Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  It was bright and sunny the next morning when Misty and I took the whaler out to the islands to hunt for chanterelles. On the way we passed skerries of sunbathing seals, as dun and tubular as slugs. They turned their heads to regard us. Misty sat up front and by the time we arrived the cigarette in her lips was wetted to extinguishment in the spray. I told her to throw the anchor in, and we watched as it sank into the emerald murk. The rope uncoiled, chasing after it, then slipped discreetly over the gunwale and disappeared itself.

  “Whoops,” Misty said. “Shiiiiiit.”

  We regarded the traceless surface of the ocean for a minute, then we sat there and laughed. We laughed for a good long time. Finally we dragged the boat up onto the beach, tied the painter off on a large rock, and did our foraging.

  Later, when I told Ruth what had happened, she said, “So we lost an anchor. Forget it.”

  “I think we can find it,” I said. “Wait till it’s low tide, you know.”

  “Okay. But why?”

  She was right, of course, in the sense of prudence or necessity, but I felt a poignancy about the anchor, a desire not to let things slip away. I can’t explain it. I couldn’t quite bear to think of our trusty nine-pound Danforth lying there for centuries, millennia—forever perhaps—wondering when we were coming back for it.

  I thought Cynthia might understand, but when I told her she just said, “You’re an idiot.”

  And yes, she wasn’t wrong, but where would we be without idiots? When would we laugh?

  By evening, when the bats emerged, Misty had organized a betting pool in the house. You could bet on our finding the anchor or our not finding it. Everyone wanted in on the action. “Your grandfather’s doing a little better tonight,” the nurses would tell me before slipping five-, ten-dollar bills in my hand. “Against,” they said.

  Percy, the longtime gardener and groundskeeper, said, “There’s no way to orient yourself. You’re not going to know where to look. Shore’s night and day at different tides.”

  “Care to make it interesting?” Misty said.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “It’ll be plenty interesting when I have to fish you out.”

  In a subtle way the house, which had been merely busy, came alive at the prospect of this unnecessary act. We had something to talk about, to grin about, something to anticipate that in its silliness, the pointlessness of its derring-do, resisted the seriousness of death. I told my grandfather about the endeavor and he nodded a little, like what I was saying made sense, but then, as comprehension set in, he raised his eyebrows and shook his head, echoing Cynthia’s verdict in his way.

  “Why?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Why anything?

  The issue with the bats was that we had no idea where they were getting in. That and they upset the nurses. You could track their progress through the house by listening to the nurses’ screams, then judging the direction and the muting interference of the walls. They seemed to know when we ate dinner too, for it was most often then that Misty and I had to excuse ourselves, dabbing mouths with napkins, and cross into the old wing, where a nurse would stand pointing dumbly to the site of our present visitation. They must have been coming in during the day, hiding themselves in curtains and crown moldings until it was dark and the time had come for them to cast about the house like inebriate demons.

  The bats were one more act in the circus our lives had become that summer. A fey carnival cast in shadow. The particularity of moments, the deceits of memory. A Chris Marker mash-up. Cirque Sans Soleil. There would be emus in the zone. I am sure it was only me who felt this. I had a way of digressing into minutiae, fixating on the feel of confluent ephemera while the world moved on. Ruth correcting the newspaper in red pen; Cynthia video-Skyping with her dogs in L.A., neurosis-ridden rescues who suffered crippling and dysphoric separation anxiety (or so she claimed); Misty’s habit of hiding framed pictures, marshmallow men, and beetle carapaces in my bed. I relished missing the forest for the trees; it was a significant part of why I had become a writer, all the stillbirths of pregnant moments. And yet in the weightless disconnection I felt that summer from all we have been taught will sustain us, I saw this tendency of mine achieve a kind of apogee, this inability or refusal to distinguish between studium and punctum, until all I saw everywhere were the dissipating freeze-frames of life, instants of salient and perverse meaning, of felicity, contradiction, the inexhaustible poetry of juxtaposition, the eclecticism that with acts of curation becomes sensibility. Sitting on the stone wall below the crab apple trees, the pale decaying fruit scattered at my feet, in the right light, the sun still crisp but low enough to sieve through the west-lying trees, I could convince myself, for instance, that I was not a person, or rather not the specific person I enacted within a web of expectations and memories, that Cynthia was not an “artist” or Misty a soul adrift, that the present did not situate itself inside a time or date, that these were instead phantoms imposing themselves on the ceaseless flux, the ever-becoming, and that my grandfather was not dying but simply living another, different day, was not my grandfather, was not who I believed him to be, certainly, but was also an elusive quantity to himself—that, in short, all the words we had for everything added up to a catalogued death sentence of the discrete, turning the raw matter of experience transactionable at the cost of making experience itself inaccessible.

  The night before Misty and I set out for the anchor I awoke in blackness to a cold wet breeze flowing in through the window. I wasn’t tired, though I couldn’t have been asleep very long. I didn’t check the time, knowing instinctively that it was hours before I could reasonably get up. I heard my grandfather in pain below me, the ebbing and flowing of an irrepressible ache. And what are you to do with that? What really can you do? Did I wish him to feel released, in the manner of Montaigne, who says we should pass from life to death with the equanimity with which we first passed from nonexistence to life at birth? Was it loving or selfish to wish him that? Loving or selfish to want him to live just as many of these gruesome days as he could? I wanted both for him, even as one wish negated the other, and what I wanted most was just to believe he wasn’t alone in his pain, in the inner confrontation with his own dissolution, I wanted to believe there was someone watching, keeping vigil with him on the level I couldn’t.

  The lights were off in Misty’s room.

  “Mirabella,” I said with a small coloratura, knocking gently.

  “I’m asleep.” I could just make out a lump under the quilt on the far bed. “And please don’t call me that.”

  I poured some vodka in a glass and sat on the cushioned chair across from her. “Don’t you think this rejection of our given names bespeaks a certain juvenility?” I said. “A not wanting to grow up?”

  “You’re the expert in that.”

  “My, aren’t we just a pepperbox of wit tonight.”

  She might have shrugged under the blanket, but I couldn’t see. Beyond the window the moon painted its glissando on the bay. It was my grandfather who had taught me the phases of the moon, I remembered, the spherical dance that gave rise to them; he had once been a scientist and delighted in teaching us, his grandkids, about the composition of the world around us, the dynamics of its interactions: tides, stars, the aeronautics of sailing, the geology of the coast.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  For what. It wasn’t for teasing her, of course. It wasn’t for anything I could very well name. Misty was sitting up in bed now. She leaned her head to one side and then the other, stretching her neck. She looked at me. I wanted to tell her that she could say anything to me, that she could cry or stop enacting herself however briefly, that everything was going to work out, although I didn’t know that it would, that wherever I was going she was coming with me, although she wasn’t. I had no business advising anyone on how to live. My own life, far from coming into focus with success, had blurred to the point that I hardly believed anymore
in the concept of “a life.” Whatever ongoing first-personhood I continued to experience seemed more a fantasy or structureless joke than a project in integral coherence, and the untethered feeling visiting me that summer might have been no more than the confirmation, on realizing certain far-fetched dreams, that there was no track governing life’s direction, life was indeed surprising, and if it was full of more good than you could anticipate, by implication it was full of more bad too. And yet, all the same, in spite of my dubiety of the stories we tell about who we are, starting with my own, I was writing at the behest of some inner scream, some reckless anger and love far too specific not to originate in me, in whatever idiosyncrasy distinguishes all the me’s that appear to be just fucking everywhere in the world. And the form this anger and this love took could perhaps most simply be described in the metonymy of Misty, her weirdness, the child she once was, the desire to nurture that person, and the rage I felt at anything and everything that did not lift her up.

  “I know you are,” she said at last. Her eyes in the dark held dabs of moonshine. And what, really, was the chance some one ray of light would leave the sun and carom off the moon and continue to the tiny sphere of her eye, so far away, and leave from there to enter my own?

  “Do you want to hear a bedtime story?” I said.

  “Tell me what happened with Gaby and the meth,” she said.

  “All right,” I said. And I told her.

  * * *

  Misty had known Gabrielle since my freshman year of college. This was when Gaby and I first met, founding the closeness that would carry us through the next four years of school, a closeness that had come at such a critical juncture in our intellectual and social self-orientation that our friendship, in later years, seemed more a case study in comparative morphology, pointing back to the time when two species were one, and our minds, which had formed during countless hours of decoding and reconstructing the world, in how they moved to the same language and ideas, resembled constructivist projects, or so I thought—in the architectural sense, in the artistic sense. And now I was an artist. And now Gabrielle was an architect.

  When she got back from Rome and came to visit me at the cottage where I was house-sitting, Gaby was excited about what she’d seen. She had a notebook brimming with sketches: buildings in profile and perspective, details of decorative flourishes, felicitous proportionalities, stabs at capturing the subtle enmeshments of public and private space. The only thing getting her down was Rome’s implicit critique of contemporary practice, which had come, she explained, to privilege concept and style over what she termed the experience of space. The experience of space was harder to talk about. It was largely private and rarely came across in images or floor plans. The true experience of a space, she said, might only reveal itself over time, months—years—of being in the space and using it.

  “And it’s emotional too, right. How does this space make me feel?” I said.

  “Which could have to do with sunlight or shade. How a building frames its views, works with a landscape. Which could simply be the absence of nuisance. So not necessarily things people even notice.”

  “Art should be habitable, not merely visitable.”

  Gaby grimaced. “You need some new quotes.”

  “What’s wrong with Barthes?” I said. “Barthes is cool.”

  “Really? No, you know this. There’s this very clear statute of limitations on invoking post-structuralism after college. It’s like three years. After that you’re the unreconstructed guy who lives in the lobby of some film archive with his sweater on backwards.”

  “That’s the opposite of a statute of limitations.”

  “What do I mean?”

  “A grace period.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re out of grace.”

  We spent the first few days of Gaby’s visit drinking and smoking into the early morning on the second-story balcony overlooking the field. Our catching-up had less to do with new information, generally, than with returning again and again to our reservoir of shared stories, comparing perspective and interpretation, amending and gently challenging what had set as memory, and testing new conceptual frameworks on the before and after, the ever-expanding context, the ramifying that never ends, until it does. The idea that started taking shape in me as I listened to Gaby talk about Rome and its built textures, the textures that gave rise to the experience of its space and that in a sense therefore were Rome, was that we might correspondingly describe literature as an experience of information, one with its own utopian aspirations to improve on the assaultive chaos of existence, to give it form, to act as docent in this makeshift exhibit culled from fleeting and desultory scatterings. Just as we needed and relied on more conscious order in the spatial dimension than we often realized, so too when it came to information—for whether we realized it or not, I now hypothesized to Gaby, without some pretty robust structuring principles our experience of information was going to be inarticulate mayhem. It was just that we didn’t see these principles when they were working, the same way, as Gaby had said herself, you didn’t typically remark the endless potential inconveniences always passing you by, always not happening. We rarely noticed the narratives we had let slip into place until events conspired to thwart them.

  There are many examples, on varying scales of significance and disruption, but at its most simple, I expatiated, you might think of having a carefully scheduled day ahead of you and blowing out your tire at 10:30 a.m. Or similarly, taking a long-awaited weekend trip and arriving at your rental to discover that the roof leaks and you can expect thunderstorms all weekend. The inconvenience is annoying, yes, but what is really upsetting, what is emotionally trying, is seeing the story you’ve been telling yourself collapse and having to start again on the tiresome process of building a narrative to give shape to your day, a plausible little ecology of plans and hopes and chores. I don’t mean by these examples to suggest that this is a first-world problem, either. It is a consequence of living in the dimensionless present, and the size of the disruption entails the scope of the revision. Gaby and I brainstormed some lugubrious options—accident, illness, or perhaps discovering after a childhood of abuse from old Russian tutors and devoting yourself to the minute beauty of the game that a computer will always beat you at chess. That technology has supplanted your life’s work. Or to take an exceedingly trivial example, but one Gaby and I discussed at some length, the time I visited her when she was studying abroad and walked her friend halfway across town late one night only not to be invited up.

  Me: We’d been flirting all day. She lived in the exact opposite direction from you. I mean it’s understood, right, what offering to walk someone home in that context means?

  Gaby: You thought the walk was a euphemism.

  M: Indeed.

  G: But then it wasn’t.

  M: It was not. That is correct.

  G: And when you realized it wasn’t a euphemism, was just itself …

  M: Look, you don’t want to fall on either side. You don’t want to be the cynic who disallows the possibility of sincerity. You also don’t want to be the rube who doesn’t know when something’s a joke.

  G: Mm-hmm.

  M: I’m not going to lose sleep over it. We were in different stories is all.

  G: It sounds to me like no one was going to lose any sleep over it. Everyone was going to get to sleep nice and early, and wake up refreshed and—

  M: …

  G: You were in different stories is all.

  M: I was in a different story. I had to throw out the whole plot arc I was working with.

  G: Which was?

  M: I was talking in this gentle, breathy voice, trying not to say anything too weird.

  G: The voice you do when it’s a girl on the phone.

  M: The part of the dramatic structure narratologists call “rising action.”

  G: Eww.

  M: That was funny!

  G: How many narratology puns do I get to look forward to in this con
versation?

  M: How many is too many?

  G: So you’re walking along, telling yourself some story that ends in sweet, foreign, dawn-welcoming butt sex …

  M: Go on.

  G: And then you reach the front door, hang out there—what?—I’m guessing five, ten minutes trying to feel out the situation. And finally she says she’s tired, gives you a kiss on the cheek, and goes in. And you have to walk home. And your story has come crashing down. And your life has no point—

  M: No, that’s where you’re wrong. My life was fine. I had to start telling myself a new story is all.

  G: Which we do all the time.

  M: Which we do all the time. And which is fine so long as the metanarrative endures.

  G (a beat, squinting): And the metanarrative again, just so we’re clear?

  M: What it sounds like, I think. The fundamental Platonic form of narrative. The prime fabric of meaning.

  G: What has significance for us. What we’re about.

  M: Yeah, sort of. Though maybe more like a scaffold. A particular shape in which any one narrative has to fit.

  G: And how do we know if one fits?

  M: That’s what I’m saying, I guess. It’s more like a feeling we get when something doesn’t fit. Then we worry the thing until it does. But some things come along, right, that just refuse to fit, and in defying the scaffold they wake us up to the whole apparatus.

  G: Like you’ve been on autopilot, yeah, without taking the time to figure out what the metanarrative is, just sort of assuming that if you do more or less what other people seem to be doing it’ll figure itself out?