He lifted up his arm to create a space for her, and she snuggled into it. He was getting hard, but it would fade. He felt a bit offended that she was so opposed to sex, had so clearly put them into the friend-zone, but somehow it was also comforting to have this clarity.
“Are you afraid of death?” She said this abruptly, in a happy-teasing way, proving her point about conversation getting more real when two people were lying down.
“Sure.”
“Do you believe in some afterlife?”
“I’m in a process of investigation.”
“I don’t. Believe in an afterlife. For one reason, and it’s not the usual reason about whether there’s a god or not. I just think that when people invent some other world that’s brighter and shinier than this one, what happens is that they’re not paying attention to this world. And they mess it up. I don’t believe in an afterlife because it would take my attention off of this life. This . . . sphere.”
He felt a pang, then. A flitter of emotion for this woman. Perhaps she felt it register in his body because she said, “Good night, Sergio. I usually wake up at around two and wander around for a bit. Old habit. Feels like an ancient habit, in fact. Checking on things.” Her voice was very matter-of-fact, her body a bit more tense. “Then I come back to bed. If you’re here in the morning, cool. We can have a short breakfast together before you go. Then I need to study. If you get up and go, though, that’s totally fine. Just turn the latch on the doorknob so it locks. There’s a bunch of fruit in the bowl by the fridge. Help yourself. It’s weird, I know.” She gave him a small squeeze and relaxed again.
He took a deep breath. He thought of Sy and where he might be right now. Perhaps Sy’s DNA was floating around, perhaps it was in some lovely place with clouds. It made him sad that he didn’t know and wouldn’t ever know. So much of life seemed to be about pinging around, totally unsettled, and trying to make peace with being unsettled. He wanted to feel comfortable, just for this night, at least, and he’d have to work a bit to get there. He wanted this to work. He wanted to prove her right; that such a thing was possible. He didn’t want this night, or his life, to careen about swiftly and in an uncontrolled way anymore, pinging here and there. Now that he closed his eyes, they weren’t stinging, and better yet, he could focus on the weight of her head, the smell of her hair, the presence of her form, all bits of consoling evidence that this night had gone in a different direction than all the others that had come before.
Chapter Seventeen
Debitum Naturae
Zach bent in front of the woodstove, feeding it dry branches, and considered how, throughout the course of this one day, he would come into a new and final phase of his life by gazing in three directions. Up, to the sky. Straight ahead, at a woman’s eyes. Down, at a box containing a brain. This was the day that would shape the rest of his days. The day to launch a new era. It sounded grandiose but there it was. A simple, quiet fact. He could feel the sensation cawing in his throat.
It was so very cold out—really very cold—and he straightened his knees with effort and stood in front of the warmth. The dark outside was astounding. Antoinette would be over by six so that they could drive down to the mouth of the canyon before the sun came up, and together, they’d be looking back up, counting the species as they moved down the mountain.
First, though, Dora’s brain.
He peeked in on the two pots of chili he’d had simmering all night—one vegetarian, one meat, he wanted everyone to be happy—and then he stood above the white cardboard box on the kitchen table. He’d retrieved it yesterday from the mortician down in town, but yesterday was dreary and ruined. Today was the day. So dark out, still, and full of promise.
He cut open the box with his pocketknife and pulled out another box. He stopped to add a log, now that the sticks were burning, and poured himself a cup of tea, now that the water was hot. He cut open the second box. Inside was a white block of Styrofoam, and it took some time to work the tight-fitted, squeaking mass out. At one point, he had to resort to stabbing parts of it away so that he could work his fingers into it enough to get a grip. It were as if Dora was tormenting him with one last difficulty, refusing even now to show herself.
Finally, he cut the tape holding the two blocks of white and they fell apart to reveal a plastic bucket. That surprised him. It looked like something cookie dough would come in, the kind kids at the school sold for fundraisers. He’d expected a glass jar, or something classier, and smaller. He didn’t like it, this white plastic. Cheap and thin, not worthy of a brain.
He looked out the window at the single strand of white lights spiraled up the bird feeder, each covered with a glob of new snow, and which he’d left burning all night to mark the occasion, the start of this Bird Count, undoubtedly the best week of the year, full as it was with camaraderie and binoculars and plumage and ears tuned for vocalizations. And surprises. This week was always filled with surprises. Perhaps it was wrong to think so, but it was lovely that Dora wasn’t around to complain about it all.
Peeling the lid off the plastic bucket also proved difficult. When he dug his fingernails under the plastic and pulled, the plastic pulled back and re-hinged itself to the bucket; when he re-pulled that part up, another part re-hinged itself. He had to use both hands, holding the bucket down with his elbows until the plastic gave way. This growing old stuff was for the birds, he was fond of saying, but the younger version of him couldn’t have managed this plastic any better.
The brain was stacked in slices. It was the entire brain, for sure, and vaguely held the expected shape of a human brain, only stacked a little incorrectly, like a Jenga game that was starting to tilt.
“What the hell,” he said. “I thought you’d be floating in formaldehyde. I thought you’d be in something.”
There was the smell of chemicals, to be sure, but the brain was just sitting there, cold and alone. He pulled at the skin on his throat, and then noticed he was doing it and let it go. It was something Dora had once noticed about him, that he did that when stressed, when he needed more air. It’s true she’d known him in ways like that, better than any human ever would.
It’s just not what he’d expected, this brain. It felt disgraceful, and that was not his intent at all. Somehow, it was an act of love. He wanted to pick up a piece, but thought that perhaps he should be wearing gloves. He closed his eyes to consider what he had on hand, and all he could think of were the yellow ones he wore when he cleaned the toilet, and that didn’t seem right. He could stab the first slice with a fork, but that didn’t seem right, either. Finally, he scowled at himself—to conjure courage—and reached out and picked up the top slice of his wife’s brain with his fingertips.
It was cold. And spongy and wet and heavy, much heavier than he would have thought. He held it out in front of him. Breathed out slowly. It looked like a thick slice of a mushroom, he decided, a very meaty gray mushroom. With spaces and grooves, as one would expect, like the picture of brains in magazines. It was denser than he would have thought.
“Hi, Dora.” He cleared his throat. Started again. “This is a little strange, I realize. No disrespect is intended. I just wanted to see you, felt I owed it to you.” He couldn’t stand holding it any longer and he put the slice back on top of the others and pressed his fingertips into his jeans. Now he leaned over and spoke down to the entire stack of slices. “Your results came back. Was indeed Alzheimer’s. The report indicated plaques and tangles consistent with Alzheimer’s, that’s what it said. Although I guess we knew that. But anyway, it’s confirmed. That’s what you had.”
He imagined he could push his hand right into that brain, smash it all up in his fingers. Knead it like bread dough. Or stab at it with a knife. To get it back for the last decade of hell, pure hell, for the both of them. Ever since that day she’d put a hamburger right on the stove top, with no pan beneath it, and he’d taken her down into the town and the doctor had said, Dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, want to t
ry Aricept?
But even before then, too. This brain that had caused her depression. And therefore her meanness, her blankness, her lack of curiosity or wonder or joy, the one that had taken away a substantial portion of both their lives. “There is no shame in chemistry,” he used to console her, and that was true, but still, they both hated this brain, and its disruption of chemicals and incomplete firings, which had made a life so difficult, so hard for the both of them.
She used to clutch her head and rock back and forth and moan, “I hate this brain, I hate this brain,” and he did too. It was her brain, they used to joke sadly, that had ended their faith in any god, ended any belief that they owed a debt to a force who allowed such suffering.
Headlights galloped across the dark outside. Antoinette was early. “Now what do I do with you, Dora?” He quickly pressed the lid back on the tub, put the tub in the cardboard box, put the box on the floor, and washed his hands, twice, just in time to open the door.
Antoinette barged in, big and radiant, clapping her gloved hands together. Her graying black hair sprung out from a red hat and ran down her back in a river. She was wearing dark red lipstick, which was a bit crooked, but which gave her a certain spark that was matched by the whir in her eyes.
“Dios mío, it’s cold out there. Roads are a bit slick. But not windy, and that’s all we could have hoped for. Give me something warm. If you’ve got it handy. We’ve got a few minutes. You’re all set, yes?” Her eyes were scanning the table, where he had just set out the Rare Bird Documentation Forms, the General Instructions & Information, and best of all, the Tally Sheets, with their long lists of species. “One hundred species this year. That’s what we want. Last year, we had ninety-eight. Isn’t that right? I didn’t check my email yesterday. You sent the map out to everyone? Everyone’s ready?”
“Good morning,” he said, handing her a cup of tea. “Yes, usual crowd, mapped out the usual way. I sent out Sibley’s website link for guidance on distinguishing the geese this year. That’s important.” He glanced at the box on the floor. “I’ve got Dora’s brain here. Want to see it?”
For the first time, she settled. “Well, no.” She blinked at him, then down at the box. “I’m surprised they let you have it. Aren’t tissues regulated? Can everyone just go around getting the brains of their spouses?”
He pulled at the skin on his throat. “Well, maybe it was a bit illegal. I requested it back, after they did the study to confirm Alzheimer’s. They could release it to the coroner, who can release it to the mortician. You know, for reburial with the body.”
“Sanders? Down in town?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Bury it, I suppose. Near where I let her ashes go. I wanted to see it first.”
“Zach, some people would find that a bit disturbing. She’s been dead, what, eight months?”
He shrugged. “It takes a long time to study a brain, I guess.” He liked the way she said his name. With the small undercurrent of an old accent. He liked that she was chubby and brown-eyed and full of life. Round with life. He found all of it exotic and new and beautiful, and liked looking at her for a few extra moments when she didn’t know she was being observed.
He shrugged. “I know it. But I wanted to see it. The report came back, she did have Alzheimer’s.”
“I guess we knew that.”
“But it’s nice to have it confirmed.”
“Yes. You like data.”
“Brains weigh three pounds. Which is a lot, if you think about it. Red-tailed hawks can weigh about that much.”
She put out her hand to touch his shoulder blade, and it lingered there, on his flannel shirt. “It’ll be nice to go out this year without her. You know, it was just hard.” She rubbed her hand up and down on his spine. “I just mean, it was hard to keep her occupied and quiet, hard to count the birds. She didn’t like any of it.”
He stared out the kitchen window at the sky. At this new day. It was still black with the smallest blur of light way far south. He cleared his throat. “It was good seeing you at the funeral last month. At Sy’s funeral, I mean. It will be strange for everyone this year, being in that same meadow where he died. ”
She had taken back her hand quickly, as if she’d suddenly realized what she’d been doing, and now had it cupped below her teacup. “I know. But we need to include that territory.” She paused. “It’s people dying that brings the living closer. More room for them to make connections. That Sy. We’re all still angry with him, I’m sure. But at least he reminded us to take care.” She caught his eyes, then looked at the box, raised an eyebrow, shook her head.
He considered it as well. “I thought it would be floating in formaldehyde. Like that brain in a jar I saw as a kid in that museum in Chicago.” He added a heavy log to the fire, with the idea it would burn slowly and still be heating the place when everyone returned for lunch. “But no, it’s just sitting in a bucket. I think it is soaked in the stuff. But I should keep it cold, right? The room is getting warmer. I’ll take it out and put it on the picnic table. No, maybe in the shed. Nothing will bother it there.”
Her smile came back. “No one is going to want to know about a brain and still eat lunch here, I’ll tell you that much. As our coordinator for Bird Count, you have an obligation to feed us. We’re all freezing our tuchuses off for you, after all.”
“It’s not for me. It’s for the birds, for nature. You all love it as much as I do.”
She winked at him, and it seemed to him that she was nonplussed by life’s oddnesses, that they only made her softer and more curious, and that such a take on life was her particular grace.
He glanced out the window at the dim glow. It was just so far south. It always surprised him just how far the sun went in winter, so very far away before starting the path back.
The cold was to be expected, but it was still hard to endure. They got out of her car on County Road 27 where the creek bed ran down the foothills. There were clusters of cottonwoods and rabbit brush and wild plums, all in hibernation, waiting. There were a few houses and acreages dotted alongside this road and Vreeland’s lower corrals, and from here, if they turned completely around, they could see the cluster of Moon’s Restaurant and the enclave of trailer homes around it.
This was the lowest territory of the Blue Moon Mountain, as low on the mountain a person could go and still consider himself a part of the mountain community, and thus the lowest area he was responsible for as the count compiler. Some folks liked living here, at the edge, closest to town. He preferred it farther up, tucked in the woods, like certain birds, the ones that preferred to nest and raise their young up high and only came down to feed. The Steller’s jays, the hooded juncos, the Townsend’s solitaires.
Antoinette had her clipboard with the species list and was rifling through some papers. Immediately, in the flush of soft light, they spotted two kestrels, three house sparrows, and one tree sparrow, which Antoinette penciled in on the tally sheet. It was quiet, then, except for the occasional ding or creak of a piece of metal fencing or a faraway rooftop. Funny how little sun it took to start the warming. Funny how one never noticed the sounds of warming until one was really listening.
They both stood leaning against the car, looking west, toward the mountains, in silence. There was nothing. Good. It was due diligence to get here before the birds, before the sun was at the angle that would send them into motion down the corridor of creek bed. Once they came, it would be a flurry, a flood of motion.
“Are we counting like we did last year?”
“Why not,” he said, stomping his feet, hoping to dissipate the ache. “You do the clicker, I’ll estimate in groups of ten. Then we’ll compare.”
“It’d be nice if they’d fly a little high, so we can see them against the sky. Easier to count that way. My eyesight gets worse each year. That’s what this Bird Count reminds me.” But she said it in a happy way. He was again
struck by her burbly joy, some internal happy setting that she didn’t have to work for. He believed he had a bit of that, but he wouldn’t mind absorbing extra from her. He felt sorry she was so cold, though; her breath wisped in front of her face and she pulled her scarf tighter.
He heard the caw of a crow and his eyes drifted right, toward it, but he didn’t see anything. Far away, someone at the Vreelands’ was dropping rotomill for the cows, and the smell of it bloomed slowly. He wondered if it was Ollie or Lillie; perhaps it was even Korina, since both Ollie and Lillie wanted to do Bird Count. He wondered who would be minding the store, if Violet went out. In any case, the rotomill smelled a little like the brain, and he felt sorry for leaving Dora in the dusty shed, cold and alone, and also sorry he had spent his life obligated to someone so opposite of the warm creature standing next to him now.
Down the road, he could see the glow of headlights. Now that it was getting lighter, they were hardly visible, but he could recognize the distant sound and knew it was Wendell’s old truck. Wendell and Flannery. An unlikely a pair as ever; a stodgy Libertarian conspiracy theorist and a gorgeous gay blond, and it was exactly that sort of thing that made him love this day so much. After all, it seemed sad to gather the community only for funerals; why not a day of joy and surprise?
Antoinette leaned against him a little, the sleeves of their down coats whispering against each other. “Who’d you put where, on the mountain?”
“Well, that’s Wendell and Flannery, and they’re on the territory north of us. Thayne and Celeste are to the west. Lillie’s doing the Vreeland property, probably with Ollie or Violet, depending on who is doing chores. And I have Ruben and Jess near their home, up the highest. That’s some tough hiking, but they’re young and strong.”
The Blue Hour Page 18