Wonderland (19 page)

When I wrest from Lila the job of telling our mother the news, it turns out to be a brief conversation. There is a silence, then my mother says, “I wish I could say I was surprised. Give Jenny and the kids my best.”

The red pants are still red far down in the veins of the corduroy, but the surface has long since gone past pink to an indeterminate roseate color, the whispered red of a fresco. The safety pins stuck through the spots where the buttons used to be are rusted. The name of the pants’ manufacturer on the little tab in the seat is worn away. In one of the pockets I find an irregular slug of metal, maybe an inch and a half long, twisted on one end, pitted. On the plane, I sit with the pants across my lap, touching and touching the bit of metal that he touched, that he saved. I run it around my fingers as if its odd shape will tell me the answer, tell me whom he loved and why. In life, he rarely said. The metal bit is cold. I press it between my palms, giving it the heat of my hands.

M
Y FATHER IS
nine. Because this is just about the middle of the twentieth century, his mother sends him out the back door on an April Saturday morning with a sandwich and an apple and tells him not to come back until suppertime. She has housework, other things to do. His older sisters are going to help her. Laura, for some nefarious reason, has already picked the bathroom. Jean, only a year older than he is, watches wistfully through the window as he goes. She waves.

My father goes up the slight incline of their street, through the little park, across the two-lane highway, and onto the broad path that winds up the mountain. He swings his slender arms, walks with a swing in his step as well, because of his curving foot. He is so happy to be going back to the mountain. He was sick with one thing or another nearly all winter. His father, the engineer who beat them all, taught him to draw, to give him something to do through the long afternoons of coughing and napping. My father drew the things he saw, and a number of things he didn’t. He often drew an ocean with an island in the middle of it, though he has never been to the ocean or to an island. Sometimes he drew a hammer or a machine gun. So, in his back pocket he carries a little sketchbook and a pencil. As the road takes him up, it reveals that the mountain is not what it seems from a distance. Walking up the mountain, which he has done many times, sometimes to bring his father his lunch if he’s on site that day, he no longer notices that the ground is very dry, with just a few scraggly weeds growing here and there; that a bulldozer sits halfway up the road; that the road itself is pitted, track-marked. A walkie-talkie lies abandoned on the ground. My father picks it up, turns it on. “Hello?” he says. “Ten-four.” But there is no answer. My father clips the walkie-talkie onto his belt and feels a slight, satisfying tug. A few yards farther on, there is a length of pipe. My father picks up the pipe and looks at the sun through it; maybe it will burn his eye. It doesn’t. He likes the tangy smell of the mountain, the mix of smoke, diesel fumes, earth, and sulfur. He likes the crusty, cracking surface of the mountain, the way it crunches under his feet, like ice. The mountain, he sees, has gotten bigger since the fall. There are more muddy pools of standing water, some of them stained yellow, others brownish black or iridescent green, like a melted lizard. The sky above him is open, blue. The breeze is gentle. He wishes he had a dog to go along with him: the dog would shake himself in the bright treelessness, shake and run off and run back without being called.

The air seems to expand as he ascends, to lift him with it. His chest puffs up. He feels a little sorry for Jean, cooped up at home, but she and Laura and Beth have secrets they don’t tell him, either. They don’t like the mountain the way he does. They are not the ones who bring their father his lunch. They say the mountain smells, that it’s dangerous there. They remind him that the mountain could collapse the way one did in the next town, swallowing five men and all their gear and a bulldozer. The mountain made five widows that day, buried five fathers. His sisters remind him that it is not really a mountain. He understands that it is all ugly and dangerous to them, but the mountain excites him. He would like to live on the mountain; he would like to sleep there and wake up there, and roast animals on sticks and eat them there. He feels the mountain in his heels, as if it is a gigantic magnet that can attract bone.

When I see my father like this, his small towheaded form with its syncopated walk heading determinedly up the road on the mountain that was not really a mountain, I want to gather him in my arms. I see him etched in green, his little green foot arcing blue with each step, the land in black and white, strewn with rubble, earthmovers, broken tools, lengths of wire, scored, crosshatched, incised, toxic, empty inside. In about twenty minutes, he is standing on the flat top of the mountain, looking straight down into the center of the earth.

Being there feels something like flying. He always, just a little bit, would like to jump. It also makes him want to pee. The pit opens about two feet from where he is standing, the gray walls plunging raggedly down to stripped earth. The pit is very, very big, as big as a lake: a lake of air. If my father leans over, he can just see the right side of the pit, or, turning his head, the left side. Cold air and a heady, metallic smell rush up from the vastness, enveloping him in strange. He loves the strange. It feels like a crown under which he is stumbling, drunk. Kicking a stone over the edge, he wants very much to touch the bottom of the pit. The stone, far away, goes
plink.
His father has told him many times, sternly, that if he were to fall into one of these open pits, which can appear unexpectedly as often as they are intentionally dug, it would be very difficult to get him out, that all the men with all their huge equipment might not be able to do it, that he might die down there, all alone. My father imagines, not without a certain amount of pleasure, that he could get lost at the bottom of the pit, that no one would hear his calls for help, and that the men would pile the mountain on top of him and its gargantuan force would crush him and he would become a fossil of smash.

He edges as closely as he dares to the lip of the pit. He leans over almost, almost to the tipping point. The cold, chemical air bathes his face, reddens the tips of his ears. He sees the toes of his sneakers, the gravelly edge of the pit, then the wild nothing. It darkens as a cloud passes overhead. My father holds his breath during the darkness, wondering if he will float up. The wild nothing dims. My father is exalted by it. His heart strains upward from its veins. He tips one finger into the vast air, begins to go over, then quickly clenches his fist, swings his arm out of gravity’s reach, and falls backward onto his ass in the dirt. The cloud passes. The wild nothing brightens.

He sits up, eats his sandwich and his apple, then hunches over his sketchbook with his pencil until the afternoon strikes its blue warning note. He is sneaker tips, a short-sleeved plaid shirt, a shock of white-blond hair, alone on the edge of a vast pit.

I think that it was on the way down from one of these expeditions that my father picked up this piece of metal, which probably fell from a truck or was lodged momentarily in a work-boot heel. I think he liked the twist, the pitting, and he put it in his pocket. He was a magpie all his life, endlessly picking up bits of whatever caught his eye, most of it junk, detritus, discards from much larger things.

“And then one morning”—this is how my father told the story, over dinner tables in London, in New York, in Spain, in Wellfleet—“one morning I woke up and the mountain was gone. Totally gone.” He’d slap the messy table with his palm, rattling the plates and glasses. “Two weeks later—mountain on the other side. Right?” Everyone always nodded, impressed. The kid from the mining town. The twisted foot, the ambition. The famous sawed-in-half train. “So I went up that one.”

And he did. But I think that, at night, as his sisters whispered and giggled in the other room, he could feel the force inside the vanished mountain still, its weird music, his absent deer pulling him close.

I
COULD FEEL
him pulling me close. From across the grimly modernist hotel room in Oslo, Simon’s gaze demanded, implored. He sat awkwardly at the Lucite hotel desk, in the casual clothes that never looked casual, the black turtleneck, the corduroy pants, the excellent shoes. He was picking through a gaily striped bag of expensive candy we had bought that day, in lieu of dinner. The others didn’t know quite what to make of Simon; in his creased slacks and slicked-back graying hair, he liked to eat candy for dinner, drink late, and pay for everyone, as if we were all on holiday. The guys in the band were polite. On the way to the airport to pick Simon up, however, our drummer, Jorge, at the wheel of the tour van, had muttered, “This wasn’t part of the deal.”

Simon unwrapped a piece of candy from its gold foil, looking miserable. “Try to understand. I have children.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.” I was angry, again. “I’ve never asked you to leave your family. I just think it’s impossible, and I’m totally frustrated, so let’s end it. There’s nothing we can be. Let’s end it here.”

“You want me to leave them. Admit it, Anna. That’s what this is about. I am doing everything I can, I have gone so much further than I should.” He put the unwrapped candy on the desk. He shook his head, staring into the Lucite desktop as if an answer might write itself across its surface. “Do you want me to leave them?”

I thought his distress was theatrical, hypocritical. His jawline, I could see, was starting to soften, ever so subtly, and I made myself focus on that, and on his stupid perfect shoes made out of ostrich skin. I pitied the ostrich and felt as angry with Simon as if he’d beaten it to death himself.

I said, “You’re so fucking self-protective. Has your family’s money done this to you, or is it the waiting for it when they die? What did you ever choose, truly choose, yourself? No, I’m not asking you to leave them, because I know you never would. You’ve said it many times yourself: you can’t. What else is there to say?”

“It is a war where I come from,” he said. “We did not travel the world making art for rich people. You Americans think everyone has so many choices, but that is an illusion.”

He steepled his fingers, leaned back, attempting to appear distant and superior, his hawk eyes very dark, score one for Simon, the existential refugee. But he couldn’t maintain it, the steeple he had built just as quickly came undone, the distance between us, between figure and ground, collapsed. I crossed the room.

Sand in my mouth as I whirled down the dunes. Sand in my ears, in my eyes. Wonderland. A riddle: the sea in which we never drown.

He pulled me close to him later, both of us stripped and spent in the cool hotel sheets. His breath smelled of licorice. I wrapped myself around him, inhaled the dear musk of him shamelessly. “Don’t go, Anna,” he said, his mouth in my hair. “Please don’t go.”

T
HE AIRPLANE IS
hushed, lights lowered for the night flight, for a few hours of sleep. I put the half-twisted slug of metal back in the pocket of the faded red pants, carefully fold the pants on my lap like a folded flag. I close the black-and-white composition book marked
Wonderland.
Who understands gravity, the pull between people? Not me. I am so tired. I miss him still, my tethered one, my fellow traveler. I have no idea how I am going to do what I have to do next. The plane rocks, flies on over the Atlantic with its heavy cargo of us inside. I wind the green and black scarf around my head—my mourning veil, as it has turned out—and lean back against the headrest. I shift around, trying to find a spot for my legs in the cramped space. I stick them at an angle out into the aisle, daring rudeness. Is this death, then, is this what remains—articles of faded clothing, a twist of metal, broken sleep, lines in a composition book, the muffled sound of an airplane’s engines. We salvage what we can, writing letters never sent.

AMOR.

B
Y THE TIME
we get to “Wonderland,” we’ve lost the audience completely. We’re playing a large, soullessly well-appointed club, all beige wood and sconces, that also serves food; long communal tables radiate out from the stage, which is round. It is my job to turn gracefully around and around without falling over while the Hamburgers at the spoke-like tables order, clatter, drink, and talk. The stage lighting is too white; my heels are too high; there are too many instruments and musicians on the small stage. For the Hamburg show we have a guest violin player, a smiley, bald, dark-skinned guy with patches of vitiligo who doesn’t speak English and pays no attention to our cues to him to change tempo. I am in constant danger of tripping over the many cables crisscrossing the stage. I try to remember to pick up my feet, like a horse doing dressage, but whenever I do this, I drop a line of the song. I’m having trouble remembering my own lyrics. My perfectly reasonable explanation is that I landed back in Berlin yesterday morning and then took a train, alone, up here. (Why are we going north again? Note to self: ask Boone about all the zigzagging and backtracking.) Technically, I haven’t missed any of the tour time, no dates have been canceled, but I’ve come unstitched from the rhythm somehow and I can’t find my way back in. Worse, I’m finding it hard to care. I keep my phone on all the time now, as if my father is going to call from heaven.

Zach, his bass clasped to himself, keeps darting little “get it together” glances my way. He’s been in a notably sullen mood since I got back, as if I deserted them rather than went home to bury my father. He and Alicia studiously avoid each other, keeping as far apart as they can on the small, circular stage. Zach plays faster and harder, trying to push me along, but I don’t agree to be pushed. His pushing further throws off Tom and Alicia, whose brown roots are coming in. We’ll have to get her resilvered, where do we do that? There are faint smudges of fatigue under her eyes, there’s a run in her lavender stockings; she’s looking thin. She bends to her cello, stumbling over Zach’s ever-increasing acceleration, shuttering her large, glittering eyelids, presumably so she can’t see the audience drinking, eating, talking, and generally treating us like mood music. They don’t care about the reindeer, they refuse to cross the atonal bridge, they are not at all captivated by the questions without answers. They got impatient somewhere around “Five Strings,” and now they’re in full-on, passive revolt. They prefer their dinners. Ironically, this is the warmest place we’ve played—my fingers are warm, the tip of my nose is warm, my throat is open and strong. I could sing for hours more, except for the fact that the monitors are making me sound awful, and except for the fact that the audience clearly can’t wait for us to finish the last song so that they can go home and have the fuck they’ve bought and paid for with their rather high minimums, and except for the fact that I’m having a hard time caring. I am an absurdity, if not something worse. The smiley, bald, patchy-skinned violinist bows on, elbow high, oblivious to the rest of us.