The Point of Vanishing (18 page)

The temperature dropped below freezing, but my sleeping bag worked fine, and at daybreak, as always, I rose and went for a walk. The grass was hoary with frost, the street was silent, the morning air bracing. There was the tight, vinegary scent of frozen crab apples, mixed with the scents of the dead leaves. The sky was beginning to lighten. Not a quarter mile away, I came to the Desmond Estate, which had been converted into a campus for a local college. Its broad lawns displayed massive, gnarled trees with black name tags. I ignored the paved paths and drifted across the grass, the sides of my boots darkening with the melting frost. The steel-gray river, which I'd glimpsed from the brow of a hill, was now a single glinting snake in the morning sun. The morning was beautiful. The whole Hudson River Valley was beautiful. I thought of the last page of
The Great Gatsby
, the green land flowering before the Dutch sailors' eyes, that last moment, Fitzgerald wrote, when man was face to face with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder. I thought of Dirk's inadvertent similarity to Gatsby—the unused rooms of his house, the twenty-two televisions, which were maybe the convenient, modern stand-in for glittering parties, and I wondered what part of the past he was trying to recapture. I wondered if it was similar to the feeling of community my parents were trying to recapture every time they drove through Newburgh. And I wondered if it was similar to what I was trying to recapture by living in the woods, just in my own solitary way.

When I came out of the estate, I followed the low stone wall beside the road. A large bird, a hawk of some kind, perched atop a dead tree. The tree had been hit by lightning, the top of it just a blackened shard, a spire towards the sky. Gazing up at the hawk, I heard a car approaching from behind me. I didn't turn. Then a car door groaned open, closed, and there were slow footsteps.
Not again.
I turned to see a police officer, one hand resting on his billy club.

“How we doing this morning?”

“OK.”

“We have a problem?”

I realized I wasn't wearing any pants. Just my wool watchman's cap, a heavy sweater, and long underwear bottoms. “No problems, sir.”

“We do know that's private property.” He gestured with his chin toward the Desmond Estate.

“I won't steal it.”

His hand tightened once around his club, released. This was conspicuously not his first day on the job. The composed skepticism of his eyes was alarming, as though the world had been arranged to deceive him. He liked the job, but he didn't like doing it—he didn't like doing it because of people like me.

Just then, a roar spread into the leaves from the far side of the hill, and another police car, blue lights flashing, topped the rise. I thought it might hit me. The siren seemed to scream from inside my face. The car skidded, spraying loose gravel into the stone wall, and a short, broad-shouldered officer emerged. He moved slowly, his hips swaying with his heavy belt.

“Problem here?”

“No, sir.”

“What's your business?” He sounded as though he were a secretary for the day. He had a strikingly handsome face, but given his height, it only diminished his authority.

“Just going for a morning walk,” I said. “It's very pretty here.”

“It's very pretty here.” He pulled down his mouth. “He says it's pretty. Identification.”

“Sir?”

“Do you have identification? Driver's license? Green card?”

Green card.
I thought of the trees. I thought of Gatsby and the green breast of land. “My license is in my tent.”

“And where is your
tent 
” the first cop said, the word dirty in his mouth, as though waiting back in this tent would be five filthy children and a woman who looked at me with hatred in her eyes.

“Sir?”

“Your tent. With your ID. Where is it?”

My legs suddenly felt naked. I took a shaky breath and tried to translate myself into terms they might understand. I told them my aunt and uncle lived on Bryant Drive, just up the road. I told them my other uncle lived across town. I told them my parents had grown up here, gone to Newburgh Free Academy. I told them my grandfather had built his own house on North Street. I told them we came to Newburgh every Thanksgiving, and that's why I was here. They didn't seem quite ready to believe me, but as I was finishing, my uncle Don stopped at the stop sign at the end of Bryant Drive in his Isuzu Trooper.

He rolled down his window. “Howie, that you?”

“Everything's fine,” I called.

“Are you sure?”

“All set.”

“Officers?” The sun winked off the gold chain around his neck. Even at a distance, he looked like a matinee idol from the fifties, surprised by cops who weren't played by fellow actors.

“All set here. Just having a chat.”

“He's a little different, my nephew.”

The short cop made a snorting sound, and after a moment Don drove off, headed into town. The day waited.

“We had a complaint,” the first cop said. “A woman in one of these houses. Called in a suspicious male.”

“Suspicious male?”

“Lady said you were walking real slow. Looking at things. She said you kept looking up at the sky. Thought you were probably on drugs. Made her nervous.”

“Neighborhood watch,” the short cop said. “Sorry about that.”

I didn't know what to say. Apparently, danger averted, they didn't know either. I wondered what would have happened if I'd been black, or if my uncle hadn't driven up, or if I'd wised off to them. I thought about the prison just on the other side of the Hudson, the electrified fences I saw out the car window every trip to Newburgh, and the enormous insane asylum on the east-bound side of the highway, and I wondered if I was admitted there, thrown behind those faceless windows, if I would ever manage to get out. It was strange to think my family's history had protected me. Strange to think family wasn't just a series of walls to keep you in one place, for better or for worse, but a way of keeping others out—a way of keeping them from fitting you into whatever narrative seemed closest at hand, whatever stereotype seemed most readily available.

The cops were waiting. I turned and pointed to the dead tree, to show them what I'd been looking at. I didn't expect them to fully understand, I wasn't going to try to explain, but I wanted to bridge the gap somehow, to make an effort at some kind of cross-cultural exchange. There was no rush now. We were outside. The morning was quiet.

They followed my finger. But there was nothing, just a dead tree. The hawk must have taken flight in the commotion. They didn't bother questioning me any further. I was harmless, not
worth the time. They walked back to their squad cars, armored themselves in the roar of the engines, and rolled back into the day.

Back in my tent in the backyard, I took my time getting dressed. The sunlight through the tent walls turned my arms and legs blue. Everything, including my thoughts, felt aquatic. Watery mirrors were everywhere. They were in the eyes of my family. In the suspicion of the neighbors. In the disdain of the police. I was a concern, a drifter, a threat. My belt was too tight. My hair was too wild. My beard was too bushy. I didn't fit in, which was exactly how I'd felt before moving to the woods, but now everyone could see it. Maybe it had been better to hide it. Or maybe it had been right to go to the woods, so I didn't have to.
What was so fucking strange about wanting to go for a walk in the morning
,
wanting to look at the trees? What was so fucking strange about wanting to be fully human?
I was furious. And I was hurt. And I wanted to go home—back to the woods.

To drive straight back to the woods, to have no other company stored up for the winter, felt dangerous. I wondered if I could trust myself, wondered how I'd been so wrong. No one, apart from the police officers, had looked deeply into my eyes. No one had even felt at ease in my presence, probably because I'd felt so uneasy myself. There'd been no conversation like the one with Ray, no seeing the chickadee movements behind anyone's words. And what I had seen had only confused me. The extra space around me, my expanded hearing and vision, had only made me more remote from my family rather than bringing me closer to them. If my visit had been a practice run, a preview of what my return from the woods would offer, then there was no reason to return.

From somewhere, hundreds of miles behind me, I heard Andrew. He'd always told me the last place I would feel comfortable was with my family.
That's the finals of Wimbledon
, he'd said after my return from Italy.
You need to start off with warm-up tournaments
,
with easier competition.
Nearly everything with Andrew was a sports metaphor, and he was nearly always right. I could feel his presence slowly filling the car—a distant caution, a warning not to keep driving. Despite myself, despite my backwoodsman pride, I knew I needed his help.

He'd left the pro tennis tour the previous summer, was living in Cambridge again, getting his master's at Harvard Divinity School. He'd played in the first round of Wimbledon, had some good wins, but mostly he'd been relegated to the satellite
and challenger tournaments, playing on broken seashells in Indonesia, or on rolled dung in South Africa, or waiting as a goat crossed his court in India. He'd sent me a few long, mostly philosophical, letters, c/o General Delivery, West Glover, Vermont. He quoted Rumi, Plato, Zen philosophers—anything he could get his hands on to talk about jumping levels, letting go and playing freely under pressure, letting the game move through him. Then, on a piece of sky-blue stationery sent from the Philippines, he'd written this:

There was nowhere for me to write him back, but that letter kept me feeling like he was my closest friend in the world. He was also searching—searching for something he couldn't quite name.

At the split between 91 North and 84 East, I headed east, which would lead to the Mass. Pike and to Cambridge. Andrew had suggested I stop by on my return north, and though I'd put him off, I needed to take the chance. I needed to know I wasn't an alien everywhere. I needed to feel the possibility some life outside the woods still existed for me. I needed to know the river could still be crossed.

It was night when I came into Boston. The green signs for Framingham and Natick and Weston floated past, the glowing white words familiar and strange, carrying with them an unwritten guidebook about what kind of person lived where, a kind of map of assumptions that no longer seemed true, as they'd been predicated on my being a kid from Brookline, on knowing where I fit in and where I didn't. The eastern sky was vaguely dark, illumined by a jaundiced glow. Then it seemed the stars had fallen from the sky. They were so close. It was impossible to find Orion or the Dipper or the North Star, but somehow the stars grew larger as I drew near. After a slow, wondrous moment, I remembered what I was seeing, remembered
how
I was supposed to see: skyscrapers. Driving towards them was still gorgeous and strange, like approaching a dazzling hall of mirrors,
the well-lit pavement leading into their luminous heart as unlikely as the yellow brick road. All of this was built by people, planned by people, used by people: every overpass and support beam and off-ramp, every street sign and streetlight, every office window, every sidewalk, every billboard, every apartment building, every convenience store, fencepost, parking lot, restaurant, truck, license plate—everything, in every direction, a testament to people's ingenuity and industriousness, thousands and thousands of people's handiwork visible in every glance. The city was a temple with an alternate god. The city was a temple to people. The variety of trees and insects and animals, the variety that had emerged in the woods in concert with each other over millions of years, had been replaced by an alternate course in evolution. Everything here had been formed by one species, for one species. The city skyline looked dazzlingly complex, but really it was dazzlingly one-sided. What could be more extreme than living in a city? In comparison, living in the woods seemed conservative, in every sense of the word.

Cars kept passing me on either side. To try to keep my mind quiet and my eyes on the road, I focused on license plate numbers, a habit I'd developed as a boy to stave off boredom. But now I couldn't help noticing the model names above the taillights or on the doors as cars passed. Rabbit, Taurus, Jaguar. Ram, Impala, Cougar. Skylark, Topaz, Denali. Everything was supposedly here: a menagerie of animals from around the world, precious stones, even the Alaskan tundra.

The world is too much with us.

The line floated into my head with the sodium glow of the highway lights. I couldn't remember where it came from. But I knew the next line was something about the getting and spending—something about the pressures that kept us from paying attention to the natural world. It was such a bizarre question, of just where the world was. Maybe it wasn't in the city at all.
Maybe all these animals and all these stars were just hundreds of facsimiles that had been imported, replacements to help us forget the strange bargain we had made.

As I followed down the spiral exit for Cambridge, I remembered reading about pygmies in the Amazon who'd lived their whole lives in the rainforest, immersed in a leafy maze or in small clearings with the sky high above them, and when forced from their habitat, they had no vision for the middle distance. A horse across an open field became an insect; a boat far upstream couldn't possibly be large enough to carry people. They could only see, and could only think, in some overlapping combination of the celestial and the close at hand. They couldn't live in the comfortable middle.

I feared, as I crossed the bridge over the Charles, that my way of seeing had developed a similar gap. When it came to people, maybe I'd lost acuity for the middle ground of daily life. There was just a dull blind spot there—a phantom sense of loss, an echo of something I could no longer perceive.

Andrew's greeting was mercifully understated. He'd prepared a welcome offering, and wanted it to speak for itself. A bottle of Gatorade, toast with peanut butter and honey, a clean white towel for a shower. He seemed to know I needed time to sit still, to let the miles slow down below me, to take in where I was. He lived on the third floor, in a one-bedroom apartment on Cambridge Street, a few blocks from Harvard Square. The moldings and the hardwood floor were the same vintage as Adams House. The blue futon was the same, too. As was the scent of radiator, old books, and dried paint, but there was a trace of something new, maybe incense or the leather sandals, which he said he'd bought in Bombay. On his desk was an assortment of seashells, a harmonica, a photo of himself as a little boy with a tennis racket as big as he was, and the cover of
Leaves of Grass
in a picture
frame. Walt Whitman's bearded madman face peered out at the room like a relative.

He sat at his desk as I dressed after the shower. I'd never felt awkward changing in front of him, but now I angled myself away. My body felt too slight, like it didn't belong here, like the room and the city outside were too strong for it.

“‘
I came in from the wilderness
,
a creature void of form
,
come in she said
,
I'll give you shelter from the storm.
' Jesus. You listening to any Dylan up there?”

“Not really.”

“You should. ‘
How does it feel? To be on your own
,
no direction home
.' You know?”

I nodded.

“‘
Where have you been
,
my blue-eyed son 
'”

“You play the harmonica?”

He wheeled his chair over to the desk, picked up the harmonica, put it down. “No, but I want to. I'm going to learn.” He wheeled back over to the futon. “You are looking a little angular,” he said.

“No food at Thanksgiving.”

“Really? Hard times?”

“Matt counted more pies than people.”

He smiled. “How is the future senator?”

I said he seemed the same.

“And the rentals?”

“The rentals?”

“You know, the parentals, the parietals, the occipitals.”

It took me a long moment. This was how we used to talk. His last name was Rueb, and I'd called him Ruby, Rubicon, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, sometimes Measles, Mumps, Rubella. There was a terrible movie called
Howard the Duck
, and he'd called me Duck, Duck Soup, Duck Sauce.

“Hemispheric,” I said.

“They didn't give you a timeline, did they?”

“For what?”

“You know,” he said. “For coming back?”

The possibility hadn't occurred to me, and I didn't understand why it had occurred to him. I stared at him. He wheeled backwards. A seashell clattered to the floor. He leaned over, picked it up, held it in his hand. “I'm just surprised they didn't say something.”

“My grandmother's eighty-fifth is in March. They want me to go to a party in Florida. That's all they said.”

“Put on your party hat.”

I said nothing.

“That grandmother shit is serious, dude. You know how your mom gets.”

I asked him about the picture of Walt Whitman.

To my relief, he began talking about the books he read on tour, and about leaving the tour, and about his classes at the Div. School. The highway and the strangeness of the city were still vibrating below me. Sitting there on the blue futon felt similar to being at college, but it didn't feel similar. It felt more like I was eavesdropping on the conversation, like I couldn't afford the comfort of being there.

I slept on the futon but didn't sleep well. Lights kept banking on the ceiling, opening shifting panels of light and closing them, like multiple moons orbiting the room. A car alarm shrieked outside like a demented bird. Upstairs, someone dropped something heavy. There wasn't darkness. There wasn't quiet. I wondered how Andrew managed to sleep. I wondered how anyone managed to sleep. I wondered what it meant that my fears were the opposite of a child's. It was night, and I was afraid of the light, afraid of the noise.

That next morning was the hardest. We followed the brick sidewalks into Harvard Square. A few yellow maple leaves lingered on the boughs. It was football weather, the kind of morning I'd loved as a student: girls in sweaters, the air crisp but the sun warm in pockets, everything sharp, everything possible. Andrew had studying to catch up on in Lamont. It was my idea to walk into the Square with him—to use him as a kind of protective escort, a human shield.

The largest city I'd visited in Vermont was Newport. It had one main drag, with four or five traffic lights, a Wendy's, a supermarket, and a movie theater with two screens. I'd gone to the movies once, late during the previous winter, just to see people, even if they were only made of light. They were showing a sequel that looked very loud and a movie called
Castaway. At the edge of the world
, the poster said,
his journey begins.
Not much promise of conversation, but it seemed a possible clue, a mirror I might safely confront. It was afternoon, only three people in the darkened theater. Tom Hanks's character seemed familiar to me and yet very unfamiliar—his solitude on the island was so vocal, so visual, so outward. I wondered if I was strange not to have befriended inanimate objects, not to have pleaded with a volleyball, or, in my case, with the woodstove or the shovel. What was even stranger was how fluent he was. He hadn't lost language at all. And his return, the scene with the woman who had been his fiancee, didn't seem realistic either. He was too at ease. When she touched him on the arm in her kitchen, the touch shot up my own arm, and I didn't understand how he didn't melt into her, or push her away—something. I walked out of the theater into the early winter dusk, purple clouds above the brightly lit sign of the Wendy's, and I felt even lonelier than when I'd gone in, because my loneliness hadn't been on the screen.

But I was with Andrew now, it was a quiet Sunday morning, and the day breathed promise. I was ready to see Harvard Square, to see faces, maybe even more faces than I'd seen in the past year. As we passed Ellery Street, a young woman in shorts and sweatshirt popped out onto her front steps, an eager black lab beside her, tail slapping against her leg. She said good morning. Then she headed off on a jog, the dog trotting alongside, her blonde ponytail swinging back and forth, a happy metronome.