N
one of them had imagined that the canister would be hard to open. It looks like a quart-size paint can, made of brushed aluminum, but unlike a paint can, its lid is clearly meant to be screwed off. No one had suggested trying it out before they got onto the ferry.
Tyler, Barrett, and Liz huddle together at the stern, leaning against the traffic-cone-orange iron railing (the harsh orange that signals
emergency
); huddled together in part because it’s windier and colder than they’d expected it to be, out in the harbor at night, even in April, but mainly because they don’t want to attract the attention of the blue-uniformed crew members (are they called crew members?), who are surely not looking out to see if anyone is illegally scattering ashes off the boat, but would just as surely intervene if they caught three passengers in the act.
Tyler struggles, as unobtrusively as possible, with the intractable lid.
Spread around them is the black, light-speckled toss of the harbor, with the ferry’s wake—gray-white, alive as smoke—furling out below. It is the most trafficked body of water imaginable. Barges lumber along, dark and silent, enormous, hectored by smaller boats, buzzing little lit-up toys. The ferry has just passed the turreted, slumbering silhouette of Ellis Island, and is approaching the Statue of Liberty, bright verdigris, remote, offering her little light to the charcoal-colored sky.
“Fuck,” Tyler says. “Fuckity fuck fuck.”
Barrett puts a calming hand on his shoulder. This is not mere inconvenience. It renders the ceremony—what there is of ceremony—comic, which is not what any of them had in mind.
Liz says, “Let me try.”
She had at first declined to come, insisted it should be Tyler and Barrett alone (they couldn’t possibly have brought a crowd), but Tyler and Barrett talked her into it. Liz loved Beth, Liz knew Beth before Tyler and Barrett did. And, more important, if difficult to explain—it seemed there should be a woman present.
Tyler is reluctant to give up the canister. Liz, who is particularly irritated by this particular man-fixation, reaches out impatiently. For a moment, they tussle over it, but Tyler, in the hope of remaining as uncomic as possible, lets it go.
“Mm,” Liz says, twisting the lid. “Yeah, it doesn’t want to unscrew, does it?”
“No,” Tyler says. “It doesn’t.” This is not the time for any remark along the lines of,
What do you think I am, an idiot? Yeah, right, it doesn’t want to unscrew.
Liz reaches into her bag. “I have a knife,” she says.
Liz would of course have a knife. She’d have the very knife she produces, a Swiss Army Knife, with a dozen different blades, a nail file, scissors, and who knows what else.
“Goddess of utility,” Barrett says.
Liz extracts the nail file, slips it under the canister’s lid.
“Careful,” Tyler says.
At first, the nail file just scrapes ineffectively against the lid’s lipless rim. Then, a little more pressure, and …
It releases. Liz unscrews it slightly, doesn’t open it. She hands it back to Tyler.
He accepts it reluctantly. Barrett keeps his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
Tyler squeezes his eyes shut, breathes heavily. He asks, “Do you think we should look inside?”
“I’ve seen ashes before,” Liz answers. “You don’t need to look inside.”
Another barge rolls by, this one piled high with boxcar-size steel containers, enormous stacked boxes that couldn’t possibly be painted black, but look black, from this distance. The barge is unlit. There’s no sign of a pilot, or of where a pilot would be housed.
Tyler nods at the titanic black hulk, which offers no lights, which moves soundlessly, faster than the ferry. He says, “Let’s wait until that thing goes by.”
No one needs to comment on the world’s propensity for producing these odd signs of morbidity, these memento mori, that have a way of appearing at precisely the wrong time.
They stand quietly, waiting for the black pilotless barge to pass. Manhattan blazes behind, all monolith and ziggurat. To the left, the lazy and tranquil arcs of the light-strings along the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, answered by a modest speckling of stars.
Behind them, on the ferry: the commuters, all of whom have sensibly elected to remain in the cabin, where they sit stolidly in the green-tinged light, neither more nor less than tired wage slaves, going home.
“Okay,” Barrett says, after the barge has passed. “Are we ready?”
Tyler nods. He unscrews the lid.
He does want to look inside. But he decides to obey Liz. Whatever he might see (are there bone chips, or is it merely dust; what color would the dust be?), he’d rather not see it as the contents of a can.
Is he capable of imagining that Beth’s relapse is connected, somehow, to the argument they had on New Year’s Eve; that he captured the attention of some terrible diety by admitting to himself that his life, freed of mortal emergency, was slightly … unsustaining? He is.
“I’m going to scatter some,” he says. “And then I’d like each of you to, too.”
Tentatively, as if he might make a wrong move (he has a momentary vision of ashes strewn across the iron-plate flooring), he lifts the canister shoulder-high, and tips it.
Nothing happens. Are they compacted? Do they need to be stirred around?
He gives the canister a small, gentle shake.
And then, a spiral of pallid brown ash flies out. It is, momentarily, a palpable stream, but it quickly catches the wind, and disperses. There are quick dull gleams of bone chips. It’s a stream, then it’s a modest wispy scrap of cloud, and then, an instant later, it’s gone.
Tyler gives the canister to Barrett. Barrett disperses a fleeting ash-cloud of his own, hands the canister to Liz, who does the same, until nothing more emerges.
The vanishing was more complete than Tyler had expected it to be. The vastness and churn of the harbor is more intimidating than what he’d pictured, more arctic in its black and sparkling way. He hadn’t been thinking of a windblown, restlessly glittering tundra, or of all these ships. He’d imagined being able to see the ashes dissolve into the water. They are, however, gone, utterly gone, dissolved in the turbulent air. The night continues. The three of them stand at the railing in silence, with yet another freighter, this one the size of a football field, passing close by, and the low moan of what Tyler can only think of as boat sound, an exhalation like that of a titanic French horn.
They’ll disembark at Staten Island, then re-board the same boat back to Manhattan. The others are waiting at home. Ping and Nina and Foster and another ten or so. They’ve made dinner, as people do. They’ve agreed that no one will utter the words “celebration of life.”
It seems that Tyler, Barrett, and Liz should embrace, or at least put their arms over one another’s shoulders. That is not, however, what they find themselves doing. They stand close, but at slightly discreet distances. It seems, to each of them, that one of the others is about to say something unbearable, though none of them can tell whether the dreaded outpouring would be grief, or accusation, or … something else, something all three can imagine, but for which none of them has a name. There are, clearly, words to be said, or shouted, or hurled out over the water, but Tyler, Barrett, and Liz all believe those words to be forthcoming from one of the others. They are possessed, all of them, by an inexplicable feeling of reserve; a sense that if they aren’t careful, true annihilation will descend. None of them will ever mention this to the others. Anxiously waiting, hoping for catharsis and hoping, with equal force, that they’ll simply remain quiet, docile passengers, they watch the lights of Manhattan, the ice-white glow of the ferry terminal, the small bright finger of Miss Liberty, recede.
And what, exactly, are they supposed to do, now, with the empty can? None of them had thought about that.
P
eople are already hauling things away, before Tyler and Barrett have brought the last of it out to the sidewalk. An elderly couple—shabbily natty, he’s got licorice-black hair and has a silk scarf knotted around his neck; she’s primly white-haired, in an ancient Pierre Cardin jacket, once apricot, now the color of a Band-Aid—are carrying off the two spindly chairs, one apiece. They carry the chairs seat-forward, as if prepared to offer a ride to anyone who might need one. Tyler, hefting a carton full of old DVDs, locks eyes with them as they depart, but they eschew recognition. They are deposed royalty. These chairs have been restored to them, but you can’t imagine, young man, all that’s been lost.
As the chair-bearing couple make their way toward Thames Street, a trio of skinny skateboard kids, each showing three inches of underwear above his jeans, zips up to examine the lighthouse-based lamp.
“It needs to be rewired,” Tyler tells them, as he sets the carton full of DVDs down on the pavement.
One of the boys says, “Thanks, dude,” and they’re off again, as if Tyler had warned them against some hidden danger.
Barrett emerges, barely managing to carry the green Naugahyde armchair. Tyler hurries to help. When they’ve gotten the chair onto the sidewalk, Barrett sits down in it.
“Goodbye, old girl,” he says to the chair.
“Good luck in all future endeavors.”
Barrett strokes one of the chair’s slick, bile-green arms. “You can get attached to just about anything, can’t you?” he says.
“Some people are more sentimental than others.”
“I’m not sentimental. I’m … compassionate.”
Tyler lights a cigarette (rehab promoted him from occasional to pack-a-day smoker). They look around. The entire apartment has been arrayed on the sidewalk. Barrett has insisted on dioramas: the living room furniture is grouped together, as are the Formica-topped kitchen table and its mismatched, rickety chairs. He’s done his best to reproduce the familiar disorder of Tyler and Beth’s bedroom, as a curator would, with all the shabby treasures that had been gathered around the bed in more or less their former places.
Tyler is surprised by how peculiar it all looks; not only because it’s out on the sidewalk but because he has, it seems, been blind to the ragtag, junky nature of their possessions. In situ, their furnishings struck him as cool, jokey, satisfyingly outré. Out here, in public, they’ve acquired a pathos they did not seem to possess when they were private, everyday objects. Strangers pass, browse, take something or don’t. The gray sky shines down on it all, silvers the pots and pans, inspires the kitchen chairs to throw modest, formless shadows onto the sidewalk. A titanic, pewter-colored cloud rolls slowly in from the west, bringing the portent of rain to a sky that had been, until a moment ago, merely overcast. The pots and pans lose their luster, the chairs their shadows, and are rendered that much more commonplace. Just so, one might be brought before the thousand-eyed, mirror-winged god, and try warming him up with a few jokes before judgment is passed.
Barrett says, “We really don’t want to keep anything? I mean, this is our last chance.”
“We’re keeping the TV.”
“I voted to get rid of the TV.”
“Then we wouldn’t be able to watch the election returns.”
“I think it’s Obama,” Barrett says. “I mean, I really think so.”
Tyler shakes his tired head. “This country is so not ready for a black president. Prepare yourself for McCain. Get ready for Vice President Palin.”
Barrett says, “I think this country is ready for someone who’ll fix the economy and maybe, oh, stop killing about a third of the world’s population.”
“You’re a dreamer. That’s a good thing about you. If also ever so slightly annoying.”
Barrett says, “I’m actually feeling a little panicky.”
“You have good reason. I mean, Sarah
Palin
?”
“Actually, I meant I feel a little panicky about us getting rid of all our furniture.”
“The sofa. We’re keeping the sofa,” Tyler says.
“That’s like saying we’re keeping Aunt Gertrude.”
“I’m going to breathe my last breath on that sofa. Do you promise to get me onto the sofa, when the time comes?”
“If I outlive you.”
“I have a feeling you will.”
Barrett glances nervously around. “Don’t
say
that. Do you have any idea how much you’ve just increased the likelihood that a cab driver is about to lose control and run me over, right here in this chair?”
“You may not be more sentimental, but you are without question more superstitious.”
“I’m more amenable to the possibility of magic. How’s that?”
They pause to watch a homeless man in soot-colored sweater and blackened wool pants, looking as if he’s just escaped a fire, pick up the Dante vase (Korean-deli tulips, still fresh, sprout from Dante’s severe and frowning head), examine it, and put it down again.
Barrett says, “Even he doesn’t want that thing.”
“What would he do with a vase?”
“Liz gave that to me.”
“How’s Liz doing?”
“Relieved, mostly. I think she was pretty much over it already.”
“She hangs out sometimes. With Andrew and the new one. She’s taken them to
dinner
.”
“As Liz would.”
“It that it? Does she do things because Liz would do them?”
“Sometimes. Don’t you do things because of that?”
Tyler hesitates. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come on. Aren’t there times when you don’t know what to do, and you ask yourself, What would I do in a situation like this?”
“Maybe. I guess.”
Tyler exhales a feather of smoke. He says, “Why didn’t you didn’t tell me about that goddamned light?”
“Uh, beg your pardon?”
“You told everybody else. You told Liz. You told
Andrew.
”
“This is coming up now, because …”
“Because it is. Because you saw the holy fucking Virgin Mother tap-dancing in the sky, and didn’t say a word to me about it.”
Barrett gathers himself, runs a high-speed search for reason and logic, fails to locate a vestige of either.
“That’s not true. I did tell you.”
“After Beth died. Which would have been, what, almost five months after you’d told every-goddamned-body else. I mean, why did you wait? No, why did you tell me at all? Why didn’t you just go on forever with everybody but me knowing that this …
miracle
happened?”