America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  The door shut and his heart rate tripled and he heard Braden gargling his mouthwash, humming “Happy Birthday” to time it. He looked around his room and thought about how nothing in it, except the ring on his finger, was something his mother had touched. If it had all turned out to be a mistake—if she had not died, if she had not left—she would not know where to find him, and if she did, she would not know what to ask.

  6.

  In the way we believe some door at home has been left unlocked, Wright felt he had the disease and knew which man had given it to him. Why the specific belief, he asked himself. It would be easier to keep it nameless and faceless, the thing ruining his body. It had taken him so long, twenty-five years, to love his body, to know what he wanted from it, what he wanted done to it, and now, he was sure, it was going, fleeing by night. There was no proof, not so much as a cold that wouldn’t go away, but his certainty about it was the thing that woke him up every morning, what he argued with in bed every night.

  The man in question had been Boy Scout beautiful, hair the color of a peanut butter cookie, silent until he became, on some issue—the superiority of a certain car, the history of the American railroad—implacably outspoken. They had fucked within an hour of meeting, upstairs at a dinner party, their places saved, leaving a few bites of pork left, on the salad plates a smattering of peach and pine nuts and gorgonzola. It was a guest room filled with the typical second-rate ephemera. Above the door a framed macaroni collage made by some child, in the corner a stack of Architectural Digests, on the nightstand an ancient university anthology and inside of it some pressed flowers. There were six pillows on the bed, each in a different pillowcase, and in the thirty minutes they spent there he shoved his face in each of them. The man had been kinder than the circumstance demanded, kissed each of Wright’s eyelids and thanked him. “For what,” he said. It went unanswered.

  When they emerged, damp and empty now of the dinner party impulse to follow any comment with a witty rejoinder, the room clapped. “I would ask if you’d like dessert,” said one of the hosts, a mutual friend—a man who could name the year and designer of any piece of furniture you showed him, who was such a beloved uncle that nieces and nephews repeatedly ran away from their house to his—his hand aloft and fork pointed out, “but it seems you’ve already had some.”

  His name was Ben, and Wright saw him once more after that. He was a third-grade teacher and a hobbyist mechanic and a runner, the first one Wright had ever met, the first person who ever took Wright’s cigarette from his hand and asked him to consider quitting. Wright took him up on the invitation, an address on the back of a library receipt, no phone number, a drunk omission or just a dare, visited him in the Berkeley hills, a thirty-minute walk from the train, surprised him where he lay under a Fiat from the fifties. “Wondering when you’d come,” he had said, still under the car.

  Wright sat on the hot curve of pavement, smelling the bake of eucalyptus and waiting for him to finish what he was doing. When Ben rolled out on the carpeted creeper, he took his time putting his wrenches away in an Army-green toolbox and then motioned toward the garage, where he washed his hands in a paint-splattered sink, then brought Wright through a door into the kitchen. He offered Wright some mineral water, then bent him over the tiled counter. On it was a wooden bowl of clementines, small and still bearing leaves, which Wright could, even a year later, see approaching and retreating as the two of them moved.

  How did he know, how could he be certain? Hadn’t there been others, around the same time? Yes. The bathroom of a bar in the city, a place where an aquarium gurgled behind the shelves of liquor, a guy with a beard who had smelled uncannily of mold and held his hand the whole time. Buena Vista Park, the underbrush taller than his ankles, fog already in from the bay, a dog nearby barking. A stoned afternoon in Sausalito, a houseboat made of driftwood, a second time with the windows open onto the water, his name possibly Hugh or Kent, a moment where the pain or pleasure of it was so large he could not see.

  Then why Ben? For one thing, he had died. It had happened in the same room, he learned, with the bowl of clementines. The hospital bed and the oxygen tank and the life-monitoring apparatuses fit better there than in the dark back bedroom, where he’d hung moody figurative charcoals of cities, another hobby he could have made a profession. The nurse who came could clean him more easily, there in the light and with the sink nearby. That he was gone Wright knew because the host of the dinner party had said so, matter-of-factly, continuing to walk and dodge panhandlers on the street where they ran into each other, the way he said it an odd semantic switchback, “Oh you know who died is Ben.” It was a necessary defense, to treat it like gossip. They could not stop at every casualty or they would all be fixed in apoplectic place. Paper sacks of groceries on their cocked hips, hair tucked into sheepskin collars, they kept walking.

  How could he be sure? It was something his mother had said. He was loath to lend her any credence, and preferred to think of her as an accident moving further into the past, but occasionally she was as large as she’d ever been, scribbling her marginalia on the years she’d left him to. There was a judgmental silence when he was denying himself some vital feeling, and sometimes it came with the image of her hands folded, features placid as a Renaissance cherub’s. This had been her way of denouncing an idea or event, by refusing its projections onto her face. He had seen it anger people, Randy, to the point of violence, ceramic trinkets launched across the room, tree branches snapped back, Say something, say something.

  It was possible he had loved Ben, or at least that Ben had recognized him in some novel way, because he had felt an unfamiliar repulsion. He had turned down Ben’s offer of a meal or a drive to a swim, his grandmother’s chicken, a rope swing Ben said was downright Rockwellian. Even a shower he had declined, although he knew the water pressure would be perfect, the towels fluffed and folded as his never were. When Wright wrote down his phone number in the address book Ben handed him, a fine object embossed and clearly cared for, he changed the fifth digit. It was the first time a man had wanted to know his oldest memory, had tendered a theory on how he smelled. “Like a stick of cinnamon left its podunk town and got a fancy education,” Ben said, then sank his teeth in Wright’s shoulder.

  The conversation was one of few in which she had used the phrase your father, the others being in reference to some genetic trait or strain in temperament she could not account for—the recurring ear infection that kept them up nights the year he was six, Wright’s tendency to take apart machines and rebuild them. Other than this she would only say she had not known him well.

  I can’t say how, but it was like my body knew, the weeks after your father, that something had changed it fundamentally.

  She had confessed this from in front of a mirror, loosened as she always was by her vanity.

  The day after I took the horse on a long ride, which I almost never did, Lloyd, have I ever told you about Lloyd, because your aunt got nervous any time he was out of her sight for more than an hour. It was the first thing I wanted that morning, to squeeze my legs around him and knot my hands in his hair. He was a villain, this horse. A long story, but he shit on my lunch, once, when I left it on the porch to grab a beer from inside. Perfect aim, middle of the sandwich. As though his asshole were another eye.

  He had sat on the toilet, as he did so often, watching his mother. Her fingers along her jaw, her mouth pursing, then relaxing, her shoulders turning to catch the light as she tugged her shirt down or adjusted a high bun.

  On my dismount he was switching a little and I rolled my bad ankle. This had happened a number of times, a side effect of a decade of ballet lessons, but this time I was weirdly disarmed by the pain of it. Charlie found me crying in my room and laughed, put my swollen foot on her lap and talked to it like I wasn’t there. I felt the injury more keenly, is the point, felt betrayed by that tendon! Isn’t that silly? But later, when I knew I was pregnant, it all made sense. I had felt I was responsible for more tha
n myself, that my foot had belonged to or was responsible for more. Always pay attention to the theater of your body.

  In the weeks following the afternoon with Ben, he had felt a quiet corporeal fear, something that altered his behavior in peculiar ways anyone would have noticed had he allowed anyone around. After a shower he stopped toweling himself off on a bath mat, in view of the mirror, instead drying and then dressing behind the curtain. He ate as though he might be caught and punished, barefoot by the fridge, at odd hours, without the proper utensils, forgoing seasoning or any modifying wish. The exercise regimen he’d taken pains to establish, the mat in the corner of his room under magazine photos of triathlons he’d sheepishly pinned there for inspiration, went from daily to never in under a week. He rolled it up and placed it on the highest shelf of his closet without asking himself why, obscuring it quickly with boxes of old books that he brought from back to front. Sweets began waving at him from everywhere. From the rear of a bodega freezer he pulled a coconut Popsicle, the lone survivor of the summer, and he ate it on the walk home in forty-degree weather, taking large sideways bites. In a Polish diner where he sometimes read the newspaper on nights he couldn’t sleep, where the tables were always vaguely adhesive and the disappointed elderly waitresses were always out front smoking, he finished his borscht and blinked and made a beeline to the frosty display case and pointed at the largest slice of something called peanut butter pie. He ate it without stopping once for a drink of water. It was as though, in advance of disappearing, his body wanted to become as substantial as possible, to become more of a burden to the thing that would fight to erase it.

  So this was how he knew, this was why he thought Ben, although it had been a year, and it was a suspicion he kept private, an illicit pet he fed only when alone. It made sense to him, that the first man who had made him want the things he had always been told he couldn’t have, the house with the lights already on when he got there, the domestic squabbles over money and décor, the child who knew and loved his name—it made sense this would also be the man to take their possibility away.

  How had Ben died? Perhaps their friends suspected what Wright believed by how intent he was on answering this question. What did he mean, they said, how had he died. He put the question to them cold, no warning or transition, as they walked uphill in clusters to the parties that had begun to feel like an elaborate performance, in the back rooms of bars between the end of one song and the beginning of the next. How had he died? Like all of them were dying, too quickly, like men three times their age. What did he mean.

  If he was a fool to think there was something of how someone lived in how he died, so be it. But he wanted to know. He would not elaborate. He only repeated the question. How had he died, Ben? Finally, there was someone who could tell him, a man who taught in the same school district Ben had, a nebbishy person who often spoke with a palm across his face. Someone had given him Wright’s phone number and they had arranged to meet at Tosca, where he had shown up early, his collar buttoned too high. Ben had loved it there, the booths as red and cheap as the wine, the waitress who lived in the back and managed the late nights in her gauze robe.

  From the way he said Ben’s name it was clear he had loved him, and also that the feeling had gone long unreturned. He had not been there at the exact moment, only Ben’s sister had, but he had brought groceries often, stood by the blender a foot from where Ben lay and ground ingredients for the repulsive smoothies that might buy a few more hours. So how had he died?

  “In the last two weeks,” he said, “Ben developed this funny habit of rhyming.”

  “Rhyming?”

  “Anything you said to him, he tried to match the last word. Sometimes he couldn’t get the word, only a sound. It made him laugh. His jaw seemed to be the only part of his face that was left. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Forget it. Why?”

  “He was always so witty and I thought maybe this was to cover up for how sedated the morphine made him, or, this might be a reach, but to kind of extend the conversation and make it bigger. He knew there were so many things he wouldn’t get to talk over, so this was his way of covering more ground, getting to say this or that one last time.”

  “And?”

  “What, and? I don’t know. I’m trying to give you what you’re asking for. How did you know him? I never saw you around.”

  “Can you remember a specific rhyme?”

  “Most of them were nonsense. Just words, just noises. Sometimes a phrase—I’d say, ‘I’m just going to get a coffee,’ and he’d go, ‘Happy children are so bossy.’”

  The conversation dried up, then, the disappointment bidirectional. There was always the strange metaphysical hope, in meeting someone who had also loved a person now totally gone, that the exchange of information would somehow remind the dead of their life, return them to it. Instead it was never enough, the salient story already half fallen away, existing only in the invisible ways it changed the person telling it. They didn’t shake hands as they left, make any fake plans to reunite.

  SOME MONTHS INTO HIS BELIEVING this, Braden, who always seemed to understand things about Wright before he had—pointing out the boy he’d go home with before Wright had even seen him, identifying an allergy to wool—sussed it out.

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?” They were walking through the Panhandle, on their long way to the Steinhart Aquarium, a place Braden loved, the only one that kept him from talking.

  “What what is.”

  “Why you’ve been walking around looking like a mugshot.”

  Wright laughed, he grabbed his hand.

  He admitted what he believed in a roundabout way, mentioning only that Ben had died. Braden hailed a cab right there, insisted on it.

  “What about the jellyfish,” Wright said.

  “They don’t have any fucking bones. I think they can wait. I’ll get one, too.” Wright apologized the whole afternoon, for a traffic jam, for the emptiness of the watercooler. At the clinic Braden filled out the forms for him. There were no appointments. The test was new that year, and there were friends of theirs who would not take it. Why confirm your house was haunted if there was nothing to be done about a ghost, went the logic. Braden and Wright waited six hours, avoiding eye contact with the other men waiting, never touching the pamphlets spread on the table before them.

  DEEP INTO THE EVENING THEY returned home and Braden began taking things down from the cupboard: olive oil, cocoa powder, cayenne. He baked a cake in a cast-iron skillet and they ate it with their hands, standing up in socks. No recipe, just some pioneer nonsense, he called it. Still, a little something to celebrate. But the results wouldn’t be back for weeks, Wright said.

  “We’re celebrating the selflessness and sacrifice of me,” Braden said, taking down the secondhand crystal he had polished. “We’re going to have a bottle of wine about it.”

  Wright pawed at the bowl of batter and placed the last in his mouth.

  “Know what I call you,” Braden said. “My Li’l Burden.”

  “Good night, Li’l Burden,” he called, later, from behind the French doors of his room, both their lights out.

  “Fuck you, Braden,” Wright said, the happiest he’d ever been.

  Their tests came back negative at the end of the month and he bawled as he walked sideways down a steep hill, shoving into his mouth potato chips he’d bought blind, relieved to be relieved. For so long he had worried that what he actually wanted was to be eliminated, the choice made for him, no more sunny rooms with people in them.

  7.

  It took up most of a whole room, the mail, in uniform boxes taped and labeled by NASA, and everyone who knew him, few though they were, his mother and some childhood friends, was surprised that Vincent kept it. The letter regarding the forwarding had arrived in the summer of 1984 and he read it standing in the kitchen, barefoot, having just come in from tending to the tomato plant in the backyard. His feet were almost translucent in their a
ge, the metatarsals beneath the skin more pronounced, like the original pencil showing through some painting . . . no longer holding mail addressed to astronauts of your class, the letter said . . . budgetary limitations. He lifted his left foot at forty-five degrees and stood on his right, then switched, an exercise he performed three times a day, morning, afternoon, evening . . . happy to provide forwarding to your home address, or to another address you provide, in perpetuity. Letters and packages from NASA had the same feeling as those from Elise, an ask from your old life that promised to be the last. Two years before she had sent a class ring he’d given her, the university’s lyceum engraved in miniature, no note, and a year before that there was a package from NASA, his old Speedmaster, relinquished by the Smithsonian, which had kept them on display. The museum was returning them to the original astronauts for reasons unclear. By a month after the landing Omega had repurposed the special design and sold it en masse, the go-to gift for fathers and husbands who might measure the inertia of their armchairs. He had imagined some scene in public, a stranger’s hairy wrist held up to point out a made-up bond, and put the watch away.

  His life had become the small acts of discipline that had once punctuated it, the main events blotted out. He washed his car once a week, made his next appointment with the barber as he was paying for the last. His accounting was perfect, his laundry folded as if by ruler.

  Why keep them if you won’t read them, his mother’s face said when she saw the stacks, but she had become, it seemed in the matter of one Sunday, too old to voice this or any other characteristic admonition. Her wheedling little questions were gone from their exchange. He visited and checked after her meals, now, rearranged the TV dinners in the freezer. Her hand and bath towels had begun appearing crumpled on her bathroom floor, and each time he came he folded and rehung them. Once she found him on the tile as he did this and tried to pass him the phone, the cord stretched to its limit.