The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  “If you see your father’s ghost,” he said. “Tell him thank you from me.”

  “He thought you deserved it.”

  Pitcall laughed, a harsh laugh that degenerated into a hacking cough.

  “Maybe I do,” he said, when the fit had nearly passed.

  George tried to judge his location by small signs as the train rattled through the dark—the double thump of a switch being crossed, a glimpse of starlit field. His reflection in the window was a distraction; the eyes, above all, that went where he went. He lowered the window, ignoring the complaints from behind him as wind whistled into the car. Outside, everything was settling into stillness. Only a faint ripple rolled out as they passed, lifting the trackside growth like a sheet of paper being torn off.

  During the night, a thunderstorm passed close by. It didn’t wake him or Elizabeth, but it found its way into his sleep. He could feel the shape of it, somehow familiar—a hand, he thought at first, but no; less distinct. It moved across the length of his body, cool and gentle, rustling the leaves outside his window, laying the thinnest veneer of stars across the night sky. The next morning, the smoke had lowered even further, obscuring everything taller than a house. The sun was a dim, amorphous glow behind it, but George felt awash in light. He would act, he’d decided, for once. He would telegraph the police in Martinez and report Dick Fleming missing.

  “Did you know him?” Elizabeth asked over breakfast.

  “Not well.”

  “So then … ?”

  “People need help sometimes.”

  “Of course. But even so, would he ask you, of all people?”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  Elizabeth puffed out an impatient breath.

  “You have enough to worry about.”

  George would have liked to hear her inventory; he didn’t think their lists would tally.

  He’d found a picture of Dick Fleming in the Epitome, their yearbook. Some years would naturally have been added, his hair maybe flecked already with gray. Doubt might have found its way into his grin, but he would still be, for police purposes, identifiable. George looked at the picture again—was there something there, in that captured moment, that might have anticipated this present one? The smoke moved past his window like the underside of some foul sea; he could sense him out there, lost and wandering, waiting for someone to call out. Like a boy playing blind man’s bluff after everyone had gone home. All except George. George was still here, and he would call his name and lead him back.

  A sudden scream of brakes threw him forward. He braced his arm against the seatback, the train shuddered to a stop. The porter did his best to calm everyone, but had little useful information to impart. Despite the ripple of panic passing through the car, for the first morning in some time George rose with confidence from his seat. The porter nodded to him, touched the brim of his cap. George smiled and nodded back. They were all on the same team, weren’t they? Though it was true that only one of them spent all day on his feet, and at the end of the day they went home to quite different neighborhoods.

  They were just shy of Wye Station, Pitcall’s stop. George patted the porter on the shoulder as he passed, and stepped down onto the road bed. He could see the brakeman and engineer beside the engine up ahead. There was a smell of burned metal drifting back, and something else. George felt a current of dread push against him. He knew—he was unaccountably sure of it—that Tommy Pitcall was at the head of the train, dead on the tracks.

  The porter was at his side, touching his sleeve.

  “You’d better come to the front, Mr. Evans.”

  George nodded, but didn’t follow the man stepping carefully along the tie ends toward what was surely a violent and bloody scene. “It’s out of our hands,” he wanted to say, but instead simply turned the other way. It had never been in their hands, was the simple truth. Very little had.

  He walked along the tracks a short distance, past the rear of the train, then turned into the woods. He tried to compose a kind of eulogy for Tommy, but could only think how like him it was to make his death a burden to so many. He remembered something about Dick Fleming then—a funeral passing down the street beside the school, the kids all come out to watch. The road was still dirt back then, and the funeral wagon was drawn by two big draft horses. One of the horses spooked at something, pulling the wagon roughly sideways. Dick Fleming brushed past him, shouldering him hard, and took the horse by its bridle. He held its head while it lifted him off the ground and slammed him back down, talking to it, until it settled enough for the driver to regain control. George only heard one thing he said during the ruckus—“calm your heart, calm your heart”—an odd phrase, but nothing more than that.

  Afterward, everyone cheered him and slapped him on the back, but he didn’t seem to care. George found out later it was Dick’s own mother in the coffin, and was ashamed of the jealousy he’d felt in the face of Dick Fleming’s heroics.

  There was an old trail that followed along the edge of the pond, over Willow Creek and up through the pines at the bottom of their land. His shoes were soaked through and his jacket flecked with needles and dead leaves when he emerged from the treeline. He stopped at the fringe of their lawn to brush himself off, make himself presentable. Elizabeth would wonder what he was doing home at this hour. He would tell her that life was short, that he wanted to take her somewhere beautiful and foreign. Not forever, but for a while. There was still so much of each other they had to discover.

  The drapes were half open, and he could see her moving back and forth beyond the window. She hadn’t seen him yet. Her movements were strange, not quite natural. It took him a moment to realize she was dancing. Her head swayed, her hips moved slowly side to side. Her hair was down, which somehow accentuated her nakedness. He watched her in wonder, enchanted, until Tommy Pitcall entered the frame beside her. He put his hands on her waist. They glided through the room—her breasts lifting and falling, his prick flouncing—as if no one else mattered. Which, he supposed, they didn’t.

  Off to the east, as he stepped back into the woods, he could hear the train starting up again. He didn’t give much thought now to what had caused it to stop. It hadn’t been Tommy Pitcall.

  “Another hobo,” Pitcall would say to Claire the next day.

  “A person, then.”

  A cursory investigation would be done, but it would be impossible to determine whether the man had stepped purposefully onto the tracks or had simply not heard the train coming. It happened both ways.

  George walked west, away from the rail line. It would be easy enough to avoid the villages and townships, they were still small and separated widely out that way. The camps, the makeshift towns in between, would surely take him in.

  As his home grew smaller and less plausible behind him, George thought of San Francisco—a place he’d never been, though Dick Fleming likely had. Specifically, he considered the turntables. Claire had visited the city as a young girl, and it was from her he’d heard about them; how the famous cable cars were turned by the passengers themselves—a mass of people with no connection to one another pushing together until the car revolved a full one hundred and eighty degrees. It was remarkable, really. Here they simply shuttled the engine to the other end of the train. It was easier by several factors, certainly more practical. But there was more than that at stake, surely.

  At some point he realized he was still carrying the yearbook. He cleared a hollow beside a dry stream bed, dropped the book in and covered it over. Dick Fleming had escaped its pages. If he was found tomorrow, it would be as a different man—an engineer, an artist, a father, husband, friend—a man with a ready laugh and a firm handshake, late of the Hotel Olhm. And who, George wanted to know, was he to deny anyone that?

  THE NEW CANAAN VILLAGE FOR EPILEPTICS

  PEOPLE FIND IT DIFFICULT TO believe there ever was such a place, even though it’s more or less still here. The name’s changed, of course. That seems to be what people objected to most. It pe
rpetuated our stigma, they said. But it was a home, regardless of the name, a place where we could go about our business ungawked at. There were walkways and gardens, a bandstand above the creek. There were lives being lived, both well and poorly. It was a world, in other words, nearly like any other.

  Our illness was scarcely considered at the time, much less understood. There were no medications then to control the seizures. The sight of one of us writhing and spitting was unsettling for the general population, so we were sequestered. Before the village, we were exiled to mental institutions, to languish with the schizophrenics and depressives with whom we shared a mutual defect: we were inconvenient. To our discredit, we looked down on them just as the world outside looked down on us.

  If we were lucky, the seizures would come in private, away from judging eyes. Many would go months, sometimes years, between episodes—all we could do was wait, to try to hear the whirring of our nerves, to anticipate the coming chaos.

  When Felicia arrived at the village, I’d been a resident nearly a dozen years. It was I who organized the crew to overlay the original hard surfaces with wood chips, I who muted the lights and built the celebrated promenade along the creek, the Grand Mall. It was there, in fact, that I first met Felicia. A warm evening in May, fireflies lighting the creekside grass. A parade of waterfowl migrating overhead. She was beautiful in the way that a leap of faith is beautiful, those decisions that pronounce us most emphatically ourselves.

  She kept a precise distance between us at all times as we walked. Stepping carefully, I noticed, almost levitating beside me. It was midway across the Japanese bridge, at the height of its sweeping arc, that she stopped suddenly and let out a cry—a high peal, like an animal with one foot caught in a trap. The seizure followed almost immediately.

  She fell slowly to the ground, grasping at whatever was closest to hand—in this case, and often afterward, some part of me. Her seizures, it always seemed, were the embodiment of a deeper struggle: In her tautened face one could see her determination to remain Felicia, to hold herself separate from the spasms that shook her body. Her eyes were a swirl of blue and gray, with brown flecks like a brook trout’s distributed throughout. In them I beheld planets colliding, stars exploding to nebulae. The universe contained within, struggling to be born.

  When it was over, she brushed herself off and rose gracefully to her feet, and we continued on. The next night we repeated our promenade (seizure included), and the night after that. And again, one night into another, until all the nights of our courtship coalesced into one long night lit by the waxing and waning moon and the yellow glow of the sodium lights.

  James was born on the winter solstice, and Felicia went the entire delivery without a seizure. The day after as well. Up until then they had been daily occurrences, as regular as our prepared meals. The change alarmed her. She remained in a heightened state of vigilance throughout that first month of nursing and broken sleep—it was, in a sense, both an astonishing gift and a perplexing loss she had to acclimate herself to.

  As the seizures remained at bay, and James grew, the cosmology of our love changed. It was something within me, she came to believe, that had caused her wiring to scramble. Never mind all that had come before, the episodes that preceded my appearance—the mind latches onto hope like a baby to a nipple.

  In time she began to doubt her onetime vulnerability, the condition we had shared fading gradually into abstraction. One afternoon I looked up from my writhing to see her pressed into a corner of the kitchen, clutching James tightly to her breast. So it was that, when the medications began appearing, I volunteered for every trial. Suffered through nausea, vertigo, dissociation, only to be told that my particular variant was not amenable to treatment.

  I watched my wife and child closely, as did Doctor Pence, the staff neurologist. After three years James was deemed unaffected, and Felicia cured. Doctor Pence was elated at the outcome. As was I, though my joy was tempered by inevitable sadness. In my experience, one rarely comes without the other. Felicia and James left on a Saturday, bright sun through the sycamore leaves, the grass unnaturally green. They each gave a quick wave before turning to face determinedly away from the village.

  Enough suffering is thrust upon us that it’s foolish to compound it with pain of our own making. Still, it’s all but impossible to simply carry on when I see them everywhere: crossing the Japanese bridge, in the broken shade of the meadow, in the soft footing of the wildly overgrown trails. I should be grateful, I know, that they are together, out in the wider world. Going about their tremorless lives in some quiet town far away from our quaking village. Free, as it is sometimes—and perhaps correctly—called.

  For me, the village is home as nowhere else has been, though it has grown derelict over the years since. There’s rot in the bridge railing, weeds rampaging through the once verdant herb beds. Its decay is perhaps a reflection of those few of us left, and of the times that delivered us here. There are cures, as Doctor Pence says, and then there are cures.

  SOGNSVANN

  SUMMER WAS GOOD AND GONE now, and that was fine with Mad. What a relief it was with winter coming, sweaters and coats and hats. She flipped her collar up; she could smell snow. By tonight, certainly.

  Her father was in his chair, his bad leg up on the ottoman, dozing in front of the TV. There was the whiff of frying oil, a little fish, a trace of smoke from the cigarette he thought he’d gotten away with.

  It wasn’t a bad place to come home to, really. The books and the carvings, the window looking out on the hillside. The big oak door he’d lugged back from a little town way up north, that closed so solidly and tightly that not a breath from outside could make its way in.

  He stirred, squinted up at her.

  “Did you remember the cake?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s all right. No one really needs cake.”

  The big yellow chair sagged slightly beneath her, the fabric of the arms rough under her fingers from years of her mother’s fidgeting. Other than little things like that, and a few pictures scattered around, she was gone so completely it was breathtaking.

  “I could go back out,” Mad said.

  “You could,” her father said. “But if you step in the same tracks too often, sooner or later you’ll get stuck.”

  She considered going anyway. It was their anniversary, after all, her mother and father’s. Forty-six years, it would have been.

  It wasn’t far to Konditori Pascal, perched on the brow of its hill like a gull. She’d even picked a tall almond cake out in the window when she’d passed earlier, the café crowded with students slashing the air with emphatic gestures and laughing over things dead Greeks and Romans and Englishmen had said. Their assurance through the glass was almost blinding, like a religious painting. She’d wanted to go in, she really had, but she’d caught her reflection in the window and it was obvious to anyone that she was something else entirely, small and mousy, almost lost in the slanting light. It was impossible for so many reasons, so she’d turned away and kept walking—she hadn’t forgotten, not at all—hurrying through the university’s brick canyons and down the stairs on the far side.

  She heard the first flakes against the window just as the fishing report was ending. It was an early, thin snow, but enough to smudge the sun into a diffuse glow beyond the trees. Good riddance she said to it and to the obscene blue sky, to the green bankside and rough beach of Sognsvann—which she couldn’t see, of course; the lake was well on the other side of town, clear at the end of the tram line.

  She’d gone out just the one time this year, piled into the last car packed tight as a herring tin. For once she didn’t mind—the bumping against each other on the turns, everyone with the same destination, was a kind of communion. Then piling off, the cars emptying out, the screams and splashing audible from the platform, the edge of the lake just visible through the trees.

  She chose a little flat patch of pebbles beside a small birch thicket from which cu
rls of bark drifted down to her, strips like pencil shavings spiraling through the sunlight, the lighter insides flashing as they fell. She could see the float out in the lake, boys showing off with dives and flips, girls shaking their hair out, eyes scanning to make sure they were being watched. She’d gone to school with some of them, but she didn’t call or swim out to join them. They’d been acquaintances through chance. They could choose their friends now.

  She rolled her towel up, wrapped it around her head so it was pressed tight against her ears. The boom of belly-flops and cannonballs echoed off the hillside to the east where the trees took over so abruptly, sweeping up in a solid wall to a blunt ridge. There were shrieks and forced laughter, all of it mingling into a wild soundtrack accompanying the pictures flitting across the backs of Mad’s eyelids—strange creatures forming from men and animals, women running half-naked through bars of sunlight, the trees moving across the hillside, their trunks rubbing together like crickets’ legs.

  The sun drew sap and nectar from the trees and flowers along the shore. She breathed in deeply. Every so often, the sun would be blocked by passing shadows, arms and legs strobing the light. At one point, an especially stubborn shadow entered and lingered. She opened her eyes to see if it was a cloud—and if so how big a cloud and whether it would be followed by more—but instead she saw a boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen, standing over her with his arms crossed on his chest, his hips thrust out. A cocky little bird.

  “You’re blocking my sun,” she said.

  The boy took a step to the side. He pointed toward the largest birch in her little grove, the one closest to the shore.

  “I’m gonna climb that.”

  She looked closer. Maybe he was even younger.

  “Okay.”

  “I just wanted to warn you. So you didn’t get scared or anything.”