The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  “You know that trailer in the field, just down the road?”

  I nodded.

  “Yours truly. Not winterproof. But next summer I’ll be there. Vacation place,” he laughed, the wheeze coming back.

  The trailer was maybe a half mile away, the closest one to the house. It sat alone, by two trees with golden apples, in the corner of wide field, a thin creek running alongside. I’d seen it on my weekly drive to the C&C. I liked that no one was ever there.

  “My brother’s got a camp up in Derby,” he said. “All the way back in the woods. A place like this.” He kept pitching as he spoke, the knock of log after log falling into place. “Got a nice platform, right close by. We wait up there for the deeyah.”

  “A platform?” I said.

  “Up in an old oak. We just sit up there, bring a couple of beers, and wait with our bows.”

  I couldn’t hide my amazement. “You hunt with a bow and arrow?”

  “Bow hunting—more of a sport that way. Not too sporting sitting up there with a gun.”

  “Right,” I said.

  We kept moving from the sun of the driveway back into the cool shadow of the garage. Nat wasn’t saying much, and I thought I’d finally lost credibility with him—maybe he was picturing me hunting with a pistol.

  “I’d sure like a place like this,” he said. “Nothing fancy but real backwoods. My wife don’t like the idea of it. She told me so. But to be in the backwoods for a full season.” He avoided my glance. “Not for the winter. That’s a little crazy, pardon my French. Too much goddamned snow. A man could lose himself in all that.” He coughed, spat something into a handkerchief he’d pulled from his back pocket. He examined his discharge briefly. “But I’d like it. I tell you that. If I could get it past the old lady. Maybe mud season till autumn. Just to see the changes, like the deeyah. Yes, sir. I’ll tell my brother about this. Met a real backwoodsman today, I’ll tell him.”

  The sunlight slanted into the garage from behind Nat, but I could see his face clearly enough. There was no trace of irony in his expression, no extra wink in his eye. I kept watching, but nothing in him changed as he pitched another two logs onto the stack. I wasn’t sure whether he was putting me on or was just entirely sincere.

  Eventually, the ground by the truck looked as though there had been a war between trees—bark carnage and wood dust everywhere. Nat said he’d be back in a few days with the next load. He shook my hand, glanced around once more, then climbed up into his Ford. He looked at me through the open window. “Good you’re playing it safe. You’ll have wood for next winter.”

  “Not sure if I’ll be here next winter.”

  He secured his cap on his head, something surprisingly soft in the lines by his eyes. “You’ll be here,” he said.

  The street moved as a blue-gray river, the houses slumbering boulders, the lights of Boston shimmering in the distance. My right eye was still swollen shut, and the world appeared vaporous, as though conjured by a spell. Stately brick Tudors hovered outside the car window, one with crenellated towers, another with stone lions posed out front, ferocious heralds of the suburbs. It was after two in the morning, and the trees draped everything in shadow, as though time itself had fallen asleep. But if I closed both eyes, there was the lean of the car, the gentle pressure to recline on the hills. The familiar sweep of the streetlights and the trees. My body enough to tell me where we were. My parents were taking me home.

  Dad drove very slowly, as though the accident had yet to happen and could still be avoided. Mom’s profile, drained and alert, looked washed out under the passing streetlights. Our family narrative had always been so straightforward. Mom and Dad had been high school sweethearts in the all-American city of Newburgh, New York. Dad’s family didn’t have any money, and he started working in a pocketbook factory at age thirteen, then paid his way through college by parking cars at a hotel in the Borscht Belt. Mom taught fourth grade outside Boston to help him pay for law school. Both Mom’s sister and Dad’s brother stayed in Newburgh, but Mom and Dad made the leap to Boston together, took the gamble together. And now Dad was a senior partner with a prestigious Boston firm, Mom worked as a career counselor, and their two sons were on their way. We were the American Dream. We were like the families on vacation brochures, just a little more Jewish. Dad with his twisted front tooth and slightly rakish smile, Mom with her short, stylish hair and lively blue eyes. The two sons tanned and athletic, horsing around in wholesome fun.

  But now, in the hush inside the car, it was painfully clear the light on all of us had just gotten more intense. At our dinner table we didn’t even talk about the other kind of family. A divorce of some friends might be mentioned, but quickly, quietly, a shame, just awful. And the skeletons in our own family closet—my father’s father dying young, my aunt leaving college suddenly at the beginning of her senior year—were topics we never discussed. Dad would begin rearranging his silverware or repeatedly hitting the lock button in the car as soon as a conversation of this kind approached. “See what you’ve done,” he’d said the night I’d finally asked Mom about her sister dropping out of college. “You’ve made your mother cry.” The kitchen clock ticked above us. Mom wiped away her tears. I’d thought the conversation had been going well—Mom remembering how dinner after dinner, with her older sister home and there at the table, no one had said a word, how they pretended nothing had happened, and how she still didn’t really know why her sister had come home. Mom seemed grateful for the chance to talk about it now, but Dad, mistaking her tears as being about her sister, rather than also being about their inability to talk about her sister, continued the tradition of shutting the conversation down. There was nothing more I could say. To push further would have been to threaten our tacit agreement about what we talked about and what we didn’t. To run heedless through the family minefield. To question our very sense of who we were.

  As Dad nosed the car down the driveway now, I felt a weakness through my chest, a fragile opening, like a long shut-up room was being aired. How had I not prepared for this? How had I not known a collision was coming all along? My breathing felt so quiet, as though I’d been caught at something, discovered with a secret I’d forgotten I was carrying. I’d been harboring a double life—one for everyone else and a different one for me. The one for everyone else was well trained at keeping people happy. He was slightly too independent for my parents’ taste, but he was a son to be proud of—a Harvard student, a fine young man, one who looked like Bob Dylan circa 1964, before Dylan went electric. Probably a future lawyer. At worst a journalist. My strategy had been to play along—to be athletic but not a jock, smart but not a nerd, reserved but not aloof. To do nothing conspicuous, like a spy in one of those TV movies, the kind of guy who blends in so well he almost forgets he’s a spy himself. And thanks to him, I didn’t have to worry about the hidden part of me, the part that crept out while I was reading in my dorm room, the part whose sense of meaning came from something he couldn’t articulate even to himself, the part who did well on tests because of what he daydreamed when he read, the part who played basketball because of the way it helped him travel in time. The part who wasn’t a professional student, who didn’t know how to please, who didn’t really know anything. The part of me I’d never introduced to my family—because I’d never needed to.

  But now it seemed there wouldn’t be a choice. In the ER bathroom, after throwing up from the pain, I’d glanced up from the sink and hadn’t recognized my own reflection. There was my familiar wavy brown hair, my familiar Nike t-shirt. But the face was a scarecrow version of my face: my eyelid swollen the size of a small plum, the skin so blue it was almost black, the eyelashes caked in blood. I hadn’t wanted to move, hadn’t wanted to break the illusion that the reflection wasn’t me. It had happened to me before on crowded subway cars, in shop windows in Harvard Square—that split second of noticing a stranger’s reflection in the window, of idly registering his hair or his mouth, and then another split second of realizing
the stranger was me, the whole thing a minor existential carnival ride, complete with minor terror, minor thrill. But those other times I had filled back into my reflection instantly—like when a cloud passes and light pours back into a room. But in the ER bathroom, it was different. I didn’t fill back in. And now, being ferried back to the room where I’d slept as a boy, I felt like I’d lost my reflection for good—my body turned inside out, the deeper part of me stirred up to the surface of my skin. I felt transparent, as though there was no way to hide anything.

  The basketball hoop hung above the garage, the backboard ghostly in the glow of the outdoor light.

  “Do you need help with anything?” Mom said, as the garage door descended jerkily behind us.

  The garage smelled of dust, mildew, and rusted garden implements. I was still in my shorts and basketball sneakers, still holding my room keys and college ID. It felt like a bad dream: I was in the clothes for one place, but had been transported to another, a place that didn’t look like itself. Mom and Dad didn’t look like themselves. Mom’s eyes had lost their usual wattage. Dad’s face hung haggard in the garage light. Usually, when I came home, I had my backpack and a big duffel bag of laundry. Dad would greet me just inside the doorway with a hug—two firm pats on the back—then stand only a few inches away as I took off my shoes, unzipped my coat, as though he might learn about me simply by proximity. “Honey, give him some room,” Mom would say, and, sheepishly, Dad would step away. Then Mom would speak in a kind of fanfare: “Everything, I want to hear everything.” And in an overexcited little herd, we’d stumble into the kitchen.

  But now my hands were empty. If there had been anything for my parents to carry, I would have given it to them—just to weigh their worry down, to keep it from floating towards me.

  “There’s nothing,” I said.

  They waited.

  I motioned for them to go ahead of me. I wanted no one behind me, nothing I couldn’t see.

  In late October, the rains came. The sky went dark, biblically dark, and for days the rain swept in sheets over the deck, pummeled the tar-paper roof, and pitted and puddled the dirt road. The maples went bare and slick. The birches grew rumpled looking, like crushed cigarettes after a party. There were no more leaves to make the rain shimmer and whisper rather than pound. The hills around the house thinned, opening into just a pencil sketch of themselves. There were fewer birds, fewer squirrels, fewer colors. The night’s darkness got heavier, lasted longer. And maybe to fight my growing loneliness, my morning routine became a kind of ritual.

  Dawn’s blue-gray light would wake me, the leftover rain dripping from the eaves, my breath pluming visibly above the covers. I’d pull on my green wool sweater, my wool hat, creak down the steeply pitched stairs, the house gray and quiet with the windows to the woods. I’d put the battered kettle on, step into the bracing cold of the open garage, and fetch small branches from the scrap box. I’d come back inside and open the woodstove, kneel to sift through the lacy white ash for glowing embers, arrange the kindling, blow on the embers as though on a child’s skinned knee, and return to the kitchen to pour the tea before the kettle began to whistle. Back to the garage for an armful of logs, another whiff of the wet woods, then back inside I’d kneel in front of the woodstove, lodging the logs over the growing flames. I’d adjust the grate on the stove to one slit, then sit down with the tea, which had now cooled enough to drink.

  I took my time. The loneliness often felt as though the day was slow, and I was stuck outside that slowness, looking in. The way to feel less lonely was to slow down to the day’s pace, to be inside it, and to look around from there. The clean, almost sharp waft of mint would cool behind my eyes. With each hot sip there was the complement of the wood smoke on my hands, as though I’d brewed the tea over a peat fire. Behind me, the wood popped, shifted, hissed. The warmth that had permeated the walls of the mug continued outward into my palms. Small tendrils of steam drifted into the air, just as my own breath had done as I gathered wood. I couldn’t help feeling myself absorbing some of the tea’s character—the way the strong mint scent made good on its steady promise, the way its taste didn’t trail off on the tongue.

  I can’t say how long any of this took. Maybe ten minutes drinking the cup of tea, maybe longer. There was no clock in the house, no microwave numerals, no computer. No sense of time other than the daylight through the windows and my own sense of pattern—finding my hand on the kettle just as it began to tremble, or stepping outside to find the sun a white hole in the clouds above the highest spruce. There had always been clocks in classrooms, clocks on walls, clocks in public spaces—clocks like the digital one above Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, or the famous clock tower in Piazza Maggiore, clocks as ubiquitous as the portraits in China of Chairman Mao or of Lenin in Russia. Not to mention the watches on nearly every wrist in Harvard Yard, nearly every wrist in Bologna, individual watches to make time’s face resemble your own, while we were all joined by common time, the common progression, which we were assured of by the bells tolling at one church or another. There was undoubtedly something true about it—the light did come and go, the sun did rise and set, the moon did change its shape in the sky. And meanwhile we all got older. Time passed. I’d never given it much thought, but now it seemed bizarre that we’d managed to shrink something so profoundly primal and complex, something so near and so far, into little circular frames with numbers up to twelve. It was like we had domesticated the planetary motions, housed them in convenient cages, harnessed them as farm animals to help with our daily work. We needed them for lunch meetings. We needed them for parking meters. Every night, we slipped the turning of the Earth from our wrists. The few stars in Boston, I realized now, had been like worn-out horses back in their stalls. Their quiet snuffling in the dark, their unassuming beauty, so much greater than the use to which they’d been put. But here, the stars ran wild. With the overwhelming profusion of them, with the visible sweep of the Milky Way, it seemed there were more stars than sky. Time was everywhere. Not minutes and hours, not days and weeks, but seasons, centuries, millennia. Time was so much bigger in wild places. And feeling them reunited, time and space, I felt returned to some natural element, like a fish returned to water.

  Before my accident, my preferred clock had always been other people. Hearing Matt flushing the toilet in the morning meant I needed to rouse myself for school; hearing footsteps pounding down the stairwell in Adams meant I was bound to miss breakfast; hearing the whir of the street cleaner on Via Irnerio meant Milena and I had only a few more hours before she had to steal back upstairs. But now my sense of time came only from the sun and the stars, and from the time it took for the water to boil, for the fire to catch. There were no other people, no other clocks. Maybe this was what pushed my morning towards feeling like a ritual—towards the sense that kindling the fire, making the tea, and even walking outside weren’t just morning activities but a way of participating in something larger. Some community not of people but of the natural world. A community that might help me find my own resemblance to Time, my own rhythm as a part of its rhythm—an orientation beyond a face or a name.

  Coming home from college always felt a bit like falling down the rabbit hole. Mom’s unwitting attempt at organization, which often took the form of arranging tchotchkes, was to announce nearly every room’s intended use. A red milk carton, suspended by a plastic stream of milk, hovered over a bowl of plastic cornflakes in the kitchen. A fluorescent orange arrow pointing down, painted by Mom herself, ran the length of the stairwell from the kitchen to the basement. In the downstairs bathroom, a small ceramic statue of a man in a bathtub sat at the edge of the bathtub. And the house’s centerpiece was a McKnight print of a blue couch in a living room, which hung above the blue couch in our living room. As a boy, when no one was around, I’d steal across the Oriental rug, climb up on the blue couch, and wait to see if a little boy would appear on the couch in the painting.

  But the morning after the accident, even my o
wn room felt strange to me. Dust motes drifted in the sunlight above the radiator. The same posters of Larry Bird and Andre Agassi hung on the walls; the same National Latin Exam medals hung over the trophies on my bookcase. But the lines on the wallpaper seemed to be trying to hold the room in place. My bookcase, my desk, my chair—nothing was quite as solid as it was supposed to be. Every object looked like it had lost its outer coating. As though it had become a suggestion of itself, a mock-up for a rehearsal of some kind, until my real bedroom was ready to return. I’d always been especially proud of my trophies: the batters so dignified and balanced in their stances; the basketball players rising up effortlessly into jump shots; the gavel, for a debate tournament I’d won, poised at an angle as though it were rapping a bench for order. But now they just looked like trophies in a store window, with no substance behind them, no real victories holding them up.

  I kept looking around my room, testing. My eyes still tracked together, and with any movement of my left eye, my right eye balked with pain. There was the swampy heaviness of the lid, the battered feeling of the eye itself, and that interior pain, no longer as piercing as a constant bee sting, but thicker, with a kind of dull vibration. The doctors had given me only Extra Strength Tylenol, which seemed like a very bad joke. Didn’t I at least get drugs? On the other hand, no drugs meant the injury really couldn’t be that bad. Two Tylenol sufficed for a hangover from too many Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong. Maybe the strangeness of my room was just a trauma jet lag, just the shock of everything that had happened and a bad night’s sleep. The ER doctor had mentioned something about an adjustment period, the brain adapting in fascinating ways, but I hadn’t really been listening. I wasn’t interested in adjustments.

  But as I emerged from my room and came to the top of the stairs, it was clear there wouldn’t be a choice. I could see each stair clearly enough, but couldn’t gauge the drop between them. There was just a series of lines, the distance between them getting smaller as they reached down to the foyer. They looked like a suggestion of stairs, a possibility of stairs, but nothing I could trust. I waited, like a skier at the top of an expert trail, trying to visualize my descent. It didn’t matter how many times I’d taken the stairs not bothering to look. Matt, who was more than six feet tall by the time he was thirteen, had always been the one who had difficulty with the stairs, the one whose perpetual effort to catch up with his own body generally reminded me of how good I had it physically. But now the stairs looked treacherous, unfixed, fantastical. I gripped the wrought-iron banister. My foot dangled. The plush blue carpeting received the ball, then the heel, the iron of the banister solid under my palm. It wasn’t until my foot struck carpet that I knew for certain where the stair was, but the next stair was still in question. It didn’t matter that memory and common sense told me each stair was the same distance down. My brain trusted my eyes—and my eyes said there was no telling where the next stair might be, no telling if I would step and not find anything solid, no telling if my foot wouldn’t just keep falling, pulling the rest of my body down. I took another step, resting both feet on the same stair. I just needed to listen to my eyes less, to trust my other senses more. Appearance was not reality. I could almost feel my brain struggling to adapt. Vision no longer knew best. It could no longer be in charge.