by Adam Haslett
At the trailhead, Michael holds the branches of the blackberry aside for me as he leads the way through the overgrown stretch of path up the slope and into the trees. The beach is twenty minutes away, which is perhaps too far a round trip when I should be getting supper ready, but it’s good to stretch our legs. He’s talking about Mr. Carter, the man he got his king snake from, but the breeze carries every other phrase out of earshot. I stay close enough not to lose track entirely.
Last night it rained and the mushrooms are out—I should know their names but I don’t. There are the perfectly white billowy balls, like bits of solid cloud floating over fallen branches, and the creamy clusters with brilliant orange tips massed on the sides of rotting stumps, and those extraordinary zigzags of brown crescents wending their way up the bark of the older trees like staircases for the Lilliputians.
It’s amazing how many thin young pines and spruces strive to reach the sunlight lavished on the mature trees, and how many of them lie fallen like oversize matchsticks on the forest floor, the ones that didn’t make it, hosts for the lichen and moss, food for bugs.
We climb up and down the steps that Bill Mitchell cut into a giant Douglas fir that must have fallen years ago across the path and now has ferns growing in its opened seams.
I wish Michael enjoyed the wonder in all this more, but his asthma has taught him to be cautious of the outdoors, or of too much running in the field behind our house, and even of the winter cold, which can set off an attack.
“…where he keeps the iguanas,” he’s saying as I come up beside him, now that the path has widened, “with the little stream running through his downstairs, he says he’s thinking of getting a small crocodile if he can build a big enough habitat, but he’s not sure, because it would take up the two spare bedrooms.”
John met David Carter a few years ago when he came to a minority entrepreneurs’ forum. If I remember rightly, he wanted to expand his pet business, and John tried to convince his partners to invest. They didn’t, but John stayed in touch, and he took Michael over to see the reptiles. One day, without consulting me, they brought back a four-foot-long black king snake. I could hardly say no given Celia’s rabbits, Alec’s hamster, the birds, and Kelsey. Michael has never given it a name, which seems right somehow. It’s apparently a constrictor, not a biter, but if that is meant to reassure me, it does not. He takes good care of it, mostly, cleaning its terrarium in the playroom, feeding it those awful dead mice, but he did leave its sliding door open a slit one night, and it got out, somehow making its way up into his bedroom, leading to a terrible commotion when he woke to use the bathroom and placed his foot on it. I didn’t mean to yell at him the way I did, but the whole thing was too awful.
“If he got the crocodile,” Michael continues, “then he’d have a complete collection, or almost with the boa and the python, and the monitor lizard.”
“He doesn’t let you get close to those other creatures, does he?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Michael says, swatting at ferns with a stick. “They’re tame.”
We walk for a minute in silence.
“I think he’s sad,” he says. “I think that’s why he keeps so many pets in his house.”
“I wouldn’t think reptiles made the best company.”
“Did Dad want to help him because he’s black?”
I’m not sure how to answer this. I don’t know why John’s taken an interest in getting minority businesses started. It may have begun through the Small Business Administration, some advantage to that sort of investing. But if so he’s carried it well past that: a Hispanic magazine in Chicago, a restaurant chain started by a black football player. It’s a fair amount of what he does. If he were American, I suppose you’d say he was lending a hand in the next stage of civil rights, supporting black ownership, and maybe that’s what he’s doing—we don’t talk about it—but because he’s English that doesn’t seem the best way to describe it. He’s not caught up in that particular history. I’m not sure what the draw is, though I’m all for it, certainly.
“I suppose your father enjoys his company,” I say. “I’d say that’s mostly why he wanted to help him.”
“I think one of the reasons he’s sad is because he’s black.”
“Don’t say that, Michael. You mustn’t say that. There’s no reason someone should be sad because of what race they are. It has nothing to do with that. Doesn’t he live on his own? That could make anyone lonely.”
“That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean that being black makes him sad, like he doesn’t want to be black. It’s something else.”
“What has he been talking to you about?”
“Nothing. The snakes.”
“Well, I think you must be imagining it, then. People aren’t lonely because of the color of their skin.”
He ruminates on this awhile as we enter the meadow. Half of it is covered in shade, and it’s in the shade that the buds of the wild primroses have begun to open, their heart-shaped yellow petals peeling away from the stamens. Caterpillars feast on the seeded heads of the milkweeds. Butterflies flutter in the high grass. We have a field behind our house in Samoset, but not so lovely and secluded as this.
Michael seems to take no notice at all of where he is.
“If you were a slave, you’d be depressed,” he says. “And you’d be terrified.”
“What are you talking about? Mr. Carter runs a business. He lives in a perfectly nice house. I hope you don’t say this kind of thing to him. He could be quite offended. He has nothing to do with slavery. Where did you get that idea?”
“You can’t say that. His ancestors, they were slaves.”
“Michael: What has he been talking to you about?”
“Nothing. I told you.”
“So you’re just dreaming all this up on your own?”
“Never mind. You don’t get it.”
This is one of his new refrains: you don’t get it. I suppose I should be used to it coming from my children. And I would if I thought the phrase meant for Michael, as it already does for Celia, an attachment to a world of peers. But when Michael says it to me it’s not because he’s caught the first hints of adolescent cynicism from some commiserating friend. He’s referring to something else, something he sees alone. It’s not just I or his siblings who don’t get it.
The ground slopes down from the meadow and a few minutes farther on bits of clear sky show through the gaps in the trees as we approach the cliff above the beach. It’s a sharp drop-off, thirty feet or more. The way down is to the right, along the angled sheet of granite running from the trees to the ocean. It’s lined with cracks, amazingly straight and parallel and sealed with some kind of black magma however many thousands of years ago. Boulders sit on it like old men keeping watch for returning ships.
The beach itself is small, just a clearing in the rocks, really, with hard-packed sand, where a flock of plovers skitters through the thin water of the retreating waves. Farther back, the sand is dry and powdery, strewn with seaweed and driftwood. This is where we’ve found the sand dollars the last couple of years, which the children put in the saucepans and buckets they collect the crabs in, furnishing their little aquariums with other inhabitants of the sea.
Michael, eyes down, writes in the sand with his stick. He’s only a few inches shorter than I am and a year from now he’ll be my height, and soon enough taller altogether. He doesn’t know what to do with his new body, how to sit or stand, which is why he never stays still, hiding in constant motion. Or it’s partly why, the rest being his ceaseless brain. His limbs twitch in response to it, more bother than pleasure, let alone athletic joy. A whole dear, unknowable creature, molting before my eyes. And if in that strange little office off the ward of the hospital in London the doctor had said to me, No, you might want to reconsider what you’re getting yourself into, you might want to put the marriage off, if he hadn’t asked me if I loved John, the unthinkable would be possible: Michael wouldn’t be here at all. His name
loses meaning when I repeat it too often to myself, but I have no other word to designate the mystery of him, my firstborn. There’s something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they’re doing, who can only experiment. It’s unfair, he had no choice.
“Aren’t you going to look for sand dollars?”
He keeps writing, giving no indication that he’s heard my question.
“What does that mean?” I ask, coming up behind him to read what he’s scrawled in capital letters: YOU MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL.
“It’s a lyric. By Sylvester. You don’t know Sylvester?”
“Is that disco?”
“That’s an understatement. But, yes, you can call it disco.”
“You like those records so much. Why don’t you ever dance to them?”
He rolls his eyes and walks away toward the far side of the beach, scraping a curving line in the sand behind him. He’s at that turntable of his hours a day with his headset on but he never does more than move his head back and forth. It seems a pity to me that he doesn’t take physical pleasure in it the way we did, and sometimes still do, with our music.
“We’re going to move back to England,” he says, still facing away from me. “Dad’s going to move us back there.”
Something in the tone of his voice brings me to a halt. It’s been cracking lately, dropping down a register at the oddest moments and then skipping back up into his boyish chirp, but these words come out complete in his new lower range, a sound from his chest, not his throat, and he utters them in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. Most disconcerting of all, he says them slowly, and he never speaks slowly.
“What are you talking about?” I say. “Did he tell you that?”
It wouldn’t be beyond John, in some abstracted mood, to mention such a thing, thinking aloud to the children with no cognizance of where it might lead their own thoughts. If it’s true, I’ll wring his neck—to hear it from Michael first.
“Well, did your father say that? Answer me.”
He turns around at my raised voice and shakes his head.
“So why do you say it?”
“Why are you angry?”
“I’m not angry. I just want you to tell me why you said that.”
“Because it’s true.”
He’s got John’s black hair, his hazel eyes, the same pale complexion. It’s clear as day they’re father and son. Which is only natural. But why, then, staring at this utterly familiar face, stilled now by something invisible, something new but very old—why is it that I am so terrified?
Celia
When Dad got us back to shore, Michael was waiting for us on the jetty. He told Dad that Mom wanted to see him. Dad went up the wooden steps to the house, and Alec and I followed Michael the other way, out onto the rocks. Michael started running, skipping from rock to rock. I kept up, watching his feet and following his jumps, avoiding the slippery edges. Alec called from behind for us to wait. Michael slowed down but kept going toward the point that we couldn’t see past from the house, the point where the shoreline turned onto the open ocean. When he got to a big flat rock just above the spray he stopped and stared out at the waves breaking onto the boulders. Alec caught up to us and immediately went down closer to where the spray was blackening the gray stone and then scurried up again each time just before it landed, looking back at us to see if were watching him.
Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Michael said, and I agreed. Alec said he didn’t like that game, but Michael and I started searching for the right little nook or cave in the rocks, and Alec came after us, saying we should look for crabs instead. We found a good spot with a flat bottom and a little overhang from a bigger slab of rock above it. It was shaded, almost like a real cave. Okay, get in there, Michael said to Alec, who complied, sitting cross-legged and fidgeting with the stones he’d picked up. Who am I? Alec asked. You’re a monk, Michael said. This is where you live. Who are you guys? That doesn’t matter. You don’t know us yet. What am I supposed to do? Alec said. You live here, you little fidget-buster, Michael said, squeezing Alec’s arm. You live here and think about the sea. Alec said, I don’t want to. Tough, I said. Why do I always have to stay in the cave? Alec said. Because you’re the monk, Michael said. We have to find you. Just stay there and don’t look what direction we’re going, okay? Shut your eyes. Alec closed his eyes and Michael and I ran across the smooth rock up along the tree line, going on like that for a while until we were well out of view of where we’d left Alec. The waves were bigger here and the water was loud, slapping against the rocks, then rushing off them as the waves drained back into the sea, showing all the seaweed and barnacles on the sides of the boulders, which disappeared again when the throat of the next wave rose up and covered them. It was getting later in the day but the sun was still in the sky.
Look, I said. Down on a broad rock just above the spray line to our right three seals were basking. They look dead, Michael said. They’re not dead, they’re sleeping. We climbed diagonally down toward them. Not too close, I said, they’ll wake up and go back in the water. Their skins were gray and brown and green and a little bluish too, all the colors mottled together, and they had huge dirty white whiskers and snouts that were wet like Kelsey’s. The biggest one was huffing and snoring. Do you see the blubber on that thing? Michael practically shouted. We could harpoon it and harvest its body fat for fuel, that blubber whale! His voice said he wanted to squeeze it like he squeezed Alec’s arm, squeezing the fat till it almost hurt.
I think they are protozoan, he said. What does that mean? Very old. Ancient. They were here before humans, living off their own blubber. Michael liked that word, blubber. He said it all the time, even if there was nothing blubberish around. We squatted down and watched them. Every few minutes one of the seals would raise its head, look over its shoulder at us, and then lay its head back on the rock. Eventually the middle one started rubbing its snout against its flank.
Do you think we’ll be late for supper? Michael asked. Maybe, I said. How long have we been here? he asked. A few minutes, I said. No, on the island. I don’t know, I said. Do you think we have a week left? he asked. I don’t know. Do you think we have ten days? Maybe.
He asked questions like this a lot but I usually didn’t answer because I didn’t really get them. It was just Michael saying stuff, asking things Mom ignored too, but that sometimes he convinced Dad to answer, which he’d do by asking more questions of Michael.
A harpoon would wake those puppies up, he said when I didn’t answer. Alec would have laughed and squealed at that, egging Michael on, but I didn’t. Michael stood up and walked in an arc around to the other side of the seals, keeping his distance. A minute later I followed him and we squatted down again, this time in the shade. A big wave doused the heads of the seals and they jostled themselves back from the wetness like big lazy dogs with no legs.
Mom and Dad are going to argue tonight, he said. How do you know? I just do, he said. Mom’s going to get angry at him. She always gets angry at him, I said. No she doesn’t, that’s not true, he said. Yes it is. She gets angry at him after we go to bed. Not every night, he said, she doesn’t do it every night. Besides, all couples have arguments. Mom told you that, I said. All couples have arguments. Mom told you that. So what? he said, that doesn’t make it not true.
Down the shoreline from where we’d come there were black cormorants on a wet rock. Some stood perfectly still with their necks folded back. Two had their big wings wide open drying in the sun, which made them look a little scary, like giant bats. None of them seemed to notice any of the others, like each bird was the only one on the rock. Out a ways seagulls flew in big circles above a lobster boat headed back toward the harbor. I still didn’t understand how they could stay up in the air that long without resting.
Michael tossed a pebble onto the tail of one of the seals but it didn’t notice. Don’t, I said. He lobbed another that landed on the biggest one’s back but it didn’t react either.
Don’t!
They’d heat Cleveland for a week in January! he exclaimed. He said that kind of thing all the time to his one friend, Ralph, our babysitter’s younger brother, and Ralph made strange noises and piled on more, like, They’d heat Nova Scotia for a year! and they’d keep going like that. Alec tried to join in but he didn’t understand how it worked so he was never funny. I understood, but they didn’t like playing with a girl. Stop it, I said, and he threw the rest of his pebbles away down toward the water.
What did you do in the boat? he said. Dad made us pretend he wasn’t there, I said. Michael had started taking small shells out of a tidal pool in the rock, drying them on his shirt, and arranging them in a straight line at his feet. I picked some up and added onto the line until it stretched in front of me too. Do you think it’s three weeks before we go back to school or a month? I don’t know, I said, why? I just want to know, he said. Once the line stretched a few feet on either side of us, he started removing shells until it looked like a white chain with missing links. A fine spray in the wind was making my face damp. I’m hungry, I said, let’s go have supper. The seals had backed themselves onto all dry rock again and weren’t moving at all, not even their heads.
Michael didn’t want to return to school, that’s why he was asking about it. Ralph was his only friend. Usually he didn’t get upset until a few days before we started, not this early, when we were still on the island.
He stood up and looking down at the seals said, Protozoan mammals beached like giant, animate pork loin. Then he started back along the rocks up by the trees and I followed him.
I hate you guys, Alec said when we reached the cave again. But we found you, Michael said. That’s how the game ends. You’re Saint Francis of Assisi praying here until your palms bleed. I don’t get it, he whined. Who are you? I’m Saint Francis as a younger man, Michael said, and Celia is his friend Clare, who cares for lepers. I hate you, Alec said, standing up and running out over the rocks ahead of us.
