* * *
—
By the time I got back, no one talked about the lights and hadn’t for a long time. Even the few T-shirts that had been printed, with cartoon alien faces and spaceships, saying, “I survived the UFO landing of 1967,” were all in the discount bins, and it was only ever referred to as a sort of a joke.
But Marty and I would still talk about it sometimes. Even though he hadn’t been there, he used to ask me to describe what we’d seen. It was always difficult to know exactly what to say. Once I said, “Have you ever seen a beautiful girl walk into the room and you know that your life has been changed?”
He must have known I was talking about Fernie, but at first he pretended not to. He chuckled and said, “Sure. Least a dozen times.” So then I said, “Well, then, no, that’s not what I mean.
“It’s like,” I said, “it’s like all of a sudden you think that maybe we aren’t just put here for the heck of it, though it seems that way most of the time. And it just sort of—surprises you, knowing this all of a sudden, so you can’t think straight for a little while.”
Marty was looking at me with this funny half smile on his face that after a while turned sad.
“Well, anyway,” I said, looking away. “It was like a beautiful girl walking into your life, and you just know that things aren’t ever going to be the same.”
* * *
—
I heard a lot of guys in Nam talk about death—or near death. Almost everyone had a story to tell, and it was always the same. This bright light in the distance they were either approaching or that was moving toward them.
“No shit,” they’d say, “just like they always tell you.”
I remember thinking how terrific it was that in the end it all turned out the same for everyone—white guys and black guys, Baptists, Jews. That it didn’t matter. You could get shot in the jungle one morning, or slip away, all pumped up with morphine, in the middle of the night, and it would be “just like they tell you.” But as comforting as it is to think about death that way, it’s also a little unlikely. I don’t mean anyone was ever lying, exactly, about what they saw, but just that somewhere along the way all the nuance got lost.
Just as it got lost for all of us back in 1967 when an unidentified object touched the earth. And a light, or a feeling—or something else we hardly had the ability to perceive, let alone understand—shot through us. Even if we didn’t believe we’d “made it all up,” whatever we’d witnessed that night was so strange—so absolutely unprecedented and unknown—that whenever we spoke of it afterward, we did so by using only the most general terms, and most of us preferred to say nothing at all.
* * *
—
The official explanation was that it had been a simple trick of the light. Similar incidents had been reported for centuries, they said. In Texas, there were the “Marfa lights,” for example, visible on nearly any calm, cold desert night just outside of that town. The whole thing could be attributed to a sort of optical illusion.
After the report came out, only the lunatics continued to talk about what we had seen as if it had really been “something.” If it ever came up in public, we would say, “Oh yeah, wasn’t that weird.” One of the Honey twins—Neil—ended up with a Medal of Merit during the war, I remember. He had dragged a buddy of his across half a mile of enemy territory, saving his life, and he got interviewed about it afterward, on the national news. When where he was from came up, the interviewer said, “Home of the alien landing, right?” and Neil just laughed. I remember feeling angry about it at the time. So what made you jump into your car that night? I remember thinking. What made you go racing off with your brother to that exact spot in the desert, where all of us were waiting, too? What made you stand there with all the rest of us, with your mouth open, looking up at the sky?
* * *
—
There was no note when Fernie left, just a week before we were set to be married. Not then, and not later. No telephone call from the side of a highway somewhere. When we’d run out of places to look and several months had gone by, Marty asked me if I thought, by any chance (he hesitated, an expression on his face like he was apologizing, in advance, for whatever it was he was going to say), there could be a connection between what had happened that night in the desert and Fernie all of a sudden being gone.
Already it was mostly a joke, what had happened, but there were still some pretty wild stories going around. Manny Duncan—who everyone knew had been high on amphetamines at the time—had a particularly intimate one, and that, of course, was the story that got circulated most.
I told Marty no. “What happened that night was just…light,” I said.
But then I thought about it some more. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I figured after a while that it had everything to do with Fernie leaving—and Marty knew it even better than me. He’d sensed it somehow, and that was how come he’d continued to ask me about it, even after everyone else had forgotten about it, or explained it away.
To say “light” was just the closest we could come to describing a thing that was bigger than us, that could have been anything, and that we didn’t understand. And that was why I knew then that, despite what I told Marty when he asked, it had everything to do with why Fernie was gone. She must have just known something then. I don’t know what. She must have seen the way her life had taken, or was just about to take, shape. Known that whatever it was or was going to be was going to be different from the life she had so far known.
And me and Marty, we didn’t have any part of it.
So, what about what I knew? How I had felt when Fernie had walked into the room at the beginning of seventh grade and I just “knew” all of a sudden: who I was, and what my life was going to be about, and the fact that nothing would ever be the same? I still wonder about that sometimes, and the closest I can come to making any sort of sense of it is to assume that it’s possible that both feelings were—and continue to be—true.
* * *
—
I sit in Marty’s studio with the animals all around me, peering at me from the corners and from the high shelves. Some of them are just not finished yet, but others are those that, for various reasons—if they got botched somehow, or the order fell through and we never got paid—we just kept. I know they can’t see, but there’s something about the look they give me when I glance up sometimes from my work and see them staring back at me that makes me feel like they know something I don’t. Even though that’s impossible. I took them apart and put them back together again. The eyes they look out at me with, I placed those myself. I extracted their skull and their thigh bones and made replacement parts out of galvanized wire. It’s an art, see—a lot of people don’t think of it that way. And I pride myself in the fact that, for the best of them, there’s no way of telling that the original structure has been cleanly removed from inside.
* * *
—
When I’m not working, I’m waiting for something. Not for Fernie any longer, but for something.
Maybe that’s just life, maybe that’s just being alive. Or maybe, because of what happened that night—August 12, 1967, which to this day, despite the official report, no one has been able to fully explain—I just keep half expecting something like it to happen again. And really, when you think about it, the odds are pretty good. I mean, what are the chances that something like what happened that night would happen just once and once only, exactly when and where it did, in our little town, where nothing has ever happened? It seems to me more likely that these sorts of things happen all the time and we just don’t notice them. Because—I don’t know—we’re distracted by other things, are momentarily looking away, or don’t believe in what we saw.
Other times, though, I prefer to think that what happened really did only happen once. That what we witnessed in the hour we stood out there, watching and wondering what would come next, was the pinnacle of achievement of some distant race, after some unim
aginable period of time. That there was no motive, no message, and that the brief moment of contact—in which all of us who had driven out to that exact spot in the middle of the desert stood, mouths gaping, staring up at the sky—was all that it was ever intended to be.
THE ADVERTISEMENT WAS POSTED ON A THURSDAY MORNING, in the campus publication, The Luminary. “Wanted: Black man, between the ages of 18 and 34.”
McKinley had received his MFA and the prestigious Rudy Huff young playwright award just that past spring, for a play praised by the Huff prize committee as a “sharp, funny, and searingly honest” approach to racial profiling in a supposedly “post-racial” world. That same spring, by some miraculous stroke of luck, McKinley had also managed to land an assistant professorship at a small liberal arts college upstate. Six months later, “What We Are Looking For” was scheduled to be performed for the first time by the Woods College inter-session theatre program. Yet another stroke of luck was that McKinley had been granted the funding to bring in the director of his choice to take part in a three-week intensive workshop, leading up to the premiere in the middle of May.
McKinley had, of course, thought immediately of Jules Cassel, his mentor in New York.
When McKinley had first entered the program he’d been dead set on writing a book of short stories—perhaps something he could later turn into a novel—and writing for the theatre had never even crossed his mind. And yet, it was done. It could be, had been, and continued to be done, and Cassel had been the one to look at McKinley squarely over the space of the short table they’d shared off of MacDougal Street one day and tell him so.
“Everyone writes short stories,” he’d complained. “Why not try theatre instead?”
Cassel did not say “why not…” the way McKinley and everyone else he knew said “why not”—with a sardonic, self-defeating shrug. He said it absolutely sincerely. As though it was not a question at all, but a matter of fact.
It was not therefore the idea itself that inspired McKinley to change his direction, but the way that Cassel presented the option. Sitting there off MacDougal Street, sipping diet ginger ale on ice, and blinking in the sunlight—his expression as blank and unassuming as a child’s.
“It’s like he’s dropped in straight out of the Enlightenment,” McKinley told Mary later with an ironic, appreciative smile.
In point of fact, nothing more than a couple of generations separated McKinley and Cassel. They even sort of looked alike. Solid WASPish good looks, unblemished, nondescript but satisfying features, a square if somewhat weak chin. In his second year of graduate school, McKinley had even unconsciously cut his hair in a similar fashion to Cassel’s. Though it didn’t wave like Cassel’s did, though it didn’t settle—undeviatingly, and of its own accord—in a perfect seam somewhere just barely left of centre, Mary noticed the similarity right away.
“Oh, hello, Cassel,” she’d said when McKinley walked in the front door of the two-room apartment they shared. She said it like Cassel said “why not,” straightforward and to the point, but even so, it took McKinley more than a few beats to realize why she’d said it. The words stung more than he liked to admit.
He felt angry, first, and then ashamed—and then, on further reflection, angry again that he should be made to feel either angry or ashamed. There was nothing wrong with Cassel, after all. He’d already had a long and—as they say when someone isn’t quite famous—“notable” career. He wrote prolifically; also published, taught, and directed. He’d even produced a few films. A scattering of scholarly articles on the continued relevance of Elizabethan drama had also appeared—articles that McKinley had, several times, cited himself. There was a takedown, for example, of neo-liberal capitalism via Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, a critique of President Obama’s reluctance to close the Guantanamo detention centre via Richard III—all proof that Cassel wasn’t entirely out of touch.
And yet there was still something…remote about him, McKinley thought. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he certainly didn’t want to be associated with it, whatever it was. Perhaps mostly because he understood intuitively, without Mary (thank you very much) having to point it out, that Cassel was his best and only option. What more was there, after all, for him than to grow older, more successful; to have his hair, and everything else about him, begin to part itself effortlessly, ever so slightly left of centre…
It wasn’t inevitable, the way Cassel made it sound. No, in fact, he had only, like, one chance in a billion of actually even making it that far. Things just didn’t always work out the way Cassel assumed they “might just as well.” Not anymore. Even McKinley’s parents, who’d named their only son after the twenty-fifth president of the United States—champion of American industry, promoter of the gold standard, and the last president to serve in the Civil War—had been skeptical, at best, when McKinley told them he was going to major in English rather than the expected pre-med. Certainly, a person had every opportunity to make his own way in the world, his parents had assured him at the time—just so long as he was travelling in the right direction.
* * *
—
In any case, it was a great boon to McKinley that Cassel agreed to be flown upstate in early May, taking time out of his sabbatical year to direct McKinley’s play at a college no one had ever heard of.
“I’m sure it will be interesting,” Cassel had responded in his one-line email reply to McKinley’s somewhat overwrought request.
“What does that mean?” McKinley asked Mary a few seconds after receiving the message. It was first thing in the morning when he opened his email, but when he saw the note he felt like a hundred watts of electricity had just been pumped through him. He’d shot immediately into the kitchen, then hovered impatiently behind Mary as she tended a single fried egg. “Interesting has got to be the least interesting word in the English language,” he told her. “I mean, honestly—it should be banned from the vocabulary. It says ab-so-lu-tely nothing.”
Mary looked at him, frowned, then went back to her egg—though both of them could see quite clearly that it did not require tending. It irritated McKinley to an unreasonable degree in that moment that someone should spend so much energy on something that did not actually require it.
“But it’s good news,” Mary said to the egg.
“Well, yes, of course it’s good news!” McKinley said. He was truly angry now—and hating himself for it. If she had just stopped fiddling with that egg, he thought. Even for a moment…If she had just turned, smiled, said, “Really? Wow!” in a way like she didn’t know everything already, he might have modestly demurred: “Oh, well, we’ll see how it goes…” Instead, Mary’s matter-of-fact response—her demonstrated incapacity to, even for a second, permit her attention to wander from the demands of an egg—had turned him haughty and defensive.
But, really, it wasn’t Mary’s fault—he knew that. It was Cassel’s.
“Honestly,” he complained to Mary, “it’s like, try punctuation, right? How about a ‘Dear McKinley,’ a ‘Best,’ for god’s sake. A ‘Yours truly.’”
Mary slid a metal spatula under the body of her egg.
“No, really,” McKinley said. “How is it okay—personally, let alone professionally—just to shoot back these one-liners, with no salutation?”
“What are we talking about?” Mary asked.
The egg flipped; the yolk held.
McKinley pouted. “A little common courtesy,” he said. “That’s all.”
* * *
—
Later, over a happy hour red, he said, “What is and is not interesting.” They were waiting for two friends from the Art Education Department at the Patio, the coffee shop at the edge of campus that doubled as a wine bar. Everything upstate “doubled” as something else. Nothing was ever just the one thing you wanted it to be.
“That is,” he said, “perhaps, and ultimately, the only thing. To be interested. I mean, truly…”
“But I do think he means it,”
Mary offered. She was softer now, kinder than in the morning. After a few more sips of wine, she would soften still more. Their friends would come; she’d begin to laugh. To use her hands when she spoke, to flash her eyes this way and that. He’d begun to notice it. That she only really turned on when other people were around now. It had dawned on him slowly, but now he couldn’t help but be certain of it, and he didn’t know if it should bother him. Perhaps it was just one of those things, inevitable after seven years with any one person.
What did he expect? Seven years! It was a number that suggested having come to a certain decision—about, for example, with whom one was going to spend the next seven years. He guessed that he and Mary had as good as decided, but they’d never even come close to saying so out loud. Decisions had always been made step by step between them, circumstance to unforeseen circumstance. Up until this point things had just “made sense.” It had made sense, for example, for them to begin to share an apartment four years ago because New York was so goddamn expensive and they both hated their roommates. More recently, it had made sense for Mary to accompany McKinley upstate because she was sick of the city and worked freelance so could really be anywhere she pleased.
Tiger, Tiger Page 6