The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

The cyclist was pulling away uncatchably, Cutler fading, struggling to hold his form to the far side of the Basilica, and he thought again of Mattie, wondering if the boy and his friends had ever done the same thing with hockey or baseball cards when they were small. The brain, deprived of oxygen, always works poorly at this stage in a race; all the same, it bothered him that he couldn’t remember.

  [ NEARING THE SEA, SUPERIOR ]

  The world being an ironist with poor taste and perfect timing, Neil Sedaka was on the oldies station crooning “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

  “You know you don’t have to do this,” he said.

  “You already said that, Erik.”

  “She was always crazy about you.”

  “You don’t have to say that, Erik. I said I’d come. I just wish we could be honest with her.”

  His cellphone trembled in the breast pocket of his coat.

  “Terminal 1, right?” the driver asked. He wore a topknot turban and had a wispy beard, no accent. He looked about sixteen. Rap or hip hop, you would guess, but he had the radio tuned to a pop oldies station.

  “Terminal 1, yes.”

  The trembling in Erik’s pocket stopped. In the overheated car his brow and freshly shaven upper lip were damp, oddly chilled.

  “Jason Singer actually got married in a hospital,” he said.

  “Jason.”

  “He had dinner with us last year. He and Ginny? First weekend in June.”

  “I don’t know how you keep track of these things,” she said.

  “I like people, I guess.”

  She let that go. Then: “But ‘first weekend in June’? I mean …”

  “It was the second-last dinner we gave.”

  The cab started up an on-ramp leading into the airport. In his belly he felt the angle of their climb, a voluptuous sensation, cruelly out of context. The cab fishtailed on the sleety ramp and recovered. She checked her BlackBerry—it seemed their words had brought her own schedule to mind—then said, “The girlfriend was the flapper, right? Cloche hat, short curls?”

  “Ginny. They were married. That’s what I was saying. They got married in the hospital, in Jason’s father’s room. They moved the date up, so his father could be part of it.”

  Silence; she was back inside one of her designs. “What did her father have?”

  “Jason’s father. AIDS.”

  You don’t listen. It was one of the first things that had drawn him to her—a distractedness he’d mistaken for creative dreaminess, thus assigning soft edges to what was actually a tough, selfish trait: the quality that helped her gain a toehold in a field still vastly dominated by men. Porter—the name was her Virginian mother’s maiden name—had a faculty of all-excluding focus that now struck him, at times, as inhuman. At other times he envied it. At all times it whetted his desire to possess her, which was now out of the question, and in fact, he realized, always had been.

  “I don’t recall much of that evening,” she said shortly, as if irked at the expectation that she should recall it, though Erik had long since given up expecting such things.

  “The conversation was scintillating,” he said. “Especially yours.”

  She let her heavy, dark eyelids droop—her standard semaphore of warning.

  “No, I mean it. You were. It amazes me you can’t remember.”

  A few moments of silence, then she said, “It is too warm in here,” and frowned, her thumb grazing his brow in an absent way, yet gently, as if she meant to taste the sweat there.

  They had opposing views of social need. Neediness, in Porter’s opinion, was the antithesis of charm; worse, those with needs could never be happy or free. To Erik, need was simply the adhesive that held the human world together. When especially frustrated he had thought of her, wrongly, he knew, as a sort of machine for transforming visual or verbal information into … well, all right, into truly original structures. Gorgeous structures. He was still her helpless fan.

  In the terminal, on the moving sidewalk, they glided up the long concourse to the departure gates. It wasn’t like her to stand behind him like this—or just to stand, instead of striding decisively onward. Petite, methodically put-together, she’d affixed her gaze to the bank of coffered skylights high above them, her estimation of the design unreadable. The supercilious arch of her brows, the satiric droop of her eyelids, the lines parenthesizing her mouth—all lent her a scornful look. Porter could look haughty patting a spaniel. He stared at her, rapt as always, knowing now that she was so absorbed in her study he was at low risk of receiving one of her fending glares.

  Again his cellphone pulsed.

  “They couldn’t choose between a space pod or a greenhouse,” she said.

  I really should take this call, he thought.

  An announcement rumbled out, slurred with echoes. It was too noisy, he told himself, to take the call.

  “I think it’s our flight,” she said, glaring at her watch, then up at the ceiling. “There has to be a better way to control sound in these big volumes.” She stalked past him in her long, lint-brushed coat, towing a carry-on bag in the brisk, territorial way of flight crew.

  ——

  They had finally separated last fall. At times it amazed him that their misalliance had survived almost a decade. Still, there had been that certain bond. It was coded, he supposed, in his genes. His parents had spent their lives and raised Erik and his two older siblings up near Thunder Bay—dairy farmers in a subarctic zone, though to Erik’s Finnish grandparents, who had lost their home to the advancing Soviets in ’45, that had not seemed unduly daunting. Erik’s mother had only really confided one thing about her and his father’s marriage, and she probably hadn’t meant to. At Paavo’s wake, shaken but sturdy—drinking vodka and Coke, though not conspicuously drunk—she’d told the three children, “Thirty-two years we are married and never once he walks into the kitchen without that my stomach does like this.” And her large, dry hand flipped over, exposing the pink, open palm. Some years later, when Erik related that anecdote to Porter, she’d said crisply, “You could interpret that sentence in two possible ways.” Yet her gaze was evasive, as if the story unsettled her, imperilled her carefully managed self-containment.

  “No, you couldn’t,” Erik told her. “Not if you ever saw them in the same room.”

  What wasn’t said: that he and Porter had just the same connection. Whenever they were in each other’s vicinity, a vital arc would leap the synapse between them, etching the air. Some friends even confided they could feel the charge. Porter loathed such talk. And in the sweaty aftermath of sex she would act as if nothing shocking had just occurred, as if she hadn’t just been far beyond herself, cursing, laughing wildly, her hard little thighs crushing his hot ears and cheeks.

  The flight had been called but wasn’t boarding. Erik kept glancing out the wall of windows at their 737 and the runway—visibility poor—and at a display panel listing several departures as delayed. On a wide plasma screen bracketed down from the ceiling, the top-of-the-hour news: a panning shot of parked cars half-buried in snow. First delays, he thought, then cancellations. It was the time of year when this part of the earth is actually turning its face back toward the sun, yet winter goes on deepening its tenancy.

  Further palpitations from his phone. Around the gate, passengers, seated, standing, had a herded, nervous look. Porter calmly sat and returned to her BlackBerry, emailing a response to a colleague’s question (he guessed) or, possibly, sending a note to her new man. Her expression and posture gave no hint as to which of these she might be doing.

  She and this new man were engaged, waiting for both divorces to come through.

  In that state of applied absorption she brought to every task, she would not notice Erik taking the call. He walked past her, toward the food court, mumbling “Coffee?” No response. He took out the cellphone. It stilled in his hand. Three messages from Thunder Bay. He punched reply. Porter was juggling three projects these days and had made it clear, not unkindly, tha
t if his mother died (she never used euphemisms like “passed away”) before they could fly up there, she would not come along. Would not be able to. Though she might, if she could, still fly up for the day of the funeral.

  The ringing was faint. Now another announcement. A pessimist would think cancellation but Erik was an optimist and he was finding that even divorce and grief left a basic stratum of one’s character intact. The back of Porter’s head—that practical pageboy cut of wondrous hair so straight and black—was still unmoving. She’d admitted, and she would never lie, especially not to be tactful or kind, that her fiancé was not the lover Erik had been. In fact he didn’t seem to excite her at all. A senior partner in an architectural firm, he did command a better income than Erik, who was a high school guidance counsellor, but Erik believed the true issue here was that Porter desired to live inside her calling in every way, not just professionally but domestically, too. For some years, he saw, she had tried to slot their marriage into her life as a sort of moonlighting, or volunteer position, and she was incapable of sustaining a secondary passion. When she wanted to chat, it was about her work—her art—and “chat” was not the word.

  “Rik, where have you been?” Anja’s voice was panicked, chafed raw. “On the plane?”

  “I’m here,” he said quietly. “We’re just leaving. How is she?”

  “I can’t hear! I’ve been calling and calling!”

  “I’m sorry.” He took a few more steps toward the food court. “How’s—”

  “What?”

  “We’re still in Toronto—we’re about to board.”

  “We?”

  “Porter’s here.”

  “What? Porter’s actually coming?”

  “Yes,” he whispered firmly.

  Porter’s demand for a divorce was a bitter blow, but Erik had been resigned to it and was even, yes, relieved, as if at last receiving a diagnosis he’d been expecting for years. Through much of the marriage he was unhappy—and yet, toward the end, it grew clearer to him that as someone of little worldly ambition he was just the sort of man cut out for happiness. It was Porter who had actually pointed this out to him—that the ambitious were never truly happy, that time terrified them, while for people like Erik time was no more than the benign, required solvent in which contentment could expand to the full. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she’d told him, near the end. And while he could not yet feel it, he could sense, waiting beyond the grief he was just starting to surmount, a birthright of serenity and, in time, the large cheerful family he yearned for.

  “Didn’t think she’d come,” Anja spat out, as if blaming Porter for something grave, their mother’s condition being the obvious surrogate.

  “Well, she keeps her word,” he said, staring at the back of Porter’s head, his heart thudding, cellphone clamped to his temple. The longer I keep Anja from saying what I think she has to say. Each second, for one thing, kept his mother alive a bit longer.

  “I’m so angry you didn’t answer. I’m alone here now!”

  “We … I’m sorry. I just couldn’t. We’re coming now.”

  “It’s too late, Rik.”

  He opened his mouth to respond. Said nothing. Stared into the crowded food court. A beefy native man with a grey ponytail rushed two steaming paper cups toward a cashier. His grin was wide and wincing, as if he was enjoying the discomfort of the heat searing his hands.

  Erik had told Porter he didn’t want his dying mother to know about the divorce. Spare her that blow. Porter considered this dishonest but chose to make a concession. His mother, Maarit, had loved Porter, admired her. Maarit had been a talented pianist who, in the manner of women of her generation, had set aside her potential career and addressed herself to home and family. Perhaps rightly, she saw Porter’s aloofness and unapologetic drive as the required traits of will that she herself might have deployed. Yet she betrayed no regrets about the conventional path she’d followed; perhaps it was truer to say that Porter’s establishment in the family afforded a sort of proxy completion of her own cancelled journey. And Porter, as if understanding this—accepting, cherishing the role—had answered Maarit’s affection with unguarded warmth. Porter, flushed and serene of face, holding a wineglass of eggnog, her other bare arm atop the upright piano as Maarit on the bench played “O Holy Night”: Maarit knew the second verse only in Finnish, not in the English she’d begun for her daughter-in-law’s benefit, but now, seamlessly, Porter subbed in with the English words, singing with zest, if off-key. Erik gaped. It wasn’t just that his wife was performing a song, a full hymn, which he had no idea she knew—she was also letting herself be seen and very much heard doing something inexpertly. She was more tenor than soprano and fell far shy of the soaring last note that Maarit herself, now singing in Finnish, easily hit, but both women seemed delighted, as if they had just performed a flawless duet on stage at Massey Hall. Erik was delighted too, clearing his eyes, clapping noisily, even as faint qualms of jealousy returned to him.

  “Rikky?”

  “When did it happen?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “I thought we’d make it.”

  “Thank God you’re coming! Jarmo and Gail are flying in from …” Anja’s thin voice buckled. After some moments: “Vancouver. Tonight.”

  Erik lowered his face. His torso jerked as if he were taking punches under the heart. He had spent most of the Christmas break at his mother’s side but had meant to be there at the end, too. And he saw that he’d believed Maarit would hold on until he arrived—the optimism of a youngest child who, as Porter once remarked with undisguised envy, always knew himself to be loved.

  He glanced toward her now, expecting the beautiful back of her head. Her face was on him, eyes deciphering. She’d turned in her seat. People around her rising, bustling. A line was forming. He reassembled himself.

  “Rik?” Anja said.

  “We’re boarding, An. I’ll see you in two hours.”

  “I love you,” she said, and his heart seemed to stagger.

  “I love you too,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  He shoved the cellphone into his pocket and walked straight toward Porter, who was studying him. He supposed she was hoping her journey would not be necessary. She had no time for it, of course. The wasted airfare (he’d insisted on paying her way but she had vetoed that) would be nothing to her. She spent more on business dinners all the time. So he told himself. She stood up, her face a collage of conflicting signals, and embraced him in her new, sisterly manner, firm at the shoulders but distinct at the waist. As their torsos met, the smell of her, bitter cinnamon, clove, wafted in a warm draft from under her charcoal cowl neck. Their bodies would never divorce.

  “I’m sorry, Erik.”

  He tightened his grip.

  “I saw you crying there …”

  He accepted her coming erasure from his life, but to have a few more days now—even a few more hours. If she stayed the night in his childhood home, they might make love again, a last time. There would be no stopping it. There never had been. Even now he felt the ambivalence in her embrace: her will’s resistance, her body’s deeper, disputing will.

  He said, “It’s just … Anja’s in rough shape. You know how I am.”

  She pulled back, studied him with her interrogator’s eyes: shale blue, deeply dubious. “You mean your mother’s not …?”

  Say it, say it.

  “We might still get there in time,” he said.

  She held his gaze—he didn’t blink either—then winced a strange smile and looked at her bag: “Well, we better get on, then.”

  She led him into the line. To hide his face from her, his eyes flooding, he turned to the high plasma screen. Still the news. He couldn’t hear the commentary but he recognized that dark shattered coastline: a view of Superior, the inland sea they would soon be flying over, taken from an aircraft moving out from shore. Completely iced over, it looked like a polar ocean. A few times a century these total freeze-ups occu
rred, though at the centre of the lake, it was said, a hundred miles out from land, an ice-free inner lake always remained, churning and steaming through winter’s coldest nights.

  [ SWALLOW ]

  So, a job.

  Your parents and many uncles and aunts would not call it a job. To them it would seem you’ve been institutionalized, which of course cannot be allowed to happen. Greek families do not allow such things to happen to their own. Greeks do not go into therapy or get hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis or anorexia nervosa and so on. Greek civilization, having lent those disorders their formidable names, cannot be expected to provide specimens as well. The bloodline is pure. And the community cares for its own—who, therefore, are less likely to need such intervention to begin with. Your father, the priest, often gives homilies on these very matters: inside your head. Inside this same crowded head your mother contributes antiphonally. It’s years since you’ve attended an actual service. Or a school. After high school you announced that you were taking a year off and moving in with your non-Greek boyfriend. A year off became several. In time, you moved out of Derek’s place but you did not move home, chastened and remorseful, as expected. You’ve become one of those adults whose main contact with her parents is neural; you hear their hectoring voices in your head and, ever on the defensive, you reply (though these days you reply less often) and at times even trade stichomythic barbs with them in your dreams. As for Mega Sister and your younger brother and vast cast of cousins, until recently you saw them often enough and got along with them fine. And you have friends, Greek and non-Greek. Everyone agrees you are a cut-up, a rough treasure, a ready ear. Such a good ear.

  Now a vast apathy has snowed you under. Not like an avalanche but a calm, soft, muffling midnight snow … on and on. It’s not quite depression. You’ve been depressed twice before, in your teens. Mega Sister, engaged now, still living at home where she daily consults her secret, porn-like stash of self-help lit (why would a Greek household need such “help”?), explains your state as a “deferred reaction” to your breakup with DeRek Perish (that’s how he spells Derek Parrish since leaving his folk-rock group to become lead singer for Thigh Master) two years ago. It’s not. Greeks don’t have deferred reactions, not even you, this inexplicably skinny, dreamy, addled young Greek. When Mega Sister recites that you didn’t grieve the relationship enough after it ended, you just nod at your cellphone. She knows nothing of your last month. It’s never what people think it is anyway. The guy you’ve been seeing, Charles, tucks his sweaters into his jeans and every slot-lettered sign has a backwards N in it. Doesn’t anyone else see how exhausting the world is?