Grist Mill Road (19 page)

Aha,
you said,
now we come to it. So you're probably one of those people who think there's something like a cave back here when I take out the prosthetic.

I hadn't thought it through. But maybe I would have thought something like that.

And you also probably imagine that an artificial eye looks like a little Ping-Pong ball, right?

Prob-ab-ly. Although I'm beginning to suspect that maybe it doesn't.

Correct, it's more like a seashell.

Seashell? Seashell sounds good.

Precisely. So this is how it works. After an enucleation, which is the technical term for the surgical removal of an eye, most people, me included, receive an ocular implant, which actually is like a little ball. The implant helps the empty eye socket keep its shape. Also, they attach the ocular implant to four muscles behind the socket to provide movement so that the artificial eye, which sits on the little ball like a seashell-shaped contact lens, looks real. However, that's where I got unlucky. The muscles behind my eye socket were so badly damaged that I have hardly any movement. All of which adds up to the fact that I have a kind of dead fish stare on one side, which I can assure you I feel very self-conscious about. And if you dare tell me you didn't notice it when we met, I'm walking straight out of this restaurant.

In which case, I'm saying nothing at all.

Look, there are some people who wear prosthetics and you might go your entire life without ever noticing that one of their eyes isn't real. The acrylic eyes they make these days are works of art—and if they move like a real eye, they can be really hard to spot. But that's the problem, my prosthetic doesn't move like a real eye. Which means that it freaks some people out.

No, come on.

Absolutely. Have you heard of the uncanny valley?

Is it somewhere near San Francisco?

Ha, nice try! But no, the uncanny valley refers to the dip on a graph charting a person's feelings of comfort when faced with various likenesses of human beings. So let's say that at one end of the graph you have metal robots—C-3PO from
Star Wars,
for example. And that's not too bad because he looks sort of like a human but clearly he's not a human. Meanwhile, at the other end of the chart you have a real, actual human, which doesn't freak anyone out, unless it's Michael Jackson, perhaps. Following me?

Don't forget, I'm in Data Acquisition, Hannah. Charts are kind of my thing.

Good. So anyway, there's a point on the graph, somewhere in the middle, where the line dives down before rising again, which indicates the cases in which people are freaked the hell out. The uncanny valley. It's what happens in the case of an android, say, that looks almost like a real person—skin, eyes, features—and yet there's something wrong with this android, it's very humanlike and yet perceptibly not human. And that's exactly what makes people feel uneasy. The same thing happens with almost-realistic humans in computer games, ventriloquists' dummies and puppets. Oh, and clowns, clowns do it for me.

Clowns are freaky as hell.

Exactly, right? So that's the very same problem that some people have with my prosthetic eye and its lack of movement. It looks real but there's something a little bit wrong, just a tiny bit off. Which means that for some people there's something troubling about me, even if those people can't put their finger on it. I'm just a tiny bit off.

So wear the patch,
I said
. It looks great on you, Hannah.

Right! And get called pirate hundreds of times every week—which is mostly little kids, admittedly, but not exclusively. You'd be surprised.

What's wrong with being a pirate?

OK, that's a fair question. And the answer is, it reminds me of being thirteen years old again. You'd left for Maine by this point, Patrick, but at school, waiting for everything to heal and then for my first eye to be made, I had to wear an eyepatch for months. Do you remember Christie Laing?

Unfortunately, yes.

Let's just say that my injury was a gift to Christie. And she didn't waste a single ounce.

At this point the waiter, who had been hovering for a while, apologized for interrupting and asked us if we were ready to order. We dutifully opened our menus and quickly found something, anything. Again, I don't remember what we ate or drank, I just remember that I'd never met anyone so easy to talk to, that our conversation carried on without a second's pause for the entire duration of the meal. But when I try to remember the rest of the evening, my memory starts to get hazy. Or not hazy perhaps. Was there something strange about that night? Am I imagining it or did this really happen, Hannah?

Everything began to turn blue at the edges.

Maybe it was a trick of the light in the restaurant … But wait, was it really the Blue Water Grill in which we met or have I only imagined our second date there? Because now when I see it again everything looks to be filling up with a pale film of water. And as night fell outside, the walls in the room began shifting to a darker shade, almost as if they were turning from bright lake to deep ocean.

I remember how your dress matched your eye and we were both wearing blue.

Really? Could that possibly be true?

Or perhaps this is just how it works, how the mind holds on to the memory of falling in love—a feeling of passing deeper and deeper into the brightest waters you've ever seen.

One thing I know for certain, I was falling more and more in love with you, Hannah, that night and every night ever since. And then it would take less than a summer to fall so far in love with you that the rest of the world trailed away. Soon there would be you, only you. I remember that summer as luminous. I remember a season of infinite blue.

 

PART III

 

MATTHEW

Where should I start?

Perhaps by saying this is a letter I wish I'd written in my cell, a letter I should have sent twenty-three years ago, after the final time you came to visit me, when at last I understood how much it hurt you that I seemed to have no reason for what I did to Hannah Jensen. Of course, if you were able to read this letter now, you might still decide I had no reason, or insufficient reason, at least, and certainly that's true.

The first time you came, sitting across that jail table from me with the visitation show going on all around us, you asked me why I did it and I said there wasn't any particular explanation. I'm sorry, that was a lie. The truth is I didn't want you to know everything that happened, not at the time, and the awful thing is, now that I do want you to know, you won't understand—the kernel of you that remains seems unable to comprehend anything anymore, not even on the good days, which are becoming rarer and rarer with each one that passes.

I wish I could cure you, reverse the erosion. I wish I could bring you back.

You were the first person I truly loved. I don't find meaning in most things, but this means something to me. I love you and I always will.

However, you know only half of what I did. If you'd known the rest of it, if you'd known what I'm about to tell you, what would you have thought? What would you have done? Would you have stuck by me? Because knowing there was someone on the outside who was still in my corner was what kept the fight burning inside me those first two tough years, and you needed the fight in that place.

The only other person who knows the whole thing is Hannah.

There you go. There is more to this story than meets the eye.

But I want to make one thing clear from the start. This letter isn't any kind of defense. I'm not attempting in the slightest to excuse or mitigate what I did to Hannah Jensen in 1982. What I did that day was wrong, there is no gray.

However, the reality is there are more than two sides to most stories. Truth is seldom a lens, truth is a kaleidoscope, and I have my truth too.

There's something else as well—another reason to write this letter now, the explanation for why I first came looking for you after not having seen you for twenty-three years. I'm getting married. Or at least, I think so, I haven't actually posed the question or even bought the ring, because speaking to you seemed like the right thing to do first of all. I suppose I was hoping that, as well as listening to my confession, you might offer me your blessing. I thought if I told you everything, you might give me permission to find a second person in the world to love.

Anyway, now I will tell you the story as if you were never a part of it, as if you were never there, because the way you are now, your mind irreversibly lost in a fog, I suppose in some sense that's true.

*   *   *

HERE'S MY FIRST TRUTH—MY
daddy beat me, that's just a fact. Oh, but this isn't one of those lines from the courtroom—
Your Honor, I only done what I done because my daddy done beat me
. No, this truth is just one of the colorful beads in the tube.

If I was lucky it was strap and nothing but strap, but sometimes the buckle snuck in. Occasionally the buckle was the whole
point. Or sometimes my daddy, his liquored fingers finding nothing under his belt loops, would curl up his hands and make fists. Although saying all this, having a father who hit you wasn't exactly uncommon back then.

Attitudes change. My daddy was born in 1948 in the great state of Texas—remnants of state pride being the reason why he insisted we call him
Daddy,
even though people laughed at us openly for doing so. He grew up in the city of Beaumont, living in an age when everyone chewed tobacco, smoked unfiltered, and merrily lit up their small boys' behinds. Bred for a lifetime of poverty, he was raised among swamp and oil and knowing the back of his old man's hand. Only my daddy's life took a sharp turn when, fourteen years old, his momma died, hospitalized for tuberculosis before succumbing to pneumonia. This would've been 1962, the year my daddy was bused more than fifteen hundred miles northeast to live with an aunt, his momma's sister, in Queens, New York, and although his geographical influences may have shifted, my father's credo remained forever stuck in that swamp.

He didn't do well in New York, left school at sixteen and worked for a while fixing roofs and digging clams before, aged eighteen, he decided to join the army. He always spun you the American hero version, that he was a patriot who signed up to do what was right. However, if you listen to my mom, who enjoys talking about him now that he's long dead, she'll tell you my daddy was classic draft bait—blue collar, single, and poor. If he hadn't signed up they'd have pulled him in anyway. Better to stick up your hand.

She also likes to say she fell for his Texas charms—before laughing and throwing back another Beam.

Anyway, whatever the reason my daddy signed up for the army, sign up he did. He received his orders to report to Fort Dix, where he was put through sixteen weeks of training, which were followed by a few weeks leave, including at least one night in the company of my mom, it's safe to conclude. Next, the army packed him off on a boat for
a month-long ride to hell,
as he always told it. However, my daddy's hell ended up being no more than a seven-week
stopover. After months of training and those thirty-one nights on a military transport ship, exactly fifty days after he arrived, late June 1967, he was medevacked out of Vietnam with a gut shredded by shrapnel and a wild dose of the Saigon clap.

At this point, I must've been steadily unfolding in my mom's belly for eleven weeks or so, not that she had any idea I was there, mistaking her first bouts of morning sickness for fears concerning her boyfriend's well-being. Later bouts of nausea, she supposed to have been triggered by news of his injuries.

So, a little further down the line, I was born, January 2, 1968, the first of two sons, my brother, William, arriving twenty months later—on the very same day that Ho Chi Minh died, September 2, 1969, as it happened. I do believe this was the achievement in life my daddy was proudest of, the propitious timing and flourishing of his second seed. Henceforth, my brother's birthdays became a kind of double celebration, the day always prompting misty retellings of my daddy's war stories. His favorite tale was all about the time he shot a Viet Cong while
the goddam gook was crouched down hopin to enjoy his mornin shit
. Whenever he told the story, he took great delight mimicking the look on the Viet Cong's face as he strained to move his bowels, exaggerating the eyes by stretching them out with his fingers, while exhaling in an apparently Asiatic manner—
Aaaah-sole, aaah-sole, aaah
 
…
—
and then he'd break off halfway through the third iteration, making a gun-shape with his hand and slamming down his thumb with a loud exclamation of
bang
! After that he'd spit something out like,
Now we gonna see if you can shit metal, Charlie
. Funny guy.

Anyway, because this was the only war story my daddy told with such cartoon levels of grotesquerie, I'm more than a little convinced this was the only Viet Cong he ever actually killed.

At any rate, however many men my daddy killed, and in whatever state of grace he found them, something had left him unsated. Or maybe his brief stint in Vietnam just turned him into a guy who went looking for trouble and found it in all the predictable places—a nose for whiskey and fistfights, he spent his nights
downing Four Roses and throwing his knuckles around. If he couldn't find a man to fight? Well …

You might have thought that, what with my having a baby brother, the burden of my daddy's mood swings might eventually have been shared. However, little Billy was, to use the word the doctors employed when informing my parents of their baby's condition, a
mongoloid
. I remember how, growing up in the 1970s, gradually the terms
mongolism
and
mongoloid
would be heard less and less and the term Down syndrome used more and more, but human niceties and linguistic fashions were something to which my daddy never subscribed. However, he did have principles—little Billy was disabled, and he never laid a serious finger on the son he referred to as The Pug.

Anyway, none of this felt unnatural to me, I wasn't unlucky or mistreated, this was just the way the world turned.

I spent the first ten years of my life growing up in a narrow green-painted apartment in Woodside, Queens, our walls being pretty much the only greenery I'd ever experienced until, not long before my eleventh birthday, we moved upstate to Roseborn, Ulster County. I don't remember which of my daddy's short-term jobs was the stated reason. No doubt he didn't last long in it because every brief period of employment in Roseborn came to an end after some kind of trouble. He worked in body shops, fixed farm machinery, built fences, plowed drives, painted houses … He was good with his hands. Hilarious, huh? Anyway, when my daddy wasn't working, he got into even more fistfights than usual. You know that phrase,
the apple doesn't fall far from the tree
? The townspeople of Roseborn looked at me like I was trouble a long time before I was anything like it.

The nicest thing my daddy ever did for me was steal a bicycle. He told me it was salvaged. Anyway, that bike got me out of the house plenty, as far away from my daddy as I could pedal for as long as possible. Win-win.

I liked living in Roseborn. Although Queens was a much bigger place, it felt somehow smaller, everything squeezed down to
neighborhoods from which you never broke free, but in Roseborn I could ride my bike anywhere on the streets, along the dirt trails outside of town and all the way up to the Swangum Ridge. It was wide open country, a place where a child could have secrets and fantasies, a place for building hidden forts. You could shape your own world up there in the mountains, even if there were only two of you doing the dreaming—me and Tricky.

Tricky's real name was Patrick McConnell. (I think you met him only a couple of times.) I suppose I gave him that nickname because part of me must have realized there was something dark and evasive about Tricky. Most of the kids at school used the innocent moniker Patch for him, but I guess they didn't see in Patrick what I saw, that he might have seemed like a quiet kid, only that was all just a front. I could always tell there were secret wheels turning inside his head. Patrick didn't keep his own counsel because he had nothing to say; quite the opposite, it was because he didn't want anyone to know what he was thinking. However, everyone went for the misdirection, the quiet kid act, and to my mind at least, that was his trick.

Anyway, the truth about me and Tricky is the first reason I wanted to be his friend was jealousy, and it might sound stupid, but this is absolutely true—I was envious of the way he rolled up his shirtsleeves.

My first day of school in Roseborn was the start of sixth grade. I was the new kid in town, so no one spoke to me, but that was fine, it gave me time to size everything up, a chance to identify who I might want to befriend.

Everyone came to school in hoodies, sports jerseys, sweaters, or T-shirts, but Patrick McConnell came to school in clean white shirts, button-downs that were as bright as the teeth in whitening advertisements, clean cotton as crisp as hotel linen, and every day, Patrick had the sleeves of those shirts rolled up just past his elbow. Now this might not sound like much to be jealous of, I'll admit, but something about the way those cuffs were folded spoke to me about everything missing from my life, because this wasn't a technique you were born with, someone had to show you how
to roll and fold something so neatly, so crease-free. Hell, maybe you even needed a special kind of shirt designed for sleeve-rolling. I spent a few quiet weeks just breathing him in, marveling at those revelatory shirtsleeves.

Our mom was vaguely Catholic, taking me and little Billy to Mass maybe once a month (although we knew our place, we weren't good enough to go to Sacred Heart, where the McConnell family prayed alongside the more important burghers of Roseborn), and I had one good white churchgoing shirt in my closet. Getting home from school one afternoon, a little way into the first term, I took that shirt from my closet and snuck off to the bathroom, the only room in our house with a mirror, pulled off my tee, buttoned up the shirt, and proceeded to fold and roll the sleeves. Only, by the time I'd flipped the cuffs twice it was already creased as hell. I started again, but the result was the same. While Patrick's folded shirtsleeves were as smooth as a priest's collar, whenever I tried to roll up my own sleeves, after a few turns it seemed some wrinkle was already there and there was nothing I could do but repeat it.

The next day, while we were all sitting in English class waiting for the teacher to show, I turned to Patrick and said, Hey, Patch, I like your shirt.

Patch looked at Jonny the Spin, Jonny the Spin looked at Patch. No one said anything. I could tell they were trying to figure out whether I was being sarcastic or just plain weird. I was used to that.

Christie Laing, a few seats farther behind, said, Hey, did you hear that everyone? Weird Matt is a faggot for Patch.

My name's Matthew, I said to her.

Fag-hew,
said Christie, her goons letting out a squeal.

Matthew,
I said a bit harder. She didn't come back from that. I've never found a situation where a clever line worked better than firm intent.

How'd you do the sleeves? I asked Patch.

His axis of glances with Jonny the Spin tilted back and forth a little more.

Rolled them up. He shrugged.

Nice, I said.

The teacher came in.

*   *   *

I'VE NEVER KNOWN HOW TO
make friends. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. In the end, my friendship with Patrick McConnell came down to dumb luck.