This Glittering World

by T. Greenwood

Ben held on, despite his body’s quaking. Despite the awful aching thud in his head. Despite the sounds finally escaping Sara, even with that terrible keening, Ben held on.

  That night, he dreamed again of snow.

  He was wearing snow boots, each heavy as night as he walked through the woods. It was spring elsewhere, but not here. Here the ground was cold with six inches of freshly fallen snow. The sky was black but littered with a million stars, pinpricks of light and an enormous moon. The path was illuminated in cold blue light. His boots sank into the snow, each step an effort almost too much to bear. He ground his jaw, concentrated on moving forward. He thought about how many storms they had endured this winter, about how many snowflakes had had to fall to make the crusty layer of snow beneath him. He wondered how far down the earth was.

  It was difficult to walk with his arms full. Each step was careful and calculated. Tentative. If he were to sink into the white, he might drop the bundle in his arms. He could disappear with it forever. On each side of him, the giant pines reached up into the sky while still bearing the weight of winter on their arms. This gave him strength.

  It was so cold, his back and legs ached with it and his face had gone from stinging to numb. He could taste the cold, a bitter lozenge melting on his tongue. He felt mucous in a warm lump in his tonsils. He sniffed and hacked and spit his steaming insides into the snow. His throat ached.

  His legs ached.

  Finally, he got to the clearing, to the place protected by the thickness of trees. The foliage was so dense it had kept out the storms and now kept out the moon. It was dark and cold without snow or light. He peered into the shadows at what he carried. He rested the quiet bundle on the ground. And then he dropped to his knees.

  The ground was exposed but frozen. He pulled the sharp spade from his back pocket and knew he should have brought a shovel. This could take days instead of hours.

  It was still here, the silence like something alive. Not even wind was allowed into this fortress of quiet. It was so dark, he couldn’t see his own hands. And so it didn’t matter as he closed his eyes.

  The two hot tracks on his cheeks felt like a betrayal of the cold, and so he wiped them away. His glove was rough and clumsy. He peeled it off and tossed it to the ground. And with his exposed fingers he began to unwrap the parcel from the blanket made of sunset.

  He was a blind man, studying a stranger’s face. His fingers touched and hesitated, both discovering and recognizing the angles. The predictable architecture of bones, but in miniature. His clumsy thumb stuttered at the place where the quickening flutter he’d both seen and heard but never got a chance to touch now lay buried. That place between tiny throat and sternum, that place inside the small citadel of bone, once beating, now, under his touch, as still as snow.

  “I should kill you,” Frank said.

  Ben, kneeling next to him in the hospital chapel, only nodded his head. He’d been sitting like this, his hands pressed together in prayers that could never be answered, for hours. Sunlight was starting to come through the small stained-glass window over the pulpit. It dappled their hands in fragments of orange and red and gold.

  “I want you to start at the beginning, and I don’t want any lies. I don’t want any candy-coating, no marshmallow fluff. You owe me that goddamn much.”

  And so Ben began at the beginning: a snowstorm, a Navajo boy beaten to death, his blood like a flower blooming in the snow. He told Frank about the hospital, about Shadi, about the long drive to the funeral. About all the other ghosts. He told him about Dusty, about the sorrow he’d held inside like a precious bug in a jar. As Frank shook his head, fuming, Ben tried to explain how he had come to be so cruel. Then he gave him the blue Mustang, Mark Fitch, and the two girls. He told him about Lucky, about the frat party. What he knew about the fight. And then he told him about Joe Bello.

  “Marty’s kid?” Frank said, rubbing his temples with two thick thumbs. “Marty Bello?” Frank took a deep breath and clenched his fists.

  “Listen, Frank. He had Ricky’s friend beaten up. He vandalized Shadi’s trailer. And he’s the one who hired those guys to get me. That’s why they were at the house. They were there for me.” Ben felt vertiginous, the stained-glass colors turning like a kaleidoscope, making him dizzy. Sick. “I’m sorry,” Ben said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You fucked up,” Frank said.

  Ben nodded and wiped fiercely at the tears he hadn’t wanted to escape. “I know.”

  Frank stood up and rubbed his hand across his head. Straightened his shoulders. “We need to make this right,” he said. ”You need to make this right.”

  Ben nodded again. “But how?”

  THE GLITTERING WORLD

  Summer arrived on time in Phoenix with its requisite sun and heat. In the mornings, Ben rose at sunrise, slipped out of bed, out onto the patio, and into the cool green of the swimming pool. He let the cool water fill his ears as he floated on his back and considered the aquamarine sky. Above him, the palm trees genuflected to the dawn.

  Sara would wake in an hour after he had already showered and shaved. He shaved every day now, running the razor along his hollow cheeks and sharp jawline. He didn’t recognize himself sometimes in the bathroom mirror. The early summer sun had turned his skin a deep gold color. It made his eyes look paler. Like blue ice. When he was finished, he would run the water over the razor, watch the soap and tiny black hairs swirl down the drain.

  Sara ironed his dress shirts each night, starched them to a crisp perfection. The smell was strong, clean as he slipped them on and buttoned them to his collar. His suits were swaddled in dry cleaner’s plastic bags, which were as thin as whispers. He polished his shoes, knotted his tie.

  When Sara woke, he would have her coffee waiting for her. Cream, no sugar. In her favorite coffee mug, the heavy pottery cup the color of a robin’s egg. While he read the paper, Sara would make breakfast. Soft-boiled eggs perched in little white egg cups, golden buttered toast, fresh-squeezed juice from the orange tree in their backyard. They would sit across the table from each other and make plans for the evening. For the following weekend. Where to have dinner. Which movie to see. Her parents came on Tuesday nights for dinner, and tried to pretend that things were the same. On Sundays, Sara and Ben went to brunch and then a matinee.

  Later, after Sara had showered and changed into fresh scrubs, she would collect her purse and keys and recite the list of things Ben needed to do. Pick up the dry cleaning, deposit a paycheck, buy mayonnaise, toilet paper, soap. Before she walked out the door, he would go to her, kiss her, and say, “Love you. See you tonight. “Then he would watch from the window as she backed the car out of the drive and headed to work.

  Despite her parents’ objections, Sara had transferred from Oncology to the Neonatal Ward, where she held infants smaller than ripe peaches in her hands, fastened tiny tubes to tiny chests, rocked their diminutive bodies to sleep. These were the babies born too soon, the babies born to addicts, the babies ill-prepared for the world outside their mothers’ wombs. Every day she kept another baby alive was a good day. And on the other days, Ben held her as she allowed the grief to wash over her like rain.

  Every day was an apology.

  One morning in early June, as Sara cracks the top of her egg with a spoon and scoops out the soft liquid center onto her toast, Ben reads in the paper that two arrests have been made in the case of a Native American man found dead last November in Flagstaff. A hate crime, it says. And one of the young men arrested is the son of a prominent local politician: one who, until now, had been a dark horse with a chance, albeit it a long shot, at taking the GOP gubernatorial primary this week.

  Ben skims the article, his heart beating like a hummingbird on cocaine in his chest. But he pretends, he has to pretend, it’s just like any other bit of news.

  In addition to two female students who have come forward as witnesses, there is a third witness, a young Navajo man from Tuba City, who was brutally beaten earlier this year after initially co
ntacting the police. Surveillance footage that recently surfaced has resulted in the arrest of two additional men, who have been charged with this assault. And based on a tip from an anonymous source, an investigation is now being conducted into Martin Bello’s involvement in the attempted murder-for-hire of this witness.

  Shaking, Ben runs his hand across his smooth chin. He sips his coffee, folds the paper, and sets it next to his plate. He imagines Frank reading the same paper at his own kitchen table, just two blocks away. Understands that they have both done what they needed to do to make things right.

  When Ben signed the statement, the one Frank prepared, his hands had trembled. He barely recognized his own name, in shivering ink on the snow-white page. Frank had friends in the Coconino County Attorney’s Office. Everything would be taken care of, and Ben’s name would be left out of it. Justice would be served. For Ricky. For Shadi. And Sara would never know what he had done, only what he had failed to do.

  Sara comes to him, her white Crocs squeaking on the kitchen floor. “I have a fitting this afternoon, for my dress. I’ll be a little late. And can you just call the caterers and make sure they know we want the ganache instead of the butter cream?”

  He nods and then kisses her, breathing in the antiseptic scent of her hair, the Clorox smell of her clothes bleached clean.

  She looks at him, her eyes wide and vivid with sorrow still. He aches.

  When she has gone, he gathers his own things and says good-bye to Maude, who is lying in a pool of sunlight on the floor. He locks the front door behind him and goes out into the bright blue day.

  He knows he should be grateful for the semblance of forgiveness that Sara has offered him. For the effort she’s making. And he believes, he must believe, it is love, not spite, that keeps her here. Ben should be thankful to Frank, who has also tendered him a certain quiet clemency. Ben should feel lucky for Jeanine’s unadulterated mercy. Her anger, her violence, has softened now into a sort of gentle pity. But Ben also knows that the reparations he has tried to make will never be enough, that atonement for some things is futile.

  Inside the truck, he rolls the windows up despite the heat. The upholstery burns through the fabric of his slacks, and the steering wheel blisters his palms. The adhesive molding holding the rearview mirror has started to melt, leaving the mirror dangling awkwardly. His eyes sting in the sun. His skin burns with the heat. He imagines his perspiration staining the crisp white shirt beneath his dark suit jacket.

  As he drives the familiar route to the dealership, he watches the early morning heat make waves on the pavement, glimmering mirages. And suddenly, the mirrored surface of the hot pavement reflects a different landscape, creates the illusion that he is not in Phoenix at all but traveling on a dusty dirt road, following behind a black truck with a casket bouncing around in its bed. He can feel the chill air, and, as he follows behind it, his heart fills with hope.

  He closes his eyes for a moment, capturing a thousand fractured images. Shadi’s long brown fingers, the shiny silver rings. Her hair, her spine, her breasts. He smells the bitter green of absinthe and pure bright snow. Hope.

  But then there is the green, yellow, red of a stoplight, a honking horn, screeching brakes as he awakes from the dream, and his truck slides dangerously into the intersection. An angry face pressed against glass, a man flipping him off, the hot rush of adrenaline as he backs the truck up and out of the way of oncoming traffic. The dirt road, the pickup truck was only a cruel chimera, a daydream. And the slivers of her melt like snow on hot pavement.

  He has made his choice. And, from now on, he will keep his promises.

  When the light turns green again, Ben pulls out onto the street, listens to the hiss and honk of rush-hour traffic, and rolls the windows back down to the unbearable heat.

  Hope. He knows now that hope is a stillborn child, conceived but never realized. It is the dream ended while still asleep. The unanswered prayer. It is simply the fragile thread that a desperate man clings to, even as it unravels and unravels and unravels.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  THIS GLITTERING

  WORLD

  T. Greenwood

  About This Guide

  The following discussion questions are

  included to enhance your group’s reading of

  This Glittering World.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Discuss Ben’s relationship with Sara and how it changes through the course of the novel. Why is he attracted to Shadi? What does she represent to Ben?

  2. Ben experienced two significant losses as a young boy (the death of his sister and his father’s abandonment). How did these two traumas shape him as a man? How do they play into his relationship with Shadi?

  3. How does Ben’s relationship with his own father affect his decision to stay with Sara when she discovers that she is pregnant? Do you think he would have made a good father?

  4. How do you feel about Sara? Is Ben justified in his treatment of her?

  5. Why do you think Ben became so involved with finding out what happened to Ricky? Was it a sense of morality? A sense of responsibility? Or was it really for Shadi? Do you think Ben would have done everything he did if he weren’t attracted to Shadi?

  6. If you were in a similar situation to Ben’s, if you had woken up, gone out to get the newspaper, and found someone near death in the snow, what would you have done? Would you have dropped the whole thing and let the police ignore an obvious case of assault?

  7. Contrast Hippo and Emily’s relationship with Ben and Sara’s.

  8. Discuss the use of snow imagery. How does it echo Ben’s emotional state throughout the novel? What do you make of the dream that he has after their baby is stillborn?

  9. There is a great deal of injustice in this novel: from the original crime committed against Ricky to the police department’s initial dismissal of his death as an alcohol-related accident. At one point in the novel, Lucky suggests that there is “no such thing” as justice. Do you agree? If not, is justice served at the end of the novel? And, if so, at what expense?

  10. The Navajo art of weaving is a central metaphor in this novel. Discuss the different senses in which the metaphor is manifested. How does the “spirit string” fit into each of these?

  11. At one point, Shadi calls Ben selfish. Do you agree with her? What does he do that’s selfish, and what does he do that’s selfless?

  12. The novel is divided into the five “worlds” of the Navajo creation myth. Why do you think the author decided to structure the novel in this way? How are the colors of each part symbolic of what happens in that section?

  13. How much do you think Sara really knew about what was going on? Do you think she knew Shadi was related to Ricky when she told Ben she wanted the rug commissioned? Do you think she knew Ben was involved with Shadi? How much do you think Melanie knew?

  14. Near the end of the novel, Shadi gives Ben an ultimatum, demanding that he choose between her and Sara. Is this, ultimately, truly his choice? Do you believe he will keep his promise and stay with Sara? Was this the right decision? Why or why not?

  15. Ben is faced with a lot of choices throughout the novel: whether or not to go to the hospital to check on Ricky, to go to Ricky’s funeral, to search for Ricky’s attackers, to move to Phoenix and work for Sara’s father, to buy the drive-in theater speaker for Shadi, to marry Sara, and the eventual choice between Sara and Shadi. What do you think of every decision he made? Were there any you disagreed with?

  16. The definition of a tragedy is a story in which the hero comes to ruin or experiences tremendous sorrow as the result of both circumstance and a disastrous character flaw. In tragedies, readers should experience both fear and pity for the hero. Would you call Ben a tragic hero and this novel a tragedy? Why or why not? If so, what is Ben’s tragic flaw?

 

 

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