The Rest is Silence (7 page)

“I've seen hundreds of tampon applicators, like pink snail shells, washed up on beaches where sewage has been pumped into the water. Nylon fishing rope, busted-up bleach jugs, coffee cup lids. You name it, the beaches are covered with it. Then there's the grocery bags flapping in trees, syringes in Tompkins Square Park. They say it's a social problem that recycling can solve. But that's not the right tack. It's a technical problem. No matter how much we recycle or landfill, burn or bury, more plastic will be made. So, instead we'll soon have microbes capable of digesting plastic. They'll eat their way through all that crap.” She patted Leroy on the knee. “Well, my inebriated friend, I'm going for a run in the park.”

“What about dinner?”

“I need to get back to the lab.”

“You just arrived last week. What could you have going so soon?”

She stood up and ran her hands down her legs to loosen her jeans where they had bunched up around her thighs. “I'll show you sometime.”

He put his cup on the floor.

“See you around,” she said and left the room.

6

Lily Lake Road

A tree crashing behind my tent wakes me from an apocalyptic dream. The wind has picked up again. There is no point in moving. I am already wet, and if a tree has my number, well, there must be worse ways to die than being crushed in a tent in the middle of a storm.

The hurricane hits hardest southeast of here, toward Halifax. When the air finally grows still that afternoon, I go for a walk to assess the damage. Spruce have toppled across the roads and taken power lines with them. Their root systems, planar from growing in the thin soil, offer themselves up like dinner plates to the sky. The power is out at Martin and Jenifer's. There is something comforting about seeing that Mother Nature is still in control, that our juggernaut can be stopped by a storm.

You'd think I'd hate camping by now. It seems like every time I get in a tent the weather turns sour.

It was August 1978, and I was a week shy of my third birthday when my father took us on a tour of New England. He told me the story of that trip enough times that it's my memory now, vivid as it could not possibly be given my age then, given that, according to him, I slept most of the time we were in the car.

He sat behind the steering wheel of his 1972 Buick LeSabre, a powder-blue convertible, blasting
Who's Next
from the eight-track tape player. He sang along to
Music from Big Pink
and
Blue
all the way across Massachusetts, with the top rolled down, the wind blowing my mother's hair back, and me lying on a blanket in the back seat. We drove through little towns in Vermont, past white clapboard houses and fire hydrants painted with stars and stripes, chipped now, to celebrate the Bicentennial. We pulled into the campground near Bennington in the dark.

Across a stream my parents found our site as raindrops began to splatter the windshield. It rained for a week. Dad took me exploring in the woods, the two of us coming back soaked despite our rain gear. I wasn't bothered by the rain, or so he told me. Mom stayed in the lean-to, reading, playing solitaire, and cooking. We went to bed as soon as the sky began to get darker after supper. On the fifth day Dad walked in the deluge to the canteen to buy the local paper. When he came back, Mom's good humour had evaporated. She wanted to go home.

Before they were done packing, a ranger came by our site to tell them that the stream by the gate had flooded its banks and the road. They weren't letting any vehicles cross it.

“We can't leave?” Mom's voice cracked.

He told them they hoped the water would recede soon and we'd be able to leave. When it didn't recede by the next day, the rangers brought in two girders to span the rushing flow, laying them on top of the road. Anyone leaving would have to drive carefully with the wheels of their car in the grooves of the girders. My parents packed up in a hurry and we joined the line of cars and tent-trailers waiting to cross the crude bridge. The rain had finally eased, but the stream continued to flow across the road, carrying branches, leaves, and plastic bags with it. I sat in my mother's lap. When it came our turn to go, Dad turned to her.

“Don't squeeze so tight.”

“Let me out,” my mother said.

“You think I'm going to drive across that with the two of you in the car?”

My mother huddled with me under her slicker, watching as Dad negotiated the girders and crawled across the bridge. He got out and hurried back to help us walk across. All I remember of that trip is clinging to her neck as the silver water rushed over the tops of the rusty girders and around her black rubber boots. And one more thing: I was happy in her arms.

When we got home she vowed she would never camp again.

I clean up the fallen branches on the paths and in the garden beds. When it gets sunny I hang my clothes and sleeping bag to dry.

As daunting as it can be to be caught in a storm, I find it thrilling. When it ends, the elation is unlike any feeling I know, and I have a renewed faith that something is looking after me. Somehow I know it won't be a storm that kills me.

The last few days have been gorgeous, and it's easy to forget the discomfort when it's sunny and warm. It's as if the summer sky's fire has licked the branches of the maples and birches, burning their leaves yellow, orange, red. The full moon last night brought the first fall frost. Today I am harvesting potatoes, carrots, and turnips. I loosen the soil along each row with a digging fork. Then I press my hands into the ground and pull them out. The potatoes, Century russets I planted in May, are my buried treasure. I lay the huge bakers in piles beside each row to dry in the sun. Once they are dry, I rub each potato between my palms to loosen the dirt. They fill a feed bag, more than fifty pounds. It turns out I have had less success with the carrots and turnips. The carrots are hairy and small, hardly worth saving. The turnips didn't like the rocky, shallow soil and are the size of malformed baseballs. I take them all next door and put them in Martin and Jen's root cellar anyway.

Deer season has opened and sporadic gunshots resound in the woods behind my tent. I walk along Lily Lake Road in the gloaming to find an apple for my dessert. There is an old wild tree growing in the ditch by the road, gnarled and twisty, but replete with large green apples. I shake a low branch and half a dozen apples thump to the ground around me. I stroll farther along to the stream that passes beneath the road, and there, not more than twenty feet into the woods in front of me, a coyote is huddled over a carcass. It crouches as if to pull another bite off the bones. Coyotes are usually shy, and they run if they see me. This one doesn't budge. It is the size of Lucy, with short grey-brown fur and a menacing gaze. Its hackles are raised as it stares back at me, and mine, if I can call them hackles, are raised too. I jog home along the dirt road, looking over my shoulder as I go.

I light a fire in the evening light and cook my dinner in the outdoor kitchen. I sit down to eat rice and beans when something comes out of the woods toward me. I stand, heart pounding. A silhouette is holding a rifle by its barrel. It walks into the clearing and is lit by the glow of flames.

“Shit, don't sneak up on me like that,” I say. Art rests his rifle against the big spruce to which my tent is tied. “You're lucky I don't have a gun of my own.”

“You should have one,” Art says, “living up here all by yourself.” He sits on a straw bale and stares into the light.

I tell him about the coyote. He nods toward the gun.

“Want me to go get it?”

“No. Any luck in the woods?”

“With this hip clicking I suspect they hear me coming from a mile away.”

“Tea?”

“You got anything stronger?”

I don't. When your father's an alcoholic you have to make a tough choice. You can either embrace the bottle or turn away. When your father is an alcoholic who kills himself, then you learn that if you want to survive there is really only one choice to make. After a couple of years, when it seemed like I might be willing to follow his lead, I made it. I have not had a drink since I left New York.

I walk beyond the light thrown by the fire into the shadows of the kitchen. My eyes adjust and I strike a match and turn on one of the gas burners. The propane hisses until I touch the match to it, when it pops blue into life. I move the full kettle on top of the flame and return to the fire.

“I've been thinking of you up here,” Art says, “by yourself. What you want is a good woman to keep you warm at night.”

“If you hadn't scared Lina off so fast.”

When the kettle begins its high-pitched whistle I rise to get it. I pull two Earl Grey bags from the jar on the stove and drop them into the teapot. Its ceramic spout is chipped. I'm seeing my life through Art's eyes now, imagining what he must think. There is food crusted on the stovetop, I make my meals standing under a spruce, and my dining-room furniture consists of two straw bales. I don't see other people making life hard for themselves on purpose. I pour the boiling water over the tea bags. We let the tea steep, and then I pour some into his cup.

“You got any milk?”

“I don't drink it.”

“I've been getting it fresh from Reagh's Jerseys since they stopped selling bags at the SaveEasy. It ain't convenient, but it tastes better, that's for sure.”

Harold Reagh lives along the Shore Road not far from Art. He's the one I bought lumber from to build my outhouse. It's his equipment — manure spreader, tractors, a hay wagon — that is responsible for churning up the dust in front of my property as it rattles over the potholes and gullies of Lily Lake Road. Sticks in the fire crackle and burn, sending up sparks into the night air.

“How'd Louise fare in the hurricane?”

He shakes himself like a bear. “What? Oh. She did O.K. Their power was out for a few days like the rest of us.” Sparks explode up with the flames. “Sorry, I'm not much company tonight. I've got memories rattling around in my head like change in a can.”

“Tell me about it. Makes it hard to fall asleep, huh?”

“A young guy like you can't have much to forget.” He pokes at the fire for a bit before he seems to realize something and stares at me. “What're you doing up here all alone, anyway?”

“I'm not alone. I've got the coyotes.”

“I see how much you like having them around.”

Then it strikes me that tonight his rifle is a prop. “Why'd you come here tonight?”

He stares into the flames, saying nothing. Then: “You told me you had a story for me.”

7

New York City

Benny woke at six and prepared to head into the dark for her morning run. She laced her shoes and pulled her sweatshirt over her head. Once she was on the sidewalk, the cool morning air felt fresh. Underneath that, however, was a warmth that told her she'd be pulling off the sweatshirt once she got to the park. It was a straight run west, then down one block to the entrance at 69th Street, at which point her pace became steady. There were no cars on the park road. Some of the men she passed checked her out. If they smiled, she smiled in return, content, from the limber way her legs felt, that it was a good day. She increased her pace. Today she could run forever.

Back at her apartment she showered, and she was heading for the lab by 8:30. Her calf muscles were sore in that way that reminded her of her run with each step. She walked down York Avenue to the entrance of the art deco building that housed both the hospital and her school. Her breath flowed without effort, like pulling a silk ribbon gently through the palm of your hand. Her mind was clear. Time stopped and she thought she might never again feel as healthy, fit, and complete as she did in that golden moment.

The glass doors at the entrance were emblazoned with the university's seal. She showed her ID and smiled at the security guards, two sullen men who had no doubt seen too many medical students with their white lab coats and their entitled airs, and refused, on principle or from ennui, to smile back. Her lab was on the third floor, and she took the stairs two at a time. The Department of Microbiology was adjacent to some pathology labs, and over the years the smell of formaldehyde had wafted throughout and soaked into the walls. She opened the doors to a corridor that was thirty feet long, lit with the sickly hue of fluorescent bulbs. On her left was a room housing caged mice. Beyond that was an equipment room filled with centrifuges the size of commercial washing machines, incubators, and scintillation counters. On the right was a lounge for the grad students and post-docs to eat lunch and drink coffee, as well as the offices belonging to the principal investigators of the two labs, Gabriel Nawthorn and Melvin Leach.

As Benny walked down the corridor she was met by a fellow grad student who also worked in Leach's lab, on his second pet project: the search for new antibiotics to fight staph infections. Jonathan Yovkov was an MD/PhD student, the son of a Bulgarian refugee who had slipped out from under the watchful eye of the USSR in 1971. Father and son had made their way to New York, leaving behind Jon's mother and two sisters. Jonathan was serious about science, insofar as it was his stepping-stone to getting rich. He shared Leach's assessment that, given the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of
Staphylococcus
, any new antibiotic would be exceptionably valuable to its discoverers. He and Leach had apprised what the other was worth to his career and interacted accordingly. What Leach offered was a lab that was creating commercial products and, with them, the opportunity to make a business out of science. Jon brought his intellect to the lab and, with it, a nascent business acumen. Jon's book outlining the process of successfully applying to medical school was in its third printing. The royalties from that book financed the bulk of his education. His publisher was asking him to write a second guide, this time for young investors.

Jon moved as though he had a private stash of time, gaining interest as he strolled from bench to desk to library. When Benny had first joined the lab, she assumed he lacked ambition. She was wrong. She had wanted to befriend him, knowing they might be working together for the next four or five years, but they kept grinding against each other. Instead of wearing down to something smooth, the edges of their relationship became sharp and treacherous. This morning he grinned when he saw Benny, as if he was telling himself a joke at her expense.