by Steve Himmer
The two of them were standing so close together that their hazy shapes merged into one, a jumble of tan skin and bright colors of clothing, standing out against the trees and the sky behind them. Mostly because they moved faster than anything in the background—it was their motion that gave them away. Otherwise it would have been easy enough to pretend they weren’t there; that’s one thing about losing my vision: I can always erase what I don’t want to see and can rely instead on old memories of what I saw when I last had a clear look. I can still see the banks of the river with no one upon them, and if those hikers hadn’t drawn in my eye with their movements I might have been able to overwrite them up on the bank with an older image of what it looked like. But they stood between those memories and me.
I could have stood to imagine that he wasn’t there but she was, flaming red hair and bare feet, slipping out of her shorts on the sand. Crossing her arms to grip the bottom of her orange tank top and, arching her back, stomach drawn in, peeling it over her head and pale, rose-tipped breasts emerging like twin sunrises from under the fabric and…
Forgive me my excess; it’s been a long time. I don’t know how long exactly, but long enough that I’d never imagined seeing a woman’s body again, and given the unexpected chance, my eyes and my mind were too weak to take her all in, even to fill in the gaps between what I could see and what I wanted to. I’d never imagined seeing another man’s body, either, apart from my own, but there would have been no joy in watching that young, muscled reminder of all I am not. That’s another small mercy of this blurred veil—I can avoid looking closely at what I don’t want to see.
I listened to the soft splash, and the whisper of stones and sand underwater as the hikers stepped into the river. They didn’t shiver or shriek at its cold, and they kept their distance, paddling close to the bank. So I stretched on my back as I do every morning and set adrift with my eyes on the clouds, spotting an alligator chased by a rabbit, a cash register doling out quarters. Clouds are about all I’m left with these days, because the more blurred they become the more shapes I can turn them into. The whole world has been remade of clouds, in a way, and all day my eyes follow the drifting shapes of objects that aren’t really there and I imagine what they might be.
It leads me to wonder about the things I must be forgetting. About all the things I don’t have a clear enough picture of to ever recall them again, and the things I haven’t described to my scribe well enough that he’ll be able to remind me at some future point when I ask. In my mind’s eye, I can still look at Mr. Crane’s house on the hill, and the view of the ocean far off past the hills, though the house is long gone and I haven’t been able to see as far as the ocean for a very long time. But everything before my arrival here in the garden, all the things I put behind me thinking I’d never need them again, those I feel slipping away.
Not that I need them, not that they matter any more now than they did when I could still see. But it reminds me, this creeping shadow across my memories, how little I really remember and how little of me even my faithful scribe knows. And it makes me wonder—perhaps even worry—how much else will be lost with my sight when it finally goes dark after all.
I have to give those hikers credit: once they settled into the water, once they let themselves drift, they were able to keep themselves quiet. Not silent, not still as the river is still, but quiet enough to make sense. Enough to seem like they knew what they were doing. Once or twice, for a moment, I almost forgot they were there. I almost reached a depth of concentration I haven’t achieved since they’ve been here.
I listened as they looked for a position in which they could float. I heard bodies turning one way and another, sliding from place to place on the water, then finally they moved to a spot upstream from my own. I could tell by the change in the water, as they swam away with their ripples. I could tell by the way their failed whispers echoed to me on the water, as they clutched at each other for balance and laughed. The spot they moved to is one I avoid, where a left behind freezer coil hides under the water, overlooked by Mr. Crane’s workers when they removed his machines. Years ago it sliced my knee open as I swam above it, and gave me a jagged red scar.
They’d have to be careful, I knew. They’d have to watch where they swung their legs and feet underwater and be vigilant if they dove, to avoid the sharp edges concealed now by grasses and vines after resting there so many years.
I waited, expecting to hear one or both of the hikers cry out when their flesh found metal, but not because I hoped they’d be hurt. I imagined their wonder after the cut, the questions they might ask each other about what that strange object was and why it hid under the water—a mystery for them but just part of the garden for me, a story I know but don’t know how to tell. Not to them, anyway, not aloud.
So we swam, the hikers and I, but my meditations were shallow and stalled because I was tense with anticipation of the sounds of their pain. Sounds that never came; they never found that freezer coil, or else they weren’t hurt badly enough to complain or cry out. Perhaps the Old Man saved that mystery for them to find on some other day.
When I felt the sun on the far side of my face, the afternoon side, I rolled onto my stomach and headed for shore. The hikers noticed and followed me in, waiting a few yards behind, I think, before coming out of the water. Back onshore my stick wasn’t quite where I’d left it, and I felt around on the sand with desperate hands, trying to hold my sore knee off the ground, but it was hard to crawl and to search at the same time while crabbing on only one leg.
Then there were footsteps, his legs on the edge of my sight, and the stick slid right into my hand. Not a word spoken, not a sound made, and the hikers retreated in silence while I climbed to my foot and my branch and hobbled away toward my cave, the top of the stick digging into my side and armpit with each step. I went no faster than I had walked to the river, but this time they didn’t follow. Not closely enough to be noticed.
18
I never knew how to behave when I found one of Mr. Crane’s cameras concealed in the garden. Should I act as if it wasn’t there, like I hadn’t noticed, go on with my goings-on unaffected to preserve the illusion of being alone and unwatched? So many of the cameras were disguised as parts of the landscape, on stalks slim as stems and rising up through the center of a burst of real flowers with only shining lenses to give them away, and only then when they reflected the sun and drew me over to search in the brush. Or they were the kind of dome camera you might find on a ceiling, forming the base of a beehive in branches high over the river, or a large glassy knot on the trunk of a tree. Once what I thought was a turtle paddled past on the water as I meditated in the lee of my usual log, and as it swam by I could have sworn its eyes were cameras and I heard the whir of tiny motors as they swiveled my way, but I never encountered that turtle again.
The stranger cameras, the ones I was most puzzled by, were more obvious. Much more. They were black plastic boxes bolted to trees or badly concealed beneath bushes, standing on thin metal mounts an inch or two high, allowing them only a short range of swivel. I couldn’t understand why Mr. Crane had gone to such lengths to preserve the illusion, so carefully concealing most of his tools, only to give it away with these other clumsy devices. The more obvious cameras annoyed me, not that I could complain. I learned over time to pretend that the cameras disguised as flower stems were real flowers, and if I passed the same flowers and camera every day it was possible for me not to notice unless I looked for it. But those other cameras, the clunky black boxes—once I knew where they were it was over. There was no denying, no ignoring and no going on as things were, because they sucked my eyes in like a black hole sucks in light whenever I passed through their view. I knew they were there, and often when my meandering brought me near one of those awkward lenses I changed direction, set a new course to the river or berry bushes or wherever I had been headed to avoid the disruption of those too vivid distractions.
Had I been able, I would have asked Mr. Cr
ane about those warts on the face of his garden. Why the difference, why so little effort where so much was made otherwise? But I went on with my business of not doing business, my mornings spent on the river and my afternoons under the trees and my evenings spent sitting outside, then sleeping inside my cave. I went on as if none of those cameras were there, and I was as convincing as I could be even when one of those boxes threw off a whole day’s meditation; how could I concentrate on not concentrating, how could I let things just happen, when I knew I was being observed and couldn’t pretend otherwise?
I tried to float past those cameras as gently as I tried to float on the river, with my mind emptied the way I’d read could be done and thought I should be doing, but each time I told my mind to be empty, images of emptiness flooded in: cardboard boxes, abandoned houses, thousands of left behind cars jamming both sides of the freeway after some unspecified but horrific disaster. Cameras hanging from the trees with no one to watch what they filmed. I knew there was a trick to it, a means of erasure and of accomplishing blankness without letting my mind know what I was doing, but what that trick was I had not yet figured out.
Strange to think how hard it was, and how smoothly it comes to me now—I wouldn’t say it’s like riding a bike, but more like breathing: it happens before I remember I even know how.
One afternoon, deep in frustration from failing to quiet the hum of my mind, and surprisingly tired from the effort of staying still (but if exercise is, as they say, ninety-nine percent mental, why be surprised when thinking hard takes a toll on the body?), I rolled over onto my stomach to paddle along with the current and swim to the end of the river where the water disappears underground. As my eyes scanned the bank where I’d left my tunic—checking the whereabouts of my belongings was a habit I hadn’t yet managed to lose, even with no one to take them but fleet-fingered foxes and crows—I was surprised to see Mrs. Crane sitting beside my pile of filthy, dark fabric. She wore a tight white tank top, and a bright blue and green skirt like tourists wear in pictures promoting South Pacific vacations. She noticed me looking and smiled, then waved across the water.
I wasn’t sure if I should respond to her presence the way I would have had her husband showed up on the bank. As on our first berry-picking excursion, and all our other encounters, I wondered if I should treat her as an employer or colleague or part of the garden. Her position wasn’t as clear as my own, or her husband’s, or the birds’ who nested nearby. Should I go on with my floating like she wasn’t there, the work I was being paid for, or should I abandon my already broken reflections and swim to shore, acknowledge her arrival as ordinary politeness required? I knew there were a couple of cameras nearby, one lens concealed in the knot of a tree on the bank and another, a clumsier one, bolted to a branch just beneath it. Why two cameras on the same tree, I didn’t know.
With my tunic left behind on the bank and Mrs. Crane sitting beside it, I couldn’t emerge from the water; I couldn’t even float on my back without showing her more than she no doubt wanted to see. But how long had she been there? How much had she already seen? And wasn’t I meant to go about my hermitic business of swimming and thinking and shedding my clothes as if my employer weren’t watching at all? That’s what he was paying me for. So if Mrs. Crane wanted to watch me swim naked, maybe that was her right as mistress of the estate. At moments like that I almost wished for a rulebook of some kind, a guide to working in the Cranes’ garden like the manual I’d been given once at Second Nature.
Looking at Mrs. Crane while trying to look like I wasn’t looking, stealing quick glances at the curves of her tank top and the bright pink dots of her toes peeking out under her skirt on the sand, I leaned farther into the water. Trying to ignore her with my mind and my voice was one thing, but other parts of my body weren’t so eager to follow commands, and their awareness of her, their zeal for her presence, wouldn’t be so easy to hide if I floated nude on my back as I’d been doing for most of the day. A wrinkly, waterlogged boner rising out of the water would hardly befit the solemn life of the mind I was meant to maintain.
“Isn’t it awful,” she called from the bank, “to be under his thumb?”
I might have spoken up to correct her, to explain that I wasn’t under her husband’s thumb so much as living in the wide open palm of his generous hand, but instead I floated silently on the skin of the river as if still deep in meditation. Though by then my higher mind was long gone and my lower one was doing its damnedest to make me stare at her, all curves and secrets up there on the bank.
Perhaps she took my lack of response as lack of hearing, but she couldn’t have expected an answer from me; maybe she thought I might look in her direction when I heard her speak. Whatever the reason, Mrs. Crane stood up from the ground and, inexplicably in light of what followed, brushed the sand from her clothes. I looked, I suppose, because her sudden motion attracted my eye. Then she untied her skirt so it fell at her feet, and she revealed… she unleashed the tiniest pair of red panties—that word, it’s a terrible word, but what other is there: especially when these particular panties were so much what that word has in mind. They were exactly the underwear one might imagine a woman who looked like Mrs. Crane to be wearing beneath her clothes; exactly, in fact, what I had imagined her to be wearing when I watched her on TV. Then with crossed arms she rolled the tank top up her stomach and over her head just as I’d seen her do on the screen, except this time there was no cutaway to a reverse angle of her back, or to the following scene: there were her breasts, her too-perfect, tan lineless breasts I won’t even try to describe.
I could not, for the life of me, peel my eyes off until she’d waded in up to her chin and was paddling in my direction. I looked as contemplative, as earnestly engrossed in a world beyond this world as I possibly could, but as the ripples of her approaching body fanned across my own submerged limbs I was as physically, corporeally present as I ever had been in my life. I was, for once, entirely right where I was, no daydream, no drifting, a body tied down to the ground. Or to the water, such as it was.
I had braced myself against the downed log with the soles of my feet as I often did, and Mrs. Crane swam alongside and took my hand. “So I won’t float away,” she said, then rolled onto her back so the crimson shimmer of her underwear rose up from the water, and so did the soft, round shapes of her breasts, nipples as pink as her painted nails—perhaps it’s wrong of me to be saying so, and to have noticed such things, and, most of all, to have let my scribe mark it all down so I might recall it much later like this, but what on earth was I to do? A moment like that one is hard not to cling to, especially when so much of what I’ve seen in my life is fading to black in my head.
It was hard to hold her hand while afloat on my stomach, so as much as I knew it might shame me or worse, knowing my untethered body was bound to betray me and perhaps cost me a job, I rolled onto my back beside her. I floated and focused on the water around me. I concentrated on the drift of the clouds but one of them, like some great practical joke, slid into and out of and into another like…
So I tried instead to imagine the desert of pebbles shifting below on the bed of the river, stirred up by our swimming, blown by invisible, watery winds too soft or too shallow for me to feel. In my mind I counted those millions of grains, slowly, with great concentration. I tried to block from my senses the too-perfect body beside me, the nearness of that body to mine, and the harder I tried to ignore it the more fully her body filled my mind like few things ever had. Despite myself I pictured Mrs. Crane floating closer, drifting against me in the flow of the river, and… and above me those clouds were still going at it.
Her fingers tightened around my hand and she asked, “Why do you stay? Is it only the money?” She leaned her head back into the water, balancing her body by pulling hard on my arm, then her face rose from the river and her hair streamed back like a TV ad for some exotic resort where beautiful women are always emerging from bright blue water. “It’s the money that keeps me here,” she s
aid. “As much as I hate to admit it. I’ve gotten used to his wealth. I’ve gotten used to all this like I’ve gotten used to being ignored.”
I said nothing, and neither did she for a while, but then, “We aren’t people to him, you know. We aren’t ourselves. We’re actors, we’re objects. Tiny plastic figures he can move about as he pleases, over here, over there, wherever he wants. Whatever game he’s playing that day. He doesn’t care who you are.” As she spoke her fingers wrapped tighter and tighter until my hand started to ache, so I adjusted my fingers in her grip which she took, I suppose, to be an offer of comfort and sympathy because she shifted her hold into a softer, more intimate one—one that seemed meant not so much to keep her from floating away as to keep herself close against me.
“I know you understand, Finch. I knew you would. We’re the same, you and I.”
I tried to feel each tiny pinprick of contact and friction as a long-stemmed leaf bounced its way along my body on its way down the river. Between the points of the leaf and the stem’s tip, I counted seventy-two individual impacts before it slipped past my toes and away.
“We’re just types,” she said. “The hermit. The wife. We’re bodies that happen to fit the slots he wants filled. That’s all. You know that, don’t you? You must.”
She rolled toward me a bit in the water, the water lapping back and forth between our bodies as she shifted, its current and force increasing as it squeezed through that narrow canal, and her movement pulled our joined hands underwater enough for my own body to roll against hers, her breasts flattening against my chest, my still erect penis (despite my best efforts) colliding with the smooth, wet fabric of her underwear, and for not even a second, for the merest sliver of time, I almost took Mrs. Crane in my arms, this woman I’d longed for and lusted after in late-night reruns. I nearly wrapped myself around her and…
