Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  Dr. Kerry came to see her later that afternoon. He had come to St. Anne the year before Mamma went away. He’d treated us for poison ivy, summer colds, a broken arm. He sat on the edge of the bed and explained what we could expect. It wasn’t going to be the encounter with pure being that David had put on the table, but it was something like that.

  “You’re going to be tired,” Dr. Kerry said. He’d driven out to the house. “You’re going to sleep most of the time. You’re going to lose your appetite. Your breathing will become irregular. You’ll probably experience many emotions, strong ones, and may have hallucinations, or maybe I should call them visions.”

  “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” she asked. This was the only sign of doubt, hesitation. She was sitting on the edge of the bed; Dr. Kerry was sitting next to her. I was standing with my back against the wall.

  “Well, you’ve already done it,” he said, taking her hand in his, “if you mean what I think you mean.”

  “I do.”

  “It’s the difference between Socrates and Jesus. You know Plato’s Phaedo?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “I’ll bet they made you read that when you were a freshman at the University of Chicago.”

  She smiled. “For Jesus, Death, with a capital D, is the great enemy, something to be conquered.”

  “And for Socrates?”

  “I’ve read the Phaedo,” Olivia said.

  The doctor touched her forehead with the palm of his right hand, as if checking for a fever, and then he released her hand. “You never knew Gabe’s mother, did you? She was here the year I came to St. Anne. She had a bad case of poison ivy from squatting to pee in the woods. I fell in love with her, but so did everybody else. I was sorry she went away.”

  “Gabe’s going to write her a letter,” Olivia said.

  “Tell her I said hello,” he said to me.

  Olivia had good days and bad days. We were still watching things happen and trying to reach our own conclusions, but we no longer tried to spin our stories to make them count in the larger scheme of things. We stuck to small stories—about what was going on at the shop, online sales, the new online listings, our first printed catalog (which was selling well), the new IT person, Carla’s weekly blogs, Adam’s plans for the Boston Book Fair, the dogs who’d started dropping by the house in the afternoon to visit with Booker—not just Whitefoot and Barley but two or three other dogs too; Signora Vitale’s youngest son, who’d gone to live for a year with relatives in a small town on the coast south of Naples; and Saskia (of course), who was pining for Nadia, who’d gone back to Amman for the last weeks of summer; the conviction and sentencing of Barbara Duncan, the town controller, who’d siphoned off almost $30 million of village funds over a period of twenty years and built a nationally renowned horse-breeding operation west of town.

  “Astonishing,” Olivia said, more than once. Shaking her head. “How could the town have that much money in the first place?”

  “It was Toni,” I said, “who figured out what was going on. You want me to read the article?”

  She shook her head.

  On the day of the second leg of the regatta, Saturday, September 3, we got up a little earlier than usual. Booker was still asleep, lying on his side in the closet, an ear flopped over one eye. We let him sleep and went down the stairs and drank our coffee in the reading nook, where we had two comfortable chairs. The weather was too cold and rainy to sit out on the balcony. We couldn’t see past the second sandbar. We had the radio on. On Friday, at the start of the first leg, two sailboats had almost collided leaving Chicago, and one had almost crashed into the stone water treatment plant. The regatta had almost been canceled, but most of the boats made it to St. Joe by Friday afternoon.

  The boats were expected to leave St. Joe about at 9:30 on Saturday morning for the second leg—St. Joe to Michigan City. We might see some sails in early afternoon, but only if the weather cleared. We sat outside. It wasn’t really cold, but it was chilly and Olivia was wearing a warm coat over her sweater.

  “We could drive over to Hesston,” I suggested, “to see the Annual Hesston Steam and Power Show. Grandpa Chaz always liked to go. A sawmill, steam traction engines, antique farm machinery.” But Olivia wanted to do the mystical experience questionnaire instead. She had the URL for the website. I had it too, in an e-mail from David.

  “You ready to take it?”

  “No, Gabe. I want you to take it.”

  “Me? I thought it was for you.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “What do I know about mystical experiences?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  “Livy, David wanted you to take this.”

  She shook her head “He thought you ought to take it. Psilocybin too.”

  “Me?”

  She laughed. I typed in the URL and had a look at the introductory quotations from Rumi and Einstein about the unity of all things: that there is a pure consciousness, that the observed and observer are one, and so on. We rushed through the preliminary questions—age, gender, body type, household income—to get to the good stuff. By this time I was curious. Was I thinking or hoping, that something was going to be settled? Was I worried that my mystical experience rating would be below average? Or above average?

  “Once you answer a question,” I said, looking at the instructions, “you can’t go back and change your answer. You can only go forward.”

  “Like life,” Olivia said.

  I read the questions aloud. Most of them were variations on a theme: Have you experienced the insight that “all is one”? Have you experienced pure awareness/being, beyond the world of sense impressions? Have you experienced with certainty an encounter with ultimate reality (in the sense of being able to “know” and “see” what is really real) at some point during your experience?

  Possible answers to these questions were:

  a. Never

  b. So rarely I can’t be sure

  c. Occasionally

  d. Often

  e. Very often

  f. All the time

  “I’m clicking ‘Never’ for the first one,” I said, “though I might have clicked ‘All the time.’” Olivia waited for an explanation. “Well,” I said, “everything is made of the same stuff. Our fingernails are stardust. That sort of thing. But I don’t think about it very often. It’s not something I really ‘experience.’”

  Have you experienced pure awareness/being, beyond the world of sense impressions?

  “I’m going to say ‘Occasionally.’” Olivia wanted an example. “Watching the dogs play on the beach? Or how about ‘longing’? Does that count?”

  “What are you longing for?”

  “Just longing.”

  “Let’s count it.”

  Have you experienced with certainty an encounter with ultimate reality (in the sense of being able to “know” and “see” what is really real) at some point during your experience?

  “All the time,” I said.

  Olivia laughed and then started to cough. “Keep going,” she said, and coughed again.

  “How about this one? Have you ever experienced the belief that you, as your separate individual self, are all-powerful?”

  “What are you going to check for that one?”

  “All the time,” I said.

  “I think you just flunked the test!”

  “I don’t think this is the kind of test you can flunk, but I might be wrong.”

  Let’s keep going. “What do you think you’ll see at the end,” she read, “once you realize you can’t turn back?”

  I was surprised by the change in tone—a shift to a different register that I didn’t care for. “How should I know?” At that moment I looked up. A sailboat was emerging from the
fog—first the prow, then the jib, then she slowed as the keel buried itself in the sand. “Look at that,” I said. “A sailboat.

  I think I’m having a mystical experience right now. “Do you see it too? My God, it’s grounded on the sandbar, the second one."

  Olivia turned her head to see it. A sailboat had run aground on the second of two long sandbars that run parallel to the beach. You can wade out a long way on these sandbars, but you have to watch out for riptides. The water gets backed up behind the sandbars, then rips through, creating a channel as the water rushes back into the lake. The boat had keeled over. The sail was smacking the water.

  I dialed 911, handed the phone to Olivia, took off my shoes, and rushed down to the beach. It was cold, starting to rain, the wind was exploding in gusts. Three people in the shallow water were wading toward shore. The woman in the middle had a blue windbreaker pulled up over her head. It didn’t seem like enough people to crew a sailboat, but I couldn’t really see how big the boat was.

  The first thing I heard over the wind as they came out of the water was a string of curses. The man was shouting, cursing the weather, cursing the weather bureau, cursing the water, cursing the commodore, cursing his wife and his son, cursing another couple who had backed out of the second leg at St. Joe because of the bad weather.

  “Hey,” I say. “You’re going to be all right. You’re alive.” Che bello essere vivi, I thought. The wife was trying to calm her husband down.

  “Son of a bitch. I’ve been running this race for fifteen years and I’m not going to quit because of a little bad weather.”

  “You stupid asshole,” his wife shouted. “You call this a little bad weather? I told you we shouldn’t go without Bucky and Sonia.”

  “Fucking cowards. They shouldn’t have agreed to crew if they were going to be scared off by a little bad weather.”

  “You call this a little bad weather.”

  The son, in his early teens, was crying.

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  “Goddamn GPS went out,” the man said to me. “We didn’t know where the hell we were. You couldn’t see a goddamn thing.”

  “We listened on the radio,” I said. “A lot of problems. Two boats almost collided in Chicago on Friday. Five-foot waves.”

  “Our GPS went out,” the man said again. “We couldn’t tell where the hell we were. You couldn’t see a goddamn thing.”

  “You don’t need to swear all the time,” his wife said.

  “Jesus Christ, listen to you. I’m going back out to see what the damage is.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I think your wife has the right idea,” I said.

  The man turned on me, his face contorted. I thought he was about to cry. We clumped up the beach to the stairs. By this time I was soaked too, just as if I’d been out in the boat. “Let’s get into some dry clothes,” I said.

  Saskia had collected towels and sauna robes and a pile of dry clothes from our different closets, and they changed in our bedroom. We got the wet clothes into the washing machine to spin dry before we’d put them in the dryer. Saskia offered to make tea.

  By the time the tea was ready, the three sailors, in warm robes, had calmed down. The boy had stopped crying; the husband had stopped cursing. We sat in the living room with the radio on. The husband talked animatedly. He had been doing this regatta for fifteen years. The first time he’d done it with his father and his uncles. This was the first time with his son. “But it won’t be the last.”

  The son sat on the floor with Booker.

  The wife worried about missing the big party at the Michigan City Yacht Club. “A regatta is a race wrapped in a party,” she explained. But I didn’t think her husband was interested in the party. He kept twisting in his chair, trying to get his body to understand what had happened. I could see that he was embarrassed. He was the captain, and he’d run his ship aground. And I felt a kind of pity for these people. The man had shamed himself in front of his wife and son, rammed his ship into a shoal, if you can call a sandbar a shoal. But even as I was feeling sorry for the man, I was conscious of my own happiness. Even though Olivia was dying, I was happy. Had I experienced with certainty an encounter with ultimate reality (in the sense of being able to “know” and “see” what is really real) at some point during this experience? Maybe. Maybe not.

  We sat in the living room. I kept checking the dryer. The rain had stopped. We could see the boat, on its side. The man wanted to go out to the boat, maybe get the GPS, assess the damage, maybe push it off the sandbar. But this wasn’t going to happen. The wife called her sister in Michigan City, asked me for directions. I said it would be easier if I took them into town. We could meet at the Shell station at the stoplight on Duval and Madison.

  We had to wait a little longer for the clothes to dry. I got tired of waiting and took them out of the dryer. They were still a little damp, but dry enough.

  “What about the 911 people?” I asked as we were walking out the door.

  “They stayed on the line,” Olivia said, “till I could see the people walking out of the lake.”

  When I dropped them off at the Shell station, the man got out his wet billfold and offered me a hundred dollars for my trouble. I shook my head. He insisted. It was his way of taking charge. I took the wet hundred dollar bill and put it in my back pocket. I could feel the dampness as I drove home.

  When I got back, Olivia and Saskia and I had a drink and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what had just happened, trying to reach our own conclusions—as Olivia liked to say—and I thought we were getting close. But we couldn’t quite put our conclusions into words. “I’ve been thinking about that last question,” I said. “What will I see at the end, once it’s clear that I can’t turn back? Maybe I’ll see the sailboat emerging out of the fog. I’d like that. But what if I see that dysfunctional family, and hear them too? That wouldn’t be good.”

  “If it’s at the end,” Olivia said, “you’ll be on the sailboat, not on the shore. You’ll be leaving the shore behind, heading out into deep water. Besides, you’re not close enough to the end to know what’s you’ll see.”

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not close enough either.”

  “What about you, Saskia?” I asked.

  “I think you’re both a little bit crazy,” she said. “I’m going into town to get some fruit and some more lettuce and a bottle of pinot grigio. All I want for supper is a big salad. You want me to pick up anything else?”

  We shook our heads. “We’ll probably take a nap,” Olivia said.

  The next morning was beautiful. The great inland sea was as flat as one of the pancakes I’d fixed for our breakfast. According to the radio, the sailboats in the regatta were becalmed in the harbor at Michigan City, waiting for wind. But the copyedited text of Varieties had arrived in the night, attached to an e-mail, so we had other things to think about. Olivia was overwhelmed and pretended to be upset by the hundreds of notes, corrections, and queries that filled the margins in tiny print. “I’m supposed to accept or reject every change by clicking ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject.’ I can’t write a single sentence that this woman doesn’t want to correct. I can’t get a single endnote formatted to suit her.” But she couldn’t conceal her pleasure in the fact that someone was paying such close attention to every single word she had written. “I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

  Olivia and I were paging through the file on Olivia’s laptop and drinking more coffee when Saskia joined us on the deck with a couple of cold pancakes on a plate. She was wearing a light robe over her swimsuit. The three of us sat in silence for a few minutes, watching two large men from the St. Anne Marina maneuver the abandoned sailboat out to deeper water and harness it, stern first, to their power boat. We kept our eyes on the two bo
ats till they disappeared, and then we watched the dogs roughhousing on the beach.

  “Reached any conclusions?” Saskia asked.

  “I thought we were pretty close yesterday,” I said, “but then… it’s like trying to reach the horizon.”

  Saskia, who didn’t drink coffee, went down to the beach for her morning swim.

  “Why didn’t you tell her about the manuscript?” I asked.

  “I just want to savor the news for a while,” she said, “before going public.”

  We watched Saskia wade out past the sandbars and then plunge in. She was a strong swimmer, but when she swam out farther than usual, I started to get a little nervous. What if she kept on going?

  But then she turned and waved.

  “That’s a good sign,” I said. “It means she’s going to turn back.”

  Olivia shook her head. “It means,” she said, “that she wants us to be happy.”

  The sun, which had come up over the dunes behind us, had turned the rims of our white china coffee cups into ovals of yellow sunlight. An off-shore breeze had begun to ruffle the surface of the lake. The boats would be leaving the harbor in Michigan City. And I thought that these were good signs too. And I realized that we were happy, at least as happy as we were ever going to be.

  XXIII. THE BUFFALO

  (September 2011)

  Reverend Sarah continued to hover around the edges of our lives. Sensing a battle, I tried to keep her away from Olivia, but she was insistent, like a horsefly, biting and stinging. That’s what it felt like. She needed to intervene, to do something. She’d given up on a visit to the bishop, and wanted to administer “last rites.” Not right away, but when the time came. “You’ve got to understand that. When it’s time, I’ll need to administer extreme unction.”

  “She doesn’t want extreme unction,” I said.

  “How do I know what she wants if you won’t let me talk to her?”

  “Sarah,” I said calmly. “You’ve put enough ideas in her head. If we’d taken her to Bernard Mitchell instead of letting her go on that retreat, she might have had a chance. I never should have let her go.”