The Point of Vanishing (16 page)

I glanced at my plate on the table, my city of honeyed streams and multigrain walls. I wasn't sure if I was a fool or a prophet. “I wish I could answer, Ray.”

“Nothing?”

“Really, I wish I could translate it. But I don't know how.”

“Maybe once you get back,” he said gently.

“Maybe,” I said. And for the first time in a long time, I believed it. The rain and the glistening leaves out the window
weren't just filled with shadow. I really was learning something—how to see, how to listen. I was learning how to move from the visible world to the invisible, and back again, which wasn't a helpful skill just with chickadees but with people. I'd heard something profound in Ray—his loneliness, his lostness—and my own loneliness and lostness didn't feel so strange.

“Good talking to you,” Ray said before we hung up.

“Good talking to you, too.”

The phone calls had grown quietly desperate. The children of Mom and Dad's friends were off to law school and new jobs, off to roommates and new cities. Phases weren't supposed to last more than a year. Dad wasn't just asking about the Honda anymore. He wanted to know about money, about plans, about my future—questions, it was clear, he'd been holding in for a very long time. My answers set new marks for evasiveness. Mom just pleaded for a visit. Family meant showing up, she said. Thanksgiving was coming. I hadn't come last year on the annual pilgrimage to Newburgh. Everyone was asking for me. My cousins Susan and Melissa. My aunt Betty. Matt. It would mean the world to Mom, just the world. She'd make the forest torte cake, just like always. I thought she was making a pun about the forest—the picture in my mind was of a cake studded with pine trees, their needles sparkling festively. But she said no, your favorite cake, the forest torte, the cake you love.

On the November night I called to say yes, expecting to receive a warm hug from Mom's voice, she responded with a stampede of questions: “Should I pick up an extra dozen bagels at Rein's? You want a frozen chocolate chip sour cream cake? You have good shoes? Dad could pack an extra pair. He could pack a tie. We'll have enough ruggelach to sink a ship, so what does it matter a few more things? As long as Dad remembers to pack them. So you have a belt? You have a comb?”

I felt as though she'd backed her car in through the woods, pushed the table out of the way, and emptied the contents of a thousand closets onto the floor. I was seeing too much, seeing things I didn't know how to see. The frame was all wrong.

But in the chill, rainy days after our call, I knew it would be different in person. In person, she'd see my eyes, she'd feel the love coming out of me. My quiet would help quiet her. I took long walks beneath the barren trees with imaginary, beautiful conversations running through my mind, conversations filled with deep understanding. Jokes with my cousin Scott; earnest questions from Melissa by the fire; maybe a football toss with Matt, the ball carrying things between us that we couldn't say. Everything I'd learned over the winter, and everything I'd felt during the summer, all that silence and vitality and love, would be like a green medallion glowing from my chest. It would emanate from my eyes. They would feel it even in my silence as I stood by the sink, or as I brought someone a piece of pie. That green glowing light would bring out a similar glow from them, and we'd bathe together in it as though in firelight. I'd always loved Thanksgiving. That feeling that there was no other place anyone in the family was supposed to be.

Leaving the house meant draining the pipes of water, pouring antifreeze into the toilet bowl. It meant finding the key so I could lock the door. It meant the excitement of travel, of going far away. Which meant packing my old duffel bag, the same bag I'd packed again and again as I'd driven around the country.

As I pulled the heavy green canvas down from the plywood shelf in my room, its musty smell carried a familiar promise. The year after Bologna, when I was desperate for some town or vista that might feel like home, it had been my faithful companion. The letters from Milena, which initially had seemed to offer a second chance, had stopped coming. Her grandmother
died that July; her family needed her. I stood on a kitchen chair in my Cambridge apartment during our last phone conversation, then on the kitchen table, as though I might climb high enough to be heard. I charmed, I cajoled, I pleaded. After Otto's visit in Bologna, we'd spent one more month together, arguing, always arguing. She'd said she could not invent her life; I'd said her life in Vienna was an invention. There were tears, there were apologies. There was staggering sex. One night, we even drove to her grandmother's house in Austria. She had borrowed a car, and we drove in the night past Verona, Venezia, across the border, then up into the mountains, through tunnels and forests, until we were there by the lake where she had read
Narcissus and Goldmund
as a girl. Her grandmother was in Vienna, there was a key hidden above the lintel in the garden shed. After sleeping until midday, eating lunch, and talking very little, we started back to Bologna, but she asked me to pull over at one of the switchbacks leading down from her grandmother's house. It was a tiny church. The gravel crunched under our feet. We were not holding hands. To the left of her grandfather's tombstone was a black marble plaque. There were swastikas at the two corners, where decorative roses might have been. Our reflections were dimly visible over the names.

“My great-uncle is there,” she said. “Many men from his village were taken into the war.”

I had never thought of Nazis dying.

“His unit was sent to the Russian front. Within two months he was killed. His picture was on the piano when I was a girl. A handsome young man. But I am sorry. Your family. I did not think.”

I didn't say anything. I was aware of the space between our hands. I didn't know whether to trust her or whether she'd brought me here to make a point. But it hardly mattered: she was right. She
came from somewhere and it was not where I came from. Our pasts and our families were part of us. She could not leave hers and I could not leave mine. I looked at the names on the hard black plaque, so many names written across our bodies and our faces. That history was a part of who we were, but it horrified me to think that it was only who we were, that it determined everything.

The fall after my return from Bologna, Milena took a job at the United Nations in New York City. All summer I'd written her long, unfortunate love letters, pleading with her, citing Kierkegaard's knight of faith, quoting Chekhov's stories, writing her that we needed to follow our love, telling her it dwarfed our families, our histories, every line that surrounded us. She wrote back with more and more German in her letters, as if to share more of herself and offer less of herself at the same time.
Vielleicht in ein anderen leben. Trotz allem, hast du keine ahnung was es fur mich bedeutet dich fer kennen.
I went to the public library to look up the German, to have my heart broken again, piece by piece, by the yellowed pages of the dictionary.
Perhaps in another life. In spite of everything
,
you have no idea what it means for me to know you.
She'd even flown to meet me in Arizona on my drive west, and implored me, as we said good-bye in the airport, not to change, she could not follow me, but please, to live this way for both of us. When I visited her in New York City, in an effort to convince her I had more to offer than just books and opera and hikes in the desert, we went with Ray one night to the Carnegie Deli. But it changed nothing. Nothing worked.

And nothing from my old life was working either. Everything in Cambridge, where I'd taken a job as a teaching fellow, had turned foreign. The meetings with the khakis and the niceties and the proposed topics for discussion. The grad students who read every book as an argument for or against their pet theories. The family restaurants in the Square that had been overtaken by chains. The ads on the subway kiosk that featured
life-size photographs of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, the words
think different
emblazoned beside a little white apple, as though Einstein and Picasso had time-traveled to 1999 and derived their genius from a computer, as though the gateway to a unique way of seeing was looking at the world through a screen. I felt like a wild animal who'd mistakenly wandered into the zoo. A born believer who'd wandered into a culture of heretics.

So, after saving enough money, I'd criss-crossed the country twice, living for a few months in New Mexico, in Idaho, in Montana. I'd lived in a trailer, in cabins, in my tent. I'd woken to different trees, different campgrounds. The land kept unscrolling, the road led out to distant colors, and the big sky promised enough space for me to heal. I'd assumed visibility would have to get better—I'd find a reflection of myself in that sky, in the land, a reflection that couldn't be broken. But nothing became any clearer. Between my two cross-country drives, I returned to Harvard to work again, to cover my expenses. Mom and Dad were still proud. The golden boy trajectory appeared intact. Outwardly, I was still living that life—and my “drives” could be forgiven as eccentricity. But they were the only part of my life that felt real. Back in my apartment on Ellery Street, I was miserable, unbearable to myself. I was still leading a double life. I was impersonating my former self and not even doing a good job of it.

But now, as I packed my green duffel, I was confident I'd put in the time, endured the solitude. I'd sat with myself day after day, night after night, alone. I could already feel the green medallion glowing in my chest. I could already feel the love I would share with my family. I wasn't packing to run across the country, to search for some new horizon, but to have a preview of my return. To test what I'd learned—and what I might be able to offer.

The first cop pulled me over before I was out of Vermont. Or, really, I should say pulled up behind me, as I was already pulled over and already out of my car. I was at a rest stop, standing on the skirt of grass by the angled parking spaces, facing the granite wall that had been dynamited to make the highway. The rest stop had no restrooms. It had no access to the woods. From my posture—feet shoulder-width apart, hands in front of me—my reason for taking in the scenery was fairly obvious. I'd heard a car pull up, a door opening and closing, followed by a lack of footsteps. I finished, zipped up, and turned around.

“This isn't a public restroom.”

It sure didn't feel very private.

“Women and children stop here sometimes. They don't want to see that.”

Did he want to see that? Is that why his fender had almost hit my calves?

“Do you hear what I'm saying to you? Respond verbally if you can.”

He looked to be about twenty. The only shadow on his jaw was from the brim of his trooper's hat worn low over his eyes. “I can hear you just fine,” I said.

“When was the last time you did drugs?”

“Sir?”

“The last time you did drugs. Are you on drugs right now?” He shifted his weight. He was staring at my eyes. It felt like a sucker punch. A migraine was thickening behind my right eyeball.

“Not since I was in college.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I'm sure.”

“And you're feeling OK?”

“Sir?”

“Are you feeling OK? Are you sick?”

“I have a headache.”

“And what's that from?”

“Sir?”

“The headache. What's that from?”

“Driving. I'm driving to New York. I guess I'm nervous to see my family.”

His eyes locked onto mine again. He'd probably watched too many cop shows. Had my eye, which was probably a little bloodshot, issued him a search warrant?

He glanced down, adjusted the brim of his trooper's hat. “Family makes me nervous, too. That's understandable.”

I waited. His car was still running.

“Well, happy Thanksgiving. And next time make sure you find the appropriate facilities.”

After he pulled out, I got back in the car and sat for a few minutes. Then I drove very slowly south towards the Massachusetts border, past the highway farms, the blue silos and fields, as though reduced speed might put the world in order. Did my eye really look that weird? Granted, it had been through some changes. First there was the accident, and the strangeness of my eye looking the same as it always had; then my pupil dilated permanently while I was in Bologna; then there were calcium deposits that flaked off on my second drive West. My eye teared through Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and by the time I hit the Badlands of South Dakota, it was watering steadily. I was driving with a tissue in my hand, like a woman weeping, and given the otherworldly sandstone spires, the blinding blue sky, I could have passed for a character in a sci-fi movie, a survivor of an earth destroyed. The irritation, I learned from a doctor in Minnesota, was caused by calcium deposits. “They formed on your iris there. Little pieces are flaking into the eye. Kind of like paint peeling off a fence. That's why you've got the irritation, the crying. Unless those bands are surgically removed, you can
bet that irritation's going to persist.” Back in Boston, I returned to Mass Eye and Ear, and a surgeon put me under general anaesthetic and chipped away, as though my eye were an ill-formed statue. The pain waited until the next morning. Beneath the bandage, which was a large white patch taped to my forehead, my eye razored with every blink, as if the red string on a Band-Aid had been dangling from my iris and someone had pulled. I was back in my childhood bedroom, below the basketball posters and the trophies, back where I'd been the morning after the accident. I knew I had to do something. I knew I had to change. No more looking for some beautiful woman or some beautiful town to save me. I needed to go far enough back so there would be nothing else waiting behind. No further layer that was just a scrim, no more version of reality that was only provisional. I had to touch the hard edge of reality, and begin from there. A few weeks later, as if to make sure I'd gotten the message, a cataract started to form on my right eye. A pearly shine, like the glint in an animated character's eye. A few months after that, I was in northern Vermont, posting my handwritten signs on the bulletin board outside the C&C.
Wanted: a cabin or house set in the woods
,
with good light
,
very solitary.