The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  “We remove the reward so that each decision is a distinct event enacted for its own sake. A pure choice in isolation.”

  A few of the kids nodded, as if they knew what the hell he was talking about.

  When it was my turn, I put some spreadsheets up on the projector, knowing full well that no kid would want to hear more about math on a day that was supposed to be a vacation from it. The numbers were meaningless artifacts from a time when I believed in balanced equations, butterflies pinned to a cork board. I closed with this:

  “Infinity is the greatest achievement in mathematics history. Aside from zero.”

  We ate lunch with the kids at short metal tables bolted to the blacktop. My knee banged against the pipe brace every time I moved, and when the bell rang I limped off beside Jason and his mice into a light drizzle. My daughter gave me a hug. She didn’t hold my presentation against me. How in the world do we deserve such generosity, I want to know.

  Early on I considered a glass eye—Jason’s idea, incidentally—but that was a bust. There was a place in Seattle that made them to order, custom colors, even patterns and little overlaid pictures. Tricia might like to help pick one out, Jason suggested—it would make her feel connected to me, he said. I could get an eye that matched her eyes, or went with her shoes, whatever. Not surprisingly, things didn’t work out as he’d intimated. She saw the socket for the first time and was repulsed. She slammed her own eyes shut like security doors, pinched them tight and turned away in disgust from my Sea of Intranquility.

  The whistle sounded at the top of the grade, and we half-jogged down to the dock. Jason looked natural doing it, his arms swinging comfortably, his knees rising rhythmically, while I shuffled awkwardly downhill. Owing to my compromised depth perception, the road hovered indistinctly somewhere below me. My bones jarred against one another as the ramp rose up and retreated again, their connective tissue worn to threads. And then—for the cyanide on the sundae—who should we meet on the ferry?

  Tricia gave Jason a big hug, studying me with a crinkled nose over his shoulder.

  “What happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  She waved me off and separated from Jason, tugging the ponytail poking out the back of her ball cap and making the odd little clicking sound she’d always made when words failed her. The rain bounced off her spandexed limbs as she cantered in place.

  “I’m training for a triathlon.” she said.

  “Good for you,” Jason said.

  The water of the strait was almost black.

  “Do you wear a wetsuit?” I asked.

  “Some people do. I don’t.”

  “Of course not.”

  She tried to glare at me, but her eyes kept flicking up to my patch, decorated today with a bright whirl of Fibonacci spirals. I moved closer to the rail. She and Jason whispered, their foreheads almost touching. They’d both been married to other people for some time, but if that meant the same thing to them that it did to most it would be a revelation.

  I tried not to listen, focusing instead on the bow wave rolling out toward Canada in a white arc. We’d gone there once, the three of us. To Stanley Park. We’d tried to get lost, and nearly succeeded, stumbling onto the car at the end of the sea wall long past dark. Our island was a pale dot offshore, an afterthought. Tricia had been holding on more and more tightly to my hand as the day faded out and the temperature started to drop. Joined for good, I thought.

  Just before we reached the car, Jason stumbled and wrenched his ankle. Tricia let go of my hand, and there he was between us—leaning his weight on me, his other arm looped around her neck.

  “What kind of friend are you?” he said when I objected, prompting Tricia to give me the first of many looks of diminishing approval. On the ferry home, we went up to the lounge and drank coffee thick with sugar. Tricia rested Jason’s foot in her lap. We seemed to be on two different boats after that, with mine listing badly and taking on water.

  Now Jason was holding up his cage describing his success in the classroom, and they were both laughing. Tricia looked at me once, dismissively, from under her wispy bangs. Then she turned away and jogged off, her shoes squeaking on the wet deck, fading off toward the bow like scavenging gulls.

  Against my will, I still see her sometimes naked beside me in our little cove on the west side of the island. She was beautiful, I have to admit, her skin like paper waiting to be written on, smooth and unmarked in the first good sun of the year. Her northern pallor translated as beauty against the gray rock, while mine came across as something sickly and deprived. She stretched languidly and rolled toward me.

  “It’s almost worth living here on days like this,” she said. I agreed one hundred percent.

  I was wearing a new patch, bright red with a gold-rimmed star in the center. She’d touched it playfully once or twice already—I didn’t like it, but she was so open beside me it seemed ungracious to object. Then she started to lift it; I could feel it hinging like a secret door. I grabbed her wrist, squeezing harder than I meant to.

  “I just want to see it again.” she said.

  “No you don’t.”

  “It won’t make any difference.”

  I don’t know who she thought she was kidding.

  She made the clicking sound, pulled her shirt closed over her perfect breasts and rolled away from me again. Something in the vicinity of my heart collapsed. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and as far as I know never came out again.

  She waited an appropriate period before dumping me, out of respect for her own sensitivity. She wasn’t so shallow as to hold my infirmity against me—she insisted on that. It wasn’t the sunken egg cup where my eye used to be she objected to, it was my inaccessibility. Though to most people’s minds I’m as accessible as a People magazine. Meanwhile, somewhere not far away, Jason was waiting, all sympathy and hard-on. She complained, he commiserated. What a burden lifted I was! How had she stood it so long?

  “How long do they live?” I asked.

  “Who?” Jason said.

  “The mice.”

  “I don’t know. Four or five months, I guess.”

  “Is that normal?”

  Jason nudged the box with his foot. “Do they suffer, you’re asking.”

  I didn’t know if that was what I was asking. Really I was just making conversation, but Jason never had much patience for digressions. Even crossing the Kendricks’ pasture he took the straightest line. The trajectory of the BB to my eye was nothing if not direct.

  “That’s what kids usually ask,” he said. “That’s what they care about, and that’s okay. I mean they’re kids, I expect that. They’re not going to care about reaction times, cortex development, autonomic versus somatic. I mean, come on.”

  “But I should.”

  “Well, look, it’s survival. What separates us.”

  “Ah.”

  “You flinch or you don’t flinch, and there you go.”

  “Yep. There you go.”

  I wondered if he’d ever tried to chase the neurons that go haywire when someone breaks your heart or stabs you in the back. If anybody had. That seemed like a sure bet for a grant.

  Off to our side, a boat full of tourists sped along beside a small pod of orcas. The orcas looped and arced. Every time they turned, the boat turned. The people in the boat were bright orange in their life jackets, bunched on one side of the boat so that it listed unnervingly. We heard the captain bark something over the PA, and some of the orange blobs shifted back to the other side of the boat.

  Jason smiled, leaning on the gate in the rail. He always stood there when he crossed, so he’d be the first one off at the other end. The gate rattled. The safety chain, normally clipped through a rusted hasp, dangled over the side and clanged against the hull.

  “How’s CeeCee doing?” he asked. “Better?”

  “She’s fine, yeah.”

  “Not everyone’s cut out for … whatever. Success. Advancement.”


  He tapped the mouse cage with his toe and smiled again as the mice scrambled down their hallways, turned in desperate circles in their cul-de-sacs. After blowing into his cupped hands to thaw his fingers, he reached down and flipped open a trap door in the top of the cage.

  “The kids seem to like her anyway,” he said. “She’s got Miss Congeniality sewed up, if nothing else.”

  With a little flourish like a magician—which is what I think he’d always seen himself as, conjuring traps and mazes from straight lines, making animate objects disappear with a wave of his hand—he snatched up a tiny, wriggling mouse and lifted it out. He held it by the tail, watching it arch its back and claw at the air with inadequate feet.

  “The world divides up in essential ways,” he said.

  And with that he dropped the mouse over the side. A little white shape descending, bouncing once on the wake from the ferry and disappearing.

  He smiled and made a mental note as if he’d learned something. His nose, pink in the cold, twitched. I wondered why we’d stayed on the same island all this time, bumping up against each other whichever way we turned. We could have left any day, either one of us.

  It didn’t take much. All I had to do was reach across and flip the latch; one finger, easy as that. Jason was leaning on the gate, hanging halfway over. His weight did most of the work. He went under only briefly before bobbing back up, eyes wide and bald spot showing. Tricia was there beside me again—as a vivid illustration of my backward progress—shaking me by the arm. I could see the spray of spit as she cursed me, red blotches on her cheeks, her chest heaving in fury as she reached up and yanked my patch off.

  The triumph in her face as she brandished the patch like a scalp, shook it victoriously and threw it over the side, was something to see.

  “There you are!” she screamed. “There you fucking are!”

  True enough. True enough.

  The tourists picked Jason up. He was a strong swimmer, even in wet clothes with a soaked jacket pulling him down, and something still stronger was pulling him in the opposite direction. It wasn’t love for his wife or children, or the shadow of unheralded accomplishments, fame yanked away. No, he knew what I knew—this episode would cement my position on the island, deep in the shade of better men. It would be my last nail.

  And what could I say? It was an experiment? I was studying him, timing him, noting the twitch of his lip, the fear in his eyes? Hardly.

  He pointed a righteous finger at me, and everyone on the boat and on the ferry turned to look. I waved. A big, slow wave, like we were long lost friends who’d finally found each other again. Oh what the years had done to us! Oh the stories we could tell!

  When we slowed on the approach to the dock, I reached down and clipped the chain back onto the gate. The rain was coming down harder, pinging off the deck and boiling the water down below. I tilted my head back and let it fall into the cup of my eye. It filled pointlessly, one drop at a time, like a battered artifact left behind by some long-dead civilization.

  PARLIAMENT OF OWLS

  A BRANCH BREAKING, A PUFF of breath. The owl pivoted toward the sounds, eyes widening, pupils dilating. The air had cooled quickly, the temperature dropping faster each day now once the sun had gone. There was a smell of impending snow, the mass of cold air pressing down. A grunt, something like a deer in panic. The owl’s eyes black now, all pupil.

  Tim Houck plunged deeper, knowing he was making a mistake. He’d been a Boy Scout before he was a minister, before he was a linebacker, before almost anything. He knew the thing to do was to wait. To talk yourself out of doing exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t even sure now which way the car was. Make widening circles left until you cross your trail—that was the rule. Back then, of course, he hadn’t been much interested in being found.

  He could taste the gin when he breathed in, the dry burn of it like paint fumes. He hadn’t been drunk in some time. The crowd was all ex-jocks, so he knew going in what the reunion would be like. There was a certain stagnation common among them. They lived in the best of their gone moments, and pushed aside the worst. No one mentioned Ethan Coulter, for instance. And why would they? The only ghosts they believed in were their own better selves.

  The air purred across the owl’s soft flight feathers. Its ears, one higher on its head than the other, kept a pinpoint on the rustlings and surges. A shape materialized out of the dark, a large figure bent low and struggling. The owl veered off and lighted on the knob of a beech limb.

  “For his years of service to excellence,” Tim had said without laughing, as he’d preached salvation and dribbled half-hearted benedictions over lifeless parishioners without doing so. Hiding from his true duty in the same absent solemnity.

  Coach Melton patted him on the ass as he stepped to the lectern—the standard football greeting. Tim watched him tear up, memorializing himself and the teams that had come and gone without a single championship. He was smaller than Tim remembered, less imposing. What he’d taken for authority must have been something else.

  The owl preened and watched the man. The first flakes began to fall, as it had known they would, fat and heavy. The man stopped and looked up, made a series of noises.

  “I repent for Ethan Coulter,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t worth much. When he could have done something, he didn’t. The ribbing turning to punches. A hard tackle called by coach, a concussion. Each step following the one before it in a way he couldn’t get his feet to do now. It was strange, looking back, how it all fell into a narrative, the pattern plain as something sewn deliberately. At the time, it had been anything but that. A void of possibility.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated, but it was impossible to call back the future that had been like an ocean washing against them. How had it shrunk to this?

  Off to the owl’s left, a rabbit stepped gingerly through a carpet of fallen needles. The owl swiveled its head to follow, then lost interest. The snow spun through the trees, driven this way and that by internal currents. Wet flakes settled on its bark-patterned back and melted on contact.

  No. Someone had mentioned Ethan. Drew Brownfield; quietly, almost to himself. Coach’s drink had frozen hallway to his cracked lips. Tim thought he might say something, but he only shook his head in mock mournfulness. There was a scholarship in Ethan’s name now. Tim turned away and threw up on the gym floor.

  “I was lost but …” he didn’t finish the verse.

  Deep in the owl’s chest its breath gathered, its throat pouch puffed out. Hoo-ooo. The sound moved through the woods deflecting the falling flakes ever so slightly from their path, before becoming lost some distance off in the general stir of hidden things going about their business.

  REPURPOSING

  THE LIGHT DIDN’T HIT ALL at once. Resurfacing, mercifully, was a gradual thing. In the narrow hallway at the top of the shaft, thick skylights bathed him in a mellow green like the inside of an aquarium. Kyle always stayed there a few minutes before pulling his sunglasses on, taking a breath, and stepping out into the diffuse sun that tumbled down through hickory and pine and whatever else the woods were made of. He took another moment there to decompress, waiting for the thud of the lock engaging behind him. It always gave him a little sting of pleasure, the way it broke the silence. As the outside world gradually acclimated itself to him, he tucked his key card into his pocket and climbed on his bike. By the time the path emerged from the trees into full sun, he was ready for it—and, like a waking lizard, tilted his head back and soaked it in.

  Carlynn and Lauren might have come from what she called the same narrow background, but Lauren still believed it was possible to rise above it. Calling their new regular The Albino, for instance—even if he really was awfully pale—the way Carlynn did, was just low class. Never mind that when he smiled, or tried to, his teeth showed yellow and the stubble on his cheeks gathered in patches sparse and uneven as a dying lawn. He was something her father would have scared her with when she was a child—a woods-thing, a ni
ght monster. Okay. Still he seemed, all in all, harmless enough.

  She watched him lock his bike to the crepe myrtle in front of the shop. Nobody around Breedon rode bikes, except for the DUIs, so she didn’t know who was going to steal it. He tugged on the chain twice, paused, then yanked it once more. Always the same. Maybe he was OCD. Everybody seemed to be now, any little superstition or habit was all of a sudden a disorder. Those poor ball players—if anyone looked too closely at them, they’d all be locked up. Rabbit’s feet, years-old undershirts. Her brother had played all through high school, and held onto that way of thinking for a good while after: If I make this light, everybody will be okay for another year. If three grapes come off the bunch at once, I’ll get that job. None of it worked, of course, but who did it hurt either?

  When the little bell above the door chimed, she made a point of not looking up. She heard him move past, pausing for a second by the counter before making his way back to the graphic novels and strategy card games.

  “Look at him,” Carlynn whispered. “Sweating through his skinny-ass waistband.”

  Well, it was hot, hotter than most years—this early, anyway. Global warming, probably. Most people around Breedon didn’t believe in it, of course, but that’s just because they knew they’d have to change their habits if they did. Lauren believed. She believed in science, and she believed—always had—that people one way or another would end up ruining things. “We aren’t as bright as we think,” her father had said. “Just because you can teach somebody to drive a car or work a labeler, it doesn’t mean they ought to be put in charge of anybody’s destiny.”