The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (27 page)

He rode in the car with me behind the hearse, but looked out the window at the scrap-iron conversion plants and did not answer when I spoke to him. In the cemetery he stood by my aunt’s coffin until it was lowered into the grave. His face was so palsied with grief, he seemed so nearly out of control, that I thought he would jump into the grave with her. But instead he turned away abruptly after the “dust to dust,” and walked alone through the gate. There was no sign of him on the road when I returned in the car.

It was early October. The days were long and cool. I went out every evening and walked. I would leave home before the sun set and stay out until night had fallen and the sky was completely dark. I went a different way each time, through back alleys, along dirt paths by the river, away from the river, over the hill on the outskirts of town, down through the main streets. I looked into doorways, into living rooms, into store windows; I watched through the glass as people ate dinner by themselves in coffee shops; I walked behind restaurants through clouds of steam from the kitchens and through the noise of clattering dishes.

I think I might have been searching for Mr. Knockly, though often I went where I was unlikely to find him. I didn’t even know if he was still in town: with my aunt gone, there was no reason for him to stay here. But when I saw him again, I felt as though I had wanted, all this time, to see him again.

I was walking in the muddy lane behind a seafood restaurant, after a heavy rainstorm. The clouds had broken up and the sky was light in places, but the sun had set. I thought there was no one with me in the lane, but I heard a noise at the other end, and saw him. He was wearing a white work shirt and white apron with a red anchor on it, and he was emptying a small garbage pail into one of the large ones that stood in a row by the back door of the restaurant. As I went up to him, he was jerking the pail up and down to free the clotted garbage. His head was bowed. I spoke to him and he looked up quickly. Garbage spilled onto the ground. He stood still for a moment; the emotion that had been in his face at the funeral had died away: his eyes, his mouth, were blunt and dogged. I said something to him, and for a moment I thought he would answer: his face moved, his lips unstuck. But when I put out my hand to take hold of him, he shied away and went indoors. There was a break in the noise from the kitchen. I stood there sinking into the mud and looking at the spilled garbage: crab’s claws, sauce. The door opened a crack, and a black face blocked the light, then the door shut again. I felt uncomfortable. I felt suddenly that it was very strange for me to be there. I left.

But I went back the next evening, and the evening after. The rest of the town had little meaning for me. I would stop on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, pushed back and forth by the people passing behind me, and stare at the red neon anchor in the window, the tables inside, the cashier’s desk, the waitresses, the manager, and the assistant manager, with whom I had once had some unpleasant dealings. I would catch glimpses of Mr. Knockly through the swinging door at the back. When someone noticed me, I would leave. Or I would walk quickly through the lane behind, almost afraid of being discovered there. I did this so often that, even in the deepest silence, the noise of the restaurant was in my ears, the sharp noise by the lane, the softer noise fronting the street.

I stayed out later and later in the evenings. I walked after the sky was completely dark, after I had seen people go home or into restaurants for dinner or into the movie house; sometimes I went on walking until the streets were deserted, the movie house darkened, and no one left in the restaurant but the owner sitting at one of the tables and writing something; and then I would not go home until the only waking life was in the bars along the riverfront. I explored every corner of the town: I thought there was not much in it that I liked, but there were things—a flight of steps, an arched doorway, the front of a factory—that drew me, and I would return to them again and again, look at them under different lights and in the dark, as if trying to discover something about them. The people of the town, though, remained strangers: I could not realize that I must be seeing some of them over and over again, it was as though each passed through only once, as though there were always new strangers coming here. And I felt so much a stranger myself that when, as rarely happened, I crossed the path of someone who knew me, and who spoke to me, I was startled and could hardly answer.

I expected to see Mr. Knockly again, but it did not occur to me to wait for him outside the restaurant. When I followed him, it was almost involuntary.

I was pushing my way through the crowd of people leaving work early in the evening when I saw his bowed shoulders and small head in front of me, moving more slowly than the people around him. I stopped, in order not to stumble over him. I watched him: he walked with his legs wide apart as if otherwise he might lose his balance, and he rocked slightly from side to side. I walked after him to the end of the main street. I dropped farther behind, and followed him in and out of the side streets. He circled back to the main street, more empty now, and then headed down to the river. There was no logic to the path he took. I was puzzled and tired. After an hour, night had fallen. We were not five minutes from where I had first seen him. Then he stopped short on the sidewalk. He stood still for a little while, then moved, then nearly ran, toward the river. I lost him.

The next night I waited for him outside the restaurant. I followed him again, and the same thing happened as had happened the night before, and for several nights after, the same. Always his brown coat ahead of me like a smudge in the gloom, always his pause and his sudden running, and always emptiness when I went after him. Then one night I did not lose him, but, running myself, followed him across the bridge and up to the door of a bar. I stopped there.

For a long while, I walked up and down the river trying to decide whether or not to go in and talk to Mr. Knockly. I knew I had no business bothering him, and I was embarrassed. I leaned against a wall above the water, watching the wharf lights speckled on the surface: there was almost no current, but sometimes a slight breeze moved the water, and then the lights jumped. Below me, on the narrow and sodden strip of land, a woman, bulky in her coat, blacker than the black water, rummaged in a bag that stood at her feet, pulled things out of it that I couldn’t identify in the dark, and threw them into the water. The soft splashes were the only noises, except for an occasional passing car up on the main street across the river, and an occasional shouting voice from over on the left somewhere beyond the warehouses.

At last I walked back to the bar. I don’t know why I was so sure he would still be there. I went in and looked around the room. There were a few men standing over their drinks, watching me. Mr. Knockly was not one of them. I looked back into a smoky corner and saw two prostitutes sitting silently together. Their legs were crossed, their bare arms rested on the table in front of them. I went closer and saw that Mr. Knockly was there. He lay asleep with his head in the lap of one of them, his arms and legs tightly folded against his body, the tail of his overcoat in the sawdust on the floor. Then, as I stood there, the woman picked up her glass and emptied a little beer into his eyes, and into his ear. He hardly moved, only kicked the back of the bench with his foot. The women smiled slightly at him, looked away, looked up at me, and stared with hostility. I didn’t know what to do, thought of buying a drink, but wasn’t thirsty. I went out.

Weeks passed before I dared go to the back door of the seafood restaurant and ask for Mr. Knockly. A thin man of about forty, dressed in the same white shirt and apron that Mr. Knockly had worn, with pale arms, a dish towel over one shoulder and a stack of clean plates with red anchors on them in his hands, looked me up and down curiously. Other men in the kitchen also paused in their work. The man said that for weeks Mr. Knockly had not worked there. In a skeptical tone of voice he added that Mr. Knockly had found work somewhere else. He didn’t know where.

For days after that, it rained. When the rain stopped, the wind sprang up, and when the wind abated, the rain came down again. I lost the sense of what clear daylight was. I had nearly given up hope of speaking to Mr. Knockly: I had thrown away the one reasonable chance. Then I saw him again late in the evening on the main street, in the rain. He was weaving back and forth over the sidewalk and jabbing the air with his fists. His hair had grown longer and was plastered to his forehead and cheeks. He plunged toward a woman who drew back against the wall in fright, he veered into the entrance of the movie house and out again, a tall man in a business suit caught him by the arms and pushed him aside, he stumbled over the curbstone and fell. As I went toward him, he picked himself up and rushed headlong into the alley beside the movie house. I went after him under the fire escapes. Though I had nearly caught up with him at the next corner, when I turned it the street was empty.

After that night, which was in late December, I was completely worn out. I did not walk as often, and when I walked did not see what was around me: though I looked up at the housefronts, at the sky, again and again I found myself watching the pavement that rolled out under my feet.

The days lengthened. In town, there was little sign of the changing season. I walked out into the country now and then, but though I tried to look, I saw nothing, or remembered nothing, of the spring. At the day’s end I only felt, in the soles of my feet, the blanket of grass beyond the factories, the rutted road that skirted the woods, and the vibrating iron of the bridge over the narrow part of the river.

When Mr. Knockly died, I was there. Summer had come. I had walked in the morning, to the town dump. On the other side of the wire fence, among the hillocks of broken glass and old shoes, I saw a cluster of men bending over and flailing something with sticks and bottles. When I came up to the wire fence, they ran off over the rubble. I went through to Mr. Knockly. One arm was twisted under him. One temple was dented. His face was hidden in the ashes. I saw no blood.

On the far side of the dump, fires were blazing. The flames were barely visible in the sunlight. The meadows beyond trembled in the heat.

I telephoned the police and reported his murder. I hung up when they asked my name.

Often I think that his idea of what we should do is wrong, and my idea is right. Yet I know that he has often been right before, when I was wrong. And so I let him make his wrong decision, telling myself, though I can’t believe it, that his wrong decision may actually be right. And then later it turns out, as it often has before, that his decision was the right one, after all. Or, rather, his decision was still wrong, but wrong for circumstances different from the circumstances as they actually were, while it was right for circumstances I clearly did not understand.

One day when the Tanuk men were away from their village hunting, an entire village of Tunit men came to their igloos and raped their women to satisfy an old grudge. When the Tanuk men returned and saw the traces of blood and tears, they vowed to take revenge for this insult and immediately left for the village of the Tunit, several days’ journey away over the thick coastal ice. They knew they would find the Tunit men sleeping as only men can sleep who have raped and traveled several days through the bitter winds of midwinter. Yet when they arrived in the Tunit village and crept through the passageways into the Tunit igloos, they found them cold and empty. They hacked off pieces of frozen meat from Tunit seal carcasses and chewed them as they deliberated upon their next move.

But in the absence of the Tanuk men, as the Tanuk women slowly recovered their calm, the Tunit men came creeping into their camp again and down the passageways into their igloos. Again the Tunit men lay with the Tanuk women and vanished into the vast stretches of sunless, icebound land that lay beyond the circle of igloos. While this was happening, however, the Tunit women returned to their camp and found the Tanuk men dozing there in frustration. Too disheartened to rape the Tunit women in revenge, as they might have done, the Tanuk men left them in order to search for the Tunit men elsewhere.

As they started toward home, Nigerk, the south wind, filled the air with snow and made it difficult for them to walk. They struggled on through the wall of dancing flakes, and suddenly before them they saw the shapes of men. They sprang with blood lust, thinking vengeance was within reach. Yet the shapes of men melted away at their touch and re-formed at a distance. Though the Tanuk men attacked them again and again, they could not harm them, for these were not the Tunit, as the Tanuk thought, but merely polar spirits.

Several days later, the Tanuk men reached their village and the igloos of their crazed wives and sisters. As their men had remained away, the women had been visited a third time by the Tunit and then, as though that were not injury enough, by the polar spirits as well, and they no longer recognized their own husbands and brothers. Their fear did not leave them until the sun rose in the spring. Only then, as the ice began to loosen its hold and the waters to reappear, did their eyes rest once again gently on their husbands and brothers.

These days I try to tell myself that what I feel is not very important. I’ve read this in several books now: what I feel is important but not the center of everything. Maybe I do see this, but I do not believe it deeply enough to act on it. I would like to believe it more deeply.

What a relief that would be. I wouldn’t have to think about what I felt all the time, and try to control it, with all its complications and all its consequences. I wouldn’t have to try to feel better all the time. In fact, if I didn’t believe what I felt was so important, I probably wouldn’t even feel so bad, and it wouldn’t be so hard to feel better. I wouldn’t have to say, Oh, I feel so awful, this is like the end for me here, in this dark living room late at night, with the dark street outside under the streetlights, I am so very alone, everyone else in the house asleep, there is no comfort anywhere, just me alone down here, I will never calm myself enough to sleep, never sleep, never be able to go on to the next day, I can’t possibly go on, I can’t live, even through the next minute.