The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  We turned up a very steep side street and it climbed like a vine. The pedals grew tight, and Milena smiled at me as I gave in and walked my bike beside her. Around the curve at the top of the hill, the pale yellow and burnt red houses stopped and the trees changed, leafy branches making a canopy over the edge of the road, tufted grasses high at their trunks. The road grew flat, and we rode easily again, the sun warm in flashes, the air cool in pockets, and then the dilapidated wooden fence that had been running alongside us stopped, and the trees stopped, and we rounded another bend and came out to a ridge. The hill sloped down steeply all green with the tops of the cypresses and pines, and far down below was Bologna. I’d felt so at ease, almost like we were riding bikes in my own neighborhood, and it was a wonder to remember we were in Italy. Milena nodded towards it, and I rode slowly behind her, looking down over the terra-cotta roofs pink in the distance and the Two Towers, streets radiating out from them in all directions, and Piazza Maggiore, neat and model-sized. I thought she’d stop, but she kept pedaling, and the ridge curved back into the trees, dipped into leafy shadow, then up a small rise, the trees fell away again, and when we emerged into the sunlight, I knew we were somewhere.

  Milena braked and I pulled up beside her. “The park is not far,” she said, breathing fast. “Just on the other side of the hill. There is a road you do not see. We eat there, no?”

  I looked up to our right—long grasses and wildflowers made the land sway in the breeze. The hillside formed a broad horseshoe, or a kind of bowl, rows of apple trees, with crooked branches and small white blossoms, sloping down below us.

  I nodded upwards.

  “But here?” she said. “It is not a park.”

  A shallow ditch lined the road, and I wheeled my bike over to it and leaned one handlebar against the grassy embankment. “There’s no fence.”

  “Naya, maybe it is OK. I think nobody comes.”

  She leaned her bike ahead of mine. We found a less steep place to begin the climb and started up. The soil was clumped between the grasses, the footing not so sure, and I thought to offer my hand. But I didn’t know what would happen if we touched. I kept climbing. The hillside leveled into a little plateau before it rose up again, the tall grass wet with dew. We couldn’t see the road and the road couldn’t see us.

  “Good?” she said.

  We shook out the blanket from her pack and spread it on the grass. The blue heat buzzed. Back behind the bowl of apple trees, the road reemerged and curved around to the left, and above it, the green hills were hazed in sunlight.

  “You enjoy life very much.”

  I turned. She was sitting on the blanket, her hand held to her forehead. Her eyes were shaded and very deep-set with the sun. It was strange—I’d forgotten she was there, or, really, forgotten I was there, forgotten she could see me. I didn’t know why I was so at home with her. It made me uneasy.

  I began to unpack the sandwiches with sun-dried tomatoes and cream cheese, the blood oranges, the bottles of water.

  “Did you often make hikes as a boy?”

  I shook my head. “Did you?”

  “At my grandmother’s house, the one I told you of, we made hikes. There are paths and huts where you stop for food or drink, and high up there are the fields with cows. We don’t go often now, but I liked this very much as a girl.”

  “The cows are up in the hills?”

  “Not in the snow or so, but high up in the hills, many cows. You can touch them. If you are soft, they do not move away.”

  I handed her a sandwich. I tried to do it softly.

  “And you? You did not go for walks? I imagine you did this often as a boy.”

  “No,” I said.

  “But I am surprised.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me so well.”

  She glanced over at me. The words had come out more sharply than I’d meant them.

  “Maybe I do not,” she said quietly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you are right.”

  I didn’t want to be right. “I hiked in the summers,” I said. “At camp. But back home, during the school year, I had a different life. I was always waiting for summer to start again.”

  “Ya, this I understand.” There was something in her voice.

  “How so?”

  “You ask many questions.”

  “So do you.”

  She gave me a look that was becoming familiar—a slight pout, head tilted, eyes half-closed but very bright. It said, This is so, but you are not supposed to say it is so. “I sit in my window sometimes at night and look at these hills. I have a glass of wine, maybe smoke a cigarette—but you do not smoke, no?”

  “You’re stalling,” I said.

  “Stalling.” She looked at me, as though acting out the word. For a moment, there was only the conversation that had been riding below us, the sound of the wind in the grass. She looked away. “At night, I sit in my window and listen to music. The Sibelius violin concerto or Schubert or Schumann. And there is so much in the music, and so much outside in the night. But the next morning I must go to class. And I go, and it is interesting or so, and at night there are cocktail parties with this very small small talk. But it is important. So I go, I talk small. But I am waiting all the time. Like you said, you waited for summer and camp to start again. But for me, it is not summer. And I do not know when it comes.”

  We ate our sandwiches, looked out at the apple trees. “I do not know why I tell you all this,” she said.

  “I was beginning to wonder.”

  “But it is not boring and typical, these concerns of the future bourgeois?”

  “You’re not typical,” I said.

  She was quiet for a while. She was still beside me on the blanket, but she was very far away. Then the spell seemed to be broken. “Do you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  But the way she was looking at me, her face as gentle as when she described the cows in the mountains, I knew. The breeze sifted through my bare feet, and I could hear the wind rustling in the grass. It seemed there was no one for miles. Her voice came from very close. “You tell me what happened to your eye?”

  I’d seen her noticing it during our first conversation on the roof, the pupil now two years after the accident permanently dilated, one of my eyes blue, the other black. But hearing her say the words, the actual words, made my chest go hollow. People had asked before, but it had never felt like this. Usually, my body just went into lockdown, bracing not to feel anything as I answered. I’d give the facts as though I were a doctor reciting a case history. But now I could feel a kind of fault line running through my chest. I tried to keep my voice level. I gave my usual response. The basketball game, the accident, the doctor’s diagnosis. How I adjusted to playing sports. How my sense of hearing grew more acute. How the pupil had dilated now, but since the eye didn’t see, the change didn’t really matter. I could have been telling the history of some long-forgotten country.

  “But how do you see now?”

  “With my other eye,” I said, trying to smile.

  “Naya, I know this. But the world. It looks different?”

  My fault line wasn’t faring well. The whole hillside seemed to be finding its way inside me, guided by her voice. “No one’s ever asked me that.”

  “You did it to me.”

  “Did what?”

  “Made me talk.”

  “Hardly.”

  “You’re stalling. This is what you say?”

  Her eyes were so ready to listen. I could feel my checkpoint guard nodding off, could feel the urge to tell her more than I should. The day had opened too wide, and I didn’t want to be here, didn’t like how uncertain I felt. Wouldn’t I just be trying to impress her, trying to use my blindness as a way to win her heart? But I also knew if I didn’t say anything, the need to talk would just keep on waiting.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  I told myself to go slowly, to say nothing I wasn’t ready to say.
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br />   “One night,” I began, “when I lived up in the hills, I took the last bus back from the city center. It let me off outside Calderino around midnight. I had to walk three kilometers in the dark, no cars on the road, the houses with no lights on. I passed the gas station, the little bar. A stream ran alongside the road, and the reflection of the moon stayed with me as I walked. I was a little nervous, a little cold, but mostly I just felt good, like I could walk anywhere.”

  There was so much space in the way she was listening. I knew I sounded strange, but it was the only way I could do it—to tell it as a story.

  “When I finally came to my road and climbed up the gravel path, I didn’t want to go inside. It didn’t feel right to go inside. Everyone else was inside, already asleep. And the night had this clarity to it. The gravel white in the moonlight, a few clouds drifting by the moon. The way the town looked so quiet, the small roads, the houses. The way I knew people would get up in the morning and drive down those roads, going into Bologna to work. Life seemed to fit together. And the strange part was that my seeing that way fit together, too. Like I was a part of the town, a necessary part, kind of like a night watchman. Like someone ought to be awake in the night, not to protect the town exactly, not to scare off possible intruders or anything, but just to see the town while it slept, to be aware of it. I know it probably sounds crazy. But it seemed important somehow.”

  “And you stood outside for a long time?”

  “It seemed like a long time. Yes.”

  “But then you went inside?”

  Again my chest hurt. I nodded.

  “But really, now, it is always like this? In some way you never go back inside. You are always outside in the night? Always watching?”

  My throat felt thick. She’d understood. “Something like that.”

  “And it does not get cold? Always being outside?”

  Her hand rested just inches from mine on the blanket. I wanted so deeply to touch it, just to feel her skin against mine.

  “Do you want to read?” I said.

  I pulled out the book from my backpack, strangely disappointed, as though she was the one who had stopped the conversation. It was a panic move, but it was the only thing I could think of.

  I lay back on the blanket. She lay down beside me. I could smell her—the sun warm on her skin, something floral in the smell of her hair. I held the book open with my palm at the top of the page, blocking out the sun. The ground felt solid against my back, but my voice vibrated wildly in my chest. I tried to focus on the words, on the boys riding their horses across the barren plains of Mexico, the air hot and dry, but I knew beneath the page she was so close. Her arm lay just beside mine on the blanket, and I could feel her through my whole body, could feel the pull to brush my arm against hers, just to have that touch. The whole afternoon I’d felt it, the desire to be closer, physically closer, and I’d kept pushing it back, kept looking at the beauty of the hills instead of at her.

  She began arranging her sweater as a pillow.

  “You can put your head on my chest,” I heard myself say.

  Something was surprised in her eyes, genuinely surprised, but from very close. She took out the pins and her hair fell down in a soft curve by her neck. I was grateful for the book in my hand—grateful to have words ready, words that weren’t mine. Then she lay down, the soft weight of her head a reassurance on my chest, her hair warm from the sun. I kept my voice reading: the boys were doing something, growing apprehensive on their horses—a gang of men was approaching from the distance, but the words were slipping back into just words. Looking below the page, I could see the nape of her neck, and I tried not to look, but then my hand was moving in her hair, the long strands silken and warm. My body was moving in a thousand directions beneath the book, but my voice kept on riding through the hot Mexican desert. Then her hand slid onto my shoulder. I turned the page. Her hand slid farther onto my shoulder, and I knew it wasn’t because of the ominous men on horses in the distance. I put down the book behind my head, and she turned her face towards me. There were wisps of sunlight and then her lips.

  As we kissed, her hair a soft drapery around us, there was nothing I could do. The world fell away and became deeper all at once. We were inside the scent of the long grass, inside the buzz of the heat. Inside the current of the conversation that had been going on without us, rising and falling on it, the sun carrying us on a raft of light. As I pulled her closer, as I felt her body beneath mine, there was the sense of riding with her on that current through a secret opening in the afternoon, traveling into some realm that wasn’t day or night, or inside or outside, somewhere where there was no possibility of getting lost.

  When we opened our eyes, far off in the apple trees, there was the call of a bird. Milena curled in by my neck. “I must hide in you.”

  “In me?”

  “From you. With you. In you. All these things.”

  I tried to get her to look at me, but she kept her eyes away. “I feel too much. This is a problem,” she said.

  If it was a problem, it was a problem I wanted us to have. “We’ll figure it out.”

  She sat up, stared out at the apple trees. The side of her face was a face I hadn’t seen. “Naya,” she said. “You do not know.”

  7

  A truck was approaching. The sound came pushing through the gathering dark, too thick, too constant to be anything native to the woods. Nothing alive, I thought, would willingly give away its location like that. It was late afternoon, the clouds trailing purple above the pines at the edge of the field, the troughs in the snow filling like faint blue pools. I’d started taking late afternoon walks, no snowshoes, just past the apple trees, past the abandoned house, usually stopping somewhere alongside the field. I liked looking at the horizon line. The snow lay scalloped and wind-whipped like an ocean, and the sky above the darkening pines pulled on me like the horizon at the ocean, but here I could keep on walking if I wanted to—into the field, into the dimming whiteness, into the dark embrace of the trees. Sometimes I’d picture myself doing it, walking and not turning back—my own jacket clear against the snow-filled field, then a speck of color fading into the distance. It would be like walking an empty page—until there were no more words, no more letters, no more past. Or maybe some first letter would eventually start to appear on the far side of the trees, on the far side of the darkness, as though some portal opened there into another world. I didn’t know if it was a fantasy of becoming visible against that emptiness, or if it was simply a fantasy of disappearing, of becoming as much a part of the land as the snowy trees. Either way, the field and the line of the distant pines had begun to hold weight for me, to exert a gravitational pull.

  But the drifts in the road were no higher than my shins. There was no reason to plow. I had a sudden fear it was Bella, wearing her glittery wig, eyes fixed ahead: she’d learned to drive, borrowed a truck, and had drawn herself a little map, complete with arrows and hearts, to remember the way. It made no sense, but it was the perfect mix of fear and fantasy, of guilt and longing—my imagination abducting the girl into abducting herself. I’d looked at her too long, she’d felt what was in my head, and now she was calling on me to deliver. But as the truck nosed out of the trees, its yellow headlights playing over the snow, I recognized it immediately. The plow angled to the side, the wooden slats along the bed. I wasn’t relieved, or even disappointed, as much as surprised. Nat almost never plowed this late in the day. And there wasn’t much new snow to plow.

  Maybe the whole Y2K thing had spooked him. I’d noticed the onslaught of exclamation marks on the magazines at the checkout line at the C&C: Millennium Madness! Will Computers Melt Down?!? Apocalypse Now! At that fateful tick when one millennium ended and the next refused to begin, computers everywhere were supposed to go on the fritz: planes would plummet from the sky, bank vaults would swing open, power grids would dissolve. Everything wouldn’t just go dark but Dark Ages dark, and we would be thrown back into mass confusion, into the
primordial terror of the dark side of the moon. To me it seemed laughable, a collective hysteria—like a grown man’s horror at the prospect of losing his remote control. But maybe I should have been more understanding: after all, what was I doing in the woods but trying to come up with my own bulleted list for survival, trying to figure out what was essential for living in an altered world?

  Of course, New Year’s had come and gone without my even noticing—only the headlines at the C&C had changed. Reconsidering Technology, Y2KHoax, U.S. Government Spends Three Billion Dollars to Avert What? But maybe Nat had been spooked. Or maybe he thought I had been.

  He rolled up beside me now, rolled down his window. He wasn’t wearing gloves or a hat. “Was in the neighborhood.” He motioned with his chin as though there were houses around.

  “Nice afternoon for a drive.”

  “Can do a little dust-up for you. No charge.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  He blew on his hands, considered the glowing tip of his cigarette. He looked like he’d been out driving for a while. The ashtray below the radio was jammed with butts. “Just wanted to tell you my son will come down.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “He’s a responsible kid. A storm hits, he’ll be down in a few days. Plow you out clean. He knows these parts. He’d rather sit in the house, play his video games, but I took him hunting around here when he was a kid.”

  He looked straight ahead, his hand still on the wheel.

  “Are you going away?”

  A wry smile creased his eyes. “I thought about that. Drive over to Burlington, fly all the way down to Miami. Have myself a big party on the beach. I’ve never seen the ocean, did you know that? Strange for a man my age.”