In the Land of the Living (20 page)

Too much in his thoughts—he’d step in some real New Haven dogshit if he wasn’t careful. Someone cried out and Leo looked up. Ahead on the sidewalk a boy on a skateboard almost ran into a man pushing a baby stroller.

Accidents killed people. At the ski resort, the year he’d broken his arm, the woman who wiped out on the slope knocked herself unconscious, skiing; then she fell and instantly stopped moving, lay crumpled on the snow. Took some time for it to sink in that she was really hurt. Her husband crouched beside her, tentatively dabbing blood from her nose. Leo was on the lift, floating high above among sparse snowflakes, moving ever so slowly as in a dream. The gears of the slowly passing towers tugged the high cables with the smallest of squeaks as they turned, a muted chirping in the snow-hushed air like the sound of Swiss clocks. The tall white steel arose from pure-white snowdrifts.

Some people shouted: “Don’t move her!” A child in a puffy green snowsuit lifted mittens to his face. In the lodge later that day, thawing skiers with matted hair and rosy cold-scalded cheeks advanced over the wet wood toward their hot chocolate in an atmosphere of vaguely sweaty woodsmoke, taking giant clomping steps in stiff ski boots. The kids who’d been behind Leo on the lift turned up, the kind of coarse children he’d encountered everywhere, and he heard one of them say, “Bam, she totally wiped out. Ha ha ha, and the little kid was cryin’, ‘I want my mommy, wah, wah, wah!’ Ha ha ha!” Never found out what happened to her.

Watch for dogshit. Look out. Listen. A Rasta man on the street corner shook the change in his Styrofoam cup. Photocopied flyers for the endless Yale clubs papered over the building behind him and sidewalk beneath him. The flyers were taped to the sidewalks, to the doors on the buildings, to kiosks around the campus. Their stapled corners twitched by the tarnished brass doorknob on the locked, windy door. “Some change, man,” he said to Leo. “How ’bout you give me some change. I don’t got nothin’ and you got somethin’. Oh, I see, at Yale what you got don’t matter, huh, schoolboy, ’cause you ain’t a material guy, you a liberal Michael Dukakis motherfucker, huh. Hey, you, how ’bout you give me some change.” Falsely accused: he was not one of them, a Yalie.

Chilly. Leo stopped by a low brick wall and yanked at his tie until it slithered through his button-down collar. He took from his bag the old eviscerated Yale sweatshirt—the sweatshirt with the frayed hole at the breast—and pulled it down over his head. He could still hear the bum shouting behind him, down the street. “You don’t got to worry ’bout no kinda AIDS an’ shit like that, I got to worry ’bout AIDS. ’Bout pneumonia! ’Bout my people. Come on now, big up Yale!”

Leo could see a short way into the cemetery. Nobody in sight there. On the arch, letters.
THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.

The sand on the street crunched under his shoes like the bones of birds—a bit of ocean beach orphaned on the cold New Haven cobblestone. The beach and the long grasses shining on the dune. A full moon over trees, with the faint lunar seas embossed on the moon like a president’s face on a coin, and the moon a silver seal on the sky. Dark sky, dark sea by night, stars rolling deep on the face of the sea like dust motes in eddies of sun. By day some days the sea refuses to be lit. Deep, impenetrable blue or even gray. Leo had found the ocean in a tub. He walked down the beach alone.
Do I even leave footprints at all?
Uncle Harvey’s thick body stooped, dripping saltwater from his stubbly chin as he searched the cooler for a plum. Uncle Harvey sank down into a folding chair from which he watched the boys in the waves and bit into the fruit, teeth popping the wine-red water-beaded skin. Leo’s uncle had gone to Yale, given Leo a first Yale sweatshirt in elementary school days, the treasured one with the bulldog on the front. When he got home he would cut the sweatshirt to ribbons with the rusted gold scissors. What had he done with it? It was in the bottom of a drawer now. Long ago, he’d made an effigy out of it, a man. Stuffed it with old towels and tucked it into some stuffed jeans. Folded some rags into an old undershirt for the head. It started with the Harvard sweatshirt. The housekeeper gave him an old wig stand to play with and he’d tucked it through the neck hole. A joke, right?
That’s a joke to play with a wig stand is all
.

Uncle Harvey was a lawyer. He taught Leo to bodysurf and showed him which was a good wave to take. He assessed the waves with something like jurisprudence, all the great intelligence that was in his mind. “That’s chop,” he would say, rejecting a wave, elbows lifted above the windy water, thumbs hooked upward, advancing with pivoting shoulders through the chest-high surf.
It’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows, no one’s got a piece of my time
. He was the first one that Leo and Mack had looked to to be their dad.

There were two uncles from the old days, before Philip came. Uncle Harvey and Uncle Ollie. Uncle Ollie and Leo fished together in the Atlantic. Together they caught twenty blues and Leo caught one mackerel, what he had been hoping for, one special speckle-backed fish among all the snappers. “My boy, you got yourself a fine-looking fish,” his uncle said, looking out over the fading light on the salt marsh and reeling in line. Ollie wore an old-style Red Sox cap that was too small and sat on top of his head because he liked to steal his sons’ hats. He wiped the fish scales on his jeans and rooted in the brown grocery bag he’d brought, neatly rolled so he could grip it in one hand and the tackle box and rods in the other. He took a big lusty bite of the pastrami sandwich Aunt Anne had packed. Aunt Anne was a Shakespeare scholar who packed lunches. The air smelled like sea salt. The sunburned waves sloshed into the dock piles where the gulls stood with beaks facing into the wind. A spider crab clutched one of the piles just below the rising and falling surface of the cold water like it was waiting for something.

On the fishing boat, Leo leaned against him and heard his uncle’s mind, beautiful madrigals woven of funny things and of Uncle Ollie’s sapient love of the system of living things in the world. With sure hands Uncle Ollie slit the belly of a snapper by inserting the tip of his knife into the fish’s anus and sawing up ventrally to the jaw, gathering scales on the blade as he sawed. They had discovered in the stomach of a bluefish a snapper in whose stomach was a baby eel chomped into three parts. That made Uncle Ollie laugh and say
Gulp, gulp, gulp
. If they were using live minnows for bait, sometimes he ate one himself. He was a doctor, too. He had mudpuppies in his lab because he was interested in their kidneys.

Leo almost remembered the attic of the old house, where, in front of the gray dresser, he had pretended to serve his aunt and uncle’s toes coffee, milk, Coke, water, orange juice. The painting of the mother bird and the baby birds—it could be hung horizontally or vertically because the baby birds poked out of the nest in a direction perpendicular to their mother’s body, the three birds in the thicket in the middle of a great big tree, where direction doesn’t matter anymore and there’s no down or up, just branches and a place to sit every which way.

Iron railings on the row house steps, like the railing behind Winston Churchill in the picture where he raised his fingers in the “V” for victory. Just they two upon the steps, the sun on their shoulders—Isidore’s wide as an armchair, Leo’s narrower than his tricycle handles. Playing on the floor inside, where the cool refrigerator presided over the shadows. Playing with “lotsa cars.”

Uncles. He could see them, but he couldn’t see Him, not even his own memories of Him. The memories were known as a black hole in space is known, by gravitational field. He spoke to Leo through envoys only now. Leo felt his big body, saw his dashing mien, through their bodies, their faces.

A mosquito hawk dances on the wall
.

A body lying still under six feet of dirt, the length of a man, a barrier through which no air could move. Long ago, Leo had tried to think of a way that air or food could get down there to his father.
Don’t worry, Daddy. The others have forgotten, but I will bring you my macaroni and cheese. I didn’t eat all of it. I will save it where no one will find it, behind the bed, where the mosquito hawk danced.…

His father and grandfather, great heroes. Those two men had sailed the cold oceans; truly they had braved the seas, the ruthless crashing cliffs of brine and spray falling from a standstill, high as a clocktower. Verily, they had winched steel and manned decks, trimmed the glim of the human hearth in the sea to keep it afloat and afire, they had sailed into the mouth of the titan waves that ate bow decks and fly bridges, that gulped freighters and battleships like toys. His father, the merchant marines. His grandfather, the navy. Two Jews among the rough sailors. Two doctors.

That was what they said,
Your father was one of the great men,
his father’s friends, walking around Leo as though he were a statue. They missed Izzy, they said. It was hard for them, they said. How hard was it to figure out what a son needs to know—that his father loved him is all, that his father would have loved him.
That’s all I ever wanted to hear, you bastards. I wonder how much he’d have loved you, how grateful he’d be for what you’ve said on his behalf to his son. Would he say, thanks for speaking to my son for me, because as you know I’m dead, and you said just what I’d have said to my son if I could: Leo, I was one of the great men. No, I’d not have said with my last breath: Leo, I love you. I’d have said, Leo, remember, I was one of the great men. Actually, you didn’t know Him well enough is the problem, or didn’t love Him well enough to think of his wishes. All I have done for the last sixteen years is think of how he must have felt. I loved Him. I lost Him. Not you.

But then maybe they thought it was obvious that a father would have loved his son and would have said so. Maybe they thought it didn’t need saying.

He didn’t know if his father had said “I love you” in the end. He had that stroke. Maybe he had said nothing at all.

Where is my father, Doctor? He is destroyed by heat
. It will come, the time will be now. All will be lost. He would stare down the blast pipe of the end of life. He would be destroyed.
Me, this body
. He would lie belowground in darkness, the roof of a coffin just inches from his blind eyes. Time would finally run out. Strange. Like the rings of Saturn.

Look the fly, Daddy.

It’s a mosquito hawk, Leo.

It’s a mosquito fly. Shoo, fly! I blow it, Daddy!

Tolstoy lost his mother at two years old. Fallen like Ozymandias. Perpetual winter of his invisible planet. Alone.
How did I get here, to New Haven, so far away from home? I’ll ride my bike back to Cleveland. It will take two hours if someone comes to meet me halfway.
Dear dead days beyond recall.

Watch me blow the butterfly. It’s on the wall, Daddy. It’s so funny. It’s so scary.

Leo peered into the darkness—the toasted bread jaw with the pipe; it could have been from photographs. He peered onto the deep, the continent of darkness. He couldn’t see, but only hear. He heard the clattering and scything, the snap and click of the surgeon’s gloves as he ties a suture, prods an organ with perfunctory fingers, separates the wet spools of intestine to peer in at the diseased
machina
. Pupils fixed and dilated. His own father, still warm with eyes of wet glass that did not react to light. Dissected, drained of blood, and buried.

Dead eyes were strange. They were just objects. If you thought of them as objects, living eyes were strange too, so that you had to use another language for them.
Yeux:
two spheres darting and flicking in eerie unison like the heads of two synchronized birds perched on the cheekbones, round and radially symmetric like flying saucers. Like aliens, filled with jelly, nutrition pumped into their skin by snaking vessels.

Watch me, Daddy!

Where are you going, gollywhopper, flipadoodle?

Hello, daddy longlegs.

Jump, Leo. I’ll catch you!

I can dive like my daddy does!

At his feet, once, there was a brittle crab skeleton, bleached white, cured with sea salt, picked clean by the fishes. Leo searched the beach with Uncle Ollie for crab skeletons. Uncle Ollie knew about skeletons and sea life. Leo was starting a dead crab collection. He had just picked up the skeleton when another boy took it and crushed it. The boy wore a white braided band on his right wrist.
Where are you now? I would meet your hard opposition with my own, much harder than you could ever muster in all your life. My indissoluble will
.
I am unbreakable.

He saw the sand which his chemistry professor said forms glass. The burette nozzle dripping in his dream—urine? That made him a man, a boy, of glass. A girl in the lab had dropped her burette and broken it. He was broken glass.

The decrepit car there on Prospect Street, like the rusted dead cars and cracked windshields abandoned in the weeds along the Metro-North line.
Decrepit,
from the Latin
crepere,
to creak, rattle; akin to the Sanskrit
krpate,
I wail, cry (his red bar mitzvah dictionary signed by David B. Guralnik said); and to the Old Norse
hrafn,
raven; and to the Cymric
cre, dychre,
cry, clamor. And
broken,
meaning split or cracked into pieces; not in working order; disrupted; or reneged upon, as a promise. Also, subdued and tamed. Subdued and tamed. See: The Theory of Breakage.
How death tames.

Jump and I’ll catch you! One, two, threeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Do it again, Daddy!

One, two, threeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I can dive like Daddy!

Ah! Leo came out of his thoughts as the clouds moved on and the sun blazed out above the cemetery arch. It flooded his eyes in red and blacked out the arch and ate its words. He imagined the panel from the comedy group that had rejected him, listening in on his thoughts. He bowed his head and blushed, then raised his face again to the blinding sun.