Landscape: Memory

by Matthew Stadler

  "Let them," he gave in, recklessly. "I've had enough of wet shoes for today. I take it Flora will be there."

  "Yes, yes. Flora and possibly Unt if she finishes with her cello and makes it back home in time."

  "Oh," he said in recognition. "That anarchist's den."

  ''That anarchist's den," I confirmed, meaning the home of Mrs. Meekshtais, avowed anarchist and alleged correspondent of Emma Goldman.

  We walked down College to Parker, the blue breaking through in patches above us and the air blowing warm with a dry wind in from the south. Flora was home and Unt wasn't. Duncan told Flora he'd come as a counterrevolutionary and would make us march all the way to Devil's Island, but Flora had other plans.

  "We're going on a picnic," she announced, getting the heavy basket from off the kitchen table and pointing me toward a pile of blankets and towels she'd stacked in the vestibule. "We'll drive to Lake Anza and spend the day."

  "But I have my Memory class," I complained.

  "Forget it," Flora recommended.

  "And my English class," Duncan reminded her.

  "We're ill," she said, setting him straight. "Sick in the head." She turned us both around and pushed forward toward the door, poking me a reminder to pick up the blankets as we passed through the vestibule and out into the brightening day.

  The sky had cleared up in the hills and Lake Anza was empty, free of boats, swimmers or walkers, all discouraged, we figured, by the gray morning. Flora had packed some favorite foods and brought the bulky Rochester as well, its box all finely dusted with Bolinas and smelling of the warm sweet dirt that kicked up off the roads there. Flora, setting the tone, stripped promptly and ran headlong into the clear blue water, splashing about furiously and then simply floating on her back, her round breasts breaking the water and her thick hair spreading loose and dark around her peaceful face. I did the same, and Duncan too.

  It was a long queer afternoon, too much like the past to feel entirely present. Our minds were in such entirely different places, so far as I could tell, that I felt the sad calm of being alone in the woods, though Flora and Duncan were stretched out there beside me. Flora, I imagined, was just as she always was, stable and entirely present. I was not, and Duncan slept. As in Bolinas, we didn't talk much. But now, I felt, there was so much not being said. Our picnic was filled with silence, not merely silent.

  I finally fell asleep, waking up after a few hours with a chill shivering through me and Duncan rolled up against my side. Flora stood close by with the camera, recording it all for posterity. The lake was busy with birds. A small fleet of merganser cruised close to our shore and one belted kingfisher kept swinging out from the trees and down into the water. Walkers came through but we were smartly clothed, having toweled down and dressed after the initial plunge.

  It was an odd displaced moment for me, that long silent afternoon, too high up in the hills to be Bolinas. Everything seemed strange down below, busy with buildings and foreign tongues and the carefully turned patterns of the marching drill, drumming on across the field. Our wheels were all turning in different directions, even while we slept together, there by the shore.

  The weather had come blowing in again. Thick gray fog was rolling up the dusky hills now, and we packed our things in Flora's car and motored back down below.

  Robert,

  I've not been well. I'll be in hospital at Rouen for a rest. A few days, or a week. Maybe home. Gave it in and couldn't find the will, finally. Just curled up in a ball there on the table, whimpering as if I'd been a dog and beaten by my master. That last boy, so frail and cheerful, slurring through all that blood, foaming in bubbles past his pale lips, his skull laid clean to the bone and shattered, Robert. He asked me if I'd time to dress his elbow, feared he had a gash on his elbow. "Could you, Doc, after taking care of the others?" he said. "I'm in no hurry."

  25 NOVEMBER 1915

  Just a fever, and dreams I don't remember.

  27 NOVEMBER 1915

  30 NOVEMBER 1915

  Mother says I'm very ill. I can only sleep.

  2 DECEMBER 1915

  I'm going on a train soon. Father will meet me.

  4 DECEMBER 1915

  I remember going then to the hollow, feeling so horribly weak. Mother says I've got to write this now. It's strange that it's possible, thinking it like a story. That's what I've been doing. I think of it like a story, to keep it all, because I'd lost it for a while.

  Duncan and I returned to the Fair, so we could pass through and see it again before it ended. The crowds had not diminished. They were riding in tiny trains and walking in groups along the grand avenues, all wrapped up in thick winter cloaks on this cold gray day. I thought of our early visits. The brittle wooden frames had stretched up into the mists. The ground was a sea of mud. The iron tracks were littered with giant anomalous heads and feet, cast in fake marble. It was all put together in an instant, looking now like it was a part of the city if not an extension of the very land. I remembered this wasn't even land two years ago and felt the impossible thinness of the brittle domes stretch suddenly outward to encompass everything. What was here two years ago? What was here a thousand years ago? Every moment then and since was gone. I bumped up into Duncan and felt him all solid and flesh. His warm breath clouded, moist against my ear.

  We went out the Presidio Gate and up into the trees. Our course was not strictly running. It included evasions and dodges and connivings, crawling under fences and leaping over hedges, scrambling down some steep hills through brush and winding fast and furious in amongst the trees.

  "What we want's a nice even pace," Duncan said as we got set to start. "Never strolling, but nothing so maniac you lose control either."

  I nodded in agreement, and wondered what was wrong with strolling.

  I'd forgotten that this was war, that this was make-believe.

  "You want to be capable of absolute silence at any moment," he continued. "So no running so fast you're gasping and choking for air."

  "But you said no strolling," I objected.

  "That's right. Otherwise you get picked off by snipers."

  "Then you can't say no gasping."

  "Try it. Max. That's why you should've stuck with training," he explained, as a matter of fact. "If you don't train you die."

  "Oops."

  "Yeah. Oops."

  I was very good over the first third of our course, drawing on my Freight Train skills, dodging trees and leaping small chasms with the sureness and accuracy of a deer, hardly gasping because we hardly let up long enough to gasp, until Duncan put his hand up and stopped stock-still in amongst the long stand of fir.

  I crouched down and heaved for air as subtly as I knew how, feeling a very deep pain inside my lungs, working my ribs and diaphragm to their full stretch. Duncan knelt beside me, breathing in steady silent breaths through his nose. Delicious dewy drops of sweat gathered across his flushed cheeks. I knocked him down onto the bare ground and kissed him all over his face, tasting the salty sweet taste of him, and sliding my hands up inside his shirt, running them across the warm wet skin of his belly and chest. I wanted to pull his pants down and take him warm and flexing into my mouth and fill me inside with him all bitter and delicious. But I didn't do that.

  "Max," he objected, "we'll be shot by snipers." He pushed my hands back out of his shirt and bear-hugged me into staying still, laying us over low to hide from the eyes of the enemy.

  "Shoot," I screamed, "shoot us now and end this terrible war." My voice echoed off into the misty woods, answered only by the long, throaty calling of sea birds lifting out of the trees. No bullets came singing through the still air.

  "Jesus, Max," Duncan said, shaking his head, "rm glad you're not going to war with me."

  "We could die together," I said, pulling my shirt apart and baring my breast to him heroically. "Take me," I growled to him from deep in my throat.

  He got up and looked out through the trees.

  "Let's finish the rest of the way
to the beach now, without any stops." He looked back to where I lay spread-eagled on the ground, my shirt undone, me looking up through the dark green tops of the trees. "You think you're up to it?" he asked.

  I lay still for a long time, feeling the salty ocean mist slipping across my bare skin and breathing it deep and luscious through my nose and mouth. Duncan offered me a hand and I took it, standing up beside him and getting set for our run to the beach.

  Through the thick woods along the western edge we found a good steady rhythm, me breathing nice and deep and relying on the quick step, slide, jump, push, step, slide, jump of our fast scrambling to keep me on track and rolling along with Duncan. It got dark and dense where we ran, and I started to feel the thrill Duncan felt, the dizzy tingle of my body pumping and the sense of the enemy, hidden behind every obstacle, ever-present and making our constant motion feel necessary, like blood.

  We bounced and beat on through the brush, the high trees gone now, giving way to twisted, wind-bent hemlock and wild tangles, open areas thick with ice plant and the ocean smell rushing in now, fresh and full with fish and seaweed. Wet clouds of mist were rolling in off the swollen gray waters. I could feel it beading up on my sweat-drenched skin, swirling in around and rushing over us, like a lover running soft cool hands all over our bodies.

  There was the beach, opened up down below, flat wet sand. We scrambled down the dirty path, cut all zigzag through thick low scrub, dumping off over one last ledge. A daring leap in stride and reckless, landing with a hard thud in the damp sand, our weak knees giving way to the force of the fall, my head dizzy from a lack of oxygen and my muscles tingling and sweet with exhaustion.

  I lay there looking sideways across the sand, watching the gray-green waves tumble and roar, rising up high and rigid and collapsing into dirty foam and roiling, boiling runnels of ocean washed up hard onto the sand.

  Duncan stripped downi to his boxers and ran out headlong into the waves, leaping deliriously up against their dark faces, his body slapped cold by the sheer weight of them, and spun around and dunked. The ocean just stretched out forever, mixing gray into the gray-raining sky out on the invisible horizon. Black rocks thick with kelp broke off land, the waters raking across their rough edges, and there was Duncan, up and over the first waves and swimming now, his skin red from the salty slap of cold water, drawing his arms through the roaring waves and drifting fast away from me and out to the wide-open sea.

  I watched from the shore, silent and motionless, standing in the wet sand, listening to that familiar sound I'd known, it seemed, forever—the steady rumble of the waves roaring near and far, the patient calling of birds, sweeping in close to land, diving suddenly down into the foamy sea. I watched Duncan disappear out into the gray, just his dark hair and the rough chopping stroke of his pink arms coming up now and again out in the swollen rolling sea. He was going in no clear direction, too tired to think clearly, it seemed, unable to find the shore, and too exhausted to cry out for help. He just kept moving farther and farther away, moving forward until I could not see him anymore.

  That's all of it I can write, the story part. It's like all these stories, so I can remember. Parts come different in dreams. I can't write them how they come. But I remember the story part. I'll feel the other, maybe in different places, different places holding that other terrible feeling, where I can't have words.

  6 DECEMBER 1915

  Fair. The rains come in. In the fire, it burned three days. Now I remember, three days and heavy gray clouds hung over waiting, wet and thick. The whole city burned, burned out for three days and no water in the pumps. Today the clouds hang low, drag rain through the broken roofs, down onto the rubble and empty brittle domes. Now I remember the sky finally let loose only after the city had burned itself out, dumping sheets of gray, drenching rain into the ashes. Today they've dug up the walks and the mud washes like a wide sea. It all ripped, torn by trenches, and some buildings collapsed only one day after, them knocking them down in the driving rain. I'm feeling that other, that dumb, mute other.

  Dear Robert,

  I'll be in Serbia, after two weeks home. We'll be up the Vardar and into the quarantine. I've never been and find I can't even remember its location on the map. I've forgotten where I was stationed. The captain had me filling in forms and I wasn't able to find words to put in all those blanks. "Length of Service," "Field Status," "Assigned to (list, beginning with most recent)," "Casualty Clearing Station," "Nature of Injury." Nature of Injury. How could I possibly say?

  The Train

  _______________________________________________

  1 5 DECEMBER 1915

  The train leaves going east. I saw his body next to me, at night last night, just beautiful and warm. It was nothing, of course, except seeing it and then feeling. The window's dark still. I sleep some, but half not, seeing myself in the window. We're slow in the mountains now, I guess.

  16 DECEMBER 1915

  Awake before dawn, then the light. Sharp-toothed silhouette all across the window and the light neither blue nor yellow. That impossible problem of light at dawn. I can sleep here, in a small bed by the window. This blanket smells of mothballs. Soft, thin blanket, dark green like mine at home.

  I am eleven, riding a small wooden train north from Stinson Beach at night. It has no roof. Where the road drops down, just before Bolinas lagoon, the tracks cross through a rugged -gap and descend down to a lake more beautiful than any ever, anywhere. There's no Bolinas and no lagoon. I realize I always knew that and the lake is what's been here all along.

  My father emerges from a shack in overalls. He walks into the lake and pulls the train behind, floating it lightly on the water's surface, smiling to me and asking if I'm sleepy. The day is perfect and clean and clear.

  The lake becomes blood, too thick to let us float toward the shore. Loons start from the trees, hit by the terrible stench. They fill the sky, sweeping down near the train for an instant, then off west over the trees, beyond the high hills, and to the sea. And I'm Duncan, and have always been, watching from the still train, knowing the loons are me. Max.

  A friendly Negro face looks through my curtains sometimes when I'm awake. He says, "You gonna sleep all five days?" He gave me soup on a tray, and smells of Sen-Sen and good strong soap. It was bright daytime, the light white off tongues of snow slipping down from the sawtooth edge. There are rocks here big as houses.

  That man left me Walt Whitman and a Harper's.

  11

  I turn, but do not extricate myself,

  Confused, a past-reading, another, but with darkness yet.

  The beach is cut hy the razory ice-wind — the wreck-guns sound.

  The tempest lulls — the moon comes floundering through the drifts.

  I look where the ship helplessly heads end on —I hear the burst as she strikes —I hear the howls of dismay — they grow fainter and fainter.

  I cannot aid with my wringing fingers,

  I can but rush to the surf, and let it drench me and freeze upon me.

  I search with the crowd — not one of the company is wash 'd to us alive;

  In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in a barn.

  I'm to see a fellow in Chicago. Then to Boston, where Father is going to meet me. Mother gave instructions to the man who brought me soup.

  The snow covers whole mountains. Now it's moonlight on the pale fields, stretching soft as sand, rising like monstrous dunes up into a sky more black than I've ever imagined. Ice-cold clear and black, stuck with stars, pinpoint perfect in the wide empty air.

  17 DECEMBER 1915

  We're riding across a flat sea of white. Father won't be in Boston. The man whose name is Teddy told me when I was awake. He had a little yellow paper from Western Union which Mother sent. Another man will meet me there.

  It's colder now, I think, than even in the mountains. I tell by pressing my hand against the window and feeling until it hurts that dull ache of cold in the bones.

 
; I am walking along high hills in China. The air is hazy with smoke and heavy and damp. There is no dawn or sunset or day or night in China, just this permanent condition. The valleys are busy with dirt roads and jitneys, crowds of people bearing burdens on their backs and yak-drawn carts loaded down heavy on their wooden wheels with enormous, rough roots like horseradish. All these travelers keep moving, never stopping to load or unload, running slow and steady, like blood through the veins of this place.

  The hills are bare dirt and terraced up their steep sides. Wild fields of wheat and rice grow together on these shelves of land. I walk the thin lip of each terrace. They crumble under with each step, dropping dirt down the long drop to the fields below and below and below. The City is built the same way. Clay shelters propped up by heavy sticks and stacked three or four high, all up and down the steep sides of the broad mountain, several miles distant at the head of this valley. The dim noise and acrid smell of the City drifts through the hot humid air and wood smoke. I'm going there.

  Teddy brought poached eggs and two thick slices of smoky ham. I had such an appetite and a stirring in my legs, from lying down so long, I imagine. The sky's broken up deep blue with a high, wide ceiling of puffy clouds, bright white and light as popcorn. This is Kansas, Teddy tells me.

  I found more books, pulling trousers out of my carrying case. The Ad Herennium, The Picture of Dorian Gray (which mother had been reading), the text from Mr. Brown's course and, inexplicably, a Baedeker for northern Germany. Mother packed my things.

  I've been to the observation car now. I wobbled down the length of the rattling train, bumping up against things every few steps along the way. I passed Teddy and he smiled at me. A man brought tea on a cane tray with sugar lumps in a china bowl and cream slightly swaying with the train. I watched the wide flat fields rolling by the window and held Whitman in my lap. I felt frightened by him, the possibility of what I might find wherever I opened to. I'd rather stay with the bright white fields and the sun peeking through the ice-cold air out there.