The Other (7 page)

In the morning, about a half-mile away, at the base of a limestone cliff, we found a seep, which at first was nothing more than a sulfurous vapor we noticed while looking for denser yew wood. Seeing algae crusting a few nearby rocks, we clawed with our ice axes until a small, warm pool gathered. It was like finding a vent on the sea floor, so rare and unexpected is a hot spring in the Olympics. (Counting ours, there are only three.) John William and I went on picking at the limestone; for much of that day we excavated, until our pool was approximately on the order of a bathtub. Then we stripped, stepped in, and crouched there for a while, but the water hadn’t settled yet, so this was a little like soaking in hot mud. We had to pour creek water over our limbs to rinse the stain out.

That evening, we stayed near our handiwork for its warmth, and as time wore on—we had nothing left to eat—it began to look less roiled. We sat wearing our sleeping bags like capes, with the pool producing its mineral effluvium, and our bare feet propped on rocks near its waters so as to warm our soles. I remember reading the first-aid pamphlet inside my kit as an antidote for boredom while John William carved a fresh fire drill from a length of yew. He wanted an abrupt transition, he said, between two diameters, as suggested in
Outdoor Survival,
so that a disk of pine with a hole at its center could be slipped partway down the shaft as a rest for his drilling hands. After a while, this ancient device was ready. We threw off our sleeping bags and knelt by the fire board. The twilight in June is long, and we used about all of it, working in near darkness. At the edge of the pool, with the kind of humorless diligence John William was prone to—me, too—we finally made the flash point for cedar tinder. The powder churning at the point of the drill turned briefly orange and then rolled into our pile of deliberately arranged shavings, where John William blew it into flames.

Six years before, in ’68, there’d been a band called The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, known almost exclusively for its song “Fire,” which was on the charts for a while, so that you heard it often on the radio, and it was this that John William quoted at that moment—“I am the god of hell fire and I bring you: fire!”—which made us both laugh. We fed the flames, throwing our shadows against the cliff wall—where their skewed shapes formed a backdrop for lofting sparks—and celebrated not only fire but ourselves. John William said, “We can’t tell anyone about this place. I mean it. We have to have a blood pact. We have to cut our palms and shake hands.”

I said, “That’s some corny bullshit.”

John William dug his knife from his pocket. “Neil,” he said, “don’t wimp out.”

It hurt. But the hard part was doing it, not the pain. As you might expect, every time you move the blade toward your hand your brain stops you. John William got it done after one false start, but I pulled back three times while he bled. “Pretend it’s not your hand,” he advised.

I finally opened my palm down the center. I’d cut myself before, but only accidentally. This was different; I didn’t feel damaged.

John William and I opted for the soul shake. It didn’t start with white guys, but white guys can understand at least part of it, and since it seemed right for this occasion, a deeply solid contact, thumbs clamped, arms crooked, the weight of each brother in a fleeting, felt balance, we mingled our blood that way.

M
Y MOTHER DIED
when she was thirty-nine, a month before I turned thirteen. She had a Grade 4 astrocytoma—an aggressive brain tumor—that didn’t take long to blind and kill her. What I remember best is that her singing voice still moved me right up until a few weeks before the end. I remember her singing “The Maid of Llanwellyn” in a lilting a cappella, even after she’d gone cross-eyed. Of course, she knew that my sister and I, and my father if he was home, could hear her singing from elsewhere in the house, and she also knew, I’m sure, that it got to us. I used to stop what I was doing when she sang. I guess I poised myself to ponder more clearly, with the evidence for it plainly in my ears, the trajectory of her last days. A few times, I sat in a closet and plugged my ears, because listening made me angry. Even at twelve, I understood that my mother sang in an emotional register no listener could easily ignore. One day, seeing her at the piano with only a little hair on her head, I realized I hadn’t heard her sing for a while, and after that she didn’t sing anymore, and then she didn’t play the piano, either. I’m not sure, but I think she chose not to sing, late in the game, because she didn’t care for what she heard.

It was July, and we skipped the Cavanaugh reunion. My father went on working, but he lost weight. He owned a battery-operated shortwave radio, and I walked the streets carrying that on my shoulder, the way kids carried boomboxes in the eighties. It was ’69, so there was good music on FM. One place I liked to go was a half-lot with a transformer station behind a chain-link fence, where I’d loll in the shade with the radio beside me. I also walked railroad tracks, breaking every bottle I could find.

People, it’s said, die in character. After she was told about the astrocytoma, my mother, for a while, tried to learn Gaelic and got interested in the Book of Kells. She bought a book of Irish tales, which I inherited by default—“Oisin in Tir Na nOg,” by P. W. Joyce; “The Legend of Knockgrafton,” by T. Crofton Croker; and so on. Wraiths, corpses, coffins, graveyards, solitary ruins, sorrow on the wind, and landscapes of gray loneliness. Characters are hounded toward death, or wither, or freeze, or slide into the sea, and in the end the storyteller will say something like “The blessing of God on the souls of the dead!” or “Thus did the hermit lay the four children of Lir to rest at last.”

At the funeral, Carol refused to look at our mother, but I went up and saw that her face had been arranged in approximately the expression I’d seen at Alpental when she snow-sprayed my father with rental skis. My mother in death had a mischievous regard. As the coffin was lowered, Carol laid flowers. At the same moment, my father took off his sunglasses and put his carpenter’s hand on my biceps. It stayed there until the coffin was in the ground, and then my father slid his sunglasses on and, done holding himself up, removed his hand.

My father did two things shortly thereafter. He started paying Carol to look after me, and he split between us the $10,000 from our mother’s life-insurance policy. He didn’t turn us over to our grandmothers or aunts for the same reason he didn’t remarry—to his way of thinking, the love we needed was just across death’s divide, and to try to replace it would be to adulterate our mother’s presence and prompt it to wane. That’s a sword with a double edge, of course, well intentioned but inherently dangerous, even for a man who didn’t believe in ghosts or an afterlife.

Mourning took me a while. I remember going to baseball practice early so I could sit in a plum tree before anyone else showed up. In this period of what probably looked like obtuseness, I felt there was something hallowed about my $5,000 in life-insurance money, which I left in a bank and didn’t touch. Five thousand dollars wasn’t much, but it was my version, if wan and proletariat, of John William’s muscular trust fund. When I told him about it, he asked if there were strings attached, because—he added—he had strings attached: he had to enroll at a college, he said, to get his first $50,000. Bowing to this, he was going to Reed, a liberal-arts school in Portland, Oregon, family-approved but not on the East Coast, home to Rhodes Scholars but not far from mountains. I was going to the University of Washington, about a mile from where I’d grown up, partly because you could get in with a 2.8, but mostly because the tuition there was $540.

We had different plans for the summer months, too, following our mineral-spa blood pact. My hand had healed pretty well, but there was a raised white scar across my palm that looked like a crescent moon. John William had one, too, but his was straighter. He was now bent on solo beach-hiking, in Oregon, whereas I was using my inheritance, or some of it, at least, to shift about in Europe among the horde of young Americans who descend on Europe every summer with Eurail Passes, guidebooks listing the addresses of hostels, and overstuffed, filthy backpacks. My aim was to have experiences. I had no other purpose in going. I thought that if I was to be a writer I would need to travel in foreign places and take notes on how things looked, sounded, and smelled. When I told John William this, he snorted. He said that my orientation was backward, and that if I felt so dire about seeing the world I should go to the Andes or Mongolia. I ignored that and told him to write me at some hostels I was set on inhabiting—Avignon, Barcelona, Grenoble, Brunico—Brunico because I was planning on soloing myself, in the high country of the Dolomites.

On my own, I flew to Amsterdam and spent my first night abroad at the Seamen’s House, a salty fleabag open to anyone with a few guilders. The next day, I sat by the Herengracht with a packet of
frites
in my hand, crying, because this is what had become of my mother. She’d been transmuted into an experience I was having—me beneath a patinaed lamp, looking at windows framed by pilasters and listening to bicyclists bumping over cobblestones while ringing their quaint little bells. I did the things you do when you are eighteen and alone in Amsterdam, which is to say I milled on the Damrak in a surfeit of melancholy, pinching my pennies and taking notes on the pigeons, distrustful of all comers. I found other streets more lived in, more personable, where the lights in the windows at dusk looked familial, but the canals, the cartouches, the towers, the churches, the black bicycles, the gilded shops—all of it only left me more lonely or, to put it a different way, exposed to myself. By those old and fetid European waters, black as they were with commerce and fever, I felt saddened and stripped. This kind of glum interiority is often the province of solitary travelers, but I was feeling plowed under by my mother’s presence wherever I went, and when parting with every guilder I spent. I was trading her for this—for the Oude Kerk and its carillon chimes and for herring sandwiches.

One morning, I walked over to the train station with my pack, a bag of rolls, my journal, and
Swann’s Way.
I must have looked like hundreds of young travelers who pass through there each summer—all wearing intrepid expressions as shields against the world and, I would have to guess, pretending to an experience of life they don’t possess. I took a train that went through Antwerp and in Brussels transferred to a different train, antique and slower, with scarred wooden seats, and this one went to Liège and eventually to Trier, where I got off and walked around noticing things, stopping now and then to write down impressions of the Porta Nigra, Trier’s Basilica, the hue of the Moselle, and so on. I was face to face with my own vagrancy after that, and got more comfortable adrift. I became attached to train travel—to seeing the grimy backs of the buildings along train lines, the fenced industry and hung laundry. I slept in train seats. I learned to opt for the rear car, so that in long bends, in open country, I could look ahead and watch the engine pass particulars of the landscape. And in the interim between the engine’s passing of, say, a half-fallen brick pumping station and my own passing of it, happiness inhabited my journey. It was like the feeling I had on station platforms sometimes just after sunrise, when no one else was around and no train was expected for an hour or more, and an express had just gone through at high speed a minute or so before, the passengers in it flashing past like the kings, queens, and jacks in a thumbed deck of cards, ephemeral as thoughts. I put down my reading when that happened and enjoyed the absence of the train’s noise, the silence of a station in the countryside. To be awake in the cool of morning on a bench near train tracks, hungry, with a little breeze blowing, and whatever book you were reading open in your lap, was a little like listening for something you thought you might have heard a moment before. I suppose you could say I felt the sweetness, then, of being alive and in good health. At the same time, my romantic spells were curtailed by the sight of garbage near the rails, or by a wandering dog raising a leg at the corner of a building. I just didn’t have the psychic wherewithal to incorporate these images into my affection for living; I let them dispirit me, as the heat of the day and the crowds on the trains dispirited me, most days, during the afternoon. And then, for no reason, my interest in this brand of transience waned, and I took to foot travel. In San Sebastián I bought a tent, sleeping bag, ground pad, cartridge stove, and cooking pot, and set out toward the Pyrenees with a long French loaf strapped to my pack and an English-language edition of
The Wings of the Dove
stuffed in a side pocket alongside my journal. It was what I expected: the smell of goat dung desiccating in the dry heat of the plain, and the dust lifted even by the passage of a bicycle as someone rode toward me out of the mountains. I stopped frequently, in whatever cool, furtive place offered privacy. I spent half a day beneath a stone bridge reading James, until some sheep came down through the cork oaks behind me to drink from the stream there. I’m making my solitude and the liberty I had abroad sound pleasant and pastoral now, but the truth is, I felt abysmal most of the time, especially in my tent after dark. Once, in some Navarran village or another, I sat at an outdoor table writing postcards and reading the
International Herald-Tribune,
and just the act of putting down my home address agitated my loneliness.