Mendocino Fire (20 page)

Possum, one of the ground crew, came up with Mary's slow-mail address, a post office box in Oregon. Somebody must have told him that Finn had lost touch with her mother. A stroke of luck, this chance to explain, to prove what she's doing is necessary, because that's a contention her mother, no great fan of causes, would be inclined to doubt.

Don't get your hopes up too much
, Possum warns.
She may of moved on. I couldn't find the other traces you'd expect—address, phone, credit card.

But a letter follows a person to her next address, right? Gets forwarded until it ends up in the right hands?

Ink on paper
, Possum says, amused by the quaintness.
Could be it has a chance.

Even twelve stories above the ground, spring throws a great party, competing frenzies of birdsong, fusillades of squirrel chatter—
distracting. The intelligence conveyed to nerve and inner ear by the tree as she exists moment by moment, only that can be trusted, not the transit stored in the map-manufacturing brain even so recently as the last jaunt to the sleeping platform or out along the stargazing branch. Something is
there
. Presence, not absence. Soul, discerned via the disciplined high-wire mindfulness Finn practices. Practices and practices, growing more poised, the muscles of thighs and arms starkly defined, the veins in her feet hypertrophied, the pads of her fingertips schooled in nuances of texture she wouldn't have deemed perceptible. There comes a moment, of course, when she forgets, climbs through the tree of the day before, and where the toehold of the familiar should be, shock blasts a hole. Having stepped off into the void, she adapts. Her feet pedal. She feels a pair of wings flung out from her shoulder blades, beginning to beat. This vision, commensurate with the terror, feels so sure and certain a way out, Finn says “Ah” to it. From deep in her throat, as naturally as in the throes of sex, the “Ah” of being scooped out of the death hole. Yet it's not space that answers Finn, it's the tree, whose soul unfolds time. Time slows and expands, wrapping terrified awareness in a confounded calm, because the tree tells her
There is time.
So she's not afraid—fear is a kind of error stripped from her brain, and what she feels is that she's been taken in by an element so sumptuous she repents, falling, of the waste and foolishness that have so far constituted her relation to time. Finn falls within this sense of cradling infinity, and what will later strike her as the deepest truth about falling, the thing she will never confide to anyone, is that she was
curious
. More mortally
aware
than ever before, thus more profoundly curious. She's still breathing, her heart's still beating—it's a lie, she sees, that the heart stops from shock. Why lie when it's like this: when there's so much that
can be comprehended and all the velvet time you need? Lie? When there's this last-breath fearlessness? Within the singularity of the fall, time can be observed, it seems, both backward and forward. In life, it's now clear, consciousness is always so
pinned down
, and time is so much bigger than that pinpoint known as
I
. The vault's been thrown open, and if, eyes narrowed, Finn faces directly into the browbeating updraft, the end of time gleams in through her lashes like a ray of sunset that's shot across space, no stranger than that in its amazingness. It's always had an end, and she was always more or less falling. The ground will claim her. Accepting that, she turns her gaze away and takes up—what? a more ordinary consciousness? her right mind?—where she left off, swimming down through the battering sensorium of glare and dark, passing through a reef of green that shatters around her in a stinging full-body corona, and then Finn is yanked out of the fall, dragged down and whiplashed up. Her hands have seized a branch. The fall roars through her, incomplete.

A pendulum of saved girl, bones scraping their sockets, legs dangling.

A bird veers below her feet, then several birds in their businesslike apartness flash by, their minds on what flushed them out: a shock shudders down through the tree, and the air fills with a staggering, sighing rain of arboreal trash, needles and scrolling ocher dust. An irregular tapping and pattering, aural confetti, Finn's face pelted by dust that smells sharp as fresh-shaved nutmeg, this scent shocked free from the compound of moss, cloud, mold, sap, sunstruck bark warm as horseflesh and evergreen cold as ozone, which together make up the essence of tree. Finn's nose begins to run. She scuffs her nose on the torn sleeve of her taut arm, waiting for the air to clear and incredulity to wear off so she can pull herself up onto the branch. Below,
there's a saddle of branch wide enough for her to land on; she measures the distance and isn't positive she can make it. Smarter to climb up, and the branch offers clefts and grooves for finger- and toeholds.

Time has resumed its ordinary momentum.

Cautiously she begins the ascent, relieved to find a smaller branch she can hook her left arm around, leaning forward to ease up onto the major branch, safe, rejoicing. High above in the canopy, at the height she fell from, her cell phone rings. The force of her longing startles her. To answer. To tell what just happened, to say
I almost died.
To say
But I'm all right, I'm all right
, to be believed. Settle down, Finn.
Focus.
It's a long climb back up through the tree, and you need your wits about you.

That night, Finn closes her eyes and broadcasts the keenest
thank you, thank you
of her nineteen years.
Thank you for my life.
Mummified against the starry cold in her down bag, smelling the panic sweat of her underarms—when, falling, had she had time to sweat?—she registers the extent of the damage that proves she's alive, the bruised muscles of her shoulders crying out, the palms of her hands skinned down to nerve. Nicks and scratches everywhere: those would have been noticed on her body if that was all she was now, body. She would have been a body with matted hair and filthy feet. They would have had to find Mary. Mary would have had to say
Yes that's her.
Mary would have had to kneel down, picking needles and twigs from Finn's hair, working frantically, as if nothing mattered but the twigs tangled in Finn's hair, as if Finn could be saved if every bit of debris were combed from her snarled and bloodied hair, and when they tried to tear her away, she would resist, saying
She needs me.
Saying
Live, live, I need you to live.
With her mother's voice close to her ear, Finn sleeps.

“Listen to me, Finn, there's a glacier. An action in Iceland. Crazy beautiful, this glacier, one of the last great ones, and right where they want to put an aluminum smelting plant. Their genius idea is, blow it up. We can go there.”

She unscrews the lid of the thermos he handed her when she first climbed into the truck and takes a swallow of bitter coffee. She thinks of saying
What if for a little while you just don't talk
but finds, where the will to deal with Mayhem—with anyone—ought to be, a scraped-bare deficit of interest. She doesn't care how this turns out. It's only an hour's ride, and when she gets back to camp, they'll know enough to let her be. They'll take one look at her and know. Mayhem is the sort of person who doesn't take that look.

In profile, his frown is pained. “Too soon to think about another action,” he says. “You're, like, bleeding. Your heart is fucking broke. God, my obsessiveness appalls me, I just start right in. Finn, forgive me, okay? For acting like it's just onto the next thing. You're grieving. I'm insensitive sometimes, I get caught up, I was thinking how great it could be, Iceland. How amazing to do an action there with you, and meanwhile I'm blind to what you're going through here and now, when you're just out of jail and what you need is a bath and something to eat and not me telling you, hey, life goes on, there's this glacier we need to save.”

“‘Who stops them?'” she says.

“What?”

“‘Who stops them? Us?'”

After a while he says, “Don't explain. It's okay. It's a strange head space, grief, strange perceptions emerge, I know.”

Woods and more woods. No one else on the road, no lights behind or before. There's this reckless blissful aloneness she used to indulge in, on road trips with a lover, the awareness that things are destined to go wrong but that
for now
they're beautiful. Even if he's not her lover he causes that same aloneness and feeling of beauty, as if the world is nearly gone and all that's left is what shows in their headlights. It's sacred. He keeps his hand down low, extending the joint. Finn takes it, inhales, holds it. Mary. Hands it back. His turn.

“Nother hit?”

“No.” She says, “You know I have no idea where my mother is?”

“You want her to hear you're down from the tree?”

“Once—this one time when I badly wanted to hear from her—my cell rang and I thought
It's her
but I couldn't get to it in time. When I tried calling back, the number was blocked. Whoever it was never tried again. For all I know, she never even knew I was in Tara.”

“Jesus, Finn. She should know you were a fucking hero.”

Mayhem drives in silence, now and then checking her profile: not asleep.

After a while he says, “We got it all on film, that climber cussing with his knee in your back—I mean, he should know better than to say
bitch
—and you're trying to reason with him, doesn't he want his grandkids to see a tree like her, and he takes it wrong, he obviously feels guilty, and it's dangerous, him holding you in one arm for the descent while your wrists are cuffed, which is insanely, criminally hazardous. Eleven hundred hits on YouTube, last time I checked.”

When she dreams of the tree it's Mary who's there on the platform with her, it's her mother in one of those slapdash outfits pieced together from thrift-shop finds, a sweater collared in mink and missing only a couple of buttons, a satin slip, green wool stockings and over everything, wrapping it up into a single package, the cumbersome military surplus parka, its hood rimmed with another, rattier kind of fur, or maybe not fur but some sort of tufted, partially destroyed dirty synthetic fiber. Out of all the lost things that could come back in a dream, it has to be that dirty parka, Mary's smoke-scented dark hair spilling out from the hood. The hair, though—that, she loves. The hair alone justifies the dream, which isn't an ordeal while it's being dreamed, which isn't painful and strange until Finn wakes enough to remember that her mother is missing. Gone without a goodbye. Mary's hair, swinging into a cave enclosing Finn's face when she was kissed goodnight, was the single aspect of her mother guaranteed to comfort her, no matter how bad a day Mary was having. It was necessary to hide these bad days from customers, though not from her daughter, and to spin stories from her own existence that obscured its precariousness and exalted its triumphs—chief among them, the uniqueness of Finn, whose destiny was obvious to Mary the moment she was born,
because I knew you'd come, Finn. For years I'd known you were on the way
, and Finn has always suspected Mary would have said
to save me
except that it would have come across as frankly egotistical and needy.
Your eyes holding such wisdom, like you had a thousand past lives behind you.
Older, Finn would try to divert her mother from narrating the tale of Finn's birth in the woods, but in storytelling, if nothing else, Mary was immune to distractions. And if no one can say what happened to Mary, why she left or where she
ended up, throughout Mendocino county strangers can tell Finn how long her mother's labor lasted, or how, bundled in a raggedy cast-off shirt, the newborn had never cried but only
looked around all calm, like “Planet Earth, you are mine.”

Iceland is beautiful, far-flung cloudscapes sailing over drenched green moors where shaggy ponies prick their ears in wonder before wheeling away, running through the smoke of their own breath.

Near the end of what the schedule called the welcome get-together, two women—summer dresses, charm—stood at the foot of the solemn Arts and Crafts staircase where he was seated, mostly in shadow, on the fifth or sixth step. Wasn't it rude, I wondered, to let them keep appealing for some scrap of his attention from below, wouldn't it be nicer to come down? That could have been me his condescension fell on: I had been scraping together the daring to approach. He was leaning back on his elbows, his long legs crossed at the ankles.
This is you in real life?
I said to him in my head. The women at the foot of the stairs were sufficiently unembarrassed in their pursuit that one of them even lifted the camera around her neck and aimed. At the prospect of his rebuking her presumption I was stricken, as if being his adoring reader conferred on me the responsibility to protect us all from any wounding or disillusioning outcome.
And then the worst thing that could have happened, happened: he stood up and turned his back on them. Inspired to document this irascibility of a famous writer's, the camera-holding fan clicked off several shots while he remained immobile, and then both women called out, bizarrely, “Thanks!” before walking off. It occurred to me that they might feel the need to maintain appearances if they were going to be his students in the coming week, as I would not be, having been too broke to enroll before the last minute, and too full of doubt about whether I wanted criticism.

Another student came up to me then, and I made my half of small talk:
New Mexico, yes as beautiful as that, no never been before—what about you, six hundred pages, that's amazing.
My fellow student's confidence was so cheerfully aggrandizing that mine flew below his radar. The full moon would be up before long, and if I wanted we could ride across the bridge on his motorcycle, an Indian he'd been restoring for years—parts cost a fortune. There was a ride like that in his novel and it would be good to recheck the details. I couldn't, I said; I had to read the stories for tomorrow. He said, “Homework, over the wind in your hair?”

Enough students were out, in couples and exuberant gangs, that I didn't worry, crossing through the campus's dark groves of eucalyptus, dry cataracts of slim leaves hanging as still as if they'd just been shushed, low enough in places to whisk across the top of my head. The boy I'd been talking to had implied that, lacking boldness, I wasn't the real deal; listening to him, I had been thinking no real writer could be as imperceptive as he was; who was real, and who wasn't, had been the question preoccupying us—pitiable, unpublished us. He had been right about the moon: sidewalks and storefronts brightened as I walked back to my hotel, followed, for a couple of bad blocks,
by a limping street person who shouted, at intervals,
Hallelujah!
On the phone my husband told me that a neighbor's toddler had fallen down an old hand-dug well but apart from a broken leg wasn't hurt, and he had finished those kitchen cabinets and would drive them to the job site tomorrow, and our dog had been searching all over for me, did I want to talk to him?
You big lunkhead, why did you ever let me get on that plane?
I asked our dog. When my husband came back on the phone he said
Crazy how he loves you
and
So the first day sucked, hunh?
and
They're gonna love the story. Sleep tight baby. Hallelujah.
Bed strewn with manuscripts, I sat up embroidering the margins with exegeses and genius alternatives—if someone had pointed out that
You should try this
can seem condescending, I would have been really shocked. At two
A.M.
, when the city noise was down to faraway sirens, I collected the manuscripts and stacked them on the desk. They were charged with their writers' reality, the way intimately dirtied belongings are—hairbrushes, used Band-Aids—and I couldn't have fallen asleep with them on the bed. Where, in Berkeley, was his house, and was he asleep, and in what kind of bed, and who was beside him?

Before leaving the party, I had sat for a while on his step in the stairwell. All I had to go on were the first-person narrators whose stubborn cherishing of difficult women imbued his work with generosity of spirit, but I felt betrayed. Savagely I compared the rudeness I'd witnessed with the radiance I'd hoped for. How could narrators so prodigal in their empathy originate in the brain of that withholder? The women had not trespassed in approaching: the party was meant for such encounters. Two prettier incarnations of eager me had been rebuffed, was that it? No. Or only partly. From his work I had pieced together scraps I believed were
really him
. At some point I had forsaken impartial
immersion and begun reading to construct a writer I could love. Consider those times I'd said not
His books are wonderful
, but
I'm in love with him
. But he had never intended to tell me who he was.
There was no fall from grace, not one page is diminished, not one scene or sentence, the books are as beautiful as ever
, I coached myself. But the sense that something was ruined survived every attempt to reason it away.

The days passed without my glimpsing him again, and besides I was distracted by an acceptance entailing thrilling, perilous phone calls from the editor who was taking the story, whose perfectionism in regard to my prose dwarfed my own. Equally confusingly, my workshop, when my story was up, found the ending unconvincing. The ending had come in a rush so glorious that my role was secretarial, the typewriter
chickchickchickchickchick-tsing
-ing along, rocking the kitchen table on its uneven legs; now I couldn't tell how good it was, and I was anxious to get back to New Mexico and realigned with instinct. A story that was going well set the table jolting, my husband said, like a three-legged dog late for supper. Home was a two-hundred-year-old adobe on a dirt road winding along the contour of a canyon wall: What had I thought would be out here, for me? At the farewell party in the twilight of the grand redwood-paneled reception room, hundreds of voices promised to stay in touch. At the room's far end, past the caterer's table with its slowly advancing queue, French doors stood ajar, and two butterflies dodged in, teetering over heads that didn't notice. They weren't swallowtails or anything glamorous, just drab small airborne slips dabbling in the party air, and my awareness linked with them, every swerve mirrored, or as it felt enacted, by the consciousness I called mine, which for the moment had more to do with them than me. After a
while they pattered back out through the doors. Then there he stood, observing their waffling exit. And now it was him I couldn't look away from. His head turned; when he believed I was going to retreat—when I, too, was aware of the social imperative to break off a stare—and I didn't, then the nature of whatever it was that was going on between us changed, and was, unmistakably, a declaration. Triumph showered through me, at finding nerve where there had always been inhibition: I was as delighted with this new self of mine as I was with the man I was staring at. But did he want this? Because who was I? He broke the connection with a dubious glance down and away, consulting the proprieties, since non-crazy strangers did not lock each other in a transparently sexual gaze heedless of everybody around them, and he wasn't, of course he wasn't, sure what he was getting into. If I had been my old shy self, that hesitation would have killed my stare. At last he looked up to see whether he was still being stared at, as he was, greenly, oh shamelessly, by me, and he wondered whether something was wrong with me, but he could see mine was a sane face and that I, too, acknowledged the exposedness and hazard of not breaking off the stare, and this information flaring back and forth between us guaranteed we were no longer strangers.

We spent the night over coffee in a café on Telegraph Avenue, breaking story-length pieces off from our lives, making a slice of torte disappear in alternating forkfuls. Our waitress's forgetfulness he explained as distraction; she had a sick child at home. How can you tell? Unicorn stamp on her left hand, he said. How a local pediatrician commemorates non-crying visits. At the next table, two sixtyish gents in identical black berets slaughtered each other's pawns. See, I told him, the way when one
leans over the board, the other leans back the exact, compensatory distance. When I recognized what I was up to, matching him detail for detail to accomplish what my old anthropology professor would have called establishing kinship—
We are detail's native speakers, and there will be no end of detail, no end to what binds us
—I understood that rapport, which had always seemed to belong among the less consequential social feats, could in fact be revelatory. The most fantastic determination arose, to stay in his presence. At the same time I understood full well that I would be getting on an airplane in—I looked at my watch—five hours. He, too, looked at his watch. Our plan was simple:
not
to sleep together, because that would make parting terrible. We would stay talking until the last minute, and then he would drive me to the airport, stopping by my hotel first for my things. I didn't have money for another ticket and couldn't miss my early-morning flight.

He left it till late in the conversation to ask, “You're, what—?”

“Twenty-four.” I stirred my coffee, not sure I should ask the reciprocal question. Forty-two or -three, my guess was, but I was bad at telling ages.

“What's in New Mexico?”

“Beauty.” I didn't look up from my coffee to gauge if that was too romantic; the narrators of his books were always in quest of a woman's unedited self. “The first morning I woke up there—in the desert; we'd driven to our campsite in the dark—I thought
This is it, I'm home.
”

Another thing he said across the table: “Your cover is blown, my friend. The story that got taken from the slush pile, that was yours.” The workshop instructor, a friend of my editor's, had gone around repeating the news.

“Someone”—the moonlight-motorcycle-ride guy—“told me, ‘It's lightning striking, the only magazine that can transform an unknown into a known.' Not that I'm not grateful, I'm completely grateful to have been dug out of the slush pile, but what if I'm not good at the
known
part?”

“Comes with the territory,” he said. “Why would it be harder for you than anyone else?”

“Too awkward,” I said.

“Pshaw.”

“Too foot-in-mouth.”

“
Be
the girl wonder.”

Which shut me up: I took it to mean that, instead of complaining, I should adapt. I would go on to hear similar corrections encoded in other remarks; this was only the first instance. “You're chipper this morning, kid”—that was a warning whose franker, ruder form would have been
Tone it down
. “You look like something from the court of Louis Quatorze” meant I should have blow-dried my long hair straight, as usual, instead of letting its manic curliness emerge. When he would announce, of his morning's work, “Two pages” or “Only one paragraph, but a crucial one,” I heard
And what have you done? Since your famous story. What?
I could be getting it all wrong, I knew, but I couldn't not interpret.

Those first charmed early-summer days he put on his record of Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations, which I had never heard before, and taught me to listen for the snatches of Gould's jubilant humming. When I was moved to tears by Pachelbel's Canon in D, he didn't say
Where have you been?
He sang Joni Mitchell's
“California” in his bathrobe while making coffee to bring to me in the downstairs bedroom. One morning, sitting up to take the cup, I asked, “Do you remember at the welcoming party, you were in the stairwell and two women came up to you? And you wouldn't say anything?”

He had to think back. “Garance and Lizzie.”

“You know them?”

“I was surprised to run into them there, but Lizzie's doing a book, portraits of writers taken from behind. And they just found out Garance is pregnant. Try getting a word in edgewise.”

My expression must have amused him. He said, “You have lesbians in New Mexico, right?”

I hadn't caught my flight. Instead we made love in the hotel room I hadn't wanted him to see, since I had left it a mess. “Was this all you?” he asked, of the clothes strewn everywhere, and it was partly from embarrassment that I lifted his shirt and slid a hand inside. When we woke it was early afternoon and the implications of my having not gone home became real to me. My husband had a daylong meeting that prevented his picking me up at the airport; at least he had been spared the ordeal of standing there scrutinizing the disembarking crowd, wondering what could possibly have kept me from making my flight. In five years of marriage we had barely been apart. I imagined him at a conference table among his colleagues in their suits and ties, drawing airplanes in the margins of his legal pad. At our small Ohio college he had majored in art, and when a friend of his father's offered him a position in a Santa Fe firm, he had surprised us both by accepting. I had been selfishly relieved that one of us was able to pay the rent on our Upper Canyon Road adobe. He didn't really have it, he said, and I said he couldn't know that, not
now at the very beginning of trying. In an unfinished painting I reclined in our claw-foot tub, paperback book held nearsightedly close, bathwater strewn with lopped-off wildflower heads.