A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  We stand with handfuls of ash and bone. “She was right,” he says. “It really isn’t much more of him than a pair of his old shoes. Okay. Here goes.”

  In silence, we sift the ashes into the field. We walk small circles, distributing. It’s too dark to see them fall. They disappear from our hands. If they make any sound it’s drowned out by the insects and the rustle of alfalfa.

  We go back to the box again and again. We don’t speak until the ashes are gone.

  “All right,” Jonathan says. “Dad, I got this far. This was the best I could do.”

  He picks up the box and we head into the area of darkness where we think the house must lie. We’ve lost our bearings scattering the ashes, and we miss the house by some distance. We must walk along the road for nearly a quarter mile. We give a passing Volvo something to wonder about—two men walking a country road in their underwear, holding an empty box.

  “Bobby?” Jonathan says.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know why I decided to do this all of a sudden?”

  “No.”

  “After Clare and Rebecca left I started thinking about how I didn’t want them to come back to Erich doing so badly upstairs and my father’s ashes sitting on a shelf in the living room. It suddenly seemed like too much death in the house. That’s when I decided to put the ashes out to pasture. I mean, what was I saving them for?”

  “Well, nothing, I guess.”

  “I want to paint Rebecca’s room,” he says. “It’s too dingy in there. What if we picked up some paint tomorrow, after work? Something gaudy that she’ll be nuts about, like bright pink. Nobody told me a baby would have such bad taste.”

  I can hear his breathing. What there is of starlight shines gray and faltering on his bare skin. We walk for several minutes in silence.

  “Listen,” he says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If something happens to me, this will be an all right place to put my ashes, too. If and when the time comes, I want you to tell my mother that. Tell her I had a last request, and this was it. God, if my father and I both end up strewn around here, where will my mother go when she dies?”

  “She could come here, too.”

  “Well, she’s always getting dragged someplace she doesn’t want to go. Why should things be any different after she’s dead, right?”

  “Right. I mean, I guess so. This is where we all belong now.”

  “What if that were true?” he says. “Wouldn’t it be something?”

  We don’t talk anymore. There is too much to say. We travel the last short distance, invisibly watched by night animals. It is like a dream, one of those childhood dreams of public embarrassment, to be walking on a public road in my frayed underwear. But, in this particular dream, I feel no embarrassment. I’m just here, undressed on a country road, with a dark wind blowing around me. Ned’s ashes are mingling with the ground in a miniature world of ants and armored, lumbering beetles. Erich sleeps his skimming sleep, intricately lit by dreams. There is a beauty in the world, though it’s harsher than we ever expect it to be. It’s as unlike the autumn farm on my family’s dining-room wall as a bone is unlike a man or a woman. Somewhere on this continent Clare and Rebecca are sleeping, in a motel or a friend’s living room. As the blue silhouette of the house appears ahead of us I remember that home is also a place to escape. This is ours; we have it to run from and we have it to return to.

  It’s black enough right now to see the future—the cold mornings and the long nights, the daily music. Jonathan and I are here to maintain a present, so people can return to it when their futures thin out on them. We’ve been on our way here for a long time. We start up the drive and I see something riffle the curtain in the bedroom window. For a moment I think Clare has come back. I grab Jonathan’s shoulder.

  “What?” he says. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing. Never mind.”

  Between the impulse and the touch, I’ve come to my senses. Clare isn’t back. What I saw was just the wind blowing. It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but too old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we in fact create.

  JONATHAN

  O NE AFTERNOON in April, several months before Erich died, Bobby and I took him out to a pond we knew of, deep in the woods. We drove ten miles to reach it, a circle of shimmering blue-black water ringed by pines. That early in the year, we had it all to ourselves. “First swim of the season,” Bobby said as we got out of the car. “It’s a tradition with us.”

  “Beautiful,” Erich said. He was frail by then. His legs hurt him, and he had trouble walking—the disease was racing through him more quickly than it moved in most people. His face had altered during the winter. His eyes seemed subtly enlarged, and his jaw was squarer. I suppose the shape of his skull had started to emerge.

  “We haven’t been out since last summer,” I said. Bobby and I helped Erich negotiate the short path that led down a slope to the crescent of earth and pine needles that served as a beach. The lake was almost unnaturally still—it was too early for bees or dragon-flies or the reflections of leaves. Less than a month ago, scraps of snow had lingered brightly in the shadows. Now the tree trunks were wet and vivid as animals’ fur and the sun was warm but winter-white, still shy of the deeper colors it would take on by May. The pond reflected a single cigar-shaped cloud that stretched from bank to bank. We stood on the narrow beach, and Bobby skipped a stone along the water’s surface, which was smooth and placid as slate.

  “You go swimming here in the summer?” Erich asked.

  “Mm-hm,” I said. “It gets crowded then, it’s the local Coney Island. It’s a real sight. There are babies and dogs, and eighty-year-olds swimming naked.”

  He nodded solemnly. I regretted having referred to a future season, one he might not see. I was still getting used to the particular system of courtesy that prevails among the sick. It was like playing host to an impoverished relation, when your own business is still paying off. Only through his unprosperous presence do you realize how much your own wealth has to do with almost everything you do and say.

  “So, are we going to go in?” he asked.

  “It’s freezing,” Bobby said.

  “You said first swim of the season. You said it was a tradition.”

  “Figure of speech,” I told him. “We’re just here to pay our respects. It needs at least another month to warm up.”

  Although I’d assumed he was merely playing along, I could tell from his voice how much Erich in fact wanted to go for a swim. He couldn’t trust the seasons—by the time it was warmer, he might not be able to walk at all. And even if he could manage it, he was far too inhibited to show his compromised body to the crowds of strangers who’d begin gathering here once swimming weather had arrived.

  “Do you really want to?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, in a tone of childish insistence.

  “It’d be a good way to get pneumonia,” Bobby said.

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “Come on, the water’s okay. There hasn’t been ice on it for at least three weeks.”

  “You’re crazy,” Bobby said.

  “That’s a fact. Come on, Erich. Let�
�s go.”

  “You can’t,” Bobby said. “It’s too goddamn cold.”

  I started taking off my clothes, and Erich joined in. We were not graceful or smooth in our undressing—there was no hint of sex in it. Or whatever there was of sex was as deeply buried as that which prevails among ballplayers before a game, a love of the physical self generous and unlimited enough to extend to other bodies as well, simply because they are present and more or less alike. As Bobby informed us of our folly we worked our way out of our jackets and boots, tossing them onto the ground. We stripped naked in the warm white light. Finally Bobby gave in and began undressing as well, because he refused to be excluded from a mistake he could not prevent.

  While Bobby got his clothes off, Erich and I stood together, nude, facing the water. We were too shy to look directly at one another, though I saw enough of him from my sidelong position. His arms and legs were knobbed at the joints, peppered with small purple splotches. His chest and abdomen also bore the scattering of marks, like old tattoos that had blurred into the skin. I held myself through a wave of revulsion, not only because his body was so changed but because his entwinement with the disease was so apparent. In jeans and sweatshirts he looked sick but ordinary; naked he looked like sickness itself. He looked as if his humanity was being eaten away and replaced by something else.

  I reached over and took his hand, to protect both of us. In doing so, I caught up with my own gesture. I felt for him, a frightened soul no better prepared to face his mortality than I would be if the disease started working on me now, this moment. My face burned.

  “Ready?” I said.

  “Ready.”

  We stepped into the water together while Bobby was getting out of his jeans. The first impression was of warmth—an inch of temperate water floated on the surface. But when we penetrated that, the water beneath was numbingly cold.

  “Oh,” Erich exclaimed as it lapped his ankles.

  “Maybe this isn’t a very good idea after all,” I said. “I mean, it can’t be good for you.”

  “No,” he said. “Let’s just go a little ways in. I want to—well, I just want to.

  “All right,” I said. I was still holding his hand. For the first time I felt intimate with him, though we had known one another for years and had made love hundreds of times. We shuffled ahead, taking tiny steps on the sandy bottom. Each new quarter-inch of flesh exposed to water was agony. The sand itself felt like granular ice under our feet.

  Bobby splashed out to us. “Crazy,” he said. “Goddamn crazy. Erich, you got two minutes in here, and then I’m taking you out.”

  He meant it. He would lift Erich bodily and carry him to shore if necessary. Since he and I were boys together, he had made it his business to rescue fools from icy water.

  Still, we had two minutes, and we advanced. The water was clear—nets of light fluttered across our bare feet, and minnows darted away from us, visible only by their shadows skimming along the bottom. I glanced at Bobby, who was grave and steady as a steamship. He was a reverse image of Erich; time had thickened him. His belly was broad and protuberant now, and his little copper-colored medallion of pectoral hair had darkened and spread, sending tendrils up onto his shoulders and down along his back. I myself was losing hair—my hairline was at least two inches higher than it had been ten years ago. I could feel with my fingertips a rough circle at the back of my head where the growth was thinner.

  “This is good,” Erich said. “I mean, well, it feels very good.”

  It didn’t feel good. It was torture. But I thought I understood—it was a strong sensation, one that came from the outer world rather than the inner. He was saying goodbye to a certain kind of pain.

  “You’re shivering,” Bobby said.

  “One more minute. Then we’ll go in.”

  “Right. One more minute, exactly.”

  We stood in the water together, watching the unbroken line of trees on the opposite bank. That was all that happened. Bobby and I took Erich for what would in fact turn out to be his last swim, and waded in only to our knees. But as I stood in the water, something happened to me. I don’t know if I can explain this. Something cracked. I had lived until then for the future, in a state of continuing expectation, and the process came suddenly to a stop while I stood nude with Bobby and Erich in a shallow platter of freezing water. My father was dead and I myself might very well be dying. My mother had a new haircut, a business and a young lover; a new life that suited her better than her old one had. I had not fathered a child but I loved one as if I was her father—I knew what that was like. I wouldn’t say I was happy. I was nothing so simple as happy. I was merely present, perhaps for the first time in my adult life. The moment was unextraordinary. But I had the moment, I had it completely. It inhabited me. I realized that if I died soon I would have known this, a connection with my life, its errors and cockeyed successes. The chance to be one of three naked men standing in a small body of clear water. I would not die unfulfilled because I’d been here, right here and nowhere else. I didn’t speak. Bobby announced that the minute was up, and we took Erich back to shore.

  “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” by Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1952 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens , by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

  “Madam George,” written by Van Morrison. Copyright © 1969 Songs of PolyGram International Inc. (3500 West Olive Avenue, Suite 200, Burbank, CA 91505). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “Aqualung” by Jennie Andersen and Ian Andersen. Copyright © 1971 Chrysalis Music (ASCAP). All rights in the U.S.A. and Canada administered by Chrysalis Music (ASCAP). Used by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  “Dr. Feelgood” by Aretha Franklin and Ted White. Copyright © 1967 Pronto Music Inc. and 14th Hour Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “America” by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. Copyright © 1957 by Amberson, Inc., Copyright renewed. Used by permission of Jalni Publications and Boosey and Hawkes, Inc., sole agent.

  “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell. Copyright © 1969 Siquomb Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission.