The Unmade World

  Maybe the truth is that while there are plenty of new perceptions for him to achieve, he’s either too old, too tired, or too damaged to process them. For him, the best means would have been through osmosis, by observing and responding to the experiences of his daughter as she aged and reacted to the changing environment. In the natural order of things, she would have graduated two years ago this spring. By now, she would have shared numerous college experiences with him—this is almost certain, though it’s certain too that she would have kept others to herself—and he could have considered them over a solitary drink late at night or discussed them with Julia.

  In a few days, he will think back over his conversation with Alex and wish he had handled it differently. He will not mourn the end result, which will seem inevitable, just how it was arrived at. Mistakes will have been made. And he will have been one of the makers.

  Today, Alex’s heat elicits only a corresponding rise in Richard’s temperature. They may not be back in the newsroom, but he behaves as if they are. “Goddamn it, Alex, I called on him because at a certain point, I always call on everybody who hasn’t yet spoken. That’s the way the fucking class works. Besides, he’s the sharpest kid in the group and says the smartest stuff.”

  “It didn’t occur to you that maybe because he’s black himself, you should have been grateful he was keeping his big mouth shut, since all he was likely to do once he opened it was make trouble?”

  “You know what, Alex?” he says. “That’s a truly disgusting remark. It truly is. I doubt the Office of Diversity and Inclusion would be favorably impressed.”

  You can see the anger draining out of his longtime friend’s face, just as the smugness left Nick Major’s all those years ago when he was asked if he’d ever had a drink at the Golden Palomino.

  “Ah, shit, Richard,” Alex says. “I’m just trying to hang on till sixty-seven. We don’t have a whole lot saved. Can you please . . . can you please just try to be a little more careful from now on? Don’t go in pursuit of truth without regard to cost. I’m asking for my own good as well as yours. I’m asking for the good of all concerned.”

  He drops his head again, looking at his cell phone. As if he’s received one of the many urgent messages he’s been getting every day since joining the busy world of academia, he stands, signaling the end of their meeting.

  “There’s no problem renewing your contract,” he says. “I can’t find anybody else that can do everything you do. Not to mention somebody else I respect and admire so much. Unfortunately, the school guidelines don’t leave me any choice but to report this snafu to HR. My guess is they’ll probably make you go to training.”

  Richard has risen too and was about to leave. Now he stops. “What kind of training?”

  Again, Alex looks at his phone. “You know. One of those sessions where they give you simulated situations and teach you what not to do or say.”

  “Or think?”

  Alex never answers. He stands there staring at his cell, this short, bald little man who’s hoping to hang on till sixty-seven.

  By the time he gets home, the heaviness owns him. Feeling it in his arms and legs, his shoulders and hips, he lies down and falls into a deep, unmedicated sleep. When he wakes, it’s nearly midnight. He pours himself the first of many drinks, then turns on his laptop, sits down, and writes a resignation letter to Alex Veranakis and the Aarden College Institute of Narrative Arts, thanking them for giving him the opportunity to teach there for the past four years and wishing them and their students much success in the years ahead. He attaches it to an e-mail and hits send, marking the end of another chapter.

  One fine Saturday in June, Elena says, “I want to take a hike.”

  Bogdan is not in great condition. True, he’s never smoked, and he drinks much less than he used to, but he’s fifty-eight years old and hasn’t subjected himself to exercise in a long time. He gets winded climbing stairs. He has corns on both feet, and he’s run out of those adhesive pads that provide cushion. His knees are swollen. There are plenty of reasons why he hates the thought of a hike—chief among them the indisputable fact that he’s always hated hikes and most other forms of exercise as well—but none of them matter. If she wants to take a hike, they will. If she wanted to go for a swim, they would.

  Possibilities abound. The two he thinks she would find most rewarding are Dolina Koscieliska, a valley that lies about seven kilometers west of town, where you find broad meadows that offer stunning views of the nearby peaks, and Morskie Oko. The latter is a mountain lake—the name means “Eye of the Sea”—about thirty-five minutes away by car. You have to park at a jumping-off spot and make a strenuous trek to get a view of the lake itself. He did it once with Krysia, and it nearly killed him, though he wasn’t yet forty. He hopes Elena will choose Dolina Koscieliska, but she prefers Morskie Oko. She fixes them a picnic lunch, and he puts it and a large bottle of water and a couple of cans of beer in a backpack, and they climb into the van.

  They reach the car park at Lysa Polana before noon. The elevation here is around a thousand meters, so it’s already a little cooler than it was in Zakopane. He puts on his windbreaker and suggests she do the same. Then he slips the backpack onto his shoulders, and they set off up the asphalt path. It’s wide enough to accommodate horse-drawn carriages, and he wishes he could hitch a ride on each one that creaks past loaded with tourists.

  The difference in altitude between their starting point and the lake itself is only about four hundred meters. But the grades are steep, and in no time, he’s puffing badly and covered in sweat. He stops a moment to pull off the windbreaker and stuff it into the backpack alongside their lunch. If Elena is perspiring, he sees no evidence. She seldom sweats when they make love, whereas he tends to get soaked. Some of us have cool bodies. Some of us don’t.

  Along the way, she takes note of various birds, telling him their names in Ukrainian. He’s never had the slightest interest in birds, and by now, he feels comfortable enough with her to say so.

  “Why this is?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. They’ve always just seemed so . . . well, so different from me.”

  She falls silent, pondering his response. In her opinion, a lot of what’s not right in the world at any given time is wrong because somebody somewhere decided that some other creature—very often another human being—is too different for them to relate. When she was housed at the refugee center in Warsaw, she went out one day to buy a sweet roll, and after she placed her order, the woman behind her in line muttered, “Banderowka.” Seventy-some years ago, Stepan Bandera massacred the Poles, and she’s somehow to blame? Never once in her life has she called the Russians names. Not even after she lost her Serhiy.

  “Your sister says no dogs?” she says. “You should get yourself a pet bird. Let it teach you how to love it. But don’t make it sit all day in a cage. Show it the world from your shoulder. A white cockatoo, maybe.”

  “You have those in Ukraine?”

  “Ukraine is not the moon. At least, it doesn’t used to be. In any nice pet store you can buy. Online too.”

  While he puffs along beside her, his body purging itself through his pores, he thinks that lately she’s making many more grammatical mistakes. He considers this a positive sign, as if she feels safe enough with him to let down her linguistic guard. There are still words and phrases, though, that neither of them ever employs. The future. Next year. Next month. From now on. About the farthest they ever go is Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow is far enough. He recalls how it feels to think you have no tomorrows, when the notion that there might be something worth doing the next day would have seemed like a cruel joke. Through a web of shattered glass, he again sees the face of his own Richard Brennan.

  They reach the lodge above the lake at a quarter till three, and he plops down at a picnic table on the stone terrace. Below them, Morskie Oko shimmers so brightly he has to shade his eyes. Even lifting his arm is taxing. His feet ache, his back hurts, he’s so wet that i
n no time the brisk air begins to chill him.

  Elena seems amused. “You won’t be worth much tonight,” she observes.

  Her resilience never fails to amaze him. Despite all she’s lost, she still enjoys a cold beer, dark bread smeared with smalec, a few shots of vodka late at night. She loves lying on her back, watching him go down on her. Until he met her, he was not much good at it.

  How we find the ones we belong to is a matter of mystery. While for many, this is obvious, it was not always clear to him. He accepted the sanctity of the neighborhood, not to mention national borders. He was born down the street from Krysia, they’d known each other since childhood. It seemed apparent that they belonged together. Yet their marriage was only good for a while, and then it was bad for what felt like forever. Elena’s was fine for some years, but then it too went sour. Maybe it would have lasted if they hadn’t lost their son; maybe it would have revived if her husband hadn’t lost his life. But he suspects not.

  Her world has come unmade, throwing her together with him. He shouldn’t be glad—it’s dangerous and wrong—yet it’s hard not to rejoice at his blind good fortune. Maybe happiness is always a zero-sum game. Somebody loses, somebody else gains.

  She removes the wax paper from the canapés, pulls the plastic top off the salad, and parcels it out onto two paper plates, giving him a little more than she’s kept for herself. She pops the tab on both beers, hands him one, and takes a swallow from hers. He still hasn’t moved. She looks at him, intending to ask if he’s not hungry or thirsty. He’s staring at the lake as if struck by its beauty. But no lake, no matter how pretty, could put that look on the face of a man who dislikes birds.

  Between them, there exists a great imbalance. She understands this, though he doesn’t. He is puzzled by her, whereas she can read him as easily as the instructions on a can of oven cleaner. He believes he’s a bad man, that the difference between bad and good is as clear as the line down the middle of the road. He crossed that line one night, and catastrophe occurred. And now, no matter how long he’s driven on the right side, he still feels like he’s in the wrong lane. He thinks something big and hard should hit him, when in fact it already did.

  She says, “You need to eat your lunch.”

  “I’m really tired,” he says, and he sounds it.

  “You are not so tired you can’t eat. It don’t use much energy or take a lot of brains. If a baby can do it, so can you, though you are not much more than a baby yourself.”

  At least this makes him look away from the lake. It was about to hypnotize him or do something worse. The vulnerability on display was becoming painful to observe.

  “I’m a baby?” he says. “How do you figure that?”

  She takes a look around the terrace: there’s a family nearby—mother, father, a little girl, and a hyperactive boy wearing a football shirt with the Polish eagle on it. Over at the edge of the terrace, in the shade of a tree, two trekkers nap, using their backpacks for pillows. Otherwise, it’s just her and Bogdan.

  She leans close to him. “Come the night,” she whispers, “you’re like momma’s little baby. Thirsty to do what a little baby gets to.”

  The beneficial effects of gravity are sometimes overstated. For him, going down is nearly as difficult as coming up. He’s huffing less and sweating less, but both calves have caught fire, and every time he takes another step, his corns are like nails being pounded into his feet.

  “You are in terrible shape,” she says, holding on to his forearm. “What you have been doing for the last few years?”

  “I spent one of them in prison.”

  “You must have sat in a cell the whole time. Don’t they have no gym at your jail?”

  “They had a few free weights. But just picking myself up was strenuous enough.”

  “When we get home,” she says, “I’m going to have to start walking you around town like a dog. I don’t want another man on me to die. Already I lost two.”

  Those words create buoyancy and lift. So what if he’s hurting? Isn’t nearly everyone, to one extent or another? Despite his discomfort, this is the nicest day Bogdan has experienced in years. Sometimes it’s important to let yourself be dragged. You never know what you might learn along the way. He’s with a woman who plans to walk him like a dog.

  They round a gentle curve, and the car park comes into view. In a couple of moments, they’ll be in the van heading back to Zakopane. Why let pain prevent pleasure? At his age, you never know how much time remains. He could have a stroke and die tomorrow. Tonight, he’ll pop some anti-inflammatory medication and do what momma’s baby gets to and a few other things the baby can’t.

  On the first of July, Richard wakes in a Marriott Courtyard a few blocks down Tremont from Boston Common. He has coffee and half of a cinnamon twist at Dunkin’ Donuts, then gets his car from the garage and drives up Route 1 to Cedar Park, where he grew up. His father’s house sold more than a year ago, and though it’s several blocks from downtown, he decides to drive past it. The couple who bought it had a three-year-old and a four-year-old, and he thought—correctly, it turns out—that they would give the place some much-needed attention. It’s been repainted warm amber, the steps replaced, the front porch turned into a sunroom that his mother would have loved. After she died, his father quit taking care of the house, which Richard thought he understood at the time but did not. He drives past the old jazz club too. It’s been the home of various businesses over the years, none of which lasted long. It’s an antique store now. All you can see through the window is junk: broken lamps, old typewriters, soft-drink bottles. He takes a right on Main, passing a CVS that stands where his mom’s favorite grocery store used to be. The storage facility is a block away.

  Using the code he received via text message, he unlocks his unit and neatly stacks the plastic containers on the highest shelves. This area is called the Highlands, and because the shed is near the base of a hill, he knows without being told that flooding is a possibility.

  He still has friends in town. He could walk up onto any number of porches, ring the doorbell, and be invited in. The first time he brought Julia here, he took her to visit his senior English teacher, his baseball coach, and three or four former classmates. Doing something of this nature, it seems to him now, requires confidence that you’re meeting on equal ground, that both you and your hosts will have news worth sharing, the majority of it good. He has none, and if he did have some, he would want to keep it to himself and savor it alone. So he drives back into the city and takes a walk through the Common and the Public Garden and considers but rejects the possibility of riding the Green Line over to Fenway to see the Sox. He eats dinner in Chinatown, then returns to the hotel and sleeps eleven hours. When he wakes and remembers where he is, it comes to him that the last couple of nights are the only ones he’s spent in Boston since he was twenty-two years old.

  Tickets were cheapest on the fourth of July, so that’s when he leaves the country, taking a Lufthansa flight to Munich. He drinks some whiskey on the plane and some red wine too, but most of his dinner remains untouched. Somewhere about halfway across the Atlantic, he finally drops off, getting a couple of hours’ sleep before landing in Germany.

  Unfortunately, there are storms all over Europe. First, the departure board says his connecting flight will be delayed for forty-five minutes. Then it says an hour and a half. Then they take it off the board altogether but put it back twenty minutes later. Most of those waiting at the gate are speaking Polish, and even if they weren’t, he would have known where they’re from. It’s not their clothes, or their faces, or their posture, or any one thing he can put his finger on. It’s everything together, the strangeness of the once familiar. If necessary, he’d be content to spend the night here. The seats are by no means uncomfortable, and there’s free coffee from a dispenser, several bars at the top of the escalator. So he sits and watches it rain, heavy drops bouncing off the tarmac.

  At three forty-five, nearly four hours late, they announc
e his flight. He goes through the turnstile and boards a bus that delivers him and the other passengers to an RJ, and after sitting on the runaway for another forty minutes, it takes off. The flight is just over an hour in duration, and he’s looking out the window when the clouds break. For the first time in nearly ten years, he sees the green, rolling hills of Malopolska.

  He’s good at judging his distance from the ground, and he can tell when they drop below ten thousand feet. Features on the landscape stop being blobs of color and assume three-dimensional properties. He sees a rocky promontory crowned by an alpine castle, a road winding down the hillside toward the autostrada. The plane banks, and the sight slips away. The spoilers extend, the landing gear locks.

  Almost nothing looks like it used to. The airport is three or four times larger now; there are many more planes on the ground, and most are parked at jetways that didn’t exist before. The baggage area, once a dingy affair with a single U-shaped conveyor, could be at almost any airport in the U.S. or Western Europe. He checks the information board for LH 1622. Carousel 3. His duffel bag is the second to emerge. He pulls the handle free and extends it, then walks through Customs unmolested.

  One thing hasn’t changed: in the arrival hall, it’s shoulder to shoulder, people holding signs up with the names of those they’ve come to collect, the same unsavory characters hanging around, looking for a pocket to pick or hoping to find an American who knows no better than to pay a hundred dollars for a ride into the city. He scans the crowd, then feels a tug on his sleeve.