Landscape: Memory (30 page)

I turned in my place to see if he understood, but he was busy scribbling so I turned back.

"Or I think there's a way past things stay which is different from how they were but isn't exactly 'gone' either, like when it rains and the ground gets all run down into gullies." I looked at the windows, dark as night now.

His pencil stopped tacking across the pad.

"Are there particular memories?"

I thought this must be the part Mother told him.

"You mean Duncan?" I asked.

"Duncan?" he asked back.

"Didn't Mother tell you about Duncan?"

"Perhaps you could tell me about him," he said evasively.

I wondered how I could tell about Duncan. Parts I don't think of at all, except in moments like when I thought of my dream and tried drawing some more, or when I'm alone in my bed and I cry so much from thinking then. But not to tell about, I've not got words to tell some parts I feel. So I thought of the rest, the summer and last winter and spring. Mother and his father.

"He's my best friend since a long time. Since the fire when I was seven."

"The fire?"

"The earthquake and fire, when the city burned down."

"Why do you mention him?"

It seemed a stupid question and I laughed a little and unched around even though I could see him clear in the glass, knowing he couldn't mean for me to tell him since he obviously already knew or else why'd he think Mother'd send me to him anyway. He just raised his eyebrows in mock puzzlement and waited through the long silence.

"I guess because I figured that's what Mother would have told you about, so I thought it's what you'd want to hear from me," I put in finally.

"What would she have told me?" he pressed on.

"That he's dead," I said to him, wondering why he was playing with me this way.

"Is there more?" he went on.

"More what?"

"More about Duncan."

"What more?" I said impatiently. "What's more than dead?" I really couldn't understand what he was getting at.

"Why did he die?"

The question was so simple and impossible.

"Because of an accident," I began, "a stupid accident." It was my litany, as close as I'd come to an explanation. "He was so tired then, and cold." I stopped speaking and watched it all play back in my memory.

His slight, pink arm collapsing down into the rough waves.

Thick clouds tumbling lower and lower onto the sea, fat and swollen gray and dumping rain down on the face of everything. The flat sand, hard wet sand, slipping straight into the mouth of the ocean. I see it stretching out wide and forever, deep under the raging waters, caressed by the heavy bellies of ancient, hoary-spined fish, scattered with rocks, and pulling at Duncan, pulling him down into that deep water. His helpless, desperate panic is in my legs and the wide, flat sand I stand on. And the rocks and water and wild, gray sky rolling in off the ocean are all impossibly that empty, hollow desperation. It is the sound of this place, the unstoppable rumbling of the water on the shore, sea birds calling into the wind and mist, the absence of any panicked cry, Duncan's silence. And what of this is memory? What is present to mind now? We are standing at dusk in Bolinas lagoon, the thin surface of the water slipping away just below our bellies, our feet set soft on the muddy bottom. What of him remains with me?

I heard the door close and watched the doctor return with a box of tissues. He offered them to me and sat down again in his chair. Lights were going out in buildings all along the lake shore. The doctor shifted in his seat and took a tissue for himself.

"Can you tell me if the friendship was unusual, special in any way?"

"No."

"It wasn't unusual?"

"No, I can't tell you."

"Why can't you tell me?"

I began to wish he'd just shut up.

"I can't tell you if it was unusual. I don't know usual."

"Was it like other friendships you've had?"

"No."

He paused a long time, waiting for me to go on, but I paused longer. It must've been minutes, the snow drifting into the light of the window, the black night hanging out over the lake.

"Did you have a sexual relationship?"

"Yes," I said as I was getting ready to think about what answer to give. The short simple word surprised me more than all the others we'd said. I couldn't elaborate as the answer'd not really come from me yet, though now that it was out there, I started to think what words could be added to it. Some few words kept crowding around down in the base of my mind, pushing at the back of my throat, jumbling and jostling for place and position, and I let a small mouthful slip onto my tongue and out, wet with my spit and warm breath pushing past my lips.

"I loved him," I heard out loud and then a terrible long silence.

It's all I'd really wanted to say for such a long time, and I could just barely mumble it through my slobber and spit and tears. Dr. Berminderung stayed silent and still, waiting.

My crying was a way my body had of freeing me from the burden of speech.

Outside the black air stung me sharp on my bare face, blowing in off the lake colder than any cold I've known and almost too painful to breathe. Distant light looked different in this air, so sharp, and tinkling too, like candle flicker but bright like a show torch and brought tight into tiny brilliant points. I got into the rumbling car and curled in against the backseat, alone in this dark warm shelter, my breath still clouding up around me, my face flush and burning.

Teddy could tell straightaway. I kept a sad face knowing he'd see, and walked slowly to my Pullman, wishing he'd follow me to bed and I could curl in tight around his strong, warm body and feel his big arms around me. If he could just hold me through the cold night I'd not feel so alone. But that wasn't possible.

 
* * *
 

I lay in my warm bed, turned toward the window, hugging the pillow to my belly, holding my fingers near my mouth imagining they were Duncan's. Salty sweet fingers warm in my mouth, running my tongue down over them and closing my lips to pull from deep in my throat. The train shot steam, long and low, billowing up in clouds and we lurched forward an unch, two, and again, me sinking down into my bed with each chug and choof of slow motion forward, finally rolling steady along the rails, the rattling rumble wrapping around me, the bed warm and lonely. The train went out along the frozen lakes, out east into the cold black nighttime.

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12 FEBRUARY 1916

The hills are insane with green bursting velvet smooth and lush, not a blond spot to be seen. We live in fog-shrouded forests of rain and damp ferns. I roll here in mud made by my body beating in against the moss, a snuffle of air and snort of water run off waxy cedar fronds by my fingers soft and pink. Jack-in-the-pulpit. Amaranth and bracken fern. Storksbill, eucalyptus, gooseberry. Miner's lettuce and mountain grape. Wood sorrel and shepherd's purse. They are my friends. I listen to the loons, calling their long low song. I'm washed away into nothing, all possible distinction dissolved by that sound.

Down below the Fair is busted, blown up to high heaven with dynamite bombs rolling thunder across the hills. It's more than war or fire or the wild ripping fault come wrecking down the rill. Only Maybeck's ruin remains, saved by sentiment. Mother's married to the earth, I saw her toppled today.

How do you remember him?

I don't, don't know this. I am innocent of this. What of him remains? An outline, a footprint? The cut of rain on a muddy hillside? How can I remember? It's not that I remember him. It may not be him I remember. I am a living thing with roots planted in the ground. I'm a rotting tree.

Why did you love him?

I can't think of this. Everything I tell you will be a lie. I didn't know him. I knew him without ever thinking and that made me able to love him. That is, he wasn't disfigured by my thinking ideas of him until the end, when I loved him most, or loved what I thought was him, when I needed the words that would contain him, and he died then. I was desperate for him, for the words that would say it.

Why did he die?

Why? His body heavy as stone, the water raking across its bed. Flesh could not hold him inside, failed to resist the ocean dragging down his throat. His dull opened eyes, unseeing, turned toward the bottom. His body died, his shell.

Why does it matter, then, his dying?

Why must a body contain him? What is this experience of soft, warm flesh? Spirit? I don't know what it was I held in my mouth then. It was much more than simply him. What is it to be breathing the breath of another, to lie in sleep, our open mouths touching? Is that all gone simply because his body's gone? Yes.

Why do you remain here?

I returned because of the weather. It rains down on me. I'm knocked flat on the ground here into mud. Or else I'm no longer here. There are other places. They all bring me back here. I'm water caught in a storm.

Is this a resolution?

Is there a sound to tell us, a blessing, a cure?