The View From the Seventh Layer

by Kevin Brockmeier

  If you decide to put some music on,

  turn to page.

  If you would rather sit down with a book,

  turn to page.

  You circle the perimeter of the room inspecting the new releases: frat-boy comedies and superhero blockbusters that surge across the shelves in wave after swollen wave, with a slender thread of foreign and independent films cutting through the center. Nothing looks very promising to you, and eventually you end up at the staff recommendations rack, always the most intriguing display in the store, with its perfect capsule versions of all the employees' personalities. You have the film purist, the deliberate eccentric, the baggy sentimentalist. You have the child at heart. You have the stranger so far from home.

  “Have you seen this one?” a clerk hovering nearby asks you. He taps his finger against a movie called Ponette, with a little girl lost in pensive rumination on the cover. “It's the best movie in here. Most of the characters are just children. The lead is a four-year-old girl whose mother dies in a car accident. She spends the movie trying to figure out what that means, whether her mother can come back to life, whether God will listen to her if she prays to Him—that sort of thing.”

  “It sounds sad.”

  “Well, it is. But it's charming and funny, too. And beautifully shot. And filled with life and color. And just kind of miraculously authentic all around. The only question is whether your heart is strong enough to take it.”

  The clerk at the front register calls out, “You should rent Breaking the Waves instead.”

  The first clerk indulges a sigh, which leaves you with the impression that you have blundered into the middle of a long-standing feud. “Breaking the Waves is a good movie—no doubt about it. Courageous. Harrowing, even. But you get the sense that Emily Watson is suffering because the director is a sadist, whereas Ponette is suffering because life is painful. Look,” he continues, “it depends on what you want from a movie. If you want art, rent Ponette. If you want sophomoric nonsense masquerading as art”—he scans the shelf marked ETHAN'S PICKS and selects a movie called Dogma—“rent this.”

  The other clerk, the one behind the counter, gives an indignant “Hey!”

  What you truly want from a movie, though you almost never get it, is to have your life changed by it. You want the story to become a part of you, folding itself into your skin and growing like a shoot grafted onto an orange tree. “All right, I'll give it a try,” you say.

  “Excellent. You'll have to let me know what you think.”

  You are following the clerk to the register when you feel a sharp pain in your chest. Your breath surges out of you. Your legs grow weak. And it turns out that your heart was not so strong after all—a pane of glass that shatters when the window opens, a walnut that crumbles when the shell is cracked.

  Turn to page.

  Your vertigo expends itself in a surge of incandescence. You hear the blood beating in your ears—an oceanic rumble with a strange electricity behind it. Everything around you seems to go crooked and tilt to one side. You brace your hands against the window and wait for the sensation to go away. By the time you can see straight again, the boy and his father have passed out of sight, though the skateboarder is still making runs at the bike rack, his arms outstretched in a posture of flying.

  Someone knocks against the inside of the window. You turn around to see the old Greek immigrant upon whose storefront you have been leaning upon gesturing at the glass. Loudly enough for you to hear, he says, “You're leaving smears, you. Go be tired somewhere else,” and makes a shooing motion with his hands.

  You mouth the word sorry, wave an apology, and set off across the plaza. The Greek's business is a secondhand clothing store called—charmingly, you have always thought—The Tired Old Man. The sign above the door depicts a tattered coat draped over the back of a chair. You have always meant to set an hour aside someday to look through his merchandise. Now, though, he is destined to remember you as yet another inconsiderate American, a sort of bush-league window vandal, and you will probably be too embarrassed to walk through the door.

  How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied—or, for that matter, awarded—because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.

  Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward—that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.

  It is as if some invisible giant has taken control of your existence, setting his hands down like walls on either side of you. He has changed your course with each bend of his fingers. He has urged you along with gusts of his breath. He has stripped you of each of your choices until there is only one path for you to take, one turn for you to follow. And at that moment, as you swing past a mailbox, he tips your head back and fills your heart with lead. The weight is like an anchor inside you. It pulls you to the ground.

  Turn to page.

  At this hour, and at this time of year, the window in the roof above your stairwell is directly illuminated by the sun, and as you walk downstairs, it hovers over you like the opening to some other, brighter world, a dazzling square of white. On your way through the kitchen, you hear the refrigerator humming. You nudge it with your shoulder to stifle the noise. Something about the action reminds you of a bull bringing its mass to bear on a wooden gate, though as far as you can remember you have never seen such a thing in your life. Where would the image have come from, you wonder, if not your own experience?

  The house seems too still now without the hum of the refrigerator filling the air. You open the living room window to let in the sounds of the street. Your neighbor is cleaning his car, dunking his washcloth into a plastic bucket and slowly wringing it out. The big drops fall into the water like silver coins. A pair of birds are exchanging notes with each other in gorgeous flurries.

  You are just about to sit down on the couch when the phone rings. You do not recognize the number on the display, but you decide to take the call anyway. The voice on the other end of the line is quiet and obliging, plainly masculine, and it asks for you by name. “Speaking,” you answer.

  “Thank God you didn't go anywhere.”

  The man lunges ahead without stopping to say who he is. There follows a short, fogbound conversation in which he tells you with great emotion about someone named David. David has made it through the surgery. David is in recovery. There was a complication having to do with the anesthesia, but you don't need to worry, because everything is just fine now, and David is going to be all right. You have an uncle David, and you knew a David Summers when you were in high school; one of the waiters at the coffeehouse down the street is named David, and there are a number of other Davids in the middle pages of your address book. But it is not until the man says, “Is Frances there? Put Frances on the phone” that the truth finally dawns on you: he believes he is speaking to a different person altogether, one who just happens to share your name.

  This is too much for the man. You hear a sound like puffs of steam sputtering from a teapot, a sound of heat and pressure, and you realize he is weeping.

  “I'm sorry,” he says. “This is embarrassing. Oh God, I didn't mean to trouble you.”

  He makes a thready little noise of wounded feeling and hangs up.

  You sit there thinking over the conversation. You barely said a word, so how could you have said something wrong? But irrationally you feel a pang of guilt. It is the kind of story you usually share with your friend Susannah. You wonder whether she is home.

  Do you call Susannah on the phone?

>   If so, turn to page.

  Do you send her an e-mail instead?

  If so, turn to page.

  The grocery store is swarming with young parents and college students, nightshift workers and middle-aged businessmen, all trying to get their shopping done on a sunlit autumn Saturday.

  You make your way slowly down each of the aisles, stopping to wait for a little girl to root through the coloring books and for an elderly man to pick out his birdseed. You are hanging back from a tangle of carts by the baked goods counter when an image comes to you of Susannah thinking of you with exasperation. A flush of embarrassment makes you tingle from head to toe. You can feel your fingers buzzing and prickling against the handle of the shopping cart. Even when you shake them, drawing a look from the stock boy unloading the crouton boxes, the sensation does not go away.

  You work your way through the grocery list you keep posted on your refrigerator, scratching your purchases off one by one.

  Broccoli—check.

  Sweet potatoes—check.

  English muffins, ginger ale, milk, eggs, laundry detergent—check, check, check, check, and check.

  Your shopping cart has a trick wheel that keeps popping around on its axle, causing the frame to lurch to the left with an indignant rattling noise. The store's intercom system is malfunctioning, but no one has bothered to turn off the music. You recognize a poor translation of the Five Stairsteps' “O-O-H Child” in the rasps and hisses trickling down from the ceiling.

  You stop at the greeting card rack to find a card for your brother's birthday. When you were ten or eleven, too young to have much of your own spending money, you saw a particular birthday card at a gift store in the shopping mall. It featured a lineup of animals on the front, standing side by side as if posing for a school picture: “Hippo birdie two ewe. Hippo birdie two ewe. Hippo birdie deer ewe. Hippo birdie two ewe.” You have been searching for another copy ever since. It is unfailingly strange to you, the way some random object that went sailing through your childhood for no more than two minutes can still mean something to you so many years later.

  You do not find the card, of course, so you pick out a different one and take it to the register. You pay for your groceries and wheel your cart into the parking lot. The sun is shining down on the asphalt. The prickle in your fingers has spread like a rash through the rest of your body. You feel a grasping sensation in your chest. You're finding it hard to keep walking. You think perhaps you should take a nap.

  Turn to page.

  “I have,” you say. “And I think you have, too. In fact, I'm sure you have. Don't you remember that time with the kid and his stun glove?”

  You are talking about the night a high school boy came into the coffeehouse with his science fair project—a glove he had wired to a model airplane battery so that it would deliver a mild electric shock through the index finger. “Now, this is just a prototype,” he kept saying as he fiddled with the current. “The real version will have a lot more juice to it.” But a few minutes later, when he reached for the calzone he had ordered, the battery discharged itself all at once, and the calzone popped open in a geyser of ricotta and marinara sauce.

  “Don't tell me you weren't happy then. I was here when the smoke cleared. I saw the look on your face.”

  David nods, laughs, nods again. “Good times.”

  An ambulance is coasting to a stop at the corner when suddenly its lights begin to flash and it pulls away in a burst of noise. “I've always wondered—do you think they just drive around the streets waiting for something to go wrong?” he asks. “Seems like a waste of gasoline to me.”

  The manager gives him a two-fingered whistle, and he says, “Uh-oh, that's me. Catch you later,” rushing off to the counter with a tray of empty plates in his hands.

  You have already finished your chai, but you upend the mug and tap the last few drops into your mouth. The maneuver does something strange to your inner ear, and you become light-headed. You close your eyes and rest your forehead in your hands. The room is crowded. The conversations around you seem to rise to a moment of crystalline poise and then dash against the wall, again and again, like waves breaking over one another as they come into shore. You feel as if you could wade into the sound and float out to sea. It takes a minute for the sensation to fade away and by the time it does, someone has collected your mug and your water glass and left the check for you to pay.

  You watch as the morning sunlight, so bright inside the room when you first came in, travels a few last inches across the polished cedar and passes through the window. A coffee grinder screams out with a guttural wail. A piece of silverware drops to the floor, springing end over end. You would like to say good-bye to David, but he has either disappeared into the kitchen or gone upstairs, and it looks as if you will have to catch him the next time. You leave a five-dollar bill on the table and stand up.

  If you head out into the plaza again,

  turn to page.

  If you stop off at the bathroom to wash your hands,

  go on to page.

  It takes you only a few minutes to walk from the plaza to your front door. As you stride down the street, your neighbor passes you in his car. He waves and taps his horn, the guitar strains of Boston's “More Than a Feeling” trailing in the wind behind him. A dog feints toward you on the sidewalk, but swings back around when her owner shouts, “Zelda! Hyah!” as if he were urging on a horse.

  The air carries a slight scent of burned matches, a smell you have always associated with the first days of fall: how the leaves will soon turn crisp and come loose from the trees, how the evenings will begin to bite into the afternoons. Something about the smell makes you lighthearted. On your way to the door, you flick the stiff red flag of your mailbox, and it springs back into place with a birchy thwack.

  You go to your kitchen and pour yourself a glass of water. There is a long message waiting for you on your answering machine. It commences with a sigh: “I can't believe you're not home. Listen, call me back as soon as you get this message. David is in recovery. There was a complication, but you don't need to worry about that, everything is going to be fine, it's just . . .” The man on the machine takes a ragged breath. You wonder if he is crying. “Never mind. It doesn't matter. The important thing is that David is going to be okay. I'll fill you in on the details when you call me back. Oh, and tell Frances that he was asking about the two of you before they put him under. All right. I guess that's it. All right.”

  It is not until the last few sentences that you realize the man must have dialed the wrong number. You do in fact know several Davids—there is your uncle David, the David who rode the bus with you in high school, the David who waits tables at Sufficient Grounds—but as far as you can remember, you have never known a Frances in your life. You play the message once more, listening for a callback number, but you fail to hear one. The caller ID display on your phone shows only an “out of area” notice, and since the man did not even leave his name, there is no way for you to track him down and explain his mistake.

  You wander into the living room, where you absentmindedly scan the titles on your bookcase. You lean back against the arm of your couch. You are still nurturing an inexplicable cheer, and you wonder if you ought to feel worse for the man than you do.

  There is something wrong with your equilibrium suddenly, something wrong with your legs. You forget the question you were asking yourself. You do not even realize you have fallen until you feel the carpet scratching the back of your neck.

  Turn to page.

  You head toward the church at the open edge of the plaza. It was built nearly fifty years ago, long before the local church boom, and its family of parishioners is small but dedicated. The building is a modest structure of oak and limestone, only a single square steeple rising above the trees to impale a corner of the sky. Because it is Saturday, the parking lot is essentially deserted, with only a pair of empty white church vans waiting in the drive. You are in the habit of hosting little int
erior debates with the declarations posted on the illuminated marquee, arguing the finer points of theology, but today the message is

  WHATS MISSING FROM OUR CH CH?

  UR!

  and you suppose you can't argue with that.

  The yard is dotted with dozens of elms and willows, clustered together so that their trunks lean against one another and their branches interlace. The bird-haunted stillness of the place makes you want to rest there for a while. You find a bench beneath one of the willows and sit down. You begin to feel tired and lie back with your feet dangling off the end, staring up into the canopy of branches. The openings between the leaves keep shrinking and expanding as the trees dance slowly in the wind, lending a beating quality to the sunlight that you find almost hypnotic.

  Once, you were staying in a cabin with your family when the electricity went out. You were four years old at the time, and afraid of the dark, and when you started to cry, your parents brought you a camper's flashlight, the kind with a broad, flat base and a lens as big around as a lantern. You stood it upright on your chest, pointing the beam at the ceiling, and it was not long before you noticed the light shifting its center back and forth between a pair of wooden rafters. Gradually you came to realize that what you were seeing was your heartbeat, its pulse transmitted by the flashlight, throbbing above you just as the sunlight is now throbbing between the leaves of the willow.

  You can't recall the last time this incident occurred to you, though the memory is a good one. Why is it that certain moments come to your mind every few days and other moments almost never? It is a mystery to you. Then your heart opens up in your breast, and the mystery does not concern you anymore.