The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  Time in the woods plays tricks on you. The lightning went again, the millions of tiny lightbulbs in the leaves less spectacular, the thunder slow to follow. The green candles flickered on the table, their shadows anchoring them to the tablecloth. The thinness was still whistling through my ribs.

  I stood up from the table, stowed the booklet in a low cupboard beneath the sink. I didn’t want to feel it close by, all those caps and bold letters, all that arm waving. I didn’t want to be reminded of all the ways solitude could go wrong. And I didn’t want to think about what would happen if I couldn’t find solid ground here, if I couldn’t find anything I could trust—or how I’d already driven across the country twice looking for answers, or how I was running out of money, out of options, out of land. After a moment, I took the booklet out from the cupboard, ripped off the back page with the important phone numbers, and fed the rest into the fire in the woodstove. The torn pages caught and crumpled in the flames. I needed this too much. Lev’s fear, I promised myself, would not be mine.

  Your life changes in an instant. When it does, it splits into two different lives, with two different timelines, the bridge between Before and After exploded in the very moment of its making, the force of that explosion throwing you indefinitely to the other side. There are questions on that other side—questions about the very nature of what is real, what is important, and what is worth living for. You have to answer them. You have no choice. You can’t go back to Before. To open the ripped sky into some deeper sky behind it, you have to answer.

  It was a fine blue-sky afternoon, early May. As I trotted down the stairs of Adams House, the musty stairwell aired by intermittent sunlight, there was nowhere I had to be, nothing in particular I had to do. I was twenty years old. Finals for my junior year at Harvard were three weeks away. Summer winked from the distance: mornings without classes, books read for pleasure, an editorship waiting for me at Let’s Go, the student-written travel guide. Not that I particularly wanted to be a travel guide editor, but it seemed something to try for, an almost-real job.

  The gym was mostly empty—the resounding echo of a few balls, a few guys shooting on the three courts. The gym always made me feel at home, if a little guilty for having so much time on my hands. My friends Ray and Alexis spent their afternoons down at the chem lab, already on the long trail towards becoming doctors; my roommate, Andrew, was either on the tennis courts, training for a professional career, or in Lamont Library drilling himself for his classes, compensating for the time he lost to the courts. But my afternoons were still a kind of waiting room: writing an occasional music review for The Crimson, doing a little volunteer work, going to the gym. That was the privilege of being an English major. Besides, it was only the end of junior year, my grades were nearly all A’s, and I was in no hurry. The given career options as presented over the years by my family had always been lawyer, doctor, or businessman—like a child’s game with firemen and policemen but the suburban version. Dad, my uncle, my aunt, and my cousin were all lawyers, and my older brother, Matt, was on his way.

  I’d spent so many hours playing basketball in high school, and devoted so many hours to watching the Celtics with Matt at home on the couch, that playing pick-up games was more than just a way of relaxing from the career track I hadn’t found. To rise into a baseline jumper, to slash through the lane, was like flipping through a scrapbook of my past—my muscles still carrying those late afternoons in the high school gym, the snowstorms Matt and I had played through in the backyard, fingers going numb. The way holidays carry vestiges of holidays past, that’s what basketball was for me. Every time I picked up a ball, the leather on my fingertips reintroduced me to all those hours with other basketballs, on other courts, with other people, which was always a quiet reminder of who I was.

  We shot for teams, ran one quick game to 11, but everyone else needed to get back to studying. As guys began filtering out of the gym, a stocky red-haired guy called over to me. He cradled a basketball on his hip like a clipboard. “We need one more,” he said. “It’ll just take fifteen minutes. You want in?”

  As I hesitated at the doorway, keys already in my hand, all I felt was a kind of aimlessness. It didn’t really matter if I stayed for one more game or if I left. The only thing waiting for me back in my room in Adams was daydreaming—and weren’t you supposed to stop daydreaming as you got older? Or maybe daydreaming wasn’t even the word. It had just happened again on my bed after lunch. I was reading a poem for class, written by a twelfth-century Japanese woman named Izumi Shikibu.

  If he whom I wait for

  Should come now, what will I do?

  This morning the snow-covered garden

  Is so beautiful without a trace of footprints.

  I glanced up, looked around my room, as if to make sure no one had seen—which was ridiculous, since my face probably betrayed nothing, not to mention I was alone. But it was for this very reason that I never studied in the library. Around me, I could feel the far hills softened by snow, the feathery quiet of the morning. I could feel that sudden hollow inside the woman’s chest—the way she wanted her lover to come, of course she wanted him to come, but the way the new snow was pristine, the way it touched the part of herself she trusted most. We were supposed to consider the difference between this poem and a haiku, to contrast the forms. And I’d get to that in a moment, do it routinely, but for now I just wanted to sit with her—with the wind at her hair, with the cool, shivery smoothness of her skin beneath her kimono, with the feeling of sex not far off, and the way she probably knew her fear was both very childish and very mature at the same time. Then I heard footsteps pounding up the stairs of the entryway, a door slamming, and I was shamed back to my assignment, back to my pen bleeding onto the comforter.

  “So what are the teams?” I said, stepping back onto the court.

  Peter, who looked like Abraham Lincoln minus the beard, paired up with me—tall, gangly, all elbows and knees. We’d played together before and I liked our chances. He needed to be in motion not to look awkward, but he had an automatic jump shot, was fast, and he knew the game. The redhead’s teammate had a massive upper body and stick legs, like the front cab of an eighteen wheeler with no rig.

  The other courts were empty and the game began—quiet, workmanlike, the satisfying echo of the dribble, the tick of the leather in and out of hands. Peter and I were ahead, the redhead and his teammate no match for Peter’s deft back-door passing. But about midway through the game, Peter took a jump shot from the right wing. The shot hit the front of the rim and angled sharply back towards the foul line. We all darted for the ball. I was ahead of the redhead, but Peter and the little truck were also converging. For a moment, the ball hovered there, suspended. I remember the feeling of being too close, of space seeming to collapse among the bodies. And then the pain.

  The gym fell quiet. I stayed down on the court, not moving. The sensation was unlike anything—so deep, so internal, that I didn’t know what to do. If I’d twisted my ankle, been kneed in the balls, I would have known the protocol: assess the damage, then limp off the court or keep playing. But a liquid, it was blood, was beginning to drip onto my face, onto my t-shirt. And the pain was something I couldn’t locate. It was too interior, like something had gone wrong inside my skull. Like some kind of acid had dripped behind my eye.

  Very slowly, Peter helped me off the court, led me down the stairs.

  Outside the gym, the daylight was shattering. My eye had already swollen shut, and to my left eye the world appeared a provisional version of itself—the brick sidewalk, Lowell House across the street—none of it firmly in place, the sunlight filtering through the trees as though from no one source, everything overly bright. The wide stone steps of the gym shimmered like water, each step solid only as it formed under my foot, one step, then the next. Space in general felt wider, less confined, but the space around me felt tighter. As though I was on a lower frequency than everyone else, existing in some range that human ears couldn’t
hear.

  Peter followed beside me towards University Health Services, but I avoided looking at him. It had been his finger that had hooked into my eye. My hand trailed instinctively along the brick wall that lined the narrow sidewalk. The day was too bright. There was nowhere to look. A constant bee sting burned at the back of my eyeball, surrounded by a tight-fist throbbing. My t-shirt was stained with streaks of blood, and anger was pushing through my veins. A tight feeling of wanting to strike back, to throw parked cars out of my way. Why had this happened? Why had this happened to me? I told myself it was just music playing in a neighboring room, just something to ignore. But I could feel so much swimming, so many emotions swirling and darting, some barrier between me and the deepest waters suddenly disappeared. Vaguely, I admitted to myself time might be a factor but didn’t admit to myself for what. Below that, as Peter and I crossed Mount Auburn Street—its two lanes suddenly horrible and dazzling—I tried to ignore the angry appeal already buzzing inside me: I can do better, give me another chance.

  At University Health Services, a doctor swabbed some of the blood away from my eye and pressed with his thumb around the lid. He was probably in his sixties. He introduced himself as Dr. Hardenbergh. He’d seen all this before, it seemed. Maybe my senses were heightened, but his white coat smelled like mothballs. His office was straight out of Norman Rockwell. He said he was going to snip something, it wouldn’t hurt, and just over the bridge of my nose, with my left eye, I saw him cut something white, like a bit of boiled egg. It didn’t hurt—he was right. Maybe it was just the eye’s version of dead skin. But that something could be cut from my eye, and with so little explanation, was not reassuring.

  After a quick examination of each eye with his penlight, Dr. Hardenbergh switched the overhead light back on. “Very good,” he said.

  I didn’t move.

  “You can go back to your dorm room. You’ll have quite a shiner.” He peeled off his rubber gloves.

  “I can’t see anything in my right eye.”

  “Just heavy swelling. Nothing to worry about. In less than a week the eye should open.”

  I had the strange sensation of desperately wanting to believe something I knew wasn’t true. “When you put your penlight in my eye, I didn’t see anything.”

  Dr. Hardenbergh removed his penlight again. His bare fingers forced my bruised lid open. “You really don’t see anything?”

  “No. I really don’t.”

  “Surprising. You’ll want to go down to the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary. You know where it is? You can take the subway. The Red Line.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Dr. Hardenbergh went to the sink, began to wash his hands. “Why would I be kidding?”

  “Time isn’t a factor? Can you tell me time isn’t a factor?”

  “No ambulance necessary. If that’s what you mean.”

  Physical anger blared through my body. I wanted to grab the doctor by his white coat and slam him up against the wall. And behind the anger there lurked a sickening fear: I hadn’t really been doing anything with my life, and now some outside factor was going to make it impossible for me to redeem myself. Of those to whom much has been given, much is expected. Didn’t this doctor know who he was talking to? Didn’t he know how much I had to do?

  “No ambulance necessary. Not necessary. Because?”

  “I can’t call for one. Simple protocol.”

  I didn’t trust this man. “Then get me a cab.”

  Dr. Hardenbergh stared at me.

  “Now,” I said.

  I liked going outside to sit in the quiet. It was like wading into an ocean, the way it surrounded and held my legs, the way it made me heavier and lighter at the same time. My first few days, I could spend only so much time inside the house without going back to it.

  It must have been my third or fourth morning. The front door, which was strangely medieval, made of heavy black iron and glass, opened to an unkempt ramble of land that sloped up unevenly towards the trees. A few rotten logs, a kind of token gesture at stairs, were wedged in among the knee-high grass, the daisy fleabane, the black-eyed susans. The single enormous oak tree had already turned deep copper, a thin skirt of leaves fallen around its base. I climbed up past its bulging roots to the highest point before the birches began. Out above the house’s tar-paper roof and the spire-like tops of the spruces, the hills dazzled in a sweep of fall color, like a town with all ages on parade: the youthful, shimmering yellow; the abiding, stately green; the full-throated oranges and reds, all of it fading to harlequin corduroy, then to the mountains going blue in the distance. None of it was new, exactly. I’d stopped to appreciate the view every morning. But for some reason, the silence surrounded me now. It was tremendous in its completeness. I’d felt it before—when I first pulled in by the meadow, when I came back from stocking up at the C&C—but maybe my senses hadn’t quite been able to travel at car speed, and now, given the extra couple days of only walking, my senses were beginning to arrive. To slow down and move in. In the past, whenever I’d been alone, there’d always been the possibility of another person—a kind of door held open in the silence for another person to enter. But now four or five miles separated me from the Mooreland farm, six or seven miles from the nearest main road. No one would be coming within miles of the house—not that afternoon, not that night, not the next day. No human noise, apart from my own breathing, would enter into what I was hearing.

  It was hard to admit to myself how desperate I was to be here. My only plan, which felt more like survival instinct, was to return to a place where my senses felt at home. As a boy, I’d gone to an overnight camp in New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut River from Vermont. We played sports during the day, sang songs by the campfire at night, hiked in the White Mountains once a week. It was a place I couldn’t remember without feeling it in my body. Every walk up to the soccer field carried the scent of sun-warmed blueberries; on the softball diamond you could smell the rain before you heard it sweeping over the hilltop, a strengthening patter until it was hammering towards you on the leaves. I liked to get up early, before anyone else in my cabin, and sneak out the door to sit on the porch. During the day, I was just like the other boys—saving my best polo shirt for Square Dance, making bets to win an extra Snickers bar on Candy Night, equally engaged in debates about the hottest girl in Bunk 19 and whether “the Garden” meant Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks played, or Boston Garden, where the Celtics did. But what I remember most vividly is those mornings. Behind me, through the screen windows, I could hear the soft sounds of my friends sleeping. The lake would be still as glass, just skeins of mist drifting across it, the morning light flashing green and gold. It was my first idea of how a lake should smell in the morning, of how a morning should look and feel—and my first feeling of fitting in with something larger than my friends, of fitting in with the world around me. It was my first glimpse of myself, really—not of myself preening in the mirror or trying to be like my friends, but my first glimpse of myself when the thing I thought of as myself was entirely quiet. Eventually, I’d steal back inside the cabin, not wanting to be caught being different, but as my friends did wake up, I’d try to carry that feeling into breakfast with them, into our activities. Some days it worked, and my perspective seemed as wide as the lake and the mountains, and some days it didn’t. But those few minutes on the porch almost always returned me to that feeling in myself, to that quiet of already belonging—returned me to a place to start from with other people.

  But now the silence, as it began to fill in, wasn’t entirely silent. High up in the oak tree a breeze stirred. Lower, behind me, the same breeze swept through the maples and birches and sounded like a stream. The land began to feel like a room—only a room without ceiling or walls. Bounding into the foreground, a squirrel came ripping through the fallen leaves, every leap crisp and loud, as though the thrashing sounds were the source of his power, propelling him into his next leap. He stopped a few yards from me, whipped his
bushy tail in quick liquid movements. He whipped and whipped. Then he bounded off, one smooth low sine curve into the trees. As my ears followed, I realized I’d been hearing space as much as sound—the dimensionality of the oak tree’s branches, of the forest edge behind me, of the dry leaves on the grass, all of it so much more subtle than I could see. The day was teeming with road signs, with ways to orient myself in space. The acres and acres of wilderness were an invitation. A way to learn what was solid—in the world and in myself.

  But later that afternoon, the rain falling again, all that space closed in on me. I was upstairs, wrestling a futon mattress from the spare room into the bedroom. I didn’t want to keep sleeping on the mattress where Lev slept, didn’t like feeling his body’s impression when I lay down, didn’t want to absorb whatever dreams he hadn’t quite finished. Sweat prickled under my armpits. The futon had rubbed a little red patch on my cheek. It would have been so easy to lift the futon over the floor with the help of another person, but there was no other person. No neighbor, no friend down the hall. No chance of the most basic help. So I kept dragging. At the doorway the futon caught, slamming me into the doorjamb. I hadn’t seen the floor wasn’t flat. A scrape above my elbow began to bleed.

  “Shit.”

  My voice sounded strange, disembodied. But something in my blood was racing. Since the accident, just being jostled on the sidewalk would throw my body into instant turmoil. About a month earlier in Boston, the strap of a man’s backpack had slapped me on the cheek as he hurried off the subway. I’d felt an immediate urge to chase him down the platform, to tackle him on the full run. What I planned to say to him at that point, our limbs entangled, I had no idea. That part of the scene, when I reimagined it later, made me feel horrible, like I was a rabid dog desperate to spread my disease. Recognizing my body for the alarmist it had become, I always had to say to it: You’re really worried about a little slap, a stubbed toe, a jammed finger? You really think you can’t heal? You really think this is permanent? But that didn’t mean the anger stopped coming. A body is stubborn that way.