Turn to page.
You select a mix CD a friend sent you and put it into the stereo, listening as the first song strikes up with an artificial needle hiss. Sometimes, during the slow-lit, lingering afternoons of high school, you would sit down and close your eyes for an entire album, just letting the music wash through you. Every so often back then you might catch yourself swaying your neck or whisking the air with your hands during one of the more expressive passages, but mostly you would lose track of your body altogether, until the last note of the last track faded away and you returned to the four walls of your bedroom as if awakening from a dream.
These days you need something to occupy your other senses while you listen. As the CD plays, you let your eyes travel over your bookcase, following a stepladder of colors from the top shelf to the bottom. This is the test: to see if you can make the entire climb using solely the books with red bindings, say, or solely the books with blue. It is a pointless exercise, but you are secretly pleased when the only color that gives you any trouble is brown.
Midway through the disc is a scratchy recording of Hoagy Carmichael singing “Stardust.” Every time you hear the piece, it makes you think of your grandparents dancing to songs like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?,” holding each other close to songs like “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” falling in love to songs like “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” How such simple tunes could have stirred such emotion in them will forever bewilder you, though no doubt your own grandchildren will someday think of you dipping your shoulders to “This Charming Man” or feeling your heart screw tight to “Hallelujah” with the same feeling of affectionate mystification.
Outside a siren goes racing toward somebody's tragedy. There is a ten-second gap in the music as the noise drowns the instruments out. Then the drums knock through the blare, making room for the guitars, and gradually the song reclaims the room.
The CD ends with Van Morrison singing “Sweet Thing,” a track you never tire of listening to. You love the way it loops and rises and loops around on itself, again and again and again, like a hundred circles stacked one on top of another, and the way Van Morrison's voice seems to carry so much sorrow and so much exultation at one and the same time. It is as if he were calling out to himself from the cusp of some precipitous decline, just young enough and just wise enough to celebrate in the face of all his suffering.
“And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain,” he sings, “and I will never, ever, ever grow so old again.”
There is a part of you that would like to adopt those words as your manifesto.
If you feel a bit hungry,
turn to page.
If you feel a headache coming on,
turn to page.
“Damn, someone's thirsty today,” the boy working the cash register says when you ask him for another refill. He winces as if a firecracker has exploded, lets a glance fly past his shoulder. “Lucky my manager didn't overhear that. He said one more time cursing in front of a customer and he'll serve my ass to me on a silver platter. Look, don't say anything to anybody, all right? Here, I'll let you have this one for free.”
“You don't have to do that.”
“Please. The syrup costs us, like, nine cents. Come on, hand it over.” He fills your cup and fastens a new lid on top. Outside a fire engine is working its siren. The sound spreads open in three distinct phases, dipping slightly, pausing, and then increasing, as if some giant mechanical beast were struggling to release a yawn. You listen as it vanishes down the road.
“We cool?” the boy asks as he gives you back your Coke.
“We're cool.”
You carry the drink outside and across the street into the plaza. A breeze makes the leaves chatter. The sun presses against the crown of your head. One of your shoelaces has come loose, and you prop your foot on a bench to tighten it.
A street performer parades past you, a pair of yo-yos spinning from each of his hands. He sends them looping around the world in matched sets, the symmetry so perfect you might almost imagine you were viewing the scene through a kaleidoscope.
A girl strides out of the bead store on the other side of the square in a T-shirt the color of spicy mustard. There is a message printed across her back in white block letters, but she is too far away for you to make out the words.
It takes you another five minutes to finish your Coke. By the time you have thrown the cup away, you can feel the pressure beginning to mount in your bladder. Maybe three cups was too much. You were so thirsty, though, and you found it next to impossible to stop yourself. Clearly the soda has gone pouring right through you. You duck into a restroom and relieve yourself, then wash up at the sink and step back into the sunlight. You have a touch of heartburn, and you press your hand to your chest, digging the hinge of your knuckles into your ribs and massaging the spot in a tiny circle. It is an old remedy you picked up from some casual gesture you saw a character make on a television commercial. You are not sure whether it really works or whether you simply like the illusion of control it offers.
You intend to start for home, but then you spot the movie rental store on the corner. It might be nice, you think, to pick up a DVD for the afternoon.
If you go inside to rent a movie,
turn to page.
If you continue walking home,
turn to page.
Your medicine cabinet is choked to the corners with expired prescriptions and over-the-counter pain relievers: aspirin, Tylenol, Advil, Bufferin, Motrin, Aleve. It looks like how the inside of a sewing box might look after tumbling down a flight of stairs—a chaos of spools and thimbles.
You take two Advil gelcaps, downing them with a glass of tap water. There is a hair clinging to the wall of the sink, and you turn the faucet on and watch it give a tremor as the outer current splashes against it, then lift free and snake into the drain.
You lie back on your bed and spend a few minutes staring into space. The fan has been adjusted to the lowest possible setting, and the motion of the blades is nearly hypnotic—an endless procession of shadows drifting languidly over the ceiling.
You think about the phone call you received this morning, how quickly the man spoke, then how soft his voice became when he understood that you weren't the person he thought you were. “Oh God, I'm so embarrassed,” he said. It sounded as if he didn't even realize you were listening anymore, as if he were merely talking to himself in some seizure of private humiliation.
You know the feeling well. You can't count the number of times you have remembered one long-gone mortifying act or another and begun firing off a quiet rebuke to yourself, saying it over and over again like a penitent thrashing his back with a switch: so embarrassing, so embarrassing, so embarrassing, so embarrassing.
There was the time you hopped up to sit on someone's counter at a dinner party and cracked the picture frame that had been left lying there.
The time your mother caught you rewrapping the presents you had opened the week before Christmas.
The time you phoned a friend one night as you were getting ready to go to bed and instead of leaving the message you had intended to leave said what you were actually thinking, which was, “I'm in love with you.”
You have learned that it's best not to get yourself started.
You stretch out your limbs and stand up. The blood rushes to your head for a moment. The carpet seems as hard as a board. You are walking down the stairs when your heart clenches tight inside you.
A fist. That's what it feels like—a fist.
There is just enough time for you to think of something you once read in a popular science book before the pain overwhelms you: that if you form your hand into a fist, you'll have an object roughly the size of your heart, and if you wrap your other hand around it, you'll have an object roughly the size of your brain.
Turn to page.
You make a small lunch for yourself, toasting a bagel and topping it with cream cheese and a slice of tomato. As you return
the unused portion of the tomato to the produce drawer, you wonder for what must be the thousandth time whether a tomato is properly considered a fruit or a vegetable. When you were growing up, you were taught that it was a vegetable—or was it a fruit?—but later you learned that it was actually a fruit—or was it a vegetable? You can never remember.
After you have finished eating, you go to the computer to check your e-mail. Susannah has not written back yet, and you find only one message waiting for you: a shipping confirmation for a DVD you ordered. It is buttoned together with a list of other movies you are told you might enjoy but which you know from experience you probably won't.
You spend a few minutes reading the headlines, then a few more minutes fiddling around with a search engine, using it as you so often do to hunt for various people you let slip out of your life when you were too young to understand how much they would one day mean to you. You wonder what it says about you that you never go probing after your own name online, or the names of people you see all the time, but only those people who have disappeared into the world as thoroughly as a drop of water into a lake. To make matters worse, most of the names you find yourself looking for are relatively common—Ann Williams, Tim Carter, John Young. Is the John Young you knew when you were in high school the same John Young who placed seventeenth in the Hospital Hill Half Marathon? He could be. But then he could also be the John Young who produces handmade knives out of sheep's horn and snake wood, or the John Young who sells real estate in Palm Springs, or the John Young whose grandfather passed away last year at the age of eighty-four. You have no way of knowing.
Ordinarily, you might find it saddening, the fact that so many of the figures from your past have been covered over by the anonymity of their lives, but The Baron in the Trees has left you with a lingering feeling of contentment. You can hardly imagine what it would take to discourage you right now.
You log off the Internet, then go to the door and open it to look at the breeze combing through the grass. You hear a ticking coming from somewhere—either the cistern in the closet warming up, you think, or a tree limb tapping against a drainage pipe.
It is a perfect early-fall day, with a wonderful parched quality to the air. It is almost as if it had never rained at all, not once in the entire history of the world. It is only a small pain, at first, the pinch you feel in the hollow of your chest.
Turn to page.
It is curious: the sounds of the neighborhood seem heavy on the air now, but really they are no more distinct than they were before, since the whole aura of ambient noises has become louder right along with them.
Birds and wind currents.
Clocks and ventilation systems.
You hear a helicopter beating at the air, or maybe it is a lawnmower. You hear a set of tires pressing the asphalt. Perhaps the mail truck has come with its morning delivery, you think, but when you look outside, you see only your neighbor backing out of his driveway, his window melting down into its carriage like a sheet of ice. He pulls into the street in a nimbus of hard rock. You recognize the song just as it fades away—Boston's “More Than a Feeling.”
It is a song you will forever associate with rec-room basements thick with speaker fuzz and cigarette smoke, just as “Bad Moon Rising” is your brother's car parked with its wheels on the curb, and “Crazy” is a nightclub with a black marble counter and one small mirror on the wall, and “Come On Eileen” is the arcade room of the state fair when you were still young enough to find the crowds and the din there exciting. Your memory is so packed with the last few decades' worth of pop music that there is barely a phrase in common conversation that can't summon a lyric to your mind. There are times when you think you could fill an entire day simply following their traces from one tune to another.
The sunlight is coming in through the window at a high slant, picking out the ribs of the end table, and you notice they are fleeced with dust. Your housekeeping can be haphazard sometimes. You take a paper towel and wipe the wood clean, catching the spillover in your palm, then dumping it in the trash. Before you have finished, you begin to sneeze.
It is probably the dust, you think, but it could also be your seasonal allergies setting in. You have never understood why your sinuses would cause you such trouble at this time of year. In the spring, when everything is blossoming and drifts of pollen ride the breeze, chalking all the windshields with a fine yellow powder—yes, okay, in the spring it makes sense to you. But why now, in the fall, when everything is drying up and dying?
You sneeze two more times, then a third in quick succession. You decide it would be best to close the window. The sash tends to stick in temperate weather, so you brace your palms against the lip and lean into it. When it doesn't move, you lower your full weight onto your hands.
A noise of strain escapes from you, surprisingly high and mouse-like. You feel a sudden flush of heat. The window is just beginning to fall when something in your heart goes still, wringing the breath out of your body.
Go on to page.
There you are, lying flat on your back, staring into the air as if through a sheet of glass. The pain is not the worst you have ever endured, but it is intense and steady enough that you quickly cease to recognize it as pain at all. It becomes just another background component of your awareness, like the scratching of the insects in the trees, like the gradual churning of sensations on your skin, a simple field upon which to observe your reactions to the world.
You are having trouble sitting up. You feel a pressure against the back of your head. You close your eyes, then open them, and by the time you do, you have lost track of how long you have been lying there. From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire. More and more of them appear, filling the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else.
What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars?
You know that you will never experience anything so beautiful again.
It will be several thousand years before the human race develops a procedure to retrieve the memories of the dead from their bodies. By then the age in which you lived will be recollected as a time of barbarism and brute physical destruction, of interest only to historians of cultural degradation. But in the name of scientific research, a few sample bodies from your century will be exhumed for memory reclamation, and among those selected will be your own.
The technicians will lift you carefully into the sunlight, unwinding your memories like a long, thin thread. The process will not be perfect. Because you died so long ago, only the last few hours of your life will be recoverable—from the moment you returned the milk to the refrigerator to the moment the barbs of light finally flickered from your eyes.
As usual, after the technicians have examined and recorded your memories, they will provide them to the museums for public display. To the surprise of everyone involved, you will prove to be a very popular exhibit. People will wait for hours to get a glimpse of you, some of them returning many times. You will come to be regarded as a sort of cult phenomenon. There are days when the line to your gallery will reach all the way through the entrance hall and across the courtyard, fading like a plume of smoke into the broken red skies of the city.
THE END
Your computer is running slow this morning, and you have to switch it off and allow it to reboot a few times before it begins working properly. Why this should have any effect at all, you couldn't say—after all, no matter how many times you put a bent fork back in a drawer, it won't be any straighter when you take it out again—but it does work, somehow, and you log on to your Internet account and read the day's headlines before tapping out a message to Susannah.
Well, as usual, strange things are happening here on the island,
you begin, and you end with,
So what do you think? Should I have said something other than what I said? Done s
omething other than what I did? Please send help or I will perish when the waters rise.
This is a long-standing joke between the two of you—treating every letter as though you were marooned on a desert island tossing a message out in a bottle. You suppose the joke has endured for so long because you find it satisfying to imagine yourselves as castaways, sitting by the ocean with knotted hair and tattered shorts, enduring the isolation of your own lives as you would a little hump of sand with a coconut tree standing in the middle.
You wait a few minutes for Susannah to respond, but she must be away from the computer, and you log off and slide your chair back under the desk. You hear something outside. When you go to the window, you see a couple of boys bouncing a soccer ball off the asphalt to each other as they stroll down the middle of the street. The noise echoes off the broad side of the house with a hammerlike crack that seems to break open as soon as it hits the air.
In a shoe box in your bureau, there is a photograph of you at the age of eleven or twelve—the same age these boys appear to be—trying to throw a boomerang with your brother. Your tongue is in the corner of your lips. Your brother is visoring his eyes against the sun. You have an impulse to go upstairs and look at the picture. By the time you reach the bedroom, though, you have forgotten what you came there for. You stand in the doorway staring at your walls, your bed, your ceiling fan. You think about the entertainer who used to perform in the shopping plaza down the street, juggling knives with long, flat blades. You think about a wilderness of red sand, soft winds blowing across it in thousands of overlapping ripples.
You walk back downstairs and hear the boys with their soccer ball again. For some reason that triggers the memory of the photograph you wanted to find, but by then the impulse to look at it has abandoned you. You pause there in the hallway for a moment with your hand resting on the wall.
The View From the Seventh Layer Page 13
