The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  “And so to dismiss it?” he said testily.

  I don’t know what we said after that. I was still thinking about that man, about how it felt to be him, to walk the street with your mouth, your life, visibly broken. It disturbed me that I knew nothing about him, couldn’t imagine his life at all, and yet something about him felt personally familiar.

  I backpedaled, made peace, couldn’t risk opening up any further. Coles had always listened like no one I’d ever met, listened in a way that allowed me to hear the part of myself I was afraid of—the part that didn’t fit with my family, the part that didn’t really seem to fit anywhere, except in the realm of the writers we discussed. I couldn’t afford to lose that, especially now, couldn’t afford to discover there was a part of me he couldn’t hear, or, worse, heard but disapproved of.

  Towards the end of our talk, Coles asked if I’d noticed the binders for travel fellowships. There was one called the Rockefeller, he said, designed for students who had reached a crossroads in their lives.

  “What senior hasn’t reached a crossroads?” I said.

  “You’d be a strong candidate,” he said. “A very strong candidate, indeed.”

  The house was an enormous alarm far above me. My heart was pounding, something forcing me back up to the surface, pushing me up, up, up, past the bright coral and the strange fish of my dreams: something was happening up there, something important. Someone had died, someone had been hit by a car, someone was in the hospital.

  I reached out for the phone beside the futon. The ringing stopped. The numbers glowed green in the dark room. “Hello!”

  “Howie. It’s Matt. You OK?”

  Matt was my brother. He lived with his wife in Newton. I was in a house in Vermont.

  “What is it?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Jesus. Don’t tell me you were sleeping.”

  There was a permanent buzz on the line, like the droning of a giant mosquito. “Just a second.” I put down the phone, lit the candle on the low windowsill above the mattress. It was snowing outside, no moonlight, sweeps of snow brushed up against the screen. My heart was still going double time, still marching towards disaster. I didn’t want Matt to hear it in my voice. “What time is it?”

  “I got twenty minutes before The West Wing starts. Just thought I’d check in. You do know what The West Wing is.”

  I was trying to do the math. The sun probably set around four, I’d eaten a bowl of Ramen noodles for dinner, and then lay down by the fire. As usual, pictures had started to appear in my mind, and I’d fallen into a kind of visualization game. A month or so earlier, it had just started happening. And because it kept me company, I kept doing it. Some nights, I’d move through my morning walk to school as a boy—picturing it house by house, the tree roots buckling the sidewalk, past the Zandittens, the Longs, the white house with the black shutters whose family I didn’t know, the Sugarmans, the Gorfinkles, the Donowitzes, the Cohens, then the left turn at the bottom of the hill, the stone retaining walls of the houses built on a slope, the yards waist-high, the plane trees with their peeling bark, loose sand still on the road after the winter snow had melted. Or I’d picture Bunk 7 from summer camp, going bed to bed, Josh Fields, Tom Carradine, Johnny Bent, Kevin Zolot, seeing how much I could recover of their blankets, their favorite t-shirts, their ways of talking, and then surprises would come: the job-wheel posted on the door, the Dopp kits arrayed on the bathroom shelves, the sharp smell of bleach, and those surprises would flare into something like short movies: the night of the sock war, a counselor slapping my hand as I reached for an ice cream sandwich, the first real conversation I had with Katherine Cohen outside Titus Hall, music from the Square Dance floating out over the soccer field. Lying on the wood floor, the firelight shimmering through the grate, I’d find myself laughing out loud or tears running from my eyes down into my ears. The stories would play on their own—some memories, some daydreams, as though I were watching my very own TV show. And then I’d come upstairs to bed.

  I’d probably been asleep for a good two or three hours. “The West Wing?”

  “Right,” Matt said.

  I saw the words in yellow and realized I was remembering the cover of People magazine from the checkout line at the C&C. “It’s a TV show about the presidency,” I said, my tone like a fortune teller reading a crystal ball. “With Martin Sheen. Very popular.”

  Matt’s relief was audible. His brother’s sense of reality was still intact. “So what’s new?”

  It seemed a strange question. “It’s snowing. But that’s not really new, I guess.”

  “Good, it’s snowing. And?”

  “Well, last night there was a full moon. The snow was blue and very bright. I could read by it.” I decided not to mention the shadow of the branches on the snow, the way they looked like roots, as though the moonlight were letting me see underground. I decided not even to mention that normally I read by candlelight. I was doing a very good job sounding normal.

  “Good. And?”

  And what? It felt like a quiz. When I talked to Mom and Dad, which happened about once a month, Mom seemed relieved simply to know I was still breathing on the other end of the line, that I still remembered Star Market and the Sterns and Filene’s Basement. When I talked to Dad, he asked questions with an implied correct answer: You feeling pretty good? (Yes.) And you’re getting some exercise? (Yes.) And you’re eating OK? (Yes.) Had he asked me about my bowel movements, I would have been happy to oblige. He was leading the witness, which was fine by me—we avoided the topic of my “living arrangement” by basically avoiding everything. But Matt was trickier. His ill-concealed frustration with my answers betrayed the questions he really wanted to ask. What’s wrong with you? Where’s the guy I used to watch the Celtics with on the couch? What the fuck are you thinking? But because they were questions he didn’t know how to ask, and had answers I didn’t know how to give, he treated me like a substitute for myself, a stand-in until his real brother returned.

  “So, I read this book. Thought you might like it,” he said.

  This was a suspicious advance. “Really?”

  “It’s called Into the Wild. Ever hear of it?”

  “I’ve seen Into the Woods.”

  “It’s a true story.”

  The phone mosquito hummed. My heart was hammering again. “What’s it about?”

  “A guy kind of like you. From the suburbs, athletic, went to Emory. Liked to read Tolstoy. But he hated society and went off to live in the Alaska woods.”

  “I don’t hate society, Matt.”

  “No, of course you don’t.” I could see the look he was giving me across the miles—his mouth twisting, his eyes dark.

  “So how does he get by?”

  “He lives in an abandoned school bus.”

  “Did he have a woodstove inside?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know.”

  “And then what happens?”

  The mosquito flew closer. A conversation was threatening, one Matt apparently had meant to imply but not begin. I could see him chewing at his lip, working the white scimitar of a scar he’d gotten when he’d crashed Mom’s Volvo in high school. It was where his words went when he didn’t know how to say them.

  “The kid starves to death. That’s what happens. He thinks he knows what plants he can eat, but he doesn’t.”

  “Sounds inspirational.”

  “He poisoned himself.”

  “You mean on purpose?”

  “Not on purpose. But he was ignorant. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into.”

  “Did I mention I go to the market in town? That I eat frozen pizzas?”

  “He went into the woods in April. He crossed this little stream to get to his school bus. But when he wanted to come back out, it was midsummer. The stream was a river. A raging river with all the snow that had melted.”

  “He couldn’t ford it.”

  “No, he couldn’t ford it. The way he’d g
one in, it didn’t lead back out.”

  I turned to look out the window. I’d been imagining a kid tromping around by an old school bus, dirty, happy, wild, but then he was standing on the bank, the stream gone muddy and violent. My stomach felt horrible. I had the feeling again of swimming up through my dreams too quickly. “There aren’t any streams here,” I said.

  “Great. That’s good to hear.”

  Part of me longed for him to say more, to explain more, but our man-to-man talk was clearly over. He’d already gone further than he wanted.

  Years later, I’d learn that he’d been the one to push hardest while I was in the emergency room. He’d arrived in the rush-hour traffic, soon after my parents. Towards midnight, while I was in the bathroom throwing up from the pain, the ER doctors had held out one last chance: if a fragment of my optic nerve still held, it could possibly be bolstered by steroids. My vision might be saved. The doctors reminded Matt and my parents of the range of injuries to my eye, they rehearsed the risk of side effects. “Please,” Matt had said. “Try anything.” The doctors reminded him of the very slim odds, of the possible complications. But Matt had kept on pleading: “Please, try anything. He’s my brother. Try anything.”

  As he switched the conversation now to running into someone from Roxbury Latin, my mind began to see the snowdrifts along the open field, the way they were piled so high. They’d never melt into a river. But my mind went on picturing them—like there might be some other version of that Alaskan river, some other blockade I couldn’t yet imagine. Maybe the road in to the house wouldn’t lead back out. Maybe it wouldn’t be that simple.

  Then I could hear a door closing, and Matt’s wife, Jami, in the background. “Listen, our show is about to start,” he said. “You take care, brother.”

  I hung up and the glow from the phone’s numbers went away. The wind kicked up and snow brushed at the window screen. I didn’t blow out the candle for some time.

  Matt hit play on the VCR, and a little tuxedoed version of him introduced himself as the host of the show. “Today we’re celebrating my little brother’s graduation. But I wanted to give you all a glimpse of how he got here. Howie, This Is Your Life.”

  A murmur of laughter rippled the room. There were roughly thirty captive moviegoers: my parents, my grandparents, my closest friends and some of their parents—some sitting on the floor, on the couch, some standing in the back holding drinks or finishing their cake on little cardboard plates with balloons and mortarboards on them. The party is here, the plates and napkins read. I had been ushered up front, to the seat of honor.

  The tuxedo vanished and Matt the reporter was standing on the wood chips in front of Temple Beth Avodah nursery school, then in front of the white-washed bricks of the Baker School kindergarten, telling stories about me. His love was only going to make it worse. Now he was at Roxbury Latin. He shot the long, narrow corridors, the refectory with the Charles I coat of arms, the jaundiced gym. My college buddies continued the thread from the Adams House courtyard. One of my freshman-year roommates waxed nostalgic about girls asking for me before I’d even arrived on campus. And Andrew described my interrupting his last exam with forty minutes left on the clock, by telling the proctor his car was being towed from Mass. Ave. “By the way,” he added, “I don’t even have a car.”

  It was all true. The girls at the door freshman year. Springing my best friend from his last exam. I was the natural, the one who could breeze through anything. I felt the room looking back and forth between me and the TV, pleased with the resemblance. I heard my name again and again, but for the young man in the video, the accident hadn’t happened. No one mentioned migraines or crashes. No one mentioned umbrellas or missed curbs or blind spots. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t confided in anyone about most of it. It didn’t matter that my friends had no way of knowing how much my life had changed. What mattered was that my name kept going, and the picture kept forming, and it was just a memory, a picture from the past, which made me feel like a ghost from the future. No one alluded to the accident. I didn’t want anyone to allude to it, but each successive story felt like another room added to a house that wasn’t the house where I lived. Maybe it was a house I’d designed, maybe it was the one I wanted everyone to see, but standing outside it now with everyone, like there had just been a fire drill, when there had actually been a fire, felt terribly strange. It was as though the boy I’d hoped to see in the painting of the blue couch had finally arrived, but he wasn’t the boy I’d been waiting for. The den was going farther away from me, as though my seat of honor was drifting out the window, as though I was looking in on a party for someone I didn’t know. Maybe that was part of the physical strain, not just the love in the room but the awareness that everyone was seeing me off-center, horribly blurry—the strain of a blurred object not knowing how to get itself back into focus.

  Mom broke into tears on the television. She was talking about my winning the Rockefeller, the fellowship that would send me to Italy for the next year. “You were just so confident. You just knew an interview was coming. You just knew.” She was openly crying, waving the camera away. “Turn that thing off,” she said. “Turn it off!” Dad, on the other chaise lounge on the back porch, held up my term bill for the camera. “Do you see what this is? Can you zoom on this? It says balance, zero. Congratulations! We made it. And congratulations on the Rockefeller! When you return from the year in Italy, maybe you’ll apply for a Rhodes!”

  No one in the room flinched. We had entered the realm of famous names now: Harvard, Rockefeller, Rhodes. And why not? We had all worked hard. We had all done our part. We had earned it. We, the Jews of Newburgh and Brookline, had arrived. Everyone was clapping, looking towards me. The video had ended.

  I stood up, gave my brother a public hug. He was so large his embrace surrounded me like the shade of an enormous tree. I wanted to stay there as long as I could, to hide inside it, to emerge as someone other than the boy in the video. Why had we all been unable to do this? Just to hold each other? To feel our pain against each other’s arms?

  “Thank you,” I said, stepping back.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  PART II

  Learning to See

  5

  The red, white, and blue OPEN flag hung limp in the windless cold. The building looked less like a restaurant than a hunting camp—a brown cabin with two windows you couldn’t see in, a screen door probably salvaged from somebody’s back porch. The parking lot was empty. I considered walking back to the car, but the handwritten sign in the window advertised HOT PIZZA—steam waves rising from a sideways triangle—and I wasn’t ready to return to the house. It was about a week before Christmas, and Nat had finally come to plow. I didn’t know how long it’d be before I made it to town again, and I wanted to hear someone talk to me and to hear myself talk back. It was something to stock up on, like soup or frozen pizza, something I’d be able to replay in my mind at night by the fire, remembering how it felt. It would be a tether back to other people, something I could pull on when I felt myself floating too far away.

  In the checkout line at the C&C, I’d been mesmerized by the cashier. Her eyes spiky with eyeliner, the crisp curls of her tightly permed hair, the swaying of her mustard yellow sleeves as her surprisingly well-manicured nails rang up the items, her eyes flicking between the price and the keys on the register, then down to the next item on the belt. We made no small talk. She said what the total came to and I paid. Only the conveyor belt was between us, and the wonder was different than the wonder of seeing a snail up close—it was more specific, more familiar. It made me aware of my hands. I was looking at one of my own kind. The oval shape of her face, the almond shape of her eyes. The questions in my mind—Where did she grow up? Who did she love?—sent a current through me that didn’t happen in the woods. They were questions I knew, questions a person could have asked me. Coming back into the parking lot, I’d felt a relief akin to the relief of coming out of a hospital. I could f
eel the diagnosis as I opened the car door, as I loaded my bag of groceries into the backseat: still human.

  But I wanted to get a second opinion before returning to the house. I wanted to hear myself say something. To check on how the silence I’d been learning in the woods would turn into sound. More and more, as I snowshoed through the trees, as I sat by the woodstove at night, I felt something inside myself expanding, growing clear. That feeling I’d known as a boy at camp often spread through my chest, even beyond my chest, beyond my body, until there was no division between me and the land. But beyond the hills, where would that feeling lead? Could it fit into rooms and conversations? Not just into the stilted pauses on the phone with Matt but into something meaningful, something that had its own form? Could I carry it with other people—so that I’d stay grounded, in the most literal sense, so that I wouldn’t lose myself again?

  Inside the café, there was murky darkness. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. Two black tables sat beside the window, another two against the wall. There were no customers. I was just taking this in, relieved no one would look at me as I ate, when a woman shot out from the kitchen. “Well, hello. A good afternoon to you!” She unloaded a menu into my hand, her voice trailing behind her. “Table by the window?”

  She moved with the electric jumpiness of a cartoon. “Right, let me tell you the specials of the house.” She set a glass of water on the table, brushed the stringy gray hair from her shoulder with girlish flair. There was a hole in her wool sweater where the shoulder seam had pulled apart. Her voice was pitched for a party of eight. “We have Cornish pasties. A specialty. You’re familiar with shepherd’s pie?”

  I unzipped my jacket.

  “Right, then, a pasty is smaller. Filled with meat and onions and potatoes. All rolled in a nice pie and crimped on the side.” Her eyes pulsed with over-determined focus, as though fighting against whatever hardship the rest of her had been through. Her accent—I wasn’t imagining it—was British.