The room breathes in and out around her in near unison, their eyes closed as they craft a representation in their mind of the intricate and perfect frog, its round, glassy eyes and rust-mottled back. They conjure a feeling of the world as a whole, trembling with life and violence, and in their minds they subtract one vibrating thread from the weaving—this fabric like a net held up to the sun, more hole than fiber. Alison remembers how it used to feel to thrust out an open hand at the right moment and feel the small, adhesive weight of a frog landing on her palm. In the man-made pond behind her grandfather’s house, in the ditches running behind the middle-school soccer field, she smelled the pungent freshness of green slime and knew to expect them near her even if she couldn’t see or hear their movement. She’s sitting straight-backed and attentive, trying to do what she can to feel the sorrowful togetherness that she sees in the silent bodies all around her. She wants to melt into them, but wanting to melt is a self-centered, individual desire, and feeling it reminds her that she has not melted, will not melt for as long as she is thinking her thoughts and not theirs.
It’s become difficult for her to feel in rhythm with everyone else, to eat in their rhythm and sleep in their rhythm, since last week’s Mourning Report on the Palo Comado Fire. Standing on a creaky old stage where campers used to put on error-ridden performances of Our Town, the hastily abridged Scenes from Shakespeare, and a clunky stage adaptation of Camp Do-What-Ya-Wanna, Linden described the known casualties of the devouring blaze: twenty-three homes, over a hundred missing pets, and unknown precious and irreplaceable wild animals—including possibly a radio-collared mountain lion in its second year of independence, still establishing the canyon as its home. The temperature of the fire at ground level was reported to be unusually hot, a toxic conflagration capable of killing the soil micro-organisms and buried seeds that would normally begin the process of returning the canyon to life. With the amount of dense, dry fuel in the fire-adjacent grasslands, there could even be a firestorm, where the fire’s inner churn would suck in new air and cause the burn to balloon, fueling a column of smoke and fiery debris that would rain down burning matter miles from the site, starting new fires of its own. Alison can’t picture the flames, and the videos won’t load on her phone, the trickle of service at the top of See Clearly Peak barely enough for downloading a photo. But as she hangs Nora’s tee shirts on the line, as she helps to weed the Earthbridge garden and examines the swollen udder of an Earthbridge cow, she summons the faraway presence of a disaster she can’t fathom, happening in a place that she’s never seen, threatening a husband that she can’t quite picture in her mind’s eye. When she thinks of him, the image she calls up again and again is from an old photo taken when they were dating. He’s reading a manuscript with his feet up on the coffee table, trying to hold the pages in front of his face to block the camera’s aim. In the photo, his face is grinning but his eyes are annoyed: when reading, he hated having his mind reminded of his body.
“Goodbye to the painted frog. Goodbye to the thick-shelled river mussel. Goodbye to the Greenland ice sheet, melting in a twenty-four-degree Celsius summer.” They say these words at the same time, a single broad, blurry voice scattered through the old wood-paneled theater. Tears flow freely down faces, as from a loose, unstanched faucet. And with this recital, the report is over, and now it’s free-form meditation and unguided mourning for all who care to participate. But Alison’s hip is killing her, and she can’t stand to sit on the hard wooden floor anymore, her legs pretzeled up beneath her, the jut bones at the base of her ass grinding into the floorboards. She stands, swivels the joint, and tries to rub out the ache. How did sitting cross-legged, Alison wonders, come to mean gentleness, enlightenment, and openhearted behavior when in reality the bent, folded legs resemble so many tangles and knots? She can see Nora sitting near the wide doors at the back of the room with the other nine- and ten-year-olds, her jaw rigid with concentration, her eyelids fluttering gently. Alison has asked her what she thinks about in her meditations, what she sees and experiences, and she always demurs, saying that the experience doesn’t really have any words in it, so she can’t translate it into words without betraying the whole thing—but out in the garden, or by the hives, she can hear Nora talking to the other kids, hushed and excited, about her visions.
Over the heads of the seated crowd, Alison sees Linden walking out the side door with her water bottle and yoga mat and goes to find her. She’s treading the narrow path through the sunflower patch with a determined, bullish step, as though lost in music coming through her headphones, but there are no headphones and no music. Alison reaches out and brushes her surprisingly hairy arm—the woman’s body is covered with a blond down, invisible against her light skin. It is this layer, Alison realizes, like newborn fur, that catches the sun during the recitation and makes it look as though she has a whole-body halo, a human figure cut out of light.
“Linden, hi,” Alison says, smiling with closed lips. “Thank you for that report. It always is such an important part of the day. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Linden replies serenely. “And my condolences.”
“My condolences to you too, for your loss both new and ongoing,” she responds quickly, the Earthbridge vocabulary still clumsy on her lips. “I was wondering if you have any update on the Palo Comado wildfire.”
“From last week?” Linden asks, her eyes flickering infinitesimally right and left, like she’s reading on a computer screen. “I’m sorry, no. The pace of disaster has us always moving on, perhaps sooner than we’d like. It’s a grave burden to be the watershed of the planet’s suffering, the ones born to bid nature goodbye.”
“Well, it’s personal to me,” Alison says, “because my husband is out there somewhere, and it’s been hard to keep doing my rootwork here, trying to stay grounded and mindful of the land, while I’ve been worrying about him.”
“Of course, I see,” says Linden, her big eyes blinking. “I’m sorry, we don’t really have the bandwidth to track individual cases. We’re trying to build a bridge between humanity and the earth, not humanity and individual people. Individuals are kind of the paradigm we’re looking to break.” She pauses, thinking. “But maybe call him? There’s a pay phone near Main Meadow, on the outer wall of the woodworking studio.”
“I know,” Alison replies.
“Oh, you do. Good.”
The sunflowers sway around them, their scent warm and dusty and just barely sweet. The edges of their big leaves rub against one another, rasping softly. In a former factory site by their house in New Jersey, a field of sunflowers had been planted to draw the lead from the soil surrounding the old buildings and painted-aqua storage tanks. In midsummer, they grew hot in the sunshine, big black eyes gazing out at the road. Then, a week before Labor Day, the thick stalks were chopped and the mass of plant matter was hauled off to the dump, to decompose atop hard-edged waste from construction sites and junkyards.
“What’s it like,” Alison asks awkwardly, realizing that she’s wondered for a long time, “to put together these reports every day? Is it hard for you? How do you make sense of it all, the information and the data? How do you decide when it’s time for a loss to be mourned, and when you need to wait to declare it because there’s still something bigger left to lose?”
Linden looks off toward the yoga barn, her face heavy now and weighed down. Only now does Alison realize that the girl may be older than she had imagined, not a college hiatus taker but a woman even older than Alison herself. Is there someone else that she’s thinking of right now, a Patrick of her own that she left behind, someone beloved still living in the blood and guts and compromise of the world? “I don’t know,” Linden says finally, sighing. “I just try to keep it to three.”
* * *
—
The Earthbridge trails cut in and out of forest and field, past family cabins and bunkhouses where unattached adults sleep eight o
r twelve to a room. She walks beneath the thick summer canopy and tries to imagine: That tall oak over there with the thick, leafy crown, bursting suddenly into hot, unquenchable flame. That broad maple on the path, disastrously burning, alive with ember, incandescent with fire raining down from its highest branches. The orange devouring the green, the smooth, satin-sided foliage crackling and curling and falling to the ground to burn upon a carpet of moss. A sleek lizard-colored leaf blackening under the heat of a match. It seems impossible to stoke in herself a genuine fear, an organic urgency. She imagines the highways clogged with people, smoke rushing across the valley, Patrick oblivious in his car, hurtling forward on the highway until the traffic begins to slow and stop and the wall of flame rears up above him. Her breath quickens, her pulse goes fast and shallow—but she’s so aware of trying to feel, of trying to worry more, almost like when she took a theater class for elective credit one semester and ended up having to perform a monologue with crying. Her friend Margo told her the trick was to pinch as hard as you could some tender spot, like the areola or the crinkly inner skin of the elbow. Pinch as hard as you could and the tears would come, the feelings would follow. But she stood at the front of the room pinching and all she could think of was flesh, whether it was possible to detach a nipple with the force of index finger and thumb. That semester, she learned that she couldn’t feel anything she didn’t feel, no matter how she might like to. She tilts her face up into the mottling sun. In the shade of the trees, with the air saturated by the whirring, chiming song of cicadas, it’s easier to imagine that fire itself is an impossibility than to imagine it happening at this exact moment, even in someplace very far away.
As Alison crosses the Main Meadow, she sees Klaus waving her over from the pay phone. He holds the receiver against the front of his shirt while he calls her name, then lifts it back to his mouth. “I’ve got her,” he says into the phone. “She’ll be on in a second.” His face is impassive, a heavy Nordic block of a head, like something he might carve into a reclaimed oak stump—but as she gets closer, she can see, even through the thick beard, that he is concerned. “I think he’s in trouble,” he says quietly, his hand covering the perforations. “But he won’t say.” She nods and takes the handset. She’s doing dull arithmetic, calculating the time difference, surprised that he’s calling her so early in the day, right in the middle of the week, when he would usually be on set and focusing on the film, her calls going straight to messages.
“Patrick?” she says. “What’s happening over there?”
“Alison,” says Patrick. “It’s really you?”
“Who else would it be?”
She waits, but he doesn’t answer. The question seems to confuse him.
“Listen,” she says, “are the fires still going? Are you someplace safe?”
“I’m in a van,” he says uncertainly. He sounds as though he’s repeating facts heard secondhand, reaching for words with a familiar shape but an unfamiliar flavor. “Yes. I think so. Let me check.”
She hears the sound of rustling, frantic rubbing against the mouthpiece.
“It’s a van,” he says. “Metal holder, doors that slide, and a lot of stuff in the back. But at least I’m in the front of the van and not the back. So I think I’m still okay.”
Alison gazes out at the Main Meadow, where children are chasing one another through the swerving paths; a knot is forming in her throat. “Do you mean the van you rented for work?”
“Work is over,” he says with sudden firmness, “forever.”
In the background, she can hear a strange mixture of sound: the clutter of vehicles or machinery against an intermittent background growl, and the sound of a muffled voice swelling and sinking in the background, the words unintelligible.
“Patrick, honey,” Alison says, and pauses, the endearment unfamiliar in her mouth. “You need to take a breath and explain to me what’s going on. Who’s there in the van with you? Where are you going in the van? Are you in danger? Nora and I are worried about you with the fires going on. We haven’t heard from you in days. You need to tell us what’s happening.”
“I can’t,” he says helplessly. “I can’t do anything. Alison, the house burned. The water burned in the basement, the swimming pool was on fire. I saw the bunnies fleeing from the scorching fields into the Kmart lot to huddle beneath parked cars. It smelled like a barbecue restaurant. I know this is real, but sometimes it’s like I forget, I peel off of our world like a sticker, and then I’m in no world. Have you ever thought of no world, sweetie? It’s worse than you think.”
“Who’s there with you?” she asks, as gently as she can. “Is it Cassidy there in the car with you?”
“Yes,” he says with more certainty, “yes, she is. She’s right here, holding the wheel. She wants me to tell you something.”
There’s a long pause and a lot of scuffling as he struggles for the words.
“She wants you to buy me a notepad,” Patrick says at last.
“A notepad.”
Alison hears the voice in the background grow louder and spikier, its tone insistent. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Nora head into the middle of the meadow, into the furring of plants and insect life, followed by three or four children who hang on her every word.
“No. A ticket,” he says. “For the plane.”
“A plane ticket? To come back here?”
“Yes,” Patrick says with audible relief. “I want to come all the way back, Alison. I want to crawl back into the old life with you and grow small in its belly, like a baby. A man needs a woman, he needs it like a water needs duck. I’ve been out west now, to see what I can see, and what I discovered is that it’s all on fire and giving off a dark-blue smoke. I saw the palm trees and the bathing-suit beach and the surf-whitened sea, and I looked until my eyes burned down to the nub. There’s no paradise here unless you’re a bird of paradise. There isn’t enough ocean to put out all the flames.” His speech is flowing now, the Patrick-like rhythms familiar to Alison. In his novels, there was always a section like this, where one character or another would make a big speech, laying out the themes of the narrative and ending with a rousing call to action. In the Hamlet book, it was the Claudius figure, the stepfather, pontificating on epigenetic theory and the tangled web of succession. In the George Washington book, it was the unlucky boatswain with his soliloquy on the miracle of brotherhood, and the blessed physics by which a boat full of brothers can float atop the river’s roof, while a rock just sinks, etc., etc. But this speech unfolding before her reads all out of order, with passages crossed out or missing or entirely unwritten. She can’t tell if it’s the phone connection or her own frayed nerves, but she can’t make the pieces of his speech knit together in her mind.
“You can tell me if you’re drunk,” Alison says. “I would understand.”
Patrick makes a frustrated sound. “Listen, if I could be another time for you, I would. If it were tomorrow and you were there on that lawn, like before, I wouldn’t try to stop you, I wouldn’t bring you back inside. I would lie down in the dew and hold you. Next time I would.”
The noise in the background increases, and the sound begins to fuzz out. When she hears Patrick’s voice again, there’s terror in it, and he speaks like a telegram.
“Get the ticket, Alison. It needs to be tonight. I have to go. We’re in the fire.”
The dial tone is like the ringing of a lone cicada. There’s a feeling of crazy, wild panic in her chest, but it has no place to go, and eventually it turns to a numb, tingling feeling in her fingertips. She realizes she needs to get to the public library as soon as she can if she’s going to make an airline reservation, and the smallness of the task, the mundanity, feels like a kind of madness. In a small clearing mown into the tangle of butterfly bush and clover, she sees Nora sitting in a tight circle with her friends here, fellow nine-year-olds with serious expressions on their f
aces. She only knows one of them by name, Appaloosa, whose mother used to work a hedge-fund job in Connecticut. As Alison heads for the bus stop, she plans a path through the grasses that will bring her close to the fervent group. Skirting the edge of the plantings, her ankles brush against the soft fronds and tiny flowers, yellow and blue and swarmed by bees. She slows down as she nears their bent, murmuring heads, and stares straight forward, so that all they’ll notice, the ones facing in her direction, is a lost adult with her mind elsewhere, slowly meandering the narrow path.
It’s astounding to see her daughter, her familiar, big-eyed, reticent daughter, at the center of this circle of eager listeners. Her daughter, Nora, of a thousand naked baby photos and awkward, forced baths, whose malformed belly button is carved into Alison’s memory like the indelible layout of her childhood home, leading this group of oddly straight-faced children. Now she eavesdrops on her daughter’s life as she would a stranger’s, wishing she could stop to listen but not wanting to break the spell. As she draws closer, she makes her face vacant and her footfall soft. Her daughter’s voice is too sweet for the words she’s saying, too tender for something so harsh: “The long game of temporary comfort, like playing musical chairs in a burning room, is nearing its end. We’ve seen the losers holding up shiny trophies of gold-painted plastic.” Her sleek brown ponytail, held in place by a flamingo-colored scrunchie, bobs up and down. “People aren’t the future,” Nora says in a low and serious tone, as the others nod in serene agreement. A couple steps farther, and Alison is too far from her to hear.
* * *
—
Half a mile’s walk from the Earthbridge campus, the regional bus makes its stops on a long, nondescript road bordered by shaded ash forest. Alison is waiting with her headphones on, listening to a mixtape on a dusty Walkman she found in one of the back recesses of the admin office. After dinner, when the buildings are empty, she sometimes paws through the boxes, looking for nothing in particular. She’s enchanted by the troves of ephemera cataloguing decades of summer-camp obsolescence, supply closets in the rec buildings and locker rooms filled with unclaimed junk that no Earthbridger wants to be responsible for sending to a landfill. For one thing, much of it dates back to her own childhood, and she finds things that she once wanted but never had—like the portable cassette player in her hand, molded from pink and lavender plastic and looking like a massive piece of saltwater taffy. Nora calls it homesickness—with such easy disdain that Alison wonders what definition of the word she’s been taught in school. Wasn’t homesickness one of the few victimless emotions, a feeling that infringed upon nobody else’s right to feel, a thing that you could enjoy within yourself without anyone’s even knowing? Didn’t it enrich the world, reminding you that there were times other than the despairing present, worlds other than the one we all have to live in?
Something New Under the Sun Page 25
