The Illusion of Separateness

by Simon Van Booy

  When Dave arrived, Philip was shy again. We all stood there.

  Then Dave and I went to speak at the same time, but I struggled through the embarrassment and told Philip my phone number. Dave offered to write it down, but nobody had a pen.

  On the journey back to Amagansett, I couldn’t hide from myself. It’s as though certain parts inside me broke, but instead of being damaged, I was free. Dave had all the windows open. I could hear his watchband on the door as he tapped to the music. I told him he could smoke if he wanted.

  But Philip never called, and the next few months were very hard. It wasn’t that I didn’t have someone I really liked—­but the realization that I had never had anyone.

  I was afraid of the sea when I was a girl. Someone said it went on forever and that frightened me. I wondered why my parents had chosen to live at the beginning and the end of the world.

  In summer, I go sailing on my father’s small yacht. Sometimes I steer while my father looks up from The New York Times calling out, “Leftabit! Rightabit! Leftabit! Now go around the iceberg if you can, Amelia.”

  Being blind is not like you would imagine. It’s not like closing your eyes and trying to see. I don’t feel as though I’m lacking. I see ­people by what they say to others, by how they move and how they breathe.

  We have an apartment on the Upper East Side that we seldom use. It’s really Grandpa John’s for when he visits. It’s close to a café on Madison Avenue called Sant Ambroeus—­the place we went after learning that my blindness is permanent.

  Grandpa John grew up at a diner on Long Island, but finds it hard to leave England now that he’s old.

  My mother was raised in England and has an accent. When she was very young, Grandpa John used to wake up screaming. Eventually, Harriet made him go to the village hall once a week for tea with other veterans of World War II. It was a ritual he would keep until he was the only one left. Mom said that whatever they talked about there changed him, and he was suddenly around more, and would dig for potatoes with her in the garden with his suit on, and lie in the mud and make pig noises.

  My grandparents really loved each other. I often wonder why they had only one child.

  My first time was on the beach at my parents’ anniversary party after it got late and ­people chatted on the terrace in small groups. I was twenty. His name was Julio. He came out with his mother from the city just for the party. I knew him from when we were kids, and his family rented a house year-round a few doors down. Amagansett was so remote then. Our road had only three houses on it.

  Back then Julio’s mother used to come over and sit on the deck with my mother and drink wine. Julio and I would play for hours. My parents have always liked to drink and talk.

  When I was a teenager, they sat me on the couch between them and dropped their wedding album into my lap. They were married in January sometime in the eighties. They had a honeymoon in Tokyo, but spent most of their time in Kyoto—­which my father said also told the story of ancient China. They turned the pages slowly. I could hear their fingers on the plastic.

  “There’s your father eating the first slice of wedding cake.”

  “She actually fed it to me,” Dad said. “Which embarrassed me then, but later I was glad she did it.”

  “Why?” my mother wanted to know.

  “Because I realized they are my hands now.”

  “Your hands!” My mother laughed. “You’re mad.”

  I think ­people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment—­we are all defined by something we can’t change.

  Losing my virginity to Julio after my parents’ anniversary party was amazing. He had a girlfriend—­but sometimes you have to break rules because nothing is perfect.

  Years and years before, when Julio lived close by, he taught me how to ride a skateboard. He held my hand as it rolled along. Then, laughing but determined, I walked it to the top of the hill. Julio was frantic, but I wasn’t afraid because I knew the road and would have heard a car. I remember the wheels spitting out small stones. How could I have known the neighbor’s boyfriend was out from the city for Passover and parked on the road?

  I spent the night in Southampton hospital.

  The doctor said I was very lucky. My father said to him, “You guys always say that,” and the doctor chuckled. Then my mother asked if it was the same emergency room where they brought Marilyn Monroe.

  Julio came a bit later with his mother and some flowers. They were like summer in his arms.

  I told him he shouldn’t have brought flowers—­that I wasn’t dead yet. But he didn’t laugh. Everyone told him to cheer up.

  After they’d gone and we were alone, Julio cried and cried. He said his parents were getting a divorce. Three months later they moved out, and Julio went to live in Park Slope. We saw each other from time to time and at my parents’ anniversary party, but our friendship was based on the past.

  The reason I have a date tonight is because of something that happened on the Jitney last week.

  The bus was busy that day. We crawl when there’s traffic. I know where we are by the length of the turns and the bumps of railroad tracks.

  When sunlight pours into the bus, I put on sunglasses and get sleepy. I feel my eyes closing. Falling asleep is like walking out on a frozen lake. The ice gets thinner and thinner until suddenly you fall through.

  When someone sat down next to me, I woke up.

  “Hello,” said a voice.

  It was a young woman. By the time we were on the Long Island Expressway, she had explained how she’s going to the airport to meet her father for the very first time.

  I smiled and said smartly that I’d never seen my father, either.

  She touched my hand without realizing I’m blind.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “He feels you.”

  And I suddenly thought of Philip out on the sea.

  So long I imagined him, so many days last summer I conjured him on my father’s boat with us.

  I could feel him cutting through the swell, a bulk of fish in the hull.

  Forklifts humming back at the dock.

  From my office that morning I called Dave. At first he didn’t remember who I was talking about. Then I reminded him about picking me up at Gosman’s in Montauk. He asked if I knew Philip’s last name.

  On the Jitney home that night, Dave called to say he hadn’t found anything out—­but that Janet was going to ask around. I thanked him but felt defeated. Before hanging up, Dave said that if Janet couldn’t find Philip, he’d break up with her.

  The next day at work I was summoned from a meeting to take a phone call.

  It was an effort for him to talk because there was so much to say.

  He said that an Irishwoman was waiting for his boat when they docked that morning—­that they had come in early because the lines were freezing.

  He said he forgot my number, but had recently been looking for me—­admitted he called the Guggenheim Museum by mistake, even hung around Stephen Talkhouse on weekends, watching ­people dance. Nobody knew who I was, he said.

  He said his mother had been very sick when we met last summer on the bench at Gosman’s Dock.

  I asked if she was okay. He said she died.

  Then a long silence that meant we were going to see each other.

  When I went back to the meeting, the interns were looking through hundreds of World War II photographs for a proposed future exhibition. The photographs once belonged to American ser­vicemen who were killed or went missing in Europe. They kept them in their wallets. They looked at them and wrote letters, maybe even held them as they died.

  I thought of Grandpa John.

  It’s late afternoon in England. He’s in the conservatory. It’s raining. Soft thuds on the glass
. My grandmother’s steps keep him going. The memory of her steps keeps him going.

  He’s watering his plants.

  Classical music is on.

  During the war, he had a gun in someone’s mouth. The man was trying to scream. A burst lip from the pushing metal. Eyes watering with fear and rage.

  JOHN

  FRANCE,

  1944

  I.

  JOHN BRAY FELL silently through the night sky, his body less than it ever was, his life a collage devoid of single meaning.

  The impact was so intense that John mistook his panic for death itself. Smoke and freezing air filled the cabin. The B-­24 nosed into a dive. He formed a ladder with the syllables of his wife’s name. Each syllable a rung closer to her, but further from God. A moment before jumping, John realized his leg was on fire and then a sudden freeze and darkness that meant he had made it. He tore at the harness, no time to count, he pulled at everything.

  The navigator lived long enough to release his parachute, then fell without moving, a ring of stars in each eye. The others were captured or died from injuries soon after landing.

  As the canopy spread and swung wildly, John feared for an instant that he was still attached to the aircraft. Then he looked around and saw nothing. He gripped the straps until his hands went numb. Breathing was quick and his lungs bled with cold. One of his feet was badly injured. A dense throb as though his heart had fallen into his boot.

  He was still saying the word Harriet long after he’d forgotten he was doing it. Shaken loose from the association of memory, it was an awkward sound with no meaning.

  He knew the enemy would find wings, the fuselage, bits of wire, a tail section, small fires.

  He might never see Harriet again. They were married but had not yet lived together as man and wife. He might never see the diner where he grew up, or the street upon which he had played baseball and ridden his bicycle. He might never see the dog, or pet it on his way upstairs. He might never go out for ice cream on summer nights with his new wife in sandals, never stand in line at the post office, or ask to borrow the car. He would never stroll the boardwalk at Coney Island, and his dream of living with Harriet, kissing over tea at Lord & Taylor, dancing at the Palace, dizzy with happiness, would end before it had even begun.

  His life was here now in the dark, in the emptiness, drifting through the air over Belgium or France.

  It no longer mattered where.

  Everything that happened to him from this moment on would be an encore.

  JOHN

  LONG ISLAND,

  1939

  II.

  THE DINER WAS full of large parties. The air swirled in currents of smoke and laughter. Outside: Plymouths, Packards, and Fords held life in the haunches of their gleaming coats.

  John clearing dishes. His mother’s voice saying good-­bye in the distance. The register and its tight bell. The smell of syrup. The fire of yolk over white plates. Uneaten crusts of toast. A single fork under the table. The ashtrays completely full. And somebody has forgotten a coat.

  John lifted it from the back of the chair.

  He or she would soon return with cold hands and the car running outside with the door open.

  The coat was long with a belt. It was soft and possessed of a scent that seemed to lift him. It filled his body and was strongest on the collar. There were hairs, too, streaks of honey in waves upon the wool.

  John took the coat into the staff room, and buried his face in the fabric. He held it against his body, to get an idea of her size. A name tag sewn below the collar spelled out her name, and like a vein, it pulsed beneath his fingers.

  Harriet wasn’t serious about John at first. He was three years younger and doted on her. But then after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she considered what her life would be like if he was sent to fight.

  She harnessed the passion she had withheld and proposed marriage on a day trip to Montauk. It was what they both wanted. The sky was blue and cloudless. After lunch they watched seagulls. Fishing boats. Bristling lines of white frothed against the bow.

  Across the ocean, Europe smoldered.

  John found basic training difficult. It also hurt to be away. He couldn’t do a lot of the things they wanted. He was told he would have to kill—­would have to cross a field of guts to come home. John could tell that some of the others were ready, and it reassured him that one day he might be, too.

  On Sundays he rode a bicycle into the countryside near the base, with a sketchbook and pencils. He sent Harriet his drawings of plants and never signed his letters. In the evenings he dressed and went into town in search of music. His superiors sometimes recognized him and waved from the orchestra section.

  He stayed up late with the other men playing cards and smoking cigarettes. He showed the picture of Harriet at Coney Island, and looked at it before bed. He never felt alone and always had someone to help when his weapon jammed during rifle practice.

  John was well liked at home, too. His family had owned a diner for twenty-­four years. He worked there after school for tips. He had a lifetime of stories. Pilots from Garden City would come in on their way back to Manhattan. Others drove for miles just to taste his mother’s brisket.

  The only fights John had in high school got as far as him being pushed over. He played clarinet in band. He collected stamps and kept them in a shoe box.

  His parents were quiet ­people. During the Depression, families they didn’t recognize came in and ate quickly without talking. When the check arrived, it was always the same: fathers rifling through pockets for wallets that must have been dropped, lost, or even left in the pew at church.

  John’s parents always gave the same answer. “Next time, then.” They figured it was going on all over the country, and had agreed never to humiliate a man in front of his children.

  In the years following the Depression, John remembers his father calling him over to the counter from time to time as he sorted the day’s mail. Sometimes the envelopes would include a letter, and once a photograph of a house with children standing in front of it. But mostly they just contained checks for the exact amount of the meal, folded once, and with no return address.

  John’s father worked hard and listened to everything his wife said, even if he disagreed. He never raised his voice and liked to go to Mitchell Field to watch airplanes land.

  The worst event of John’s childhood was when his little cousin Jean got polio. She was taken away one morning and came back a year later in the body of an old woman.

  JOHN

  FRANCE,

  1944

  III.

  IN THE DISTANCE, sudden flare-­ups of light. The crackle of guns. John wondered where their B-­24 had hit the ground. The flash of impact. He thought of his crew and tried to remember wives or mothers. He imagined a field of wreckage and the farmer for years to come, tripping on twists of charred metal. The pieces would sit in a bucket and outlive everyone involved.

  He remembered that his pistol was still under the navigator’s seat along with his wallet. Harriet would have rolled her eyes. “Typical John.”

  Then another shade of black that meant ground. He hit too soon to prepare and lost feeling in his injured foot. The ground was softer than he remembered at training because Europe is wetter.

  John collected his billowing canopy and looked for a place to hide it. The sky glowed with dawn.

  Then shapes appeared in the distance, dark figures approaching. He dropped his parachute and ran. Sharp pain forked up his torso; parts of his body dragged because he couldn’t feel them. He ran for other shadows ahead, dense, motionless, ancient.

  He imagined he was running for Harriet’s coat in the forest before him. Leaves stuck to the wool, a hand appears, then arms, shoulders and the breathless climb to her neck. He would feel for the collar, then thread his life through the loops and hollows of her n
ame.

  The ground was thick with fallen leaves. If he could burrow, he had a chance. He must die and come back to life. He would recite the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud by simply declaring the name of someone he loved. He would trap the contents of his life in the safety of a single word, like a bubble in the sea.

  Harriet was a young wife. She lay under sheets without moving.

  Moonlight washed over her bed and chair.

  The street outside was quiet, but the silence unbearable.

  She could not feel the mud stuffed into John’s mouth to prevent a fatal sneeze or cough, or the mess of shattered bones in his foot.

  Instead she crept downstairs and built a large fire.

  Her father woke to the snap of flames. He grabbed his robe and rushed out of the bedroom. The house glowed with the heat of his daughter’s blaze, but he stopped halfway on the stairs, hypnotized by the flickering shadows and by the outline of his crying child.

  He imagined the fighting overseas. The flashes and the cries. He could taste it in his mouth.

  And as he stood there, not moving, his heart opened upon the many fields of dead, with their helmets on and their eyes pretending to see.

  Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.

  MR. HUGO

  MANCHESTER, ENGLAND,

  2010

  I.

  1948. WOKE UP screaming in a Paris hospital.

  Soon after—sent to another ward where ­people walked around. Played games. Stared out the windows. Lay on the floor.

  I learned to watch others for clues.

  I had to watch, because I understood nothing.

  I waited to eat. I waited for night.

  Night came.