The View From the Seventh Layer

by Kevin Brockmeier

  At the end of August, a few days before her junior year began, Andrea flew back home. Despite all her efforts to wrest her bedroom into the present, the space seemed strangely alien to her now, and it took the better part of a week for the sensation that she was camping out in some half-forgotten region of her childhood to pass.

  When you have suffered enough damage, you have a choice: you can seal off all the cracks around yourself, putting up a thick casing of diffidence and reserve, or you can let all your protections fall and leave yourself open to every touch, every collision. Andrea—and she was Andrea again now, not Andi Girl—followed the second road. She began experiencing her life with a clarity and intensity she hadn't known before. It wasn't a matter of choice: the smallest nudge from any direction, it seemed, and she would find herself laughing or crying. A song on the radio, a television commercial, a comment made by someone at school—that was all it took. Everything around her appeared to be shining from someplace just under the skin, as if no T-shirt or flagpole or blade of grass was anything more than a pair of hands cupped around a lightbulb, and at night, when she went to bed, she always fell asleep right away, exhausted by the day's continuous play of shapes and colors.

  Had anyone detected the change in her? she wondered. One day, her chemistry teacher, Mr. Fuller, asked her to stay after class so that he could find out why she kept excusing herself to go to the restroom. And there was the time in theater history when I passed her a note that read, Are you all right? You've got this look on your face, and then a second note that read, Not that you don't usually have a look on your face. It would be impossible to have a face without having some sort of look on it. But other than that, no one seemed to have noticed the difference. Sometimes she imagined it was only her spirit drifting past the rows of silver lockers, a tangled wind that no one was ever quite able to see. She looked forward to seventh period, her acting class, when she could take all the pain and delight and confusion she felt and put them openly on display, as if her whole life were just some sort of performance.

  Her mother gave her a car for her birthday, an '87 Honda Civic, and she began driving herself home in the afternoon. She was asked to join the Key Club and the Honor Society, which she did, as well as the Y-Teens, which she didn't. She took a small role in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker. She signed up for a five-session PSAT prep course. In November, when Justin's parents took him off the ventilator, Andrea flew back to Colorado for the funeral. She missed two days of school, telling no one where she had gone except for Rania, her parents, and, months later, me. She was reluctant to need anything too much, or to express her need too publicly. Everything good in the world—everything she loved—seemed to be straining against the tightness of its own beauty. A single ounce of pressure, she thought, and it would all burst open from the inside, vanishing forever.

  Andrea had stopped writing poetry when she was fourteen, shortly after her Sylvia Plath phase, but she decided the time had come to give it another try. She bought herself a journal bound in burnt orange velvet. In class, whenever she was given a few minutes to let her mind wander, she ran her fingers over the nap, smoothing all the fibers carefully in one direction and then carefully back in the other. Sometimes, without thinking, she would begin drawing a word in the velvet—fireplace or tangent, avenue or parsimonious, any random word that happened to come drifting through the air. After a while she would notice the pattern she was making, brush the velvet clear, and slip the journal back into her shoulder bag. If it was January, the trees would be bare outside the window. If it was March, the first few oaks would be leafing out. She loved the feeling of peaceful melancholy that overtook her as she watched the blackbirds sailing over the branches and the gray clouds massing behind them. The air from the heater blew past her shoulders, and the sound of a distant car horn came over the hill, and I don't think she had any idea what people saw when they looked at her.

  Andrea with her hair held back in a simple black band.

  Andrea in her loose cotton shirt with the IMAGINE button over the chest.

  Once in a while, she would perceive someone's stare, and her face would shift into a reflexive little expression of surprise. “I'm sorry, did you ask me a question?” she would say. “My mind was—you know—” and she would make a sound like a firework whistling into the sky. There is no form to this story because it is true, or at least as close to true as I have been able to make it.

  One Friday, the school turned everybody loose at noon so the teachers could attend a training session. Chris Bertram and I were lingering on the patio, trying to decide what to do with ourselves, when Andrea came out the front door with Deborah Holloway, shield ing her eyes with a notebook. We convinced them to join us, and together we set off for the park at the foot of the mountain, where the gutters of the pavilion were stuffed with pine needles and the water from the drinking fountain tasted like iron pipe. Andrea had never spent any time with me away from school before. She was struck by how little difference there was between the way I behaved in the classroom and the way I behaved on the playground, as if a desk and a swing were all the same to me, the one no less frivolous than the other. She was wearing a silver ring with a band that was fashioned into a snake, and I kept taking it off her finger and singing a song: “I'm Sammy the Snake / And I have to confess / That I look and I sound / Like the letter s.”

  Over the next few months she began to see more and more of me. We went to a Fishwagon concert by the river. We performed a scene from The Crucible at a drama tournament. For no reason at all, we bought an old surfboard at a garage sale, the wood beneath the wax already crumbling to punk, and propped it against the door of Rania's house. For a while it seemed to Andrea that I had lifted her free of something she had always believed was implacable—of the endless search for company, those innumerable Fridays and Saturdays she spent driving from parking lot to parking lot hoping to recognize someone's car. One night we took a break from studying in her bedroom, and she twisted her desk lamp around to throw a hand shadow onto the wall. She linked her thumbs together and oscillated her palms. “Look at the beautiful butterfly,” she said, and I transformed my hands into duck bills and started an evil marching chant: “We are ducks. We hate butterflies. We are ducks. We hate butterflies.” There were moments when I could make her laugh so unselfconsciously that she felt like a child again, expanding into her past as she was moving into her future. Sometimes she thought of me as a John, other times as a Ringo.

  She loaned me her journal so I could read her poetry, and I returned it to her with a note written on the velvet: Hi, Andrea. It's me, your journal. My favorite poem, I said, was the one that ended “I gave you my love in an acorn shell, but you left me anyway.” It was a poem about Justin, though she had not yet told me about that part of her life; and when I read it out loud to her, the sound of her own sadness coming out of my voice made her eyes well up with tears. It was a Friday night in late March, and we stopped to eat at a Wendy's, where she gave me the toy car from her kids' meal: a “salad mobile” with lettuce, tomatoes, and a radish on top, which would race forward whenever I wound the spring tight. She was amused by how much I seemed to enjoy it. Afterward, we went to a showing of L.A. Story, and during the coming attractions, when I tried to roll it across her temple, the wheels let go with a whir, snarling her hair up in the axle. I spent the whole two hours of the movie patiently untangling it strand by strand. She could still feel the play of my fingers on her scalp, along with the soft tingle in her stomach, as I drove her home and she told me what had happened in Colorado.

  She was trying to show me that things had changed between us, that I had taken up housing in that small space she reserved for the people she genuinely trusted. The next week, she invited me to dinner with her mother and Jon. She introduced me to her father when he came to town for a business conference. She feigned an argument with me over whether the pencil holders that had been popular when we were kids had been hedgehogs or porcupines—I said hedgehogs, s
he said porcupines.

  We were rehearsing a duet scene from The War of the Roses the afternoon someone shattered the window of her car. “Do you think the Civic will be safe here?” she had asked as we pulled away from the high school in my Pontiac, and for the pleasure of sharing the drive home with her, I had said that I was sure it would. When we returned a couple hours later, we found a rock as heavy as a steam iron sitting on her front seat and jags of glass sticking up out of the upholstery and the carpet. Her stereo was missing, along with a box of her cassettes: The Lightning Seeds, The Sundays, Lenny Kravitz, the Jesus and Mary Chain. This was 1991, and the music she listened to—that we both listened to—announced that we were looking in on the world from its periphery, except for the Lenny Kravitz, which announced that we did not really believe in peripheries.

  I drove Andrea to the gas station down the street so she could call her mother and Jon. Then I waited in my car with her for them to arrive. It was a spring evening, shortly past six o'clock, and the sun was setting over the tops of the repair bays, propelling the long shadows of the pumps onto the grass. The two of us sat there in the middle of my bench seat, Andrea wringing the tail of her shirt in her hands and gently repeating the word motherfucker, motherfucker, as I held her from behind. After a while, I put my lips to the nape of her neck, touching them to the spot where the fine hairs began to taper away.

  This is what I should have been thinking: Andrea is in pain.

  This is what I was thinking instead: I am kissing the back of Andrea's neck.

  Of all my memories of her, this is the one that troubles me the most.

  Andrea watched her senior year pass in a dizzying spin of standardized tests and college application essays. Please tell us about your career goals and any plans you may have for graduate study. What quality do you like best in yourself and what do you like least? What event has most influenced your life? Explain. I was one year older and had left for college at the end of August, enrolling at a university two states away, and she knew that she could not expect to see me until Thanksgiving or Christmas. Suddenly she had more time to spend with her other friends, particularly Rania. The two of them started talking on the phone again, going to movies, trading mix tapes. One night they even went to the craft store and bought a dozen spools of embroidery thread so they could fill a few hours making friendship bracelets, the way they used to when they were kids. Silver for the memories they shared. Blue for the years that had slipped away.

  At school, Andrea was busier than ever. She was elected president of the Drama Club and secretary of Student Council. She played the Wicked Witch of the West in a production of The Wizard of Oz. She wrote an essay on The Metamorphosis for Ms. Greenway's AP English class. Her mother told her that she was thinking about putting their house on the market, but she promised to wait until Andrea had graduated and moved away. At college one day, in the yard beside the library, I came upon two acorn shells fused at the stem, and I cushioned them inside the smallest box I could find, one that had held a staple remover, then sent them off to Andrea in the mail. Three days later, the tiniest package she had ever received was waiting on the table by her front door. A mixture of joy and regret blew through her; she was aware of the feelings I had for her, aware of all the things she had neglected to say to me, aware even of the way I saw her features in the faces of women I didn't know as I walked through campus in my beaten old tennis shoes. And yet already she could sense me beginning to disappear from her life, another grasshopper preparing to tighten its legs and leap away.

  During the last few months of high school, there was a feeling of such great ease in the air that it hardly seemed like school at all to her. She gave a reading of one of her poems at the launch party for the literary magazine. She dedicated an evening a week to volunteering at a soup kitchen. The neighbor's cat died of old age, and a few days later there were two Labrador puppies chasing each other around the puddle by Andrea's mailbox, one called Jarvis and the other called Willie. It was a cold night in April when she dreamed she was a little girl again, watching her father haul all his possessions into the street. Her mother was leaving with him. And so was I. And so was Justin. And so was Rania. And when she woke up she couldn't shake the feeling that it had all really taken place that way: everyone she knew driving off in a big yellow moving van, and she the one—the only one—staying behind. She had hesitated far too long. She had missed her chance, and her childhood had reached out and snared her.

  There were times she believed she would never get out of it.

  But she did get out of it. She went away to college and then to graduate school, to London and Boston and Washington, D.C. She rented an apartment. She found work that was meaningful to her. She thought about me every so often, wondered where I was and how I was doing, whether I still propped my glasses on my forehead when I spoke, whether I sang as much as I used to, whether I could honestly say I was happy. I was living in our hometown again and doing pretty well. I propped my glasses on my forehead so reflexively that I frequently forgot they were there. I still sang, though not as often as I once did, and I was still happy, though not as often as I once was. Sometimes, driving past restaurants that had once been other restaurants, big box stores that had once been wood lots and houses, I imagined that if I could just make the right set of turns, the city would unlock for me, and my car would carry me into the roads of fifteen years ago. From time to time, in the narrow light of a late-autumn afternoon, Andrea would find herself walking past the windows of a high school, and she would remember how it felt to be sitting behind such a window at her cramped wooden desk, looking out at the shadows of the trees stretching over the lawn. She used to be there and now she was here, and all of it, both the freedom and the constraint, had happened in the same lifetime. How was that possible?

  Not long ago, I was having lunch with a teacher of ours from high school, Ms. Goss, who offered me the news that Andrea was engaged to be married. I was startled to feel all the old adoration come tumbling loose inside me, a great surge of it that made me close my mouth and set my fork down on my plate. The look Ms. Goss gave me said that she could see something like contrition on my face.

  “Is she taking his name?” I asked.

  She thought about the question. “I don't know. I don't think so. It doesn't sound like Andrea to change her name, does it? But then it doesn't sound like Andrea to get married, either.”

  “I'm not sure why I should be upset by the idea,” I said. “After all, it's not as if I've been in love with Andrea all these years.”

  Which, of course, was just another way of saying, I've been in love with Andrea all these years.

  But even that is not quite true. The truth is that I am slightly less than half in love with all the other girls I knew back then—with Jennifer and Erika, Vicki and Allison, Ara and Emily—but I am still, to this day, slightly more than half in love with Andrea.

  The last time I saw her was several years ago. We met for coffee at a little restaurant on Kavanaugh, and she told me about her work, traveling to the Middle East as an advocate for democratic solutions to public policy issues. There was a confidence in her voice, a strength of purpose I had never heard from her before. She carried herself like a professional, with skillfully applied makeup and well-cut, sensible clothing. She was beautiful, and I couldn't help but admire her, but I was also saddened by how much she had changed, by the magnitude of the distance she had traveled, the terrible impenetrability of the past. In high school, Andrea wore one long braided strand of hair that trailed past her ear like an ornament from a chandelier. Once, on a spring break trip to New York, she bundled everything she needed for five days into a small canvas backpack.

  “Sometimes I remember the way I used to be,” she said as we sat across the table from each other, “and I'm surprised nobody ever smacked me.”

  I took a long sip of my coffee so that I would not have to answer her. I wanted to tell her that she ought to be more generous to the girl she used to be,
if not out of respect for herself, then out of respect for me, or more specifically for the the boy I used to be, who loved that girl, after all.

  A FABLE WITH SLIPS OF WHITE PAPER SPILLING FROM THE POCKETS

  Once there was a man who happened to buy God's overcoat. He was rummaging through a thrift store when he found it hanging on a rack by the fire exit, nestled between a birch-colored fisherman's sweater and a cotton blazer with a suede patch on one of the elbows. Though the sleeves were a bit too long for him and one of the buttons was cracked, the coat fit him well across the chest and shoulders, lending him a regal look that brought a pleased yet diffident smile to his face, so the man took it to the register and paid for it. He was walking home when he discovered a slip of paper in one of the pockets. An old receipt, he thought, or maybe a to-do list forgotten by the coat's previous owner. But when he took it out, he found a curious note typed across the front: Please help me figure out what to do about Albert.

  The man wondered who had written the note, and whether, in fact, that person had figured out what to do about Albert—but not, it must be said, for very long. After he got home, he folded the slip of paper into quarters and dropped it in the ceramic dish where he kept his breath mints and his car keys.

  It might never have crossed his mind again had his fingers not fallen upon two more slips of paper in the coat's pocket while he was riding the elevator up to his office the next morning. One read, Don't let my nerves get the better of me this afternoon, and the other, I'm asking you with all humility to keep that boy away from my daughter.

  The man shut himself in his office and went through the coat pocket by pocket. It had five compartments altogether: two front flap pockets, each of which lay over an angled hand-warmer pocket with the fleece almost completely worn away, as well as a small inside pocket above the left breast. He rooted through them one by one until he was sure they were completely empty, uncovering seven more slips of paper. The messages typed across the front of the slips all seemed to be wishes or requests of one sort or another. Please let my mom know I love her. I'll never touch another cigarette as long as I live if you'll just make the lump go away. Give me back the joy I used to know.