American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

Marcus often used this bathroom when they ran out of paper upstairs. How he broke his arm, though, was a mystery Morten planned to solve later but never did.

  “It’s going to be all right, Marcus. Everything will be OK,” he said, crouching onto the floor and wrapping his arms around his son. “It’ll be OK.”

  But Morten was wrong.

  He took Marcus to the hospital, where they confirmed he had broken his radius and needed a cast. It was an over-the-elbow type that mercifully left his thumb and fingers exposed. “Six weeks, come back,” the doctor told them, and sent them home.

  Astrid had to stay behind in the house with her sleeping daughter. She curled into bed with her and placed her open palm on the girl’s chest. The window was cracked open because the room smelled like acrylic paint. She had seen a picture in a magazine of a red tree with butterflies and decided to enliven the children’s room with color and whimsy. Astrid could hear the wind in the trees outside and Sigrid’s slow and peaceful breathing. A glorious, living heat radiated from her body, and her arms swept comically across the bed. Lying there, Astrid absorbed Sigrid’s youth and her health and tried not to think. The boys would be back soon. Marcus would be exhausted. She knew he’d fall asleep in the car on the ride home. Morten would carry him in and put him to bed on the sofa downstairs to avoid the stairs. There was a blanket on the sofa, and a pillow. He would sleep well.

  Soon after, a soothing summer rain started and Astrid listened to the drops on the roof and windows; the heavier drops falling from the gutters to puddles collecting below. She took comfort in knowing that the children would listen to that sound too. Her job—her duty—was now to cast their ship as far forward as possible into the sea without holding on to it for too long, thereby delaying their journey.

  After putting the photos into the box last night, Morten found a bottle of very good whiskey and drank as much as he wanted. In the morning he ate eggs, sausage, and toast with two cups of coffee, which he rarely does. Afterward he drove to the church.

  It is a small and white building in a pool of grass. It is austere, as they all are in the Lutheran north, but it is not unwelcoming. The doors are closed this morning; there is no one else there.

  He has not been to visit Astrid’s grave in . . . it must be some four months or so now. The last time was in April after the snow had retreated, leaving only small pools like cream collecting in the brown hollows on the dark sides of hills. The days, then, were already appreciably longer, and what had been hard ice on the path through the gravestones had melted. Left behind were millions of pebbles the community council had used to keep mourners from slipping. Now, the snow long gone, each stone digs into the soft soles of his leather shoes. There is truly no point in dressing properly in this country. The expectations don’t require it and the physical conditions don’t allow it. That too is something to lament. And yet he trudges on, stubbornly, defiantly, dressing properly and wearing good shoes.

  When he reaches her, Morten bends low but does not place his knee to the ground. He arranges the small bouquet of flowers in the holder at the base of the grave.

  Astrid had wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered in the hills, but Morten had begged her not to. It was too much, he’d said. “I can’t take the thought of fire. Just . . . spare me that. A place—somewhere to go. Do that for me.”

  “You know I won’t be there,” she’d said to him.

  “No, but I will.”

  True to analysis and now true to fact, here he is. The August winds are picking up and the first smoky scent of the coming autumn is already in the air. “It’s warmer where the kids are,” he says to her. Morten doesn’t feel closer to her here, nor does he feel more at peace, but her grave gives him something to tend to. Something to do with his hands: something to husband.

  Morten removes a small white cloth from his pocket, wraps his finger inside it, and traces the letters of her name, returning them to a sharp white.

  “I had thought they could help each other,” Morten says to Astrid. “I didn’t know Lydia died. He hadn’t said. I sent Sigrid there because I thought he could help her. They were so close, those kids. I remember that morning over breakfast—you remember the one—when you were watching them paint with watercolors and you realized they loved each other more than they loved us. I was a bit jealous, I admit,” he says, “but you said it’s better that way because they’ll have each other the longest. That was the first time I understood that you and I had created something together. We created the children, obviously, but here we had created things that loved each other completely and independently of us. It was like watching balloons dance together as they rise up to the clouds.”

  Morten stops talking and looks around to make sure he is still alone.

  “Balloons,” he says, appalled at himself. “I’m talking to ducks now too. Ferdinand. We haven’t had a pet since the cat. I figured I was done. To be honest with you, I’m a little lonely.

  “Astrid, the reason I’m here is that something is wrong with our son. When you died, Marcus fell apart. It was worse than we could have imagined. He became a shadow of the boy he had been before. I feel as though you already know this, but I need to say it anyway. Since then, one way or another, I believe he has been looking to return to the magic of those early days with the watercolors. When he was safe in our presence and joined in every way with his sister. Undistracted. Now . . . he roams the world looking for something, which is always elusive or denied to him.

  “As much as I lost Marcus,” he continues, “I gained Sigrid—I gained her in ways I didn’t deserve. I feel as though I didn’t earn her affections; I simply lost or sent away everything else she loved. We are so close now, and it means so much to me, that I feel guilty. I think our bond is too tight. I hold her too close. We closed up the space where other people might belong. She has no husband. I thought by sending her to America to be with Marcus, we could bring him back somehow. Bring us all back together at just the right moment. Time seems to be running out though. I joke with her, but I’m concerned.”

  Morten puts his hands into his pockets to fish for his pipe but it is not there.

  “He wrote me a letter. He said it had happened again. At first I didn’t know what he meant. But now,” he says to Astrid, “I’m wondering if it had something to do with you.”

  My Mother

  Sigrid wakes to the sound of Irv in the shower bellowing out a song she doesn’t know. It involves somebody knockin’ and whether Irv should let him in. And then something about the devil and blue jeans.

  He is quite committed to the tune.

  It has been a long time since Sigrid has shared a bottle and talked for hours. She tried with her Ambien-recommending friend Eli after the Horowitz case last month but it didn’t work. Unfortunately, Eli isn’t very good at drinking. She doesn’t understand that as a bottle drains, it does not become empty so much as it becomes filled with the room around it; its moods and emotions mix with whatever remains in the bottle so that every subsequent drop expounds greater truths and erstwhile beauties.

  But only if you can hear it. And Eli, poor Eli, simply does not have the ear.

  Irving does.

  This morning Irv sings and Sigrid lies against the pillow, beneath the warm blanket. The first cars of the day make their way across the dew-soaked asphalt outside. Across from her is the old cathode-ray television and a cream-colored hotel phone with a key pad that looks ancient today. This room hasn’t returned to the 1980s but has stayed there. Shabby as it is, there is a comfort in the familiar.

  In Oslo, Sigrid lives alone. She is accustomed to solitude. But there is a new quality to solitude here in America—one that is less about being alone and more about standing beside time itself as though it is a river you can watch flow past from the bank. In Norway, she always feels the presence of the city, the country, and government, the grand agendas of politics and continental debate. Even in her solitude there, she feels connected—not emotionally, perhaps, but fac
tually, as if the shared journey is always a character in her life.

  Not here, though. Not in this motel that is separate from the flow of time. Here she is an individual. Classic rock songs on the radio sound current and cowboy boots are tomorrow’s fashion, not just yesterday’s. And unlike anyplace she’s been in Europe, here she feels . . . separate. She can slip into oblivion if she chooses or rend her clothing from the top of a building and demand the attention of the world. The choice, though, is hers.

  Until this moment she’s always thought of America’s lack of interest and sophistication about Europe—and the rest of the world, it seems—as a kind of ignorance and inferiority. But lying here, she has the most unexpected sensation of destination; as if here is all that really exists and is the only place she is meant to be. It isn’t a wonderful place, or even special. But it is present and vivid, the way life was as a child.

  Beyond the American shores—from that television on the dresser—come stories about life and events elsewhere. But they feel removed and abstract and safely, even inherently, far away. Sigrid does not feel cut off from the wider world so much as she feels it doesn’t really exist. Is that what it feels like to be American?

  The singing stops and the water with it. He starts to whistle. He’s terrible. This becomes a hum when he brushes his teeth and then—surprisingly—blow-dries his hair. He appears in the doorway in a towel with the smile and swagger of a man who’s won a prize for something made in his garage with a spot welder.

  “Howdy,” he smiles.

  “OK.”

  “It’s gonna be a good one. I can feel it,” he says, whipping off the towel and dressing as if they were married. “We’re going to go out there under that warm sun in a rented canoe, we’re going to shimmy up to your brother, who’s going to be so glad to see you that a tear comes to his eye, you’re going to convince him to come back and tell us the story, and then we’re going to bring the stakeholders to this nightmare together and see if we can’t find a smart way to ease us all back from the brink of a new race riot—oh yes, we are. And later, when President McCain pins that Medal of Freedom on my chest, I’m going to accept it with all the humility that befits my station . . .”

  “Good God, Irving. What is it with you people and all the words?”

  “I’m as energized as that little pink bunny this morning.”

  “We didn’t have sex last night.”

  “And yet I feel like I did. Isn’t it fantastic?”

  Irv buckles up his pants as Sigrid walks in her panties and Marcus’s T-shirt to the steamy bathroom. Kicking Irv out, she showers. When she emerges Irv is not in the room at all. Alone, she applies more than her usual amount of makeup, in part to remedy her late night of drinking and not sleeping, and also because the memory of her face on television is still fresh.

  Irv returns twenty minutes later with three local newspapers and a bag full of muffins. He is balancing two cups of coffee in a cardboard holder, designed for a nation on the go.

  “It’s seven,” says Irv, handing her the coffee and flopping down into the chair by the window. “I realize you got here first and this is your call, but for my two cents, I say we first visit Frank Allman, learn what’s what and take stock, and then we’ll see if the police have a boat on the lake. I figure they must. We’re out of our jurisdiction, but these guys won’t mind if we take a peek. I bought Marcus a blueberry muffin. Does he like blueberries?”

  “American blueberries are different than Norwegian ones.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Ours are smaller and blue on the inside. Yours are bigger but aren’t blue.”

  “Our blueberries aren’t blue enough for you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell Maine.”

  “It was nice of you to bring my brother your inferior muffin.”

  “Like I said, it’s all going to work out just fine.”

  By nine o’clock in the morning the three young men who had been camping near Marcus had waved their goodbyes to him, packed their canoe, and left behind a patch of flattened thistles and a black char of ash. Marcus—finally alone—walks among the stones and fallen marshmallows and stands in the spot where they’d laughed last night. Hands in his pockets, he takes refuge in the absence of those same sounds.

  Nearby, two black crows are tussling over the remains of a hot dog coated in dirt. The tube of meat splits into uneven pieces and each crow takes flight with its own share.

  Marcus kicks through the needles and leaves at the campsite. Raucous they may have been, but the campers didn’t leave behind anything that wasn’t biodegradable. They were, ultimately, good kids.

  The lake is dimpled by a breeze, as gentle as a confession. The sea birds bob with their backs warming, their feathers dry and glowing. The rain did not reach here last night. The thin mist on the lake is only the morning’s haze. It will burn off. There is a deep blue above that will soon scorch the world when the angle is right. For now, though, he breathes in the morning.

  He could be done with it immediately and he knows this. Guns are good that way. In the eye, the mouth, the temple. Painless and instantaneous. It isn’t even scary, really. The brains are blown out before the sound wave of the bullet even reaches the ear. Which doesn’t matter anyway, because by then there’s no brain to process it.

  The Taurus .38 revolver is in the same orange backpack he brought to America eighteen years ago; it was that and his guitar. It is a pity not to have it here too, but he left it behind in his room because he knew it would make him too melancholy and possibly rob him of the courage for what needs to be done. The sound of picking a C chord and transitioning to an A minor using the C/B note is simply too beautiful to be halted and replaced with a gun. Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” begins this way. Marcus knew he didn’t have the fortitude to move from that sound to death. The distance would be too great.

  So: The stage is set. All that is required now is for the player to perform his part. It is a one-man show without an audience. What, then, is he waiting for?

  A completeness. A sense of the whole. A resolution. A return to the tonic. A way to close off this life before ending it. This is what he doesn’t feel yet. There is something left undone.

  Marcus would laugh at the idea if he could. How remarkable that a need for aesthetic balance can fend off death itself.

  He was told once that the wavelength of a note is precisely half as long when played one octave higher. This makes music a physical presence, not only a learned convention. The mind actually rebels at sonic discord; the absence of harmony can cause actual physical pain. Could that be true for a story, too? And if for a story, what about a life?

  Jeffrey’s? Lydia’s? His own?

  The gun is heavy. It is beautifully made.

  He is surrounded by harmony and balance and composition. It is why he has always liked it here. Remembering makes him part of that.

  Karen called Lydia when they were in Montreal. Jeffrey had been dead for four hours before she had been able to dial.

  Lydia was alive for two more months.

  During those two months—from the distance at which she kept him—he watched her decline.

  It was different from his mother’s decline. In their house, when he was a little boy, Astrid was calm and quiet and withdrawn. Her motions and activities were ritualistic and mechanical. The way she washed dishes. Washed the clothing. Corrected his homework. Marcus watched Lydia suffocate under the pressures of injustice and hopelessness around her. It was a suffocation born of history but felt in her throat. This was not his mother’s death. That was only personal. She had been in charge, despite the cancer. She had chosen to emotionally remove herself from life. For Lydia, life was being ripped away and torn out.

  Sigrid—little Sigrid—had barely noticed. Sigrid hopped into her mother’s arms in the mornings and complained and demanded like little children do; she rattled off stories as she turned herself into a mannequin with clothing flying
on and off—this matches, this doesn’t, where’s the one with the flowers?—as her mouth produced a flurry of ideas, each featherweight and irrelevant on its own, but together becoming evidence of a contented child living a present-minded life. Growing. Alive.

  Marcus does not remember himself that way. He was older. His arm was broken and wrapped in a cast with a blue coating. He understands now that he projected the literal feelings into a metaphor and came to see his mother like a statue, as immobile as he was—the cancer a calcification working its way outward, her skin hardening into a moon-pale stone. She would occasionally ask him about his broken arm but he said only “It’s fine.” He visualized the cancer that he’d heard about in the bathroom as a coldness inside her that was spreading; the way ice crystals form on still pools of water in the early winter. The crystals were so cold, they were almost black. He remembers hearing the ice inside her freezing. It hardened in her veins and arteries and seeped into her organs, threatening—and then promising—to constrict her heart until it stopped.

  Lydia always hated Marcus’s house, but he had tried to keep it clean for her between the time of their first post-lecture coffee conversation and the Montreal trip. They usually went to her place—a two-bedroom on the upper floor of an old Victorian converted into a condo. There were some rare times, however, when she would come by and stay over. As their relationship deepened and stabilized in those formative weeks, she eventually commandeered a drawer and brought a few toiletries. He, in turn, stocked the fridge with the best he could buy, which was not much. Under these conditions she periodically stayed at his house. After Jeffrey, though, this stopped.

  When they returned from Canada she pulled away from him. There were no more visits and he let the house go. They would see each other on campus and talk, but the connection—the sense of a love developing—was gone. She didn’t end it yet, not explicitly. He tried to reel her back.