special kind of paint Magda and I wrote our names on his surfboard. As we drifted back to sleep—the sound of the Land Rover roaring to life outside in the rain—an umbilical cord of light beneath our bedroom door held the world together.
After leaving for Poland, Magda wrote to my father once a week for two years and stopped when my mother returned from Australia—her skin several shades darker, a cigarette quivering between her lips as she stood before my father in the doorway. I was living in America when my mother appeared and know that my father took her in with no explanation. My mother had been away for eighteen years. She was actually surprised that I was gone, that I had grown up.
She never knew Magda, though I imagine she harbored the same kind of jealousy toward her as my wife does—a strange contempt because it is welcomed by me and probably by my father.
In the gloaming as I open the door of the abandoned car, Magda sings to me through the grinding of iron hinges. I sit inside. The steering wheel is a circle of bone and the chassis rocks with gratitude as I make an indentation in the seat. I am here and inhabit this moment, but I am forever on that wooden seat with Magda, or watching her release steaming eggs from their hot shells.
I never saw her after she left for Poland, but in the letters she wrote in the early years, it sounded as though she was happy. Once she even drew a stork on the envelope.
I know she missed us and that somehow we had given her the ability to live—that my father and I had untied a knot.
And now she is gone. I am not curious as to how it happened; that will come with the telephone call from my breathless father in the early hours of the morning.
I wonder if Magda passed my dreaming wife on her way.
I have encountered thousands of people only once, but they carry a memory of me and everyone else—like sand on a beach, shaping the edge of a living world.
When I arrive home from my walk, it is late and I am drowning in moonlight. I can smell hot coins of rain collecting in the sky, ready to fall. I can see my wife sitting on the porch swing smoking a joint. The smoke twists upward from her mouth, and, dissipating, it slides over the roof, above the empty forgotten car and the wildflowers, climbing, circling, giving itself to the unknown.
I approach. It begins to rain. My wife looks at me in the same way my mother must have looked at my father. She pats the cushion next to her. The seat takes on the weight of my body, and we both begin to laugh uncontrollably—as if simultaneously realizing that everything is a beautiful trick.
FRENCH ARTIST KILLED IN SUNDAY’S EARTHQUAKE
The final moments of her life. Marie-Françoise lay crushed under tons of rubble.
The fish she had been eating was still in her mouth.
Her eyes would not open.
She could sense the darkness that encapsulated her. She could not feel her body, as though during the fall, her soul had slipped out and lay waiting for the exact moment when it would disappear from the world.
Then her life, like a cloud, split open, and she lay motionless in a rain of moments.
The green telephone in her grandparents’ kitchen next to the plant.
She could feel the cool plastic of the handle and the sensation of cupping it under her ear. She could hear a voice at the other end of the line that she recognized as her own.
The weight of her mother’s shoes as she carried them into the bedroom.
The idea that one day she’d be grown-up and would have to wear such things.
Running into a friend.
That time had passed.
And then t
he rain of her life stopped, and she was in darkness, her heart pushing slowly against her ribs. Muted noise as though she were underwater.
Then the rain of moments began again until she was drenched by single esoteric details:
Morning light behind the curtain.
The smell of classrooms.
A glass of milk.
The hope for a father and the imagined pressure of his arms against her.
Laying her head upon her new boyfriend’s cool back in the morning. She had done it twice. It was as important as being born.
Her grandparents again, but characters in their own stories—walking barefoot in the snowy mud and stepping on a buried hand.
The end of the war.
A bungalow in France.
A daughter.
A granddaughter.
Her mother’s elbows as she drove their old brown Renault.
Marie-Françoise could not feel her body and was unable to shout.
There was no sound, nothing stirred but the silent movies projected on the inside of her skull.
She was not so much aware that she was dying as she was that she was still alive. Had she more time, she may have nurtured a hope of being rescued. Instead, memory leaked out around her.
Blowing out candles unsuccessfully—birthday year insignificant, just the aroma of smoke as small fires were extinguished by tiny helping breaths.
Then the sound of footsteps in the hall, and creeping barefoot to find her grandfather dead at the kitchen table with the refrigerator door open.
An egg unbroken on the floor.
Her grandmother’s screams.
This memory was not painful to her now. Her life was an open window and she a butterfly.
The Secret Lives of People in Love Page 8