The Point of Vanishing (13 page)

“Did you often make hikes as a boy?”

I shook my head. “Did you?”

“At my grandmother's house, the one I told you of, we made hikes. There are paths and huts where you stop for food or drink, and high up there are the fields with cows. We don't go often now, but I liked this very much as a girl.”

“The cows are up in the hills?”

“Not in the snow or so, but high up in the hills, many cows. You can touch them. If you are soft, they do not move away.”

I handed her a sandwich. I tried to do it softly.

“And you? You did not go for walks? I imagine you did this often as a boy.”

“No,” I said.

“But I am surprised.”

“Maybe you don't know me so well.”

She glanced over at me. The words had come out more sharply than I'd meant them.

“Maybe I do not,” she said quietly.

“I'm sorry.”

“No, you are right.”

I didn't want to be right. “I hiked in the summers,” I said. “At camp. But back home, during the school year, I had a different life. I was always waiting for summer to start again.”

“Ya, this I understand.” There was something in her voice.

“How so?”

“You ask many questions.”

“So do you.”

She gave me a look that was becoming familiar—a slight pout, head tilted, eyes half-closed but very bright. It said,
This is so
,
but you are not supposed to say it is so.
“I sit in my window sometimes at night and look at these hills. I have a glass of wine, maybe smoke a cigarette—but you do not smoke, no?”

“You're stalling,” I said.

“Stalling.” She looked at me, as though acting out the word. For a moment, there was only the conversation that had been riding below us, the sound of the wind in the grass. She looked away. “At night, I sit in my window and listen to music. The Sibelius violin concerto or Schubert or Schumann. And there is so much in the music, and so much outside in the night. But the next morning I must go to class. And I go, and it is interesting or so, and at night there are cocktail parties with this very small small talk. But it is important. So I go, I talk small. But I am waiting all the time. Like you said, you waited for summer and camp to start again. But for me, it is not summer. And I do not know when it comes.”

We ate our sandwiches, looked out at the apple trees. “I do not know why I tell you all this,” she said.

“I was beginning to wonder.”

“But it is not boring and typical, these concerns of the future bourgeois?”

“You're not typical,” I said.

She was quiet for a while. She was still beside me on the blanket, but she was very far away. Then the spell seemed to be broken. “Do you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

But the way she was looking at me, her face as gentle as when she described the cows in the mountains, I knew. The breeze sifted through my bare feet, and I could hear the wind rustling in the grass. It seemed there was no one for miles. Her voice came from very close. “You tell me what happened to your eye?”

I'd seen her noticing it during our first conversation on the roof, the pupil now two years after the accident permanently dilated, one of my eyes blue, the other black. But hearing her say the words, the actual words, made my chest go hollow. People had asked before, but it had never felt like this. Usually, my
body just went into lockdown, bracing not to feel anything as I answered. I'd give the facts as though I were a doctor reciting a case history. But now I could feel a kind of fault line running through my chest. I tried to keep my voice level. I gave my usual response. The basketball game, the accident, the doctor's diagnosis. How I adjusted to playing sports. How my sense of hearing grew more acute. How the pupil had dilated now, but since the eye didn't see, the change didn't really matter. I could have been telling the history of some long-forgotten country.

“But how do you see now?”

“With my other eye,” I said, trying to smile.

“Naya, I know this. But the world. It looks different?”

My fault line wasn't faring well. The whole hillside seemed to be finding its way inside me, guided by her voice. “No one's ever asked me that.”

“You did it to me.”

“Did what?”

“Made me talk.”

“Hardly.”

“You're stalling. This is what you say?”

Her eyes were so ready to listen. I could feel my checkpoint guard nodding off, could feel the urge to tell her more than I should. The day had opened too wide, and I didn't want to be here, didn't like how uncertain I felt. Wouldn't I just be trying to impress her, trying to use my blindness as a way to win her heart? But I also knew if I didn't say anything, the need to talk would just keep on waiting.

“Tell me,” she said.

I told myself to go slowly, to say nothing I wasn't ready to say.

“One night,” I began, “when I lived up in the hills, I took the last bus back from the city center. It let me off outside Calderino
around midnight. I had to walk three kilometers in the dark, no cars on the road, the houses with no lights on. I passed the gas station, the little bar. A stream ran alongside the road, and the reflection of the moon stayed with me as I walked. I was a little nervous, a little cold, but mostly I just felt good, like I could walk anywhere.”

There was so much space in the way she was listening. I knew I sounded strange, but it was the only way I could do it—to tell it as a story.

“When I finally came to my road and climbed up the gravel path, I didn't want to go inside. It didn't feel right to go inside. Everyone else was inside, already asleep. And the night had this clarity to it. The gravel white in the moonlight, a few clouds drifting by the moon. The way the town looked so quiet, the small roads, the houses. The way I knew people would get up in the morning and drive down those roads, going into Bologna to work. Life seemed to fit together. And the strange part was that my seeing that way fit together, too. Like I was a part of the town, a necessary part, kind of like a night watchman. Like someone ought to be awake in the night, not to protect the town exactly, not to scare off possible intruders or anything, but just to see the town while it slept, to be aware of it. I know it probably sounds crazy. But it seemed important somehow.”

“And you stood outside for a long time?”

“It seemed like a long time. Yes.”

“But then you went inside?”

Again my chest hurt. I nodded.

“But really, now, it is always like this? In some way you never go back inside. You are always outside in the night? Always watching?”

My throat felt thick. She'd understood. “Something like that.”

“And it does not get cold? Always being outside?”

Her hand rested just inches from mine on the blanket. I wanted so deeply to touch it, just to feel her skin against mine.

“Do you want to read?” I said.

I pulled out the book from my backpack, strangely disappointed, as though she was the one who had stopped the conversation. It was a panic move, but it was the only thing I could think of.

I lay back on the blanket. She lay down beside me. I could smell her—the sun warm on her skin, something floral in the smell of her hair. I held the book open with my palm at the top of the page, blocking out the sun. The ground felt solid against my back, but my voice vibrated wildly in my chest. I tried to focus on the words, on the boys riding their horses across the barren plains of Mexico, the air hot and dry, but I knew beneath the page she was so close. Her arm lay just beside mine on the blanket, and I could feel her through my whole body, could feel the pull to brush my arm against hers, just to have that touch. The whole afternoon I'd felt it, the desire to be closer, physically closer, and I'd kept pushing it back, kept looking at the beauty of the hills instead of at her.

She began arranging her sweater as a pillow.

“You can put your head on my chest,” I heard myself say.

Something was surprised in her eyes, genuinely surprised, but from very close. She took out the pins and her hair fell down in a soft curve by her neck. I was grateful for the book in my hand—grateful to have words ready, words that weren't mine. Then she lay down, the soft weight of her head a reassurance on my chest, her hair warm from the sun. I kept my voice reading: the boys were doing something, growing apprehensive on their horses—a gang of men was approaching from the distance, but the words were slipping back into just words. Looking below the page, I could see the nape of her neck, and I tried not to look,
but then my hand was moving in her hair, the long strands silken and warm. My body was moving in a thousand directions beneath the book, but my voice kept on riding through the hot Mexican desert. Then her hand slid onto my shoulder. I turned the page. Her hand slid farther onto my shoulder, and I knew it wasn't because of the ominous men on horses in the distance. I put down the book behind my head, and she turned her face towards me. There were wisps of sunlight and then her lips.

As we kissed, her hair a soft drapery around us, there was nothing I could do. The world fell away and became deeper all at once. We were inside the scent of the long grass, inside the buzz of the heat. Inside the current of the conversation that had been going on without us, rising and falling on it, the sun carrying us on a raft of light. As I pulled her closer, as I felt her body beneath mine, there was the sense of riding with her on that current through a secret opening in the afternoon, traveling into some realm that wasn't day or night, or inside or outside, somewhere where there was no possibility of getting lost.

When we opened our eyes, far off in the apple trees, there was the call of a bird. Milena curled in by my neck. “I must hide in you.”

“In me?”

“From you. With you. In you. All these things.”

I tried to get her to look at me, but she kept her eyes away. “I feel too much. This is a problem,” she said.

If it was a problem, it was a problem I wanted us to have. “We'll figure it out.”

She sat up, stared out at the apple trees. The side of her face was a face I hadn't seen. “Naya,” she said. “You do not know.”

A truck was approaching. The sound came pushing through the gathering dark, too thick, too constant to be anything native to the woods. Nothing alive, I thought, would willingly give away its location like that. It was late afternoon, the clouds trailing purple above the pines at the edge of the field, the troughs in the snow filling like faint blue pools. I'd started taking late afternoon walks, no snowshoes, just past the apple trees, past the abandoned house, usually stopping somewhere alongside the field. I liked looking at the horizon line. The snow lay scalloped and wind-whipped like an ocean, and the sky above the darkening pines pulled on me like the horizon at the ocean, but here I could keep on walking if I wanted to—into the field, into the dimming whiteness, into the dark embrace of the trees. Sometimes I'd picture myself doing it, walking and not turning back—my own jacket clear against the snow-filled field, then a speck of color fading into the distance. It would be like walking an empty page—until there were no more words, no more letters, no more past. Or maybe some first letter would eventually start to appear on the far side of the trees, on the far side of the darkness, as though some portal opened there into another world. I didn't know if it was a fantasy of becoming visible against that emptiness, or if it was simply a fantasy of disappearing, of becoming as much a part of the land as the snowy trees. Either way, the field and the line of the distant pines had begun to hold weight for me, to exert a gravitational pull.

But the drifts in the road were no higher than my shins. There was no reason to plow. I had a sudden fear it was Bella, wearing her glittery wig, eyes fixed ahead: she'd learned to drive, borrowed a truck, and had drawn herself a little map, complete with arrows and hearts, to remember the way. It made no sense, but it was the perfect mix of fear and fantasy, of guilt and longing—my imagination abducting the girl into abducting herself. I'd looked at her too long, she'd felt what was in my head, and now she was calling on me to deliver. But as the truck nosed out of the trees, its yellow headlights playing over the snow, I recognized it immediately. The plow angled to the side, the wooden slats along the bed. I wasn't relieved, or even disappointed, as much as surprised. Nat almost never plowed this late in the day. And there wasn't much new snow to plow.

Maybe the whole Y
2
K thing had spooked him. I'd noticed the onslaught of exclamation marks on the magazines at the checkout line at the C&C:
Millennium Madness! Will Computers Melt Down?!? Apocalypse Now!
At that fateful tick when one millennium ended and the next refused to begin, computers everywhere were supposed to go on the fritz: planes would plummet from the sky, bank vaults would swing open, power grids would dissolve. Everything wouldn't just go dark but Dark Ages dark, and we would be thrown back into mass confusion, into the primordial terror of the dark side of the moon. To me it seemed laughable, a collective hysteria—like a grown man's horror at the prospect of losing his remote control. But maybe I should have been more understanding: after all, what was I doing in the woods but trying to come up with my own bulleted list for survival, trying to figure out what was essential for living in an altered world?

Of course, New Year's had come and gone without my even noticing—only the headlines at the C&C had changed.
Reconsidering
Technology
,
Y2KHoax
,
U.S. Government Spends Three Billion Dollars to Avert What?
But maybe Nat had been spooked. Or maybe he thought I had been.

He rolled up beside me now, rolled down his window. He wasn't wearing gloves or a hat. “Was in the neighborhood.” He motioned with his chin as though there were houses around.

“Nice afternoon for a drive.”

“Can do a little dust-up for you. No charge.”

“I appreciate it.”

He blew on his hands, considered the glowing tip of his cigarette. He looked like he'd been out driving for a while. The ashtray below the radio was jammed with butts. “Just wanted to tell you my son will come down.”

I didn't understand.

“He's a responsible kid. A storm hits, he'll be down in a few days. Plow you out clean. He knows these parts. He'd rather sit in the house, play his video games, but I took him hunting around here when he was a kid.”

He looked straight ahead, his hand still on the wheel.

“Are you going away?”

A wry smile creased his eyes. “I thought about that. Drive over to Burlington, fly all the way down to Miami. Have myself a big party on the beach. I've never seen the ocean, did you know that? Strange for a man my age.”

The dashboard glowed in front of him. His skin looked faintly yellow. I could feel the road without him.

“Are you sick, Nat?”

“Docs just say take it easy for a while. Maybe a month or two. You know. One doc says one thing, another doc something else. Regular geniuses, they are.”

I felt a stab of sympathetic anger. The last doctor I'd seen had paraded five med students my own age into the examining room without asking my permission, and had flashed his penlight
while they took a look, one after the other, as though I were simply a jar of formaldehyde, a blind eye floating in the dark.

“What is it?” I said.

“Liver. Maybe. They don't know.” He nodded towards the woods behind him. “But summer comes, I'll be here. Back in my trailer. You'll see more of me than you want.”

“I'll hold you to that.”

I realized I'd put my gloved hand on his door. He was my main connection to the outside world, and I was suddenly afraid to lose him. I felt the urge to put my hand on his shoulder, but it wouldn't have been right. I just gave a tap on the door, like it was an extension of his body. But even that felt strange. “Take care of yourself,” I said.

“Don't let me catch you up in that hospital.”

“You won't.”

“Just keep eating. Keep going to town.”

I thought he'd meant he didn't want me to come for visiting hours. “Promise,” I said.

“You need anything, you call my wife.”

“I will.”

“Anything.”

He gave me a last, emphatic look, and the truck rolled forward, his window still down. He seemed to be towing dusk behind him, the darkness clustering around his red taillights.

The woods went terribly quiet, the trees along the road in silhouette, tall black spires that could have been made of stone. Early evening had settled over the field like a bruise. I could still feel the pull of the horizon beyond the trees, but it shamed me now. Nat must have thought of himself as my protector, as a kind of guardian for the kid in the woods, and it hurt to realize how much he cared about me, maybe because I'd stopped thinking I meant much to anyone. And it hurt to feel how much I cared about him. I barely knew him.

His truck faded out of sight, and with the evening chill slipping through my beard, I thought of what it would mean to lose the people I did know. A few years earlier, after my grandfather's funeral, Mom had told me something Poppa had said to her when his own father had died. He'd been knotting his tie in his bedroom before the funeral, and he hadn't heard her at the door. He was soft-spoken, my Poppa, a man with a natural kindness that generally sheltered him and everyone he loved. But there was something different, something bereft in his eyes. When Mom sat down next to him on the bed, he said, “Now I know what forever means.” Mom had teared up telling me the story, growing uncharacteristically quiet afterwards. We were driving from Newburgh back to Boston, and her attention didn't flick to something on the side of the road, or fall through a side door into some other story. The trees alongside the highway kept streaming by. There was only that fathomless void of what her father had felt losing his father, and of what she had felt losing hers. She apologized for crying. There was a tremendous loneliness in her, so beyond her daily concerns, which I'd never imagined she had. An otherness from everything else in the world. It wasn't that I'd still thought of her as an extension of me, the way so many children think of their mothers, but I'd assumed she still thought of me as an extension of her. Most of the time, for better or for worse, that's how she acted. But there was this other part. A part of her, because her father was waiting there, already tending towards the beyond. And I suppose it was the first time I knew, really knew, my mother would die. Her father had passed on that
forever
to her, and some day she would pass on that
forever
to me. She wouldn't be there to answer a call from the hospital, or be there for me not to call from the woods. That's what death was—no matter the love that had preceded it, there would be no answer, no possibility of an answer, forever.

As I continued walking between the tracks of Nat's truck,
the evening closing around me, I tried not to think of losing anyone in my family. I'd assumed the lives I'd left would stay the same: Mom and Dad and Matt would be just where I left them, their daily routines predictable almost to the half hour—the breakfast cereals, the commute, the evening news. But maybe it wouldn't work that way. Terrible things happened. Illnesses, accidents. And I felt irresponsible in a new way—not just because of some expected me I was abandoning but because of them, because of my responsibility to them as their son and brother. I couldn't bear the thought of Mom or Dad or Matt getting sick—especially while I was away, occupied with my own needs, so deeply unable to help. And I couldn't bear the thought of what it would mean to them if I disappeared.

Nat turned around down by the meadow, his headlights swinging back towards me through the trees. I needed to be doing something, to be fighting for something, but I didn't know for what. Or maybe I was fighting, but just too slowly.

As Nat passed, he didn't slow down, just raised one finger from the steering wheel. He hadn't lowered the plow.

There were footsteps coming down the corridor, a quick double knock, Milena peering in my room, clicking the door shut behind her, and then her hurrying across the tile floor to my mattress. She sat down beside me. She looked at me for what felt a very long time. “It is still you,” she said.

She ran a finger along my cheekbone, and when I kissed her, the book I'd been reading slipped to the floor. My hand was already deep in her hair, my other hand pulling her towards me.

“But I must take off my boots.”

She began to unlace them. Her shins were very white.

“You are smiling at me.”

“It doesn't quite seem real.”

She put my hand on her thigh. “But I am very real, no?”

The room was taking shape around us. The pile of books on the nightstand, the bedside lamp, the mattress covered by a thin blue blanket. No colorful world maps on the wall like in Juan Ignacio's room, just strips of paper with my own chicken-scratch handwriting taped above the desk, quotes stolen from Van Gogh, Chekhov, Silone—nearly all about love or art or both. So much of the room had been aspirational, something I didn't know if I could actually live by. But this was the third night Milena had come, and with her sitting there on the mattress beside me, everything felt possible.

“Class was OK?” I said.

“But do not talk now.”

Clothes tangled at our feet, our bodies clear of buttons and denim and silk, clear of lace and cotton and clasps, nothing between us now, finally just hips and smoothness and heat, the bedside lamp knocked off the bedside table, and her voice very close in my ear, “But we do not make love.”

In the rush, language just tiny houses and roads seen from far above, I understood her as talking not about sex but about love itself,
we do not make love
, as though she were saying love was something you couldn't make but could only find.

She'd said it every night, but now she said, “Please, do not listen to what I say,” and when we were still again, her head on my chest and the room still moving, she said, “But I do not sleep here every night.”

But every night she came. A few nights later, she sat facing away from me, unhooking her bra under the pajama top.

“Should I close my eyes?”

“Naya, but you must let me pretend it has only been a week.”

“A week.”

“Only a week since I come to you.”

“But it has only been a week.”

She draped her bra over her satchel, moved towards me. “This is why you must let me pretend.”

Neither one of us was so good at pretending. She began to bring me things. One night, she opened her satchel and fished out disks and a portable CD player. We started with
La Bohème.
We sat with the libretto in the candlelight, looking back and forth between the Italian, the German, and the English, then not looking at the words and only listening. A group of starving artists has no money and no heat in a garret in Paris; it's a frigid Christmas Eve. There's a knock at the door—the dreaded landlord. The friends go out; Rodolfo, the writer, stays behind to finish an article he's writing; there's a second knock, and just from his response, you can hear he's going to fall in love. The knock is the same, the
who is there?
is the same, but the music lifts. It's Mimi, who lives upstairs.

Milena clutched my arm as we listened. I'd always scoffed at opera by default—it was reserved for ironical scenes in movies when the guy crashes his car, ruins the girl's new dress, bungles everything. You weren't supposed to live with such grand passions. But with Milena warm beside me, with the Bologna evening breeze playing at the sheets, the music didn't feel out-sized. When Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimi—
Who am I? I'm a poet. And what do I do? I write. And how do I live? I live!—
there's no part of his life that isn't fuel for what he's singing. He's singing with his whole life, his whole past, his whole heart—all of it there in the fullness of his voice, the strings lifting with him, the feeling so much bigger than anything appropriate for meeting your upstairs neighbor, and yet entirely appropriate for the feeling of falling in love. He's giving himself to her fully, and in giving himself fully he becomes fully himself, in a way he hasn't been with his friends or his work. My skin turned electric and tears came to my eyes, and Milena made no move to wipe them away. As the aria ended, I felt as though she had returned me to
some unknown part of myself, to some interior country where everything I'd felt and longed for made sense. It was similar to what came over me when I read, but now the feeling was outside of me, too—it was vibrating off the walls, off the bed, and I wasn't alone with it.