As Simple as Snow

by Gregory Galloway

  “Suicide watch?” I said. “Or Columbine?”

  “Either. Just don’t make any sudden moves.” He wandered off among the crowd, talking to almost everyone he passed. He was like a politician, shaking hands and nodding, smiling at everyone. I could almost hear him saying, “I’m counting on your vote.”

  Mr. Devon came over by me. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I think Mrs. Crenshaw is going to ask you for a dance,” he said. Mrs. Crenshaw was about ninety years old.

  “Only slow dances,” I said.

  “I’ll be sure to tell her.”

  “Don’t make me spend the whole night hiding under the bleachers, Mr. Devon.” He nodded and we were silent for a while.

  “How’s your hand?”

  “Good,” I said. “Like brand-new.”

  “That’s great. I expect to see you ready for baseball this spring, then.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Mr. Devon stood there a few minutes more, then excused himself. “If you need anything,” he said, “anything at all, just ask me. All right?”

  “Thanks, Mr. Devon.” He reached out and patted the back of my head with his hand. I watched him walk toward one of the exit doors and stop and talk to Carl. They walked past Mrs. Crenshaw and went outside. As I waited for them to come back, I saw Claire come through the doorway.

  “I called your house and they said you’d come here,” she said.

  “I hadn’t planned on coming, but Carl talked me into it. I’m sorry I didn’t call.” Actually, it hadn’t occurred to me. I thought that she would be with the rest of her friends. I didn’t really think that my relationship with her would continue. “Is anyone else coming?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We didn’t talk about it. I was like you—I hadn’t planned on showing up.”

  Carl came back, and the three of us went and got some soda and stood around and watched people dance. Almost everyone was on the dance floor, and almost all the girls tried to get Carl to join them. He politely declined.

  A slow song started and the dance floor emptied except for couples. Claire turned to me and said, “Come on.” She led me onto the basketball court and leaned into me, and we swayed in a little circle.

  It was the first physical contact I’d had with anyone since the night before Anna’s disappearance, and it caused a sudden rush of feelings. I was nervous and embarrassed. I thought people might be staring at us, but I didn’t want it to end. It was relief; I knew things were going to get better. We continued to move with our small steps, circling around each other. My mind drifted there in the dark, a pleasant, drunk dream, with the soft lights swirling across the ceiling, the other couples’ shadows swaying in time with the music. I didn’t even look at Claire, I just tried to imagine that it was Anna, that she and I were dancing together. We had never danced together. Then I realized that Claire was crying. She wasn’t making any noise, but I could feel her tremble, and feel her tears dropping on the back of my shirt and soaking through to my skin. She lifted her face to mine and I felt the tears on her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s all right.” I held her tighter, and before I knew it I had started to cry. We kept swaying to the music, holding each other and weeping. When the song was over, she hurried to the restroom, and I tried to find Carl.

  “What were you guys doing out there?” he said.

  “What did it look like?”

  “It looked intense.”

  “She just started crying, and that got me started. Did everybody notice?”

  “I don’t think they thought you were crying,” he said.

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “It’s a hard time for everybody,” he said.

  Claire came back. “Did I make a spectacle of myself ?”

  “Carl seems to think that we’re the talk of the night.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What did you say?”

  “It’s too goddamn dark in here,” he said. “Who knows what’s going on?”

  “You’re making less and less sense,” I said.

  “I’m having a bad night. This was a bad idea. Why did you drag me here, anyway?” He wandered off.

  “I’m really sorry,” Claire said.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Is everybody really talking?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing we can do about it. You could do nothing, and people would still talk. This was a bad idea. I’m going home.” I went to the coat check and got my coat and started to leave. Mr. Devon caught up with me.

  “Mrs. Crenshaw’s going to be really disappointed,” he said.

  “Tell her maybe next year.”

  “Hey,” he said, “I’m going into the city tomorrow for an art exhibition. I was wondering if you wanted to go with me.”

  “Sure.”

  “You can bring someone if you like. Maybe Claire would like to come?”

  “Yeah, maybe. I’ll talk to her about it.”

  “Great. I’ll be by about ten to pick you up.”

  a step away from them

  The next morning Mr. Devon tapped the horn on his pickup and waited for me. It was freezing cold outside, and maybe colder in the truck. I could see my breath forming clouds that drifted away from my mouth and nose. “I think there’s some warm air coming out,” Mr. Devon said, waving a gloved hand in front of the air vents. It felt like he had the air conditioning on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I had on a pair of khakis and a black turtleneck; and not even my warmest coat. I was shivering and tried to scrunch my head down into the warmth of my scarf.

  “Is anyone else coming?”

  “Just us,” I said.

  “That’s too bad. At least it would be warmer. Instead, you’ll have to try this trick. Do a math problem in your head, you won’t feel as cold.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s true. The area of your brain that registers cold is also responsible for solving mathematical problems. So if you give it a math problem to work on, it’ll get distracted from the cold problem.”

  I tried it. I stopped shivering, but I was still cold. Mr. Devon looked over at me and laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll take the train. My treat.”

  Mr. Devon sat across from me on the train. He was wearing brown corduroys and a heavy blue denim shirt. His black leather jacket was unzipped and a navy blazer edged from under it. A camera hung around his neck. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a thermos. “Do you drink coffee?”

  I nodded and he poured me a cup. I took off my gloves to get the warmth from the plastic cup. “I don’t think I’m ever going to be warm again,” I said.

  “Just wait until the ride home,” he said. “We might have to set the dashboard on fire.”

  I had a book, a biography of Houdini that Anna had given me, and my CD player in my backpack, but Mr. Devon talked most of the trip.

  “What did I tell you about the show?” he said.

  “Not much.”

  “Well, did I tell you that some of my work is in it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Nothing to get excited about, but I’ve got a few pieces. It’s a group of us who have known each other for a while, and we periodically rent a space and exhibit some work and try to sell it. There’s some good stuff there, some stuff you will like. Not mine, I mean some of the others’. There’s also a theme to this show, which I thought you might get a kick out of. It’s called A Step Away from Them, and every piece has to be based on or influenced by another work.”

  “What works did you use?”

  “You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” he said. “I just hope that you like it. I hope it’s not a waste of a Saturday for you.”

  “I didn’t have anything planned.”

  “I imagine it’s been tough.”

  “It’s been tough,” I said.

  “Have th
ey been good about getting you information?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I’m not so sure there is any information.”

  “I haven’t heard anything,” Mr. Devon said. “Everybody’s hoping for the best, though.” I nodded. “I’m not going to say that I know exactly what you’re going through, but I know a little about it. I lost a girlfriend myself.”

  “How was that?”

  “A fire,” he said. “She fell asleep on the couch, with a lit cigarette in her hand. I was asleep upstairs.” He lifted his left foot onto the seat and rolled his pants leg to his knee. A pinkish-white scar ran up the front of his leg, from below his sock to above his knee. “It’s sort of how I came to teach here. After it happened I just wanted to get away for a while.” He pushed his pants leg back down to his boot and put his foot back on the floor.

  “I’m sorry about that, Mr. Devon. I didn’t know.”

  “Not too many people do. It’s not something I want too many people to know about, if you know what I mean. Anyway, as I said, that was part of the reason that I came here, to try and . . . not forget—that isn’t the right word—but move on a little, put some distance between us.”

  I nodded and we lapsed into silence.

  We walked out of the train station and into the bright, cold noon light. We made our way to the exhibition space. I guess I expected the place to be a museum, with clean white walls and guards standing around watching to make sure you didn’t touch anything. I expected the quiet and sterility you would find in a hospital. This was nothing like that. As you walked in off the street, there was one large room with a couple of old couches haphazardly placed near the center. A short hallway on the left led to a room that was being used as a theater—a few rows of folding chairs, and even a few armchairs, which looked as if they had been saved from the dump. A staircase in a corner of the main room led down to another, smaller room. We put our coats in an office near the staircase. There were about twenty people in the studio when we arrived; they were sitting on the couches or standing, smoking and drinking coffee or beer.

  Mr. Devon introduced me to the five other artists who were exhibiting. They were all younger than he, guys just out of college, and they all looked deliberately unkempt. Their clothes had holes, and one guy had duct tape holding his worn-out army boots together. A few of them had scraggly goatees, and all of them had filthy hands, stained with paint and tobacco and who knows what else. They seemed nice enough, but after meeting them I hoped that I wouldn’t have to talk to them again, at least not about their art.

  Most of it looked worse than the stuff we did in Mr. Devon’s class, and only a few pieces were better than the things Anna had sent to me. A few I liked, though. There was a smashed boat in the middle of the room, between the two couches. Its splintered planks stuck up from the floor like a broken rib cage, and each board was painted with a different scene, like a marauding band of Indians or the starry night sky, or with lines from a poem. The piece was called Le Bateau Ivre. “It means ‘The Drunken Boat,’” Mr. Devon told me. “That’s a poem by Rimbaud. Do you know Rimbaud?”

  “I know who he is,” I said, “but I don’t know that poem.”

  “Well, there it is,” Mr. Devon said, nodding at the wreck on the floor.

  The rest of the exhibit wasn’t really worth commenting on, except for his stuff, which was the best in the room. He had a series of black-and-white photographs, disturbing pictures of bare, burned backs and shoulders and arms. They were obviously women in the photographs, except one that showed a naked couple embracing, just their shoulders and arms, blistered and scarred. I didn’t say anything. Mr. Devon explained that the photographs referred to a movie, Hiroshima Mon Amour.

  “I haven’t seen it,” I said.

  “You will,” he said. “In college, probably.”

  Next to the photographs was a collage. It included a photograph of him in the middle of pictures of girls from school, stretching and arching their backs during gym. The expressions on their faces made them look as if they were in pain, and the collage was put together so that Mr. Devon, his arms folded across his chest and a stern smile on his face, appeared to be torturing them, or at least responsible for their torment and getting some satisfaction from it.

  “Anna would have liked these,” I said.

  “They cheer up the place, don’t they?”

  “I really like this, though,” I said. The last piece of Mr. Devon’s was an aquarium with a wineglass, a pipe, old specimen jars, balls of cork, and other objects suspended in a clear, solid solution. Scraps of newspaper, maps, and postcards floated on the surface. It was called Lycidas.

  “I may not try to sell that piece after all,” he said. “I might be too attached to let it go.”

  Mr. Devon said that he needed to hang out in the place for a while, so he suggested that I wander around outside. I had intended to do just that. First, though, I wanted to watch the film that was running in the theater, so I waited until the next showing. It was called Window Fan Baby Moving and was the view of a baby from its swing. The camera moved back and forth in slow motion, showing a fan in a window, and through the blades of the fan the leafy branches of a tree brushing against the window in the breeze. Everything was blurry, patches of colors moving slowly across the screen. I was sitting in one of the armchairs, and a few minutes into the movie I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, I was disoriented, not immediately sure of where I was or what time it was. The baby was still swinging, the blades of the fan barely turning, the branches of the tree sweeping across the screen. I didn’t know whether it was the same showing of the movie, or whether another one had started. I got up and left the theater. As I entered the main room I saw Mr. Devon near the stairway, leaning against the wall and intently holding a woman’s hand near his chest, writing something on her palm. At first I thought it was Claire—she had the same straight dark hair, the same long, black overcoat—but when she turned her face away from Mr. Devon and started to laugh, I could see that it wasn’t Claire. She was about the same age, though, maybe a little older.

  I tried to change direction and walk away from them, but it was too late. Mr. Devon saw me and immediately started walking toward me. “Back already?” he asked.

  “I never left,” I said. “I fell asleep watching the movie.”

  “It does that to everybody.” He looked at his watch. “Are you hungry? Let’s go get something to eat.” He got our coats and backpacks, and we walked a few blocks to a bar.

  Mr. Devon didn’t seem to give a second thought to taking me in, and I didn’t say anything. It was my first time in a bar. It was disappointing. The place was gloomy, with a few groups littering the tables, and a row of men at the long wooden bar, hunched over their drinks and watching basketball on televisions crammed into the corners. We sat at a booth near the back, and Mr. Devon positioned himself so he could look out the front window at the street.

  “Do you mind if I order a beer?” I asked.

  “If they’ll serve it, you can drink it. Just know that I won’t take you home drunk and I won’t take you home sick.”

  We each ate a hamburger and an order of fries, and I had two beers. Mr. Devon had five or six vodka and tonics. We barely made the train.

  It was dark as the train pulled away from the city. The train car was filled with an antiseptic white light. I wished that I could turn it out and peer into the night outside. The seat had a hospital-bed smell, bleach hiding urine. The whole train was like a rolling hospital, quiet and sterile. Mr. Devon sat across from me again; he seemed nervous, agitated. He folded and unfolded his arms and shuffled his feet, unsuccessfully trying to get comfortable. His bottom lip jutted out in an angry pout, and he looked over at me and noticed me watching him.

  “Did you have a good day for yourself ?”

  “I did,” I said. “Thanks again for bringing me.”

  “What was your favorite thing?”

  “I thought your stuff was the best by far. I especiall
y liked the aquarium piece.” We’d had this same conversation in the bar.

  “It’s called Lycidas,” he said. “What did you think of the photographs?”

  “Unsettling,” I said. “I’m going to have to check out that movie you told me about.”

  He nodded quickly. “Let me tell you something I haven’t told very many people. I told you about my girlfriend and the fire. But what I didn’t tell you was that the official report didn’t say the fire was an accident.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t,” Mr. Devon said. “That’s why I’m telling you this. There was some evidence that the fire wasn’t started by her falling asleep with a cigarette on the couch, but was set deliberately, with a match. Seems like a hard way to go about it, doesn’t it, especially with me asleep upstairs?”

  “Does that make sense to you, that she would do that?”

  “You never know what people are really thinking,” he said. “I try to tell myself that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make any difference. I’m not giving you advice, but it’s not bad advice either.”

  “Do you think there’s a heaven and all that stuff ?”

  “I don’t think I’m the person to ask about that,” he said. “But I’ll tell you that I don’t think this is the end of the story. I think that people, especially people who are important to you, don’t ever leave. And I don’t mean that as just memories, I mean those people stay with you in a physical sense. You might think I’m crazy, but there’s science behind what I’m saying. There’s a physical law that says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It only changes form. It’s a biological fact that the human body contains energy. We’re little more than walking test tubes of chemicals acting and reacting with each other, firing off energy inside us. And once you’re dead, well, the physical body might be gone, but your energy has to go somewhere. It has to. It can’t be destroyed, so where does it go?