Look at me: (46 page)

Of course, most of his colleagues were incising Lake Michigan with powerboats or driving their children through the Grand Canyon or laying bricks around flower beds.… But there, an open door! A fellow summer straggler! Jim Rasmussen, reading at his desk and gently massaging his scalp. Moose lunged toward his colleague indiscriminately, singing “HEL-lo, Jim” from the doorway just one or two seconds ahead of the recollection that Rasmussen was his flagrant enemy—that he’d tried more than once to get Moose fired and referred to him as a “Looney Tune” in a recent faculty meeting. Rasmussen wheeled around with a frightened look. A mistake, a mistake. Moose saw the confusion in his colleague’s eyes.

“Moose,” Rasmussen muttered, suspicious of this uncharacteristic and unnecessary—indeed, interruptive—salutation. A mistake! But now, having clanged hello, Moose felt compelled to follow up with something more.
Speak
, he commanded himself as a purple heat filled his face. Talk about the weather or a sport or some departmental matter (what did people talk about?). “So, ah,” he finally said, “you reading anything good, there?”

Rasmussen squinted at him, awaiting the catch. Several agonizing moments passed, and finally he held up a book. An eighteenth-century man was Jim Rasmussen, and Moose braced himself for a monograph detailing the succession of Spanish kings, or a biography of Robespierre, a history of mining in England—prepared himself to respond with some query about the evolution of sight, about glass and its uses, but what Rasmussen brandished aloft was something Moose had trouble deciphering at first: an unauthorized biography of Jennifer Lopez.

“Uh,” said Moose, uncertain who she was, but mortified for Rasmussen purely on the basis of her picture.

“I’m crazy about her,” Rasmussen said defiantly, slapping the embarrassment right back at Moose, refusing to accept it. He wouldn’t pay—Moose would pay. “Just crazy about her.”

“Huh,” Moose said weakly.

“Can’t get enough.”

“I’ll, ah, let you get on with it, then.”

“Nice to see you, Moose,” Rasmussen said, baring teeth, and Moose sprang away from the door and fled the debacle, unsure how extensive a debacle it really was, fighting a sense that with this bungled effort at fraternity, he had at last clinched his academic ruin.

Silence fell in around him like clods of earth as he descended the steps to his office. Turning the key, Moose smiled, demonstrating to someone (who?) that all was well, that everything was under control, that really it was a good thing the campus was so empty because he had an awful lot of work to do, and for that reason it was probably all for the best that—

But he wasn’t going to think about Charlotte. Moose had made that promise to himself a week ago, when it happened, and since then had managed (mostly) to banish his niece from his mind. He hadn’t even told his wife—hadn’t mentioned Charlotte’s name even once—though Priscilla had asked him repeatedly what was wrong.

Hands trembling from the Rasmussen imbroglio, Moose collapsed into his chair and set down his mail, a slender quantity bereft of the creamy professional envelopes he craved. He sorted through it nevertheless, purely for something to do on this desultory day. And then he stopped. A change had occurred in the atmosphere around him, a change as simple yet dramatic as a cloud occluding bright sunlight, with the crucial distinction that there had been no sun (metaphorically speaking) in Moose’s life for several days. No, he was too little in the sun for that metaphor to serve (not that any did), so Moose excluded sunlight from his figuration of the shift of mood in his office, a shift like those icy currents he’d encountered on occasion while swimming in warm water: a tentacle of cold that brought with it an intimation of the ocean’s vastness, its depths, its darkness, the unfathomable creatures abiding in its nether reaches.

Moose rose from his chair, went to the window and lifted the shade. In nosed a few streaks of sunlight. He gazed at the path, half hoping that someone would walk along it and lift his faltering spirits—but who would come? Who but more Rasmussens, an infinitude of Rasmussens bent on thwarting him?

But he wasn’t going to think this way! Moose went to his file cabinet, opened it with his key and looked down at the musty mass of his manuscript—the history of Rockford, Illinois, which so often had the power to cheer him. He lifted a sheaf of pages and held them in his hands, straining to mobilize the worn and rusty machinery of his optimism. Perhaps the problem was that he didn’t get out enough. He should do as his father had done, drive into Chicago once a month or take the train (except there was no more train), have a swim and lunch at the University Club among polished wood and expensive tailoring, raspberries for dessert, served over ice and topped with a clump of whipped cream. Chicago.

Chicago!

The consolidation of these signals and notions into a plan was a physically galvanizing event; Moose replaced his manuscript with great care, locked the drawer, then strode from his office without pause, kicking shut the door, ascended the stairs and left Meeker Hall without so much as a glance in the direction of Rasmussen’s office. Then he huffed his way from the deserted college campus along serpentine paths drenched in the surreal rhythms of locusts.

One-half mile later, awash in sweat, he found his station wagon parked in its designated spot outside his apartment at Versailles. For perhaps fifteen seconds, he contemplated going indoors and leaving a note for Priscilla, who was at the hospital, explaining his unscheduled departure for Chicago. But no. That would impede his present momentum, and momentum was so hard to sustain. Go, he thought. Go! He had his wallet and his Visa card—hit the road, Jack! The very idea of departure made him giddy, and Moose struggled to calm himself, to anchor his mood like someone trying to peg down an unruly tent in a very strong wind (how he loathed metaphors, their coupling of unlike things into grotesques, like minotaurs), but the tent was too big, the wind too strong—his good mood continued to billow and flap untethered as he pulled out of Versailles with a whoop, punching the radio dial until he found an oldies station, music from the seventies, hey this was great; Moose sang along with “Hotel California” as he careened down East State in his low-slung station wagon, finessing his way around Lincoln Town Cars driven by white-haired ladies whose faces were only inches from the windshield. Eventually he circled onto the interstate. Ah, what happiness came of sheer motion, just letting it rip. No wonder the highway was an American icon for freedom! To hell with pills, Moose thought. Motion therapy—why not?
Mutatio loci!
And it wasn’t just that a voyage such as this reminded him of the blind, easy days before his transformations—it was simply that moving felt good.

The phrase broke across Moose profoundly,
moving feels good
, a phrase that was not only inarguably true (proof being his present fizzing state of near hilarity), but (better yet) whose truth was blessedly independent of the minotaur of metaphor. Moose scrabbled in the glove compartment for a notebook in which to write—someone was honking, oh, shit, he’d swerved out of his lane—he tooted his horn and grinned, he was so happy! Splayed the notebook between his thighs and wrote, or hoped he was writing,
Moving feels good
, la-dee-dah, heart racing, skipping beats.
Motion—curative?
he scrawled, then was distracted by signs for O’Hare airport to his right, signs that reminded him of his plan, as yet unrealized—undivulged—unresearched—to take Priscilla to Hawaii. Would he ever do it? Could he? These questions affronted Moose like a flock of blackbirds flapping so near to his face that he wanted physically to bat them away (and they were only metaphors!). And now here came the ominous sensation once again, an icy premonition of doom. Moose fought it back—
I am a fighter
, he thought. Surely the problem was that he was out of practice, not having traveled anywhere in so long. A trip to Chicago would be the best way to start—get his feet wet, as it were, go to the lake with its chalky limestone rim, go to the places his father had taken him as a child—yes, a melting sensation of relief notified Moose that this was indeed the right choice, the best choice, and, best of all,
the choice he had already made.
He was halfway there! And if that venture proved successful—he was accelerating again, fleeing the contortions of O’Hare airport for the refuge of motion itself—if all went well in Chicago, then perhaps he would be ready to attempt Hawaii.

By one-thirty, a twelve-by-twelve-foot square of corn had been mowed, cleared, tamped, doused in water and buried under a layer of bright orange sand—a tiny patch of Technicolor beach secreted among verdant farmland. The farmer’s two sons began dragging load after bristling load of sticks and twigs and kindling wood with their heavy work gloves, piling it onto the sand into a thorny tower that reached higher than the surrounding corn.

Somehow, Irene had managed to find two men to dig the ditch. They arrived in a pickup truck, one tall (Mike), one short (Ed), their sad, floppy faces like diagrams of the damage wrought upon human skin by prolonged exposure to sunlight. As they climbed from their truck, shovels in hand, Thomas sidled over to Irene, who was standing beside me. “They look a little,” he said, and moved one hand ambiguously.

She nodded, watching the men. “I’m surprised,” she said. “The one I talked to sounded.”

“The heat. We don’t want.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Voices,” he agreed.

“Is this an actual conversation?” I asked. “Do you really understand each other?”

They both looked startled. “We’re just saying the men are older than we expected,” Irene said, coloring slightly.

But Mike and Ed were ready for work, needed work—for the money, of course, but also because this job had emancipated them from an afternoon of the computer courses they’d been forced to take since the banks got their farms: how to create a file, write a letter, make a chart. They took the classes to please their frightened, crabby wives, who somehow expected them, at fifty-eight and sixty-one, to reinvent themselves as middle managers. All this I gleaned from listening to them talk while I waited for Irene to return with the Grand Am (she was buying lunch), so I could crawl back inside it. Thomas stood near me, eyeing the ditch diggers, wincing at the whistling noises their lungs made (smokers both, packets outlined in their breast pockets), the way their sclerotic bellies strained the belts of their work pants.

“How you guys doing?” he asked, with anxious friendliness. “You feeling okay? You want to take a break? It’s pretty hot out …” But Mike and Ed were fine, they said, just fine. Dirt shot off their shovels and sweat veered among the exotic tributaries of their faces.

Irene returned with sandwiches and sodas and potato salad, which she arranged in the open back of the film crew’s van. This makeshift buffet, along with a few curious spectators who had joined our ranks (friends of the farmer and his children) began to make our escapade feel like a real shoot. As we ate, sitting cross-legged along the edges of the cornfield, swatting flies, Grace’s car turned off the interstate and bobbled up the dirt road, rousing clouds of dust. Halfway up, she stopped, and Pammy and Allison got out along with Allison’s new boyfriend, a youth whose startling beauty brought us briefly to a standstill.

“Who the hell is that kid?” Thomas asked me, nearly choking on his tuna sandwich.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I mean, he’s a local kid. He spends hours on the phone with my niece.”

“What a face,” Thomas said. “He’s a star, look at him.
Look at that face
!”

The teenagers trudged up the road, the boy awash in those same baggy pants I’d seen on kids in New York, clutching a skateboard under his arm. With perverse anticipation, I awaited what I knew was coming next:

“We’ve got to find a way to work him in,” Thomas muttered.

“I don’t really see how.”

But already Thomas was up and away, sandwich abandoned to the dust, hightailing it over to Irene (eating a BLT alone inside the Grand Am, talking on her cell phone), whose job it had become to grant his wishes.

I rose to greet the kids. With touching formality Allison introduced me to the boy, whose name was Ricky. He grinned as I shook his spindly hand—a sweet, irrepressible grin that he yanked away a moment later and folded inside an origami of teenage caginess. He was olive-skinned, with bright dark eyes set wide apart, white teeth inside a broad, mischievous mouth. Yet his beauty was irrespective of these features; it was more, somehow, ineffable. In the middle of a cornfield, a drop of beauty had landed. And despite all that I knew, I could not help feeling that this boy was numinous, an articulation of some deep wonder that would fill his life. He wandered off with the girls, then mounted his skateboard and leapt in the air, kicking the board from underneath him in an apparent effort to perform some trick. He landed on his knees in the dirt, waving that grin like a flag.

I went back to the Grand Am and kept reading.

53

We drove—I drove—into the next day and through it. Occasionally we paused for food. Never at McDonald’s, though. Z refused
.

As the hours wore on, I got tired. Then more tired. Then catatonic. But something made me put off stopping. The mood of expectation was delicious. It tingled between us all the way through Pennsylvania
.

Finally, an hour after we crossed the line into Ohio, we stopped at a motel. In the weak, dusty daylight, we slept.

I woke three hours later. I turned on my side and watched Z sleep. His stern, gaunt face
.

“Who are you?” I whispered. “Who is Z?”

The world felt right. The miles of highway, the trucks howling past. Scraps of voices from the parking lot outside our window. A child crying, an engine thrumming to life. “Honey, is Angie’s Ponzy doll in the back seat?” Step step step
.