Suddenly Light, page 14
I was already a misanthrope—halfway through college and suspecting the outside world was already as I knew it—but that summer it took enormous possession of me. I had been a sullen child and was turning into a sullen young man. I found myself angry not only with individuals but the great mass of us—our smell and our sadness, where and when we thought things could be different for a short while. There were lots of couples among the guests and staff, but it was the loneliest place on earth, a massive white party boat blinking in the middle of a black-blue ocean. The managers there were more like me—living not only with the partiers but the young and rotating seasonal staff. So many people did not come back. The managers who stayed long-term were the kind of people who felt nothing at all.
Alison was a cold slap out of that disaffection, the torpor. She was untouchable. She could climb to any height and remain there, suspended, like a bulb. Her laughter flicking on and off. And that’s what she did on the cruise ship, up the antennas so many nights, coaxing me up but giving up on me, sitting up there alone—and then coming down. The job didn’t bother her at all—she got what she wanted. Away. She was not bothered by people. But I don’t think she necessarily loved them either. She was, always, apart.
Sofi Barcette, it said on the email. I found her online. Public, all of her photos, going back years. She looked different early on. Hair light brown, face and cheeks and mouth a little fuller. Now she was thinner but with muscle. Her face was growing more dramatic, arched. Her breasts were flattened into hard semi-circles on her chest. She kept posting photos of herself with words about strength, photos in athletic gear with all the jumpy tendons jutting out of her skin, posture of a fighter. It seemed the new exercise regime meant a lot to her.
It didn’t take long to find him. There he was, about two years ago, a guy with a sharp haircut, sharp beard. Handsome, standing tall and with a head-thrown-back contentment. Only one photo left. That one thing we keep after someone has left. I imagine the other photos were incinerated immediately, but this one she could not let go, even publicly—or perhaps especially publicly. She wanted people to know. There were very few photos left from this stretch of time; he must have been in many, all wiped away. The exercise regime started immediately after.
There was a new guy in one or two recent photos. Shorter and stocky, a gym guy, jacked. The rebound.
I had been the rebound twice. First on that cruise ship, where Alison had come from the Big School Relationship. We parted after the cruise job and met each other again four years later, after an engagement that evaporated. I knew about women that had left lovers, or had had lovers leave them.
I had taken a new turn, north through a neighbourhood I didn’t know very well. There was already a tug on my right side, close to my ribs, but my legs still felt good. The houses here were smaller and clustered closely together; they were set back further from the sidewalks with long front yards. Behind them, the fenced backyards were short squares. Many lawns were dotted with toys or cheap patio furniture loosely assembled; it was a street where most of life was lived out front. It looked lower income. I slowed and looked around because I wanted to see what it was like.
There was nobody outside because it was a cooler day without much sun. It had rained many hours ago, in the morning. Some front windows showed large televisions, wall-sized, on cartoons or sports or living room comedies. I wished it was warmer out as I walked through the neighbourhood. Still I liked seeing it; at least people still watched television together; at least they were in the same room. That felt like the key detail of a family—being in the same room all the time. In bigger houses everyone was lost in rooms.
There was a small park square with a bench, a garbage can and three trees around it. I sat down with my elbows on my knees, looking down, catching my breath. If you look across the grass, it is green. But if you look down at the grass, you see the green stems standing up, and the layer of yellow and brown underneath. Another metaphor, maybe.
I started to run again as I was turning south. Starting up again was a good feeling, cool legs going warm.
I didn’t know what to say to Sofi. I felt uncomfortable that I had looked at her pictures, but they were there for everybody to see, her real name. She was proud of all of this—this was her face to the world. Young people were so interested in that.
But I didn’t know her at all. I could have been wrong about that guy—maybe he meant nothing; maybe I made assumptions because I had nothing else to do with my time. That’s what I had a lot of now—circular time that never moved forward. I didn’t actually know anyone anymore.
I wanted to say so much, anyway. I wanted to tell her to stop posting the pictures where she looked strong but it was obvious she was sad and to forget that haircut fucker—leave him behind. I wanted to say he was a mistake that she could not recognize because she couldn’t fathom how long the story would actually be and how much would come after. She couldn’t see enough because she wasn’t at the height yet. I wanted to tell her that nothing was as bad as it seemed—a dark omen because things would inevitably, one day, be a lot worse. One day she would bury someone and live in a dead house and have an endless collection of days to count for nothing and no one. And this guy with the haircut would be little more than an obscene caricature in the empty capitulations of youth. And when she looked back, she would be ashamed. Not that she would ever actually look back, not to this pointless time—the stubbed toe of a child.
More than that, I wanted to tell her about me and Alison. And what cancer would take away in several meaningless strokes that passed like a season, and how you never had a grip on anything because almost immediately it would change. Pain became an oxygen; you took it in and pushed it out; it kept you alive and awake. Otherwise you were always on the verge of blackout, hovering at the edge of your vision. Good days. They tell you to savour the good days, so I faked it all for her so she would think we were having one—a good day. But there are no good days. There are only days when she is vomiting too much and the following day, when she hardly vomits at all. Was that a good day?
You learned things you never wanted to learn.
I don’t know why but I wanted to tell Sofi everything about the past few years, as if she could understand, which of course she could not. But there was an impulse in me. To not let it pass without someone as witness—a particularly unworthy person. A young person with small grievances, too self-conscious, always thinking about how they look. Always presenting. I didn’t know why it had to be a person like that. Maybe I had to see for myself how little they cared, like young trees bending in the wind. How little it mattered.
But I never said anything at all. Nothing happened, and we just occasionally ran together at the back of the pack. All of us quietly alone.
I started talking to cashiers. Nothing meaningful, but for the first time in my life I would offer something about the weather.
Most grocery stores were staffed with tired, unkempt mothers in their forties and fifties and teen girls there in the short-term. There would be a lull between the beeping scanner and me not having enough to bag yet. “They’re calling for rain, but I don’t see it,” I would say, or some variation, to fill that space.
Most of the women were uncomfortable or bored by that—the older ones would wonder what had happened to me; the younger would assume creepiness. Nothing too alarming, but curious. Once or twice, someone would smile and even say something back. I didn’t even reply. I would smile and excuse them back to their world with a downward glance that said I would not intrude again. A small warmth in my throat.
When unloading bags, half a dozen oranges spilled hard onto the ground in the parking lot. I had to chase them down, like reckless children, one going under a car. Usually I would be angry, but life had crushed me into a posture of humility—everything was normal now. And I remembered that bruises on a fruit actually turn the fruit sweeter. That was a metaphor too. I had been thinking a lot about metaphors lately and seeing them around me. It was as if the world was trying to show me something.
But pulling out of the lot a few minutes later, I realized that sweetness soon turns to rot. So I didn’t like the metaphor anymore. I banished it. It was an Alison thing to do—she felt no shame banishing something of no use to her. She knew almost no shame at all.
Alison had black hair and never dyed it anything else, a kind of arrogance she kept while friends and sisters experimented with colouring their hair in their youth. She had black eyebrows, straight, unarching. Her face was expressive, but she was aloof to many things that would bother me.
She would not have been forgiving of Sofi. Sofi was trying too hard. Nice girl, she would have said at first, but later would slip a comment that showed what she really thought about women like Sofi. The cloying, the asking to be considered, the publicness. Sofi was a pretty, young, professional woman, but still a stumbling calf. Her confidence was patched together with weak things—opinions of others. Alison was a jaguar, creeping along wet green leaves, owing debts only to herself.
As long as she could, Alison was climbing up trees—nimble with practice, if not always fitness—and assuming her rightful perch. Watcher, surveyor with distant eyes. And then teasing, looking down on me.
Cancer decimates everything. No discernment. No selection process. No rightful order. That was the primary break for me—this break between me and the world, even forgiving the fact we never had a strong bond in the first place. A force of nature that could tear down another force of nature; it was a tear within itself. Of all the people in the world—Alison. Arrogant and formidable, crafted by generations of stubborn men and indestructible matriarchs, she was proud of her family. Cancer and Alison were evenly matched. An eighteen-month prognosis went thirty-two months, and I imagine that long deaths are better because we had more time. But I also remember after she died, I slept for days.
When I finally woke, I was blinded by disorientation—profound and narrowing and empty, like a deep cave. And then the grief came in waves, pushing me back. Like I was drowning in there.
Unfairness was something you thought of frequently when your wife was dying. Your home was a hospice now. And when you stepped outside, everything else was the same. So much pathetic human fragility was rotating through your vision—formerly entertaining, now depressing, nothing in between—and yet the one thing you relied upon for being unbreakable suddenly broke. And I had to watch the world continuing around me in mindless rotations, a globe spinning in blue and beige and green—commercials and traffic and an old couple ignoring each other in line. Unfair. Unfair.
You know the dog died, in shock, after Alison? Two days later, just died in her bed.
It did reach the point where it became easier for me. I woke up a few minutes before my alarm and sat on the edge of my bed with my feet on the wood floor. I felt like I could run for a long time and that it wouldn’t be hard. At my age—I couldn’t believe it. My legs came back so quickly, and apparently my lungs had caught up. The other half of the bed was empty. As I stood up, I sensed the mattress adjust. There were odd moments like this—sensations and changes in light and weight and temperature. Strange kitchens, empty sofas. Adjustments concerning the house or furniture.
You read a lot of books and join the groups for people who survive cancer deaths. Grief was a shifting kaleidoscope, absolutely fascinating if your awareness wasn’t paralyzed in the moment itself. An art for outsiders. One man kept everything in the house the exact same, quiet as a temple; another man burned books and painted every room; another man sold and moved and worked in a bar in Akron. He did that for two years and then he came back and started a distribution business in restaurant supplies. There were no rules about how to do this. One guy saw handguns wherever he went—sitting on coffee tables and counters, on his desk at work. They were a micro-hallucination for an easy out, a quick exit. They were actually there to comfort him.
I put on my shoes and went for the run, feeling my legs bouncing on elastic springs, ageless, without burden. Anticipating the adrenalin, my lungs shimmered inside my chest as I pulled deep clutches of cool air. When I fell to the back of the pack, Sofi was there, wearing a light coat in the soft blue morning, her legs thin. I was fond of her—the black sheep, a bit sad, a bit brave, despite what Alison might have said. But there was a distance between us that would not allow for a single decent conversation.
Then she surprised me.
“Do you still like running?” she said to me, looking at my face, as we waited to cross a road. “Because I feel like you’re flagging.”
And she smiled, an effort between strangers.
“I ran before,” I said, “but I just started again after my wife, Alison, died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It was cancer.” My voice was hard on the word.
The light changed and the head of the pack started jogging along and slowly we fell into line behind them. I let myself see a thick slant of early sunlight coming down from the low-rise buildings and casting half of the sidewalk in gold. I felt as if my legs were glowing, yellow-warm.
“I like running,” she said. “I like moving.”
I didn’t respond right away, safe in the movement along the sidewalk and the subtle gathering, dodging, realigning of a group of runners, a flight of birds moving along a city street. I knew this was an opening, but I also knew it would be missed. And yet that was not unsatisfying—it also seemed right.
“Running keeps you busy,” I said. It was a boring thing to say and I left the silence to hang, empty, at the end.
“Yeah,” she said.
We turned and ran north; I fell behind slightly to give her back her space. Again my mind turned to light and trees and how the world around us was patterned. I thought, Sofi could have taken a picture of all this and posted it, showing all her friends how beautiful it was. But she didn’t.
Sofi was ahead of me, taking shorter strides at a tidy pace. She seemed to decide something because she slowed to fall into step beside me.
“Hey,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“About two years ago, my mom died.” She was looking straight ahead, holding pace. “Got an infection—couldn’t fight it out. I don’t talk about it, but then…” she trailed off quietly before trying again. “You said your wife—” Her voice caught and stopped.
I didn’t say anything at first. My feet moved ahead of each other in a rhythm I knew like breathing. My shoes were white with blue stripes wrapping around the point of the toe, like an arrow. Those bright arrows moved ahead one pace at a time, taking turns, cutting across the grey concrete, swiping through sidewalk squares. I had been relying on that so much—to move time forward, to break out of circular days, seasons, and years.
“I didn’t know,” I said. It wasn’t the right thing to say, but I was realizing I had been wrong—it wasn’t the guy with the haircut. It wasn’t a child’s wounded heart. She was like us, out here; we were all running and running and running. If you don’t know what day or month it is, if you can’t eat or sleep, but your body still does, dead to itself—you run.
“Of all the people in the world—my mother,” Sofi said, not looking at me, red blotches on her face. “No one else was like her. Anywhere. Ever.”
“I felt that way too,” I said quickly. “Of all people. Alison.”
I lost my pace for a few strides, surprised by how surprised I was, how I had relied on our distance. Through her eyes, seeing blindness, how my grief was apart and my own, how it did not matter.
We were running alongside each other, our breath jumping in and out. I thought of Alison and what she would have said of all this—do what you have to do.
We caught up to the group at another red light.
“It’s true, though,” I said. “I’m done.” I felt honest. My heart was open and empty.
She turned her head and looked at me. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “You’re done.”
Then she surprised me again—a smile, almost a smirk. Brave.
I ran a few more times in the group, and then I went solo, at my own pace, sometimes just walking and sometimes sitting in parks. I sat under trees, never climbed them. Not because Alison had smiled down on me from that height, but because I never knew how.
Kin
1989
She was an angry and easily hurt child, face shut up like a fist, mouth snapped up tight. She was nine.
She was taller than most kids, strong, with big arms and pale white legs. She was prone to a sore stomach, afraid to tell her mother and to answer questions about it; she didn’t know how to describe it either. It didn’t seem to hurt all the time, but when she thought about it, it felt sore.
Every day she walked to school through the damp early morning grass, soothed by how many quiet minutes she had alone between the loud, ugly interiors of her home and the crowded scenes at school. Most of the time, more than anything, she felt bored. She had nine stretches of sidewalk, four lengths of grass, and the counting kept her mind moving forward. The last length was the longest, across the undrawn soccer fields to get to the school—all along the way, lined by small townhouses.
Standing and waiting with the others in gym class, she was too tall, looking down on all of their heads. Most girls fell into semi-formed circles, backs out, while the boys moved in and out of ragged assemblies, restless and loud. At recess she wandered with Amia. She did not like Amia very much, but she was reliably present, hovering by the doors and waiting to walk out together. Amia was ordinary, inside and out. And she knew already that she was not ordinary. She could see it in the way the other girls looked at her—their eyes changed. She was too tall, distracted by strange moods. The boys did not look at her, and she did not look at them.
