by Lydia Millet
The show was being put on at a Minor League baseball stadium about twenty minutes from my parents’ that’s always been the perfect place for pyrotechnics; we used to go there for the Fourth when I was a kid. Until I went to college I came here every Independence Day, first with my parents and Solly, then with a swarm of classmates, and by my last years in high school with guys in their hand-me-down family cars—not watching the show, just using the dark and crowds and noise as camouflage. That was when the stadium was small and dilapidated, with wooden seats, before it was renovated into the slick behemoth it is now.
I led the others into the elevator and we went all the way to the last row, where the view was worst for sports but best for fireworks. It had been a hot day but now a breeze swept up and chilled me; I’d remembered to bring a jacket for Lena, but not one for myself. As we filed along into our seats my arms came up in goosebumps.
Ned would have to work hard to find us, I figured, and of course there was no good reason he should try: no photo op, no obvious prospect of gain. Then again, hounding me seemed to be its own reward. He was always able to trace my movements. And he’d said he was coming.
Tumbling acrobats erupted onto the field, frolicked and ran off again; lumpy costumed creatures ran out next, waggling their top-heavy bodies, possibly cartoon animals connected to a TV show. Tinny pop music blared loudly from a bad sound system to accompany their antics, then mercifully cut off. Vendors of popcorn and glow-in-the-dark novelties moved among the seats; I bought Lena a whistle in the colors of the rainbow. Finally the main show started, a local orchestra that tuned up and launched into a jumbled rendition of the 1812 Overture.
Maybe it wasn’t jumbled, I thought, maybe the flaw was in my ear, maybe Ned’s long fingers had twisted even the music that I heard.
Lena bounced off my lap in delight when the first firecrackers shot into the sky. She’d moved along to sit with Main Linda by the time, a few minutes later, her father appeared at the end of our row.
He wasn’t wearing a suit and tie for once; in a jacket and a polo shirt he was strictly business casual. Where was his bodyguard, I thought, his driver, the fake Secret Service guy? There was always one of them at least, but I saw no one near. Maybe they were seated somewhere, hidden in the crowd.
I moved out toward him instantly, exactly as though I wanted to be in his company and sought it out—and I did want to, I wanted nothing more than to reach him at that moment. Instead of a rush of adrenaline or heavy dread it was a stolid calm that guided my progress; I barely noticed the guests as I inched myself along between their jutting-out knees and the seatbacks in front of us. It was almost romantic, as though, beneath the falling pink stars and showers of green, there was no one anymore but Ned and me.
Stepping onto the catwalk I remembered parking with a boyfriend senior year, just a few steps from the stadium wall. I knew the moldy smell of the seats in his car, the lacy brown rust along the bottom of the doors, and how we’d thought of the fireworks as our soundtrack—the world was about us. We were sure of that as we made out, moving in the darkness of the car with our long, lean arms and legs bound up in each other, that soft skin tingling over the curves, thrilled by the conviction that this here, this was the only and the all. There was no question, then, that the world had been created as our scenery.
That was the bliss of being young, the pure egoist joy. But if you get old and don’t grow out of it, I thought, looking up at my husband, you are ruined.
Maybe he’d never had a chance for that. Maybe he never had that kind of youth. Maybe he could only feel it now.
I leaned in as though I wanted to kiss him, and though I don’t think he believed or wished for that anymore he must have been surprised for a moment. He’s always assumed I’m harmless, pathetically harmless, and that gave me a couple of seconds’ grace to slam my hands against his chest. I was feeling nothing for him then but a pity that stretched all the way back to his childhood, all the way back to before he was him.
At the second of contact I saw how the guests had been drawn together, dots gathering around a node or birds flocking to a flyway. I saw Ned and his ominous host converging on us like a machine army—even the child in the subway train, even the air in the tires of my car, even the fire that had burned the house, all these were his armaments. I saw in every granule and wave how my husband’s power had seemed impossible, how it had borne the sheen of dark magic for me but was constituted of energy, energy subverted.
And when the heels of my hands came off him again, the images faded.
But it wasn’t easy to send him over the rail. I didn’t have enough weight behind me or enough leverage; maybe the angle of my approach was weak. I felt the bulk of his chest against my hands, the shock of his unyielding body as he leaned back. The chest was the wrong place to hit, a mistake that almost cost me my life: he was well-balanced with the rail against the backs of his thighs. Instead of toppling backwards he grabbed me and steadied himself—a strong man as well as a beautiful one. With his disciplined allegiance to fitness he’d always had strength. Discipline equals strength, though the coldness of the equation is depressing—unfair, it seemed to me as I felt instantly shocked and made foolish by the feebleness of my attack.
I’d felt its prospect tingle on my skin and seconds later that prospect had ebbed. My chance had passed. Why does strength hold itself so stubbornly away, why can’t it be that we can summon it out of feeling or impulse, out of just wanting to? Fear made my legs weak. I couldn’t move.
One hand grabbed my right shoulder and the other dug into my left wrist like a claw, and then it was twisting me there, by the wrist, and I don’t know if I gasped or shrieked.
But all the time he was smiling.
Then he raised his hand from my shoulder and, still smiling, punched my face with it, sideways and hard. I felt my nose crunch and the pain was blinding; my eyes squeezed shut and now he was punching me again. And again. My tongue felt a loose molar and my mouth was full of blood.
I was willing to fall with him if I had to. I feared being crippled, but dying I could stand, as long as I could hold a picture of Lena in safety as I fell, Lena in Solly’s care, Solly and Luisa keeping her safe from harm. Before I could push myself forward and topple us both there was a rush of others around me, a cluster of people, and it’s hard to say what the geometry was. Ned must have known I wasn’t alone, but only then did his smile flicker. Or so I believe. I couldn’t see much by then, was blinded by the blood in my eyes.
I know there were others all around me but I couldn’t say if we made noise, I couldn’t say how our hands moved or our feet, couldn’t say much about who did what, whose bodies pushed or pulled, all I can say is that at a certain point I swiped at my eyes and saw we were by ourselves.
Ned was gone.
And when we looked around us—after we leaned over the rail and stared down into a pool of black that didn’t tell us anything—we found the crowd seemed to have ignored our scuffle. But I wasn’t paying attention, I was preoccupied by the pain in my face, the blood dripping down my chin. My nose made a high wheezing noise when I breathed. Will took my hand, Navid was squeezing my shoulder, and then we turned and in a rush we pounded down the stairs—other than me it was all men, Will and Gabe and Burke and Navid and Don; Lena was away from all of it, back in the seats, deep into the row surrounded by the Lindas.
We pounded down and out and around, running hard until we got to the right stretch of pavement. In the dark I breathed my fast, wheezing breaths, tried not to faint from the acuteness of the pain. There wasn’t a floodlight anywhere near us and I couldn’t see his face. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to.
Finally someone found a penlight—I think it was hanging off a keychain—and its weak light was dancing over Ned’s head and shoulders, a small spot unequal to the task, lighting the planes of his face in a piecemeal way. I clenched my hands into fists so the pressure would anchor me against unreality.
But he looked as real as any
thing lying there, real and even alive, his magnetism intact despite the white polo shirt that should have left him looking like an out-of-place golfer. His jacket was spread open at his sides like wings, his arms were flung out, eyes nearly closed, well-shaped mouth just a bit open. The skin of his face was stainless, almost without a pore, its same delicate hue of salon gold.
Only the pebbly asphalt around his head was stained.
NEWS OF HIS death ran in Alaskan media outlets: heroically trying to save a fellow climber, he’d lost his footing in the mountains and plummeted. On the main street in Anchorage there were altars of flowers and photographs. People held candlelight vigils, although (said Charley) they were notably more modest than for fallen celebrities.
There are cameras at the stadium but maybe it was too dark for them to capture what had happened: in any case none of us were ever contacted, none of us were questioned. I have to conclude this was intentional—that it wouldn’t have jibed with the narrative.
We stayed in my parents’ house for two weeks after the Fourth. I had to have my nose reset and the bruises around my eyes are still fading; the tooth I lost was at the back so the gap doesn’t show.
Lena asked about the nose and the bruises, of course. I thought about not telling her, but then I thought again and I did. “I pushed your daddy,” I said. “Listen. I’m not proud of it. It’s not the way to solve problems. But then he hit me back. Harder. Men shouldn’t ever hit women.”
“He should have only pushed you back,” said Lena, pragmatic. “It’s not fair. I’m glad I don’t like him.”
“Lena,” I said, holding her hands, “your daddy’s not coming back. We won’t see him again.”
“That’s good,” she said.
I’VE BEEN HELPING my mother with the funeral aftermath. Solly had to go back to work, so we said goodbye to him and Luisa and waved to them from the front porch as they drove off.
After they left we moved at our leisure through tidy rooms, curating the many vases of cut flowers as their rotting stems sloughed off into the clouding water. We sorted clothes and shoes into boxes for donation, read and acknowledged condolence cards; we cleaned out my father’s desk, his chest of drawers, the file cabinets and high-up shelves at the back of his closet. I drove my mother to the bank to fill out forms, went online to switch her utilities and other services out of his name, made sure she filed a claim with the life-insurance carrier.
While we were going about these dull tasks, Will walked with Lena to a nearby park, a nearby pool. He took her to the movies, to a beach in Connecticut, and once to a state fair, where they went on a Tilt-A-Whirl, ate funnel cakes with powdered sugar and, by shooting a water gun, won her an orange stuffed giraffe.
Those public places, open to the world, the two of them were able to wander through in liberty.
For me it was a melancholy, dreary time with a curious softness. I kept waiting—I wait even now—but so far I’ve found no moral torment in being a murderer.
None at all.
IF WHAT SLIPS through to us from the deeper language is filtered and textured by our own interests and affections—our ties to babies or animals or trees—maybe I heard only what I could.
Maybe our gods are as small as we are or as large, varying with the size of our empathy. Maybe when a man’s mind is small his God shrinks to fit.
Because if you’re the kind of person who wants to know what’s at the end of the universe, what’s at the edge of being, and you grow older and older and comprehension settles on you that you’ll never know, despair can well up. The question of what we don’t see, what’s beyond our capacity—in the space where the answer should be, in the knowledge that nothing will ever give us that answer—we have to pass through all the dark nights we live until we die. Never to see what’s at the end of infinity, never to see the future of what we love, even the hidden lives of our children—
the knowledge breaks our hearts. It nearly cracks us open as we walk.
It’s enough of a burden, that futile desire to know more than we ever can. But worse than the mind’s natural limits, far worse is the invasion of its privacy. Ned’s desecration of my thoughts, that was a distortion I could never have kept living with, that conversion of the world’s airy expansiveness and wild unknowns into gray squares. Compared to that violence the presence of divinity was gentle.
With language, with the splendid idea of an intelligence that lasted forever, at least I still had my own perceptions, my own moods. I had room for doubt, plenty of space for movement. That room and space could be inhabited. But Ned’s monotony of empty assertions in the service of self-promotion, self-replication and mastery for its own sake, his reach that extended past the boundaries of even the body—that was a weapon without end.
DON CALLED ME tonight, just called me on the cell phone. Slowly I’m learning to live with his pronouncements. It wasn’t over, he said, as I had to know: in fact we were still at the start. My husband happened to be the first we met, he said, the first we encountered personally, but another had already risen to take his place. There are many like him.
They are legion, said Don. They speak in false tongues and want to own the world.
No, scratch that, he said. We both know they own the world already, but now they want even more.
Now they want to make it over in their own image.
“Are you ready?” he asked me.
I THINK OF what Kay wrote in her mania.
Deep language is in all living things but all the others, it stays with. Only not humans … God leaves us, Anna, God leaves us.
Yet we’re the children of that language—not the only children, that boast was always a rookie mistake, but among their multitudes. We still swim in the shallows of that vast and ancient sea, the water that runs through us, a coding of genes and flesh that lives on in beings and cultures. We are those bonds that make our nervous systems, our circulation, our lungs exert their miraculous intelligence without our direction—the beneath and always, the insane, preposterous motion of life.
Let God leave us, Kay, if what you mean is constant company. Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we need the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it’s our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.
Our loneliness is our strength. It’s not the same as being alone—almost the opposite. Loneliness is the sense of others, present but beyond our reach.
We feel a terrible tenderness, a terrible gratitude, and at the end we see that face and know the moment is here. The beast has come for us at last.
ALSO BY LYDIA MILLET
Mermaids in Paradise
Magnificence
Ghost Lights
How the Dead Dream
Love in Infant Monkeys
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Everyone’s Pretty
My Happy Life
George Bush, Dark Prince of Love
Omnivores
FOR YOUNG READERS
Pills and Starships
The Shimmers in the Night
The Fires Beneath the Sea
Deepest thanks to Maria Massie and Tom Mayer, beloved agent and beloved editor, and to all at Norton who worked on this book, including Elizabeth Riley, Ryan Harrington, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Ingsu Liu, David High, Bill Rusin, Deirdre Dolan, Dan Christiaens, Golda Rademacher, Karen Rice, Meredith McGinnis, Steve Colca, and Julia Druskin.
Copyright © 2016 by Lydia Millet
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