The Point of Vanishing (2 page)

The other courts were empty and the game began—quiet, workmanlike, the satisfying echo of the dribble, the tick of the leather in and out of hands. Peter and I were ahead, the redhead and his teammate no match for Peter's deft back-door passing. But about midway through the game, Peter took a jump shot from the right wing. The shot hit the front of the rim and angled sharply back towards the foul line. We all darted for the ball. I was ahead of the redhead, but Peter and the little truck were also converging. For a moment, the ball hovered there, suspended. I remember the feeling of being too close, of space seeming to collapse among the bodies. And then the pain.

The gym fell quiet. I stayed down on the court, not moving. The sensation was unlike anything—so deep, so internal, that I didn't know what to do. If I'd twisted my ankle, been kneed in the balls, I would have known the protocol: assess the damage, then limp off the court or keep playing. But a liquid, it was blood, was beginning to drip onto my face, onto my t-shirt. And the pain was something I couldn't locate. It was too interior, like something had gone wrong inside my skull. Like some kind of acid had dripped behind my eye.

Very slowly, Peter helped me off the court, led me down the stairs.

Outside the gym, the daylight was shattering. My eye had already swollen shut, and to my left eye the world appeared a provisional version of itself—the brick sidewalk, Lowell House across the street—none of it firmly in place, the sunlight filtering through the trees as though from no one source, everything overly bright. The wide stone steps of the gym shimmered like water, each step solid only as it formed under my foot, one step, then the next. Space in general felt wider, less confined, but the space around me felt tighter. As though I was on a lower frequency than everyone else, existing in some range that human ears couldn't hear.

Peter followed beside me towards University Health Services, but I avoided looking at him. It had been his finger that had hooked into my eye. My hand trailed instinctively along the brick wall that lined the narrow sidewalk. The day was too bright. There was nowhere to look. A constant bee sting burned at the back of my eyeball, surrounded by a tight-fist throbbing. My t-shirt was stained with streaks of blood, and anger was pushing through my veins. A tight feeling of wanting to strike back, to throw parked cars out of my way.
Why had this happened? Why had this happened to me?
I told myself it was just music playing in a neighboring room, just something to ignore. But I could
feel so much swimming, so many emotions swirling and darting, some barrier between me and the deepest waters suddenly disappeared. Vaguely, I admitted to myself time might be a factor but didn't admit to myself for what. Below that, as Peter and I crossed Mount Auburn Street—its two lanes suddenly horrible and dazzling—I tried to ignore the angry appeal already buzzing inside me:
I can do better
,
give me another chance.

At University Health Services, a doctor swabbed some of the blood away from my eye and pressed with his thumb around the lid. He was probably in his sixties. He introduced himself as Dr. Hardenbergh. He'd seen all this before, it seemed. Maybe my senses were heightened, but his white coat smelled like mothballs. His office was straight out of Norman Rockwell. He said he was going to snip something, it wouldn't hurt, and just over the bridge of my nose, with my left eye, I saw him cut something white, like a bit of boiled egg. It didn't hurt—he was right. Maybe it was just the eye's version of dead skin. But that something could be cut from my eye, and with so little explanation, was not reassuring.

After a quick examination of each eye with his penlight, Dr. Hardenbergh switched the overhead light back on. “Very good,” he said.

I didn't move.

“You can go back to your dorm room. You'll have quite a shiner.” He peeled off his rubber gloves.

“I can't see anything in my right eye.”

“Just heavy swelling. Nothing to worry about. In less than a week the eye should open.”

I had the strange sensation of desperately wanting to believe something I knew wasn't true. “When you put your penlight in my eye, I didn't see anything.”

Dr. Hardenbergh removed his penlight again. His bare fingers forced my bruised lid open. “You really don't see anything?”

“No. I really don't.”

“Surprising. You'll want to go down to the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary. You know where it is? You can take the subway. The Red Line.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Dr. Hardenbergh went to the sink, began to wash his hands. “Why would I be kidding?”

“Time isn't a factor? Can you tell me time isn't a factor?”

“No ambulance necessary. If that's what you mean.”

Physical anger blared through my body. I wanted to grab the doctor by his white coat and slam him up against the wall. And behind the anger there lurked a sickening fear: I hadn't really been doing anything with my life, and now some outside factor was going to make it impossible for me to redeem myself.
Of those to whom much has been given
,
much is expected.
Didn't this doctor know who he was talking to? Didn't he know how much I had to do?

“No ambulance necessary. Not necessary. Because?”

“I can't call for one. Simple protocol.”

I didn't trust this man. “Then get me a cab.”

Dr. Hardenbergh stared at me.

“Now,” I said.

I liked going outside to sit in the quiet. It was like wading into an ocean, the way it surrounded and held my legs, the way it made me heavier and lighter at the same time. My first few days, I could spend only so much time inside the house without going back to it.

It must have been my third or fourth morning. The front door, which was strangely medieval, made of heavy black iron and glass, opened to an unkempt ramble of land that sloped up unevenly towards the trees. A few rotten logs, a kind of token gesture at stairs, were wedged in among the knee-high grass, the
daisy fleabane, the black-eyed susans. The single enormous oak tree had already turned deep copper, a thin skirt of leaves fallen around its base. I climbed up past its bulging roots to the highest point before the birches began. Out above the house's tar-paper roof and the spire-like tops of the spruces, the hills dazzled in a sweep of fall color, like a town with all ages on parade: the youthful, shimmering yellow; the abiding, stately green; the full-throated oranges and reds, all of it fading to harlequin corduroy, then to the mountains going blue in the distance. None of it was new, exactly. I'd stopped to appreciate the view every morning. But for some reason, the silence surrounded me now. It was tremendous in its completeness. I'd felt it before—when I first pulled in by the meadow, when I came back from stocking up at the C&C—but maybe my senses hadn't quite been able to travel at car speed, and now, given the extra couple days of only walking, my senses were beginning to arrive. To slow down and move in. In the past, whenever I'd been alone, there'd always been the possibility of another person—a kind of door held open in the silence for another person to enter. But now four or five miles separated me from the Mooreland farm, six or seven miles from the nearest main road. No one would be coming within miles of the house—not that afternoon, not that night, not the next day. No human noise, apart from my own breathing, would enter into what I was hearing.

It was hard to admit to myself how desperate I was to be here. My only plan, which felt more like survival instinct, was to return to a place where my senses felt at home. As a boy, I'd gone to an overnight camp in New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut River from Vermont. We played sports during the day, sang songs by the campfire at night, hiked in the White Mountains once a week. It was a place I couldn't remember without feeling it in my body. Every walk up to the soccer field carried the scent of sun-warmed blueberries; on the softball diamond
you could smell the rain before you heard it sweeping over the hilltop, a strengthening patter until it was hammering towards you on the leaves. I liked to get up early, before anyone else in my cabin, and sneak out the door to sit on the porch. During the day, I was just like the other boys—saving my best polo shirt for Square Dance, making bets to win an extra Snickers bar on Candy Night, equally engaged in debates about the hottest girl in Bunk 19 and whether “the Garden” meant Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks played, or Boston Garden, where the Celtics did. But what I remember most vividly is those mornings. Behind me, through the screen windows, I could hear the soft sounds of my friends sleeping. The lake would be still as glass, just skeins of mist drifting across it, the morning light flashing green and gold. It was my first idea of how a lake should smell in the morning, of how a morning should look and feel—and my first feeling of fitting in with something larger than my friends, of fitting in with the world around me. It was my first glimpse of myself, really—not of myself preening in the mirror or trying to be like my friends, but my first glimpse of myself when the thing I thought of as myself was entirely quiet. Eventually, I'd steal back inside the cabin, not wanting to be caught being different, but as my friends did wake up, I'd try to carry that feeling into breakfast with them, into our activities. Some days it worked, and my perspective seemed as wide as the lake and the mountains, and some days it didn't. But those few minutes on the porch almost always returned me to that feeling in myself, to that quiet of already belonging—returned me to a place to start from with other people.

But now the silence, as it began to fill in, wasn't entirely silent. High up in the oak tree a breeze stirred. Lower, behind me, the same breeze swept through the maples and birches and sounded like a stream. The land began to feel like a room—only a room without ceiling or walls. Bounding into the foreground,
a squirrel came ripping through the fallen leaves, every leap crisp and loud, as though the thrashing sounds were the source of his power, propelling him into his next leap. He stopped a few yards from me, whipped his bushy tail in quick liquid movements. He whipped and whipped. Then he bounded off, one smooth low sine curve into the trees. As my ears followed, I realized I'd been hearing space as much as sound—the dimensionality of the oak tree's branches, of the forest edge behind me, of the dry leaves on the grass, all of it so much more subtle than I could see. The day was teeming with road signs, with ways to orient myself in space. The acres and acres of wilderness were an invitation. A way to learn what was solid—in the world and in myself.

But later that afternoon, the rain falling again, all that space closed in on me. I was upstairs, wrestling a futon mattress from the spare room into the bedroom. I didn't want to keep sleeping on the mattress where Lev slept, didn't like feeling his body's impression when I lay down, didn't want to absorb whatever dreams he hadn't quite finished. Sweat prickled under my armpits. The futon had rubbed a little red patch on my cheek. It would have been so easy to lift the futon over the floor with the help of another person, but there was no other person. No neighbor, no friend down the hall. No chance of the most basic help. So I kept dragging. At the doorway the futon caught, slamming me into the doorjamb. I hadn't seen the floor wasn't flat. A scrape above my elbow began to bleed.

“Shit.”

My voice sounded strange, disembodied. But something in my blood was racing. Since the accident, just being jostled on the sidewalk would throw my body into instant turmoil. About a month earlier in Boston, the strap of a man's backpack had slapped me on the cheek as he hurried off the subway. I'd felt an immediate urge to chase him down the platform, to tackle him
on the full run. What I planned to say to him at that point, our limbs entangled, I had no idea. That part of the scene, when I reimagined it later, made me feel horrible, like I was a rabid dog desperate to spread my disease. Recognizing my body for the alarmist it had become, I always had to say to it:
You're really worried about a little slap
,
a stubbed toe
,
a jammed finger? You really think you can't heal? You really think this is permanent?
But that didn't mean the anger stopped coming. A body is stubborn that way.

I felt the primal surge now, a readiness to fight, and, below it, a shadow feeling of having been violated.
Stupid Lev
,
lonely troll
,
why didn't you fucking warn me about the ramshackle carpentry?
But, hearing my thoughts ricochet in the empty house, I knew I was being absurd. Completely my idea to move the mattress, completely my execution. I stood by the window foolishly. The rain kept whispering into the dark trees. There was no one for miles to blame. Maybe it was the first lesson of solitude:
everything really is your fault.

In the bedroom, I dropped the futon with a loud slap on the floor. The blood continued to fork down my forearm, two jagged trails.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
I finally managed a grim smile. This was just part of settling in, just start-up costs, and from now on, I reassured myself, things would go more smoothly.

But later in the night, the rain drumming on the roof and the pitched deck above the mattress, the noise of my own mind surrounded me. I started thinking about how the house made no sense. Three roofs, two of them flat, bound to be buried in snow. A front door, at the bottom of a steep pitch, bound to be buried, too. The triptych windows to the woods—beautiful but ideal for losing heat. The house clearly hadn't been designed by a Vermonter. Or even by a person capable of envisioning snow. I tried not to think about how my plan, if it even was a plan, was just as haphazardly formed. I tried not to think about Ray and
Alexis in med school in New York City, not to think about my parents, not to think about other places I might have been. And then there were the undercurrents, the background thoughts, the ones that had become a part of my mind's weather—the ones I didn't need to think about to feel. If only the basketball had come off the rim differently, if only I'd left the gym after the first game. And, of course, Milena. There was always Milena. Just the cool echo of her name, from those dark woods of not-thinking, carried the scent of my room in Bologna, of the thin blue blanket on the mattress, carried the sound of her voice, so foreign and so familiar in my ear. I couldn't allow myself to think about her. Couldn't allow the thought that she had punched my ticket to the woods as much as the accident had. That year in Italy after college had made it so hard to return to Boston, so easy to get in the car and head west, so easy to begin the descent into solitude. It was the two together, a delayed chemical reaction, an exponential loss.