I stayed in that one spot for a stretch of time that seems endless now. I slept or passed out, because one moment it was dark and in the next the sun was beating down on me and mosquitoes were feasting on my flesh. Time had shuttered itself again.
Chapter 17
I
have come to believe that fate is a stronger science than medicine or anthropology. There are so many equations that must be solved before one can understand what fate brings.
There were fifteen thousand other women with me in college, each imbued with a sense of cause and hope that these years spent in university life would lead them to their destiny, that they would find a willful career, a livelihood, and perhaps someone who wanted to share in this life, someone who would complete the symmetry of their existence.
I am haunted by the false equations, by the fateful errors that have brought me back to this lake, beyond a life with the person I’d always loved, to where I am now, questioning my own mind and very best intentions.
Bruce Duper is crossing the lake in his father’s old Fischer, his arms waving wildly to attract my attention.
I am standing on the dock on the threshold of a life I’m not sure I’ve led, trying to piece together the traumas that have caused me to forget who I am and what I’ve done. A fish jumps and for a moment it seems suspended above the lake, its skin like quicksilver, and then it is gone. I think about Molly and see her as if she were a dream, gliding above the ground, her hair flowing behind her, hands outstretched. I think about how I used to pick her up in my arms and twirl her until she giggled and laughed and begged me to stop, covered my face in kisses. We were so in love then. She was light, peaceful. And then in the kitchen that night three weeks ago—like she’d lost all sense of space and was living in a dead world where there was no reason, no rules. But that was not the truth. The truth was that I’d killed her years before. That night in the kitchen, though, she looked worn down, as if the world had spun much too close to her again, and that, finally, she wanted to push the future forward and end this era of destruction and death earmarked by my arrival.
A Chinook wind has picked up from the north causing the lake to ripple with curled waves. The glare from the sun makes everything seem to be on fire.
When I close my eyes they burn orange, then blue, and Molly is rising from the flames, sailing towards me, Katrina in her arms.
I’ve never felt so alive.
Bruce shouts, honks the horn on his father’s boat. I lift a hand up to let him know that I see him, that I feel him, that he has entered my being like a virus, has infected my capacity to remember things as they actually occurred.
I STOOD UP
in the forest and got my bearings. The house was just over a hundred yards away. Either I had run in a circle or I had never left at all. From behind the trees, I could hear voices: a man and a woman.
I prowled the perimeter of my home like a panther, stooping through the trees, sniffing into the air, pausing at any noise. Stepping into the clearing behind the house, I coiled, prepared myself to attack, to launch myself toward whatever it was that I found. I would rip the world to shreds.
She was pacing in the backyard, walking in concentric circles, following the same pattern over and over again, her feet falling in her footsteps. I stood still and imagined myself an animal, camouflaged by my colors, hidden in plain sight.
“Come back inside,” he said.
I flinched when I heard his voice, soft and measured, comfortable in my home, in my bed with my wife.
“I don’t want to fight about this anymore,” Molly said, though she said it to herself.
“Molly,” he said, stepping out onto the porch. I wilted back into the trees. “I want to talk about putting an end to this.” He waved a handful of papers in the air. “We need to be rid of him, once and for all. Rid of these letters, these drawings, everything.”
“Don’t tell me what we need to do,” she said.
“When I get back home,” Bruce said, “I’m calling the sheriff, have him arrest Paul for stalking you. He’s a threat, you know. He’s not right in the head.”
Molly looked up from the ground then, and I think she may have sensed me, may have known I was standing only a few feet away. Though our worlds had come to a point that seemed hopeless, she could salvage a portion of herself. She stopped pacing and walked over to Bruce, standing on the porch.
“He’ll never be out of our lives,” she said. “You’ll have to accept that.” Molly slid an arm around Bruce’s neck and pulled him toward her. Yes, I thought, grab him by the throat and push him away.
No.
They kissed and he held her and she buried her face in his chest, and then he saw me. He called my name
and he chased after me. I could feel his footfalls as he lumbered toward me.
No.
I am remembering another day, another man.
Bruce’s boat is only twenty feet from the dock now. He is wearing a flannel shirt and jeans and his face is red from the wind whipping against it. “Don’t move, Paul. I want to talk to you.”
“I’m not mad at you,” I say.
He didn’t see me there in the woods. What he saw was Molly and he held her and they kissed, and maybe for Bruce life had finally begun. Maybe he’d found the one thing that he’d always wanted—a purpose to wake up each morning, knowing there was another person, another life that depended on him.
I thought that I could never unsee this. I would never wake up and not know that I’d lived this moment. I wished then that I were just an animal, that I could sniff the scent of Bruce and Molly, could run my paw over the matted earth below me, leaving a mark for them to know that I was close, that I could seize upon them if they came too near, and then simply leave without any sense of sovereignty. And I think I even prayed for a moment, which I never do, and asked God to save me, to make me invisible, to let me go on living in some other form.
He lifted her into his arms, and I slouched back another ten yards into the forest.
“I love you,” he said.
Twenty yards.
“I’ll do anything to keep you,” he said. “You know that.”
Thirty yards.
“I want him gone,” he said. “I want you to cut him out forever.”
Fifty yards, and I’m sprinting away from this vision, away from this truth, jagged branches stabbing at my face, my ears, my arms, and I’m running for my life, and I’m running with Katrina again, back through the woods, back through time, back to where this all started. I’m holding Katrina in my arms and Sheriff Drew is behind me.
“It’s gonna be all right, Paul,” he said. “You couldn’t save her.”
“I have time,” I said. “I can put her back.”
“She was sick,” he said. “I’m real sorry, son, but she’s dead. She’s dead and you can’t bring her back.”
“What do you know about what I can do?”
“You’re not thinking right,” he said. “Your daughter should have been in the hospital. I know that. I know that. Now c’mon, stop running. I’m an old man.”
Sheriff Drew was smiling, I remember him smiling,
trying to calm me down. I remember looking down at Katrina and thinking that I was a murderer, that she could have been saved, and I deserved to die.
Jumping over fallen trees, stumbling over rocks, heading for the water, for right here, circling back around Sheriff Drew. “Don’t,” he shouted. Diving into the water with Katrina in my arms, going back to where it all started, back to the bottom of the lake, back to the beginning, giving myself back to earth, starting again, all over, never thinking about life without her and Molly, knowing we’d all be together this way forever, for a life without words, and illness, and abortions and tumors. Together.
BRUCE DUPER STEPS
onto the dock and I am reminded that it took us millions of years to learn how to lie, that words have come a long way from the caves of Taung, the deep fissures of Sterkfontein, and the open plateaus of Tanzania.
“You took my boat,” he says.
“I’m sorry about that,” I say. “I needed to come back.”
Bruce sniffles once and then stretches his arms out, like we are meeting casually on a city street after a long day of work. “I called the sheriff,” he says.
“Good,” I say.
“How do these things happen?” he asks. “How do people forget what they’ve done?”
“It’s an illness,” I say. “Did Molly tell you about it?”
“I read some of your letters.” Bruce says. “I won’t lie. She filled me in on the important things, matters of safety and such.”
The real danger now is fear. I believe in science, in formulas, in the delineation of man and beast. I understand the process by which I was created, by which man went from a single cell to this creature I see reflected back to me from the water beside me. I have lived my life with the understanding that it was the only life I would get. Now, today, this very moment, I think about my children, about my wife, about my mom and dad, and I think about Ginny and Leo, and about Bruce Duper standing in front of me here—the people who have loved me, have known parts of me intimately—and I think it is plausible that all my science is wrong. I’ve made a tragic mistake believing I was put on this earth to understand man.
I’ve never believed in the Bible or in the Koran or the Torah, but I still think that I can be saved. There is a power in me that says I am my own god, my own dominion, and that only I can determine what comes after all of this has turned to vapor.
“You were there,” I say. “I saw you holding her.”
“And then what happened?”
“And then,” I begin to say, but there is nothing, no words, only a sense of motion: running through the woods, away from the house and then, somehow, back in Los Angeles, in my apartment, grading papers, calling Ginny, living, breathing, taking a phone call that says my wife is missing, a blank spot in time.
“I found your footprints in the dirt,” Bruce says.
“I’d been there,” I say. “For the anniversary. I’d come up to commemorate Katrina. You showed up drunk and I left.”
“I didn’t see you,” he says.
No, I think, you couldn’t have. I’ve been invisible my entire life. A siren rings out and both of us turn to look. Cutting across the water is a boat with a twirling blue light. It is more than half a mile away, near the center of the lake, and though I can’t see any people aboard, I know who is coming. I look up into the sky and mark the time. It is not yet noon.
“I was hiding,” I say.
The siren grows louder. I break it down by pitch, by tone, until it is nothing but a buzz, a jumble of consonants, and I think that everything falls apart for a reason. There is no final conclusion to life, nothing to sum up the quality of existence. I wondered for a long time after Katrina died if I would ever see the world as
my father once had, rife with chance and hope. I would never get used to parting with things, never get used to saying that I once had a daughter, never get used to feeling like my head was full of soot and that everything had burned around me. In parts of my mind it is obvious to me that the world has never changed, that things have stayed the same, frozen in place for me, frozen in this kind of madness that makes me believe I am a monster, and have done things normal people would shudder at.
The lives that were extinguished around me did not just peter out as one might expect. They smoldered inside me, flared up time and again, searing the terrain.
My body feels tight, like I’ve been squeezed into a tiny box, and that my ribs will splinter from my chest if I breathe too deeply. I close my eyes and concentrate on being small, on shrinking down to the head of a pin, on making this entire world a white dot.
“Paul,” Bruce says, “I want you to calm down.”
“I’m fine,” I say, because I can now remember waking up in my car, my body cramped with hunger and thirst, only to find myself beneath a tree in a gas station parking lot in Sacramento, hundreds of miles away from Granite Lake.
Think
, Molly says in my mind.
Remember
.
Sweet angel, I think. What have I done to you?
I am right here
, she says.
I have always been right here
.
I am a meticulous man. I am bound by theories, by carbon, by givens and proofs. Molly still exists for me, though, today, in a form other than the physical. It is almost everything I need, this sense that she is beside me here on the dock, guiding me through the morass of my memory, stepping me over the land mines.
I walked in a fugue, the world clicking past me. I stepped into the gas station’s restroom and found myself face to face with a monster; I was cut just below my left eye, a deep gash that spilled blood down the length of my cheek and then down my neck before finally drying along the line of my clavicle. My thumbnails were ripped down to the very quick in jagged cords, as if they’d been pried out of something solid, something moving, something resisting. My shirt was ripped along the chest and arms.
I’d never believed myself to be a violent person, had never thought that I was more than just a curse to the people who’d loved me, had never stared at myself in a mirror and wondered whose blood laved me.
I cleaned myself off in the bathroom, wadded up and threw away my bloodied shirt and then went back to my car and tried to piece together where I’d been and what I’d done. I listened to the messages on my
cell phone and heard only Ginny’s voice, telling me to hurry up with my papers so that we could go out and live a little.
It was a weekend. A Sunday. Yes. Why wasn’t I in Los Angeles? A rational person would have known that first thing, but I wasn’t rational, never had been. An accident? A fight? I concentrated on the pain in my body, tried to localize the suffering, tried to recall the exact events of the previous evening, but there was nothing, only spots of blackness and the stickiness on my hands.
“I remember now,” I say.
Bruce shakes his head once and then breathes in deeply. “Paul,” he says, “Molly never said anything about you coming up to visit her that weekend. Did she know you were coming?”
“Yes,” I say. “Of course she did. It was important!”