The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  “It smells like diarrhea,” Kitty said.

  “Ah, but it merely tastes like vomit!”

  At the Hippocrates Health Institute, he met some people who called themselves breatharians. “They live off the fruits and berries of the air,” he told Jonathan. “Their bodies are so efficient that they subsist on sunlight and purified water. Can you imagine the lightness? There are documented cases of breatharians who have lived to be 130 years old.”

  Jonathan thought about his grandfather in Cleveland, who was 71. He had a hard time imagining Lou at Zadie’s age, never mind 130.

  “What would you do if you lived that long?” he asked.

  “That’s a problem I’d like to have.”

  On the first warm day of spring Lou bought himself and Jonathan ten-speed bicycles. They rode to Walden Pond and back, and up the industrial banks of the Merrimack River as far as Haverhill. They started talking about a big ambitious trip to Akron, Ohio, where Jonathan’s aunt lived. Summer was out of the question—Lou would be gone, as usual. In any case, September was perfect biking weather, and he’d smooth it over with Jonathan’s teacher. What of any real importance could Jonathan possibly miss in a week away from seventh grade?

  All summer, in his lower bunk, Jonathan pored over a road atlas (feeling some gratification when Kitty complained about being left out). In his mind, the bike trip became a sort of audition for the Soviet Union: a chance to prove he was old enough and good enough company to take along next year. When Lou got home in late August they took a few shake-down rides, tuned their bikes, and went over their packing lists. In the interest of traveling light, Lou tore a bath towel in two and gave Jonathan half. They had to save room in their panniers for tools and maps, and a few discretionary items, like books and a deck of cards. A few days before setting off they convened in the living room, moving pushpins around a map on the wall.

  “We can take the commuter line to Fitchburg,” Lou said, sinking another pushpin. “That way we make Fisk’s house the first night. He’ll drive us to New Paltz in the morning.”

  “Why are we going to New Paltz?” Jonathan asked, suspicious.

  “Fisk and I have to meet with Larson. But that should only take an hour or so.”

  Jonathan’s father called his friends—most of them Slavicists like himself—by their last names, and this was how Jonathan knew them as well. For as long as he could remember, he and Kitty had called them Fisk and Larson and Grubsky and Stetz.

  “Isn’t it cheating, though?” he asked. “I thought we were going to ride our bikes the whole way.”

  Lou waved the objection off. “Don’t be an ideologue,” he said. “So we take a train. So we get a lift. The important thing is to travel by the seat of our pants. Anyhow, after New Paltz the real adventure begins. The Delaware River, the Alleghenies, Scranton. If we biked the whole way, we wouldn’t have time to do Scranton properly.”

  Jonathan’s legs felt rubbery as they pushed their bikes up Fisk’s steep, rocky driveway. They’d ridden sixty miles—almost twice as far as they’d ever gone in one day. Fisk greeted them at the door of his cabin with a towel wrapped around his waist. “Schultz! Jonathan!” he said. “You made it! I’ve been heating up the sauna.” His tiny cabin was dominated by a long wooden table, almost hidden under stacks of books, catalogues, loose papers, and dirty dishes. He’d set up two army cots in the small space between the table and his own bed, which was jammed up against a picture window. The shapes of several cars and trucks were visible in the darkening meadow out back.

  In the sauna, Fisk—now without his towel—crouched on the slate floor feeding logs into the stove. His skin had turned pink, contrasting violently with his thick white hair and beard. Lou lay stretched out on the opposite bench, arms folded behind his head, sucking droplets of sweat out of his bushy moustache. The two men slipped in and out of Russian.

  The heat made Jonathan woozy. “How long do we stay in here for?” he asked.

  “How about we cool off in the river?” Fisk suggested.

  They darted out into the chilly evening, across the driveway and down a mossy bank to the creek that ran through Fisk’s property, yelping as they squatted in a deep part of the current. Fisk’s beard glowed in the moonlight as he splashed himself with his long arms.

  “Jonathan, one day I’ll take you to the public baths in Leningrad,” Lou said. “It’s better than rejuvelac. You climb a ladder and sit on a shelf—the higher up you go, the hotter it is, until the steam is so thick you can’t see your neighbor as he beats you with his vennik.”

  “What’s a vennik?” Jonathan asked, his teeth chattering.

  “A switch cut from a birch tree. Ah, you’d love it.”

  They ran up the bank and across the driveway, where Jonathan and Lou had left their clothes in a pile outside the sauna, and dressed in the cabin.

  “Officially, I’ve given up meat,” Lou said as Fisk put a dish of beef stew in front of him, “but this smells too wonderful.”

  The men talked about Serbian verb stems until Jonathan’s eyes began to droop. He put his bowl in the sink, spread out his sleeping bag, and opened his book, but he was asleep before he could find his place on the dog-eared page.

  When Jonathan woke, his father was at the table arranging some wild mushrooms on a sheet of newspaper. “Hen of the Woods and some late chanterelles,” he said. “We can have them for lunch. Larson will be delighted.”

  “We’re staying there for lunch?”

  “An early lunch. We’ll hit the road right after and see if we can make it to the banks of the Delaware tonight.”

  Jonathan sat between his father and Fisk on the bench seat of Fisk’s pickup truck, studying a New York State map while they talked across him. He counted just over fifty miles from New Paltz to the Delaware River. “When does it get dark, Lou?”

  “Around seven o’clock, I’d say.”

  “How many miles an hour do you think we can go on our bikes?”

  “For crying out loud, relax. I promise you, we’ll be in Scranton by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Larson lived a few miles outside of New Paltz. His house was a gloomy little replica of Lou’s, down to the cupola on the mossy roof. He hugged each of them for a long time before showing them into the living room. His wife, a Polish woman named Olga, disappeared into the kitchen with Lou’s mushrooms. Larson was one of Lou’s oldest friends, but Jonathan could tell he annoyed Lou a little with his jowly, sad-eyed devotion. He wondered sometimes why his father was friends with Larson at all when he had so many other people to talk to about textbooks and verbs. Specifically, he wondered why they had to squander the morning here when Larson came to see them in Cambridge so often. Olga brought coffee for the men and a Fresca for Jonathan, and as he took the first swig, he realized he’d left his water bottle behind at Fisk’s cabin.

  While the Slavicists talked on, he thought about his water bottle. He pictured it sitting on the rough plank under Fisk’s outdoor spigot. It was brand-new, white, with rings in the plastic that kept it snug in its bracket, and a thing on top that you pulled out so you could squirt water into your mouth without slowing down. He meant to say something, but Larson kept filling every conversational gap with appreciative murmurs and repetitions of Lou’s comments. It wasn’t until they’d loaded their panniers on their bikes and said goodbye to Fisk and the Larsons that he had a chance to mention it.

  “Oh, Jonathan,” Lou said. “Why didn’t you speak up before Fisk drove away?”

  They had to double back on Route 55 and find a bike shop in town. By the time they set off, it was after two. Lou hurried him up the long hill past Minnewaska State Park and down a busy stretch of Route 209.

  Early the next afternoon they stood on a rise above Scranton looking down at a belt of factories surrounded by low hills. “An old coal town,” Lou said. “Had its glory days around the turn of the century. Top-notch anthracite.” The freight lines, spreading out across the valley, reminded Jonathan of one of his favorite sto
ries: how Lou had hopped a train when he was fourteen—not much older than Jonathan was now. He’d gotten all the way to Enid, Oklahoma, and presented himself at the local jail, where they gave him a sandwich and a bed for the night. Jonathan must have seen something like it in a movie. In his mind’s eye, the scene always ran in black and white.

  They rode down into the valley, over tracks and under trestles, past warehouses and empty shopping centers, until the city streets began: storefronts, bus shelters, fire hydrants painted red white and blue for the Bicentennial.

  “Hold up,” Lou said, pulling over to the curb. “Look at that!” He pointed to a sign hanging over the entrance to a bar up the block. “Zimne Piwo. This must be a Polish neighborhood.”

  “What does Zimne Piwo mean?” asked Jonathan.

  “Cold beer. Zimne: cold. Piwo: beer.”

  They went more slowly, looking around them.

  Lou stopped again. What caught his attention was a red neon sign on the ground floor of a four-story brick building. “The Royal Czestochowa,” it said. Through the window they saw long tables and hanging fluorescent light fixtures, and against the back wall, a cafeteria counter. The handwritten note taped to the double glass doors directed them to “enter throw hotel.”

  Two empty cement urns flanked the main entrance. Pipedin muzak followed them through a wide, high-ceilinged lobby lined with vinyl couches and into the dining room. A lady in a housecoat sat by the front window, motionless, a piece of toast suspended halfway between her plate and her open mouth.

  “I’m famished,” Lou said as they pushed their trays along the metal rail. He loaded up with a cucumber salad, a plate of pierogies, and three slices of black bread. “Proszę, pan,” he called out to a man in a long apron who watched them from behind the cash register. “Jest ten bigoş?” He pointed at a vat of stew.

  “Tak, tak. Bigoş,” the man said, shuffling over and picking up a ladle. He had the same moustache as Jonathan’s father.

  “You should try some of this,” Lou said. “What the hell.” He put a parfait glass of lime jello on his tray.

  Jonathan accepted a bowl of bigoş. It smelled bad, like sauerkraut. He took some black bread, which he frosted with a thick layer of margarine, and inspected the jello. Suspended in it were pale, fuzzy pieces of canned fruit cocktail.

  “This is where I’d like to spend my golden years,” Lou said as they sat down with their trays. “Dozing in my oatmeal. Reading day-old newspapers. I could take a room upstairs.”

  Jonathan felt a momentary panic, as he always did when his father talked about retiring in some faraway place: Czechoslovakia, Sevastopol, Akron. He imagined for a second that he would be left behind, but then he remembered that Lou was talking about the future, when he would be older himself and living on his own.

  The bigoş tasted even worse than it smelled. Jonathan chewed on a piece of bread and poked at his rubbery jello with a teaspoon. He considered whether he could get away with asking for a slice of pizza or a hot dog later, when they were exploring Scranton. The man in the apron was pushing a cart around the room now, tossing dishes into the bin and wiping the tables down with a rag. Lou said something to him in Polish, and soon the two of them were chatting away. Jonathan could see that it was not going to be easy to dislodge his father. He took a newspaper from the pile in the middle of the table. “School Bond Measure Passes”; “Wilkes-Barre Police Chief To Step Down”; and below the fold, “Mine Cave-in on Washburn St.” The picture showed a house leaning at a strange angle, surrounded by traffic barriers.

  He looked up Washburn Street on the map. “Lou,” he said, “can we go see this?”

  The house, when they found it, had tipped even farther back from the road. There was van with a gas company logo parked out front, but there was no sign of activity beyond the barricades. Yellow police tape was scattered in the front yard amid furniture, toys, soggy bedding, and trash bags with clothes spilling out of them.

  “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, boychik,” Lou said.

  The windows of the house, tilted skyward, reflected steel-grey clouds gathering in the western sky.

  In the morning they biked along the Lackawanna River, through Wilkes-Barre, then northwest on Highway 309. A few miles on, they hit the steepest climb of the trip so far. They switchbacked until traffic got too heavy, then inched up the breakdown lane. Jonathan’s mind emptied of everything but forward motion. He strained against the pedals and stared at the small patch of road crawling beneath him, and when he looked up, he could no longer see his father. The grade steepened even more. Defeated, he got off his bike and walked, leaning his forearms on the handlebars. After a while he decided that pushing the bike was as much work as riding it, so he got back on, almost tipping over as he struggled to gain momentum on the hill. He found Lou resting under a tree in the next village with the map spread out in front of him. He leaned his bike against his father’s and sat down heavily.

  “Guess what they call this range we’re in,” Lou said.

  Jonathan shrugged.

  “The Endless Mountains.”

  When they set off again under thickening clouds, Jonathan was determined to get out front, or at least keep pace, but once again Lou pulled ahead. Every time Jonathan spotted him, the distance between them grew until his father disappeared entirely. The road went up and down along a ridge, neither losing nor gaining much altitude. Jonathan stared straight ahead, not looking at the countryside as it passed. He was glad to be alone now, relieved of the obligation to be good company. “Eat my dust, Dad,” he screamed through clenched teeth as he pushed up a hill, checking over his shoulder to be sure he was still alone.

  Late in the afternoon, he spotted Lou’s bike outside a trolley car diner and found him inside, sitting at the counter. A fry cook leaned on the counter in front of him, smoking. Seeing Jonathan, the cook stubbed out his cigarette and straightened up.

  “Hey!” Lou said, swiveling around. “I was just talking about you. No one believes I have a twelve-year-old son who can ride his bike up a mountain.”

  “Mine don’t do nothing but watch TV,” the cook said. “Good for you, kid.” He slapped the counter twice and turned back to the grill.

  While they ate their sandwiches, Jonathan calculated their mileage on a napkin. He made a column of the distances between the little red arrows on the map, then added them up and checked his addition, going over their route to make sure he hadn’t left anything out.

  “Whattaya got?” Lou asked, mopping his plate with a bread crust.

  “Fifty-seven miles so far.”

  “Let me see the map.” He put on his reading glasses. “How are you holding up?”

  “Good.”

  “Why don’t we bypass Williamsport, then? Let’s see if we can make it here.” He pointed at a town where the road they were following intersected Route 15.

  When the rain came, it wasn’t a soaking one. It softened the line of trees and released perfume from the yellowing ferns alongside the road. Jonathan passed a sign that said, “State Game Lands Number 134.” He realized he hadn’t seen a house for miles. At Route 15 he found Lou waiting outside a boarded-up gas station.

  “It looks like the town’s gone,” Lou said.

  “You said there would be a motel.”

  “I guess I was wrong.”

  The mountain air atomized their breath. “I’m cold,” Jonathan said.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Lou said. “We can turn around and go to Williamsport if that’s what you want.”

  “No, I don’t want to backtrack.”

  “Good. Neither do I.”

  They pushed on, riding together now. They put on their headlamps when it got dark. Trees, fields, collapsing sheds, clusters of trailers scrolled past in the thin bands of light until they came to a darkened house. The residents had turned in for the night or moved away; they couldn’t tell which, and they decided not to knock on the door. Exhausted, they spread out their sleeping bags on the wide
front porch and ate a dinner of sardines and crackers. Lou rolled up his half-towel for neck support—a habit he’d picked up in Japan when he was in the army—and Jonathan wadded his pants and shirt into a pillow.

  A freight train blasted by in the middle of the night, so close it shook the porch, and for a moment Jonathan didn’t know where he was. Then he saw his panniers and his sneakers, stuffed with newspaper to soak up the day’s rain. The sky was clear now. The moon, high over the trees across the road, flooded the porch with light. He could count every link on the chain of his bicycle, leaning against the rail in front of him.

  “Lou, are you awake?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Lou?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Did your dad ever go with you?”

  “Go where?”

  “You know, like the time you went to Oklahoma?”

  “No,” Lou said, “Zadie had to mind the store.” He adjusted his towel. “We’ve got a big climb tomorrow, Jonathan.” Soon he was snoring softly, inhaling and exhaling the fruits and berries of the air.

  While Jonathan waited for sleep to return, he thought of Lou at fourteen—just a few years older than he was now—running alongside a slow-moving train, grabbing on to the side. Lou had stopped snoring. When Jonathan looked over he was lying perfectly still, washed in a cold light. Jonathan went back to his reverie.

  A dark, flat place sped past the open door of the boxcar. It was all he could summon when he thought of Oklahoma. The train slowed, then stopped in a sleeping town. This time, though, instead of his father, Jonathan saw himself turning his pockets inside out for the man at the jail.