She had not used my name. She had not written, You are not the one I need—though this was the real message. She had not signed it with her full name. It was as concise as a surgeon’s incision, as final as an executioner’s slice across a vital vein.
I purchased a handgun and a box of bullets. With these and the ring in my jacket pocket, I rented a car from a city agency and drove north. At Montpelier I dropped the car at the company’s local agency. Then I found the closest bar where pickup trucks were parked outside. I went in and negotiated with a young man, long-haired and down-at-the-heels, who agreed, for a price, to take me up into the mountains.
First we loaded his pickup with groceries and boxes of alcohol. Along the way, he asked a few questions. No, I told him, I wasn’t planning a party. No, I wasn’t heading to a commune. I had an old family place up there, I explained, lots of memories. A retreat, I said; I had some thinking to do.
“Looks like a dandy retreat you got planned,” he said with a smirk. “Can I come too?”
“Sorry, I need some time alone.”
Did I want a toke, he asked—or did I have a joint or two of my own to share? I shook my head to both requests. He lit up, and I rolled down my window, riding the rest of the way with my head freezing, sucking up the pure winter oxygen. He said no more throughout the winding fifteen-mile journey, and dropped me at the end of the lane leading into the Franklin homestead.
When he had disappeared back down the road, I trudged through deep snow, carrying my gear as far as the house. It took three trips back and forth to bring everything that far. I had hoped to camp out in the house, but its windows had been smashed, and snow had blown into the rooms. It was empty of furniture, the woodstove plundered and inoperable. The mill and brewery were likewise falling apart, roofless, gutted, and vandalized.
But the cabin by the pond was intact. The door was unlocked, the windowpane undamaged. On the collapsing porch sat a row of stacked cordwood, covered by a decaying tarp. Inside, a kerosene lantern hung from the rafters, with oil in its reservoir. The stove was still in one piece and connected to its chimney, with a half-empty woodbox offering enough birch to start a fire. Nothing belonging to my grandfather had been left behind, with the exception of dirty sheets, a pillow, and a blanket on the army cot, as well as a cardboard box under the bed, containing old clothes and a pair of plastic beach sandals. Tacked to the logs beside the cot was a magazine photo of the Twin Towers burning. Someone had used a felt-tip pen to make a black circle around the upper floors of one of the buildings.
I lit a fire in the stove, unpacked my things, drank a half bottle of cheap wine, and settled in to face my past, whatever it might be. I knew that I must do it this way or I would die. I might choose to die anyway, depending on the truth. My own personal ground zero. I loaded the gun and slipped it under the pillow.
Beyond these images there were only fragments of a life splintering and collapsing. I remember emptying bottles down my throat, cooking things, burning the food by neglect, staggering around the cabin, yelling at everything—my grandfather with his disgusting narcissistic fairy braids; my parents for leaving me alone; the woman with the scalpel who severed arteries in my heart, watching me bleed from a distance, detached and philosophical, cultured and sensitive to her final artistic bon mot. I also roared at the terrorists and the vast society of malice that had spawned them. And yet, strangely, I could hardly muster any hatred for them personally. This I reserved for the end-of-the-line Ben Franklin, the man whose pain meant more to him than his grandson’s.
Through the delirium of rage, I considered what he had told me the last time I saw him. I mulled over numerous interpretations, some of them plausible, most of them contradictory. I still could not understand why he had chosen to hurt a child. Was it because he believed his beloved daughter had been dragged from the life he wanted for her? Had he taken personal insult from her rejection of the safe and natural environment he had provided? She had married a man whose work he despised, had stayed in the city he loathed, choosing to raise her children with more advantages, and as a result had died too young, leaving him afflicted in a life already overloaded with unresolved grief. Again and again the various explanations came down to this: My grandfather had been locked into the gravitational pull of his negative emotions. It was always about him, his miseries, his pride, his happiness, his needs, his sorrows. In his mind, his sufferings were always caused by others, and lest he take an honest look at himself, he must sustain the habit of blaming at all costs, even to the point of absurdity. In my semirational moments, I believed this was the truth of the matter.
Increasingly, however, his hateful words returned with greater force, and under the influence of little food and constant drink, my depression deepened. The words gained credibility, and then assumed an authority that could not be denied.
I watched another sun rising through the stripped birches. I threw two frozen hamburger patties into a skillet and put it on the stove to fry. As I sat and waited for my breakfast to cook, I choked down the day’s first shot of whiskey. Followed by another. And another.
I picked up my gun and put the barrel into my mouth, to see what it would be like. I pulled it out and waved it about, and almost without knowing it I squeezed the trigger. The bullet whizzed past my head and struck a pan hanging on the wall. I vomited onto the bed and threw the gun down.
“Nothing makes sense!” I shouted. “Life, death, accident, murder—nothing!”
The pond will tell me, I thought when I calmed down. The pond was my childhood. It was the great sea; all secrets were drowned within its depths. I have to look down through the ice, because the past is buried there, my lost childhood. If I can see it, I may understand it. If I understand it, I may be able to begin again. The little racing car is down there too. I will dive in and find it when the ice melts in spring.
I drank more whiskey, upending the bottle like a true scion of Ben Franklin. I threw on my jacket and staggered out of the cabin, trudging through deep snow to the edge of the pond. The wind had swept parts of it clean, leaving a broad patch of bare ice out near the center. I twisted the gold ring off my finger, and pulled the other ring from my pocket. I tried to crush them in my fist, and then hurled them over the pond. They descended in an arc, hitting the ice, ding-ding-ding, rolling, zinging, spinning out of orbit and wobbling into immobility. Their massive weight rested on the ice for a few seconds, bending the surface downward as a star’s gravity sinks the invisible graph of time. I ran out after them, intending to smash with the heel of my shoe the garbled trajectory of my manhood. The ice buckled under me and I fell through.
Down through frozen fire, down through the dual rings of death, I am falling from the tower heights. I am screaming, screaming as I go down to shatter on the sidewalk below. On impact, my face touches mud, glass, plastic, matted leaves, memories, and secrets. Then my body revolves and my feet plant themselves in the liquid earth, I bend my knees and push for the surface. My heart skips a beat, and another beat, and even as I strain for the light above, I know I am dying. My heart fails, my lungs fail, and now I am dead.
I break the surface, hacking water from my lungs. Gasping, panicking, pushing the floes aside, I gain the shallows, smashing the ice shelf with my every step. Reaching the shore, I fall onto the snowbank. Rising on all fours, then standing, I strip off all my clothing, which is beginning to burn me, freezing solid against my skin. Then I am running barefoot through the trees, my flesh burning, shaking uncontrollably. Back in the cabin, I crouch by the stove until my body ceases its convulsions, then dress myself in old clothes I find beneath a bed. I pull a dirty blanket over my shoulders.
I look about, wondering what has happened.
Where am I? I do not know this place.
I walk along a country road. An old man in a pickup truck stops and offers a lift. I get into the cab beside him, still shivering.
“Did ya have an accident?” he asks. “I didn’t see no car off the road.”
&
nbsp; “F-f-fire, ice, water,” I stammer.
“Okay, hang in there, boy. I’ll take you down to the hospital in Montpelier.”
Next I am stepping out of his truck, then walking out of the hospital parking lot, the old man calling after me, shaking his head.
After that, I stop beside the cabin of a sixteen-wheeler idling at a gas station.
The driver rolls down his window.
“Where you goin’ dressed like that?” he asks.
“I d-d-don’t know.”
“Well, I’m goin’ to New York City.”
“I-I-I’ll go there too.”
“Okay. It looks like this is your lucky day. I ain’t got no partner on this run.”
I remember nothing about the journey.
I am standing on a sidewalk in a city, the truck roaring away, leaving a trail of exhaust. I need to get out of the wind; it’s burning me. I climb cement steps, push a splintered door that is barred by yellow tape. The latch gives a little, then breaks. I go inside and climb the staircase. On an upper floor, I enter a bare room, littered with broken glass, mouse droppings, a frozen bat, a metal bed without a mattress. I lie down on the rusty springs, wrapping the blanket around my shoulders.
I will rest awhile. If I can sleep, I may dream, and when I awake from the dream I may remember where I should go.
The shivering returns, waking me from a dream, but the images dissolve and I cannot recapture them. I gaze through the window at the world, at the layers of phenomena. Many of these are visible, though flattened into a single plane. The invisible layers of secrets and lost memories are present but incomprehensible. They may be seen in brief flashes, though they are beyond counting. They are in relationship, yet how it works, and why it does, remains indecipherable. I exist as an element of the whole and may observe parts of it—myself a part, of course. Yet to see and understand the whole, I must wait patiently.
10
The grammar of memory
I raise my head and see that I am again in my room of hidden memories. Yes, here are the photos spread around the walls, the two little racing cars, the old painting of the horse. Beside me the giant is seated with his back to the wall, his knees up, chin on his chest, breathing lightly.
“Billy,” I say, shaking his arm.
“Huh?” he says, startled. “Oh!”
He yawns. “I’m awake, Francisco.”
“You can call me Max,” I say. “That’s what people mostly called me.”
Openmouthed, he stares at me. His face lights up.
“Yes, Billy, it’s coming back. I’m remembering things. Not everything, but pieces are coming together.”
“That’s wonderful!” exclaims the giant, clapping his hands like a child. “Oh, that is wonderful!”
“Some of it’s hard, Billy. I know now why I lost my way. It took a couple of hours to go through it, just the bits and pieces, like a trail through a dark woods.”
“Longer than a couple of hours, Francisco. When we got home from Vermont, you slept through the whole day and into late last night. I heard you get up around midnight.”
“What time is it now?”
“Nearly morning.”
“I’m sorry. You should go back to bed.”
“No, I can’t. I’m too happy. Can you talk about what happened to you?”
“I’ll tell you more soon. But it’s enough to say that I had an accident. I fell through the ice and nearly drowned.”
“Francisco, I’m so glad you survived.”
“I wouldn’t have, without you.”
He tilts his head reflectively.
“You know, I’ve often thought that we look at a pond and think it’s an ocean. Other times, we look at an ocean and think it’s just a pond.”
“You mean we don’t really understand what’s important?”
“Something like that. We get large and small confused sometimes.”
“Billy, can you tell me about the time you lost your memory? When we first met, you said you once were crazy but now you aren’t. Were you really crazy?”
“I don’t know for sure, Francisco.”
“Max.”
“I don’t know for sure, Max. My thoughts weren’t working right for a while—a few months, if I remember correctly. Most of the time was spent in a hospital bed. Then another thing happened. And maybe I was truly crazy for the second part. But it’s in the past now. Twelve years ago, and it hasn’t happened again.”
“Billy,” I say, choking up, “all the time I’ve lived here, I’ve been thinking mostly about myself. You’ve been looking after me, and I hardly gave it a thought.”
“If you break your leg, Max, your leg demands all your attention for a time. If your mind gets hurt, it tries to possess your attention too.”
“I know. I understand. But I can see now that you worked hard to keep me alive, and it must have taken a lot out of you.”
“Nope, Max, not much. And you gave a lot in return.”
“You’re good.”
Billy smiles.
“No,” he says. “I just remember what it was like when it happened to me.”
“When you lost your memory, you mean?”
“When I lost everything.”
“You’ve been a true friend, Billy. And it’s time I started being a real friend to you. I really would like to know what happened to you.”
He ponders this a few moments, gazing far away, his childlike face growing older as he considers my request. Coming to a decision, he looks down at me and slowly gives a nod of affirmation.
“All right, Max,” he murmurs. “If you wish.”
I listen without interruption as he tells his story:
The car accident was in early April 2001. I remember nothing more than a deafening bang and then the car buckling and tumbling, my body and head lashing around, and blood flying everywhere. My seat belt was a World War II parachute harness, and it didn’t break, but it wasn’t tight either. My head and shoulders were inside the hopper, which Dad had padded with styro insulation because we have cold winters in Iowa. I guess that’s what saved me.
The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed, wondering where I was, hurting all over, an oxygen mask on my face. I tried to tear it off, but my arms wouldn’t move. Nothing would move. I was encased in plaster, and whatever part of my body wasn’t in a cast was bandaged.
The light in the room was too bright. Whenever I opened my eyes I saw people moving back and forth around me. I heard constant beep-beep-beeping, and a voice on an intercom. Now and then, faces bent over me. I felt the sting of needles. My body was turned and cleaned. I felt sick when I saw the tube trailing out from between my legs, dripping yellow fluid. Other tubes went into my arms and belly through open ports in the plaster.
I couldn’t think at all, but I was aware enough to wish I could slip away and die.
There were voices—doctors, nurses, medical students:
“He’s hanging by a thread, but the thread is getting thicker day by day.”
“Heart of a lion.”
“Head like an oak.”
“An oak hit by lightning. No one can survive this.”
“Do your best.”
“I’ve never seen anyone this tall in my whole life.”
“He was a basketball player.”
“The MRI and X-rays show no tumor on the pituitary gland and no osteogenic malformations, so this has to be genetic.”
“The parents are dead.”
“Next of kin?”
“None.”
With eyes closed I listened to it all, trying to patch it together.
“William,” a voice called. “Come on, big boy, wake up.”
“Can you wiggle your toes, William?”
They called me William and Willy and Will and Billy—also the names of famous giants whenever they thought I couldn’t hear.
Needles pricked my exposed toes.
“The automatic reflex is working fine, indicating no permanent
nerve damage, as far as I can see. Any regaining of consciousness, Nurse?”
“He opens his eyes for a few seconds, Doctor. Just a few flutters a couple of times a day.”
“Is he conscious enough to feel pain?”
“He groans whenever he comes out of it. The pattern is consistent—consciousness equals pain.”
“The morphine drip should be keeping it under control.”
The morphine drip kept it barely under control, though never quite enough. Whenever they turned my body, I opened my mouth to scream, but only croaks came out.
More and more I remained awake, listening, waiting, hoping that someone would let me die. I tried to recall beautiful things, happy memories to distract me from the pain. But nothing would come. There was nothing there. I had overheard someone say my parents were dead. I felt perplexed. Who were my parents? No images arose in my mind.
Sounds drifted in from time to time: a cow mooing, the roar of a crowd in a stadium, the pounding of a basketball on a wooden court.
Then the visitors came:
“Yo, Billy, it’s Coach. I brought the guys to see you. Can you hear me?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the nurse’s voice. “He can’t hear anything.”
I tried to call out to them, I can hear, I can hear! But my mouth issued only its groans and croaks.
“I think he hears me,” said the coach. “We love you, buddy. Keeping fighting now. Keep fighting.”
“We love you, buddy, we love you!” came a chorus of voices, and I opened my eyes on a forest of tall trees surrounding the bed, white and black and yellow trees bending close, with faces worried or encouraging or sad. I saw a hand spinning a basketball on a fingertip.
“He sees it, he sees it. I saw him smile.”
“That ain’t no smile.”
“Sure it was. You know the way his eyes go when he’s happy.”
Then I dropped down into the arms of my mother morphine.
In the middle of the night I was stabbed by new pains, my skull cracking open, but my hand could not reach the call button. Suddenly there was someone with me, standing beside the bed. I tried to turn my head to see who it was, but a blinding headache would not allow me to. I smelled a beautiful fragrance so subtle and unknown to me that I was bewildered by it. The woman put her hand on my bare forehead and held it there gently. She did not speak. The headache receded and I fell asleep.
The Fool of New York City Page 18