Thirteen Ways of Looking

by Colum McCann

  It is too early yet to call but she keys the phone alive anyway and touches the ridges of the numbers, a rehearsal.

  Out beyond the outpost, nothing but the dark and the white frost on the land. The stars themselves like bulletholes above her.

  8

  He wants desperately to create gunfire across the Afghan hills, or to see a streak of light that is not just a metaphor—an RPG perhaps, or the zip of an actual bullet into one of the sandbags—to force a tracerline across the reader’s brain, to ignite alternative fireworks on the eve of the new year, and to increase the intensity of the possible heartbreak.

  But the simple fact is that the Afghan night remains quiet, no matter what he imagines, not even the howl of a stray dog, or the faint hint of voices in the outpost.

  At two minutes to midnight Sandi drops the balaclava from between her teeth and leans across to pick up the satellite phone once more. (He has an inkling now of what she might say to her son, or rather Kimberlee’s son.) Sandi clicks the flashlight on the front of her helmet, thumbs the phone on forcefully. The front panel lights up. She has been given a code. She takes off her gloves in order to dial the numbers precisely. She has a botched tattoo on the flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger, the initials of someone else’s name from long ago, she does not think of him anymore.

  It is midnight in Afghanistan and early afternoon in South Carolina.

  9

  He is writing this (almost) last part now in France where he is traveling after a book event. It is the middle of September and deadline is looming. Some things he knows for sure—Sandi will not die, she will simply pick up the phone, she will dial through, she will call her lover and her lover’s son, and she will simply say, “Happy New Year,” in the most ordinary way, and they will return the greeting, and life will go on, since this is what our New Year’s Eves are about, our connections, our bonds, no matter how inconsequential, and the story will be quiet and slip its way into its own new year.

  10

  Inside the kitchen on North Murray Avenue, Kimberlee stands at the counter, with her hands webbed wide, waiting for the call. Spread out in front of her is the prospect of a feast—chopped peppers, onions, a half pound of oysters, a cup of cooked shrimp, tomatoes, sprigs of thyme, lemon, lime, olive oil, salt, three cloves of garlic for the bouillabaisse she has planned.

  Kimberlee has placed a second wineglass at the end of the table. She is thirty-eight years old, tall, slim, pretty, a university professor. She aches for the call. She has not talked to Sandi in a week, since just after Christmas, when they argued about the length of Sandi’s tour. The call itself has become a distant memory, a barely remembered pulse. Kimberlee listens to the wine gurgle against the side of the glass. This to her is the essence of the season: the loneliness, the longing, the beauty. She reaches for a spoon and begins to stir.

  11

  It’s late September, and he is seriously deadlined now, but he is struck by the notion that the story is endless. He could stay with Kimberlee, or he could return to Afghanistan, or he could slide into the past, or he could follow Joel down to the bleachers with his sweetheart later tonight (let’s call her Tracey), or he could descend the hill to where the other Marines are having their party, or he could follow the path of a satellite, or he could go back to Sandi’s original lover, or he could summon in the snow to swirl across the night.

  He is in Normandy by the sea. The waves ribbon and buckle on the shores of Étretat.

  12

  He cannot get this phrase out of his mind: The living and the dead.

  13

  How is it that a particle of a voice gets transmitted down a telephone line? How is it that Sandi summons up a simple phrase, and the muscles in her throat contract? How is it that Kimberlee hears a sound and already her hand is moving through space to reach for the white kitchen telephone? How is it that Joel feels a pang of desire for Tracey? (What exactly will those bleachers look like at midnight?) (And who, by the way, is Joel’s father?) (And what is it that Kimberlee teaches in university?) (Did she meet Sandi on a college campus?) (What might Sandi have been studying?) (When did Sandi move from Ohio?) (Did she join the Marines after a breakup?) (Was she married before she met Kimberlee?) (What is that initial tattooed on her hand?) (Does she want to have a child of her own?) How is it that a voice travels halfway around the world? Does it go through underwater cables, does it bounce off of satellites? How does a quark transmit itself to another quark? How many seconds of delay are there between Kimberlee’s voice and Sandi’s? Could a bullet travel that distance without them knowing? Could there now be a death at the end of this story? (Are there any female engagement teams in the Kerengal Valley?) (Is there even such a thing as a Browning M-57?) How private is the phone call? Who might be listening in? Can we create a brand-new character so late on, let’s say an agent in Kabul, a malevolent little slice of censorship, eavesdropping in on Sandi? Can we see him there, with his headphones, his heartlessness, his bitterness, his rancor?

  And what about his own childhood New Year’s Eves in Dublin? Could he disappear back to them? What was that song his father used to sing? What about those days when he used to run out into the Clonkeen Road at midnight, banging saucepans to ring in the new year? What about that sense of promise the Januarys used to bring to his boyhood?

  But more important—and perhaps most important—what happens to Sandi when she gets through on the telephone? What sort of feeling will rifle through her blood when she hears Kimberlee’s voice? What great desire might arc between them? Or what sort of silence might hollow itself down the telephone line? What will happen if they argue once again? Will Sandi describe the bunker where she sits? Will she try to articulate the darkness? Will those fine teeth chatter in the cold? Will Kimberlee open up immediately and make her young lover laugh? Will the white wine disappear from the glass? Will she talk about the bouillabaisse? Will she even use the word love? What will Joel’s first words be to Sandi? Will he tell her about Tracey? Will he tell her that he will go down to the bleachers tonight? Will Joel’s father (let’s call him Paul, living up north, in a college town in New Hampshire, a biologist, an anti-war activist) ever hear any of this? How many years has he been estranged from Kimberlee? Has Sandi ever met him? How long will the phone call eventually last? What happens if the satellite suddenly fails?

  Where will his own children be this New Year’s Eve?

  How do we go back to the very simplicity of the original notion? How do we sit with Sandi in her lonely outpost? How do we look out into the dark?

  (And who, anyway, was that dead Marine?)

  13 redux

  The phone rings: it rings and rings and rings.

  It was their first Christmas in Galway together, mother and son. The cottage was hidden alongside the Atlantic, blue-windowed, slate-roofed, tucked near a grove of sycamore trees. The branches were bent inland by the wind. White spindrift blew up from the sea, landing softly on the tall hedges in the back garden.

  During the day Rebecca could hear the rhythmic approach and fall of the waves against the shore. At night the sounds seemed to double.

  Even in the wet chill of the December evenings, she slept with her window open, listening to the roll of the water sounding up from the low cliffs, rasping over the run of stone walls, sweeping toward the house, where it seemed to pause, hover a moment, then break.

  On Christmas morning she left his present by the fireplace. Boxed and wrapped and tied with red ribbons. Tomas tore the package open, and it fell in a bundle at his feet. He had no idea what it was at first: he held it by the legs, then the waist, turned it upside down, clutched it dark against his chest.

  She reached behind the tree and removed a second package: neoprene boots and a hood. Tomas stripped his shoes and shirt: he was thin, strong, pale. When he pulled off his trousers, she glanced away.

  The wetsuit was liquid around him: she had bought it two sizes too big so he could grow into it. He spread his arms wide and w
hirled around the room: she hadn’t seen him so happy in months.

  Rebecca gestured to him that they would go down to the water in a few hours.

  —

  THIRTEEN YEARS OLD AND THERE was already a whole history written in him. She had adopted him from Vladivostok at the age of six. On her visit to the orphanage, she had seen him crouched beneath a swing set. His hair was blond, his eyes a pellucid blue. Sores on his neck. Long, thin scars on his lower back. His gums soft and bloody. He had been born deaf, but when she called out his name he had turned quickly toward her: a sign, she was sure of it.

  Shards of his story would always be a mystery to her: the early years, an ancestry she knew nothing about, a rumor that he’d been born near a rubbish dump. The possible inheritances: mercury, radiation sickness, beatings.

  She was aware of what she was getting herself into, but she had been with Alan then. They stayed in a shabby hotel overlooking the Bay of Amur. Days of bribes and panic. Anxious phone calls late in the night. Long hours in the waiting room. A diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome gave them pause. Still, they left after six weeks, swinging Tomas between them. On the Aeroflot flight, the boy kept his head on her shoulder. At customs in Dublin, her fingers trembled over the paperwork. The stamp came down when Alan signed. She grabbed Tomas’s hand and ran him, laughing, through Arrivals: it was her forty-first birthday.

  The days were good then: a three-bedroom house in Stepaside, a series of counselors, therapists, speech experts, and even her parents to help them out.

  Now, seven years on, she was divorced, living out west, her parents were gone, and her task had doubled. Her savings were stretched. The bills slipped one after the other through the letter box. There were rumors that the special school in Galway might close. Still, she wasn’t given to bitterness or loud complaint. She made a living translating from Hebrew to English—wedding vows, business contracts, cultural pamphlets. There was a literary novel or two from a left-wing publisher in Tel Aviv: the pay was derisory, but she liked stepping into that otherness, and the books were a stay against indifference.

  Forty-eight years old and there was still a beauty about her, an olive to her skin, a sloe to her eyes, an aquiline sweep to her nose. Her hair was dark, her body thin and supple. In the small village she fit in well, even if she stood at a sharp angle to the striking blondness of her son. She relished the Gaeltacht, the shifting weather, the hard light, the wind off the Atlantic. Bundled up against the chill, they walked along the pier, amongst the lobster pots and coiled ropes and disintegrating fishing boats. The rain slapped the windows of the shuttered shops. No tourists in winter. In the supermarket the local women often watched them: more than once Rebecca was asked if she was the bean cabhrach, a phrase she liked—the help, the nanny, the midwife.

  There was a raw wedge of thrill in her love for him. The presence of the unknown. The journey out of childhood. The step into a future self.

  Some days Tomas took her hand, leaned on her shoulder as they drove through the village, beyond the abandoned schoolhouse, past the whitewashed bungalows toward home. She wanted to clasp herself over him, shroud him, absorb whatever came his way. Most of all she wanted to discover what sort of man might emerge from underneath that very pale skin.

  —

  TOMAS WORE THE WETSUIT all Christmas morning. He lay on the floor, playing video games, his fingers fluid on the console. Over the rim of her reading glasses, Rebecca watched the gray stripe along the sleeve move. It was, she knew, a game she shouldn’t allow—tanks, ditches, killings, tracer bullets—but it was a small sacrifice for an hour of quiet.

  No rage this Christmas, no battles, no tears.

  At noon she gestured for him to get ready: the light would fade early. She had two wetsuits of her own in the bedroom cupboard, but she left them hanging, pulled on running shoes, an anorak, a warm scarf. At the door Tomas threw his duffle coat loose around the neoprene.

  —Just a quick dip, she said in Irish.

  There was no way of knowing how much of any language Tomas could understand. His signing was rudimentary, but she could tell a thing or two from the carry of his body, the shape of his shoulders, the hold of his mouth. Mostly she divined from his eyes. He was handsome in a roguish way: the eyes themselves were narrow, yes, but agile. He had no other physical symptoms of fetal alcohol, no high brow, no thin lip, no flat philtrum.

  They stepped out into a shaft of light so clear and bright it seemed made of bone. Just by the low stone wall, a cloud curtained across and the light dropped gray again. A few stray raindrops stung their faces.

  This was what she loved about the west of Ireland: the weather made from cinema. A squall could blow in at any time and moments later the gray would be hunted open with blue.

  One of the walls down by the bottom field had been reinforced with metal pipes. It is the worst sort of masonry, against all local tradition, but the wind moved across the mouths of the hollow tubes and pierced the air with a series of accidental whistles. Tomas ran his hand over the pipes, one by one, adjusting the song of the wall. She was sure his fingers could gauge the vibrations in the metal. Small moments like these, they crept up, sliced her open.

  Halfway toward the water, he broke into a Charlie Chaplin walk—twirling an imaginary walking stick as he bent forward into the gale, feet pointed sideways. He made a whooping sound as he topped a rise and caught sight of the sea. She called for him to wait: it was habit, even if his back was turned. He remained at the edge of the cliff, walking in place. Almost a perfect imitation. Where had he seen Chaplin? Some video game maybe? Some television show? There were times she thought that, despite the doctors, he might still someday crack open the impossible longings she held for him.

  At the precipice, above the granite seastack, they paused. The waves hurried to shore, long scribbles of white. She tapped him on the small of his back where the wetsuit bunched. The neoprene hood framed his face. His blond hair peeked out.

  —Stay where it’s shallow now. Promise me.

  She scooted behind him on her hunkers. The grass was cold on her fingertips. Her feet slid forward in the mud, dropped from the small ledge into the coarse scree below. The rocks were slick with seaweed. A small crab scuttled in a dark pool.

  Tomas was already knee-deep in the cove.

  —Don’t go any further now, she called.

  She had been a swimmer when she was a child, had competed for Dublin and Leinster both. Rows of medals in her childhood bedroom. A championship trophy from Brussels. The rumor of a scholarship to an American university: a rotator-cuff injury had cut her short.

  She had taught Tomas to swim during the warmth of the summer. He knew the rules. No diving. Stay in the cove. Never get close to the base of the seastack.

  Twice he looked as if he were about to round the edge of the dark rock into the deeper water: once when he saw a windsurfer, yet again when a yellow kayak went swiftly by.

  She waved her arms: Just no more, love, okay?

  He returned to her, fanned the low water with his fingers, splashed it high around her, both arms in his Chaplin motion.

  —Stop it, please, said Rebecca softly. You’re soaking me.

  He splashed her again, turned away, dove under for ten seconds, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, came up ten yards away, spluttering for air.

  —Come on, now. Please. Come in.

  Tomas swam toward the seastack, the dark of his feet disappearing into the water. She watched his wetsuit ripple under the surface. A long, sleek shadow.

  A flock of seabirds serried over the low waves in a taunt. Her body stiffened. She edged forward again, waited.

  I have, she thought, made a terrible mistake.

  She threw off her coat and dove in. The cold stunned the length of her, slipped immediately along her skin.

  —

  THE SECOND SHE CLIMBED from the water, she realized she had left her phone in the pocket of her jeans. She unclipped the battery, shook the water out.

  To
mas lay on the sand, looking up. His blue eyes. His red face. His swollen lips. It had been easy enough to pull him from the cove. He hadn’t struggled. She swam behind him, placed her hands gently behind his shoulders, pulled him ashore. He lay there, smiling.

  She whipped her wet hair sideways, turned toward the cliff. A surge of relief moved along her spine when she glanced back: he was following her.

  The cottage felt so suddenly isolated: the small blue windows, the bright half-door. He stood in a puddle in the middle of the floor, his lips trembling.

  Rebecca put the phone in a bag of rice to soak up the moisture, shook the bag. No backup phone. No landline. Christmas Day. Alan. He hadn’t even called. He could have tried earlier. The thought of him in Dublin now, with his new family, their tidy house, their decorations, their dramas. A simple call, she thought, it would have been so easy.

  —Your father never even phoned, she said as she crossed the room.

  She wondered if the words were properly understood, and if they were, did they cut to the core: your father, d’athair, abba? What rattled inside? How much could he possibly catch? The experts in Galway said that his comprehension was minimal, but they could never be sure; no one could gauge that depth.

  Rebecca tugged the wetsuit zip and gently peeled back the neoprene. His skin was taut and dimpled. He laid his head on her shoulder. A soft whimper came from him.

  She felt herself loosening, drew him close, the cold of his cheek against her clavicle.

  —You just frightened me, love, that’s all.

  When darkness fell, they sat down to dinner—turkey, potatoes, a plum pudding bought from an organic food store in Galway. As a child in Dublin, she had grown up with the ancient Hanukkah rituals. She was the first in her family to marry outside the faith, but her parents understood: there were so few Jews left in Ireland anyway. At times she thought she should rebuild the holiday routines, but little remained except the faint memory of walking the Rathgar Road at sundown, counting the menorahs in the windows. Year by year, the numbers dwindled.