No more talking. My heart’s—
Don’t you play football? Stop breathing so hard and look at the river.
Strange snake. No head, no tail: a mirror made of muscle.
Ess after ess after ess.
And way, way out, that purple-black ribbon is the ocean.
Down, down, down we went. Tired, hungry.
Fuel.
We must have passed six, seven places to eat, reasonable places. If Nest couldn’t stop, if her mind simply couldn’t let her stop, I would have to force her to stop. I, the one with his mind and heart composed, would finally have to put my hand on Nest’s shoulder and say, be bold enough to say, “It’s time for us to eat. It’s time to rest.”
I think it’s difficult to remember when you’re around someone as powerful and smart and interesting as Nest, who also happens to have a difficult mind, that you are the more powerful. It seems the opposite. We don’t seem to think as fast and as deep. We are not oceans; we are puddles. Or so we think.
But Nest’s power comes from a frailty. Her power comes from a mind that could break itself. This is what it means to have a treacherous mind, to get sick from thought.
We might get hungry or tired, but our minds won’t turn against us. We won’t be killed by thoughts. We have no Minotaur, no Chimaera. But we have our needs, too, right? At some point we lose patience, or we can feel ourselves giving up. Until, at last, there’s a spot of relief.
“And here we are,” Nest said. “The Astro.”
I think they renamed it after a renovation for the elderly pinball machine out back. When was the last time you played pinball? Ever?
I recommend the milk shakes and egg salad. And the pie. And the caramel crunch cake.
Do you like corned-beef hash?
Not here you don’t.
A waitress seated us at a booth halfway down the wall. The diner was busy but not packed: not quite lunchtime.
Q, would you trust me to order for you? I’m waiting for your voice. A little while more. Would that be all right—?
Look. You have to look. There’s a terrible man. He eats like a jackal. Tearing at his food. Why can’t he eat like a man? Scraps falling out of his mouth with every bite; chomping, bolting, talking, and. His wife’s the little white-haired monkey across from him. Doesn’t she move like a monkey, her fast mouth, faster fingers, and her eyes back and forth, back and forth, up and down? Her eyes anywhere but on her husband.
They have to be married. How long has the monkey hated sitting across from the jackal? If she sat next to him—. If she sits on his shoulder and eats her fruit and cottage cheese, picks at nits, then she doesn’t have to watch him.
The jackal’s talking and talking. His food’s landing in his lap, on his arms, down his front, on his monkey-wife’s plate—.
Maybe the jackal and the monkey have been married for fifty years. Maybe they’ll die a week apart, one from old age, the other from a worn-out heart.
My parents have been married twenty years. Vladimir and Martha will love each other until the end of the world, long after death. Even if, one day, my father never returns from the labyrinth. Even if my mother drifts endlessly Between, not asleep, not awake, dancing with a cowboy.
The waitress brought us water and flipped to a clean sheet in a pad.
Nest ordered wheat toast and a vanilla shake for herself. Really? I nearly said it. What kind of lunch is that after all the miles? I worried she’d order me a plate of cottage cheese and call it good.
“He has laryngitis,” Nest said, “but my friend here will have chicken soup, an egg salad sandwich on rye, fries, and three sides: bacon, sausage, and applesauce. And a chocolate shake.”
Thank God. Nest did all right, though I might have gotten myself a plate of roast beef.
We waited for our food.
We waited a year.
You could go play pinball, or—?
Do you have favorite words, Q? Words that come easily to you? Like, hut-hut-hike? Muscle, fist, and pencil? Rock, blood, ball? Such a boy.
How about cataclysm, murmuration, and quixotic?
Titmouse, kitten, and pony? Calculus?
No—?
I have favorite words, Q. And some of them are sexy.
Nest lowered her eyelids halfway and pouted:
Sexy is as sexy does—.
Don’t laugh. You’ll ruin everything.
Now I have to return to center.
Nest closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they had become dark, smoky mirrors. She bit her lip to gather blood, to bring it red: her swollen mouth.
Eclipse.
Tooth.
Nibble.
Thread.
Finger.
Bone.
What was Nest doing to me?
Her tongue and teeth. Gaze and lashes.
Her sigh. Her throat—.
Could Nest actually make me forget all about food? Could she make me want her now more than a meal?
The waitress appeared.
“Perfect timing,” Nest said.
My soup came cold, something I never told Nest. I was too hungry to care. Fuel. So we ate.
Hungry. Hungry for Nest. Hungry all over. Egg salad, fries, applesauce, bacon, sausage. Shake. Soup. All the miles behind us, and all the miles to come. I only wanted to eat and eat and—.
“You need a poem while you eat.”
That’s what Nest said. And then:
SEA POPPIES
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
I have to interrupt to admit something, no lie: the soup, the cold soup, had gotten warmer.
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
Warmer—
your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
I cooled a spoonful with my breath.
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
“Conch-shells,” Nest said, and I blew across another spoonful of soup.
Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?
I left the last bit of soup at the bottom of the bowl, too hot to drink.
MILE TEN
You’re the middle of the day, Q. You’re right now. And almost every worry is gone, asleep.
But—.
Nest and I were out on the street, fed and warm. Sun everywhere. The infinite city of bright stone, concrete, and glass. I felt like I could walk a thousand miles. Nest knew how to keep me close. She knew to feed me right when I couldn’t bear it anymore, so I would be happy and ready for anything. I had our backpack: the books, the Millennium Falcon in a bottle, water, and Nest’s flannel.
“Do you love me enough to keep going?”
Nest sensed my surprise, and that I wanted to speak.
“Shh,” Nest cautioned. “There’s more to go before I let myself hear your voice.”
Let herself—?
I hitched the backpack and nodded over my shoulder, west.
No, this way, Q. I’m taking us where we have to go.
A destination?
I didn’t think Nest had a plan, and maybe she didn’t start with a plan, but she found one. When did she get a solid idea in her head? When did she decide she had to take me someplace? We’d drifted from where we started.
Still, I trusted.
And I trusted her that night a little less than a week ago. When we started the drive, Nest had no plan, not so far as I knew. She’d wanted to talk, and I wouldn’t say no.
We hadn’t seen each other in two months before that ride, two months she was housebound and had refused to talk to me, two months of her suffering. Depression, the other side of bipolar, when she’s infinitely tired and near silent. When the Chimaera cries and moans—.
Could she have found a plan then, too, her first night out, while driving with me? Had she thought of a place where we had to go? Did she know the exact tree where she could collide with a good chance of killing us both?
I don’t know. I don’t remember being afraid, and I don’t remember fighting for control of the wheel. I don’t remember wrestling with the Chimaera. And who’s to say I hadn’t been persuaded the destination she had in mind wasn’t exactly right and perfect? Two young lovers dying together? It’s an old idea, tried and true, no matter how pointless.
It’s day six, and Nest sleeps. I want her to wake. More than anything else, I want my Nest to wake and stand.
On that walk, three years ago, we were just becoming something. Nest came up with a plan, maybe it was only a few moments old, just over lunch, when she figured out how to make me want her and how to let herself want me.
We were headed somewhere.
It scares me just as much to think of how love survives as how it dies.
Yeah. This is one of those moments when I think my mind is older than I am. When I’m not exactly sure what I’m thinking or sure of its importance, or if it—.
Love lives on surprise. But what if we fail to surprise? Or we surprise the wrong way? Love can die fast.
Am I making any sense at all?
I want to surprise you. I’m taking you somewhere I’ve only ever seen from the outside. It’s been closed and hidden and locked a long time. We’re going to find our way in, and we’re going to stand in the sun, and we’re going to lie down, and.
Sometimes we get surprises that make us love more or harder because we’re afraid.
For a few months, just after they were married, Vladimir lived apart from Martha. Not very long, and not a separation or anything like that, as if they’d woken up from their wedding and realized they’d made a terrible mistake. Research called my father west; physics. But Martha’s Popp was dying. As the youngest, she felt she had to stay with him and help her mother. They agreed Vladimir should go on without Martha; she would join him as soon as possible.
One month, two months, three months. They phoned, they wrote, they made the best of it. Popp held on, and Vladimir worked and thought, and one night got into a terrible car accident.
I memorized the letter he wrote and sent the next morning.
The noise of it, Martha, as the car, downside up, all wrong, revolved on its roof.
Imagine an undertow that drags you down and rakes you across the bottom of the ocean. All the cruel sand against your cheek. The sand scours your head, strafes your ear. This is the steel of the car roof against the asphalt, grinding and grinding—the noise of it.
But the noise came after.
One of my headaches, and the pain spiked, as it does. You know. Fishhook in my eye. A hardworking demon sawing through my skull. Lightning under my tongue. No wonder I lost track of the road.
When the car drifted onto the shoulder, I jerked the wheel, but the guardrail was right there—. I hit at the exact angle to send the car upside down. Upside down again. And I think once more. Three times.
Silence. That weird, deep silence, when I could say to myself, with all the time in the world, Everything will end. I could say to myself, Now, now, now, now, now, when you and I have gotten to the truth, now that we’re married, now, I’m going to die.
No Angers. No Minotaur. The labyrinth destroyed. Everything done.
I waited. I waited a century. At last, the noise came.
And then?
Then it all stopped. The car stopped.
I imagine my father, Q, back at his university apartment, sitting at his desk with a cigarette, since he smoked then, about four in the morning, pen and paper, and exhausted.
The sea lets you go. The waves move through and past you. You stand again, soaking wet, coughing, but alive. The spindrift, the salt, and the first thing you hear is a wheeling gull.
I’d survived, and I heard a gull, in this case the radio, hissing.
An ashtray and the long ash at the end of his cigarette. The skinny smoke.
My father survived an accident that should have killed him, and he’s writing the only woman he’ll ever love.
I smelled a burning. I thought, I’ll be burned alive.
I tried my door. It was crushed and wouldn’t budge. The door across, no luck. So I reached behind and pushed open the door diagonal from me and shimmied out on my back. I got to my feet and brushed myself off as if I were a superhero. Dusty clothes, glass in my hair, but otherwise unhurt.
Someone spoke, a man: “I expected blood all over the windshield.”
Then, a second witness: “Anyone else in the car with you?”
No. Only me.
The first witness evaporated. The second: “You must know you’re blessed. Unbelievably blessed.”
Blessed? I turned to look at the car. One door all but sheared off, twisted frame; a second and third door crushed; wheels collapsed; the whole thing overturned; the windshield blown apart; the underbody torn up.
I walked farther away, the second witness at my side—“You see you’re blessed, don’t you?”—the sirens coming and coming, and I thought about you. How would I get back to you without a car? How would I tell you we nearly lost everything?
My mother flew out to my father.
“I had to go,” she told me. “I didn’t know who was driving that car. Your father or the Minotaur? The Angers? I didn’t want him alone. I didn’t want—.”
“You didn’t want him to die without you,” I said.
“Popp was going, but he had Dye. They had their love, which you never saw. I was afraid for Dad. I knew what I had to do.”
“Why didn’t Dad call you after the accident? Why wait?”
“He did. Not right after, but the next day. We didn’t have cell phones then, sweetheart. I mean, people did, but we didn’t. He wanted to write it out of him first. And then, in the aftermath, his Minotaur. He called when he could.”
“You must have been out of your mind,” I said, “when you heard.”
“No one as deeply in love as we were and young ever expects to be interrupted or broken by anything or anyone, let alone death. We had the Angers to deal with, the Minotaur, but a car accident, something so stupid as that?”
Popp died during the time my parents were gone, but they, my parents, made it through. They drove home in an old car new to them. They drove twenty-one hundred miles over six days in July, when my mother was very, very pregnant. They raced against me. I was ready to be born.
I’m not going back to death and dying. I swear.
Once, though, I asked my mom: “If Vladimir had died, you’d have remarried, right? Sometime?”
My mother was chopping celery or onions or sweet potatoes for soup, and she chopped awhile.
“The whole flight out to your father,” she began, “after his car accident, I thought about this and that, returning to all sorts of memories and ideas and daydreams. Mostly, I admit, I was afraid the plane would crash. ‘Wouldn’t that be just perfect?’ I said to myself. ‘Vladimir survives an awful wreck only for me to go down in this plane.’ I couldn’t keep myself from worrying. And then I couldn’t even decide what I wanted more, to get there alive or dead. Life is hard, love is hard, and in death, love is perfect.”
My mother stopped there, and I finally said, “That in no way answers my question.”
“Oh,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”
“No.”
She said, “I think it does.”
I couldn’t get my mother to say any more. She referred me instead t
o a poem.
I’m walking fast. I can feel it. We’re nearly there. Where everything ends and begins.
I had no problem keeping up, but Nest did walk fast, and she got quiet. She stopped talking altogether for a long time. But I could see her smiling.
“Another block, then around the corner.”
Nest was nearly running.
“Come on, Q. We’re going to church.”
“There,” Nest said, slowing down. “Church of the Redeemer.”
A dead church, really, boarded up and scorched. I had some vague memory it had burned a year or two before. Arson.
“Come with me around back.”
The church looked like the worst of its onetime parishioners: splintered and full of holes, sick, shocked. That building would have coughed, if it could. It would have fallen over and moaned. Instead, it stood there, burnt, tired, and quiet.
This desperate neighborhood—.
“Watch the glass.”
Weeds and chunks of stone; broken wood, plastic bags, and paper. Somewhere, the sound of birds.
“Here, Q. This is it.”
Behind the church, there was an area surrounded by a dark fence about eight feet high. No Trespassing. Keep out.
“I don’t see any holes,” Nest said. “Pick me up.”
It was nothing to boost Nest, and I pulled myself up after her.
Over the fence and in.
I’ve wanted to see this place for a long time. Last spring, the two of us, my Chimaera and I, sat together outside the fence. I cried, and she breathed fire until she went to sleep. We never went inside.
We stood in a living garden. It might have been overgrown and every bit as neglected as the church, a dead garden, but it was alive.
When she left I could—.
The flowers, Q. They smelled so good, but I could also smell smoke and shit and garbage. I thought, Where are all the flowers? And I thought, I’m crazy.
I tried to look through the dark fence, to find some way over: I knew.
Ten Miles One Way Page 11
