Authors: Anthony Doerr
Five minutes later the police were shining flashlights in the windows. Ward stood on the sidewalk in his sweatpants, shaking
his head, gesturing at the screeching hawk, which was now perched on the gutter. Porch lights up and down the block switched on. Two men in coveralls pulled their truck onto the lawn and tried to snare the hawk with long-poled nets. It screamed at them, dive-bombed their heads. Finally, at the peak of the noise, sirens wailing, men shouting and the bird crying savagely at them all, there was a gunshot, an explosion of feathers, and afterward, a silence. A sheepish cop reholstered his handgun. What was left of the bird fell in a lump behind the hedges. Fragments of feather drifted up, spinning into the darkness.
She waited until the police were gone and the neighbors’ lights had gone out. Then she went downstairs, took the other hawk and set it free in the backyard. It lifted drunkenly into the sky and vanished over the city. She stood in the yard, listening, watching the spot in the haze where she had last seen it, a black speck against a field of gray.
It has to stop, Ward said. What will you haul in here next? A crocodile? An elephant? He shook his head, circled his wide arms around her. In just three years his body had become soft enough to repulse her. Why not go to college? he’d say. You could walk to campus. But when she imagined college she thought of her dreary days in the schoolhouse in Lushoto, the heat of classrooms, the impatience of mathematics, bland two-dimensional maps pinned to walls. Green for land, blue for water, stars for capital cities. Schoolmasters obsessed with naming things that had existed unnamed for a million years.
Every day she went to bed early and slept late. She yawned: huge, widemouthed yawns that seemed to Ward not so much yawns as noiseless screams. Once, after Ward left for work, she climbed onto the first city bus that stopped and rode it until the driver announced last stop; she found herself at the airport. She
wandered the terminal, watched the names of cities shuffle up and down the monitors: Denver, Tucson, Boston. With Ward’s credit card she bought a ticket to Miami, folded it into her pocket and listened for the boarding calls. Twice she walked to the jetway but balked, turned around. On the bus back she found herself crying. Had she forgotten how to take that extra step? How had it happened so quickly?
She complained about the humidity in the summer and the cold in the winter. She claimed illness when Ward offered to take her to dinner; he’d tell her something about the museum and she’d look away, not even pretending to listen. Without thinking about it she referred to the house—still, after four years—as his house. It’s
our
house, Naima, he’d insist, thumping the wall with his fist,
our
kitchen.
Our
spice rack. He began to wonder if she’d leave; he became certain he’d wake one day and find her gone, a note on the mantel, a suitcase missing from the closet.
He’d come home late and meet her on the stairs. I had a lot of work, he’d say. And she’d go past him, out into the night, moving in the opposite direction.
In his office he took a notepad from a drawer and wrote:
I see now that I cannot give you what you need. You need movement and life and things I can’t even guess at. I am an ordinary man with an ordinary life. If you have to leave me to find the things you need, I understand. No one who has ever seen you run beneath the trees or hang on to the hood of his truck could ever again be entirely happy without you, but I could try. I could live, anyway.
He signed the page, folded it, and stowed it in his pocket.
The twining of their lives: born on different halves of the world; brought together by chance and curiosity; leveraged apart by the
incompatibility of their respective landscapes. While Ward was sitting on the bus, heading home, his letter in his pocket, another letter, tucked into the guts of an airplane, shuttled from truck to truck, hand to hand, was waiting in their Ohio mailbox: a letter from Tanzania, from the brother of Naima’s father. Naima brought it in, set it on the counter and stared at it. When Ward came home he found her in the basement, on the floor, cocooned in an afghan.
He waved a finger in front of her eyes, brought her tea that she did not drink. He pried the letter from her fist and read it. Her parents had died together, when a section of the road to Tanga gave way in a rush of mud, rolling the truck into a gorge. She had already missed the burial by a week but Ward offered to send her anyway: he knelt before her and asked if she’d like him to make arrangements. No answer. He laid his hands on her cheeks and raised her head; when he released it, it fell back onto her chest.
He slept beside her in his shirt and tie on the concrete floor. In the morning he took the letter he had written her and shredded it. Then he carried her to the car and drove her to the county hospital. A nurse wheeled her to a room and plugged a tube into her arm. She’d be okay, the nurse said, they would help her.
But this was not the kind of help she needed: white walls, fluorescent lights, the smells of sickness and disease slinking through the halls. Twice a day they pushed pills into her mouth. She drifted through the hours; her pulse ticked slowly through her head. How many days did she lie with the television burbling, her heart emptied, her senses dulled? She could see the white moons of faces rising and falling as people bent over her: a doctor, a nurse, Ward, always Ward. Her fingers found the metal railings of her bed; her nose brought the sterile smells of hospital food: instant potatoes, medicinal squash. The TV hummed incessantly. Her sleep was gray and dreamless. When she tried to remember her parents she could not. Soon Tanzania would be gone from
her altogether—like her orphaned hawks she would know no home except where she was kept, hooded and tied, against her will. What next? Would they come in and shoot her?
Was it morning? Had she been there two weeks? She tore the tube from her arm, heaved her way out of bed and stumbled from the room. She could feel drugs in her body slowing her muscles, dumbing her reflexes. Her head felt like it was a glass globe resting precariously on her shoulders—one wrong movement and it would fall; it would take her the rest of her life to sweep up the pieces.
In the hall, amid rolling gurneys and hustling orderlies, she saw lines of tape on the floor fanning out like the paths of her youth. She picked one and tried to follow it. After some time— she could not say how long—a nurse was at her elbow, turning her, shepherding her back to her room.
They began locking her door. Peas for dinner; soup for lunch. She felt herself sliding away; the muscle of her heart had thinned and blood slopped around inside. Something deep and untrammeled within her had died, diseased somehow, trampled. How had it happened? Hadn’t she guarded it carefully? Hadn’t she secured it away in the center of her?
After the hospital—she could not say how many days she was locked in that room—Ward brought her home and installed her in a chair by the window. She watched buses, taxicabs, neighbors plodding back and forth with their heads down. An immense emptiness had settled inside her; her body was a desert, windless and dark. Africa could not have seemed farther away. Sometimes she wondered if it even existed, if her whole history was just some dream, some fable meant for children. Look where impulsiveness can get you, the storyteller would say, wagging his finger in the child’s eyes. Look what happens when you stray.
Spring passed, summer and fall. Naima did not get out of bed until noon or later. With the slow revolution of seasons only the tiniest memories—the squeaks of robin chicks begging worms from their mother, snow sifting through a streetlight—trickled back. They came to her as if through a thick wall of glass; their meanings were changed and they had lost their context, their edge, their wild savor. Even her dreams came back eventually, but these too were altered. She dreamed a train of camels sauntering through a woodland, orange clouds looming over the canopy of a forest, but in these scenes she was nowhere to be found—she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward’s museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren’t allowed to touch.
Some mornings, watching from the bed as Ward tied his tie, the tail of his shirt hanging over the plump backs of his thighs, she felt resentment foam up from some rotting place within her and she’d turn onto her stomach and hate him for hounding her through the rainforest, for leaping from the rim of that cliff. Everything had unraveled between them: Ward had given up trying to reach her and she had given up allowing herself to be reached. She had been in Ohio five years but it felt like fifty.
Evening. She was squatting on the back steps, half asleep, when a line of geese skimmed over the gable of the house. They passed so low she could see the definition of their feathers, the smooth black curves of their bills, the simultaneous, coordinated blink of their eyes. She felt the sudden power of their wings as the air they displaced shifted over her. They moved steadily toward the hori
zon, bleating, alternating leaders. She watched until they were gone and then watched the spot they had disappeared into and wondered: What avenue did they follow? What strange and hidden switch in their heads was thrown each winter, what sent them shuttling down the same invisible pathways to the same southern waters? How glorious the sky was, she thought, and how unknowable. Long after they were gone she trained her eyes sky-ward, waiting, hoping.
It was 1989; she was thirty-one years old. Ward was eating a cupcake—a stalactite of frosting hung from his bottom lip. She went in and stood before him. Okay, she said. I want to go to college.
He stopped chewing. Well, he said. All right then.
In a gymnasium students milled between stalls labeled Government, Anthropology, Chemistry. One booth—decorated with glossy photographs—caught her eye. A volcano ringed with snow. The cracked seat of a chair. A series of photos of a bullet exiting an apple. She studied the images, filled out paperwork: Photography 100, Introduction to the Camera. Ward had an old Nikon 630 in the basement and she dusted it off and brought it to the first class.
That will never do, her instructor said. It is all I have, she said. He fiddled with the loading door, explained how light would seep in and spoil her photos.
I can hold it shut, she said. Or I’ll tape it. Please. Tears sprung to her eyes.
Well, the instructor said, we’ll see what we can do.
Their second day he led the students onto the campus. We’re snapping a
few
exposures here, he called. Don’t burn your film. Focus on the structures, people.
The students fanned out, aiming their lenses at the cornerstones of buildings, the chiseled end of a handrail, the domed cap of a fire hydrant. Naima walked to a grizzled, bent oak leaning out
of a triangle of lawn between sidewalks. Her camera was taped shut with electrical tape. It contained twenty-four exposures. She hardly understood what that meant, to have twenty-four exposures in her machine. F-stop, ASA, depth of field, all this meant nothing. But she leaned forward, pointed the lens up, where the leafless branches shifted against the sky, and waited. The cloud cover was thick but she could see a rift forming. She waited. In ten minutes the clouds parted gently, a thin ray of light nudged through, illuminating the oak, and she made her exposure.
Two days later, in the darkroom, she watched the instructor unclip the black coil of her negatives from the line where they were drying. He nodded and handed the strip to her. She raised them as he had done, to the bulb, and suddenly, seeing the rendered image of what she had captured only days before—oak branches bloomed over with sun, a fracture in the haze beyond— she felt a darkness tear away from her eyes. Shivers ran down her arms; joy founted up. It was rapture, the oldest feeling, a sensation like rising from the thick canopy of forest and turning, looking out over the treetops, seeing the world again, for the first time.
That night she could not sleep. She burned. She was three hours early for the next class.
They made contact sheets, then prints. In the darkroom she watched the developing bath intently, waiting for the grain of her photo to emerge on the paper—it floated in, first faint, then gray, then fully there, and it struck her as the most beautiful magic she’d ever seen. Developer, stop-bath, fixer. So simple. She thought: I was made and set here to give voice to this.
After class the instructor called her over. He leaned over the prints and pointed out how she’d trapped a telephone wire in this frame, how she could have extended that exposure a bit longer. Good, though, he said, a good first set. But it’s a bit wrong, too. Your camera lets light in—can you see here how the fringe is washed out? And here the tree looks flat; there is no background, no point of reference. He took his glasses off and leaned back, pontificating now. How to render three dimensions in two, the world in planar spaces. It’s the central challenge for every artist, Naima.
Naima stepped back, reexamined her photo. Artist? she thought. An artist?
Every day she went out and snapped pictures of clouds: altonimbus, cirrocumulus, the cross-hatching of contrails, a child’s balloon drifting over train tracks. She caught the skyline of the city reflected in the bottom of a cloud, two puff-ball cumulus drifting across the face of a puddle. A cerulean rhombus of sky mirrored in the eye of a dog, killed minutes earlier by a bus. She began to see the world in terms of angles of light; windows, bulbs, the sun, the stars. Ward would leave money for groceries on the counter but she’d spend it on film; she wandered into neighborhoods she’d never seen before; she squatted in someone’s front yard, motionless, for an hour, waiting for a thick raft of stratus clouds to rupture, to see if the light might saturate the thin spar of a spider’s web trussed between two blades of grass.