Authors: Michael Cadnum
Not for longâfor only a few heartbeats. The young woman sprang from me and vanished. I pulled myself to my feet, panting. The remaining leather-jacketed figure jerked its head out of the crumbling wall. His face was shiny, a mask of strawberry jam.
I took hold of an arm and slammed him into the ground. His head broke, and then his neck. Several times I drove him into the ground. As he broke apart, he snapped sloppily, noisily, piece by piece.
When I was done I was alone. The bearded man had abandoned his smouldering possessions, and the young woman was running. The sound of her steps was very clear, and the wheeze of her lungs, cigarette phlegm.
She was far off by now, and I stood in what looked like a small lake, body parts and wrecked clothing at my feet, a stew of ordure and nourishment.
I was faster than I expected to be. I caught her from behind, picked her up, and carried her. I kicked open a gate of chainlink.
“Please don't hurt me,” she said when she could talk, breathing hard.
“Hurt you!” I said. I could not keep a tone of amazement from my voice.
“Please.”
But her
please
meant something different now.
I wouldn't dream of hurting you
. I fell to my knees. She put her hand to my eyebrows, touched my lips with her fingers. “I think,” she said. “I think I know you.”
“Be still,” I said.
“Do I?” she asked.
As I drank she continued to ask, as though she could almost remember and needed only a hint, just one hint, which day it had been, which moment we had shared, this woman I had never seen before.
I found my way west, under the freeway. The overpass thumped and hissed with traffic. Railroad tracks gleamed. I knew where I was going, and what was about to happen, without being able to name it.
Reeds snapped underfoot. A killdeer broke away with a cry of alarm. I waded into the bay, in the quiet surf that barely stirred the driftwood, the styrofoam and plastic trash. I waded all the way out, my body so filled with heat that it streamed from the cut in my finger, hot, salty.
I put my head back and drank in the sky. I didn't simply look. I looked and I owned. It was absurdâI knew this. But I felt that I was right to sense something of myself among the stars, and I laughed.
I swam. What was swimming, I wondered, but a way of not sinking? Of finding the body continually supported by the next stroke, and the following, until the horizon is touched, that edge of everything.
I cried out. My hand stung. My fingers stretched. Both hands were breaking, the knuckles dislocated, my thumbs agonizing. I could not take another stroke. I slipped under the water.
But I kept swimming. I glided, the stones and sea plants of the bay grazing my belly. I tried to work myself to my feet, but this landscape was unfamiliar to me. When I lifted my head I could not reach the surface of the water.
With one kick I was free of the water, in the air. I breathed, and it took me upward. My hands reached, and my body followed.
I fell upward, unfolding, my cranium changing shape, and when I could not keep silent any longer my voice was a high, tin wire. But I could still hear it, my hearing transforming, too, the impossibly high grace note the only sound I could utter.
A treasure trove opened before me in the darkness. Wealth glittered. This was mine, as much of it as I could take, all this topaz, these rubies, this crush of light.
It was the light of cars and buildings below me, slipping farther downward as I climbed, the necklace of the Bay Bridge reflected on the water, the spires and citadels of the city across the bay drifting closer as I breathed air into these foreign lungs.
The wind caught me. I spread my hands outward, the leather spans lifting. I was terrified. Surely this would all end in an instant. I would wake, or my bones would snap, and I would plummet.
I claimed something as I tumbled, caught myself, climbed higher. I knew this was what I would never turn back from, this unsteady mastery. The city streets teemed with traffic, the antigents and corpuscles of light, and the Golden Gate Bridge held itself against gravity as I did. The pilons and the cables suspended the earth's pull gracefully.
Graceful as the wing is, hovering, describing the wind as it ascends, nightbirds far below, spidering across the surface of the bay.
Part Three
29
When I was eight years old my mother told me a family secret.
I remember the afternoon perfectly, because my mother had taken the unusual step of spreading a picnic near the arbor. Both my parents thought the property to be larger than it really was, and they had constructed a trellis and a woven-stake arbor, only to finally celebrate sunny afternoons in a garden where there really wasn't room to do very much.
My mother shook an afghan out on one of the well-manicured rectangles of lawn, and we sat there, the two of us. She said that she would tell me something very serious, a secret, and that after she was done telling me I could ask any question and she would answer me. Having said that, she left me with a plate of tomato and cheddar sandwiches, a family favorite, and went inside for lemonade. I had time to wonder what was coming.
We lived only a few blocks from the house I later shared with Connie, years of my life in the same neighborhood of stately, college-town homes, live oak trees and occasional outcroppings of native stone. The large boulders butted from certain gardens like the heads and shoulders of giant champions, and I think I had felt a little let down by the fact that my boyhood home had not possessed an up-thrust boulder of its own, only a garden of gladiolas and a lawn of bermuda hybrid with a sprinkler system.
The sprinkler was on a timer. Throughout my childhood, my young adulthood, my university years, except in the heart of the rainy season, every predawn at four o'clock the sprinkler came on. It was a satisfying, lulling music, the deep calm one always gets from water flowing just beyond one's sanctuary, a feeling of cozy security.
I recall this long moment, waiting for my mother to return, as the peak of my childhood, an afternoon I look back on with nostalgia, but with no desire to relive the events again. I do relive it by seeing it so clearly in my mind, and given the opportunity to reinhabit the past I would decline. I am no longer that boy, finding a lawn moth, cupping it, letting it go. I squinted at my mother as she approached with a pitcher of something pink, not lemonade at all. I was glad; it was raspberry Kool-aid, which I actually preferred, at that age, to real juice.
She told me this: before I was born my mother and my father had wanted a baby. They had a baby, a little boy. But this little boy had not been strong, and he had needed help my mother and my father could not give. The child lived now in a hospital near Santa Rosa. I recall finding the word “hospital” strikingly out of context. A growing boy, older than myself, would not like a hospital. My father had shown me around Herrick and Alta Bates many times and I associated such institutions with brisk people carrying clipboards, slowly efficient people pushing gurneys of dirty laundry. And people too weak to crawl out of bed, watching television, expressionless, arms dangling.
It was important for me to know this, my mother said, because my brother had finally gone to sleep. It was hard for my mother to tell me this, and even harder for me, in my pained confusion, to shape what I imagined to be an entire range of sensible questions an older child or an adult would ask. Instead, the only question I could think of was, “What was his name?”
In my present state of experience, I know that an adult would be only a little better equipped to comprehend the hardship and loss my mother's story involved. And that a name, Andrew Morris Stirling, is as much as many of us ever have of each other.
And so I entered the prime years of my pre-adolescence with the opportunity to mourn a brother, to resent my parents for keeping him secret, to wonder at the nature of a handicap so severe the love of a younger brother, and two parents, would be meaningless.
It was a wisdom I would carry into my adulthood, and it colored my decision to study law. Love cannot struggle far up the steep foothills. Understanding, hope, delightâthey all grow weary. Something about life baffles each of us, and only under the protection of experts with hands and habits like gardeners can some of us survive.
I believe that I fell at the end. It was a graceful fall, and I did not hurt myself.
When I outwardly resembled a human being again I was on the ground, on a walkway of crushed gravel. It took me some time, but the effort was a pleasure, recalling fragment by fragment the recent joy. A fountain trickled, and I recognized the neighborhood, one of the more exclusive neighborhoods of San Francisco, upper Broadway, housekeepers and security guards.
I gathered myself from the fine, hard points of stones, calculating my fingers, my teeth, assessing myself as a new creature, one that was like a man only in the most superficial way.
Someone beyond a hedge was walking slowly, a flashlight beam breaking through the wall of green. I tried to estimate the hour, but all I could tell was that there were still stars above, and that only toward the east did any of them seem to be growing dim.
The flashlight swept the gravel walkway. I had many miles to go before I could join Dr. Opal. I would not be able to make that journey tonightâor any other night. Now that I understood my own nature I could not stay with my old friend. I could not play out my nights in a mock-human existence, passing the nocturnal hours in the same routine thoughtlessness with which human beings spend their days.
I knew now what I was able to do, and I would not turn from this new course, this new responsibility I had undertaken in my heart.
In the growing dawn I found a swimming pool under a blue plastic cover. The cover was littered with pine needles. The needles rolled gently as I stirred them, slipping into the dark water.
Sleep
. My mother said my brother was asleep, and I knew what she meant without question. It didn't even strike me as euphemism, merely an alternate way of saying what we knew to be true. That death was a kind of sleep, and that oblivion could be cruel, but was by no means the greatest evil.
My body drifted downward, and I stretched out on the bottom of the pool.
And slept.
30
For a moment I didn't know where I was. And I was happy.
I used to keep a journal. I knew the pointlessness of it, writing words no one would ever read. The writing itself became the point, covering the pages, what I had for lunch, what movies I stood in line to see, who sent me a letter after such a long wait. All through my college years I kept a variety of notebooks, spiral notebooks from the campus bookstore, handbound books from England.
In recent years I had dug them out of the box in the bedroom closet. It wasn't by accident, one of those rainy afternoons, cleaning out the closets, absorbed suddenly in old photos, old letters, and the engaging embarrassment of one's own old philosophical inquiries. I had sought them out deliberately when I knew that Connie was being unfaithful to me.
I had known it was only a beginning. Connie was a force of nature that could be observed, monitored, and perhaps ignoredâbut never stopped. I had read through my notes of nearly twenty years before, surprised at how only two decades had already yellowed the margins and faded some of the ink. To my relief the diaries were not embarrassing so much as a reminder of how much I had forgotten. I had noted with enthusiasm a new album by B.B. King, a production of
Twelfth Night
by the Berkeley Shakespeare Theater, and in almost every instance the party I described or the exam I had taken was an event I had completely forgotten.
Water gurgled. The sound kept me awake, listening to the slop of water in and out of the filter valves of the swimming pool.
The sheet, plastic and vast, lifted and fell with the very slight current, a current so slow in was almost nonexistent. If I could stay here, I knew, it would be like happiness. Water supported me, my body drifting with the slack current. It tasted of stale bleach, human body salt, and algae, a mixture of chlorophyll and mucilage. I opened my eyes.
I could not go back. I could not wake up in a bedroom with a woman, my closet filled with my clothes, my memories. It was not simply that Connie had thrown the box and its contents away by now, along with everything else that had been mine. I was never going to be able to engage in even a fitful, sporadic coupling with a woman I called my wife, or get up in the morning to sit in commuter traffic on the Bay Bridge.
The plastic tarp clung to me, stuck to my wet clothes. I was wrinkled, my fingers white and creased as the underside of a mushroom. I left sloppy wet footprints on the poolside concrete, and my trail reflected the stars.
A siren rolled along the edge of my hearing. Something else heard it, too. From beside the hedge came a diminutive howl. I was taking one slow breath after another, my heartbeat sluggish, heavy in my ears. The creature scrambled across the gravel, paws in the sharp stones. At the sight of me the beast froze. The animal would not take a further step, but stood trembling. The tiny haystack of hair showed teeth, giving a faint growl.
I smiled, stretching forth my hand. “Come here,” I breathed.
A back door opened, and a man's figure in silhouette called, “Harold?”
The man could not see us; we were sheltered behind a juniper, a great, sprawling shrub. The wire-haired terrier looked back toward the house, briefly.
I felt a tender contempt for the man at his doorway, calling for his pet. How little the man knew about the hunter who ate dog biscuits from his hand. I laughed soundlessly, and the man put his hand to his throat.
He wavered in the doorway, thinking he should venture forth, prefering to stay where he was. I ran my tongue over my lips, over my teeth.
I sent a blessing, a farewell. I surprised myselfâcompassion swept me. For this man, tired, frightened of something he had sensed, for this dog, oblivious to everything but my hand.