Shelter in Place (26 page)

The light makes its rough end glow.

Her face is turned slightly toward me and what is absent in her expression strikes me hardest.

She is incautious. She is undefended.

I lean against the wall and feel a blow of sadness.

What is its source?

The depth of her grace, yes. And the relief of seeing this other part of her again, at last, returned. Still, contemplative, gentle. And the intimacy of it, yes. All of these.

But there is dread too.

Many years later, Tess and I took a train into Canada and somewhere along that line we stopped in a wide-open plain of snow. There was some problem with the tracks ahead. We'd been going for days and then all at once the noise ended. The chatter, the constant rattling, the speeding landscape.

All at once, the world was still. We were alone in the center of a vast white world.

This was like that.

Sudden stillness.

Space opening up around me.

A cooling of my eyes.

A slowing. The machine hissing, shuddering, shutting down.

Silence.

It was just like that.

She slipped into the bath and turned the faucets with her toes.

She closed her eyes and sighed.

I waited and when it was unbearable I went to her and I kneeled on the white tiles and I washed her hair.

Neither of us spoke.

All that night the train went nowhere.

F
uck you, Tess. This morning, furious again, I got out of bed, dressed, ran below the sky low and heavy through the woods where the trees closed in so dark I couldn't see the ground. Ran hard enough along those deep snaking trails to burn my lungs. Looping home terrifying a feeding deer which went leaping into the underbrush as I came swooping by so close I could hear it breathe and all those branches cracking beneath its hooves and behind my eyes and when the grey light of the clearing appeared I sprinted full-blast driving with my knees just the way you taught me, Dad. Fuck you for leaving, Tess. Fuck you for quitting, you child, you coward, deserter, defector, traitor. Fuck you, turncoat bitch, you so proud and principled and sure all those years ago condemning my sister for doing just what you have done yourself. Fuck Claire, you said. Such certainty. Such moral clarity, my exquisite hypocrite, liar, deceiver, failure, renegade. Home I was sweating, pacing the deck, chasing my breath, adrenaline rolling, I wanted you back only to slap your face hard, the violence building in me, saw my palm against your skin, heard the cracking sound. And do you see how with that fantasy, that visceral hunger, I am no better than Sam Young? Another terrified man run out of language, absent imagination. Me, the usual. Me, the same old shit, clutching the same dull script. Showered, dressed, lit a fire. Usually it all subsides after swimming through the dark woods where I fight it, hammer it to the ground, but not today.

Today I could not win. I could not get it out.

Tess, I kneeled at our sacred wall of books and withdrew
The Once and Future King
from a low shelf: hardback, horizontal stripes of blue and green and black and blue, crowned lion rearing up on one hind leg, claws pawing the air, jaws open, roaring.

You are the knight
, your mother wrote across the top of the third page.
Happy Birthday. October 30, 1981
.

You were ten.

I am ashamed to tell you: I burned that book.

T
he day I followed Sam Young the clouds raced across the sky while I waited in my truck hidden by shade watching both the front door and the still black surface of the trampoline.

He left his house in a tweed suit, Thermos in one hand, leather satchel in the other, got into his car and drove away. Something silver. I followed him all the way to Emerson. And then from a parking lot on foot to the great quad, into a brick building, up the stairs, along a corridor where I passed him as he stopped to unlock his office door.

I read a book on a bench and waited, followed him to a raked hall and watched from the dark back row as he clicked through slides and gave a lecture on something I can't remember. It would be helpful if I could. It might lend a little weight here, a layer or two of meaning. The story of a great battle, perhaps. Maybe I should invent something. The Barbarian Invasions. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Good and evil. Let Sam Young foreshadow his own fate.

But these are not the lies I want to tell.

I can't even remember what his specialty was.

I was looking for something in him I couldn't have described then.

It was some new version. A version we couldn't harm.

He was a stodgy speaker. The lecture hall had no charge. There were no questions at the end. I followed him to a meeting and then later back to his office where he left the door open. I waited down the hall. Students stopped by. He was friendly and patient. There was warmth in his voice. They seemed to like him. When the hour was over, we went to a café at the student union building where he ate lunch with two men and a woman. I assumed they were professors. I was too far away to listen. He smiled a lot and when he spoke, the others leaned forward. They laughed. He removed his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. Although his hair had fallen across his forehead, he left it alone.

I wasn't following orders. No one knew I was there. I hadn't been sent.

It's that I wanted to see him in some other realm, with some other quality.

Or I wanted some further confirmation of his cruelty.

I was there looking for one thing or another.

Make him a man, or make him an object.

But more the former. I was looking for evidence. More than anything I wanted to come home and show it to her. Say, “Look at what else he does, Tess.”

Tess, in our living room a few nights before, pacing before the fire addressing her troops.

Look, I wanted to say, see? He is this thing too. He is also this other thing.

After lunch I followed him to the library steps where he sat and smoked a cigarette. He tilted his face to the sun and closed his eyes for a moment.

Look, he is contemplative. Look, this is a man with an inner life.

I followed him inside the library, and into a lighted theater where he took a seat and began to write on a legal pad. A woman on her way down the aisle touched his shoulder. He looked up and smiled. The seats began to fill. A man walked to the front, made an introduction I cannot recall, and then left the stage. The lights went dark and a film began to play. I left, bought a cup of coffee on the quad, and took it to a bench.

What had I discovered? What evidence could I bring before the court? To my superior? Sam Young liked a cigarette in the sun, was kind to his students, attended meetings, made his friends laugh, allowed his hair to fall out of place, saw films.

Seemed generally liked.

Was generally alive.

What I'd come to find was what I found.

So I sat with it feeling, if not hopeful, then encouraged. It was hope without dimension, but I let it carry me for a while. Along with the coffee and the sunshine and the safety of that place.

I believed, or pretended to believe, that I might change our course. That this new information might have some kind of significance.

And then there was Marcy Harper standing in front of me.

“Mr. March,” she said.

There was none of the coldness I'd remembered. Instead she smiled—warm and mocking. I was surprised by it, by her manner, by the easiness of our banter, by our affected formality.

“Ms. Harper.”

“Back to campus, I see.”

I nodded. “I like it,” I said. “Closest thing we have to a park.”

She sat next to me on the bench.

“How's your mother?”

“I'm never sure how to answer that question, Marcy.”

“She's stopped writing to us, you know.”

“I didn't. I'm sorry.”

“Me too. She won't see me anymore.”

“Did you visit her often?”

“Twice. Once alone, once with a few others.”

“What was she like with you?”

“She was smart,” she said, nodding to herself, “and fiery and tough, too. Full of advice, full of ideas.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“Things we might do here. Ways to protest, ways to fight.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, nothing revolutionary, really. Letters and marches. That kind of thing. Mostly it was just her enthusiasm, her encouragement.”

“What about violence?”

“No, never.”

My mother knew how to choose her generals.

“I see. Well, you can always try again,” I said. “She changes.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe you'll mention it to her.”

I laughed.

“What?”

“Now you want my help.”

“I'm sorry about that.”

“No. Don't be. I was a prick.”

“You were fine. Sometimes I lose my humor. It must be difficult for you.”

I shrugged. “So what's next in the campus rebellion?”

“You really care?”

I nodded.

“A woman was raped in the basement of the Beta house two weeks ago. Remains under investigation. No one has been arrested. Saturday we're going to gather out front.”

“Maybe I'll see if I can convince Tess to come.”

She shook her head and laughed. “You're going to come stand in front of a frat house with a bunch of college girls on a Saturday night?”

“It's either that or set it on fire.”

She laughed. “Which do you think Anne-Marie March would prefer?”

“The fire,” I said. “The fire, of course.”

There was a surprising ease between us. She had a term for what they were planning, some academic jargon, the kind of thing Tess abhorred: aggressive silence, violent passivity, accusatory presence, et cetera. I can't remember. Doesn't matter. The thing is that when Marcy left I felt that sad hope of mine bolstered. I stood on the steps of the library with the belief (or some thin version of belief) that there was an alternative and when Sam Young came past me down the steps, I followed him to his car.

Now I felt a sense of affection for this man, about whom I knew so little. This man I'd spent all day inventing. Affection as I drove behind him, tailing, counting five seconds between telephone poles, slowing to twenty on Water, feeling, by the time he disappeared onto Vista, a strange illogical love for the man I'd created.

And then a spark, perhaps composed of that contrived and desperate affection, ignited those unknowable rockets and I was hovering three inches above my torn seat, eyes well-tuned, and I hit the gas, took a turn, came up fast on him, the gearshift, so supple in my palm, was a weapon, a controller, and I raced forward incapable of error, dropped from fourth to third and that downshift noise made Claire giggle, it was on the road, in my throat and I pulled the Mariners hat down low nearly to my nose, and I was on him, my rusted front bumper two feet away, then one, then inches, and then there were Sam Young's eyes in the rearview mirror. He accelerated, tried to escape, but there was no losing me. I was expert, I was weightless, I had infinite control and I was going to stop him, Dad. It would be okay. I would save you the heartache. I was going to pull him over even if it meant driving his shitty sedan into a tree. I would change him, fix him, force a confession, take him to jail, break his arms, whatever it took to avoid whatever it was Tess was planning.

But then he slowed down.

Those red lights shining in my eyes, refracting in my windshield, exploded the engines.

And it was gone.

The dimensionless hope, the flimsy belief.

I slowed to a creep. The sedan hovered for a moment, and then shot away.

I stopped and waited next to a hydrant, with the slow flood of tar.

Now I slunk down and drove along his street.

I heard the thump and squeak of the trampoline.

There was Anna flying through the trees, and as I passed she met my eyes. She waved from midair. That familiar, expressionless face. I raised my hand out the window and spread my fingers.

She kept her mouth shut.

By the time I'd returned home, I had nothing to show, no evidence to provide. Nothing but an invitation to another protest lit by candles, to participate in aggressive silence, violent passivity, accusatory presence, et cetera.

And what would Tess Wolff say to that?

I came in and found her sitting on a front windowsill, feet flat against the floor, toenails freshly painted red.

Or so I remember it: blade of late spring light carving across her ankles.

Seymour sitting on the couch.

I poured myself a bourbon from the bottle on the coffee table, touched his glass with mine and sat next to him.

“How does it go, Joe?”

I'd forgotten it. This thing Seymour used to say to me. Until now, I'd forgotten it entirely. Gone and then returned. Who knows what else exists in there? All that information resting dormant. Dust on water, flotsam on the surface of a still sea.

Anyway, that's what he said.

That evening, and all through those days.

“How
does
it go, Joe?”

Over that short course of time when we were friends, when we believed so fully in our own intransience, when there was no consideration of separation, no sense of time ever drawing us out into the wider world.

This tidal past rushes back so rapidly. Comes and goes so often without explanation.

I loved Seymour asking, “How does it go, Joe?”

So I tell you this to record it, to mark it down before it's gone again.

And I tell you because, simply: I loved Seymour Strout.

It matters, doesn't it? I think it must. I think the three of us mattered, in the same way that Tess and I did.

As units.

As single pieces in time.

Or single pieces of time.

I don't know if there's any distinction between time and what exists within it.

All these loves of mine. Love for my past selves, for my mother, for my father, for Claire, for my vanished Big Sur friends, for Tess, for our Cannon Beach family, for Seymour, for all those dissolved and dissolving, for those waiting within me, caught in some taut mnemonic fold, and for this physical world, I insist they are of significance.