The Point of Vanishing (14 page)

She began reading
All the Pretty Horses
on her own, sneaking it to school in her satchel among her books on European political history and global justice. At night, she'd update me on what she'd read, on where John Grady Cole and Lacy Rawlins were in their journey across Mexico, on the forbidden romance between John Grady and the Mexican girl Alejandra. I loved hearing her tell the story—the brightness in her eyes the same as when she'd told me about
Narcissus and Goldmund
—and I couldn't help hoping when she talked about John Grady and Alejandra that in some way she was talking about us. Spring had come full force into the city, bringing fruit vendors, opening the window shutters on the apartment buildings. The Giardini Margherita were full of teenagers practicing love. And night after night, we returned to each other up in my room. I didn't go to any more Hopkins parties. We ate out together rarely. We knew Juan Ignacio knew about us, but I didn't talk about it with him. It was an alternative life from the lives around us, and from the lives we had come from, but it felt possible—a different way of living, one that was guided by what we felt for each other, and sanctioned by all the quotes hanging on my wall, the opera we were listening to, the books we were reading.

Some nights she asked me to read
All the Pretty Horses
to her. Some nights she read to me in German. Some nights we didn't read or listen or talk at all. We simply got beneath the covers, the April breeze drifting through the window, the candle wavering on the tile floor.

I should have known better. I hadn't counted on the dark, how quickly it would fall. I'd sat too long, drifting on the light fading on the mountains, not noticing the heavy clouds blowing in behind the ridge. And I needed to move now. Not to rush, not to risk turning an ankle by landing hard with my snowshoe on a fallen tree, but to pole and to step, to pole and to step, deliberately and without pause. It was early February; I'd learned to gauge the wind, the warnings of the clouds. I knew better than to ignore the center dropping out of the air, the wind unmooring itself from the land. I knew better than to forget I wasn't the sky and the clouds and the snow, to forget I wasn't the weather—and that it could hurt me.

I'd descended past the shelf of land, snowshoeing down the back way, not following the regular path to the meadow. It was my shortcut. During the fall, underbrush had cluttered the back trail, but the deep snow had effectively cleared it by burying everything. There was no more trail now, but I knew the house was basically to the southeast. I just had to keep stepping, to keep poling, to keep my mind calm, my body moving. I couldn't tell if the gathering white-blue darkness came from the clouds, from the dusk coming on, or from both, but I'd reach the house more quickly this way—it was barely a mile.

A crow cried hoarsely, beat its giant wings overhead, angled itself hard against the wind. The forest was emptying. The wind thrashed in the tops of the trees. The snow swirled madly, like a school of white minnows having lost direction beneath the waves. They seemed to be swallowing my face, trying to rearrange my nose, my mouth—like the horizon I'd imagined walking towards had suddenly enveloped me. My heart raced below the booming, below the quiet between the gusts, the very marrow of the trees keening against the cold, the pulp contracting
inside them. I trudged on, trying not to rush, testing for buried tree limbs with my poles. I realized I couldn't picture myself in relation to the house anymore. There wasn't a familiar landmark in sight—not a boulder, not a clearing. The woods had become general. Every direction looked the same.

If I kept moving in a wide arc to the right, at worst I'd come out above the house, somewhere by the open field. If it was full dark by then, I could find my way along the road. Even a mile of road would take no more than twenty minutes. The plan was there in my head before I could agree—like I wasn't the leader, or even part of a group, but just a straggler following behind. The toes on my right foot had hardened into something like a club. I'd worn mismatched socks and could feel the cotton one inside my boot pooled around my ankle. I was usually a boy scout about layers, but the house had gone strangely quiet in the afternoon, a quiet I could hear, and I'd hurried outside, not wanting to bother changing socks when there was only so much light left in the day.
Only so much light left in the day.
Against the snow catching in my eyes, I tried to focus on the trees ahead, to work myself into a kind of rhythm. But I was pushing too fast—not just for my body but for my vision. I didn't know how to adjust, to turn my seeing down, to compensate for the speed of the storm. The woods were going flat, into one thick wall of snow and wind. I couldn't shake the feeling of being prey, of being flushed in some direction. And as I felt myself racing downwards, the words came into my head from behind me, as though from something I was trying to outrun:
If a man falls in the forest and no one is there to hear him
,
does he make a sound?

It seemed a bad joke. Fragments of poems and songs sometimes swept into my head on my walks, lines I'd never consciously learned by heart.
The woods are lovely dark and deep.
But this visitation didn't seem pleasant. Its timing was poor. The trees were losing definition, dimming into silhouette. The uneven
ground hovered bluish white, like a frozen brook, pockmarked here and there by fallen branches.
If a man falls in the forest
,
and no one is there to hear him
,
does he make a sound?

The wind pitched the slender birches like ships at sea, the sustained gusts a strange uncentered kind of wave. Clearly, the wind was hearing nothing. My tracks disappeared behind me, and I was just a shallow breath, the uncomfortable gravity of a body—an alien speck of color hurrying through the wood. The snow, the wind, the trees—they would go on with or without me, no matter the thoughts ricocheting around my head, no matter the feeling or lack of it in my heart. It seemed I'd crossed into a realm where there was no sound, where no person was supposed to go, where no human could be heard. This wasn't the dissolve into a lover, the dissolve that freed you from yourself to make you more yourself. It was nothingness. I could feel my own bones inside me, could see myself as a skeleton walking, could feel my own disappearance as a disappearance already forgotten.

The blue of the snow had thickened into gray. The gap in the trees had become consistent. At first, I thought I was imagining it, but I was suddenly on a trail, and it was widening. The old logging road. The lane to the house would become visible around a bend about a quarter mile ahead. I would get back to the house—my toes wouldn't be frostbitten. My pace slowed; the wind raged. There was nothing to do but keep walking. The road was less dark than the dark around it, the opening a relief from the bullying crowd of the forest. As I neared the crossroads, I felt an unsettling urge to turn away from the house, towards town, to keep walking until I came to the lighted sign of the Gulf station, to the jingle of the bells on the door, to some clerk behind the counter whose hello or how are you would rattle around my chest like the first coin in a beggar's cup, but I knew the walk would take far too long, and even to drive, if the
car could make it out, would feel very strange. To ask someone to help you to exist, without being clear what you were asking for, seemed immoral somehow. Was there nothing else to give a person form?

Eventually, there was the open field, which I did not look at, and then my car, its trunk reassuringly solid under my glove. There was the top of the yard, the snow a dark gray lake, the house a drifting black boat hunched against the wind. There was no light in any of the windows, no light spilling onto the snow. The darkness hit me like a blow. I had imagined, without realizing it, a kind of homecoming. No one tending the fire, no one cooking dinner by the stove, but just a light in the window, the sense of returning to a home. But the house was cloaked in darkness, as though it had been absorbed by the woods, as though it had become part of the beyond as well.

There was nowhere else to go. I trudged down towards the garage. I needed to build up the fire, to make toast, to take a hot shower. To do anything small and particular. Anything human.

Milena wouldn't look at me. Vanished socks were flushed out of hiding, dust flew in the midmorning sunlight. A strand of hair hung loose by her neck. She was at the mattress, kneeling down, stripping the soft, cream-colored sheets she'd brought a week earlier. She wore an old leather purse over her shoulder, her back and arms moved very fast. She'd already stuffed her striped green pajamas, which she kept under my pillow, into her satchel. The thin blanket fell onto the floor. She tossed it back with one hand, but most of the stained mattress was still exposed.

“But you have other sheets?”

“Yes. Milena?”

“They are here. They just opened the door. They are here.”

“They?”

“Otto and my father. They came on the train.”

The plan was for her father to come for the weekend. Her father. That was the plan. We had celebrated her birthday together the night before, and today her father would arrive.

“My father brought him as a surprise. As a present.” She was standing still now, looking right at me, but I could feel both of us moving. The moment was collapsing. There was too much weight pressing in on us from upstairs.

Juan Ignacio had warned me. Slouching in the kitchen doorway the morning of the picnic, apparently fatigued by the obviousness of it, he'd said, “C'mon, man, a woman like that, you don't think she has a man in Vienna?” And then, the first night we'd made love, she had confessed it herself. “This is a problem,” she'd said, her hand still on my chest. “I should not like you this way. This should not happen.” What she didn't want to happen, I was certain, was love. And so I'd trusted her hand, warm on my chest, rather than her words. I'd trusted the current between us.
I realized that when you love you must either
,
in your reasoning about that love
,
start from what is higher
,
more important than happiness or unhappiness
,
sin or virtue in their usual meaning
,
or you must not reason at all.
It was one of the quotations we slept below every night; it was what we were living by. We'll figure it out, I'd told her. And in the following nights, wordlessly, it seemed we had. We didn't talk about Otto. I didn't ask, she didn't offer. He existed only in the background of her stories from Vienna. They'd been classmates in law school, their families were friends; beyond that, all I knew was her pet name for him was The Chinaman: he had little body hair, was shorter than she was. She said his actual name, Otto, with deep respect, almost with fear. I didn't like how the pictures in my mind changed when she said it, how he had trouble remaining in the background as part of the group. But I knew her life with him wasn't like her nights with me. Not the way her fingers clawed into my back. Not the way she'd steal looks at me afterwards, as
though she'd just been introduced to herself. It wasn't a competition between me and him. It was a competition inside of her: the life she'd been raised to live versus the life she might make on her own. She was at the same crossroads as I was, I was sure of it. And if I could just take her far enough down the path with me, far enough to see how beautiful it was, we'd make the same decision together.

“For how long? How long do they stay?” I said.

“It is only three days.”

“Only?”

She said nothing. She looked more agitated than I'd ever seen her.

“Are you OK?”

“Naya, I do not know. But I must go.”

Her opera CDs were still on the bedside table. Stupidly, I remembered we had only made it to Act III of
The Marriage of Figaro.
The sheets cradled in her arms looked disposable, all our nights gathered up and ready to be washed away.

“I come find you when they go.”

“Will you tell him?”

Her eyes pleaded.

Then she was moving by me, the hallway overly bright with sunlight behind her, the sound of her footsteps hurrying down the corridor very loud and terribly thin.

I didn't chase after her. I only imagined running up the stone stairwell and making a scene: her father looking on stunned, her eyes begging me to stop, and Otto a very real person, with leather shoes and a high forehead, with a clean shirt he had picked out for the trip, the happiness of his birthday surprise draining from his face. The scene, I realized, was silent. Or maybe they muttered a few words of German, but English had no place. The result would be the same no matter what I said.

The stripped mattress sickened me, the
La Bohème
CD cover on the bedside table, the handsome Rodolfo with his mouth open in song. Everything I'd been so confident of was contracting. Vienna, the real Vienna, with its clean streets and dark wood bars, seemed to be invading my room. The cathedrals, the apartments, the cafés with newspapers on sticks. Her stories weren't just stories—they connected to her life, to her family, which meant to obligations, to responsibilities. The very thing I'd wanted to forget in my own life she had not forgotten in hers.
How could I have been so blind?
I was the one who saw every approaching car before it turned the corner, the one who heard every last pigeon cooing down the street. But I hadn't listened, hadn't seen.
Not paying attention.
It was the one consolation prize I was supposed to have: heightened attention was mine forever. But I hadn't used it. And now there was the chance that what I'd hidden for so long, the me she'd helped me to come home to, wouldn't be enough. She might not return. She'd left all of us—Rodolfo and Mimi, and John Grady Cole and Alejandra, and all the quotes above the desk. She'd guided me into this realm, and now she'd popped back out through a hole in the hedgerow, and gone back to her real life.