The View From the Seventh Layer

by Kevin Brockmeier

  “What's that?”

  “Your pen.” He motions toward Jacob's hand. “It's busted.”

  Sure enough, the ballpoint pen Jacob has been carrying has left a gummy black stain on his palm, so thick that it crackles when he flexes his fingers. He notices an ugly black streak at the belt-line of his pants, and another on his satchel, and, as he makes his way to the bathroom to clean himself off, another on the door of the mail room. He is like a character in a comic strip, he thinks, leaving a dotted line of filth behind him. With a little soap and water he is able to wash most of the ink off his skin, but a bruiselike trace of gray remains on his palm, thickening to black where it has collected inside the lines. It will be another full week before the mark fades away entirely.

  Jacob takes the elevator up to his office and checks his voice mail. There are three messages waiting for him. The first is from Audrey: “Jacob, listen, I'm not feeling so well. If you get this message, I need you to come home and give me a ride to the clinic. The sooner the better. Please hurry.”

  The second, also from Audrey, says, “Jacob, where are you, Jacob? I'm not kidding, I need you to—” She lets out a gasp. “Jesus, it's like a soldering iron. All right, I'm going to try to make it to the clinic on my own. I want you to meet me there as soon as you get this message. Do you hear me? As soon as you get this message.”

  The third message is from Dr. Phillips at the college health clinic: “Jacob, this is Nate Phillips—um—over at Health Services. Listen, we need you to come in right away. Don't worry, Audrey is going to be okay. But I'm afraid there's been an accident with the baby.”

  When did Jacob's baby first notice the heartbeat that enveloped him, the seawatery amniotic fluid in which he floated? Was there a moment when his consciousness began to stir and he knew he was alive? Sometime in the months following his conception, he must have undergone the transformation from a simple collection of cells and enzymes to an individual human being, from a process of assembly to the person being assembled. Jacob almost believes that he can imagine what it was like. His baby lay in the warmth and buoyancy of the darkness, immersed in a sound so engulfing that it seemed like just another kind of silence. He listened to the roar of his own blood and to the roar of the blood that surrounded him. There was the occasional tick of something settling into place. He noticed a mild gurgling sound that rose up from out of nowhere and he could not be sure whether the sound was something he heard or something he was.

  Now and then the baby felt a soft elastic pressure against his skin—it was Audrey pushing down on her stomach with her hand, though he could not have known that—and he threw his head back and over to the side in order to roll. Audrey stacked three quick breaths on top of one another and sneezed. The baby dove and turned like a fish. He liked to move when Audrey was still, and to rest when she was moving. Her footsteps reverberated through his body like an incantation.

  His thumb was tiny, the size of a cherry pit, and sometimes, without trying, he would find that he had fit it into his mouth. He could taste a salty, coppery flavor that seemed infinitely familiar to him. The gentleness of the sensation was everything he knew. And because he did not yet exist in synchronicity with time, with no memory of the past, and no expectation of the future, he was able to believe that it had been there forever.

  Did he realize what was happening when his heart stopped beating and his muscles went limp?

  What did he apprehend in that one brief instant before the light filled his head?

  If the baby had lived, he would have been a boy named Nicholas.

  Jacob repeats the name to himself as he goes sprinting across the campus. Nicholas, he thinks. Nicholas and Audrey. Nicholas and Jacob and Audrey. Though he leaves his office as soon as the doctor's message finishes playing, taking a shortcut across the glass atrium of the Fine Arts Building, then cutting through the alley behind the cafeteria, he can tell by the dwindling number of cars in the parking lot that a large portion of the afternoon has passed.

  The early-evening patient lag has commenced at the health clinic, and the waiting room is nearly empty. A man Jacob has never seen before is staffing the admissions desk where Audrey usually works. Nobody has to tell Jacob what has happened. He knows in his gut that Audrey has suffered a miscarriage. But there is still a part of him that has yet to accept the situation as fact, a part of him that is waiting for someone to utter the words out loud.

  He gives the desk clerk a few seconds to finish slotting a patient file onto its shelf. Then he interrupts him with, “Excuse me, I got a call from Dr. Phillips a while ago. My girlfriend, Audrey, is—”

  “Ah. Which would make you Jacob, right? Audrey's Jacob. Yes, the doctor called you, but that was two and a half hours ago. Don't you realize what time it is?”

  Though Jacob has yet to replace his missing watch, he continues to check his wrist for the time once or twice every day. He feels like a fool whenever he catches himself doing it. To the average person, he supposes, it must look as though he is bowing his head in embarrassment—as though he is only barely managing to keep himself from covering his face with his hand. “I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't.”

  “Well.” It might be the first time he has ever actually heard a man tut. “Audrey was transferred to St. Vincent's at four o'clock this afternoon. I presume you're on foot. Would you like me to phone a cab to take you to the hospital?”

  “Yes, I would appreciate that—” He pauses to let the clerk fill in his name.

  “Monty.”

  “I would appreciate that, Monty. Listen, can you tell me what's wrong with Audrey?”

  The clerk shakes his head. “No, I think you'd better wait for one of the doctors to give you that information. I'm not qualified.”

  By the time Jacob arrives at the hospital, the sun has fallen into the treetops, and the sky has taken on the motionless quality of a peaceful midspring evening—a pale blue, just beginning to darken to red, and stitched together by the condensation trails of half a dozen airplanes. Jacob pays the cabdriver and then finds his way to the reception area, where a nurse directs him to the obstetrics ward on the third floor. The waiting room is almost deserted, just like the one at the health clinic. The glowing panel of a vending machine flickers on and off with a barely audible ticking noise. An old man in hard-soled shoes and a fedora sits paging through a tattered magazine. A custodian walks by carrying a push broom over his shoulder.

  It takes Jacob a few minutes to find a doctor who can tell him what has happened to Audrey. Placental abruption: those are the words the doctor uses, and he says that although most women go into delivery within fourteen days of termination, the hospital might need to induce labor “if it looks like your wife isn't cooperating. Look, I'm sorry for your loss,” he tells Jacob, placing a meaty red hand on his shoulder. “But all the indications are that Audrey—it is Audrey?”

  Jacob nods.

  “That Audrey is going to come through this just fine. There's no reason why the two of you won't be able to try again.”

  A great tidal flood of relief spreads through Jacob: relief that he knows what has happened; relief that Audrey is out of danger; even, to his surprise, relief at the prospect that the two of them might still have a child together. It seems that, without his awareness, something has locked together inside him, tumbling to one side by the very slightest of degrees. He has figured out whatever it was he was waiting to figure out. He feels an overwhelming tenderness for Audrey, an irresistible desire to comfort her. “Can you show me which room she's in?” he asks the doctor.

  “She's right down the hall—go past the swinging doors and it's the first room on your left.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  Jacob finds her lying down along the exact center of her bed, entirely hidden beneath the immaculate white sheets except for her head, which is propped up on two thick pillows. She reminds him of an overturned dressmaker's model he once saw: heavy with the weight of its body, fixed in its own curves. The skin of her
face is colorless and slack. Her hair is damp, and she has tucked it behind her ears.

  She tracks him with her eyes as he crosses the room, but does not say anything until he pulls a chair up to the bed and brushes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Oh, Jacob,” she whispers, and before she can go on, her face crumples and she begins to cry.

  His first instinct is to hush her and hold her close to him, to pat her back as a parent would a child, but Audrey has always hated being hushed, so he stops himself and continues brushing her cheek. “It's all right,” he says. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  “It's not going to be okay. It's not. I lost the baby. Where have you been all day?”

  “I was in class this afternoon, and then I had a meeting with Professor Moser. I didn't have my phone on me, Audrey. I'm sorry.”

  “Dr. Phillips had to drive me here from the clinic.”

  “I know.” He watches her take a deep breath, then clench her jaw as though a fist has gripped her stomach. He says to her, “You're not still in pain, are you?”

  “No. The doctors said that that part was over.”

  “Have they told you what's going to happen next?”

  She nods and shuts her eyes. Then she brings her hands to her face to massage her forehead. The sheets rise up in a pair of slowly moving finlike ridges that subside back into place as soon as she has worked her elbows free. She is the only woman Jacob has ever loved.

  “Here, let me do that for you,” he says.

  She lets her hands fall to her chest, and he begins rubbing the soft notches of her temples with his fingers, tracing endless tiny circles over the stray wisps of brown hair.

  After a while she asks, “Have you been in a fistfight with somebody?”

  It is such an unusual question that he has to laugh. “Of course not. What do you mean?”

  “Your hand,” she asks. “What happened to your hand?”

  “Oh, that. I broke a pen. I got ink all over myself.”

  She nods, satisfied. A patient walks down the hallway wheeling an infusion bottle on a tall metal stand, his loose clothing rustling in the draft from the overhead vents. Audrey lifts her head to watch him shuffle past the door. Then she falls back onto her pillow, giving a long exhalation through her nostrils. Jacob can feel it blowing against the side of his face. She begins to cry again. “I really wanted this baby,” she says.

  “I know you did.”

  “I'm so exhausted.”

  “Then you should let yourself rest. Don't worry. I talked to the doctor, and he says we can try again whenever we're ready.”

  He sees Audrey's shoulders go tense, hears the mattress creak as her body bears down against it. At first he imagines it must be some spontaneous expression of gratification, the final tightening of the spring before the watch begins to tick.

  But then she grits her teeth and says, “We can try again?”

  “That's what the doctor told me.”

  Her answer is slow and quiet. “It's been six months, and finally, after all this time, you tell me we can try again. Now you say that? I absolutely cannot believe you.” She grips his hands, which are still reflexively massaging her temples, and sets them aside like a couple of broken toys. “Please leave, Jacob.”

  “No, you don't understand. I—”

  “Get out,” she tells him, and then she says it louder: “Get out!” And she must find it satisfying to repeat the words, because she keeps yelling them even as he stands up and backs away—“Get out! Get out! Get out!”—the venom rising in her voice as he passes through the door and out of sight.

  As he stands in the hallway trying to decide what to do—should he leave Audrey to her grief and anger, or should he go back in and begin the long work of explaining himself?—the answer to his other dilemma, the one he has been considering for the past two years, comes to him in an instant. It is like the concussive burst of a camera flash. He knows, or believes he knows, what Thomas Aquinas comprehended that night in his cell, what Friedrich Nietzsche perceived as he watched the horse trembling beneath the blows of the whip. He knows why the two men laid aside their pens.

  Both of them had spent their lives as thinkers and writers attempting to repair the material of the past. How could the past be salvaged? How could it be used to prepare the way for the future? Aquinas joined the philosophy of Aristotle with the teachings of the Church, showing how the mechanisms of logic might open up a pathway to God. Nietzsche concluded that the traditions of Christianity were a burden that must be cast aside so that the human race could achieve the nobility that was its true inheritance. They both had such hope for the dawning era, such confidence in mankind's ability to transform itself. And then, Jacob believes, they were given a glimpse of the future. They observed the brutality in whose service their ideas would be employed, the cruelty and the barbarism. They witnessed the centuries of suffering that lay ahead. They saw how the writings of Aquinas would lead directly to the horrors of the Inquisition and how those of Nietzsche would lead to the savagery of the Second World War.

  Aquinas received his vision in a candle that burned like a stake.

  Nietzsche received his vision in a whip that fell like a thousand bombs.

  And after their visions were disclosed to them, they folded their hands together and never wrote another word. They wished their ideas had never been set to paper.

  Jacob waits in the stillness of the obstetrics ward, where the only sound he can hear is a hoarse voice telling him to get out, get out. There is no change machine, he thinks. The past is irreparable and so is the future. He presses his palms to the wall and listens to Audrey weeping for the child they have lost.

  THE YEAR OF SILENCE

  1.

  Shortly after two in the afternoon, on Monday the sixth of April, a few seconds of silence overtook the city. The rattle of the jackhammers, the boom of the transformers, and the whir of the ventilation fans all came to a halt. Suddenly there were no car alarms cutting through the air, no trains scraping over their rails, no steam pipes exhaling their fumes, no peddlers shouting into the streets. Even the wind seemed to hesitate.

  We waited for the incident to pass, and when it did, we went about our business. None of us foresaw the repercussions.

  2.

  That the city's whole immense carousel of sound should stop at one and the same moment was unusual, of course, but not exactly inexplicable. We had witnessed the same phenomenon on a lesser scale at various cocktail parties and interoffice minglers over the years, when the pauses in the conversations overlapped to produce an air pocket of total silence, making us all feel as if we'd been caught eavesdropping on one another. True, no one could remember such a thing happening to the entire city before. But it was not so hard to believe that it would.

  3.

  A handful of people were changed by the episode, their lives redirected in large ways or small ones. The editor of a gossip magazine, for instance, came out of the silence determined to substitute the next issue's lead article about a movie star for one about a fashion model, while her assistant realized that the time had come for her to resign her job and apply for her teaching license. A lifelong vegetarian who was dining in the restaurant outside the art museum decided to order a porterhouse steak, cooked medium rare. A would-be suicide had just finished filling his water glass from the faucet in his bathroom when everything around him seemed to stop moving and the silence passed through him like a wave, bringing with it a sense of peace and clarity he had forgotten he was capable of feeling. He put the pill bottle back in his medicine cabinet.

  Such people were the exceptions, though. Most of us went on with our lives as though nothing of any importance had happened until the next incident occurred, some four days later.

  4.

  This time the silence lasted nearly six seconds. Ten million sounds broke off and recommenced like an old engine marking out a pause and catching spark again. Those of us who had forgotten the first episode now remembered it. Wer
e the two occasions connected? we wondered. And if so, how? What was it, this force that could quell all the tumult and noise of the city—and not just the clicking of the subway turnstiles and the snap of the grocery-store awnings, but even the sound of the street traffic, that oceanic rumble that for more than a century had seemed as interminable to us as the motion of the sun across the sky? Where had it come from? And why didn't it feel more unnatural?

  These questions nettled us. We could see them shining out of one another's eyes. But a few days passed before we began to give voice to them. The silence was unusual, and we were not entirely sure how to talk about it—not because it was too grave and not because it was too trivial, but because it seemed grave one moment and trivial the next, and so no one was quite able to decide whether it mattered enormously or not at all.

  5.

  A stand-up comedian performing on one of the late-night talk shows was the first of us to broach the subject, albeit indirectly. He waited for a moment in his act when the audience had fallen completely still and then halted in midsentence, raising one of his index fingers in a listening gesture. A smile edged its way onto his lips. He gave the pause perhaps one second too long, just enough time for a trace of self-amusement to show on his face, then continued with the joke he had been telling.

  He could not have anticipated the size of the laugh he would receive.

  6.

  The next morning's newspapers had already been put to bed by the time the comedian's routine was broadcast. The morning after that, though, the first few editorials about the silence appeared. Then the radio hosts and TV commentators began to talk about it, and soon enough it was the city's chief topic of conversation. Every family dinner bent around to it sooner or later, every business lunch, every pillow talk. The bars and health clubs all circulated with bets about the phenomenon: ten dollars said the government had something to do with it, twenty said it would never happen again.