The Point of Vanishing (7 page)

And so I jumped.

The news from breakfast wasn't good. In the cupboard above the stove, there were two more packages of Ramen noodles, one package of spaghetti, but no sauce, no cereal, no bread, no peanut butter. In the refrigerator, no milk—just the crusty dregs of some blackberry jam and Lev's sad yellow box of baking soda. I could go a few more days, maybe even a week. I could rifle through the dusty canned goods in the bomb shelter. But sooner rather than later I needed to get to town. I needed to get food.

The snow was only about a foot deep, but drifts had formed alongside the open field, deep wind-carved cornices that looked like white-capping waves. This morning, even with the fire built up and throwing heat, the chill off the front door was shocking. Generally, as a point of pride, I avoided looking at the thermometer affixed to the side of the house, preferring to take in the weather for myself. Snow squeaking underfoot meant cold; instant nostril hair freezing meant very cold; and for more nuanced readings, there was the sharpness of the air on the exposed skin by my eyes and how far up into the woods my toes went numb. The thermometer's precision had come to seem superfluous—a stand-in for my own body, which was less finely calibrated than the thermometer's little black lines, but told me more: the direction of the wind, the smell of coming snow, the idiocy of not wearing wool socks. My body was probably even sending my brain news updates I didn't know it was receiving—teams of meteorologists and first responders shuttling around, all of it simply registering as an instinct to turn back towards the
house or to snowshoe deeper into the woods. But this morning, with my brain actually piping up and telling me I needed to get to town, I checked the circular thermometer. The long red arrow had keeled over and given up. The numbers to the right of zero stood aimless, overly ambitious, like the speedometer of a car up on blocks. Everything, including the very possibility of temperature, canceled on account of the cold.

After the first snow two weeks earlier, Nat had magically appeared in his truck, a battered yellow plow angled rakishly on the front. We hadn't spoken since his final wood delivery in October, and I was planning on calling him but didn't want to call until the road was truly impassable and the cupboard truly bare—not just because of my backwoodsman pride but also because of my backwoodsman lack of money. But with only about six inches on the ground, he'd come on his own. He'd rolled down his window, ashed his cigarette. “Long stretch coming in
heayah
from Mooreland Road.”

It was a very long stretch.

“I'll show with the snow. Not for a few inches like this, but when you need it.”

He'd looked straight ahead, the truck idling. I tried to think of what I could afford. I had just under $1,900 in my bank account. The wood was paid for, no expenses other than about a $150 a month for food, but Lev had mentioned the possibility of staying for another year.

Nat suggested $225 for the winter. I couldn't tell if he was lowballing, so the flatlander would do his negotiating for him, or if he was just being generous. Did I look that hard-up?

“Deal,” I said.

Since then, there'd been a few inches almost every night, and he hadn't come. But I didn't want to call. I didn't want to look helpless or desperate. I didn't want to look like some young idealist who had gotten himself in over his head. And, on a
deeper level, maybe I needed to believe that Nat really was looking out for me—and that if the snow warranted it, he would come.

But now I needed food, something with color. I'd dreamed of orange juice. The orange radiance of it, its impertinence against the dim, gray sky. Then just one swallow. And a circus starting up inside my face—the tartness a trapeze act in my cheeks, the sugar a strapping majorette prancing in my throat.

So I trudged up to the car. The steering wheel was bone-cold through my gloves. I let the engine run for a good fifteen minutes, but the car still felt like it was a part of the snow and shouldn't be disturbed. Eventually, I downshifted into the lowest gear and rolled towards the open field. Alongside the apple trees, there were no drifts, just a silent whiteness gliding beneath the car. The motion felt so smooth, an entirely new mode of transport. The first challenge was the sudden rise, at the curve before the road straightened out alongside the field. Spindrift was blowing in sheets off the top of what looked to be a three-foot drift. I hit the gas. My little white Honda acted like a motorboat, the undercarriage bouncing off the snow, white plumes spraying to the side, the car rocking and pulsing, snow flashing up over the windshield. My foot held steady. I couldn't see, but the car was fighting for momentum, the steering wheel resisting my hands, the car angling towards the trees. I let up on the gas, and the car lost traction, juddering to a stop. The thick snowy branches hung over the hood, as though beckoning. The quiet held the car like a glove. My stomach growled and I thought of the empty refrigerator, how hungry I would be. I shifted into reverse and the wheels spun. The sound was terrible—no better than a toy car with its wheels in the air. I got out with the shovel. Good Lord, it was cold! The air felt like a thin layer of ice cracking and spiderwebbing around my face. I shoveled until my hands were numb. Got back in the car, hit the gas.
Stuck again. Reverse ten yards. Hit the gas, stuck again. I felt like an old-style football team: three yards and cloud of dust, only there was more snot running out of my nose.

There was just too much snow. And no getting out.

Two days later, Nat came. As I trudged down past the buried stone wall and into the meadow at the end of my morning walk, I could hear a truck in the distance. It was a bright, cloudless day, and with no leaves in the trees the engine sound seemed to be coming from all directions at once. I'd taken another inventory of the cupboards and had been limiting myself to two meals a day. Breakfast that morning had been some cooked pasta with the old blackberry jam. If two more days passed, I'd told myself, I would give in and call.

I leaned against my poles, listened, and as the picture from my ears filled into the shape of Nat's truck, with a real yellow plow and the real Nat behind the wheel, I felt a rush of gratitude so deep it shamed me. Nothing came out of my mouth, but my body felt like it was emitting a sound as I stood there—like music was broadcasting from inside me out into the winter air. It was too intense. I didn't want to need anyone this badly. I hadn't felt particularly lonely before hearing his engine, but it disturbed me how happy I was to hear him—not just to know the road would be open but to know he hadn't forgotten me. I
existed
for him. This house in the woods, with me inside it,
existed.
I didn't like thinking about my parents thinking about me, worrying about my sanity, or even about Ray imagining me like some modern Thoreau, living deliberately beneath the pines, or about Andrew calling me a woodsman Bob Dylan—
how does it feel
,
to be on your own
,
with no direction home
—because those conceptions of me, however generous, didn't really match up with how I felt. But for Nat to remember me was reassuring. His conception of me, whatever it was, didn't start with my old life.

As I snowshoed through the meadow towards the road, he
raised one finger from his steering wheel in salute, his cigarette dangling from his mouth. I wanted to say hello, to talk about the weather, to talk about anything, to bring him his money. But he ignored me, the truck shunting forward and back, tires spinning and then catching, the plow battering the soft snow into solid banks. There was music playing from his radio—something country, something with strings. To get his attention required yelling, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. My voice had been dormant for too long. Sometimes at dinner, just opening my mouth for the first spoonful of soup, my jaw would ache from disuse. And the quiet around me was too large; too much would fall clattering around me if it shattered. So I started towards him on my snowshoes, sliding down the snowbank by my car. But he didn't see me. When he did, and I raised my hand, he just raised one finger again, and the truck sped out of the meadow, little chains of snow spitting up from the back tires as he went.

The road was clear now. The track led all the way to the grade that led down to the house. I should have been relieved, should have been rejoicing, but as my snowshoes clomped onto the hard empty road, I had the strangest feeling. A physical disappointment, an awful lightness in my hands and feet. Unformed words clustered in my throat—they had no reason to take shape now. They were stillborn, caught in the long delivery between me and the outside world. I could feel them slowly sinking back down into the depths. The most painful part wasn't the words themselves but all that they were swimming through—that distance between my silence and how it might feel to talk to another person. I'd had no idea the distance had grown so large.

After the accident, perhaps on the advice of her doctor friends, Mom had suggested I see a therapist. Every month or so, she'd bring it up again on the phone, and I'd tell her there was no
need, perhaps
she
should see a therapist, everything was fine. But fall of senior year, with everyone planning for the future, I wondered if she hadn't been on to something.

Preparations were being made. Futures were being plotted. It was only November, but you couldn't walk into Adams House and not feel it. Every meal had the diffuse buzz of Grand Central Station—harried seniors checking for posted maps, for spinning placards, for the time on some enormous clock. Hardly a day passed that someone didn't interrupt a conversation about cute sophomore girls or Karl Marx to hurry off from breakfast in a blue suit, hair combed, a leather folder at his side. Representatives from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and McKinsey were on campus to recruit. Everyone was herding towards the future. Even the frighteningly studious kids who seemed to come from nowhere, who emerged from the Widener stacks maybe once a semester for hygiene purposes only, were suddenly passing through the dining hall in high heels and makeup, with new blouses and haircuts, their backpacks on over their new outfits, little corporate butterflies not quite emerged from the chrysalis.

My friends were staying relatively calm. Ray and Alexis grudgingly filled out med school applications despite respective fantasies of writing and filmmaking. Meanwhile, Andrew was training for the minor leagues of pro tennis, standing shirtless in front of our window at night, studying his reflection in the darkened glass as he mimed service returns. He'd practice his hip turn, practice it again. His image hovered in the leaves of the oak outside the window, as he hit imaginary ball after imaginary ball into the unknown.

We were all trying to do the same in our minds—imagining possible futures, trying to glimpse how we might look in one scenario or another. This was 1994. America looked to be entering a golden age, one even more golden because it was ready to
include us—no more Cold War, democracy victorious, organizations like Teach For America and AmeriCorps popping up to address social issues, rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and U2 raising millions of dollars for AIDS and world hunger. The Internet existed but none of us had e-mail, and the dot-com boom, with its gold-rush euphoria that money was everywhere to be made, was still a few years away. To be twenty at Harvard was to inhabit a world that was shiny and bright and moral—a world that might still be corrected. To be called an idealist was still high praise.

And yet, I had no idea how to imagine myself as a part of that world. Not even with Ray and Alexis's ambivalence, which seemed a sign of character. Before the accident, my default future was law school with a grudge, with a slim book of poetry hidden in my backpack. But now that track no longer seemed possible. Not because my grades had slipped, or because anything had changed outwardly, but because I knew it would be a lie.

So one blustery November afternoon, I went to see my advisor, Professor Coles. I'd liked him from the very first day in lecture, when he'd shuffled onstage in a gray moth-eaten wool sweater, his gray bushy hair looking moth eaten as well. Initially, I'd thought he was a homeless man who'd wandered into Sanders Theater in the midst of a delusion, his voice plaintive, filled with unease and conviction. But week after week, as though he'd rolled out of bed in the middle of the night and all 650 students were at his kitchen table, he talked about novels and about questions that gave him “pause.” Intelligence, he seemed to be saying, was a fairly worthless faculty, even a shortcoming, unless it was employed in the service of leading a decent life.

His office was in Adams House, on the other side of the dining hall, in what had been FDR's dorm room. The bathroom still had a toilet with a pull chain and claw-foot tub, but Coles's
updates were minor, as though he liked being partially an inhabitant of the past. Two small couches faced each other, with a Hopper print on one wall, a print of Robert Kennedy walking a dirt road in Wyoming on the other. No photographs of Coles with “big shots,” as he called them, though he knew, I'd later learn, nearly every writer he mentioned in lecture, and he himself had been on the cover of
Time
magazine, his photo above the impossibly researched caption “America's top psychiatrist.”

I settled into his white canvas couch, nervous to give up my role as star student, and more nervous to try on the role of patient.
Would he ask me to lie down? Should I tell him my dreams?
It wasn't appropriate, coming to him this way, but my pride didn't know what else to try. Besides, it seemed it would be fairly easy to steer the conversation away from my thesis on Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man
and towards my own growing sense of invisibility, or heightened vision, or whatever it was. But, sinking into his couch, I didn't know how to start talking about the mornings on my bed, looking down onto Plympton Street and watching the rush up to class, how beneath my classmates moving like schools of fish, there seemed to be tides, sweeping them not just up to class but towards the future in particular directions, directions that didn't have to do with the moon or the tides but with societal forces that didn't make much sense. And I didn't know how to tell him that at night in the dining hall, the autumn air scraping at the high windows, I'd often find myself drifting on the background sound of conversation, as though the background had become part of the foreground, as though the far away had become near.