The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  He had weed in the glove compartment. Might there be a stray Ativan or two in there as well? The thing to do was slog around to the uphill side, the passenger side, reach through the window, and feel around in the glove compartment for whatever he could find. But wouldn’t you know it? He got partway around the Mercedes, and the whole car seemed to shudder and tremble. Billy watched it start into another drop—it was as if the car were shaking its wheels free of the mire—and then down the grade it rumbled, through the mud and across the grass, sliding to a rest at last in a patch of milkweed at the foot of the hill.

  He felt a raindrop, and another. The clouds were not in sight yet, but Billy could sense the weight of low pressure bearing down. An emerald light was in the air. The birds and other animals had gone quiet; the world was still, as it can be when bad weather is coming. He was thinking of Mary. By the time he’d managed to have sex with Mary, back in high school—she was a senior and he was a junior, and that fact alone was thrilling—she’d already had one abortion and one marriage proposal.

  He half walked, half slid down the hill. The Mercedes was sitting in a gulch between the woods and the embankment. He heard running water again—the creek had to be close. He reached gently into his pocket and took out his phone. His hands were a cut-up mess. The garage he used for the Mercedes was on the other side of Charlottesville, close to Julia and Mark’s farm, and, anyway, too far for a tow truck to come. Could he drive back up to the road? It didn’t look to Billy as if there’d be much room to maneuver.

  Daily life’s frustrations, even the big ones, no longer ruled him, not the way they had for a long time in his life. He’d been psychotic with agitation that had grown from his grief, and it was hard for him to remember what that had been like, exactly: not the grief—he had plenty of that still—but the urge to die. He’d got all but there. He’d had the Browning loaded. He’d had it ready and at hand, a few times.

  He smelled storm. He might be able to drive for a while beside the road. The sun was high. Billy put his phone in his pocket and got back in the Mercedes. The car seemed all right. He drove slowly. He was in a wide but navigable trench. It wasn’t bad driving. The trench curved slowly around to the right, and then came to a straight section that reminded Billy of the Roman road that he and Julia had walked a length of during that difficult vacation in Italy, the winter before she left.

  They’d gone to see the paintings and frescoes of Tiepolo. Billy had become vocal about Tiepolo after seeing Bacchus and Ariadne in Washington, and Julia had got into him, too. After Christmas in Rome, they had taken the train north to Venice, and had spent a week walking around in the cold, searching out churches and palazzos and wandering the Gallerie dell’Accademia, where they had both become enchanted, though for different reasons, with The Rape of Europa. Julia got excited over the distant meeting of clouds and sea in the picture’s right-hand corner, while Billy fixated on the encroaching cloud plume to the left, the spire of pink and gray—it looked to him like a mushroom cloud—exploding upward from behind the rocky outcropping on which Zeus, transformed into a bull, seduces the Phoenician princess Europa, dressed in white and attended by ladies-in-waiting. The cloud threatens to wipe them all out, but Europa and her entourage seem either unconcerned or unaware. She sits enthroned on the back of Zeus. Two other bulls wait nearby. A maid tends to Europa’s hair and another bathes her feet; shepherds and an African are on hand, and putti fly about and urinate from on high, and a black bird perches on a strange little cumulus cloud that has floated in over the princess’s head.

  There was the creek. It came out of the woods and flowed into a concrete drainpipe that tunneled under the road. A stretch near the trees looked fordable. He could angle the car just so, over and between the rocks. Once he got to the other side, though, where was he going to go? Trees pushed against the embankment, and the way was overgrown. Billy nosed the car forward anyway. He felt a curiosity. The undercarriage of the Mercedes was not high, and when the wheels dropped into the water Billy heard and felt the bumper scrape the rocks. He jerked the car, not across but up the creek—maybe he could follow it out into a field or a yard somewhere upstream. The retirement home where his parents had ended their lives was up the way he’d come that morning, not on the little lane but on the bigger road at the end of it, heading down from the hills toward town. He saw lightning in the distance, and peered through the windshield at the dark clouds now crossing the sky over Afton Mountain.

  He turned on the headlights and the wipers.

  In the hospital, he’d had hallucinations. He remembered looking in his bathroom mirror—it was made of metal, not glass—and seeing his face deformed. He’d known better than to believe what he saw, but, on the other hand, he hadn’t known better, far from it: There it had been in front of him, his bent, misshapen skull. Now, as he drove into the forest, Billy recalled that, for a long time, the time of the locked ward and his sick brain and the torn-up suicide notes to Julia, he’d felt the burning. He’d felt it in his temple. It was, somehow, he knew, both imaginary and real, a beckoning, an itch, a need for a bullet. Of course he’d thought always of the Browning, of loading it and getting into position on the living-room floor, or maybe out back in the barn, maybe laying down a tarp first.

  The barn on the hill behind his house—that was where he made his art. When he wasn’t teaching seventh graders how to draw, he made big untidy installations that he referred to as his trash heaps. Along with the rifle and the comics and Julia’s art, he had in the back of the Mercedes a canvas bag with about two dozen cans that he’d saved from trips to the shooting pasture. He was planning to include them in a piece. He needed more, but he didn’t eat much canned food, and his personal use of the materials in his work was crucial to him.

  The thing about Mary was that her limp looked good. It wasn’t a very noticeable limp. One of her legs was shorter than the other. Billy remembered her swaggering down the hall in high school, thirty years before. Her father had been a country doctor, the sort who got out of bed and drove into the hills at all hours to treat people who couldn’t pay or get down the mountain to town. Mary was a year older than Billy, but she’d let him put his hands down her pants. He’d ridden his bike up Route 250, past the Episcopal church, to her house. There was never anyone home but her. She’d been provocative and graceful and unembarrassed. He remembered her standing on her short leg, the other leg propped out at an angle, toes touching the floor, a dancer’s pose.

  What he needed to do was fix up the car. It was a 1958 220S with a white roof and a gray interior, and there had been rust on the body and the chrome and underneath, on the chassis, for a long time. Billy wasn’t a car buff, and didn’t know what this one might be worth cleaned up. People had offered to buy it. He remembered riding in it with his grandfather, who never drove faster than twenty-five miles per hour. His grandfather had told stories, actually, of driving his old Ford up creek beds, back in the thirties.

  Billy urged the car up a mossy rise and over a little waterfall. Branches scraped the roof.

  After Julia left, in his worsening he’d walked and moved as if crushed by some stronger form of gravity. The air had pressed him down, and he could not get out from under it. Some days, he’d curled in a ball on the floor and promised himself that soon, soon, soon—it would be his gift to himself—he’d walk up to the barn and lie down with the rifle.

  The car was swamped. Or it wasn’t, exactly, but the creek had risen and the tires now made a wake. The Mercedes didn’t have much acceleration, and the steering felt loose. Billy powered over a high rock, or maybe a tree root—it was hard to see—then, suddenly, precipitately, the wheels dropped in front and the car slammed down and stopped.

  Billy pressed the gas. The motor raced and the car shook but didn’t move. He gave the engine gas again, and the rear wheels spun, churning the creek and throwing mud. He put the lever in park. Lightning hit, close and loud. Billy reached across the seat, opened the glove compartment, and felt around for
the pot. There was the registration paperwork, and there was a pill bottle, his Ativan; and there were his pliers (he’d recently begun preparing the cans, tearing and disfiguring them before shooting), and the joint and the lighter, and the driving gloves that his grandfather had worn and that Billy’s father had kept in the car after Billy’s grandfather died, and that Billy had left there after his own father died. He took the gloves out and felt how old they were, then worked his hands into them.

  On or off—he wasn’t sure what felt better.

  He put the pills in his shirt pocket, turned off the ignition and the wipers and the lights. He remembered how the misery had bowed him over: He’d gone everywhere, in those days, with his head down, barreling rigidly forward, compounding the pain by moving at all; but when he touched himself to find where the pain was coming from he couldn’t find the spot.

  It was dark in the woods without the headlights. He lit the joint and the car glowed inside. Julia’s paintings were in back. She worked with tiny brushes, and he’d wondered, sometimes, when he saw her at it, what she was thinking while she slowly built up the paint on the canvas. He exhaled smoke and watched the saplings at the edge of the creek bend in the surge.

  She’d talked to him, as they stood together at the Accademia, gazing at The Rape of Europa, about the singular cloud hovering over Europa, its complete non-relation to the more natural-seeming clouds that dominate the painting as a whole, the delicate, pale clouds on the horizon, the spire of darker cloud rising up behind the rocks. “Everything is off in Tiepolo,” she’d said. “Spatial relations don’t cohere. It isn’t simply that people fly with angels through the air. What world are we looking at? The paintings at all points lead the eye toward infinity.” She might have been anticipating his own predicament, his own crisis of perception, when, nine months later, and again the following year, he’d lain on the operating table, crying and holding the nurse’s hand, while the doctors got him ready. The hospital ceiling was white foam tile with fluorescent lights, and the doctors had looked to Billy as if they were levitating beneath them, beneath the lights—as if they, the doctors, had descended from heaven to perform electroconvulsive therapy.

  Someone was coming toward the car. A figure moved between the trees beside the creek. It was a boy carrying an umbrella. He was skinny and wore jeans and no shirt. He stepped down to the bank and splashed across to the car with the umbrella over his head. Billy rolled down the window, and the rain swept in, drenching him.

  “Are you the doctor?” the boy said.

  “Doctor?” Billy said.

  “Luther said he saw car lights. We prayed you’d come. Are you smoking pot?”

  “I’m stuck on this rock,” Billy said.

  “I see that,” the boy said.

  “I was making good progress, and the next thing I knew the wheels were spinning.”

  “Creeks aren’t the best for driving in a storm,” the boy said.

  Billy rolled up the car window. He opened the door and put out his foot. The rock was massive and slick; the creek was about to overtake it. He eased himself out and stood clear of the car. He was still wearing his grandfather’s driving gloves and holding the joint. He lowered one foot into the creek, leaped in, and lunged toward the bank, where his feet sank into the wet earth. “I’m fine,” he said. “I made it.”

  “Don’t you have your doctor’s bag?” the boy asked.

  He looked to be twelve or thirteen, the age of Billy’s students, but Billy didn’t recognize him.

  “It’s our mother,” the boy said.

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s up that way.” He held the umbrella over Billy, who said, “What’s wrong with her?”

  “It’s cancer.”

  “I’m sorry,” Billy said.

  “She’s up here,” the boy said.

  There was no need to lock the car or take the key. Billy put the joint in his shirt pocket with the pills—it would get soaked; he should have left it in the car, but there was nothing he could do about that now—and said, “I doubt I’ll be able to help her. I want you to know that,” and then followed anyway, a few steps behind the boy, to the place where the boy had crossed the creek on his way down. Billy watched the boy wade through the water, and then slogged in after him. The creek here was deep and fast. The car would be all right or not. Billy leaned against the torrent and struggled up onto the bank, and then he and the boy pushed ahead, slipping in the mud and on the mossy ground, pushing branches away from their faces. Once, Billy stumbled, and the boy held the umbrella over him while he got up. The umbrella was torn and bent, and water poured down it onto Billy’s neck.

  They went over a rise, and then walked down along what looked like a lane—maybe the land had been cleared at one time—a grassy, open promenade between the trees. The lane led into a hollow. There was a cabin, a shed, really, with a sinking roof and small square windows and a chimney overtaken by ivy. The cabin featured a porch, though not much was left of that, only a few boards elevated on piled stones, with no steps leading up from the yard to the door. The cabin had two front doors, oddly—one beside the other. Billy didn’t see an actual road, or a car parked nearby, but there was trash littering the ground.

  The boy hopped onto the porch, closed and shook the umbrella, and stomped clay from his shoes. Billy climbed onto the porch—he had to heave himself up—and kicked the red mud off his own heels. The boy pushed open the door on the left. “I brought the doctor,” he called inside.

  “Show him in,” a man answered.

  The boy held the door. Billy had to duck under the frame. Water ran from every part of him. The floor inside was missing in places, and the air felt cold, like a draft from underground. It smelled like the earth. Water dripped through the roof. Two windows, one in the rear and one on the side of the cabin, let in faint light—their panes, if they’d ever had any, were gone.

  Billy’s eyes were adjusting. The cabin seemed bigger from inside than from out. As he came in, he saw, to the left of the door, a tumble of bags and suitcases. A dividing wall ran down the middle of the cabin, splitting the space—that explained the two front doors—and there was an interior door, partway down the dividing wall, leading to the cabin’s right-hand side. The room on the left, the one he was in, might have been ten feet wide by thirteen or fourteen feet deep. The fireplace and the chimney were over in the other half.

  Billy saw a bed pushed up under the window at the back of the cabin. A woman was lying in it, and a man stood over her. The man spoke to the boy on the porch: “Caleb, put down that umbrella and get the doctor something to dry himself.”

  Billy heard the other front door open and close, and he heard the sounds of the boy moving behind the dividing wall. Billy could feel his footfalls traveling through the floorboards.

  “She’s struggling,” the man said to Billy.

  The bed was an old iron thing with a mattress on top. The woman had a coat draped over her and a bundle of clothes for a pillow. Rain spattered the windowsill above the bed but didn’t seem to be getting on her.

  “We’ve moved her from corner to corner all night, except where the floor’s out. The water follows her,” the man explained.

  “It’s been quite the storm,” Billy said.

  He picked his way across the damaged floor to the bedside. His shoes squished.

  “Don’t fall through,” the man said.

  The man was bald and hadn’t shaved—he wore the shadow of a beard. It was hard to tell if he was old, or maybe just Billy’s age, and he spoke with an accent that reminded Billy of the Appalachian mountain speech he’d heard when he was a boy, but which, even so, he couldn’t place—it wasn’t local.

  “I’ll be careful,” Billy said. He felt as if he were seeing through a fog. The splashing rain on the windowsill made a mist in the air, but it was also the pot, deranging his balance, his sense of perspective.

  At the bedside, Billy leaned down and saw the woman shudder beneath the coat that was cover
ing her. Then she was still. The door in the dividing wall opened, and the boy appeared and handed him a damp, dirty piece of cloth, a towel, of sorts.

  “Thank you,” Billy said.

  The man said to the boy, “Go find your brother and tell him the doctor’s arrived.” The boy left the room through the front door. To Billy, the man said, “We didn’t mean to be staying here.”

  They stood over the woman on the bed. Why were there no chairs? Everything looked wrecked and rotten.

  Billy went down on his knees. The man said, “I know there’s nothing to be done,” and knelt, too.

  The woman’s eyes were closed and her mouth was open. Her skin seemed stretched, and her lips were parched. The man told Billy that she’d taken neither food nor water for some time. He and Billy faced each other over her. There was a moment when Billy’s heart raced. The man studied him. Billy looked down. The man said, “You’re not a doctor, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m sorry.”

  “But you’re here.”

  Billy explained, “I teach junior high over in Crozet. I was on my way to the dump to throw some things out.”

  “The dump’s not up here.”

  “The road was blocked. I took the creek and wrecked on the rocks.”

  Billy heard footsteps on the porch. The door opened and the cabin shook as Caleb and his brother came in. The brother was bigger than Caleb, older, and wore a dark shirt. They stood dripping side by side at the foot of the bed, and Billy remembered sitting at his own mother’s deathbed, feeding her a mixture of morphine drops and Ativan, squeezing her hand, and telling her he would miss her, while her breaths came farther and farther apart.

  The woman on the bed inhaled. Her dark hair was fanned out around her head.

  The man told the boys, “I want you two to go down to the creek and bring the doctor’s car.”