by Chris Knopf
She scooped up a handful of smooth rounded pebbles and tossed them at the water. I heard two or three plunks.
“That’s an uncharacteristically optimistic thing to say,” she noted.
“Always been a fan of a half-full glass.”
Some more time went by, which Amanda filled by tossing pebbles into the bay. Eddie checked in on us, licking our faces to make sure we weren’t dead. His breath was perfumed with the dross that collected along the bay shore.
“I’ve always just done what I’m supposed to do,” said Amanda. “I bought all the bullshit about how to be a person, and all that’s ever come of it is crap. I used to have nothing and life was crap, and now I have so much, and it’s still crap. Tell me why I should keep trying to make something worthwhile out of all of this …”
“Crap?”
Amanda was a person I always had a hard time getting into focus. That was my fault, not hers. Even when she was right in front of me, or like now in profile, something about her or me made it impossible to know if I was really seeing her at all.
“I’ve been getting into Kant,” I added. “Maybe he knows.”
“Who else reads all the books the rest of us tried to avoid in college?”
“You need to meet more retired fighters. The heavyweights are a bunch of crazy existentialists. Just love Being and Nothingness.”
“That’s sounds more up my alley.”
“Not if you ask me. If somebody said, ‘What’s up with that chick Amanda Anselma?’ would I say, ‘Oh, you mean Ms. Abject Fatalist? Ms. Existential Despair?’ No, probably not.”
“I can’t believe it. You’re actually trying to cheer me up.”
“That’s what I do. Spread cheer wherever I go. A mission from God.”
She laughed a not entirely cynical little laugh.
“Weren’t you the one who said God had a lousy sense of humor?” she asked.
“No. I said God wanted to be a practical joker, but had trouble coming up with jokes that were actually funny.”
“Maybe only to Him.”
“Another question for Sartre.”
“Maybe he knows why God doesn’t want me to develop Jacob’s Neck.”
“With all due respect, I think the Almighty’s got other things to do. The answer to that is entirely within our ability to grasp.”
“So you think there is something going on?” she asked. “Not just rotten coincidence?”
“Rotten, yeah. Not sure about anything else.”
“Meaning you’re only partly sure, but you’re not going to talk to me about it.”
“Engineers keep half-baked hypotheses to themselves.”
“Oh, now we’re engineers. Do they read Kant?”
“Only the empiricists. In between crossword puzzles.”
“Let me know when one of those hypotheses is ready to come out of the oven.”
“Only if we get to celebrate.”
“Half-full glasses all around.”
Eddie and I escorted her back to her burned-out house. I opened the door to the Grand Prix so Eddie had a place out of the way to curl up, which he was more than happy to do.
I spent the rest of the day helping Amanda and her crew pick through the charred remains and assess what might be saved. She was expecting experts to come by the next day, which is why she wanted to clear out as much of the clutter and destruction as possible.
It looked to me like the first-floor joist system and a big part of the northwest corner were salvageable. As were all the mechanicals in the basement. I pointed that out, which I pretended cheered her up a little.
It was dusk when we made it back to Oak Point. I’d dragged my homemade Adirondacks out to the edge of the lawn facing the Little Peconic at the first hint of warming weather. It was too cool for rational people to sit outside and drink, but that’s what we did anyway, which speaks to the prevailing state of our rationality. Amanda even had a special concoction her friends in the City had stuffed into her suitcase, a customized cosmopolitan mix featuring Absolut Citron and pomegranate juice.
“What a thing to do to an innocent vodka,” I complained.
“Vodka’s never innocent, and even empiricists need to try something different once in a while.”
It wasn’t bad if chilled properly, especially after the second or third glass. And the air wasn’t as cold as it should have been, or maybe we were warmed by seasonal expectations, reflected back upon us by the iridescence of a moonlit Little Peconic Bay.
“I think I’m getting hungry,” said Amanda eventually “It’s all the pomegranate juice. Whets the appetite.”
“I’m too loopy to cook. But I bought lots of cold edibles that’re in the fridge.”
“After I wash this crud off of me.”
“Agreed.”
I went down the basement hatch and turned on the water to the outdoor shower. The faucets were already open, so the water would be warmed up by the time I stripped off my clothes. There was still a slight danger of freezing temperatures, so I was pushing the timing a little, but next to sleeping out on the uncomfortably chilly screened-in porch in early spring there was nothing like a stupidly frigid outdoor shower.
It was too dark to see the cloud of vapor, but I could feel it when I stepped into the enclosed shower stall. I stood motionless under the scorching stream for a few minutes, lost in the feeling of the water as it steamed away the day’s accretion of stress, effort and avoidance.
I kept soap and shampoo in a little cedar cabinet mounted to the wall. I think I was about to reach over to pop it open when a tiny click, like the snap of a very thin glass straw, went off somewhere deep inside my head. A shrill ring followed the click, which would have drawn more of my attention if my throat hadn’t choked on the air and my heart rate hadn’t suddenly ripped into a thudding staccato. The floor of the shower stall began rocking like a washtub caught in a ship’s wake, sloshing up and down at random forty-five degree angles. And then all the way to ninety degrees and over I went, my left shoulder absorbing most of the fall.
The phrase “my heart beat right out of my chest” ran across my mind as I felt the pounding heartbeats interrupt every shallow breath. The shower stall by now was rotating like a carnival ride, and all sense of up and down, side to side vanished. The ring in my ears was escalating into a siren. I somehow made it to my hands and knees, feeling the slippery redwood slats that formed the floor.
The world continued to turn and spin, but I stopped caring about that and concentrated on slowing my heart. I wondered, how much can it take? Can a heart actually beat itself to death? I sat on the floor and wedged myself against the wall, steadily slowing my breathing, cupping my hands over my mouth to retrieve CO2.
Then I suddenly couldn’t breathe. My throat clamped shut and the siren in my head began to crackle, and then decayed into a wet scream. A scream no one could hear because it wasn’t audible to the world. It was all inside my head.
Another voice was in there, too, questioning, is this it? Is this what we’ve all been waiting for? Is this how the end feels—hot, wet and naked, screaming silently into your hands as you wait for the final ball of incandescence to burn it all away?
I didn’t get the answers, but I was still producing questions when I heard another click, or more like a dull thud, that instantly caused everything to go black as time, as consciousness and further interrogatives flicked into oblivion.
——
I lay frozen in the cold rain. I could see a grass hut just a few yards away. It was crowded with people huddled under the dubious shelter. I wanted to join them, but all I could move was my eyes, which I had to blink frequently to keep them from filling with water. I wanted to shift positions to take pressure off my sore shoulder, but I couldn’t. A vast weariness clung to my limbs, drawing me down to the earth, my jaw slack and my tongue lolling, an uncontrollable wad in my mouth.
The gang under the hut stood looking impassively at the rain. I knew they’d be no help to me. But the h
arder I tried to move, the less possible it seemed to be. It was like this for so long I almost started getting used to it when Eddie suddenly trotted into the area between me and the hut. His tail was wagging, slowly, the way it does when he wants to say hello, usually out of the blue, just for the hell of it. He looked over at me and barked, something he rarely did. I liked that about him, that he dispensed his barks sparingly, strategically.
I wanted to say to him what I usually said, something like, “Yeah, yeah, easy for you to say,” or “Frame that argument a little more clearly and maybe we’ll have something to debate.” But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t move my mouth or activate my vocal chords.
So, naturally, he kept barking. More and more insistently. I started worrying about the neighbors. I didn’t know them, except for Amanda, and I didn’t much care what they thought of me, but I always thought a barking dog was sort of rude.
“Knock it off, will ya?” I demanded, in my mind.
But he kept barking, and waving his long feathered tail.
“Sam, Holy Christ,” said Amanda.
Then the rain abruptly stopped. Eddie was still barking.
“Eddie, shut the hell up,” said Amanda, which he did, more or less.
The hut evaporated before my eyes, and the cedar walls of the shower enclosure emerged. That and Amanda’s wet hair, which fell from her forehead and smelled like tropical flowers, covering her face as she felt around my body.
“What the hell happened?” she asked.
She had a flashlight. When I opened my eyes she pointed it away from my face. She kept asking me urgent questions, but she didn’t know I couldn’t speak. Or move. On the other hand, maybe I could.
“Uh,” I said.
“Uh?”
“Fell.”
“You fell?”
Now I had Eddie’s wet nose poking around my face, his warm, prickly fur scraping over my wet body.
“Eddie!” Amanda yelled. “Get the hell out of here. He’s all right.”
“I am?”
I picked my left hand up off the floor and wiggled my fingers. I located my right hand and used it to push myself up so I was sitting with my back against the wall of the shower enclosure.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
I looked at my legs sticking out in front of me. In the cold dark it was hard to see my toes, but I knew they were wiggling. I drew my knees up to my chest and flexed my leg muscles. Everything operational.
“Fucking hell, I’m cold. I got to dry off.”
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No you’re not. You’re going to help me stand up. Then you’re going to hand me that towel.”
“What happened? Talk to me.”
“I am. I’m talking to you now. I’m telling you to help me stand up.”
I gripped her arm and together we stood. The floor of the shower enclosure had been reattached to the earth. I snatched the towel off the hook and wrapped it around me.
“That was interesting,” I said.
“Let me drive you to the hospital,” said Amanda.
“You want to help me?” I asked.
“I do.”
“Follow me into the cottage. If I pass out along the way, leave me where I fall.”
“Okay. Sure.”
My equilibrium seemed as good as it ought to be after a few tumblers of Absolut and pomegranate cosmopolitans. My head was clear—no more little clicks—but I thought I heard a distant ring. Before we reached the side porch I gently shook off her grasp and walked on my own. The ground held and my heart stayed calm in my chest.
Eddie had stayed welded to my side. When I reached the side porch I squatted down and scratched his ears, letting him look me over.
“I’m okay, man. Everything’s okay.”
“You have to let me get you to the hospital,” said Amanda, almost knocking me down as she shoved her way into the kitchen.
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“That’s not up to you.”
When I stood up the world tipped a little, but then righted itself. The ringing in my ears was gone. My mouth was dry and my hands and feet tingled, but otherwise, no major upheavals. I walked into the house.
“It has to be up to me, beautiful,” I said to her. She and Eddie followed me into the bedroom where I dug out some clean clothes. After slipping on my jeans I sat on the bed and took stock again. All faculties seemed nearly intact. Acuities an open question.
“You’re afraid to go,” she said.
“I am.”
“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything.”
“I’m afraid of hospitals. People die in those places.”
“You still haven’t told me what happened.”
“Just had a little vertigo. Slipped and hit my head.”
“You should have seen your face when I found you. It was awful.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I said.
“Eddie was going berserk. It didn’t sound normal. I knew something was wrong.”
“Worried about getting his dinner.”
I went into the kitchen and poured another drink. Amanda scowled at me, but didn’t say anything. The three of us went out to the screened-in porch where I sat at the pine table. Eddie and Amanda secured the floor. As I settled down, I noticed tiny pinpricks were sticking at my fingertips where I held the chilled glass. I worked on regulating my breathing and slowing my pulse rate. Amanda worked on her scowl.
“What happened to all the edibles?” I asked.
“You actually want to eat?”
“And drink and be merry.”
I let her talk me into staying put while she went to get the food. I was glad to be alone on my porch for a little while. I took off one of the storm windows so I could look through the screen at the water and hear the sounds of the birds and bay waves. The air was cool but calm, and the porch would stay warm enough as long as I stoked the woodstove.
My hand had a slight tremor when I took a drink. I switched the glass to my left hand, which was steadier. An unwanted recollection of the punchy old guys who hung around the gym in New Rochelle forced its way into my mind. Their lumpy faces and hands swollen into balloons, the flesh pink and smooth, stretched taut with edema. Hands that shook so badly they couldn’t hold a full cup of coffee. Their heads bobbing uncontrollably, involuntarily agreeing with everything you said.
You’d think the owners of the gym would shoo them away, afraid the ravages of the trade would deter young fighters. But every gym had the same old guys. A standard feature of the ambiance. Nobody saw them as a cautionary tale, the blindness of youth and commerce being what it is.
The next time I took a drink my right hand was steady. Along with my resolve. As of that moment I was alive and as fully functional as I had a right to expect. Until that status changed, I wasn’t living in anticipation of the moment it would. Thoughts like that are dangerous. Inhibiting. Make you think you might actually have something to lose.
“Fear and anger make you stupid,” I told Amanda when she showed up with a wicker basket full of comestibles.
“Some manage it with a light and cheerful heart,” she said.
She had the good sense and generosity to keep our dinner conversation superficial. I bored her with tales of my days as a troubleshooter for the hydrocarbon-processing business. Drinking coffee under a tent with guys in white robes after spending the afternoon scaling a cracking tower that soared above the desert sand. The sweetness and gentility of the maintenance teams, desperate for knowledge and thrilled by my company’s technological prowess.
I taught them what I could, though I doubt those young engineers, or the people back at our office in White Plains, ever understood what the enterprise truly meant to me—the ideal undertaking for a brain never safe on its own, undistracted and free to wander, malevolent, into dark and lethal domains. Places where things could happen that were incomprehensible, unexplainabl
e in the cold light of day, even to myself.
——
Southampton Hospital was only a few city blocks from the high school. It was also made of red brick, the Village standard. Unlike the school buildings it was tucked inside an established neighborhood of Victorians and early shingle-style homes, mature Norway maples and copper beech festooned with building permits, or notices of an upcoming hearing before the architectural review board. Likewise, the streets were lined with pickups and vans, and the syncopated rhythm of construction filled the air. Fresh framing lumber and reddish brown cedar shakes strained against zoning setbacks and height restrictions, casting shadows over the occasional bungalow or modest two-story colonial, bearing uneasy witness to the neighborhood’s original intent.
I found the guy I was looking for in the hospital canteen. This was easily done, since the canteen was so small and Markham Fairchild was so big. He was working on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich from one of the vending machines, nodding his head to a compelling beat coming through a pair of white earphones. I imagined something along the lines of Bob Marley, a stupid stereotyping of Markham’s Jamaican origins, since it turned out to be Dwight Yoakam.
“I like all those country guitars,” he said, peeling off the earphones. “And the lyrics. Little stories.”
I sat down across from him with a cup of astringent vending machine coffee.
“If they have to plug it in to play, Doc, I’m not interested,” I told him.
He wiped his hand with a napkin and reached across the table. I saw mine disappear briefly into his handshake.
“You bleeding out from somewhere or just come to call?” he asked.
“No blood, no buddies in the ER.”
“Capital.”
“I’m just looking for some free information.”
“That’s fine for you, Mr. Ah-cquillo, but I pay a lot of money to Georgetown University for the information up here,” he said, tapping his temple.
Markham’s specialty was trauma care, often fielding patients fresh out of the OR. I’d first met him while regaining consciousness. The hallucinatory sensation that I’d been transported to a land of brilliant and affable giants had never quite left me.
