What You Can See from Here

by Mariana Leky

  The optician was measuring his field of vision. In front of him he saw nothing other than light gray with a friendly red spot in the center of a limited area the shape of a half sphere. At the edge of his field of vision were smaller, flashing dots, which the optician indicated he had seen. Sticking his head in the hemisphere and confirming that the flashing dots were there reassured him.

  Selma passed Elsbeth’s house. Elsbeth, also still in black, stood in her garden with a leaf blower. She held the blower up to the apple tree. It was April and the leaves were accordingly young.

  “What are you doing?” Selma shouted over the roar of the leaf blower.

  Elsbeth did not turn to face her. “I want time to pass,” she shouted. “I want it to be autumn already. The autumn after the autumn after this one.”

  It didn’t occur to the leaves to let themselves be blown off their branches. They were young and strong. They didn’t understand what Elsbeth had in mind and didn’t feel in the least bit threatened; in fact, they felt like they were getting a blow-dry.

  “Put it on turbo,” Selma suggested. Elsbeth didn’t hear her.

  “And what are you doing?” she called loudly without turning around.

  “I’m carrying Luisa,” Selma shouted back, and Elsbeth answered, “That’s good, too.”

  Selma nodded at Elsbeth’s back and continued on to Palm’s house.

  * * *

  Selma had briefly considered letting the dogs starve. Palm had not fed them for days. Since Martin’s death he had not left his house, not even for the funeral. Selma had wanted to bring him to the funeral since she suspected he would not come. She went to his house. Famished, the dogs bayed even louder than usual. She had slipped past them, knocked, and rung the bell, but Palm had not answered the door.

  “Palm, you have to come,” she had finally yelled up from under his kitchen window. Then she had cleared her throat and added, “You have to carry his coffin.” As she shouted this last sentence, she had squeezed her eyes shut. Such a sentence should never be shouted; even in a whisper it would be too loud. “There’s no other way, Palm,” Selma had shouted then, twice.

  Palm had not opened the door and so there was another way.

  * * *

  Now, standing before Palm’s house, Selma briefly thought of going back to Elsbeth, back to the optician, so they could help her with the bologna slices. She decided it was too much trouble.

  Selma always found letting others help her to be too much trouble. The worst part, she thought, was thanking them afterward. She would rather fall from an unstable ladder, get an electric shock from a lamp cable or an unelectrified shock from an engine cover, suffer lower back pain from carrying a heavy bag, or break through the floor in her apartment than accept assistance and have to express gratitude afterward.

  Bending forward, Selma stretched out her arms and poured the contents of her bag onto the ground. Then she crouched down, trying to keep me from slipping off her back. Selma’s disks also tried to keep from slipping, and even then, her face bright red and her disks indignant with the strain, she still found it all less trouble than saying thank you. She threw the slices of bologna over Palm’s fence and the dogs went crazy.

  Selma held me tight and stood up. She sighed, and her disks sighed with her in chorus. She went to the back of the house. The basement door was unlocked.

  She climbed up the basement stairs and crossed the kitchen, trying not to see the half-eaten toast with Nutella that still lay on a plate. She went through the living room, trying to overlook the Obelix pajamas still draped over the back of the sofa, and went into the bedroom.

  Palm’s bedroom had probably not been aired for years. There was an enormous dark wardrobe next to a dark double bed with two mattresses, one yellow and bare, the other covered with rumpled sheets and pillows on the foot of the bed. The room was dim. Selma turned on the light.

  Palm lay on the floor, on his side. He was asleep, his head resting on Martin’s schoolbag.

  The schoolbag had been found a hundred meters down the tracks. The bag was almost intact, only the right shoulder strap torn.

  Selma sat on the bed on the rumpled side. She shifted me from her back, over her shoulder, and onto her lap. My head was cradled in her elbow. Selma could feel her heart beating irregularly. These days, she often felt her heart take a step out of line, like the optician when his inner voices accosted him.

  She looked at Palm asleep; she looked at me asleep. Two broken hearts and one faulty one, Selma thought. Then she thought of Iron Henry in the fairy tale and of his heart, and let herself fall backward onto Palm’s blankets, which smelled acrid—of schnapps and rage.

  The ceiling lamp hung right above Selma’s head. In its bowl lay a dead moth with its dead moth heart. Selma closed her eyes.

  A fixed afterimage appeared behind her eyelids in which what was actually dark appeared light and what was actually light appeared dark. She saw Heinrich walk down the street and turn back, as he always did, to wave one last, one very last time. Selma looked at the image on the inside of her eyelids, at the stopped motion of the very, very last wave, the frozen smile, and Heinrich’s dark hair was light and his light eyes very dark.

  Selma lay there for a long time. Then she lifted me back over her shoulder. She swayed briefly and her heart stepped to the right. As she stood, Selma pulled the blanket from the bed, dragged it behind her until it covered Palm’s stomach and legs. She let go.

  * * *

  “You have to put her down for a bit,” the optician said.

  “I should examine her,” my father said.

  “She should eat something,” my mother said.

  “You’re already all crooked,” Marlies said.

  “You should eat something, too,” Elsbeth said.

  Everyone said something, except for me, Palm, and Alaska.

  “She won’t let go,” Selma said. And: “She’ll wake soon.” And: “She’s not very heavy.” That last one was a lie. I was as heavy as a boulder.

  Selma decided to do exactly what she always did, because otherwise she’d run the risk of never doing anything again, and at some point, as with the dead retired mailman, her blood and mind would congeal, she’d die or go crazy, neither of which Selma could afford to do at the moment.

  Because it was Thursday and that’s what she did every Thursday, she turned on her television series. I slept on her lap. In the series, at the very beginning, a completely unknown man in a very good mood entered the gate of the Victorian manor house and was greeted by Melissa as Matthew, even though he was not Matthew. Selma scooted closer to the screen and opened her eyes wide, but it truly wasn’t Matthew. He just vaguely resembled him. Apparently the actor who had played Matthew didn’t want to anymore, or had been hired away to another series, or had died and so at the last minute they’d had to find someone similar to play Matthew.

  Selma turned off the television and started writing a letter to the producer. She wrote that this was not acceptable. She wrote that if someone had died or been hired away, he couldn’t simply be replaced by someone else who pretended to have always been Matthew. One shouldn’t stoop to such cheap solutions, not even on American-Victorian landed estates. It’s undignified.

  Selma offered her explanation over three closely written pages. Then the optician came over and found Selma at the kitchen table, writing her letter with me across her lap like a blanket. Selma looked up at him and he handed her a handkerchief.

  * * *

  Because Selma wanted to get back to doing what she always did as soon as possible, she went for a walk in the Uhlheck at six-thirty. “Come, Alaska,” she said, but Alaska didn’t want to; in fact, in those days Alaska also wanted to do nothing but sleep.

  The optician followed Selma to the Uhlheck in case I slipped or her disks did. The optician looked at the ground. His eyes stung from crying, from too many field-of-vision tests. Besides, he felt there was nothing left worth seeing. The symphonic beauty he had always tried to get Ma
rtin and me to appreciate had been retired to storage like an old theater backdrop.

  On the third evening, it started to rain over the Uhlheck. As a precaution, the optician had brought along Selma’s raincoat and rain hat, a transparent bonnet with white polka dots. He draped the raincoat over me on Selma’s back, gently placed the rain hat on her head so nothing would happen to her hairdo, and tied the bands carefully under her chin. Then they started walking again, but after a short distance Selma stopped in her tracks and the optician, who hadn’t expected this, ran into her from behind. Selma swayed and the optician held her tightly. He tried to stabilize her and me with his own body as he had the sawn post of the hunting blind.

  “To be honest, she’s becoming rather heavy,” Selma said.

  She turned around and started for home. For the first time since the invention of the world, she didn’t want to walk for the full thirty minutes in the Uhlheck. The optician was surprised when Selma didn’t climb the hill toward her house but continued downhill until she reached the general store. She stopped in front of the cigarette vending machine.

  “Do you have any change?” she asked, and shifted me over her shoulder and farther down her back. My head hung just above her rear end.

  Selma had smoked when Heinrich was still alive. In many of the gray photographs of her and Heinrich, they both had a cigarette in the corner of their mouths and if they didn’t, Selma claimed, it was only because they laughed so hard the cigarettes had fallen out. Selma had stopped smoking when she was pregnant with my father and had become one of those people who wave their hands reproachfully and cough indignantly when anyone is smoking any distance away.

  “Selma, now, this is no reason to start smoking again,” the optician said, and as soon as the sentence was out of his mouth, he knew it was the most idiotic sentence said in a long while, and this at a time hardly lacking in idiotic sentences. It was more idiotic than the one about time healing all wounds, more idiotic than the one about God working in mysterious ways.

  “Then give me a better reason,” Selma said. “Give me just one reason in the entire world that is better than this one.”

  “I’m sorry,” the optician said.

  He took his change purse from his jacket pocket and handed her four marks. Selma inserted them into the vending machine and pulled the handle of the first silver-colored compartment. It didn’t open. First Selma pulled, then she yanked the handle. Then she yanked all the other handles, my head bouncing side to side on her back. None of the compartments opened.

  “Piece-of-shit vending machine,” Selma said.

  “Let it go,” the optician said, “I have some.”

  “You do? But you don’t even smoke.”

  “Apparently I do,” the optician said.

  He took a pack and his lighter from his trouser pocket, tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Selma. Selma inhaled deeply, all the way to her belly button. She leaned her free shoulder against the vending machine and closed her eyes.

  “Glorious,” she said.

  Selma smoked the entire cigarette leaning against the vending machine with her eyes closed and her see-through rain hat on her head, and the optician watched her. Selma’s beauty was the only beauty that hadn’t been packed up and taken away, and a dozen opening lines from the letters flashed through his mind during the span of the cigarette. He looked into the darkening sky. Above the optician spread a vast expanse in which bright points would soon appear, and there wasn’t any way whatsoever to indicate that they had been seen.

  Selma opened her eyes, threw the cigarette butt on the ground, and crushed it thoroughly. “I had no idea you smoked,” she said.

  The optician almost replied, “There are quite a few things you don’t know, Selma, quite a few,” but his inner voices accosted him and he swayed to the right for a half second. “Definitely not a good time,” the voices said, and for once, they were right.

  * * *

  Selma and the optician returned to our house. Selma swung me from her shoulder to her stomach—by now she’d had quite a bit of practice—and stretched out with me on her bed.

  The optician sat on the edge of the bed. He had never sat there before. Selma’s bed, the bed in which she occasionally dreamed of an okapi, was narrow. A flowery quilted coverlet lay over a puffy duvet.

  Selma switched on the lamp on her night table. A folding traveling alarm clock in brown imitation leather sat next to it, ticking loudly. Over her bed hung a painting in a gold frame that showed a boy with a shawm sitting happily among his lambs.

  If the optician had looked at the painting, he would have noticed that the boy looked like he had never been accosted by anything or anyone. If the optician had had eyes for anything other than Selma and me, he would have found the room to be very beautiful: the diarrhea-colored alarm clock that ticked too loudly, the large flower-patterned quilt, the fat lambs, the bronze bedside lamp with a frosted glass shade shaped like a gnome’s hat; the optician’s hidden love was so vast, he would have found all this to be sublime. But he only saw Selma and me, lying on her bed facing each other, my arm around her neck.

  Selma looked at the optician. He nodded.

  “Luisa,” she whispered, “you have to let go. It’s time.”

  She took hold of my hands and they relaxed their grip. I turned onto my back without opening my eyes.

  “Is everyone still here?” I asked.

  Selma and the optician exchanged glances, and Selma invented the world for the second time.

  “No, not everyone is still here. But the world is. The whole world minus one person.”

  “Alaska isn’t big enough,” I said.

  Selma and the optician exchanged glances again. The optician gave her a puzzled look and Selma formed a word silently with her lips, which the optician couldn’t understand. So she formed the word a second time, and because the optician still didn’t get it, she finally grimaced, forming the word with her entire face: pain. She looked so comical, the optician almost burst out laughing.

  “You’re right,” Selma said. “Alaska isn’t nearly big enough.”

  “He’s also not heavy enough,” I said. “What’s the heaviest animal in the world?”

  “An elephant, I believe,” Selma answered, “but that wouldn’t be enough either.”

  “We need ten elephants,” I said, and the optician cleared his throat.

  “I beg your pardon, but that’s not correct,” he said. “The heaviest animal in the world is not the elephant, but the blue whale. A fully grown blue whale can weigh up to two hundred tons. There’s nothing heavier in the world.”

  The optician leaned toward me. He was glad there was something he could explain at a moment when sound explanations were in short supply.

  “A blue whale’s tongue alone weighs as much as an elephant, and a blue whale weighs fifty times as much as its own tongue. Just imagine.”

  Selma looked at the optician. “How do you know that?” she whispered.

  “No idea,” he whispered back.

  “It sounds made-up,” whispered Selma, and the optician whispered, “But I believe it’s true.”

  “If you only weigh fifty times as much as your tongue, then you’re pretty light,” I said.

  “Not if you’re a blue whale,” Selma said.

  “With a single breath, a blue whale could blow up two thousand balloons,” the optician said.

  Selma gave him a look. He shrugged. “It’s true,” he said.

  “Two thousand balloons aren’t very heavy either,” I said. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Do what?” the optician asked.

  “Blow up two thousand balloons with the single breath of a blue whale.”

  “I don’t know,” the optician said. “Maybe to have decorations. For a celebration.”

  “Why would anyone want to celebrate?” I asked.

  Selma stroked my forehead again and again. Her small fingers occasionally brushed my closed eyelids.

  “T
he heart of a blue whale only beats two to six times a minute, presumably because it’s so heavy,” the optician explained. “A blue whale’s heart is also unimaginably heavy. It weighs more than a ton.”

  “Martin could lift it,” I said.

  “He could even lift ten fully grown blue whales,” Selma said, “all at the same time. Ten fully grown blue whales piled one on top of the other. Heavy tongues and hearts included.”

  “Martin is not fully grown,” I said.

  “That would be almost two thousand tons,” the optician calculated, and Selma said, “He could do it easily.”

  “I don’t want to grow up,” I said. For a while, the only sound was the ticking of the alarm clock.

  “I know,” Selma finally said. “But we’d be very happy if you decided to grow up anyway.”

  “That’s true,” the optician said. He cleared his throat several times, but whatever was stuck in his throat would not be cleared. The optician gingerly stroked my cheek, slowly and gingerly, as if he were sounding out a particularly difficult word in a sugar package horoscope. “You have no idea how happy we’d be, Luisa, if you decided to grow up after all. My dear child,” he said quickly and softly, the way you rush to finish saying something before you start to cry and can’t say any more.

  I opened my eyes. Selma and the optician smiled at me in the dim light of the bedside lamp. Tears were streaming down the optician’s face. They rolled out from under his glasses and down his cheeks.

  I looked around. Selma’s bedroom, the entire world, was as small as the stomach of a blue whale. Selma stroked my forehead, again and again.

  And again.

  IT’S LIKE THIS

  Frederik had appeared six months earlier, the day Alaska disappeared. The previous evening Selma hadn’t closed the door properly, and in the morning it stood wide open and Alaska was gone.