by Susan Choi
A thrill of self-conscious anxiety prickled his skin as he stepped near to do what she asked, which felt strangely like helping her out of her clothes. But it was the baby he’d freed, and once that was accomplished, he stepped away quickly, blushing so much he was sure she must feel the heat from him, even though it was too dark to see. “Feel better, Esme?” he asked, to conceal his embarrassment.
Esme was now sitting very upright and alert in her mother’s arms. Mark saw the fire miniaturized in her eyes, which seemed uncannily keen, tigerlike, gleaming out of the darkness.
“And I’m Laura,” the young woman said. “Do you even want to know the rest of our names? No one should have to confront our whole family at once.”
Mark wanted to. “I’m Mark,” he began, and as he was saying it, and thinking of how strange it sounded, of how uncertain a statement it suddenly was, a blotch of light came bouncing wildly through the night, and a great cry went up.
“Oh, my God!” Laura cried, bounding away with Esme in her arms. “Are you crazy? I thought you were going to wait until morning!”
“Who wants beer?” a new male voice was shouting. “Where’s Esme—there’s my girl! Look at you! Look at you, little camper!”
Mark turned and walked back to his pack, his heart beating wildly, as if the pack might have vanished. But it was there, though it took him a moment to make out its bulk. His hands were trembling, it must be with hunger, though he felt he had no appetite. He hauled the pack a little farther away over the wet grass and began to dismantle it in the darkness. He lighted his candle lantern and rolled out his ground cloth and found a Baggie of trail mix that smelled strongly of socks. He swallowed sun-warmed, brackish water, forcing it over the lump in his throat.
He was almost scared out of his skin when the children approached, their eight eyes and the stripes on their sneakers reflecting his candle. “We brought you some chili and rice,” the oldest girl said, holding out a bowl that was temptingly steaming and had a spoon stuck on top. “Our moms say you’re welcome to join us.”
Mark had the happy feeling that they’d fought over who got to carry the bowl. He reached out to accept it, and the girl gave it to him, with the other three looking on closely.
“Hey, thanks,” Mark said. “That’s really nice. Tell them thank you, okay?”
“Are you coming?” the girl asked after a moment.
“I think so. I might.”
But he didn’t. After he’d watched them reluctantly leave him, he wolfed down the chili and washed the bowl from his canteen. Then he got into his sleeping bag. He lay a long time, sheltered by their voices, before falling asleep.
Laura’s family had made a conquest of the mountain. Not by any aggression but only their forceful reality, their uniformity, their geniality, they’d made the woods into their backdrop, and apart from anomalous Mark, nothing alien to them remained. Gene was gone. Gone were Mark’s father and mother, and his forgotten grandmother, whom he had encountered only that once, and of whom he had not been reminded again until his mountaintop vision. They had all drawn the lid on their chamber of ghosts. Mark did not even dream. When he opened his eyes in the morning, the interval didn’t exist anywhere in his body. Thunderclap—the sun stood overhead. He sat up.
Laura was pacing and bouncing Esme, who was bundled again. Esme sat straight up from her pocket of cloth, like a mirror of Mark sitting out of his sleeping bag.
“You probably think that we’ve been here all night,” Laura said. Behind her, on the far side of the clearing, the rest of the camp lay silent, giving off a luxuriant aura of sleep.
“Have you?” Mark asked. He was aware of foul fuzz in his mouth, the ripeness of his armpits and crotch, the fact that he was speaking to her from the intimacy of his bed.
“Believe it or not, she does sleep. She just doesn’t sleep until way after midnight, and then she gets up at five, and then she’ll doze all day long and come to life around sundown. She’s a total vampire.”
In the daylight Esme was very beautiful and sagacious and not at all vampiric. It was clear to Mark she wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. Perhaps Laura was walking and bouncing her because too exhausted for anything else. “Want to put her down?” he said.
They disentangled Esme again, a replay of the previous evening’s proximity, with Mark keeping his lips clamped this time so she could not smell his breath. At the end of the ordeal, he found that it was he, and not Laura, who held the baby by her sides, with her feet dangling down. He quickly stooped to put her on his sleeping bag, where she sat very steadily plumped on her bottom and took a fistful of fabric. Mark and Laura sat down to either side of her, off the ground cloth, and Mark felt the dew soaking his shorts.
“What time is it?” he asked after a moment.
“Just past six.” Laura lay down, heedless of the wet grass, slinging one arm over her eyes.
Both females seemed settled. Mark pulled his pack near and furtively dug for his toothbrush. Each item he removed, Esme reached for, and a furrow of concentration and annoyance appeared on her forehead. Finding toothbrush and toothpaste Mark scrubbed his teeth and was able to complete the operation without Laura’s seeing him, although he knew she must hear him. But that seemed less humiliating. “I should get going,” he said, just for something to say.
Laura lifted her arm from her eyes to squint at him. “Really? That’s too bad. You should at least stick around for breakfast. My mother bakes bread in a can in the fire. It takes until noon, but it’s pretty darn good.”
Esme tipped suddenly forward, and Mark moved to catch her, but she was only shifting onto all fours. Once there she examined his sleeping bag closely. Laura propped her head on one elbow. “You going to crawl away, Esme?” she asked.
“How old is Esme?” Mark wondered. He’d never felt the least curiosity about a baby. He’d never touched one, he realized, until just a few moments before.
“Almost ten months,” Laura said. “She’ll be a year in September.”
“Do you think she’ll walk soon?”
“God, I hope not.” Laura laughed. “I need a little more time to prepare.”
“When do they usually start?”
“I don’t really have any idea. My sisters’ kids all walked between fourteen and seventeen months, so I’m hoping I’ll have a few more months of immobile Esme. Not that she’s really immobile,” Laura added as Esme, with resolute thrusts of her arms, began crawling the length of the sleeping bag.
“Do babies ever walk when they’re just ten months old? Or even, climb out of their cribs?”
“If they do, then I pity their parents.” Laura laughed again. “No, I don’t know. I’m sure some do.”
“But it’s uncommon.”
“I’d say so. Why? Are you hoping to see her first steps? In that case you should definitely stay for breakfast.”
The impetus for these questions was so personal he was sure he had not been oblique, but a true exhibitionist, and that he’d confessed that the myth of his own babyhood now seemed flawed, far too mythic for him to believe. At the same time, he knew he had not told her this, and he longed to. He felt he was obeying ever more reckless impulses when he asked, “Was it your husband who got here last night?” But Laura didn’t seem to notice the color he felt coming up once again in his face.
“Yeah, he’s crazy. He had to work late, so he was going to hike up this morning, but instead he comes up in the dark, with all his gear on his back and a twelve-pack of beer on his shoulder. I’m taking pity and letting him sleep. Usually he gets up with Esme, to give me a break.”
Her casual evocation of a domestic routine had much the same effect on him as the photographs of Gene’s sons had once had. “That reminds me that I ought to be hitting the trail myself,” he said, not having come up with a destination but simply wanting to be gone.
“What’s your plan?” Laura asked him as he began reassembling his pack. “Are you doing a long-distance hike?” She’d pulled Esme onto her l
ap so he could roll up his sleeping bag.
“Not really. Just driving around, checking out a few places I’ve wanted to see.”
“Sounds nice. A vacation?”
“I’m not really working right now.” He’d left Pine Hill without giving notice to his boss on the house-building crew and without seeing Dorothy—because, he now realized, he hadn’t yet understood he was leaving.
“Do you live near here?”
“No.”
“Sorry,” she said after a moment. “I’m not trying to pry.”
“You’re not.” Mark paused in his packing, an unpleasant thought crossing his mind. “I’m not a fugitive or something,” he assured her. “I’m just in between houses and jobs. I’m sort of wandering, I think.”
“I envy you. If you’ve got the freedom to do it, that’s great.”
“It doesn’t feel as free as you’d think.” He paused between yanking his pack’s straps and then yanked them tighter. “Have you heard of the word ‘hegira’?”
“That’s a record by Joni Mitchell.” They both laughed. “No, I’ve never known what that word means.”
Mark closed his eyes, trying to picture again the word’s full definition, as he’d read it in Dorothy’s library. The word had recurred to him recently, for no obvious reason. But he’d noticed that this often happened: a word he’d brushed past long ago, ignorant of its meaning, somehow found its way to him again and then felt uncannily apt when he learned what it meant. As if the word had returned to reveal to Mark not just its meaning but a meaning in his situation, of which until then he had been unaware.
“Hegira,” he told her. “It’s from the life of Muhammad, but it can mean any ‘journey or flight from danger, to a more safe or congenial place.’”
“Is that what you’re doing? Hegira?”
“I guess. Yeah,” Mark said, and then he grinned foolishly, and Laura grinned back, while Esme looked sternly from one to the other.
“And how’s it going? Your hegira?”
“Better. I mean, I don’t think I’m quite there. But it’s going okay.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me, too,” he said, meaning he was glad she had been part of it, and knowing, as he felt he almost never did with women, that she understood his subtext. She was flirting with him, wasn’t she? He had assembled his pack and was hoisting the heavy weight onto his back when he heard children’s voices drift out of the tents. Perfect timing.
“Have a nice life,” Laura said.
“How about ‘See you next year’?”
“That’s much better. See you next year.”
“See you next year, Esme,” he said, crouching down to make eye contact with her. “You’ll be walking.”
“Oh, yeah,” Laura said.
And what was most remarkable, Mark thought, gazing into the baby’s clear eyes, was that they took it all in, lucid and attentive, and yet nothing remained. She was just ten months old. In her future this time of her life would be severed from her, no less than Mark’s sleep of the previous night had been severed from him. All that fierce striving and wakeful intelligence, and what would she keep? Not a thing, not the fire or the tent or the trees or the unshaven stranger. They might tell her that anything happened, and she would have to believe them.
23.
“…WITH A COAT HANGER,” LEE REMEMBERED HER saying.
The poor man had undone the wire coat hanger and sharpened one end, so that it worked like those pokers the park rangers used when they picked up the litter. And that’s the way he’d done it, too: one page at a time, with incredible patience, stretched out full length on the pavement with an arm down the storm drain.
The first year of their marriage; the first house; Sawyer Street. “The poor man” the one other young college instructor who lived on their block, a painfully thin, tall and angular, bearded historian who reminded Lee of a tormented artist, something like D. H. Lawrence. The young historian’s agonized efforts to complete his dissertation and obtain his degree were well known on the street, although for obvious reasons the young historian didn’t mix much with his neighbors. He was already overwhelmed with offspring: a toddler and an unexpected pair of twins. He would never finish; this was Lee and Aileen’s prediction. Tidy and efficient in their freestanding home, mistakenly convinced by Aileen’s seven-month pregnancy that they, too, were practitioners—but more calm and successful—of family life, it was their fleeting privilege, or folly, to pity their floundering neighbor. His toddler had taken the single copy of his thesis-in-progress and disposed of it in the storm drain.
“Sheet by sheet,” Aileen clarified, miming the arduous salvage, as Lee laughed helplessly.
Lee’s own dissertation was finished, and Aileen was in charge of creating the precious clean copies. There would have to be three: one for Lee’s adviser and committee, one to live in the stacks of the library, one for Lee to retain. Each page typed three separate times, no mistakes, on a special typewriter with math symbols they’d rented short-term. When she was typing English, she could read as she went and so work with astonishing speed, but not here. All Lee’s handwritten pages of numbers were gibberish to her. She had to check every character, back and forth, to be sure it was right. And she wasn’t contending just with an illegible language but with Lee’s often illegible writing. When at last she completed a page, she proofread it again, and if it still seemed correct, she enshrined it in the relevant stack on the top of the bookcase. No toddler yet, but there were all sorts of other mishaps that could befall a typed page. She’d considered storing the finished pages in the refrigerator, in case they had a house fire, but was afraid that it might be too damp.
This was tedious work that had gone on for months, while Aileen incurred headaches from eyestrain and cricks in her neck and funny cramps in her fingers and wrists, and the chair that she sat in progressively distanced itself from the typewriter table. Soon she was reaching for keys with completely straight arms. She and Lee had a joke that the stacks of clean pages expanded more slowly than she did. But they never would have likened their own situation to that of their hopeless neighbor. To the contrary: the longer it took, the more triumph to savor.
It was possible, running a fingertip over the page, to feel the indents where the keys made their marks. Although not the key striking down on the paper, or the surprisingly strong slender finger striking down on the key, or the arm a tense bridge from the hand to the shoulder, or the sleeveless green dress, the slight body within like a stalk when observed from behind. Then the enormous surprise of her, viewed in profile. Lee chose not to remember a previous time when she’d been thus transformed, but forgetfulness wasn’t an effort; this was all new to him. He was no less transformed; perhaps more so. Watching his wife, her smooth brown hair tied back, as she made his work real. The elating gunfire, the metallic hailstorm, the repeating mechanical slaps of the small metal hand (and the sagging depletion of ribbon); but there was no sound it was really akin to, Aileen’s typewriter noise. Once it had sutured the seams of his world. Now no comparison quite brought it back.
The horror he’d felt, upon seeing page twenty-four sharply folded in thirds, was for her, not himself. For her squared little pile of successes and the haystack of failures. He’d just missed, as it faded again, the forgotten typewriter percussion. But now, even with the disfiguring folds, the page felt like a gift. He would never have thought Lewis Gaither could have given him this: the reminder that Lee and Aileen had been happy together. Not for a year, or a few months, or even the length of a day; but there had been tiny bright grains throughout, like those flashes of mica that wink at the beach.
For hours, since leaving the library, he’d been afraid to stop driving, but by early evening he was so hungry he thought he would faint at the wheel. He’d gone without food for more than two days. At an interstate rest-stop McDonald’s, he braved the drive-through hunched under his cap and then devoured the burger and fries in his car at the outermost edge of the vast par
king lot. Every once in a while, a car parked within a few hundred yards, its weary passengers emerging and trudging indoors toward the bathrooms, and when this happened, Lee lay sideways, the gearshift impaling him, until the intruders’ noise faded away. He himself waited, more and more painfully, until nightfall and then hurried over the grass toward a margin of trees and pitch-darkness, and peed there, looking back at the rest stop’s bright lights.
Once he’d both eaten and emptied his bladder, the purely physiological burden removed was enough to pass for a momentary lessening of his anxiety. His hands still trembled; his heart still fled and tumbled headlong; his mind still raved with imprecations and pleas; but at least he felt able to take a brief rest before driving again. After a few empty moments, during which he cleaned and recleaned his fingers on a paper napkin, he allowed himself to gently unfold the dissertation page again. He didn’t even read what it said, his own work; he only gazed on the sharp little marks. He could almost have felt he was sheltered, in the teeming rootlessness of the vast parking lot. Perhaps he was camouflaged here, a flat flounder ensconced in the seabed of night, just the unnoticed beads of his eyes shining forth alertly. His own creeping tranquillity brought him up short. As if to gaze any longer might amount to a heedless and dangerous idyll, he quickly put the sheet away and forced himself to turn to the other, its replacement, its dark opposite, its intended negation.
This was not excellent-quality letter-size stock, with a watermark, but a cheap little slip of notepaper. And no specialized keyboard for math had been used, but a standard typewriter, in very poor health. The lack of salutation still struck Lee, as it had when he’d first gaped at it in the library, as violent, a sort of verbal ambush, although now, squinting at the truncated, single-spaced lines piled atop one another, he could also imagine that it might have been to save space:
If you’re reading this then we both might feel pleased with ourselves. My last letter to you: I was agitated, I failed to include my true post office box where you might write to me. No matter. This is better, if it works. The post office is too insecure. Do not think I choose this location because it is perfectly safe, i.e. rarely if ever sought out. Not at all. It is fine work, I’m sure, though I will not have time to read it. In my situation there is no “perfectly safe.” I weigh risks against benefits. I do hope you are first to get here, after me.
