How We Are Hungry (9 page)

QUIET

THE LAST TIME I told this story, I ended it with a conversation I had with the nickly shimmer of the moon on a black lake on the Isle of Skye. It went like this:

“You are a lucky one, Tom, to have Erin and others like Erin.” The voice of the nickly reflection of the moon was not as deep as you might expect. It was a singer’s voice, though, a tenor, one that loved itself without reservation.

“Thank you,” I said. “I feel blessed.”

“I often think of coming down to live among you, to make a big mess of it all,” he said. “It always looks so messy, and I think I might like that.”

“It is messy, I guess.”

“It looks
awfully
messy. It looks almost impossible to survive, to tell you the truth. The pain of it all.”

“It’s not all that painful,” I said.

“But Tom,” it said, “the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone’s pendulums swinging, to and fro, and always you’re getting hit by someone else’s swinging pendulum. You’re minding your business, but someone else’s pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.”

“That happens, yes.”

“I saw you and Erin by the shed.”

“Oh.”

“I was there.”

“That makes sense. I saw you, too.”

“I watch you often, Tom. I have time on my hands. Time is different to me than it is to you.”

I was still thinking about what the nickly shimmer had seen. He, however, was warming to the sound of his thoughts.

“I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can’t remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It’s all in puddles and ripples. That’s what time is for me.”

Three days earlier, at the airport, I was stunned that Erin had actually shown up. That she’d really come. That she had a car. “And you can drive on the other side? Do they do that up here, too?” “They do. I do.” She looked good. Pale. She had a long nose, bent a bit, seeming almost broken, working in perfect concert with her exquisitely thick chocolate hair, hair like it had been brushed a thousand times by magic elves.

I have always been the good friend. I have been harmless, listening, waiting.

“You look so much better,” she said to me.

“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what she meant.

I had flown out for a long weekend, and she and I planned to drive to the Isle of Skye. We hugged and I groaned into her sweater, pulled back and looked at her more. Her eyes still the blue of oceans on maps. She still had dark freckles, almost spots, really, round and discrete, sprayed over and around her nose and cheeks. I depended on those, and loved her old coffee-colored jeans, flared a little, faded over her bold, assertive backside—she’d been in a college production of a play about Robert Crumb’s women. Such a triumph she was—and so how had I, with my shapeless torso and oily neck, been allowed to get so close? I stood and bounced on my toes and tried not to sweat or scream or lift her and carry her around on my shoulder.

Edinburgh was raining and dark at noon. I was baffled that Erin—Erin Mahatma Fullerton—was so confident here, when she’d left me and D.C. only a year before. That she could drive on the wrong side of the road with such confidence.

“You’re incredible,” I said, about her driving. “How do you not mess it up? How are we not dead?”

“I guess I’m just used to being good at everything.”

She was good at everything. I couldn’t remember anything she couldn’t do well. I wasn’t jealous about this. I was not threatened. I should be able to just make a statement like that without being judged.

She drove with her hand on the wheel, not really gripping it, her wrist resting on top. I reached over and squeezed her knee.

“This is so weird,” she said, then laughed by throwing her head all the way forward. It was the first time I’d seen her do that.

“I know,” I said. “But good, right?”

“Yeah, good. It’s good.” She laughed again the same way. Each time she did this she almost hit her face on the steering wheel. It was a new and fake habit—at what age do we stop acquiring affectations like that? I hoped she wouldn’t do it again, because if she did I would have to ask her to stop.

We’d met at a protest, or on the way to one, a confused and desperate event. It was supposed to be an anti-IMF/World Bank march, but had been fashioned into an action against the potential bombing of Afghanistan. This was in September.

Blocks away I first caught sight of her pants, violet-blue, and followed her quickly and asked if she were heading to Freedom Plaza. She said yes. She was friendly enough, accepting my companionship for the walk there. She said she was curious only, didn’t want to get too close to the demonstration, being an employee of the Treasury and all.

I laughed. Was she serious? She was. What was her area of work? She worked as a liaison between Treasury and the IMF. I laughed again. I’d never met anyone from Treasury.

“Hold on,” she said. She stood, her knuckle on her lips.

I stared at the knuckle on her lips. Something happened then that should not have been possible: a tiny bird alighted on her shoulder. Erin was unsurprised.

“Well zippety-do-da!” she said to the bird. “Isn’t that strange?” she said to me.

The bird departed and Erin led me through a short cut. Under a marble archway and through an outdoor mall we walked. I dipped my fingers into a small fountain, the water too warm. We passed a Cartier shop on the right as the sounds of the protest became louder, somewhere above our heads. Before us were a set of polished steps and to our left the park. I followed her.

There was something experimental about her, I thought, physically. She didn’t seem to have a left arm. We walked down the steps, and I was on her right side, so I wasn’t in a position to know more.

I leaned forward and confirmed that there was no left arm swinging, no left hand at her side. I was growing more certain that she had only one arm. A large black minivan stopped in front of us, and in the window I saw her reflection clearly. Four cops or agents in riot gear stepped out, hulking, sullen, and Erin was missing an arm. The effect wasn’t something ruined or feeble, though, was somehow harmonious—not a handicap but just a viable variation. Instead of allowing her one sleeve to dangle, she’d sewn it at the shoulder. Or the manufacturer had. It was seamless. She saw me looking. She turned and walked.

Did people look at Erin strangely? It depended on their angle, first of all. Those who could grasp and be certain that she was missing a limb might cock their heads or pause briefly. Not out of revulsion. It was more like simple surprise, as when you see identical twins, adults, dressed alike, or a cat on a leash. I wanted to be closer to her because she seemed like the future to me, like a new sort of person, a new species. When I was thirteen I’d had a friend, half French and half Vietnamese, who had given me the same feeling of satisfaction—bridging the gap between my world and the one I thought was new.

On the peripheries of the protest was a smattering of TV cameras, trolling. We watched while demonstrators wandered into and out of the plaza. It wasn’t clear if the protest was beginning or ending or in full swing. The energy was mild. The ratio of protesters to those documenting them was roughly one to one.

“You don’t seem very happy,” she said to me.

This made me happy. I smiled. I felt like a bird that had landed on her shoulder. She was unspoiled land on which I could settle. I could bring everything I had.

I asked her if she worried about losing her job, if she was caught on film. I put my knuckle to my lips.

“Not really,” she said. “There are lots of jobs. There are so many things to do. Too damned many, really. It might be time to move anyway. This town is choking me.”

She laughed with her eyes closed. I laughed and watched her. I knew then that I would get her a job where I worked, that she and I would become closer, that I would know the things I wanted to know about her.

We sat on the curb.

Near us a bearded man’s sign said “Friend of the Earth.”

Erin pointed to him. “He’s a friend of the Earth,” she said.

A couple walked by, young and holding hands, wearing black handkerchiefs over their faces. Erin’s face darkened. “I have to get out of this country for a while,” she said.

That was more than two years ago. Now, in our small plastic-smelling car we skittered around Edinburgh’s glowering black fortress. Up the hill and through the castle’s parking lot running and squealing in the rain and once within the thick stone walls we took a tour elucidating the history of the country’s crown jewels. We made very, very funny jokes about these crown jewels, and the role of the peasant women in protecting and hiding them. We watched footage of Scottish soldiers from WWII, maybe it was WWI, though most of the film involved the soldiers standing around smoking pipes. The old speedy film made them seem nervous, their movements bird-like. There was a long stretch of the soldiers in kilts, dancing two by two, arms hooked, on an outdoor stage, presumably to entertain their colleagues. Spinning, twirling, sometimes with one hand above their heads, sometimes one over their bellies— it’s hard to explain.

“They don’t teach soldiers to dance like they used to,” Erin said.

Every man in the film was dead by now. When I was very young I couldn’t watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust. I hugged Erin from behind, and she stared at my hands linked, loosely, over around her waist.

I knew that she had not been content since moving to London. Her worries, though, came from home. She was getting news from her family and felt helpless. Her favorite cousin, a marine, was in Kabul. Her parents were still married but were seeing other people; her mother was dating a retired man who held the Stop sign at a school crosswalk. He sat on a lawn chair when between trips across the road.

“I always assumed he wasn’t all there,” Erin said, about the man, whose name was Jedediah. “Not retarded, you know…” She made a face that looked like a zombie’s. She scratched her temples and crossed her eyes. Now the man was sleeping in her mother’s bed.

I’d never been interested in someone like Erin before. She had an MBA, which I didn’t understand—MBAs generally or the fact that she’d wanted one. She knew menus and cheeses and Caribbean islands named after saints. But she was very strong and even reckless. She had quit her job in D.C. and now she was here.

She wanted to start an ex-pat community in London, or Scotland or Ireland. Or Norway. She hadn’t made up her mind, and was auditioning possible locations—somewhere, she said, “where all the churches aren’t covered in scaffolding.” Skye was among the candidates. She’d just been to Montenegro and was disappointed. “I expected more mustaches,” she said. “Mustaches and fedoras.”

I had the feeling that she’d overromanticized the idea of living elsewhere, but I didn’t tell her this. We stepped through the castle museum, so many old things behind new glass. She complained that she was losing friends to substances and babies, that she was fighting, over the phone, with everyone she knew in the U.S. She was convinced she was right each time, but still, she wanted to know if she seemed insane. I told her she was perfect.

“I’m always on your side,” I said.

“Fine. You stay close, and together we’ll systematically remove all the crazies from my life.”

The car didn’t have a CD player but Erin had an adapter that connected her portable disc player to the tape deck. While she drove us down the hill and into the town, I hooked everything up, only to find that the wires wouldn’t stay connected without some kind of adhesive.

“Hold on,” she said.

She stopped the car at a small market on the back end of the castle and ran in. It was the first time we’d been apart since the airport, and it was too soon. I put my hand on the leather where she’d been sitting. I wanted it to be warmer.

She jogged back to the car grinning like she’d stolen something The door opened, rain and wind scrambled in loudly, and she came inside. The door closed behind her with a clump.

“Guess what I just bought?” she asked.

I guessed: “Tape.”

“Riiiiight…” She was twirling her index finger in the air, pulling more words from my mouth, like winding a yo-yo. It drove me half-mad with desire.

“Special tape?” I ventured, wanting to take her face and squeeze it and lick it.

“Not just tape. Scotch tape.”

“Right.”

“Get it,
Scotch
tape?”

“Oh.”

The rain pattered.

She pulled it out of the white paper bag with a flourish. I widened my eyes, trying to seem impressed.

The tape was yellowed, an amber sort of color. It looked like the tape we’d used in grade school, before they invented good tape.

“It looks old,” I said.

“No, no, this is the best. They invented it, these people! Probably up there, in that castle. A bunch of monks, took them centuries.” She was desperately trying to get some tape from the roll but it wasn’t attached to any standard tape dispensing device. I wanted to help but knew she’d ask me if she felt she needed it. That was the rule.

In a few seconds she was done assembling, wrapping the tape around the adapter and the walkman. But the tape wasn’t sticking. It fell off immediately. It was like paper. It was not tape. It had no adhesive qualities whatsoever.

I laughed and then stopped. She was angry. She peeled off another strip and tested its stickiness against her fingers.

“It’s not even sticky,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

She started the car and pulled out.

“This is
Scotch tape
, right?” she said. “God
damn
it.”

Up through the highlands at dusk. Throughout the electric-green hills were great white stones flung like teeth.

“I see this and I think glory,” I said to Erin, loving the sound of the word
glory
, and hoping it would impress her in some way. I was driving now, and soon realized that driving on the wrong side wasn’t very difficult.

“I’d love to live here,” I said, trying to sound dreamy.

“You can’t live here,” she said. “There’s nothing here. No work.”