In any case, my grandfather was wrong. There was still some hope for me in school, thanks to the recent discovery of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which, according to the people who had discovered it, was responsible for all sorts of misbehavior. I went to see a Dr. Jeremy Ott, who asked me if I had trouble following what people were saying, if I experienced periods of intense anxiety, if I thought about violent acts, if I had ever felt the desire to set persons or objects aflame, if I took drugs, what kind of music I liked to listen to, and why, and whether I ever had trouble following what people were saying. Yes, yes, yes, yes, no, punk rock, because it was so fuckin’ loud, what did you say? I was saved. My mothers enrolled me in St. Hubert’s Prep, which took a charitable view of misbehavior, offered financial aid to half the student body and admitted girls, some of them refugees from Nederland’s sister school, the Anglesey School for Girls. SHP had a computer room, but I hardly ever went there. Another current had me in its pull, American history, who knew? It was as though I wanted to prove to Mr. Savage that he hadn’t been wasting his time. Or maybe—thank you, Dr. Ott!—maybe it was just that I couldn’t pay attention to any one thing for too long.
A GALAXY OF CHICKENS
Much later I found a story that the Chinese had discovered America. It was in a book on the history of Santería in Central and South America, don’t ask me why I was reading about that. There was a chapter on the nature and purpose of chicken sacrifice, in which the author, one George F. Carter, discussed the difference between the European and the American chicken: the former has white feathers and white flesh, whereas the flesh and feathers of the latter are black. In this the American chicken resembles the chickens of, yes, China. “Since the Asiatic chickens are very different from the Mediterranean chickens and most of the traits that reappear in the flocks of the Amerindians are found in Asia, the obvious conclusion would be that the Amerind chickens were first introduced from Asia and not from the Mediterranean …” You can hear Mr. Carter growing excited here. “When one considers the total data available on the chicken in America, a conclusion for a Spanish or Portuguese first introduction of chickens into America is simply counter to all evidence. The Mediterraneans, as late as 1600, did not have, and did not even know of, the galaxy of chickens present in Amerind hands …” A galaxy of chickens spun through my imagination; white European hens shone against a black mass of Asian wing- and tail-feathers. Mr. Carter went on to observe that in China, too, the chicken was thought to have magical properties; the Chinese used to read the future by dripping chicken blood on parchment. I watched the blood spatter on the page, and what it showed me was not the future but the past: I was back at Nederland, telling Matt Bark that I’d found something really good. I gave the report on the Chinese; I had irrefutable, unsuspected proof that Eriksson and Columbus were latecomers; Mr. Savage nodded his approval, and when I sat down he declared that if we learned only one thing from American history, it should be that if you trusted yourself you would get there in the end. I won; I went out for pizza; I was not expelled. Of course none of this would ever have come to pass. Even if I had somehow stumbled on the Asian-chicken hypothesis back then, Matt Bark would have laughed it off. Chickens? Dumbfuck, who cares about chickens?—But … —You think chickens discovered America?—No, they were carried on ships …—What, to start a chicken farm? Chicken-shit! Chicken boy!
Even in my daydreams I lost the argument. But the chickens remain, all over Central and South America, black, silky-feathered Asiatic chickens that lay blue-shelled eggs. So, Matt, what do you make of those chickens?
THREE
REGENZEIT
On Monday morning it occurred to me that I hadn’t visited my grandfather’s grave. The cemetery was at the other end of Thebes, on a gentle slope that steepened farther ahead and became the flank of the ski hill. An iron fence surrounded it, though the railing was falling down in places and lengths of baling wire had been strung across the gaps. The Rowlands were buried at the back of the graveyard, in the shadow of a pair of maples that were slowly pushing up the earth with their roots, so that, if they continued, the oldest skeletons would eventually be exhumed. Jean Roland lay beside his wife, Anne, who had outlived him by a decade. Small gray stones, their heads flush with the earth, remembered children who had not survived. Their son Oliver and his wife Claudine, born a Gerer, kept a respectful distance. Not all the Rowlands come back to Thebes in the end—my great-great-uncle Othniel, for example, is buried at the foot of a cliff in New Mexico—but I used to wonder, if my mothers came back, what distance they would keep from my grandparents. I passed the white column erected by the citizens of Thebes to John Rowland, who had turned the failing Rowland Mill into the profitable Thebes Furniture Company, manufacturer of the three-legged “Thebes stool,” of which my grandfather had a few examples, and found the rough gray stone my grandfather had picked out when my grandmother died. Its shape was suggestive of a naturally occurring rock, as though the Rowlands, having reached the zenith of their humanity with John, were sinking back into the natural world. Mary Rowland, born Ashland, 1924–1990, and the inscription, Beloved Wife, which enraged my mothers. It was just like my grandfather, they said, to turn my grandmother into another of his possessions.
Oliver lay between Mary and his father, John. There was no stone for him yet, only a wooden marker, to which a sheet of paper in a plastic envelope had been stapled. Oliver Rowland, it said, 1922–2000, and the words, May He Be Remembered, which, as they were printed in twenty-four-point Helvetica on a piece of paper that had been warped by the rain, undermined the sincerity of this wish, even though there were fresh flowers on the grave, indicating that people still remembered him. Here he was. I put my hand on the bare earth. I tried to imagine my grandfather lying beneath my hand. Body, I told myself, this is a body. But all I could think was that I should have brought flowers, and that my knees were cold. I stood up and brushed dirt from my pants. I walked past the graves of people who had died fifty or sixty years ago, mill workers, probably, covered by last year’s leaves. Their children were not buried here, no one wanted to be buried in Thebes anymore, except the Rowlands and the other old families. The town must have shrunk almost to nothing, I thought, when the last of the mill people died and their children moved away. What a grim place it must have been when no one came to the lunch counter, when the meeting hall stood empty and the musicians stopped playing at Summerland. Left on its own, Thebes would have died too. It would have become a place like the ones you pass on Route 23B, settlements so small they no longer merit their own post offices or general stores, Main Streets with nothing on them but a garage or the offices of a Bible study association. Who would want to live in a gloomy town hemmed in by mountains, cut off from the rest of the world? It was only when Joe Regenzeit arrived, when he opened Snowbird and made the snow fall, that life flowed back toward Thebes in the form of weekend visitors from New York City, who liked what they saw and rented houses, caused antiques stores to open, demanded Chilean coffee, created, out of mud and rock and poverty, a branch of the TrustFirst Bank, the Kozy Korner and Kountry Kitchen, the organic grocery with its bins of glistening fall apples. Regenzeit had rescued Thebes; he fixed what my grandfather could not fix. No wonder Oliver hated him.
I drove to the grocery and picked out a bouquet of white flowers, lilies, I hoped, from their small, expensive floral department. I took them to the cashier, who turned out to be the pretty girl I’d supplied with beer two days earlier. I asked if she’d had fun at the party.
“It was OK,” she said, mistrustfully.
I told her not to worry, I wasn’t going to report her. In fact, my friends had stood outside the same gas station when I was younger than she was, trying to get college students to buy us beer.
“I didn’t know you were from here,” she said. I could see from the change in her expression that she’d admitted me into her human race: I was no longer an anonymous beer-donating adult. I thanked her for the flowers and went out, whis
tling. A Subaru Outback pulled up as I was getting into my car, and Yesim got out. She was wearing a black parka and a pair of night-black sunglasses that hid half her face. She looked like a secret agent, or rather, like a person dressed in a secret agent costume, someone who was making no secret of her secretiveness. I sat in my car with the door open and my legs stuck out. I wanted Yesim to see me, but she came out of the store holding a cup of coffee in its brown paper sleeve and got into her car. I decided to follow her. She took Route 56 out of town, past the main entrance to Snowbird, and turned onto a service road. I turned too, wondering what I was doing, but not really wondering. The road climbed steeply, and Norman Mailer’s car began to rumble and thump, as though Mailer himself were in the engine compartment, duking it out with the forces of inertia and rust. The temperature gauge crept toward Hot and I had to slow down: fifteen miles an hour, ten. I came around a curve and saw the Outback ahead at a fork in the road. For a moment I imagined that Yesim had stopped for me to catch up, then she took the left branch and I thought she’d been moving all along. The road switchbacked through a pine forest, climbing what was, from the Theban point of view, the far side of Mount Espy, the side that looked north to the next ridge of the Catskills. A break in the trees offered a momentary panorama: the flatlands through which the Hudson ran, an almost invisible silver strand. There were people down there sitting on their porches, mowing their lawns, walking their dogs. They had never seemed so far away, and also, curiously, they had never seemed so happy, those invisible people in the valley, but I wouldn’t have changed places with any of them. I coaxed Norman Mailer’s car up the hill, toward Yesim, who was out of sight.
I found her at the summit of Mount Espy, standing near the shed that housed the machinery for one of Snowbird’s chair-lifts, her hair blowing in the chilly wind. We could see the whole valley from there, with Thebes tucked away at the end of it like a cluster of pale cells stuck to the wall of a dark-green womb.
“I wondered if it was you,” Yesim said. I couldn’t tell from her tone of voice whether or not she was pleased.
“I hope I didn’t frighten you,” I said.
“No,” Yesim said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not very frightening.”
“Oh, yeah? I frighten plenty of people. My neighbors in San Francisco think I’m a ghost.”
“Really?”
“At least, I think they do.” San Francisco wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, and I regretted having mentioned it.
Yesim turned away from me, and walked toward the shed.
“What happened on Saturday night?” I asked.
“It’s complicated. I tried to explain.”
“About Mark? It sounds like you’re having second thoughts about him.”
“Mark is only part of it.” Yesim took off her sunglasses, which were, in any case, unnecessary: purplish cumulus clouds were coming over the mountains from the east, their bottoms dark and unpromising. She touched her eyes with her fingertips. “Did I tell you I was in love with Professor X?” she said. “Not platonic love, not love from a distance. I washed her when she couldn’t move. I washed her stomach, between her legs. I fucked her with my hand.” She watched me to see what reaction this new word, fucked, would provoke.
“OK,” I said, “but you don’t love her now.” I had never formed a mental image of Professor X, so Yesim’s words had little power to disturb me.
“No,” she said, “not anymore. But then there was my therapist, Dr. Y. Nice man, he showed me pictures of his grandchildren. We fucked everywhere but on the couch, he said he didn’t want to look at one of his other patients and think of me lying there.” She said fucked as if it were a technical term borrowed from another language, like cogito or Geist. It was a pretension, a word that didn’t belong to her, although it might have belonged to Professor X or Dr. Y. “Then there was Miss Z, who lived with me after the Pines,” she said, “and her friend, Mr … . shit, I should have started earlier in the alphabet, now I have to call him Mr. AA. I couldn’t say no. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you had sex with a lot of people, but so what? Does that mean I can’t like you?”
“Mr. AA liked me,” Yesim said. “He was very nice. He had a daughter in Wisconsin, and he sent her a postcard every day. He played classical guitar. He gave great massages.”
“So what was wrong with him?”
“He wasn’t the most stable person,” Yesim said, “although he was better than Mr., what should I call him? AB? BB?” Yesim looked up at me. “Now you know.”
Just then, as if to prove some idiotic hypothesis about the world, it started raining. There was almost no warning: the clouds were just on top of us, and a fat cold rain was falling. “Fuck,” Yesim said. She fiddled with the padlock on the shed. By the time she got it open we were both wet. “What are you waiting for? Come in.”
The shed was cold and dim. A few chairs, or benches, dangled from the curved track that would send them back down the mountainside, their safety bars open as if they’d been waiting for passengers since the end of the last winter. The air smelled of dirt. Yesim said she had to check to make sure the power was working, that was why she’d come up here. She tugged at the cover of the fuse box but it wouldn’t open. “Fucking stupid thing,” Yesim said. I pointed out that there was a catch; Yesim released it and the cover opened. She peered into the fuse box and flipped a switch and the lights came on.
We sat for a while on one of the chairs, not talking, just swaying back and forth, our feet dangling in the air, listening to the enormous sound of the rain. Yesim said she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to burden me with her tale of woe. I said I didn’t mind. She smiled. Was that the turnaround point? The place where we stopped struggling against gravity and let ourselves be carried downhill, toward whatever there was at the bottom, the lodge, home, life together? No. All we’d done was to turn on the power. We sat in the shed until the worst of the storm had passed, then we went out. The sun was shining again, lighting up the edge of the clouds like a curtain; red and yellow trees on the northern mountains stood out and seemed almost to sparkle.
Yesim said she had to go to the office, Kerem was probably wondering what had happened to her, and we walked to our respective cars. The flowers I’d bought were still lying on Norman Mailer’s passenger seat. I took them back to my grandfather’s house and rinsed out a vase; I set the vase full of flowers on the kitchen table, but it was too wobbly so I moved the flowers to the windowsill. They looked good there, their white petals taking on subtle color in the daylight. They made the house look as if someone lived in it.
REGENZEIT
The next day I ran into Kerem at the Kountry Kitchen. He was waiting in line to pay as I came in, and he embraced me. He had a black eye, which he’d tried to cover with makeup, but it didn’t work. The puffy blue flesh around his eye stood out like a burial mound seen from the air. I asked what had happened to him, and he told me he’d been in Philadelphia over the weekend. “Man,” he said, “there are some assholes in Philly!” He told me how this homeless—he used the word as a noun—had called him a sand nigger. “You should have seen what I did to the guy, though. I think I busted his collarbone.” Then: “Hey, you talked to my sister.” I nodded. Kerem asked if she had shown me her poems and for some reason I said yes, she had.
“Did she show you ‘Uyum’?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“‘Uyum’ is incredible,” Kerem said. “You have to admit I’m right. People are going to be reading it a hundred years from now.”
“They might.”
“She’s a genius!” Kerem said. “What I need you to do is hook her up. Do you know anyone in publishing?”
I thought of the people at Marina’s salon: Holly the graphic designer who wrote a zine called Hollylujah!, sullen Ted who kept an online diary about the girls he hadn’t slept with. “I don’t know if my friends will be much help,” I said, but Kerem wasn’t listening. He leaned close to me, and fo
r a second I had the strange feeling that he and Yesim were two parts of the same person.
“I don’t believe in fate or anything like that,” he said, “but I do think you showed up just when you were needed.” He hit my arm. “You should stick around until winter! I’ll hook you up with free passes to Snowbird.” He patted my shoulder one more time and left. I ate my lunch, a bowl of chicken soup and what the menu referred to as Yankee pot roast, though I doubted it had seen the inside of a pot, or an oven, or anything the old Yankees used to prepare food.
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