When everything had been said, she lay down. Ben leaned back on his elbows, and their arms touched. He waited for Diane to move. He wondered if she knew they were touching.
* * *
• • •
A few hours later Ben opened his eyes and sat up quickly. A wet dog stood with a stick in its mouth. Night was draining into the sea.
When they got back to the car, it was almost six. The eastern sky was dazzling. Gloss white paint on iron benches looked bright and delicate.
They talked a little but were mostly silent. Ben noticed she’d kept the fish fork. It was under the hand brake with some coins and the wrapper from her ice rocket.
When they came to a busy roundabout, Ben said it was probably the best place to get out. It was the morning of a different day. The roads were full of people going to work. Children drifting in groups toward school fields.
Diane pulled over and slipped some notes from her wallet.
“Take the train the rest of the way.”
Ben looked at the money in her hands.
“Please,” she said. “Take something for your journey.”
When he closed the door, they stared at one another through the glass, but only her outline was visible. It was the first of many times he would try to remember her face, the first of many times he would look for someone and not see them—search for someone whose absence defined him.
Not Dying
The Art of Fugue
“An Incomplete Work of Unspecified Instrumentation”
A piece in which the voices come in,
And the listeners go out, one by one.
—SAINT-SAËNS
Author’s Note
When I was in Kentucky, one of my neighbors lived alone and never had visitors. His speech was extremely delayed and he always wore the same thing—denim overalls with a dozen key chains dangling from a belt loop. My favorite was a doll’s shoe in the form of an ice skate. He worked somewhere local, but I don’t know where. And he walked slowly, taking small steps.
Sometimes I would hear his TV through the wall. But sometimes it was him, talking on the telephone.
He would disappear on weekends and holidays; I thought he was with his parents, but I later learned he had a wife and a daughter in the northern part of the state.
One night, we came to our respective doors at the same time.
“I wasn’t always like this,” he said.
A week later it happened again. But this time he invited me in. On the table was a bowl of nuts with chocolate pieces mixed in. On the wall, framed pictures of a woman and a teenage girl in a wheelchair. He said the child was his daughter.
The following story is inspired by what he told me over the next five hours.
1.
For a long time all he could do was lie still with his eyes closed.
It was snowing then.
Flakes tumbled from the sky and broke apart on the windshield. The truck was stiff because the engine had been off since dark.
2.
The radio was on, but low. When a powerful voice rose in anger to announce the end of the world, Lenny sat up. The voice wanted listeners to know it loved them. But most of all it was God’s love that mattered. Then the voice went silent with the snow all around still falling.
Lenny’s wife and daughter were inside the house. He could see their faces in his mind, but could not hold their faces steady. They flickered and broke apart as though memory were another trick of light on water.
He turned the radio dial. Went from one end to the other, but caught not one sentence, nor one word, nor a single note of music. All had gone quiet. He reached for a plastic-wrapped soft pack of cigarettes. They were deep in the glove box where his wife or daughter wouldn’t find them when foraging for candies. He struck a paper match, then watched blue smoke curl through a crack in the window.
After smoking, Lenny flicked out the glowing end and lay on his back across the bench seat of the old Ford pickup. Then he closed his eyes with radio static all around and cold seeping in through his heavy coat.
3.
Repent, the voice had said. The end is near.
Lenny tried to imagine what it would be like. The voice said sometime tomorrow, early or late it didn’t know—but in a few hours the Earth would no longer exist. Even in memory.
Lenny watched the snow falling. Then pictured himself alongside his wife and ten-year-old daughter in the master bedroom of the farmhouse they had rented for the weekend.
The idea had been to get away from the city.
A vacation house in the mountains. Hours from anywhere, with no television, Internet, or cell phone reception. A weekend of long meals, building fires, talking—Monopoly.
If the end of the world were coming, Lenny thought, we’d be better off in the country. He was calm because he didn’t believe it. He tried to imagine what the city would be like: a screaming crowd going madly in all directions; fire; shoes and flattened pieces of clothing on the road; barricades of upside-down shopping carts; people getting pulled from their vehicles.
If it happened tomorrow as the voice had said, they would die quietly in a house that was not their home. Most likely upstairs in the yellow bedroom, with their daughter between them.
Jane’s doll too, in sweater and ice skates.
4.
Lenny tried to imagine how dying would feel. He closed his eyes and let his head hang to one side. Stopped his breathing.
But his mind was fixed on the idea of escape. Getting Carolin and Jane to safety. Somewhere far away, a cliff overlooking plains, faces streaked with dirt, they sob at lines of smoke in the distance; the smoldering remains of a lost race.
The heat of fire carried him back to childhood. A Western Shoshone reservation in Nevada.
Outside the trailer, scattered toys, a washing machine full of empty bottles, the neighbor’s ’71 Chevy Cheyenne with flat tires and faded paint.
Low, blowing, pale-green desert grass all around.
Lenny used to sit watching the long road up the mountain for a cloud. Somebody coming or somebody gone. He wanted to be outside when the cloud was his father. To show he’d been waiting. That he was loyal like the men in westerns.
He knew there was a world beyond the sun-red dust and always blowing wind. He’d seen people on television in gray cities of falling rain.
He knew the sea from books. On the page it didn’t move; still, the oceans and tides conjured from his weekly bath were enough to flood the world.
When Lenny was ten, his mother took him on their first vacation. A noiseless cloud rolling down the mountain with no one watching. Two people in a white car with soda, chips, and borrowed Nevada plates. A mother and son leaving the reservation for a body of water in Arizona, where Lenny would once again be weightless.
5.
If the world were ending he would try and get his girls to the desert. It was ground that remembered him. Perhaps there would be other survivors who knew more and had a plan?
Would they believe they’d been spared for a reason? That they were special? That’s how religion is born, Lenny figured, still lying there on his back in the truck. And that’s why the voice was so passionate. Religion preys on the weak. It is born through fear. To be saved you must give up hope in anything else. Freedom through servitude. Then you’ll be ready. For Him.
Lenny laughed because his wife would have said Her. But if there was anything, he thought—it had to be nothing like us, no blood, nor flesh, not even a face.
Outside it was still coming down, like the bones of all those who had come before.
Lenny’s daughter, Jane, was delivered in a city called Albany, at a hospital of redbrick and glass. He hesitated to say born, feeling now, lying there in the cold, that bodies do not create life, but channel it.
Then he lit another cigarette and smoked un
til it was hot in his fingers.
6.
Lenny felt he should do something. Maybe drive to a gas station or find a town. He could know then. There would be lights on and people outside their homes.
He sat up and tried the radio dial again, his mind rolling along with the static. Anticipation like a net. The announcer must have been a fanatic, going through a nervous breakdown, or angry at being fired and attempting to spread fear in his last moments on the air.
Lenny’s body craved a lick of bourbon, or a finger of brandy in a heavy glass. Something to get in his gums. He’d been sober for almost a decade—since becoming engaged to Carolin. But smoking was a different matter. He liked one every night at exactly the same time. If Jane and Carolin were sleeping he’d have another. Then, if he was up late, a third.
It was soon past midnight.
He sat up and opened the door of the truck slowly, then took a few steps outside. It didn’t feel like the world was ending. Just another long winter’s night. But he was careful to close the truck door with only a click. His lips were sticking and tasted of blood.
The sky had cleared for a moment, and he stared up into the bowl of stars. Set loose his breath. Seeing it reminded him of ancestors praying to the souls of dying animals. Made him wonder if it was possible to live without eyes and a mouth, a brain and limbs, blood and hair.
7.
Part of him wanted to get back in the truck and just drive—make sure there was nothing in what he’d heard on the radio. He could surely leave the girls for an hour. Find a diner—get fried eggs and black coffee.
When he was in high school, there was a place he went to. It wasn’t far from the reservation where he lived with his mother. An hour west. Deep in the desert. It was open all night, served hamburgers and onion rings. A lottery machine on the counter. Popular with Native Americans, but veterans too. A place to go drunk. A home for those who found no rest in sleep.
Summer nights were baking hot. Lenny used to stand outside, listening to the desert and the grind of diesel trucks making time out of Reno.
Sometimes he got drunk and slept in the car with the windows open.
Lenny knew a lot of people in that place and had good friends on the rez. But after high school, he took off for Arizona. To live near the lake he’d loved as a boy.
8.
Years passed. It was exciting to live away from home. The black cowboy hat his mother gave him as a graduation present was dusty and worn out. He called her once a week and sometimes she visited.
One Saturday, after ripping up an old fence for his neighbor, Lenny drove to the lake with the intention of cooling off.
There was a young woman on the beach staring at the water with her knees up. A blue swimsuit matched her eyes. She moved her fingers in the sand like she was drawing. One of her friends was getting buried.
Lenny did not feel love when he saw her, just disappointment at how they would never meet. He wondered if other people felt things for strangers, then carried the weight of that absence.
There was no wind that day. People just stood in the water. Some were playing games in the water, but Lenny was just standing in it, trying to cool off.
8.1.
He couldn’t believe it later on in the parking lot. She had a flat tire, and there was no one else around. They had chosen to go home at the same moment. He reached into his truck for the black cowboy hat, then went back.
“Looks like you’ve got a flat there, miss.”
“Darn it!” she said, looking around. “And my friends are gone.”
Lenny could see the outline of her bathing suit under a loose T-shirt, but kept his eyes on the tire.
“You probably went over a nail.”
“Will that do it?”
“A nail? Sure.” Lenny couldn’t believe how she didn’t know the power she had over others.
“I can put the spare on for you?” he offered.
“I think I’ll be okay.”
Lenny stared at how sunk down the car looked with the crushed tire.
“I wouldn’t want to keep you,” she said quickly. “It’s probably a lot of trouble, right?”
“It’s no trouble. I could change tires all day.”
“Are you a mechanic?”
He shook his head. “Just like fixing things.”
“You’d get along with my dad then. He was a cop, but now he works on old cars.”
“What kind?”
“Ford trucks, mostly.”
“No kidding?”
8.2.
When they looked in the trunk there was no spare. Lenny had to drive her home. She didn’t seem nervous, but he tried to think of things that would make her feel safe.
“I’ll fix that tire for you tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’ll go to a junkyard in Boulder City, get you a wheel. Then we’ll drive out to the beach and put it on.”
“You can’t do that.”
“It’s no problem.”
“Don’t you have things to do? It’s Sunday.”
Lenny laughed. “Like church?”
“Well I don’t know . . . do you think it’ll cost a lot?”
“I don’t think it will. A wheel like that. Can’t be more than fourteen inches. Hopefully the junkyard wheel will have a good tire already on it.”
“I’m Carolin,” she said, turning her body to face him.
“You’re not from Arizona, I can tell.”
“How can you tell?” she said.
“Your accent, I guess.”
“I’m from Albany.”
“Where’s that?”
“New York.”
“Wow, city girl.”
This made her laugh. Lenny looked at the road. He couldn’t believe the girl from the beach was in his truck.
8.3.
They rode out to a junkyard in Boulder City the next day, but it was closed, so Lenny bought something from the auto shop to spray in the tire and make it hard. He followed her from the lake with his hazard lights blinking all the way to her house.
That night they had Mexican food on the patio. She went barefoot. Lenny saw she had painted her toes. After eating, she brought him inside to watch television. They laughed along with the people they couldn’t see. She said he could stay, then took him into her room. Streetlight lit up her bed. They kissed and she undressed with the windows open, insects rattling in the trees.
A few days later they met to play minigolf and eat something. After eating, it felt early so they drove a long way to the college she had in mind. The parking lot was empty but for Lenny’s truck. He could see his red taillights in the rearview mirror. Carolin was saving up for the tuition payments, and getting her state residency.
The neighbors soon got used to seeing a Ford pickup parked outside her yellow house. Some had things they needed doing and trusted Lenny, because at first he wouldn’t take money. His truck was white with a bench seat. The bumpers were rusted. One end was twisted out. Carolin said he should save money too. Then buy a garage and fix up old cars, like her dad.
Sometimes Lenny drove her to the sacred grounds. He had a blow-up mattress in the back and they used it on clear nights when the stars were more powerful than anything they had seen on Earth. It felt good to talk like that, without being afraid, as though being together meant taming things from the past.
Lenny even told her about his father disappearing; about when that had happened to him and his mother back in Nevada.
9.
A year after they met, Carolin had to go back east because her father got cancer. They sold her small car and piled their belongings in the back of Lenny’s truck under a blue tarp.
That was many years ago. But Lenny knew the story of how he met Carolin would one day be thousands of years old. One day millions. Not lost,
but lodged somewhere in the darkness between stars, waiting to be reclaimed. The certainty that all happiness would be forgotten made Lenny value it more. But he also sensed a deeper happiness. One that was unexpected, that came later, without pain and the memory of others.
He couldn’t see any stars now from the driveway, but knew they were somewhere through the freezing air, beyond the snow and the clouds, beyond the mountains, far away.
* * *
• • •
He hoped he might feel better in the house. Shake off the radio announcer’s words like snow from his jacket. Perhaps convince himself it was a joke or he’d misheard—or was caught in some complicated dream where you wake up, but in truth you’ve gone deeper. Inside the farmhouse, the fire he’d lit with his daughter was still going. He would tell her in the morning what a good job she had done. He sat on the carpet in his socks. Could feel the heat pushing his face.
Jane and Carolin were sleeping upstairs. He thought he might go and look at them. Listen to them breathe.
When they woke in seven or eight hours, the sky would be a low flare of orange beyond the dumb, packed snow.
Jane would want to go outside and play. She had been born in Albany and was used to the winters. Carolin would come downstairs with her book, wearing glasses, looking for coffee and toast. That was what tomorrow would be like, unless Lenny woke his wife to repeat what he’d heard in the truck.
Carolin would listen with her eyes closed. Groan and turn over.
Come to bed now, she would say.
The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories Page 7