Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  “How can things not be where they should be?”

  “They can’t. But they aren’t.”

  Then Sara was screaming. She had spotted someone in a white shirt, moving through the woods down below them, maybe a mile away. George joined her as she hurtled down the slope, trying to get to the only person she’d seen in an hour before they somehow disappeared. It was a person—she was sure of it—a pale, angry man with a voluminous white beard, who as he became aware that they were bearing down on him, rushed quickly in the other direction.

  George called out to him to “stop, slow down, wait!” When at last they got within a hundred yards of the old man, Sara waved her floppy white hat at him. “Sir! Sir! S’il vous plaît. Please! Could you help us? Help . . . um. George, what’s the French word for ‘help’? How do I say, Which way is it to”—she paused, not sure where they even wanted to get to anymore—“town. La ville! Am I saying that right? Is it ‘vil’ or ‘veal’?”

  George had no idea, and the little man was yammering in French so quickly that she couldn’t even tell when one word ended and the next began. From the way his face pinched up at them, she could guess that he was in no mood to help them. He continued to duck around the trees and scowl.

  “Allez-vous en!” he shouted, terrified. “Je veux être laissé seul.”

  “Help!” George yelled at him, waving both hands. “We’re . . . WE ARE LOST!”

  “He doesn’t understand,” Sara shouted. “George! The guidebook has travel phrases. On the back cover. Back cover.”

  As George dug inside the pack to find the guidebook, Sara tried to beg the little man, who shouted at her in French as he tried to get away.

  “Please. We’re Americans. We’re lost! Americans? Lost!”

  The man picked up a rock and hurled it at her, and it fell halfway between them.

  She screamed and hid behind a tree. “We don’t want to hurt you!” she shouted. “We need to find Point Sublime!”

  “What’s that in French?” George shouted.

  “That is French! Sublime is a French word. Maybe it’s ‘Pont’? Sub-lime? Subleeem? Suble-me? George, what’s ‘lost’? How do you say ‘We are lost’?”

  Sara called again to the little man, but it was no use. He was rushing away, flinging rocks at them as he went.

  “George, hurry up!” she screamed.

  “I’m looking!” he screamed back.

  The little man made it to the cliffside and nimbly climbed up the face, turning back occasionally to shout and make obscene and angry gestures. Desperate, Sara tried to climb after him, but it was no use. The tiny man was pulling up onto a ledge that led around to a higher part of the canyon.

  “Perdus! Perdus! Perdus!” cried George as he rushed over to the cliff, clutching the guidebook in front of him. “Nous sommes perdus!”

  But as he ran, holding the book up in the air like a flag, he stubbed his toe on a rock, and the book dropped onto the dirt behind him. The man was gone, and the sun beat down on them as they sat there exhausted and miserable, more perdus than ever.

  “How could you let him get away?” Sara sobbed.

  “Me?” George yelled. “You were scaring the hell out of him.”

  Neither of them could even look at the other. They were still panting from the climb, shaking with both fear and adrenaline. George wordlessly got out the compass and began his ritual of smacking it and spinning in circles, trying to get the needle to land somewhere. Sara looked for any sign of the little man but saw nothing but wide expanses of woods in front of them, with no paths or mountains.

  “There’s got to be something somewhere, right?” George said after another several hours of walking. “I mean, at some point we’ll end up in Italy or Spain or something.”

  Sara didn’t answer him—she’d fallen into a dark silence, which put George into his usual jittery-talking mood, which only further fueled her irritation.

  “We’re going north, right?” he said.

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t care which way they walked.

  He peered at the cheap little compass. “It says we’re going north,” he said, “but then why is the sun setting behind us?” They hadn’t been able to see the sun behind the rocks for some time, but now it was visible, dipping below the clouds, big and red.

  “How can the sun set in the south?” he asked, whacking at the compass.

  It was then that she snapped. “How in the hell should I know?”

  “Don’t blame me for this, okay? You’re the one who was so eager to do this today. If we had waited and gone with the group, this never would have happened. I’m doing the best I can here!”

  Sara shot him a deadly look. “If we’d waited, you’d have come up with some excuse not to do it! I can’t wake up one more time to find you drunk on the couch hugging her ashes.”

  “Well, excuse me if I’d rather go to bed with something that isn’t running to the gym every time I turn around. You’re always anywhere but next to me!”

  He gave the compass another heavy whack, but the needle continued to declare they were heading north, when all logic and physics would dictate that they were heading east, away from the setting sun.

  “My skin is peeling off,” Sara sobbed. “I’m starving. And we’re going to die out here.”

  “We’re not going to die,” he insisted, though he was beginning to fear the same.

  “Forget where the sun is, and think about what we do when it goes down,” she shouted. “We’ll be out in the middle of the woods, with no lights, and no food—”

  He smacked the compass again even harder, but it didn’t budge.

  “Would you cut that out?” she screeched, angrily clawing at his arm. “You’re going to break the damn thing, and then what?”

  “It’s already broken!” he shouted. “That’s not south!”

  “Who gives a shit?” she shouted back at him. They hadn’t fought like this in—ever. Normally they fought about reasonable things, like what movie to see or whether to have Christmas with his family or hers. One of them would inevitably give in (usually George), and they’d move on without animus. He didn’t know how to hold a grudge, and if she did, well, she didn’t when it came to him. But here there was no giving in, no moving on. They couldn’t escape this.

  It seemed to her that as furious as she was with him now, it was, in a sense, nothing new. She’d felt this way for a long time now, since he’d stopped being the George she’d always known. She wondered if he knew how much he’d changed, and if he thought she was different now. They’d been together such a long time, and partly they had managed it because they had never demanded very much of each other. Love, faithfulness, kindness: these had all come easily. It had never been very hard to make things easy for each other. But these past few years they had begun to lean harder. When Irene got sick, they had begun needing more from each other. They’d both changed, little by little, and she hadn’t minded it because she’d assumed that when it was all over, they’d return to the way they’d been before.

  But what if there was no way back to before? Now it was as if he couldn’t stand unless she were propping him up. Drinking, moping, miserable. And without him, what would become of her? Would she keep running and subtracting from herself and trying to beat her life into lists of manageable tasks? And the worst thing—what she was sickest of—wasn’t George or herself at all, but the vast expanse of years ahead of them. Time upon time during which they would surely go on changing and needing each other and being disappointed and losing things they loved and having no control, and she was terrified of it, absolutely terrified, so much that it made her want to throw up.

  “Who cares?” she screamed. “Who cares?”

  Then George shrieked and howled like a crazy person. He set his pack down on the ground and fumbled madly with the urn.

  “Don’t! What are yo
u doing?” she yelled.

  Her words bounced off the trees and vanished into the deep crimson sunset. Orange light cascaded off the clouds, which for a moment looked like great plateaus above them. When she was a girl, she’d believed that was where dead people went, fluttering around on little wings with their harps and white robes.

  George looked triumphant as he heaved the great iron urn up above his head—and nearly toppled under its weight.

  “What are you doing? Put that back!” she screeched.

  “Irene! Irene!” he was shouting. Streaks of tears dripped from his pinched eyes. The compass. “She’s a magnet!”

  He was ready to fling the urn at the nearest tree. He hated it with all his might. He wanted to see it crack in half, to watch a gray cloud of soot and sediment mushroom out and disappear onto the forest floor and be gone forever. Lost. Perdu. But even as he stood poised at last to be rid of Irene—who had sent them on this insane journey, who had nearly gotten them killed, who he saw now had ruined the past three years of their lives—George couldn’t let go.

  “Stop,” Sara said softly. She eased the urn away from him and set it on the ground and held her husband closely. He breathed in and then sobbed.

  They sat silently and watched quietly as the sun went down and darkness fell. They felt the forest come alive around them. They each felt the other in their arms. They wished Irene were really there. They wanted to close their eyes and sleep and not worry about waking up in the morning. They watched as one by one, tiny pinpoints of stars emerged above them—some brilliant and some barely glowing—but in the darkness there were millions and millions.

  George looked down at his pale, weak, pained body. Sixty percent of it was indistinguishable from the little drips of water that clung to the sides of the empty canteen. Mostly, he was just a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. Eighteen percent carbon. Three percent nitrogen. Some calcium and potassium and other salts. All down the line, these were the same elements that he measured every day in the stars of the Ring Nebulae, the same as in the sun, as in all the stars in the universe. On an atomic level, he was constructed from fused leftovers, expelled into the void when these stars inevitably collapsed. In a way it comforted him that he was elementally connected to everyone and everything—even if, as he lay in the dirt, he felt sure there was also something to him beyond atoms. He’d seen something leave Irene, in those final seconds, and it wasn’t energy or matter.

  Back in high school physics he’d learned the cycle of decay and renewal over the course of millennia, and what a small footnote mankind was, when you looked at the entirety. But what he hadn’t learned until much later was that for millennia, these stars, perceived by the naked eye, were thought to be, well, what they appeared to be: lonely, single points of light, isolated by billions of miles. But with better telescopes, astronomers in the seventeenth century had first noticed that some of these single dots were really two stars orbiting each other, or some common point, but in any case swirling close together. And now scientists had discovered that the vast majority, over 80 percent, of stars in the universe were these binary systems. Some were even multiple systems, three or more stars bound up in the same complex gravity.

  He could hear Sara breathing beside him, and he reached over to take her hand. It was surprisingly warm. But he knew he shouldn’t be so surprised. She—this woman he loved—was a great inferno of carbon and nitrogen and water, orbiting his own glowing, celestial body as it, in turn, circled hers.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many stars,” she said, as awed as he was by the wide, bright swath of the Milky Way, stretching above them from one end of the valley to the other. Silently they stood up and, eyes fixed on the heavens, lofted Irene’s urn from the damp earth. He held the base while Sara unscrewed the lid. Together they tipped it into the soft wind that remained of the earlier storm. In the dark they could barely see each other or the ashes as they swirled away, but they felt the urn getting lighter as they emptied it. George believed that on some microscopic level the last elemental traces of Irene would change this spot and, even if imperceptibly, affect all that would someday grow from it, just as surely as she had forever changed his life and all their lives.

  Sara closed her eyes and wished Jacob and William were there with them. She began, silently, ordering all the events of the day into a story that she and George would soon tell many times. She opened her eyes and looked at her husband. He was looking up at the dippers and the North Star. He was staring into the dark place where, though the light hadn’t yet reached them, 237 Lyrae V had long ago collapsed and formed a new bright white star. And George, just like the explorers of centuries past, felt the warming chill of knowing just how large it all really was and exactly where he was inside it.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered to Sara, taking her hand. “I can find our way back from here.”

  THE CITY THAT IS

  See gray threads of streets, dotted with the green of trees off the lanes. See glass rising, indistinguishable from sky. See aluminum herds coming down the West Side Highway and gulls circling the Battery. The ferry is just easing in. See the firecracker glow of M&M’s advertisements on Broadway, where the Levi’s are ten stories high. See the pine tar on the telephone poles and the chalk-dusty cobblestones. See where the careful grid begins to go off in angles, because part of this city is from before it was even a city. See, everywhere, there are children here. Everything is two or three times bigger in their eyes. See a takeout bag gusting up into a traffic light. There may be snow there, below, crusted to the curb. Or weeds driving up between the acts, to live an inch, or two, before the parade of dogs and passing feet. We are almost always about to touch. To be hit by bicycle messengers or buses. See how soon we get lost. See soot on silver, Post No Bills, snaking subway cars. Tunnels below tunnels below tunnels. See the copper skeleton city inside of it, all pipes and wires. We have this much in common. These belong to us all, like the blankets of green forests that hold pearl lakes inside and the rivers that cradle us and all that sprawls beyond them. See? It is a different city than the one we knew. It changed while we weren’t looking, and while we were. We will never really understand how it changed because of us. Our words and motions moved its air and entered its vines. Still, my city is not your city, and neither of ours is the same as the city that belongs to the rest of them. To all the people elsewhere, remembering, or expecting it. There is a city that none of us knows at all. Why there is a dinosaur on the side of that building. Where all the yoga pants come from. What happened on that street corner fifty years before we were born. How that empty sports bar down the block stays in business. If anyone anywhere owns that bike that’s been locked to the speed limit sign for the past nine months. There is the city where we are falling in love, and the city where we have lost all hope, and the city that never lets us down. There is the city that comes at us from all sides and knocks us down into puddles of something (we’d rather not know what). There is the city beneath the paint that coats this city. There is the city we step out into on warm days with no place in particular we have to be. Had you forgotten? There are cities where we are still young and cities where we have become very old. There are cities with just me, and cities with only you. There are cities that have vanished completely. There are cities we speak of very highly. There is a city we can never go back to, and a city we have never left and a city that was never built, and even one city that we all, each of us, believe in, that never fully leaves us.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks are owed to the dozens of supporters, believers, and friends who have helped me to write this book: Chelsea Lindman and everyone at Sanford Greenburger; my editors at Viking, Chris Russell, Beena Kamlani, and, formerly, Maggie Riggs; and my publicist, Angie Messina.

  Thank you to Leah, Joshua, my parents Dennis and Deborah, Oma, Jonathan, Dennis and Susan, Hanna, Chris, Theodore and all the rest of my family.

  I owe a grea
t debt to the kind eyes and hearts of Elizabeth Perrella, Andrew Carter Dodds, Neil Bardhan, Jerry Wu, Jill Rafson, Robin Ganek, Rachel Panny, Emily Ethridge, John Proctor, Jordan Dollak, Michael Levy, Andrew Bodenrader, Dongwon Song, Yaron Kaver, Dr. Aaron Prosnitz, Dr. Joel Green of the University of Texas at Austin and the Space Telescope Science Institute, Katie Peyton, and to Tom Mansell and Lenn Thompson of the New York Cork Report. Additional thanks to the good people at Bien Cuit bakery for many vital refills.

  I am indebted as well to the support and generosity of Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence University, the New York Public Library, my tremendous colleagues at SUNY New Paltz College, the PEN/New England Organization, The UCross Foundation, and the Sherwood Anderson Foundation.

  This book was written in loving memory of my sister, Jennifer, who pushed me first.

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