The Illusion of Separateness (3 page)
I.
S
ÉBASTIEN LOOKS OUT
the classroom window, but doesn’t see passing cars, or brown leaves like claws on the sidewalk attached to nothing. He can reach for things without touching them. Thinking and desire are one.
After school, he will take Hayley to see the iron skeleton he found in the woods. He wants to find a corner of the playground and hug her all lunchtime—hug her so tightly that she becomes a part of him. Instead, later on, she will trail him through the woods to the skeleton behind the farm. There she will love him the way he has seen in films, especially the ones he watches with Grandma on Saturday afternoon, when the room flickers and the music is heavy. The actors’ faces are soft and gray. It begins with a single dance. And then a telephone call.
U
nwashed sheets hang in the sky. They smell of salt from the sea. It’s been raining since early morning, but will turn to snow when the bell rings.
S
ébastien awoke to rain on the window like a thousand eyes. The wind was gusting. Birds blown off course. Teddies blown out of bed. They all have names and behave differently. He likes to hold one at night. It gets him through.
The lights in the classroom are always bright and warm. The class mice, Tik and Tok, are sleeping. Their fur is tight. Sébastien’s hair sticks up in the morning. Only water keeps it down.
He likes to draw for ten minutes before school. Sometimes when he sharpens his coloring pencils, the lead breaks off and he’s back where he started. His mother shouts at him to get dressed, but he’s looking at the hollow socket. He can feel what is not there.
His drawing is unfinished.
The outline of another world.
He feels this one by imagining others.
Play is where he recognizes himself.
Closing his bedroom door on one life because there are so many.
His mother shouts at him to get dressed. He indignantly stands, driven by the engine of his heart.
The tyranny of school.
The shuffle of toast and the scrape of butter.
The kettle driving ghosts into the world.
Resting his feet on the dog’s back under the table. The dog won’t move as long as crusts or bits of sausage appear from time to time.
It’s so early, but his father is already out on the tractor.
The school corridor smells of milk and coats. The sound of boots being taken off. Sometimes socks come off, too. Like children, they don’t want to leave home.
The fear of being lost.
The fear that never goes away and cannot be dispelled.
Then the bell and a list of names called out. Sébastien knows it by heart and whispers it in bed, like a prayer of parentheses. Desks opening and closing like mouths. Scribbled messages on the back of the seat in front of him. He feels the teacher’s unhappiness. It’s in how she stands, how she moves, her hair, her clothes.
The lesson will end one day. A ringing bell means glory, freedom, something to run for. He can go home and sit at the table with nothing to do. He can venture into woods and look for animals. He can visit the skeleton, and drum on its hard skin.
He can set up his LEGO train and lay people underneath to fix the engine. He can close his curtains and put his flashlight in a sock. Moonlight spills across the train yard. Little plastic men and women go home to hot plastic dinners. They walk quickly to keep warm.
They are like us, but smaller. They are like us with things in their pockets, and good moods and bad moods, and spontaneous moments of love and cruelty. They yawn. They too lie awake, unable to sleep, going over arguments or unraveled by desire. They give birth to plastic babies, whose fathers work in the train yard. Even at night, the train must be repaired.
Nobody knows why it broke down in the North Pole at midnight. Perhaps a miracle will occur before supper, and Hayley’s family will not freeze in the Arctic tundra of white bedsheet and aluminum-foil lake.
Sébastien looks out the classroom window. The teacher is talking but says nothing. Her heart is asleep. His heart is asleep. The children’s hearts are asleep and will remember nothing.
H
e imagines himself in the black metal shell of his skeleton house—a home they will soon share. He is sitting in the heavy seat that long-ago fathers sat in—when the great skeleton flew. Sébastien knows from old films. He’s seen them in the air. When the world was gray. The men who flew his skeleton wore masks. You could hear them breathing.
It was not Sébastien’s France then, not a country of brioche and endless school, trips to the windy beach with the caravan in summer—but a country of mud, and women in aprons watching the giant skeletons pass above, spitting bullets into the guts of other skeletons.
Children then must have stood around in puddles wondering when their parents would come home, looking up at the sky for metal drops, or down at themselves in the gray water. They were barefoot and thin. Sébastien has seen it on television. And his grandmother has told him.
Sébastien feels what he has never experienced: houses on fire, dogs barking at people trying to hide. He has seen pictures in books too. He knows something happened long ago—something bad. He can see it in the eyes of the children who live in the pages.
He wants to take Hayley into the metal belly of his secret house. It lies sleeping in the woods behind his family farm. It yawns when you knock. Although his mother once told him not to go too deep into the endless woodland at the far end of the cow pasture, he genuinely forgot. By then it was too late. As recompense, he does his chores. He helps Papa with the cows on Sunday and forces down Brussels sprouts. He gets dressed after being asked three times, and doesn’t leave LEGO pieces everywhere.
I
t gets dark quickly in the weeks leading up to Christmas. People go to bed early. Winter is for dreaming. Moonlight sharpens the garden outside Sébastien’s window. He opens his window a crack. The cold fills his bedclothes like a flapping tongue. He listens for animals and sometimes hears them. Sparkling lines of tinsel tie the house together. Cards hang on strings above the fireplace.
Hayley has agreed to play.
She said yesterday she would come over. That’s when he thought:
SHOW HER THE SKELETON
Take her into the woods, why not?
She will glow as she walks around. His pleasure has doubled already. She will not want to go home. She will have questions, he knows that. There are things he wants to know too. Why did it crash? Where was it from? If there are real skeletons in there, he hasn’t found them. Did the skeletons not in there have children? Are they skeletons now because of time? Maybe the skeletons are in the trees. He’s heard of that. It was in the news once.
He knows you have to be older to marry. It’s so sad because he’s ready now. And then you find a house and then babies are given to you carefully in towels at the hospital. Their tiny lips say
who
.
But at least there are damp flat cushions in the back where it’s very dark. Light only reaches its fingers in so far. The windshield in the front is split into pieces like a spider’s eyes. Some of them are broken. Some are too dirty to see out of.
When it rains, the skeleton dreams of gunfire. Sometimes Sébastien sits in the seat where the gun handle is and pretends to shoot cows grazing silently in the dusk, beyond the trees. He imagines steaming parcels of roast beef in every place where a cow was. Then he fires upon the potatoes. Brussels sprouts cut to shreds.
When he first discovered it, he was too afraid to go inside. He kept patting the black skin and listening to the echo. He looked around for the second wing but couldn’t find it. Then he peed on a wheel with a flat tire that’s close to a pile of twisted black metal and decided to go in where it’s split.
Sébastien marvels at how it cut through thick trees, then plowed the earth with its glass nose.
His father said the forest beyond the pasture is too expensive to clear. His family bought the farm when Sébastien was one. His father was an attorney in Paris. He met Sébastien’s mother on a train to Amsterdam. There were no other seats. They were forced together and found they preferred it. His mother came from Normandy and dreamed of staying in the country. After they were married, they looked for places where they could make a living.
The teacher sometimes stops talking, and when Sébastien looks over, she is already looking at him, which means: Why are you looking through the window and not at me? But Sébastien is not looking through the window, but through the scrapbook of things that have pierced his heart.
Lives are staged from within.
Sébastien wants to make a little home for Hayley in the skeleton. They can sit in the old seat and press buttons. There is dust and mud and oil on everything, the smell of something heavy, dripping, and tick, tick, tick. (Also groaning.)
There are dials and switches and things to hold and pull. All the bits must remember what happened. They keep each other company but say nothing.
Sébastien found something else under the seat, a leather case with brown cards and the photograph of a woman.
The secret fills his mouth like cotton wool, but if he tells, it might be taken away. He might be famous (local newspaper or television) for finding it, true—but if fame takes away the thing it celebrates, then Sébastien would prefer the inspired silence. We’re all famous in our own hearts anyway.
Yes, it is snowing.
Three-year-olds are screaming.
Others rush past to be in it. Sébastien is leaning against the wall of the canteen hut. Some of the children are laughing and kicking snow. It’s annoying how they copy one another.
Parents are chatting and smoking.
Cars hum along the road by the gates. The glow of brake lights.
H
ayley.
H
er eyes are deep and dark. Her hair is combed neatly to one side. She doesn’t say anything, but smiles. A few of her teeth are missing. Her shoes are never scuffed like his. Her backpack has a cat on it. Hayley loves cats. She has a kitten and Sébastien has played with it once in real life, but in his imagination they are brothers and the cat talks and tells him about life in Hayley’s house.
“I can’t play today,” she says.
“You have to.”
“
Maman
is picking me up.”
“Why is she?”
“I’m going to the dentist.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you go tomorrow?”
Hayley shrugs. “I’ll ask.”
“I want to show you something you won’t believe.”
“Show me tomorrow.”
“It has to be today. It has to be now.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
Hayley’s mother appears in the distance, waving.
“You can bring your cat if you like.”
“Okay. Where is it?”
“You’ll see.”
“Can we go tomorrow?”
“What about today?”
“I already told you.”
Hayley’s mother is almost upon them.
“Take something, then,” Sébastien says, fumbling in his pocket. He holds up a small, wrinkled black-and-white photograph of a woman. Hayley grabs it from him.
Finally, Sébastien and I are married.
T
hey both drop into the photograph, past white threads where the image has creased. The young woman in the picture doesn’t notice. In the background a hot-dog stand and a Ferris wheel.
The woman tilts back her head.
Her smile is changing into a laugh.
Sébastien found the photograph under a seat in the glass nose of the skeleton.
“Is it your grandmother?”
“No,” Sébastien says, “it’s you grown up.”
Hayley stares at the photograph. She touches the woman with the tips of her fingers.
“I like my hair,” she says.
“Yeah, me too, it’s just like my grandmother’s.”
Sébastien turns over the picture. “It even almost says your name.”
They stare at the chain of letters until her mother comes.
“Good-bye, Harriet,” Sébastien whispers. “See you tomorrow.”
I.
T
HE
F
ERRIS WHEEL
turned slower than normal so girls could kiss their soldiers good-bye.
“Stand still, Harriet, or it’s not gonna work.”
John’s father had given him a camera.
“It’s too windy,” she cried.
John put the camera down and went over to her.
“I really want a picture of you on the boardwalk,” he said.
She pressed her lips against his and pulled his hair.
“Don’t go,” she said.
“Don’t go?”
“I don’t want you to.”
“If I don’t go, I can’t come back.”
“Don’t go,” she said.
They sat on a low wall and looked at the beach. People were lying on towels. It was a hot day. There were bodies in the water. Children eating quietly under canvas umbrellas.
Something was happening, and nobody knew where it would end. The children who played on John’s street wanted to know when their fathers would come home, why their neighbors banged on their doors late at night—why people sat crying in the kitchen with the wireless on.
When it got late, they held hands and walked toward the subway.
“Can you still take the photo?” Harriet asked.
She straightened her blouse and adjusted her hair. The thought of his not coming back brought them closer.
John steadied his hands and looked through a small hole at the woman in front of him. He had never loved anyone so much. But it was something he could never admit to her.
It was a truth anchored in his heart so that her pain might be less, so that she might find another, get married again, have children, watch them grow, make their lunches, see them off, visit them in college, get old herself, plan retirement, give away all her jewelry to grandchildren, regret nothing—even forget,
even forget
the boy she was first married to, who took her picture at Coney Island, then was blown to bits in his B-24 by antiaircraft guns over the French coast, escape impossible.
The book of their love would be a chapter in her life.
A digression that ends in a rain of metal over wet fields.
T
hen a moment before the snap of the shutter—a gust of wind lifted John’s hat. Harriet screamed and couldn’t stop laughing. Behind her, people on the Ferris wheel and the roller coasters were screaming too. You could hear them up and down the boardwalk, lost forever in that last great afternoon of their lives.
