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Shelter in Place

Page 17

by Alexander Maksik


  There were other things, of course. Other finishing touches, other details. Photographs. Paintings we’d bought over the years. Stones we’d kept from as far back as Cannon Beach. Other objects gathered through time. Even remnants of our lives before each other.

  But today I’m telling you of the telephones because this morning I went around disconnecting their bases, removing their clear wires from our walls. Dropping each receiver, base and power cord into an old brown paper shopping bag.

  How long had it been since that satisfying click? A feeling, a noise I’ve always loved—the sure connection between wire and wall.

  No one calls the landline anyway.

  Now people are devoted to cell phones, but I prefer the larger receiver in my hand, the fullness of sound, voices so close and pure and uninterrupted.

  Or I did.

  I’ve become tired of spoken language. Of the constant talking. No one shuts up. I can’t stand it any longer. Not my own voice, not the voice of most anyone.

  I’ve removed the satellite dish.

  Now the phones are gone.

  What’s left?

  The people in town.

  And I don’t mind them usually. Or the village small talk. I don’t go in all that often anyway. Just for breakfast and the paper sometimes when I feel my mind begin to slide away from me. When it’s pushing so hard against the bars I’m afraid they’ll break. When the bird comes, when the tar is thickest in my veins. Then it soothes me to be there.

  Except for when they play the wrong music. Then I have to leave immediately.

  Maybe I’ve become a curmudgeon, but I don’t think it’s that. Not only. It’s just the noise is too much. I look around and see the people nodding their heads, and reading their newspapers, and meanwhile my brain is burning and I have to leave.

  The music.

  Which is a language I wish I could speak. Or at least fully understand. I don’t mean the incessant shit they play in the diner. I mean what I’ve been listening to here. The good radio. Our CDs. The records, which were once my parents’. I have sorted them all. Not so much the good from the bad, but the brutal from the rest. There are sounds now I can’t endure. Just as with certain light. Fluorescent, flashing neon, the naked bulb.

  It’s to do with the holes in my system. There are cracks. There are gaps.

  The modem.

  Sending its invisible signal into the house. Its round blue light providing hope. Stamped into the plastic are three crescents widening from a single point and these are what I imagine pulsing through the air—delicate little half-moons passing through the walls, through my body. And maybe riding on one of those will come a message from the dark. Will come word. Maybe, but I think the modem is the next to go.

  The computer.

  It rests bulky and outmoded in our office defiling my father’s redwood desk. Even in our most glorious days, I hated the thing. All its wires and plastic and heat. Ugly and threatening. I’ll get rid of the thing today. Maybe I’ll go to the garage and find my father’s .45. Take it out to the clearing and murder that horrible machine. Maybe I’ll take a hammer to it.

  The mailbox.

  White half-oval riding a sturdy wooden post. A red metal flag, which when there’s mail the mailman continues to raise. How many men like that left in the world? Our little mailbox at the end of our little road. I go out once a day anyway. Flag up or down. Just in case he makes a mistake. Paul Thomas, the mailman, never makes a mistake. The box is always empty when the flag is lowered. I go anyway to make sure. We’ve never met, but we leave him a bottle of Jameson and a hundred bucks in the box every Christmas. And always before the New Year he replaces it with a whiskey cake wrapped in foil and red ribbon along with a card saying, Thank You! Merry Christmas! It’s signed, Paul and Sally, who I take to be his wife, though I don’t know for certain. Could be his nurse, his lover, his sister, or his daughter. Could very well be his dog.

  I don’t know which of them makes it, but the cake is invariably foul. Tess and I look forward to it. To learning how bad a cake can be. Just to evaluate the heights of its vileness, to see if it was possible to make a worse cake than the cake of Christmas past. Christmas Eve we slice two slivers. A sacrament we deliver to each other’s mouths. I love that. The absolute wretchedness of something causing such joy. My theory is that Paul and Sally (human or canine) are teetotalers, that they are simply returning our whiskey to us in a different vessel—a dense disk of sugar and flour and fruit.

  Tess, on the other hand, believes they hate us. That their delivery is an annual gesture of violence.

  Whatever the case, each year, that single mouthful of cake, which we are honor-bound to swallow, makes Tess laugh with an uninhibited recklessness that I love as much as anything in my life. The wildness of her laughter. The spectacle of her falling sideways, laughing the air from her body.

  It’s obnoxious. Unoriginal too. A young couple from the city thrilling at the kindness and poor taste of their country neighbors. You see what your wild revolutionaries have become? Bourgeois snobs, insipid invaders.

  What else is left?

  The cell phone.

  Speaking of hope. This I cannot give up. I leave it on the edge of the table where the signal is strongest. I keep it charged. I keep an eye on it.

  People used to say, send word. Send word when you get there, send word when you land. Send word when there’s time. Send word when you’re settled.

  I love this phrase, and I will admit that what I hope more than anything is that. Tess sends hers through the mail. That I will walk up our long drive to see the red flag raised, and there on the cool floor of the metal box will lie a letter.

  But Tess sends no word.

  And instead I go on sending you mine.

  73.

  Something about crawling around beneath his table today, about collecting the telephones, the weight of them in the shopping bag, made me think of my father.

  My father who found calm within the Quaker meetinghouse out on the point at the end of the bay where he practiced waiting worship with a small congregation of Friends.

  A democratic faith devoted to peace and without hierarchy.

  My father listening to God in all the ways a body can listen.

  “I’m just puttering around the house,” he’d say when I called.

  “What are you doing, Dad?”

  “Not much, Joe. Just puttering.”

  Which could have meant gluing a chipped mug, or installing crown molding in the living room.

  And then, as I do now, I would see him in White Pine. The same living room, the same kitchen, the same front door, same front yard. The pile of soil was gone, replaced by a crabapple tree. The whole place refreshed as if he owned it himself. Refaced cabinetry, new furniture, which he’d made over the years using the Arbus workshop. A new fence out front. Fresh paint.

  The landlord couldn’t believe her luck.

  My father wanted nothing in return—not an option to buy, not a reduction in rent, no reimbursement for improvements made. He only wanted a home he could afford to stay in, to work on, to putter around, a home not far from his wife.

  By then, Tess and I were in Seattle living in a shitty apartment down by the water in Belltown. A damp and grungy fourth-floor walk-up full of windows. We looked out on the bay, and the fishing boats coming and going, and the tankers out further, and beneath us a mad carnival of crime and general degradation. All that heroin, all those people rampaging below our windows at night. None of it bothered us then.

  We’d just ridden into town from White Pine. We arrived believing we were cool to violence, immune somehow to its reach and power. We were not its victims, but its perpetrators.

  We had done what we had done.

  I was my mother’s son.

  We were made of violence, Tess and I. Formed and drawn and bound by it.
Woven through our creation myth.

  Tess and I. We. The single object I believed us to be.

  And were it not for my mother and her hammer, would Tess have ever followed me to White Pine? And was she following me at all? Was she not also following my father? My mother? All of us at once? We her surrogates.

  And who was surrogate to whom? It wasn’t one for one. Father for father. Mother for mother. It’s not so simple with Tess.

  And what was I? Proxy for whom?

  Well, whatever the answers, I think of Tess and me in our apartment above the bay, the two of us on the run from White Pine, pretending to be invincible and unscathed.

  We came determined to start again. Two frightened and arrogant kids sailing into the big city from their fishingtowncollegetownprisontown.

  “Sink or swim, Joey March,” Tess said when I stopped the truck in front of our new home. “Begin again. Round two. Shake it off. Nothing to regret. What’s done is done. One, two, three, go.”

  We were young, but we were so tired, so ground down.

  Still, I knew we’d swim.

  Now that it was out of our system.

  But the truth is that it was never in mine. Not that. Not what Tess had in hers.

  I tell you this as someone whose system is fractured. Is coursing with venom and pollution, a system of disconnected gears and failing filters.

  Not only.

  There are other things in me, yes, but still, I tell you this as someone who knows something about the dark. As someone with talons sunk in his lungs and cold tar in his veins.

  But who also knows the blazing rise, the ecstatic clarity.

  And each its respective violence.

  But neither is what Tess had.

  What Tess had was never in my system. I go on telling myself.

  Maybe I am not so much my mother’s son.

  74.

  It was 1992. Very cold, very clear. A Sunday morning. At last, we’d accepted my father’s invitation to worship and now we walked from our house to his, and then down to the water, past the tourist bureau, Nick’s Knacks, the harbor with most of the slips empty, the fishing boats already out to sea.

  A couple of guys smoking outside The Clam Shack. Wool beanies, Mariners caps, Carhartt coats. It was blowing hard and we leaned into it just slightly as we went. Any word we spoke was whipped away. He’d explained the rules.

  “You sit. You wait. You listen for God. And if you feel compelled, you may speak. But it is unnecessary, and most of us don’t.”

  We walked the gravel path to the meetinghouse door and I remember the relief of stepping inside—the warmth, the sudden stillness, the protection from the wind, which strained hard against the unstained glass.

  “God is in the wind above all,” my father said. “Invisible. Delivering all things.”

  So he believed. So he claimed.

  There was that far-off howling and the water moving against the rocks. It was a single room. Modest. Unadorned. Wooden pews. A single silver cross.

  “Peace is in God and in his world,” my father the new Quaker told us before he opened the door.

  I liked being with Tess on one side and him on the other. I liked the sounds of the water, and the panes bending, and the stillness of all those other people.

  I liked the winter light carving into the room.

  That day they were rioting in Los Angeles. The city was on fire, while the three of us sat together in the quiet meetinghouse—Tess on one side, my father on the other.

  We sat and we listened and we were waiting for God. That was the edict.

  Near the end, I turned and looked at my father. He sat upright, his long torso very straight. Eyes closed. His hands were folded in his lap, like a debutante’s. I saw him then in some new way and felt an abrupt surge of love. He was a man who fought, who refused everything he abhorred—violence, indifference. He would let none of it seep in. And whatever we call it—honor, character, integrity—was what I saw in his new posture, with his thick, scarred old hands resting there so delicately.

  There is nothing much else to recall.

  We sat and we waited and when an hour had passed we rose and we left.

  We were quiet and calm on the walk home along the water and when we said goodbye in front of my father’s open door, I hugged him with an uncharacteristic strength and intensity.

  He said, “I love you, Joe.”

  And I said, “I love you, too.”

  Tess kissed him on the cheek.

  “And I love you, Richard.”

  She laughed as if it were an obvious and unnecessary thing to say, took my hand and we walked away from him, turning the corner and heading up the hill.

  We were going to Lester’s for a pizza and a pitcher. I could feel the swelling brightness, but it had not, for a change, arrived from nowhere and without explanation. It came from Tess, and from my father, from the stillness of that hour, from the light and the gulls, from the peace of our stroll along the waterfront. Perhaps it also came from love. Or was love, that sharpness, that general, nameless pleasure. But there was also in that admixture of causes, relief.

  I believed that something had changed in Tess. That the joy I felt—and yes, maybe joy is the right word for these rushes, these swells of confidence and clarity—was in part to do with the belief that Tess had changed, that she might have abandoned her plans.

  That I’d been freed from the duties of revolt, the duties of war.

  But at Lester’s sitting in my father’s booth, a pitcher of Olympia between us, waiting for our pizza, Tess said, “Do you think a woman should live like that?”

  And then my nameless pleasure was replaced by disappointment.

  I did not know her plans precisely. And perhaps Tess didn’t know them herself.

  Even so they were inevitable.

  I don’t know if we continued speaking. We must have. But what I remember is her gaze on me and her question and that feeling of defeat, that rise of fear.

  75.

  The winter light carving into the room.

  This line has been humming in my mind now for days and I realize suddenly it is not mine.

  I have stolen it from a poem Tess loved, which she found at Left Bank Books, a little place around the corner from our first apartment in Seattle. It was a shop she adored, her favorite in the city.

  The book she found by accident. Something about its title. Something about its cover of red volcanoes. She brought it home and fell for its longest poem. For months she read pieces of it to me.

  Tess in bed facing the bay, and me with my back to the windows listening, watching her full of daylight.

  I haven’t thought of it for a long time, but those words, light carving into the room, I see that they’ve infiltrated me:

  Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,

  I am thinking as I stride over the moor.

  As a rule after lunch mother has a nap

  and I go out to walk.

  The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April

  carve into me with knives of light.

  I only remembered the last two lines. I had to search out the rest. There it was on our wide bookcase—a slim file of time. On the title page she’s written, Tess Wolff. Seattle, Washington. November, 1995.

  The same year they murdered Yitzhak Rabin.

  The same year the Mariners lost the pennant to the Seated Men. The year three American soldiers kidnapped, beat, and raped a twelve-year-old Okinawan school girl.

  It’s the same year they blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City.

  These things were on her mind in 1995. They are in her notes in the book’s back pages, pages soft with use.

  I’ll keep it on the table, and maybe read it all later. I can’t now. Her asterisks, her lines are like the light. They
carve into me, and I don’t have the heart for it today.

  I don’t have the strength to feel the softness of those pages, which somehow are the softness of Tess Wolff in 1995.

  Not only, of course.

  That wasn’t all she had.

  Not all softness.

  And looking at that stanza in front of me now I think I should have paid more attention.

  Well there are many ways of being held prisoner.

  Beneath which she’s drawn a long black line. Thick and steady.

  We were autodidacts in our way. Both of us having squandered our educations in a safe haze of disinterest, going along, half-reading, half-listening, skipping classes. Almost from the moment we met, we regretted it together. Our shared experience of wasted opportunity. Even in Cannon Beach that summer we were reading, listening to music, trying make up for the shame of laziness, of wasting those four years in our respective colleges.

  Loving Tess made me hungry for everything and I want to believe that it was the same for her.

  That what we were together was a single insatiable beast.

  What do you think? Can two people become one voracious animal?

  Well, I’ll tell you this: For a long time, we were so hungry.

 

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