Bright Before Us (8 page)

When the guide finally stopped speaking and all questions had been answered, he gathered his swab and his foil, saluted us, and walked away. A beat passed and we looked at each other.
Hello?
you said.
I think we're forgetting something?
You checked your tour pamphlet, and we saw it for the first time: “See the cannon-
loading
demonstration.”
Oh for fuck's sake,
you said. We stood there laughing, your long wisps of red hair whipping you in the face. I didn't say so, but I was relieved. I had been dreading the sound.

I said,
What do you want to do now?

You blew your nose and said,
You know, I'm a little relieved?
Above us a gull flew forward but was beaten back by the wind. It hovered there, flapping and stationary.

You nodded.
I kind of hate loud things.

We walked toward the car. I still felt a kind of desperation each time I thought of you, still stole glances at you when you looked away. Looking at you was easy. Standing there at the edge of the Fort Point parking lot—and I wish I could say it better, but I'll have to resort to this—you looked real, and alive, and I had a strange bout of tunnel vision suddenly, where my eyes almost watered at the sight of you.

Hey,
I said.
Let's go to Mel's.

 

When we pulled in, the neon sign was lit, the power on. You ordered pancakes and a chocolate milkshake.
Bid your teeth farewell,
I said. The 1950s jukeboxes at each booth blared music from the 1970s; children ate burgers out of paper Cadillacs. You grinned big as the waiter walked toward us, carrying your short stack. As he set it down—the moment after it touched the Formica table—the lights overhead died, the music distorting and then cutting out.

How about that,
you said, lifting your fork.

 

We left Mel's food-sick, so full we unbuttoned our pants. Their fridges were again losing their cool—the staff turning people away at the door. The day was a wash for everybody. Before we started the short walk to my car, you paused and fished around in your purse for a mint. Outside a little market on Geary stood a man in a bloody
apron, his face somber. He lifted packages wrapped in white paper from where he had stacked them, six-deep beneath a parking meter.

What?
you said, turning to look. The butcher lifted the packages and tossed them into a dumpster. The echo reverberated like weak thunder as the wasted meat hit the dumpster's steel belly; first two, then three or four at a time, as the butcher hastened to finish the job.

I'm freezing,
you said.

I pulled your coat tighter around you. You held my gaze, waiting for something, and exhaled. Your breath altered so slightly that I thought I had imagined it, until you inhaled again and your breath jumped along that same ragged catch, and the place we were headed became real to me: you were going to be mine, no matter who was waiting for me across town. I could push back pangs of guilt, or I could embrace this in a spasm of denial. But either way, it was going to happen. My hands were still gripping your button placket.

Let's go for a walk,
you said.

By the time we reached Golden Gate Park it was raining again. Beneath one of the gray stone archways, a man slept on the ground. You grabbed my arm as we passed him in the small tunnel.
Francis,
you said, but I ignored you. Having passed the man, you continued to hold my arm. Just beyond the archway a tourist ran toward us.
How do you get to the bridge?
he said. He held a waterlogged map out in front of him. You let go of my arm and gripped my hand as we stood there, getting drenched.
The bridge, the golden one.
His accent was gravel in his mouth. Behind him, a car full of nervous faces peered out at us. I
looked down at our fingers, and then at the small orbs of water collecting on your eyelashes.

That way,
you said to the man, pointing. It would have been easier to point with the hand I held, but you didn't let go.

We walked back and got into my little white car, soaking the seats. I shifted with two fingers, the other three still clamped to yours.

Are we holding hands?
I said.

Into the marina, no less,
I said.
We're idiots.
I took the turnoff toward your house.
Are you okay?

My feet are like blocks of ice,
you said. I was hot, but I let go of your hand and turned the heater on full blast.

Can we do the just-feet one?
you said.

I turned the heater on so it blew only on our feet.
Such an ingenious invention,
I said, feeling for your fingers again, and finding them.

Maybe you don't remember all of this, the way I do.

That day at camp, when I lost my glasses out there in the soccer field, I sank to my knees and began feeling for them in the grass. I saw, gliding toward me, a white glow with a red top and a glint.
These are yours,
you said, and the glint twinkled as the lenses refracted sunlight. You were wearing them. I took them from your face and put them back on mine. You became crisp: a white cotton dress, dirty sandals. Your red hair was in a
bun like a ballerina's. Later, you came up to the pole and asked to play.
My side, my way, I get first hit,
I said: the tetherball mantra. You nodded, and then we were friends. Maybe you don't remember that. Maybe you remember us becoming friends in high school, the circle of acquaintances that slowly brought us into the same social orbit. Or maybe you would say we really became friends in college, long after those acquaintances disappeared—after our exiles to different towns, when we set aside our adolescent self-consciousness and finally showed ourselves to each other. Maybe you don't remember everything, but I keep those memories for the two of us, like valuables in a vault. If you need them, you can have them. And there are other things I keep—things I found out after it was too late to tell you. Like this: before a sound that loud would have incited panic, Fort Point used to fire blanks at the end of the demonstrations. They would put gunpowder in the cannon and set the fuse without any artillery: no cannonball, just sound. So maybe we did hear that colossal boom on our fourth-grade field trip. Maybe at least some of those memories were real. What I'm saying is that it's possible. What I'm saying is that there's a chance, Nora, that we didn't just invent it all.

M
onday came. woke to the predawn sounds: the garbage truck whining around the block, neighbors starting their cars, drive-time traffic reports audible through their open windows. I fought an ache in that lymphatic region neither ear nor neck, ricocheting between agony and panic. Greta came into the bathroom, where I was shaving with her pink razor.
You want me to take the night off?
she said.
You look awful.

No,
I lied. I wanted the lazy momentum of a married evening—dinner, dessert, prime-time pap; canned laughter and bowls of ice cream. I wanted anything that felt normal, secure, mindless. I wanted someone to sit beside me. Still, I told her no.
Don't call in sick,
I said.
We can't afford it.

She paused, then spit out what I knew she had been holding back:
You shouldn't have done that yesterday. It's not healthy.

I know,
I said. The previous morning, I had opened my eyes at 6:00 AM sharp—a habit from two years of alarm clock enslavement—walked to the bathroom, downed three of her ten-milligram sleeping pills, and slept for another eight hours. When they wore off, I took three more, and so on. I had been snowed under for a solid twenty-four hours, had exceeded the recommended dosage a half-dozen times over. Greta didn't bother to scold me. Each time she had noticed me taking more, she had made quiet clucking noises, and then finally, she had begun softly to cry.

Now, her tears renewed.
It's not safe, either,
she said.

She inspected my face, lifting a leg of her pajamas to scratch her knee. Greta worked late every weeknight, waiting tables at the one high-end place in Vallejo. With tips, she made more than I did. We sometimes crossed paths as I came home from school and she left for the restaurant, blithely waving to each other. Once home, I could piece together her day from the dishes in the sink, her stacks of movie cases, her bottle of nail polish on the scarred coffee table.

I'm sorry,
I said.
I know.

I wiped my jaw, pulled on clothes, and kissed Greta good-bye. She let go of my shoulders when the kiss ended, but I didn't move. She drew me to her again, both of us silent, until finally I pulled away and left.

I slid into the car through the passenger-side door—the only door that opened. I swallowed two Vicodin, left over from a long-ago wisdom-tooth extraction; I kept them stashed in the glove box. A moment later I shook out two aspirin.

I had been commuting for only eight months, but I had discovered what stop-start driving does to a body. The
muscles in my right leg were permanently tight, sore from the feather touch necessary to hover above the gas, then the brake. I knew when to change lanes to avoid potholes. I had the phone numbers from the billboards memorized. I recognized cars on the road from their bumper stickers, the fading foam-paint football-team cheers scrawled on rear windshields. In twenty minutes I would inch over to cheat in the carpool lane, until the CHP trap where a motorcycle officer surveyed the passing cars like a cat. I would join the shining mob pulled toward San Francisco's magnet, paying the toll in nickels from the ashtray. I could cue the route in a mental reel.

But I-80's usual gridlock was weirdly absent that Monday morning, and I coasted, wracked by nerves, through towns I saw every day but had never visited. I flipped on the radio for an explanation, but every station was at commercial except one almost out of range, playing a gargling duet of static and “Eleanor Rigby.” I knew there was no holiday, no easy out. Nothing was going to save me. I left it tuned to the barely audible Beatles. The words were muffled, but I knew them by heart.

 

I got to Hawthorne early but didn't go in. I had forty minutes before the kids arrived. I had taken the Vicodin on an empty stomach, and I gnawed on my nails, fearing further nausea.

Up the street was a truck just like the one I had driven in high school—a manual transmission that took me weeks to master. It rattled if you managed to push it up to seventy. Senior year it began screeching when I started the engine, the sound trailing off in quavering vibrato, like someone was strangling a violin. People around me would
stop and stare. After a while, it made that sound whenever it liked; I didn't know what was wrong with it, but I kept driving it anyway. I took it to get smog-checked, and the guy heard that noise as I pulled into the garage.
That belt's gonna snap,
he said, cigarette flapping.
And then the engine'll shut down.
He glared at me.
You drive on the freeway, son?
He nodded emphatically, the cigarette going nuts.
You drive with people in your car?
I had stood there dumbly as he leaned down and growled,
Goddamn tires are near bald, too—Jesus, man. You're gonna be one of those sad little fuckers on the news, with the yearbook photo and your parents crying ...
He waved a hand in the air and left to go print up my paperwork. The car passed inspection but I left terrified, walking everywhere for weeks. I wasn't certain if what he had said was true or if he wanted to scare me into costly repairs, but even so—I wasn't taking the chance.

Then, slowly, the immediacy of his words dissipated. Once again I took my friends to movies, drove three blocks to 7-Eleven, skipped class to haul seventy-five miles to the Santa Cruz boardwalk.