Broken River, page 13
The experience has left Irina with a sense, strangely enough, of calm. She lays the guitar down where her mother was sitting. She shuts her eyes and listens to the vigorous splashing and thumping of her father’s shower. She listens to the breeze moving the branches outside. She’s going to sleep now—she’ll sleep until dinner. She sends her thoughts out to the thing: Watch over me. It isn’t here anymore, but perhaps it can hear her. Father’s shower has combined with the wind, and now there is a sizzling from below, from the kitchen, where her mother is cooking, and the distant sound of traffic from the road and the creek as it runs over and around rocks. It’s the sound of the world, and the thing watching her is part of it, and this feels like the solution to a problem: that’s why the chord revealed the thing, it’s because it’s made of sound! It’s this feeling, the feeling of the problem presenting itself and being solved, that tips her over into dreamless sleep.
9
But earlier that day, in Broken River, the dark-haired woman lay on the hotel bed she had paid for, her hands laced behind her head, scowling at the stuccoed ceiling shot through with cracks and wreathed in cobwebs that trembled in the steady wave of warm air rising from a large, white-painted radiator. The Observer might have expected the woman to smile, or perhaps to drift off to sleep, but instead she seemed agitated, uncomfortable in her skin.
The woman stood, smoothing her nightgown down over her belly and thighs, though there was no one else in the room to notice the wrinkles it had developed in her overnight bag and in the struggle to remove it an hour ago. The Observer followed her across the room and to the window, and her gaze to the street, where the man, her lover, leaned, smoking, against an exposed-brick wall a short distance from his daughter, the girl.
The dark-haired woman, having taken notice of these two, now pulled back from the window, perhaps in fear of being seen. Across the room, her phone buzzed, and she hurried to find it in her handbag. A small smile appeared on her face as she took in what the screen displayed; soon her thumbs were in rapid motion, tapping out messages, presumably to the man on the street.
The Observer didn’t presume to understand the lines of affection and repulsion, hope and disappointment among these three: the man, the girl, and the woman. It was not clear why this mode of communication—the encoding of short bursts of information into digital signals that were then transmitted into the upper atmosphere and back to earth—was preferable, in this instance, to simply shouting out the window. The girl’s face was gripped by intense animation, at times evincing consternation (when she happened to glance over at her father) and confusion, at other times excitement (seemingly in reaction to the messages on her own device). The girl’s hold on her childhood was slipping; before long the word “girl” would no longer apply.
The dark-haired woman issued quiet breaths, small grunts, as she gazed, alternately, out the window from a safe distance and at the text-filled bubbles scrolling down her screen. Eventually, the girl, having pocketed her device and failed in her struggle to maintain an adult demeanor, began to cry. The man looked up in surprise and went to her: there, on the sidewalk, he threw his arm around her, engaged her in a brief but intense conversation, and led her away. Seemingly in response, the woman fell silent, her face still. She gazed out for several minutes, as though deep in thought, at the place the man and child had occupied.
Now, hours later, all is quiet and calm. The dark-haired woman is leaving Broken River, having quickly changed her clothes, gathered her things, and departed the hotel. “Checking out? Already?” asked the desk clerk, and the woman replied, with audible disdain, “Family emergency.” She sits, motionless relative to her speeding car, not singing along to the pop radio station that can’t seem to maintain a clear signal here among the mountains.
The Observer lets her go. It is time to turn its attention to the family many miles to the north, though the Observer is increasingly aware that it needn’t choose one time, one place, one group of human beings to attend to. Indeed, it is quite capable of observing anything, all things. But it has begun to recognize that its purpose, as opposed to its ability, is limited: or, more precisely, its purpose is to be limited. It is unconcerned with, bored in fact by, the immensity of its power. It is interested only in the strategic—the aesthetic—winnowing of that power.
It has been brought into existence in order to amuse itself.
What has caused it to come into being is not clear, and the Observer is not sure that it is interested in knowing. It is new in this world, yet it feels that it has always existed: or, rather, it has existed as long as the humans have. Its identity is connected to the self-awareness of the humans, and to their awareness of the world around them. The humans are already limited in what they can notice, compared with the Observer, yet they elect to be even more selective in their perception, filtering out those obvious truths that might nudge them away from their established trajectory. They refuse to seize available opportunities that might expand their experience even slightly; they maintain obsolete habits rather than adjust promptly to new circumstances. They seem almost to prefer ruin to voluntary change.
Yet the humans seem to think that anything is possible, that life is limitless, which is entirely and obviously wrong.
Of course the humans die. Quite possibly all of them. Perhaps the Observer will die as well; it doesn’t know, and it can’t imagine what it would do differently if eventual death were a certainty. But the humans, it suspects, know. This is likely why, years ago, at the beginning of the Observer’s existence, the murdered man and woman screamed, even before any damage was inflicted upon their bodies: they were justifiably fearful that their lives were about to end. If the humans know that death is coming (and, by the Observer’s standards, it would seem that it tends to come very soon), their words and actions must all be profoundly influenced by that fact. They fear making wrong choices, so they avoid making any at all. They keep very still, hoping that death might fail to take notice of them.
The man and girl have now returned to their house, and the girl is in bed, asleep. The breaths she draws are even and silent. She is curled on her side, this child who is already half an inch taller than she was when the man and woman made love in the unfinished house. The man and woman don’t appear to have noticed this yet about their daughter. But it is clear, or it should be, that the girl has grown out of her fall clothes and that they ought to buy her some new ones. Perhaps they have other things on their minds.
Indeed, the girl herself seems to have failed to notice the space between the bottoms of her jeans and the tops of her shoes, and the fact that she can now see half of her wristwatch (she found it sitting on a bench in the subway—it’s a cheap ladies’ Timex with a rectangular golden face and little hash marks instead of numbers to mark the time, and her parents have not asked her where it came from) poking out from her shirt cuff. Her sneakers still fit; she isn’t in school, and so there’s nobody to mock her, no one whose gaze she could feel self-conscious in. Perhaps, the Observer thinks, the girl, the whole family, could go wild out here, forget about the existence of other people and their judgment. Their hair could grow long and tangled; they could kill their dinner with their bare hands.
But no: the man and woman have not forgotten themselves. There are clues. In the bathroom, the shower has stopped, and the man is standing, naked and dripping, in the steaming stall. He’s staring straight ahead, at nothing in particular, and scowling. His left hand is idly stroking his belly, which has increased in girth in proportion to the girl’s increase in height; his right hand cups his flaccid penis in its nest of dark hair. After a moment he shifts his left hand to his creased forehead, where it digs and massages. Perhaps the man has a headache. He really ought to turn the shower back on and let its powerful spray soothe his face. But the girl used all the hot water, and the heater in the basement has not had time to fully replenish it. He’s going to have to just get out, which he does, violently flinging aside the curtain and stepping, still dripping, onto the rug. He buries his face in a towel and leaves it there longer than our Observer is interested in watching.
Downstairs, the woman is standing at the stove. A blue-and-white pinstriped apron covers her usual uniform of black jeans and sweater. In her left hand is a wooden spatula; her right hand grips the handle of a stainless-steel wok. The wok is filled with vegetables, and they are steaming and sizzling. On the burner behind the wok sits a pot full of rice. Behind the woman, the table is set for three.
The vegetables are cooked. They were cooked some time ago. In a few moments, they will be overcooked. The woman is standing quite still. The expression on her face is one of thoughtfulness tinged with concern and perhaps, at the corners of her eyes and mouth, the slightest hint of terror. Has she realized that her husband’s erratic behavior this afternoon is consistent with continued infidelity? All the necessary information is there for the woman to make this determination. But she seems unable, or unwilling, to do so.
The woman’s hand reaches around behind her. Her brow knits in concentration, and then she winces and her body jerks. Her reverie broken by the evident pain, she looks down at the wok, emits a small gasp, quickly removes it from the heat. The words “Oh, shit” escape her lips. A few flicks of the spatula confirm that half the vegetables are blackened and shriveled. The woman sighs, slumps against the counter. For a moment, the Observer wonders if she is about to collapse onto the floor.
But then the woman opens the cabinet beneath the sink, scrapes the burned food into the trash bin. She sets the wok back on the burner, turns off the gas, and sets to work chopping vegetables again.
This delay in the completion of the family dinner gives the man’s natural energy and grumpy good cheer enough time to reassert themselves. The girl’s nap markedly improves her mood. The three appear to enjoy their meal and, afterward, a filmed entertainment in the living room. Their laughter will indicate that the movie is a comedy, but the Observer can find no appreciable difference between the onscreen human folly that evokes merriment and that which induces sympathetic misery.
It’s time for the Observer to move on: again above Route 94, along the river, past the hills and railroad, past the farms and villages. Back to Broken River. It could go there instantaneously, of course, but at this moment it prefers to take its time. Without impending death to hurry it along, why not? The temperature has dropped—it’s been dropping all day, down to levels at which the humans begin to complain—and now it’s snowing, even though there are still a few days left in October. The Observer reaches the flat land where Broken River begins, and moves through town, past the abandoned theater, which an angry teenaged boy is attempting to break into through an alley door (he will succeed); past the apartment building where Jasn Hubble is watching a YouTube video of the Average White Band’s cocaine-fueled performance on Soul Train that originally aired November 22, 1975, and where his eyes follow, with longing, the movement of a Lake Placid Blue Metallic Fender Mustang bass with matching headstock; past the empty animal shelter that now once again shelters animals, a family of stray cats here of their own volition who got in through a rat-chewed hole in the rotted plywood back door and who are being fed daily by the old man who lives on the other side of the disused, weed-choked parking lot; and finally over the cluster of jail-themed bars and the prison itself, a mile beyond which a trailer park lies. It’s large and fairly tidy; compared with most of Broken River, it is thriving. Many of the streets that run through it are paved, and the pavement is in decent shape; the rest are graveled and reasonably free of ruts. At the end of one of these streets stands a neat beige doublewide around which a small deck has been built. Light shines from the trailer’s windows, yellow from the lamps inside and blue from the television, which is showing a baseball game to a compact, overweight, alert-looking man in his fifties. Our Observer, however, remains out on the deck, where the girl called Sam is standing, clutching herself against the cold, which her thin cardigan sweater and baseball cap do little to protect her against. One hand holds a cigarette, the other a phone.
She says, “He didn’t say anything about coming home.”
She says, “He didn’t say anything about your letters, Mom.”
She says:
“I don’t think it’s about you, Mom. He’s just got other things on his mind.”
“No, I don’t think he’s coming back to Buffalo.”
“No, but I’m going to stay here for a while, okay? Uncle Bobby’s fine with it.”
“I said he was fine with it. I think he’s lonely.”
“I haven’t met any girlfriend.”
“Well, I didn’t meet any boyfriend, either, so I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“I have to go. I love you, too. I have to go. Goodbye.”
10
Sam is standing on the deck, gripping her phone, snow falling all around her. It’s cold out and she is shivering, but she isn’t eager to head back into the trailer and pass through the room containing her uncle on the way to another lonely night in her bedroom. Not that she doesn’t love her uncle or appreciate the room: she’s kind of surprised to realize she’s okay with both, for now. She had been led, before coming here, to believe that her uncle was little more than an embittered, self-satisfied loser whose dominant conversational mode was that of explaining why all his problems were the result of other people’s failings. And it’s true, there’s more than a little of that in him. He seems surprised that the world hasn’t given him more, hasn’t brought him the riches he thinks he deserves. But, as far as Sam is concerned, he doesn’t have it so bad. He’s got a job, anyway, as the site manager and retail clerk at a stone quarry, which is why this doublewide is surrounded by rock gardens, low stone walls, and frankly weird and incongruous intentional piles of what he calls “irregular flag.” He always seems to have some rocks in the trunk of the car, and she suspects he steals them from work: his miniature rebellion, a thumb on the scales of justice.
Anyway, even if her uncle was little more than an insecure prick with some very slightly suppressed creep impulses, Sam would be all right with it. She adores the old man. When he still lived in Buffalo he was her favorite surrogate father; they used to play cards together, and he took her to the track with him most weekends. But then his wife left him, his sister’s crazy got unbearable (Sam’s father and poorly considered namesake, Lee Samuel Fike, was already gone before she was born, and Uncle Bobby liked to mutter under his breath that he didn’t blame the guy), and he packed up and moved here. Sam hadn’t seen Uncle Bobby for years, and it was only when Daniel got three to five for growing weed under lights that she ever considered even visiting. By this time she was already planning to move away—she hated school, despite her excellent grades, and had GED’d her way out at sixteen, plus living with her mother was a nightmare—and she figured she could come out here with the stated intention of getting Daniel back on his feet. She would crash with Uncle Bobby for a few weeks, then help Daniel find a place, live with him for a little while, and decide what to do once she had the lay of the land.
Instead, she has mainly bonded with Bobby and at the moment has no plans to move out. She admitted to him, a few days before Daniel’s release, that she felt guilty about abandoning their mother. “Look, she’s suffering, no doubt about it,” Bobby replied from the other side of the sofa, gesturing at the glowing, silenced television with his burning cigarette. This was how he talked: at the TV, regardless of where in the room you actually were, or if it was on. “But just ’cause you’re suffering don’t mean you got the right to make everybody else suffer with you. The crazy bitch sent your brother up the river. I’m not saying he wasn’t breaking the law, I’m saying your fucking mother ratted him out. She pretended not to know what she was doing, but she did.
“That’s what she’s like,” he went on, cracking open a beer and changing the channel. Sam couldn’t discern any logic in the channel changes, neither in their timing nor ultimate destination. Now, many weeks later, she has decided that the TV is like an animated painting for Uncle Bobby, a series of abstract patterns and colors; he’s not actually interested in human narratives, finds them tiring, despite his fairly acute sensitivity to human personality. “She’s sneaky. She’s a manipulator. She was a manipulator when she was three fuckin’ years old. She learned to get me blamed for all the shit she did: stealing from the neighbors, leaving a turd in the bathtub, setting the fuckin’ cat on fire.
“I’m pretty sure your granddad was making her suck him off, though. I mean, I think that’s what that’s all about. Or maybe she’s just a psycho. Anyway, go ahead, feel bad for your mother, but don’t let her make you feel like anything’s your fault. She’s forty-eight. She’s got her health and she’s no idiot. If she can’t make her way in the world without you, fuck her.
“Am I right?” he asked the TV. “Am I right? Fuck her!”
“Yeah, okay,” Sam said with a laugh. “Sure.”
So no, none of the three of them has any reason to be here, really, except that they all want to be far away from Mom and Broken River is a town few people think about or want to go to. For Sam, the place is probably a stepping stone, though to what, she has no idea. Like her brother, she is smart and decent-looking and built to endure. Daniel, too, is unlikely to stay here long—he tends to develop ambitions, and even if the ambitions center mostly on growing pot, he will likely achieve them and will either grow out of Broken River or end up back in prison.
