The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  I looked down at my snowshoes, rested my neck and shook my head, trying to clear the inside of my eyes. By the time I looked up again, my eyes were soft. Just the tangle of the high branches, the blue palm of the sky. I wanted to calm myself, to let my vision go wide, to feel myself not trapped inside branch after branch, to see without the possibility of any labyrinth. And then there was a streak. A gray blur lifting from one tree to another. My eyes didn’t chase. The blur went again, a bit to my left. And there, hunched in a ball against the wind, feathers slightly ruffled, adjusting itself on a snowy twig, was a bird. Tiny black head cocking left, cocking right. My heart rushed. It wasn’t so high up after all. My long lost friend! I wanted to raise my arms in greeting! And, with another blur, there was the other one, just a few trees away. I had slipped behind the mask—here we all were together!

  Eventually, as I resumed snowshoeing up the hill, my error dazzled me. Instead of just looking for a change in the air, I’d been hunting for an individual chickadee—a little tuft of gray and white and black in the snowy trees—which meant training my eyes only to see one thing and effectively blinding myself to everything else. But relaxing my eyes, and opening my gaze to movement, was to allow myself to see the smallest changes, to see, in a way, what the forest saw: the space between the trees, the lines of the branches, and any movement that might happen there. Maybe this was the way to see, to let my eyes be like ears, simply open to space and whatever might enter it: no limit on depth, no limit on possibilities. I pushed up to the top of the rise and looked out over the vista. The sky was perfectly clear—pale blue above the far white mountains and darkening blue up the vault.

  As I stood still, breath smoking in the cold, I had the feeling that the mountains were a true mirror, because they didn’t try to see, didn’t get lost in the vast surface of details. They excluded nothing. There was no part of me they didn’t accept. And the reflection they offered would never shatter: no accident or heartbreak could take it away. It was essential, not relative. They just needed more time to give me a reflection that was a little more solid—something I could take back to the daily world.

  “Fuck, come on, man. Real life. Real girls.” Juan Ignacio’s voice could have been a neon sign with a woman’s legs kick-kicking from a martini glass. I tried to think of A Moveable Feast, of the literary buddy stories I’d been lapping up in my room in the hills outside Bologna. The women and the cafés. The conversations and the exploits. Albeit expressed a bit more gracefully, this was why I’d moved down into the city. But it was late March now, and all I’d done since moving in two months earlier was to read, to write, and to wander the city on my own.

  “Just give me a minute,” I said.

  After checking my hair in the bathroom mirror and finding it a lost cause, I followed Juan Ignacio’s long back up the drafty stairwell. Music throbbed from the front room, and through the doorway there were the shapes of people dancing. The apartment was laid out just like ours—the same long, narrow corridor with the same windows on the courtyard. Young Italian families occupied the lower floors of the building, their laundry lines suspended over the courtyard, and international twenty-somethings, mostly students in the Johns Hopkins graduate program for international relations, lived upstairs. I followed Juan Ignacio through a palisade of faces and hands, a receiving line minus the wedding, with lots of German and cigarette smoke. Faces kept peering at me, dazzling and bright, and I couldn’t tell if it was with interest or concern. A lit cigarette brushed too close to my hand. Lipstick bunched on a woman’s lips. Maybe I really had spent too much time alone in the hills. After securing two cups of wine in the kitchen, Juan Ignacio led me back into the room with the dancing. I was just beginning to consider how long it would be before I left when I noticed a woman. She was talking with two well-dressed men, her hips still in rhythm but the music nothing that was carrying her. One man, with thin blond hair to his shoulders, was smiling, as though the conversation and the music were all one thing. The other man, who was handsome, looked a bit uneasy and was hardly dancing at all. The woman wore a white blouse open at the collar. Her neck was long, her hair up on her head. She seemed to be enjoying herself but ready at any moment to step through a door and find herself somewhere else, someplace better.

  The dance music changed to a Donna Summer remix, and I felt an odd little surge of confidence. Not in America, it was easy to feel patriotic, to muster a healthy American disdain for Germans dancing to disco. Besides, I’d always loved parties in college—the dancing, the alcohol, the feeling of something hidden moving below the floor, something rising and starting to emerge. Juan Ignacio joined a group of friends and I didn’t follow. The faces and bodies felt too close, and I wanted the wall behind me to recede, so there’d be more space between me and the dancers. I could see the woman in the white blouse so clearly. The play of her hips beneath her long skirt, the expression on her face. I tried to look away, but I was pretty sure she wanted to say something to me. The two men kept dancing beside her. Her mouth, which was strong, her teeth slightly too large, gave the impression that she was about to speak. She recognized me, I was almost sure, and she was on the verge of mouthing something—to ask where we’d met, or if I wanted to dance.

  The song changed again. There was no way I wouldn’t have remembered her. My mind tore through my past—through bus stations and piazzas and museums, through lecture halls and airports and summer camp, even through New York City, where I’d once tried to memorize the faces of girls at Grand Central, wondering who they were, where they came from, suddenly dizzyingly aware of the number of girls I would glimpse once and probably never see again, suddenly dizzyingly aware, beneath that enormous ceiling adorned with the constellations, of the role chance could play in a life. But the dancing woman was nowhere. Not rising out of any summer stream, not stepping onto any train, not walking beside me down any street.

  As I looked at her again, a sudden longing overwhelmed me. I wanted my past to be different—for my life to be different, so that it might have included her.

  “Are you Italian?”

  The song had ended, I’d gone to the window for air, and she was standing beside me. I had the momentary feeling that I’d willed her there. “American.”

  Something in her eyes stalled.

  “Is it so bad?”

  “Naya,” she said. “My name is Milena.”

  “Naya?”

  “Naya. It means no and yes. But at the same time.” She smiled lightly, a smile at herself. “This is very Viennese.”

  The man with the long blond hair was clearly watching us. “Would you like to get a drink?”

  “We go to the roof.”

  I followed her to the kitchen for more wine, fearing a series of delays and introductions, but she moved purposefully through the crowd. The stairwell rose one more floor, the air immediately looser, the music blurring behind us. We passed through a door that said only attenzione.

  A crescent moon hung in the sky. I’d expected the roof to be a kind of party satellite, but maybe the others didn’t know about it. We were alone. The March air bit with a pleasant sharpness. We could see the terra-cotta rooftops, the Due Torri lit from below, and Piazza Maggiore glowing like the courtyard of a medieval palace. She rested her wine on the parapet.

  “Would you say the moon tonight is naya?” You could see the crescent, but you could also see the part of it that was dark. Apparently, the guard who checked the normalcy papers of my comments had nodded off in his booth.

  She tilted her head to the side, dim light catching her neck. “But naya does not usually mean this.” She almost smiled. “So you are the American writer, no?”

  I did my best to sound modest and impressive.

  “Do you know Musil?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Goethe?”

  “Not personally.”

  She made a face. I was becoming more American by the second. “Herman Hesse?” she said, clearly throwing me a bone.

&n
bsp; “Hesse! I read Siddhartha when I was sixteen. At this real estate office where my father found me a job. I read and forgot to answer the phone.”

  “Exactly. You know Narcissus and Goldmund ”

  I wasn’t about to lose the little ground I’d gained. “Tell me about it.”

  “Now, this is very teenager experience, but when I am fourteen, I read this book. It is the story of two young men who meet in a monastery school. One is quiet and studies hard and reads Greek and Latin and so. The other is beautiful and likes to adventure and to live. I read it in summer, at my grandmother’s house in the Steiermark. For days I do not go with the others to swim in the lake. I do not go to the meals. I sit in the garden and read and wonder which character I am more similar to. But I want to be both. Is this not strange? Even then I know the book is obvious. It is supposed to be obvious. You are supposed to find a compromise between them—to live part adventure, part study. But it is not obvious to me. I want to be both of them, completely. I sit in the garden with my too-big sunhat, and I want to go everywhere and to read everything. But when my friend Sophie asks me to walk in the mountains or to swim, I don’t want to go. Nothing is fast enough. Nothing outside is big enough for what I feel inside. You must know this feeling, no?”

  I was stunned. The chill night air had slipped inside my shirt, but I tried to hide it. I had the sense this woman knew more about me than I knew about myself. “I guess it’s a feeling of not knowing where to start.”

  She squeezed my arm. “Ya, exactly,” she said. Her touch rattled through my body.

  The music from the party downstairs had drifted far away. We went on talking. It was as though there was no possibility of misunderstanding, because the words meant so little, were just approximate shapes for what we felt, and what we felt had somehow arrived before us—more like a frequency we were hearing, or a certain hue that was part of the air.

  The conversation lasted maybe seven minutes. When we were both starting to shiver, we went back downstairs, but I didn’t return to the party. I didn’t want to lose the feeling. She needed to return to her friends, and I didn’t want to chance feeling jealous or out of place. I continued downstairs to my room, took a long hot shower, then lay on top of the blanket. The music was still throbbing above me, drifting down into the courtyard. I remembered the way she had looked at me while she was dancing, like she recognized me. She hadn’t been mistaking me for someone else.

  6

  I was nervous to be bringing them to the house. Linda had said they needed a Christmas tree. They didn’t have a car, they couldn’t afford a delivery—they possibly were trying to hire a ride up to Newport. But I knew they couldn’t afford it. The café was just as bereft of customers the second time I went. Bella’s sweatshirt had the same penguins pulling the same polar bear on the same sled; Linda’s gray sweater was still unmended. Linda had sounded defeated, ready to concede, a Christmas tree a convention she and her unconventional daughter could do without. They had a parakeet, Mr. Kipling, and Mr. Kipling and a few bags of microwave popcorn were all the cheer they needed. It wasn’t so much her loneliness as her resignation to her loneliness that got me. Maybe it struck a chord with some fear I had about myself—some future I didn’t want to admit as a possibility. Anyway, I may have been a Jew and a hermit, but I wasn’t the Grinch, was I? Pine saplings dotted the top of the incline where I left my car; an axe and a rusted hacksaw waited in the mud-room. And these two displaced British women weren’t expecting anything, which made it possible to offer. It would just be a tiny Christmas miracle, with no expectation of anything to follow. The whole expedition—picking them up, felling the tree, driving them home—would cost me nothing. At least that’s what I’d told myself.

  It was a bright, windy late afternoon, and they were waiting outside the café, playing some kind of hand-clapping game in the cold. Linda wore a thin scarf tied roguishly around her neck—part high fashion, part Huckleberry Finn. Bella, in her enormous Michelin Man coat, looked ready for Siberia. They were giddy. From their faces, you might have thought suitcases were waiting at their feet and we were setting out to drive cross-country, wild adventures ahead.

  “You’re sure. You’re absolutely sure,” Linda said, the car door open, the cold whipping in.

  “Yes.”

  “There must be quite a lot of trees, of course.”

  “Mother, just get in.”

  Bella was already in the backseat. Linda closed her door, smiled at me—gratitude flavored with conspiracy. I wondered how long they’d been out in the cold.

  “Nice car. Does your radio work?” Bella said.

  “Bella!” Linda said.

  I flipped it on—there was static, the sound of the empty street, of long skies and coming snow. No one was out in town, everyone probably already inside with their families, baking cakes, wrapping presents, touching up the ornaments on their trees. The truth was, I didn’t really know what most people did on Christmas, only that it was usually nice to be with my own family not doing whatever those things were. We didn’t have any Jewish Christmas rituals—no Chinese food, no going to the movies. We were more or less left out of America for the day, but we were left out together.

  Only two stations surfaced through the static in English, and we drove through the pre-holiday quiet to commercials for snowmobiles and truck dealerships. I feared “White Christmas” coming on—this non-Grinch thing could only go so far—but as we turned onto Roaring Brook Road, a familiar chord hit.

  DOES he love me, I want to know, HOW can I TELL if he LOVES me so?

  Bella launched into full lip sync in the backseat, shaking her long blonde hair back and forth, and Linda executed a half turn, first just to smile, then big-eyeing it with her. As we passed the abandoned county fairground—the hand-painted sign for Aug. 23 still posted above the snow—I couldn’t help feeling it too: the easy champagne of the music, the lift of being in the car and going somewhere, of not being alone, of having a kind of mission. We were going to chop down a tree. We were a group now, my little Honda a quietly rollicking Merry Band of Misfits.

  “How far is your house?”

  “About ten more miles.”

  “Very well,” Linda said, adjusting her scarf. I wasn’t sure if she wanted the trip to be longer or shorter.

  As we turned onto the dirt road, crossed the snow mud-stained with tractor tracks, and continued up into the woods, the intoxication subsided. The station was going scratchy. I switched the radio off. We followed past the trailers, into the thicker snow of the unmaintained lane, and the silence of the trees surrounded us. I had the feeling that I was taking them inside my mind. I pictured them as though inside a crystal ball, caped wayfarers exploring some unmapped region, the forking paths into the woods really just various substructures of my consciousness. The thought was horrifying—far too interior. I didn’t want anyone that close.

  Linda pulled at her cuticles. Bella hummed to herself. I was a man they didn’t know, taking them to a cabin in the woods. A cabin with an axe and a hacksaw. It occurred to me I should say something. The silence in the car was a silence for one, uncomfortable with three, and I knew I should be putting them at ease. But I couldn’t play tour guide. I couldn’t translate. To talk about the land would have felt like I was talking about myself. Just having them with me, where I had only been alone, was already a kind of conversation, an intimacy I didn’t know how to understand.

  “It’s so far away,” Bella said. The snowy road rolled silently beneath us.

  “Patience,” Linda said.

  We passed the open field, pushed through the drifts, and I parked in the small plowed-out space, the lone human accommodation, at the top of the grade. As we got out of the car, I didn’t say anything. I wanted the place to speak for itself, like an abandoned cathedral, its hush still in the air. When I returned from town, my only customary routine was to piss in the snow—less to mark the territory than to feel myself back in the woods, back in the wild. I didn’t suggest i
t now. But I was conscious of moving more slowly than I had in town, of feeling oddly proud of the apple trees outlined and shimmering with snow, of the majestic display of the pines.

  They followed me down towards the house. A skein of smoke was still rising from the chimney.

  “It’s quite big, isn’t it?” Linda said. Snow glinted off the sloping roof of the garage. A jagged palisade of icicles hung from the beaten deck outside my room.

  “It looks enchanted,” Bella said.

  The rustling of our jackets and our boots squeaking against the snow were oddly loud, like we were an invading battalion. I didn’t want to make them wait in the cold, but I didn’t want them inside the house.