He changed his last lire to dollars in Rome, got onto a larger plane, quieter but no more numbing than the last. He was waiting for the blow that would knock the feeling back into him, but it didn’t come: he looked out every few minutes onto the gray expanse of ocean and saw the bleak, featureless landscape of his heart. The farther he flew from Calabria, the less a person he became, or so he thought. It was as if, while trying to touch up a painting, he had inadvertently washed out the entire thing, so thoroughly that he had forgotten what he’d been trying to paint in the first place.
* * *
In Seattle he bought lunch—tacos—panicking all the while over the unfamiliar money. The clerk took about half of it. Before he could protest, Bernardo found the tacos in his hands, in a paper bag, and other people moving to take his place in the line. Everyone seemed wild and ugly here. He found his terminal, sat down and ate. The tacos were salty beyond belief, and he ate them with blinding speed.
He bought a copy of Time, and watched other travelers while pretending to read it: the text was full of unfamiliar people and weird idioms, and he couldn’t muster the presence of mind to decode it. The people around him looked bored. A mother held a sleeping baby, hitching it up reflexively on her chest at intervals; an old man talked to a young woman by the windows. A middle-aged couple dressed in garish jogging outfits held clothes bags and did not speak to one another. A boy sat alone, wearing stereo headphones.
When the time came, they filed into the plane, a small jet with seats grouped in twos. His was in the last row, against a carpeted wall, and wouldn’t recline. He buckled his seat belt and read the ads in Time.
A young woman sat down next to him. He recognized her from the waiting area; she had been talking to the old man. She smiled at him and said “Hi.”
“Giorno,” he said, forgetting. “Hello.”
“Great seats,” she joked. She struggled with the recline control and quickly gave up. Bernardo watched the operation with sympathy.
“Well,” he said, “it is only small fly.”
She raised her eyebrows. They had a shocking expressive sweep to them. “That’s true. One point for us.”
He nodded. “Ah-hah.”
Her eyes were fixed on his face, and he turned away for a second, coughing. “Are you from…overseas?” she said.
“Italy.”
“Wow. Always wanted to go. Visiting family?”
“My son.”
“Well, hey. That’s terrific.” She turned to look out the window on the opposite side of the plane, where the ground was moving slowly past. In the front of the cabin, flight attendants demonstrated the safety equipment. The young woman cracked her knuckles, then extended a thin, smooth hand to him. “Megan,” she said.
He shook it. “Bernardo.”
“So where’d you learn English?”
He shrugged. “Everybody know a little.”
“Well,” she said, pointing to his magazine, “I’ll let you read. I just thought we ought to do introductions.” He nodded, unsure of how to tell her that he preferred this to the magazine, but before he could work out the words she had settled back into her seat and closed her eyes.
The flight was bumpy, but the view spectacular: there were no clouds, and below them the ground spread out, vast and blank. The occasional town came into view, but mostly it was mountains and plains, a river or two. He didn’t know long he’d been looking when he noticed her face over his shoulder. He started.
“Sorry, don’t mean to bug you.” Both of them sat back. “Is this your first trip to Marshall?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, you’ll love it.”
“Yes?”
“I go to college there,” she said, leaning over him again, “and I absolutely love it. It’s a funky town. It’s going to be hard to leave.”
“So you stay?” he said.
She shook her head. “Gotta move on. Things to do, et cetera. Got a boyfriend there.”
“He will go too?” Bernardo asked, and it filled him with envy, the thought of a traveling companion. But of course he had one, if he’d wanted her.
“Yeah,” she said. She pointed down at the earth. “Now keep your eyes on this. We’re going to rise up over those mountains and land in that valley. That’s the Marshall Valley.”
He watched as the mountains grew closer and rose to meet them. Then the ground dropped away to reveal a wide plain dotted with farms and houses, then factories and a city, gray and bright in the sun. There was an electronic ping, and the seat belt signs went on. Bernardo hadn’t taken his off since they left the ground.
“Doesn’t it look nice?”
“The mountains have no houses.”
“They’re not allowed.”
He looked at her. “No?”
“Yep. People like the hillsides bare.”
He watched in silence as the plane banked and the entire sweep of the valley was exposed. She said, “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“Seen him?”
“Your son?” she said.
“Ah.” He shrugged. “Maybe twenty year.”
He pushed the little tray into the back of the seat in front of him and slid the latch home. The plane had evened out, and drifted over trees interrupted here and there by open ground, and he could see it all clearly now: each individual tree, every animal. He could tell the horses from the cows.
Then there was a deafening roar somewhere in front of him that decayed into a loud and steady ringing, and everything outside jumped. People’s voices rose. He felt hands on his arm. The window was like an old movie—dark, light, dark, light—and in the cabin objects moved across the floor like loose animals. Masks, oxygen masks, dangled comically before them like gag spiders. He reached out with his free arm for one, but couldn’t catch it, and a jolt sent his hand back to the armrests. He felt the American girl’s head on his shoulder, but if she spoke he couldn’t hear her. Everything around was noise now, his head filled with it, as if it were coming from inside him. His stomach floated free in his gut like a buoy. And then a terrible knocking, a gush of summer air, and he shook in his seat until he thought he might come apart.
At some point he didn’t feel the American girl at his side anymore. And then nothing seemed near him at all, nothing he could see or touch or otherwise sense. He was in a completely new place where no one had ever been before, or could go to, and for the moment this filled him with sweet relief.
* * *
Trees in front of him. A steady tone in his left ear, silence in the right. He shook his head and nearly fainted away with the pain of doing it. He looked gingerly down at himself and saw that he was still belted into his seat, still holding tight to the armrests. Just beyond his feet, a tongue of torn carpet, hanging out over a drop the height of a man, and dark soil below. He stuck his toe out over the edge. There was no one in the seat next to him. Where was the girl? Where was everything, the rest of the airplane, everything?
There it was, far off to the left, one wing laid flat along the ground and the rest of it scattered about. Trees felled, broken; an intact chunk of the cabin black and burning, a cigar butt on the forest floor.
It was very quiet. He waited.
I must be dead.
He released the seat belt and stood up. Got dizzy, sat on the sheared-off edge and vomited over the side. Every muscle felt torn from its moorings. He turned his hands over against the weird backdrop of the forest: not a scratch on him.
I must be dead.
* * *
The air smelled rank all around him. He turned and looked back at what he’d left: the tail of the plane, completely, impossibly whole, nestled up between two giant conifers. If he looked up he could see the path the rest of the plane had taken through the trees: it fell, taking their tops off clean, until finally they beat it down.
Nearer the wreckage now, he stopped and found himself surrounded by things: a six-pack of canned soda, spread-eagled on the ground ahead; a shining somethin
g that resolved itself into a pair of glasses; a length of shiny fabric, half blackened, with smoke rising off it. These objects were like clues in a mystery, the solution to which was both obvious and obscure. He could feel the answer rising up, dark and horrible, but his mind was unwilling to let him see it, the way a movie murderer pulls the cowl over his head before he turns to face the camera. And like that, the desire to see the killer’s face left him, and then the desire to take another step. He could feel the numbness tamping itself into his fingers and toes, asserting itself along the length of his bones, and it made him so weary he sat down hard on the forest floor and lay back in the dirt. He was aware only of something tremendous having happened, something baffling and awful, and an urgency that seemed distant, far removed from his own predicament, whatever that might be.
“I must be dead,” he said aloud now, and it shocked him to hear the hope in his voice.
part two
6
Monday morning, Paul woke sweating in the dark, unable to pry apart his jaws. He lay still a long time, willing the muscles in his face to relax, remembering the dream. Its predominant element was his teeth: he was clenching them together and couldn’t stop, and the pressure on his molars grew until, with a sickening crunch, they shattered. Oddly there was no pain, only the salty, warm rush of blood and the weird scrape of tooth fragments against one another. He began to panic. He jumped into the car and soon found himself lost among labyrinthine streets in search of a dentist’s office he couldn’t find.
Awake in bed, he got his mouth open and probed it with a finger. The teeth were all intact. He looked at the clock. It was ten after six. Anita slept beside him. For a second he thought about waking her, but decided against it. All weekend, as the investigators and reporters came and went, he and Anita had gently pulled away from each other and settled into a mutual politeness in which unprovoked speech seemed rude and physical contact brazen. He worked his jaw, massaging the muscles, then slunk out from under the covers.
In the shower, the dream anxiety retreated, and at the breakfast table the space it left began to fill with the real anxiety of his first day on the job. Already, his having been hired seemed like an embarrassing and potentially disastrous mistake, and he wondered if somehow he had been taken for someone else.
He had responded to the ad on a whim, in person, a week ago. The office lay just off the strip beyond downtown, sandwiched between a popcorn and candy shop and a discount shoe store in a shrub-and-white-gravel “professional village.” Paul walked in through the swinging glass door and was struck immediately by the overpowering smell of popcorn butter.
“I’m looking for Emil Ponty,” he told the man at the front desk.
“That’s me,” the man said, looking up from a typewriter. He was short and thick with a wide, froggish face and ugly plastic-rimmed eyeglasses. Paul took a quick look around the office and saw, half-hidden by a carpeted partition, a teenage girl with purple hair talking on the telephone.
“I’m Paul Beveridge,” he said. “I saw your ad.” He held up a scrap of newsprint in the air between them.
Ponty rolled his chair over to a filing cabinet and pulled out several sheets of paper. “Okay,” he said. “Have a seat.”
“No way!” the girl in the back suddenly screamed. “No way!”
“My daughter,” Ponty said. “On lunch from the high school. We’re going out for a bite.”
“I can come back…
“Nah, it’s no problem. If she’s done on the phone before I’m done with you, you can come along. Now you want the assistant job, right?”
“Yes.” He rummaged in his bag until he found his résumé.
Ponty looked it over for approximately five seconds. “Real nice-looking paper, Paul Beveridge,” he said. “You went to Alabama, did you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Roll Tide!”
“Oh, yeah.”
He tossed the résumé onto the desk and leaned back in his chair. “So the job’s like this, Paul. You don’t work full-time, exactly, but it’s twelve bucks an hour, which in this town, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a king’s ransom. Job isn’t for everybody. A lot of sitting and waiting for people, a lot of walking around town smoking cigarettes, a lot of time in the car. You got a car?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, good. No drugs or drinking on the job, I hate that shit. You’re not Bogart, okay? Do you mind looking in people’s windows? Taking snoop pictures?”
“No, sir.”
In the back, the daughter screamed again. Paul jumped. “Oh God, Kate! He’s such a little weasel!”
Ponty swiveled in the chair. “Hey, pipe down! I got a meeting here!”
“Sorry.”
“Okay,” he said, spinning back around. “This oughta be your only job. Sometimes you might have a week straight with nothing to do, sometimes you’ll do forty-eight hours in a row, no breaks. You have to be around when I need you, is that all right?”
“That’s fine.”
Ponty looked at him for some time, until Paul began to think something was wanted of him. He began to fidget.
“Well?” Ponty said. “You want the job?”
“Do I want it?”
“Do you want it.”
“Well, yes.”
“Okay then.” He handed Paul the papers he’d taken from the file cabinet. “Fill these out and bring ‘em back to me.”
Paul stared at the papers. “You mean you’re hiring me?”
“Yeah, you’re hired.”
He picked up the papers and looked at them: I-9, W-4, employee information sheet. Ponty sat in his chair, hands behind his head.
“Can I ask why?” Paul said.
Ponty shrugged. “You look like you can blend in. You didn’t come swaggering in here wearing a trench coat. That’s what the last guy did. A trench coat? In August? This is not the kind of guy I want sitting in a tree for fourteen hours, you know what I’m saying?”
“Sure,” Paul said. Fourteen hours in a tree?
The girl hung up the telephone, jumped out of her chair and threw her arms around Ponty’s neck. Ponty patted her arm. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“Yeah, okay.” He turned to Paul. “Hungry?”
They walked to a hamburger place on the strip and sat in a booth, Ponty and his daughter on one side, Paul on the other. The daughter’s name was Alyssa, and she was preternaturally beautiful, a fact she seemed dimly aware of and slightly embarrassed about. She kept her head down much of the time, looking up only occasionally to see, Paul thought, if he was watching her. Which, in fact, he mostly was. After they ordered, it occurred to Paul that he didn’t have any money, and he told Ponty.
Ponty waved his hand in the air. “Ah, it’s on me. Celebrating my new assistant.”
“Did you have one before?” Paul asked him.
He nodded. “Yeah, for a while. But he was a pervert.”
“A pervert?”
“Got off on looking in windows. He started turning in these reports. He’d tell me everything I wanted to know, but he also told me about what was going on behind every other window on the block. Then he finally quit. He took off with this woman he was supposed to be spying on. He actually called me from Portland to tell me this. He watched her and watched her and finally just went up and knocked on the door, and the next day, adios.”
“I see.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t get the burger after all,” Alyssa said to her menu. “I don’t want to get fat.”
“Fat!” Ponty yelled. “You’re fourteen! You’re a bean pole!”
“Fat runs in the family,” she said.
“Your mother’s a rail. I dunno who you could be talking about.”
Alyssa giggled.
When their burgers came, Alyssa fell upon hers. She was the first to finish. Afterward she picked at the french fries, taking several bites to eat each one. When they were all done, Ponty stood up to pay the bill. His belly curled over the edge of the table and knocked o
ver the pepper shaker, though he didn’t seem to notice.
Outside, Ponty hugged Alyssa. “Gonna come by after school?”
“Going to Mom’s.”
“How’re you getting there?”
“I got a ride,” she said. Paul noticed that the purple hair was all growing out of one side of her head. The other side was shaved clean, and the purple hair swept over it, like the bald man’s trick. Now that they were outside, she kept touching it.
“Who from?” Ponty demanded.
“Dalene.”
“Christ,” he said. “That girl and her truck. Okay. You tell your mom to get you to school tomorrow, then.”
“She knows.” She backed away in a little skip and waved to Paul. “Bye, Paul.”
“See you,” Paul said. He watched her as she walked off toward the high school.
“She’s a terror,” Ponty said.
“Yeah,” Paul said back, automatically.
Ponty looked at him. “Don’t get any ideas.”
* * *
He was still sitting at the kitchen table at seven-thirty, the milk drying up in the bowl in front of him, looking out the window at the trees. Anita came out of the bedroom and shuffled past him. She began to make coffee. When she finally sat down across from him, he felt suddenly like they had been on a long trip, had driven without rest from city to city, and had only arrived here the night before. He felt like last night was only the first step in catching up on lost sleep, and that they were here together, subtly changed, on a brief break from that sleep.
“Nice sweater,” she said.
Paul looked down. The house had been chilly when he got out of the shower, and he had found the birthday sweater in the dark and put it on. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and he reached for the buttons.
“No, leave it,” she said. “It looks good on you.”
Light of Falling Stars Page 9
