by Amity Gaige
But you’re just glad it’s not you who has to operate. (When they gave you the scrubs, you wondered.) You just have to hurry the hell up and change and find the OR, and in the devastating moments in which you are apart from her, changing, you realize that you never, never want to lose this woman, and that the two of you are now connected by some kind of experiential sinew stronger than any cord, any cable, any mooring. Stronger than anything a man could make with his hands. She is lying in the light literally crucified, wrists tied to a T-shaped table, when you arrive and sit in the chair they have placed at her head. And you dry her cheeks because she is crying. And you reassure her. You say, it’s OK, baby. You say, I’m right here. And when they cut her belly open you don’t even look at her belly. Because you’re not talking to her body anymore. You are not talking to her body, no. Because a room is created by every love at its apex. And you are talking to her soul in that distant room. It’s a room you’ve never been to before, and a room you may never get to again. You’re really not even supposed to know it exists.
In the end, you have never felt this close to anyone in your whole life.
You say to yourself, I will never forget this. I will never betray this. I will live my life to the standard of this. And even if I fall short, I will never give up my commitment to believe in and live by this.
But you don’t.
That is, you do forget. You become complacent. And one summer evening several years later, while standing on the hill above the College of Saint Rose in the middle of a pickup soccer game, you look out over the balsam green Hudson River Valley and you wonder, Yes, but what was that other thing? What was that dream I was supposed to remember? You’re late to get home, but you figure no one will mind if you finish out the half. And right before you jog back onto the field, you observe with perfect sangfroid that you can’t even locate what you’ve forgotten in a category of forgetting. Just like that, you let go of it. You liked the feeling of love, but you weren’t interested in the work, so you let go of it. You gave it up because it would have been difficult. You liked it only when it was good, when it made you look good. When it asked more of you, you demurred; in fact, you pretended that no request had been made. You forgot that you owed them anything, that you owed them the effort of love. You hoped they would eventually forget too. You hoped they would forget you and forget themselves and go on worshipfully bearing your icon. It took her years to figure it out. And then she did, somehow. But you. Your understanding lagged behind. You never imagined anything beyond the conquering. And these are the regrets that dog you now, with all this time on your hands.
So. Much. Time.
I let you down.
I let you down.
I let you down.
I let you down.
I let you down.
I let you down.
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I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down.
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I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let
you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down. I let you down.
EN FIN
I’ve been silent a long time now. Twenty-one days by my count. My voice, when I hear it in my sleep, has acquired an odd depth from disuse, a kind of virgin hoarseness. My speech strike has been an interesting experiment, bringing me just about everything except for what I’d hoped. As a tactical method, it’s been a clear failure. I’ve been deemed noncooperative, and despite my polite notes explaining my silence, I’ve been placed under protective custody and left entirely in my cell for all but an hour of solitary roaming in the gym. I haven’t seen my daughter. I haven’t heard a word. All I know is that the letter I tried to send against the advice of my lawyer to the old Pine Hills apartment was returned to me unopened, with no forwarding address. I’m left to think that all I’ve gained from my silence is this document, one I never would have written if I had allowed myself to speak. If I had spoken, I would have jawed all day long in the dayroom with the other guys. I would have sung under my breath at night. I would have made friends with the guards or found my way to the infirmary, or into one of the workshops on child development offered to those who’ve acquired an academic interest in how they got here. Instead, I wrote.
I wrote to you, Laura. I wrote for you and because of you and with you in mind, sitting across the kitchen table in your old gray cardigan. I could not have written this document without writing it for you. I could not have written this document if I had thought you weren’t listening. But now that I’ve come to the end of it, pulling up to the present moment, I’m struck by the sudden understanding that I cannot require you to read it. Or maybe I understand that you never will. You just never will. Even if this document passes the vetting of my lawyer, even if he decides that it mitigates instead of aggravates the charges against me, it will be sent to you (at your new address) as an inert pile of papers wrapped in twine. You’ll come home one day, see it waiting for you, and you will pause. You’ll heft it off your stoop and put it on the table. Meadow will ask you what it is and you’ll say Just some thing. She’ll run away to change out of her school clothes and you will look out the window and sigh. That evening, after she is in bed, her hair damp from the bath, her eyeglasses stored in her sneaker, her face kissed fifty times in all the ritual places, you’ll tuck up your legs and attempt to read.
But you’ll only get so far. A page or two. It’s too much. You’ll read it later. You want less and less to do with the proceedings. Your testimony at my hearing will be brief, reluctant. You want to move on. You don’t wish me ill anymore, but you’ve also stopped caring what happens to me. Somewhere in your soul you’ve disengaged, you’ve uncoupled, you’ve let go. You’ve turned to your daughter, to encouraging her happiness and bracing yourself for her questions. In fact, it occurs to me now, the only reason you would ever read this document is if you wanted to intercede. If you wanted to save me.
How strange to be quiet here, of all places. I have often wanted to babble just to contribute to the noise. Constant noise, constant light. And me sitting like a poet in the middle of it. It’s funny to listen to people talk when you can’t respond. People talk so much. Gaggingly long monologues on minor personal preferences. Verbatim recitations of pointless conversations. Uninterpreted bits of memory. Take the man in the neighboring cell. A classic recidivist, a real prison grandfather. He almost seems relieved to be back in prison just so he can talk as much as he wants. The whole unblinking day he talks. He arrived about a week after my extradition here to CCI Albany. Having been outside during the heart of my news cycle, he’s a fan of my case, and he talks about it through the vents endlessly. He says he knows the prosecuting attorney in my case, and for long hours he parses this woman’s trial record with a certain bloodless admiration, and I can’t help but listen.
“Don’t worry, Kennedy,” this man says. “You’ll be all right once they realize you’re not a monster. And you are not a monster. You wouldn’t even be in here if it wasn’t for your famous name. Ironic, isn’t it? If you weren’t a Kennedy, no one would have bothered with you.”
I rest the side of my head against the wall and massage my scalp with the gritty surface. I’m sitting at my metal desk. My stool is kindergarten short and dented like an old cookie sheet. I’ve got my yellow legal pad. I’ve got my dull pencil. An exquisite five minutes go by without commentary. I close my eyes and let my mind dance lightly, remembering. After a moment, I see a familiar shadow approaching, swaying back and forth against the kitchen wainscoting. Someone enters the kitchen, his face wrapped in gauze. I open my eyes, waiting for pleasanter memories to surface. But they don’t come.
“Yeah, you’ll be all right, Kennedy. You’ll be all right.” I hear my friend lean his weight against his cell door, and I marvel at his ability to stand up for the entire day. “But what is all right, you know? They won’t let you near your kid. They’ll try to ship you home to Bavaria or wherever the hell.”
I sigh and get up. I lie down on the mattress and put my forearm over my eyes. My legs, the mattress, everything is swathed in the same disposable, gridded material. The sheets are real and you could call them soft.
My friend’s voice floats down to me again through the vents. “What I wonder about is this—do you miss it, Kennedy? I mean, your made-up life.”
I almost laugh. Do I? Do I miss Twelve Hills? Do I miss my made-up mother and my made-up father? Do I miss even the unsubstantiated connection to a famous family?
I had imagined it so well. It got to the point that I could see myself as a child, digging the sugar-fine sand outside our cape, or being read to by my favorite teacher, or walking flanked by the wide asses of my nannies. These visions were so sturdy that if I looked around in my mind, and panned the scene, it would spread itself out for me infinitely—not shallowly, infinitely—and if you had asked me what was beyond, what could be seen, well, I could tell you. To the west were the dunes. To the north, the salt marsh where I gathered sea lettuce. And there, jutting into the ocean, the inoperable lighthouse on whose philanthropic restoration committee my own mother served.
I guess I needed a life that I could revise. If I had just accepted the one life, my first life, I would have honored its limits. I would have lived quietly, hardly even dreaming. I would have tried to convince myself that a sad and quiet life is adequate. Instead, I dreamt. I decorated entire rooms of my past with the pleasures I salvaged elsewhere. Even falling in love with you, Laura—especially falling in love with you, and feeling so changed… Love was my counterargument. Suddenly there were Christmas parties all over Twelve Hills, and well-loved women in silk dresses, and boys nursing crushes on other boys’ mothers, and soft rugs for the babies, and brotherhood for the men. My God, it sounds sentimental when I put it that way, but that’s what my second life did for me.
And pain. Even pain. It’s no good if it’s anonymous, monolithic, genocidal. The pain in my made-up life was boy-sized pain. And so it was better, because I could stand it. I no longer had to be a partial suicide, living only half a life, or less—allowing only the pleasant moments, mild, unthreatening—the small minority. I no longer had to be half alive. A partial suicide like my father.
My eyes shut, he walks blindly into the kitchen again, hands out, searching the air for the door of that little half-fridge that we always kept half-empty. Vater. I tell him to go lie down. I’ll bring it to you, I say.
If we could know, if we could be warned, we could claim all our scattered properties before death forecloses. Have I made it sound like I tried? Here’s a memory:
1994. A Sunday. I’m driving southeast in a borrowed car. It’s a Pontiac Firebird in Collector Yellow
with a seriously awesome sound system, and it’s just accepted an Aerosmith tape into its deck in a way that feels distinctly sultry to me. I’m twenty-six, beating time to the song on the steering wheel. I’ve just crossed the Massachusetts border and have taken the long route across the state via the Mohawk Trail, a road I like for the view atop Mount Greylock and for the knickknack store that sits there like a Buddhist temple buffeted by crosswinds.
I’m late. I told Dad I’d be in Dorchester days ago. He is to have cataract surgery on both eyes on Monday, and he needs my help settling some affairs. While the delay itself is forgivable—I don’t remember the reason for it—driving the scenic route along the Mohawk Trail is not. Yet I drive without hurry. I have not seen my father since the degeneration of his eyesight began, and when I arrive I will be woefully unprepared for his groping debility. I have a girlfriend—not the wife, not The One—but a much less serious girl named Angela. It’s Angela’s Firebird I’m driving. Angela was my study mate in Spanish, senior year at Mune. She tracked me for several years after graduation until I relented and went to bed with her, and at this stage we are spending a lot of time together, mostly naked. I am thinking about this—about Angela—as I descend into the Pioneer Valley, barely noticing the lurid foliage on either side of Route 91. Come back soon, Angela had begged that morning in bed. Promise you’ll come back soon.
I do not love Angela. I have told her this in an effort to head off future indemnity. She says she’s OK with that. She says love is “just a word.” In my limited experience, this seems sound. I do not love Angela, but as I drive the Mohawk Trail, I do miss her. She is my main squeeze. She is my working thesis. With her, I associate all that I love about Albany, which is that I have absolutely no familial, cultural, or philosophical connection to it. I’m bound to it only by the exercise of my own free will.
