The Secret Goldfish

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The Secret Goldfish
David Means

An extraordinary collection of short stories from an author who is set to become one of America’s leading literary voices.In the tradition of Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff, these are all-encompassing stories of the American psyche, of love and loss and of the landscape and its people.A goldfish circles in its bowl, refusing to die, becoming the silent focus of a difficult family life; a pianist loses his talents as he is forced to question the meaning of love and commitment. Through a blend of lyricism and humour, these stories of ordinary human dilemmas take flight and become mythical and universal. David Means is a rare writer who transports us to the heart of what it is to be human.

DAVID MEANS

The Secret Goldfish

Copyright (#ulink_a3a2e8c9-21d2-54e4-93a6-91ee74a2ea7a)

These short stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (https://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

This edition published by Fourth Estate 2012

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2005

Copyright © David Means 2004

David Means asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Some of the stories in this book appeared in the following publications:

‘The Secret Goldfish’ in the New Yorker; ‘Lightning Man’ in Esquire; ‘It Counts as Seeing’ in Harper’s; ‘Sault Ste. Marie’ in Harper’s; ‘Blown from the Bridge’ and ‘A Visit from Jesus’ (as ‘Two Folktales from Michigan’) in Witness; ‘Elyria Man’ in McSweeney’s; ‘The Project’ in the Alaska Quarterly Review and Harper’s; ‘Carnie’ in Witness and The Best American Mystery Stories, 2001

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007164875

EBook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN: 9780007405336

Version: 2016-07-25

Dedication (#ulink_9e018c9c-df0b-5e65-913f-35011959b36e)

To Genève

Epigraph (#ulink_c89c9974-9245-5eb8-af95-9e2ecde402d0)

The pure products of America go crazy—

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Contents

Cover (#ud0918ade-db2e-5f66-9366-bebdf870040a)

Title Page (#u5e9f5afc-943b-548a-88e4-498ba6d7bc50)

Copyright (#u5acb1abe-7ae1-5220-879d-0ebdd0009401)

Dedication (#ud3e66c6a-01c4-599b-8ee9-15d77f61ada5)

Epigraph (#u32054c8e-bee7-5a36-a891-deb7f428741e)

Lightning Man (#ucedf2d51-2395-514d-9c6d-7609d7eb13a7)

Sault Ste. Marie (#uf4233a62-5b5e-5b5e-ae46-919239268609)

It Counts as Seeing (#uec0b11a2-f580-5e36-94bb-9389c89cbe35)

Blown from the Bridge (#u275f7152-aa19-59d3-a6ff-5ddfc069feea)

A Visit from Jesus (#litres_trial_promo)

Petrouchka [With Omissions] (#litres_trial_promo)

Elyria Man (#litres_trial_promo)

The Project (#litres_trial_promo)

Hunger (#litres_trial_promo)

Counterparts (#litres_trial_promo)

Dustman Appearances to Date (#litres_trial_promo)

Carnie (#litres_trial_promo)

The Nest (#litres_trial_promo)

Michigan Death Trip (#litres_trial_promo)

The Secret Goldfish (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

LIGHTNING MAN (#ulink_bc94ad99-7aec-5d71-a4a3-35f1be8561f4)

The first time, he was fishing with Danny. Fishing was a sacrament, and therefore, after the strike, when his head was clear, there was the blurry aftertaste of ritual: the casting of the spoon in lazy repetitions, the slow cranking, the utterance of the clicking reel, the baiting of the clean hook, and the cosmic intuitive troll for the deep pools of cool water beneath the gloss of a wind-dead afternoon. Each fish seemed to arrive as a miracle out of the silence: a largemouth bass gasping for air, gulping the sky, gyrating, twisting, turning against the leader’s force. But then he was struck by lightning and afterward felt like a fish on the end of the line. There was a paradigm shift: he identified purely—at least for a few months—with the fish, dangling, held by an invisible line tossed down from the heavens.

Lucy had languid arms and pearly-white skin—as smooth as the inside of a seashell, he liked to say—and he smelled, upon returning to the house on the Morrison farm one night, her peaty moistness on his fingers. He’d touched her—just swept his fingers into wetness—and now, unable to sleep, he’d gone outside to the porch swing to let the adrenaline subside. His hope was to score with her before he left for boot camp. A storm was coming. Sheets of heat lightning unfurled inside clouds to the west. Deep, laryngeal mumbles of thunder smothered the cricket noise. The bolt that hit him ricocheted off a fence twenty yards away. Later he would recall that he’d half-jokingly spoken to the storm, and even to God, in a surge of testosterone-driven delight. Come on, you bastards, give me what you’ve got—the same phraseology boys his age would soon be using to address incoming mortar rounds on East Asian battlefields. Come on, you bastard, try another one, he yelled just before the twin-forked purple-mauve bolt twisted down from the front edge of the squall line and tore off the fence at what—in flawed memory—seemed a squared right angle. It hit a bull’s-eye on his sternum, so far as the doctors could deduce, leaving a moon-crater burn that never really healed. His father came out shortly to lock up the barn before the storm began (too late), a cheroot lodged in his teeth—and found his son on his back, smoking slightly. During his two-week observational stay in the hospital his teeth ached and sang, although he wouldn’t pick up the apocryphal transmissions of those megawatt, over-the-border Mexican radio stations. Upon his return home, Lucy came to his house and—in the silence of a hot summer afternoon—ran her hand down under the band of his BVDs.

Just before the third strike, a few years later, he saw a stubby orphan bolt, a thumb of spark wagging at him from the fence. (Research would later confirm that these microbolts in truth existed.) When Life magazine ran a single-page photo montage entitled “Lightning Man,” the article said: “Nick Kelley claims he had a strange vision shortly before being struck. He was with two friends in a field a few hours south of Chicago, showing them some property he planned to develop. A small bolt of lightning was seen along a fence just before he was struck. Visions like this, possibly hallucinatory, have been reported by other eyewitnesses.” The photo montage showed him in the backyard with a barbecue fork, pointing it at a sky loaded with thick clouds. The report failed to mention the severe contusion along his cheek and certain neurological changes that would reveal themselves over the course of time. His love for Lucy had been obliterated after the second strike. With the third strike his friendship with Danny was vaporized. And in between the first two, he’d temporarily lost all desire to fish.

The fourth had his name on it and was a barn burner, the kind you see locking horns with the Empire State Building. As it came down he talked to it, holding his arms up for an embrace. This was, again, in a boat, out in the middle of Lake Michigan, trolling for coho and steelhead. (He liked the stupid simplicity of fishing in this manner, keeping an eye on the sonar, dragging a downrigger through the depths of the lake, leaning back in his seat, and waiting.) The boat’s captain, Pete, caught the edge of the bolt and was burned to a crisp. Nick held a conversation with the big one as he took the full brunt. It went something like this: no matter what, I’ll match you, you prick, this story, my story, a hayseed from central Illinois, struck once, twice for good luck, third time, a charm, and now, oh by Jupiter! by Jove! or whatever, oh storm of narrative and calamity. Oh glorious grand design of nature. Rage through me. Grant my heart the guts to resist but not too much. Make me, oh Lord, a good conductor. I will suffer imitatone Christi, taking on the burdens of the current and endeavoring to live again.

Shortly after his release from Chicago General, he began weekly attendance of the Second Church of God (or was it the Third?), where he met his first wife, Agnes, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Lucy (same peaches-and-cream complexion). When it came to his past and his history with lightning, scars aside, he had the reticence of a Cold War spy: the book was closed on cloud-to-ground, on hexes, on lightning rod drummers, and the mystical crowd. (He had been offered gigs selling Pro-teck-o-Charge Safe-T rods. LIGHTNING IS THE NO. 1 CAUSE OF BARN FIRES!!!! and from 1–800-Know Your Future.) The book was closed on media interviews, on direct one-on-one confrontations with big bolts. (He in no way worried about smaller variants of lightning, those stray electrical fields that haunt most houses, those freak power surges that melt phone lines and blow phones blank, or those bolts of energy that float bemused into farmhouse windows.) Later he’d come to think that he had been willfully ignoring these forms and thereby picked a fight with them. Once, a film crew from France tracked him down to dredge up the past, but for the most part he urged himself into a normal life and felt bereft of charge, working at the PR firm, representing some commodities brokers, so that when the next strike came it was out of the blue—the blue yonder, a rogue bit of static charge, summer heat lightning. This time he and Agnes were safely ensconced in their summer rental in upstate Michigan watching the Cubs on television. Agnes lay prone on the divan wearing only panties and a bra, exposing her long legs and her schoolgirl belly and the dimpled muscles of thigh. The cobwebby bolt radiated in a blue antimacassar across the window screen, collected itself, swept through the window, and seemed to congeal around her so that in that brief moment before she was killed, before the power failure plunged the room into black, he was granted a photo negative of her glorious form.

To get away from Chicago, he bought the old family farm, rebuilt the big barn, installing along its roof line six rods with fat blue bulbs attached to thick braided aluminum wires dangling from the barn’s sides. The horizon in those parts let the sky win. Even the corn seemed to be hunching low in anticipation of the next strike. In the evenings he read Kant and began dating a woman named Stacy, a large-boned farm widow who dabbled in poetry and quoted from T. S. Eliot, the whole first section of “Ash Wednesday,” for example, and entire scenes from The Cocktail Party. Nick was fifty now, lean from the fieldwork, with chronic back pain from driving the combine. But he loved the work. He loved the long stretches of being alone in the cab, listening to Mozart sonatas while the corn marched forward into the arch lights, eager to be engulfed by the mawing machine. Behind the cab—in the starlit darkness—emerged the bald swath of landscape.

No more messing around. His days of heady challenge were over, Nick thought, ignoring the pliant flexible nature of lightning itself, the dramatically disjointed manner in which it put itself into the air, the double-jointed way it could defy itself. The Morrison homestead was about as dead out-there as you could get. He was working night and day to harvest the soybeans, trying to compete with the big Iowa industrial farms. Too tired to give a shit. Thunderstorm season was mostly done. Those fall storms that heaved through seemed exhausted and bored with the earth, offering up a pathetic rain, if anything.

The bolt that struck him the sixth time came out from under the veil of the sky—as witnessed by his farmhand, Earl, who was unhitching some equipment and just happened to glance at Nick resting his back in the yellow lawn chair. The whopper bolt struck twenty feet away from Nick, balled itself up, rolled to his feet, and exploded. He flew head over heels against the barn. In the hospital he remembered the medicine ball exercises from grammar school gym class, heaving the leather-clad ball at each other, relishing the absurdity of the game: trying like hell to knock the other guy over, to overcome him with the inertia of the object. To properly catch a medicine ball you had to absorb the force and fall back with it so that at some point both you and the ball’s momentum were married to each other. It was a delicate dance. He was pretty good at it.

Nick suffered further neurological damage, strange visions, a sparkling bloom of fireworks under his eyelids. He began to remember. It became clear. He had separated from himself during the strike. A doppelganger of sorts had emerged from his body: a little stoop-shouldered man, thin and frail, making small poking gestures with his cane as he listed forward. A soil sniffer of the old type. A man who could gather up a palm full of dirt and bring it to his nose and give you a rundown of its qualities—moistness and pH and lime content; this was the old dirt farmer of yore who knew his dry-farming methods and gave long intricate dances to the sky urging the beastly drought to come to an end. This man longed more than anything for the clouds to burst open at its seams, for a release of tension in the air, for not just thunder and lightning but the downpour the land deserved. He was a remnant of all those dry-method farmers of yesterday: failed and broken by the land, trying as best they could to find the fix, an old traditional rain dance, or a man who came with a cannon to shoot holes in the sky. Beneath the spot where the lightning ball had landed the soil had fused to glass, and below that—Earl took a shovel and dug it up—the glass extended in an icicle five feet long, branching down to the underground cable that delivered current from the old barn to the storage shed. A power-company representative explained that these underground cables were as prone as aboveground wires to lightning strikes. God knows why, he added.

For three weeks Stacy sat beside his hospital bed and accompanied his anguish by singing odes and folk songs and small ditties she’d picked up as a kid in Alabama, in addition to going through the complete collected poems of Eliot. She had a pure hard voice that seemed carved out of the American soil. In the bandage casing, amid the welts of itching and the drips of sweat running down his legs—all unreachable locations—he had acute visions of combat in Korea, the U.S. First Cavalry Division taking the full brunt of a barrage of Katyusha rockets—until bolt no. 8 (as he envisioned it) intervened, with its thick girth, the revoltingly huge embrace of the horizon as it came eagerly down. It was the big one, the finalization of several conjoining forks into one, unimaginable fury.

After Stacy took off on him, he put the farm up for sale and moved six miles to the north. He would live a bachelor life in a small Illinois town. A siege mentality had set in. He would hunker down, avoid fate by immersing himself in the lackluster flow of the landscape, in the view from his room over the Ellison Feed & Seed store, a vista so boring it made you want to spit (and he did). Boarding in the rooms around him were exiled farm boys who sniffed glue from brown bags, listened to music, and whiled away days writing on the walls with Magic Markers. There was nobody as deviant and lost as an ex-farm boy, he would come to learn. They were depressed from knowing that the whole concept of the farm—the agrarian mythos of land-human love, not to mention the toil and tribulation of their own kin, who had suffered dust bowls, drought, and seed molds—had been reduced to a historical joke. Industrial farms ruled. Left perplexed in their skin, they listened to hip-hop, attempted more urbane poses (many had missing limbs), smoked crack and jimsonweed, stalked the night half naked in their overalls, carved tattoos into their own arms. Nick felt akin to them. In their own way, they’d been struck by lightning, too.

Of course the next strike (no. 7) did come. It arrived in a preposterously arrogant manner, in a situation so laden with cliché that even Nick had to laugh it off when he could laugh, weeks later, after the trembles, the delusions, and the spark-filled sideshows. He knew that the next one would be his last. The next one would be the killer. The end. No more after that one. He felt no. 8 at the side of his vision, as he stared out the window at the dead town, so dry—caught in a midsummer drought—it made his throat itch. In his field of vision there now appeared a blank spot, empty and deep and dark. The room crackled in the midsummer heat. The window opened to a view of a defunct farm town, circa 1920, with false-front facades in the Western style, buildings shell-shocked and plucked clean of life. The beaverboard walls grew rank and emitted a dry mustard smell. In the long afternoon shadows the farm boys hung out with crumpled bags to their faces—breathing the glue the way injured grunts took bottled oxygen. As if it made a difference. When he ventured downstairs he walked with a hobble, keeping his weight off the balls of his feet, which were swollen and raw. Now I can safely be called enfeebled, he told the boys. They gathered around him, fingering his scars, showing in kind their own tattoos and flesh wounds, stumps that flicked quickly, glossy twists that traced the half-healed paths of box-cutter slashes and paint-scraper battles. They offered him crumpled bags. He declined. They offered him gasoline to sniff, weed, Valium. They asked him to tell his stories, and he did, giving them long tales, embellishing details at will, watching them nod slowly in appreciation. Here was something they could understand. Nature playing mind games. Nature fucking with him. He dug deep into the nature of lightning. He made himself heroic. He raised his fist like Zeus, catching bolts out of air. He tossed balled lightning, dribbled in for a fast break. This was the least he could do for them. He pitied them for their empty eyes, for the dead slurry way they spoke.

In the dark room as the days turned and the sun raged over the cracked streets below, shrub-size weeds driving up through the damaged macadam, Nick let the siege mentality develop. He would avoid the next one. No. 7 had come just after his complete recovery, when he was called back to Chicago to make a court appearance in litigation over an option fund. He had gone out to the Oak Ridge Country Club with Albert Forster. The club would soon install lightning detection equipment—the first of its kind of the Chicago metro area—to forewarn of exactly the kind of conditions that led to strike no. 7. A mass of cold air arrived from Canada, dug into the hot reaches of the Central Plains, picked up steam, and formed a storm front that had already spawned a classic F-4 tornado, reducing one trailer park to a salad of pink fluffly insulation material, chips of fiberglass, and chunks of Sheetrock. As he teed up on the second hole, bunching his shoulders in a manner that foretold of his forthcoming slice, the front was tonguing into the sticky summer air overhead. In the end it was just another bolt. Simple as that. It appeared as a surprise. Two blunt rumbles swallowed the golf course, a flick behind them, and then, just as Nick threw his club into his backswing, adjusting his shoulders, head cocked, eyes upward on the sky, no. 7 forked down, split into five wayward crabs of raw voltage, and speared him in the brow the way you’d poke a shrimp with a cocktail fork.

In the room he listened to the walls crackle and sat in front of an oscillating metal fan and didn’t move for hours at a time. Down the street old Ralph the barber told his own kind of lightning stories about the Battle of the Bulge. If the rotating fan failed to keep him company, he’d go down to watch Ralph cut hair. Outside Ralph’s establishment a wooden pole turned to rot. Inside, the mirrors were clean and the chrome and white enamel basins were kept shiny. The sad parameters of his life became nicely apparent at Ralph’s. Here is a man defined by lightning, the shop said. Here is a man who could use a shave. A bit off the sides, layered in back. In the shop, his story was lore, it was myth, it was good talk. It was clear in those humble confines, amid the snip of sheers, the concise irreversible nature of cutting hair. (People just don’t realize how tough human hair is to cut, Ralph said.) Amid barbering—flattops, Princetons, layer cuts, wet and dry—the best Nick could do was to answer the probing questions that Ralph sent his way. He embellished as much as he could. But he didn’t lie. In the barbershop, words felt ponderous and heavy. He filled in with silence as much as he could, and when that didn’t work, he hemmed and hawed. But with Ralph the silence seemed necessary. What went unspoken was filled in with Ralph’s grunts and his nods and his attention to whoever was getting a cut; if he was between cuts, he might be cleaning the sink or arranging his scissors or stropping his razor with thoughtless Zen strokes. Christ, it’s a good story you got, Nick, he said after hearing an account of no. 7. Ralph had a long, pale face—the face of a man who seldom saw the sun—with eyes that drooped in sockets that drooped. Ralph sat on a fence between doubt and belief. He would never fully believe this strange man who came out of the blue and claimed to have owned the Morrison tract, the famous farm over in the next county, a farm that was at one time perhaps the best-run bit of land in that part of Lincoln County. He would only half believe this guy who seemed so weatherworn and odd. Men like this arrived often out of the Great Plains, even now, years after the great wanderings of hobos and tramps, and they often spoke in a reverent voice of preposterous and prophetic events, events that were mostly untrue but that somehow had the ring of truth. Ralph knew the importance of such souls. They walked the line between fact and fiction, and in doing so lightened the load of the truth. They made you aware of the great desolate span of the Central states, of the empty space that still prevailed. He snipped with care around the ears and then snapped the buzzers on and cleaned up the neck, working to create a neat line. He would listen to Lightning Man’s stories again, and by the time the man’s whole repertoire of tales was used up, another year or so would have passed and he’d be ready to hear them again, forgetting enough of the details to make it interesting. Lightning Man would become a fixture in the shop. He’d have his own chair and ashtray. Into the long afternoons his words would pass. A place would be found for this man. Odd chores would be offered so that he might find subsistence, a few bucks here or there. In this manner another soul would be able to conclude his days upon the earth—at least until the odd premonitions came and the air grew absurdly still and above the shop the clouds began their boiling congregation, and then a faint foreshadowing taste of ozone would arrive. Then everything would change, and nothing would be the same again.

SAULT STE. MARIE (#ulink_31f3c24e-75b3-53f3-b53e-1e2b20d25de0)

Ernie dug in with the tip of his penknife, scratching a line into the plastic top of the display case, following the miniature lock system as it stepped down between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. At the window, Marsha ignored us both and stood blowing clouds of smoke at the vista…a supertanker rising slowly in the lock, hefted by water…as if it mattered that the system was fully functioning and freight was moving up and down the great seaway. As if it mattered that ore was being transported from the hinterlands of Duluth (a nullifyingly boring place) to the eastern seaboard and points beyond. As if it mattered that the visitor’s center stood bathed in sunlight, while behind the gift counter an old lady sat reading a paperback and doing her best to ignore the dry scratch of Ernie’s knife, raising her rheumy eyes on occasion, reaching up to adjust her magnificent hair with the flat of her hand.—I’m gonna go see that guy I know, Tull, about the boat I was telling you about, Ernie announced, handing me the knife. He tossed his long black hair to the side, reached into his pants, yanked out his ridiculously long-barreled.44 Remington Magnum, pointed it at the lady, and said,—But first I’m going to rob this old bag.—Stick ‘em up, he said, moving toward the lady who stared over the top of her paperback. Her face was ancient; the skin drooped from her jaw, and on her chin bits of hair collected faintly into something that looked like a Vandyke. A barmaid beauty remained in her face, along with a stony resilience. Her saving feature was a great big poof of silvery hair that rose like a nest and stood secured by an arrangement of bobby pins and a very fine hairnet.—Take whatever you want, she said in a husky voice, lifting her hands out in a gesture of offering.—As a matter of fact, shoot me if you feel inclined. It’s not going to matter to me. I’m pushing eighty. I’ve lived the life I’m going to live and I’ve seen plenty of things and had my heart broken and I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis in these knuckles so bad I can hardly hold a pencil to paper. (She lifted her hand so we could see the claw formation of her fingers.)—And putting numbers into the cash register is painful.—Jesus Christ, Ernie said, shooting you would just be doing the world a favor, and too much fun, and he tucked the gun back in his pants, adjusted the hem of his shirt, and went to find this guy with the boat. Marsha maintained her place at the window, lit another cigarette, and stared at the boat while I took Ernie’s knife from the top of the display case and began scratching where he left off. Finished with the matter, the old lady behind the gift counter raised the paperback up to her face and began reading. Outside, the superfreighter rose with leisure; it was one of those long ore boats, a football field in length, with guys on bicycles making the journey from bow to stern. There was probably great beauty in its immensity, in the way it emerged from the lower parts of the seaway, lifted by the water. But I didn’t see it. At that time in my life, it was just one more industrial relic in my face.

A few minutes later, when Ernie shot the guy named Tull in the parking lot, the gun produced a tight little report that bounced off the side of the freighter that was sitting up in the lock, waiting for the go-ahead. The weight line along the ship’s hull was far above the visitor’s station; below the white stripe, the skin of the hull was shoddy with flakes of rust and barnacle scars. The ship looked ashamed of itself exposed for the whole world to see, like a lady with her skirt blown up. The name on the bow, in bright white letters, was Henry Jackman. Looking down at us, a crew member raised his hand against the glare. What he saw was a sad scene: a ring of blue gun smoke lingering around the guy Ernie shot, who was muttering the word fuck and bowing down while blood pooled around his crotch. By the time we scrambled to the truck and got out of there, he was trembling softly on the pavement, as if he were trying to limbo-dance under an impossibly low bar. I can assure you now, the guy didn’t die that morning. A year later we came face-to-face at an amusement park near Bay City, and he looked perfectly fine, strapped into a contraption that would—a few seconds after our eyes met—roll him into a triple corkscrew at eighty miles an hour. I like to imagine that the roller coaster ride shook his vision of me into an aberration that stuck in his mind for the rest of his earthly life.

For what it’s worth, the back streets of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, were made of concrete with nubs of stone mixed in, crisscrossed with crevices, passing grand old homes fallen to disrepair—homes breathing the smell of mildew and dry rot from their broken windows. Ernie drove with his hand up at the noon position while the police sirens wove through the afternoon heat behind us. The sound was frail, distant, and meaningless. We’d heard the same thing at least a dozen times in the past three weeks, from town to town, always respectfully distant, unraveling, twisting around like a smoke in a breeze until it disappeared. Our river of luck was deep and fed by an artesian well of fate. Ernie had a knack for guiding us out of bad situations. We stuck up a convenience store, taking off with fifty bucks and five green-and-white cartons of menthol cigarettes. Then a few days later we hog-tied a liquor store clerk and made off with a box of Cutty Sark and five rolls of Michigan Scratch-Off Lotto tickets. Under Ernie’s leadership, we tied up our victims with bravado, in front of the fish-eyed video monitors, our heads in balaclavas. We put up the V sign and shouted: Liberation for all! For good measure, we turned to the camera and yelled: Patty Hearst lives! The next morning the Detroit Free Press Sunday edition carried a photo, dramatically smudgy, of the three us bent and rounded off by the lens, with our guns in the air. The accompanying article speculated on our significance. According to the article, we were a highly disciplined group with strong connections to California, our gusto and verve reflecting a nationwide resurgence of Weathermen-type radicals.—A place to launch the boat will provide itself, Ernie said, sealing his lips around his dangling cigarette and pulling in smoke. Marsha rooted around in the glove box and found a flaying knife, serrated and brutal-looking, with a smear of dried blood on the oak handle. She handed it to me, dug around some more, and found a baggie with pills, little blue numbers; a couple of bright reds, all mystery and portent. She spun it around a few times and then gave out a long yodel that left our ears tingling. Marsha was a champion yodeler. Of course we popped the pills and swallowed them dry while Ernie raged through the center of town, running two red lights, yanking the boat behind us like an afterthought. Marsha had her feet on the dash and her hair tangled beautifully around her eyes and against her lips. It was the best feeling in the world to be running from the law with a boat in tow, fishtailing around corners, tossing our back wheels into the remnants of the turn, rattling wildly over the potholes, roaring through a shithole town that was desperately trying to stay afloat in the modern world and finding itself sinking deeper into squalor beneath a sky that unfurled blue and deep. All this along with drugs that were swiftly going about their perplexing work, turning the whole show inside out and making us acutely aware of the fact that above all we were nothing much more than a collection of raw sensations. Marsha’s legs emerging beautiful from her fringed cutoff shorts—the shorts are another story—and her bare toes, with her nails painted cherry red, wiggled in the breeze from the windows. The seaway at the bottom of the street, spread out in front of a few lonely houses, driftwood gray, rickety and grand, baking in the summer heat. They crackled with dryness. They looked ready to explode into flames. They looked bereft of all hope. In front of a Victorian, a single dog, held taut by a long length of rope, barked and tried to break free, turning and twisting and looping the full circumference of his plight. We parked across the street, got out of the truck, and looked at him while he, in turn, looked back. He was barking SOS. Over and over again. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Until finally Ernie yanked his gun from his belt, pointed quickly, with both hands extended out for stability, and released a shot that materialized as a burst of blooming dust near the dog; then another shot that went over his head and splintered a porch rail. The dog stopped barking and the startled air glimmered, got brighter, shiny around the edges, and then fell back into the kind of dull haze you find only in small towns in summer, with no one around but a dog who has finally lost the desire to bark. The dog sat staring at us. He was perfectly fine but stone-still. Out in the water a container ship stood with solemnity, as if dumbfounded by its own passage, covered in bright green tarps.—We’re gonna drop her right here, Ernie said, unleashing the boat, throwing back restraining straps, trying to look like he knew what he was doing. The water was a five-foot fall from the corrugated steel and poured cement buttress of the wall. The Army Corps of Engineers had constructed a breakwall of ridiculous proportions. We lifted the hitch, removed it from the ball, and wiggled the trailer over so that the bow of the boat hung over the edge. Then without consultation—working off the mutual energies of our highs—we lifted the trailer and spilled the boat over the edge. It landed in the water with a plop, worked hard to right itself, coming to terms with its new place in the world, settling back as Ernie applied the rope and urged it along to some ladder rungs. To claim this was anything but a love story would be to put Sault Ste. Marie in a poor light. The depleted look in the sky and the sensation of the pills working in our bloodstreams, enlivening the water, the slap and pop of the metal hull over the waves. The super-freighter (the one with green tarps) looming at our approach. To go into those details too much would be to bypass the essential fact of the matter. I was deeply in love with Marsha. Nothing else in the universe mattered. I would have killed for her. I would have swallowed the earth like an egg-eating snake. I would have turned inside out in my own skin. I was certain that I might have stepped from the boat and walked on the water, making little shuffling movements, conserving my energy, doing what Jesus did but only better. Jesus walked on water to prove a point. I would have done it for the hell of it. Just for fun. To prove my love. Up at the bow Ernie stood with his heel on the gunwale, one elbow resting on a knee, looking like the figurehead on a Viking ship. I sat in the back with Marsha, watching as she held the rubber grip and guided the motor with her suspiciously well-groomed fingers. I could see in the jitteriness of her fingers that she was about to swing the boat violently to the side. Maybe not as some deeply mean-spirited act, but just as a joke on Ernie, who was staring straight ahead, making little hoots, patting his gun, and saying,—We’re coming to get you. We’re gonna highjack us a motherfucking superfreighter, boys. I put my hand over Marsha’s and held it there. Her legs, emerging out of the fringed grip of her tight cutoff jeans, were gleaming with spray. (She’d amputated the pants back in a hotel in Manistee, laying them over her naked thighs while we watched, tweaking the loose threads out to make them just right.) Tiny beads of water clung to the downy hairs along the top of her thighs, fringed with her cutoff jeans, nipping and tucking up into her crotch. Who knows? Maybe she was looking at my legs, too, stretched against her own, the white half-moon of my knees poking through the holes in my jeans. When I put my hand over hers I felt our forces conjoin into a desire to toss Ernie overboard.

Two nights later we were alone in an old motel, far up in the nether regions of the Upper Peninsula, near the town of Houghton, where her friend Charlene had ODed a few years back. Same hotel, exactly. Same room, too. She’d persuaded me that she had to go and hold a wake for her dead friend. (—I gotta go to the same hotel, she said.—The same room.) The hotel was frequented mainly by sailors, merchant marine types, a defiled place with soggy rank carpet padding and dirty towels. In bed we finished off a few of Tull’s pills. Marsha was naked, resting on her side as she talked to me in a solemn voice about Charlene and how much they had meant to each other one summer, and how, when her own father was on a rage, they would go hide out near the airport, along the fence out there, hanging out and watching the occasional plane arrive, spinning its propellers wildly and making tipping wing gestures as if in a struggle to conjure the elements of flight. Smoking joints and talking softly, they poured out secrets the way only stoner girls can—topping each other’s admissions, one after the other, matter-of-factly saying yeah, I did this guy who lived in Detroit and was a dealer and he, like, he like was married and we took his car out to the beach and spent two days doing it. Listening to her talk, it was easy to imagine the two of them sitting out there in the hackweed and elderberry on cooler summer nights, watching the silent airstrips, cracked and neglected, waiting for the flight from Chicago. I’d spent my own time out in that spot. It was where Marsha and I figured out that we were bound by coincidence: our fathers had both worked to their deaths in the paint booth at Fisher Body, making sure the enamel was spread evenly, suffering from the gaps in their masks, from inhaled solvents, and from producing quality automobiles.

I was naked on the bed with Marsha, slightly buzzed, but not stoned out of my sense of awareness. I ran my hand along her hip and down into the concave smoothness of her waist while she, in turn, reached around and pawed and cupped my ass, pulling me forward against her as she cried softly in my ear, just wisps of breath, about nothing in particular except that we were about to have sex. I was going to roll her over softly, expose her ass, find myself against her, and then press my lips to her shoulder blades as I sank in. When I got there, I became aware of the ashen cinder-block smell of the hotel room, the rubber of the damp carpet padding, the walls smeared with mildew, and the large russet stains that marked the dripping zone inside the tub and along the upper rim of the toilet. Outside, the hotel—peeling pink stucco, with a pale blue slide curling into an empty pool—stood along an old road, a logging route, still littered with the relics of a long-past tourist boom. The woods across from the place were thick with undergrowth, and the gaps between trees seemed filled with the dark matter of interstellar space. When we checked in it was just past sunset, but the light was already drawn away by the forest. It went on for miles and miles. Just looking at it too long would be to get lost, to wander in circles. You could feel the fact that we were far up along the top edge of the United States; the north pole began its pull around there, and the aurora borealis spread across the sky. I like to think that we both came out of our skin, together, in one of those orgasmic unifications. I like to think that two extremely lonely souls—both fearing that they had just killed another human being—united themselves carnally for some wider, greater sense of the universe; I like to think that maybe for one moment in my life, I reached up and ran my hand through God’s hair. But who knows? Who really knows? The truth remains lodged back in that moment, and that moment is gone, and all I can honestly attest to is that we did feel a deep affection for our lost comrade Ernie at the very moment we were both engaged in fornication. (That’s the word Ernie used: I’d like to fornicate with that one over there, or I’m going to find me some fornication.) We lay on the bed and let the breeze come through the hotel window—cool and full of yellow pine dust—across our damp bellies. The air of northern Michigan never quite matches the freshness of Canada. There’s usually a dull iron ore residue in it, or the smell of dead flies accumulating between the stones on shore. Staring up at the ceiling, Marsha felt compelled to talk about her dead friend. She lit a smoke and took a deep inhalation and let it sift from between her teeth. (I was endlessly attracted to the big unfixed gap tooth space between her two front ones.) Here’s the story she told me in as much detail as I can muster: Charlene was a hard-core drifter, born in Sarnia, Ontario, across the lake from Port Huron. Her grandmother on her mother’s side raised her, except for a few summers—the ones in our town—with her deranged auto-worker father. She was passed on to her grandfather on her father’s side for some reason, up in Nova Scotia. Her grandfather was an edgy, hard drinker who abused her viciously. Along her ass were little four-leaf-clover scar formations. She ran away from her grandfather, back to her grandmother in Sarnia, and then ran away from her and crossed the International Bridge to Detroit, where she hooked up with a guy named Stan, a maintenance worker at a nursing home, who fixed air conditioners and cleared dementia-plugged toilets. Stan was into cooking crank in his spare time. They set up a lab in a house near Dearborn, in a pretty nice neighborhood, actually. Then one day there was an explosion and Stan got a face full of battery acid. She left him behind and hooked up with another cooker, named King, who had a large operation in a house near Saginaw. She worked with him and helped out, but she never touched the stuff and was angelic and pious about it. Even King saw a kind of beauty in Charlene’s abstinence, Marsha said. For all the abuse she had suffered she had a spiritual kind of calm. Her eyes were, like, this amazingly deep blue color. Aside from her scars and all, she still had the whitest, purest skin, Snow White skin, the kind that you just want to touch, like a cool smooth stone. She just got more and more beautiful until eventually the guy named King couldn’t stand the gentleness in her eyes and, maybe to try to change things around, he started to beat her face like a punching bag. One afternoon, under the influence of his own product, he had a couple of friends hold her down while he struck her face with a meat pounder, just hammered it, until she was close to death—maybe actually dead. Maybe she left her body and floated above herself and looked down and saw a guy with long shaggy hair and a silver meat hammer bashing her face in and decided it just wasn’t worth dying in that kind of situation and so went back into her body. (Marsha was pretty firm in her belief about this part.) Charlene’s cheekbones were broken, her teeth shattered. It took about twenty operations on her jaw and teeth just to chew again. Even then, chewing never felt right; her fake teeth slipped from the roof of her mouth, she talked funny, and a ringing sounded in her ears when she tried to smile. When she laughed too hard, her mouth would clamp up and she’d hear a chiming sound, high in pitch, like bells, and then the sound of windswept rain, or wind in a shell, or wind through guy wires, or a dry, dusty windswept street, or the rustling of tissue paper, or a sizzling like a single slice of bacon in a pan, or a dial tone endlessly unwinding in her eardrum. Forever she was up over herself looking down, watching King go at her, the two guys holding on to her shoulders, her legs scissor-kicking, the flash of the hammer until it was impossible to know what was going on beneath the blood. When Marsha met her again—a year or so later, in the break room at Wal-Mart—she had this weirdly deranged face; the out-of-place features demanded some thought to put straight. I mean it was a mess, Marsha said. Her nose was folded over. The Detroit team of plastic and oral surgeons just couldn’t put poor Charlene back together again. A total Humpty Dumpty. No one was going to spend large amounts of money on a face of a drifter, anyway. Marsha forced herself to look. Then Charlene told her the story of King, the reasons for the damage, and the whole time Marsha didn’t remove her eyes from the nose, the warped cheeks, the fishlike mouth. She tried as hard as she could to see where the beauty had gone and what Charlene must’ve been like before King mashed her face, the angelic part, because she kind of doubted her on that aspect of the story. As far as she could remember, from their nights together getting stoned outside the airport fence, Charlene had been, well, just a normal-looking kid. But listening to her talk, she put the pieces together and saw that, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe this mishmash of features had once been beautiful. Her eyes were certainly bright blue, and wide, and she had pale milky skin. That night after work they decided to go out together, not to a bar where she’d get hassled but just to buy some beer and go to Charlene’s apartment and drink. She had some little pills she called goners, good God goners, something like that. So they went to her apartment, took the pills, drank some beer, and decided to watch Blue Velvet. Whatever transpired next, according to Marsha, was amazing and incredibly sensual; they were stoned together, watching the movie, and suddenly between them there grew a hugely powerful sense of closeness; when Marsha looked down at her on the couch, Charlene appeared to her too gorgeous not to kiss (that’s how she put it, exactly). Her mouth was funny because her teeth were out, so it was just softness and nothing else and then, somehow, they undressed—I mean it wasn’t like a first for either of us, Marsha said—and she fell down between Charlene’s knees, and drove her to come, and then they spent the night together. A few days later, Charlene quit her job and split for Canada, back over the bridge, and then the next thing Marsha heard she was up north at this hotel with some guys and then she ODed.

The story—and the way she told it to me, early in the morning, just before dawn—as both of us slid down from our highs, our bodies tingling and half asleep, turned me on in a grotesque way. To get a hard-on based on a story of abuse seemed wrong, but it happened, and we made love to each other again for the second time, and we both came wildly and lay there for a while until she made her confession.—I made that up, completely. I never knew a drifter named Charlene from Canada, and I certainly wouldn’t sleep with a fuckface reject like that. No way. I just felt like telling a story. I felt like making one up for you. I thought it would be interesting and maybe shed some light on the world. The idea—the angelic girl, the perfect girl, the one with perfect beauty getting all mashed up like that. That’s something I think about a lot. She sat up, smoking a cigarette, stretching her legs out. Dawn was breaking outside. I imagined the light plunging through the trees, and the log trucks roaring past. For a minute I felt like knocking her on the head. I imagined pinning her down and giving her face a go with a meat hammer. But I found it easy to forgive her because the story she made up had sparked wild and fanciful sex. I kissed her and looked into her eyes and noticed that they were sad and didn’t move away from mine (but that’s not what I noticed). What did I notice? I can’t put words to it except to say she had an elegiac sadness there, and an unearned calm, and that something had been stolen from her pupils.—You weren’t making that up, I said.—You couldn’t make that shit up, she responded, holding her voice flat and cold.—So it was all true.—I didn’t say that. I just said you couldn’t make that shit up.

—We’re gonna get nailed for what we did, she said, later, as we ate breakfast. Around us truckers in their long-billed caps leaned into plates of food, clinking the heavy silverware, devouring eggs in communal silence. A waitress was dropping dirty dishes into the slop sink, lifting each of them up and letting them fall, as if to test the durability of high-grade, restaurant-quality plates.—We’re gonna get nailed, I agreed. I wasn’t up for an argument about it. The fact was, our stream of luck would go on flowing for a while longer. Then I’d lose Marsha and start searching for a Charlene. For its part, the world could devour plenty of Ernies; each day they vaporized into the country’s huge horizon.—He’s probably dead. He knew how to swim, but he didn’t look too confident in his stroke.—Yeah, I agreed. Ernie had bobbed up to the surface shouting profanities and striking out in our direction with a weird sidestroke. His lashing hands sustained just his upper body. The rest was sunken out of sight and opened us up to speculation as to whether his boots were on or off. After he was tossed from the boat, he stayed under a long, long time. When he bobbed up, his face had a wrinkled, babyish look of betrayal. He blew water at us, cleared his lips, and in a firm voice said,—You’re dead, man, both of you. Then he cursed my mother and father and the day they were born, Marsha’s cunt and her ass and her mother and father and God and the elements and the ice-cold water of the seaway and the ship, which was about four hundred yards away (—come on, motherfuckers, save my ass). He kept shouting like this until a mouth full of water gagged him. We were swinging around, opening it up full-throttle, looping around, sending a wake in his direction and heading in. When we got to the breakwall we turned and saw that he was still out there, splashing, barely visible. The ship loomed stupidly in the background, oblivious to his situation. A single gull spiraled overhead, providing us with an omen to talk about later. (Gulls are God’s death searchers, Marsha told me. Don’t be fooled by their white feathers or any of that shit. Gulls are best at finding the dead.) We got back in Tull’s truck and headed through town and out, just following roads north toward Houghton, leaving Ernie to whatever destiny he had as one more aberration adrift in the St. Lawrence Seaway system. For a long time we didn’t say a word. We just drove. The radio was playing a Neil Young song. We turned it up, and then up some more, and left it loud like that, until it was just so much rattling noise, a high nasal twang caught in a cyclone of distortion.

IT COUNTS AS SEEING (#ulink_1ca1f818-22d0-548d-a2cf-47d037ed3176)

I went right up to him and took his elbow, not even asking him if I should because he was heading hellfire for the first step, not seeing—because how could he?—that step, flashing his red-tipped cane around in the air (in the air, I stress). What else could I do except grab him? Others might have gone for his hand or shoulder, but having been trained in the proprieties of guiding the blind, I took the back of his elbow, which he jerked quickly away before stating, flatly, in a firm, resolute manner, with a slight accent—British or mock British, at least Harvard—back off. Back off, he says, and I let go and then he tumbles all the way down to the bottom of the stairs, doing this cartwheel motion, head over heels. He had a firm grasp on the acrobatics of his tumble, I think, and when it slowed down in my mind it was very much like those folks up in space goofing off, showing the schmucks down on earth, poor souls, the delights of zero-G. This blind guy took a prim and proper control of his body in relation to gravity and went down those stairs with wild agility, not a bone broken or a ligament torn in this version of events. Across the street people looked wild-eyed at the scene. One gentleman—in an elegant suit coat and tie—I noticed specifically, a witness, who would back up my claim (or so I thought at the time) that I was only trying to assist this blind guy in getting down the stairs. This man made a beeline across the street and stepped over the moaning blind man and came right up and began to shout. He had a ruddy face, up close, with pockmarks, a drinker’s face, my father would say, and this face ruined the suit coat. Up close it was stained with glossy streaks of what look like melted butter. This quick assessment made me realize that he was a derelict who, along with one other guy in town, slept in doorways, copped a buck here and there, and so on and so forth. I realized that he didn’t witness the fall, and was yelling at me about something else, had me pegged for someone else, apparently, and was yelling,—Marvin, you’re going to have to spare me this kind of aggravation, you bastard, because for God’s sake, Mary is not going to leave you for me, or me for you, or any of that. I didn’t see the blind guy at all before he hit that first step, until he was already falling. I was in the bank shuffling through my withdrawal—new twenties, still crisp and unbroken and therefore impossible to get apart. I was trying to part them and walk at the same time—around me the hollow cacophony of the marble, real marble from the days of real banks—when out of the edge of my eye, not the corner, through the bright front doors, bathed in midday light, really, really bright, I saw the blind guy (I had noticed him ahead of me in the line and wondered how he might find his way to the proper window, or the exact place in front of the window, noting that the cashier gave him slight directions, a bit to your right, a bit to your left, sir—until lined up in the correct trajectory, he moved forward), but then I was beckoned to my window and went up and put the check into the little metal throat and forgot about the blind guy until I was back by the door counting the cash and saw him take that step into what must have been, surprisingly, empty space. His heels went skyward, rubber tennis shoes, those white clunking sneakers you see old folks wearing, and then he was out of my vision and I had a moment’s pause: in that moment I recollected that the blind man was named Harrington and that he was made blind (is that the proper term?) in a freak flash fire on his yacht when he was spreading sealing putty and the vapors ignited. He was owner of the boatyard down the river and had an estate near there, too. When I got out to the steps a crowd was gathering around, stepping carefully to avoid the pool of dark blood around his head. For some reason I stood unwilling to commit myself to going down the steps, and in that moment a girl—maybe fourteen or twenty (it’s hard for me to differentiate between ages of these kids)—glanced at me. Our eyes met, as they say. Hers were hazy and dark, maybe hazel-colored. She drew forth her hand and pointed her finger like a pistol and said, loudly, He pushed him. I saw that fucker push the guy. That asshole shoved the blind man down the stairs. Before I could move I was beset upon from behind by two burly men, both with security guard uniforms and fake sheriff badges. They put me into a proper headlock and secured my wrists with cuffs.

Iswell with a solicitous desire to help the blind man tick tick ticking his way ahead of me out of the bank, with an almost imperative desire to help at all costs, no matter what his needs. No question about it, I’m going to help him through the doors and out and into the street after properly guiding him down the stairs. Counting my bills, fanning the crisp ones out, at the same time closing in on the guy, all the while also searching memory banks for more information on the blind man, putting together fragments of gossip—the owner of that boat with the fire, his house clearly available to my mind’s eye, wondrously large, situated on about five acres of expensive land stretching in wide vistas of rolled lawn all the way down to the river. Almost ready to burst with the desire not only to take his elbow but to touch it, too, to feel the sharp (is there a sharper, more protruding object in the human body?) bony nub of it in my hands, and to help him down the walk whether he wants it or not. No matter what his feelings are on the matter, I’m bound by some deeper internal duty to help him out and in doing so, of course, as will be pointed out to me later, after the fall, when his blood is pooling around his head, to help myself out as well by satisfying my compulsion to help.

My desire to help guide the blind man when I see him through the bank doors is just tiny, nothing much, a very small seed in the core of my fruitless heart. Microscopic is the way I describe it to the police during the inquest into the fall and the so-called riotous aftermath. Not duty or a sense of right and wrong but maybe a small hint that if I do not help this man who is swaying toward that fateful first step, then in some way I will be indicted as one who did not come to the aid of a fellow human, no matter how sordid or pathetic that human might be, which was the case, because this man stank of urine and God knows what—dirty from top to bottom. This image of his face stuck with me through the whole process: here was a man with a fine estate and with so much to his name, putting aside the damage he suffered in that horrible fire, who has let himself go to seed. His face was not only blemished by the scar tissue, which would be expected in such cases, but was also dirty in an industrial sense, with grit and grime and smears of what seemed to be axle grease smashed into his pores. Coming upon him and trying to take hold of the very fine nub of his elbow, bony and sharp, I thought of that Walker Evans photo: a man in the moth-holed cap presumably just out of the coal mine, clutching his shovel handle, staring half blankly into the lens. Not a bit of charm or irony on that fucked-up face. A face void of insight. A blank face holding all the blank portents of humankind. The blind man’s face was similar but gave the impression that it might be cleaned up with a good scrubbing: just a nail brush and a bar of lava soap. My desire was only to clean up this man, to move him toward some place where he might be able to bathe, to rub his back with a brush, to scrub beneath his nails, to shave, to buff his feet with a pumice stone, to shampoo his scalp, to dab a cloth under the fold of his ears, to sprinkle aftershave across his face, to trim his nose hairs, to pluck his brows, to clip his nails, to exfoliate his skin, to brush his shiny hair; a desire to move him at least in the direction of all this had me slightly ahead of the blind man, nudging him and therefore causing him to misstep and tumble forward. Unfortunate as it is, the story does have its elements of humor, I am told: the acrobatic, clownish nature of his fall. His foppish Chaplinesque bowlegged tramp moves as he fell. The whole thing is certainly grist for the rumor mill. Many are afloat regarding the event: I pushed him./ I was angry and insisted that I help him./ I didn’t help him./ I didn’t come near him./ I was still in the bank counting my money when he fell./ I gave him a good hard kick in the ass./ He staged the whole event in order to sue me./ He was suicidal and found the most intricate manner to kill himself—so intricate he could not have planned it in such detail./ He pushed me./ I pushed him back./ We pushed each other and fell simultaneously./ He wasn’t blind./ He was a fraud./ I was the one who was blind—legally, though I could see colorless masses across my field of vision./ I wasn’t near the bank. I was in the Grand Union.

When I came out of the bank the blind man was being hoisted into the ambulance, one of those boxy affairs, more a truck than the kind we used to have, which were low and sleek station wagons, making me aware, on seeing the man being hoisted in, that the hearse, a direct relative to the ambulance, hasn’t kept up with the evolution of styles, or else has stayed back in the past for some good reason. A blind man is being put into the ambulance, I thought, because one of the EMS technicians had put his cane neatly alongside of him, though not under the blanket but next to the man and held down by the Velcro straps. The blood was clearly evident, and I heard talk near me of what had happened, that the man had taken a tumble, had fallen head over heels, someone said, no kidding, actually did a little somersault/cartwheel on the way down, you should’ve seen it, this blind guy comes out and this other guy comes behind him to help and it looks, well, it looks as if this man gives him a push instead of helping, and then next thing you know the blind guy’s falling. Down amid the crowd I spot blue shirts, badges, notepads out, a man in handcuffs, or not cuffs but those little elastic straps they use when they arrest a bunch of people at once, demonstrators and the like, mass arrests more than anything, but sometimes used instead of handcuffs to avoid the stigma of metal cuffs; this very elegant man in a fine suit coat and a tie, thin, maybe gaunt, very European-looking, I think, a slightly bewildered look on his face, eyeing the crowd as it closed in on him with ears cocked (if ears can cock) to hear his side of the story, and he’s looking through the crowd right at me, and we exchange what seems to be a kind of knowing glance, though I’ve never seen him before, I don’t think, not sure, doing a search of my memory because in this town you mostly know everybody. I don’t know him. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him before. But to be sure, I get a bit closer, shoving through the crowd, and get up near him and see that he is a very dainty man, very refined up close with a very thin veneer of sweat over his whole face, from top to bottom. He nods in a knowing way that says he somehow recognizes me, too, and is going through his own mental records to try to make the connection. But before he can speak—because his mouth is open—he is whisked away, held on both sides by the cops who have to get him through the crowd, which is closing in, a few people shouting and calling him an asshole and saying he should be shot, pushing a blind man down stairs like that, until out of impulse I am shouting at him, too, going with it, yelling, You’re the most vile bastard on the face of the earth, how dare you push a poor soul down the stairs, a blind man no less, blind as a bat, blind as Lear, how can such evil be allowed to coexist with all the good things of this earth? And so on and so forth as I work my way as close to him as I can, so that I’m hanging over him, right behind the cop, as he’s forced down into the car seat, though he isn’t resisting at all.

After making a deposit of berth fees for my boatyard, I’m going as usual out the bank to the steps, feeling the nub of my cane hitting the first void (that’s the word I use for any place where the cane refuses touch, comes up empty-handed, so to speak), not thinking, of course, because all this touch-and-feel stuff is second nature to me—translating the taps, vibrations up the cane to my hand and in turn into my brain, where the sensation is translated to the dimensions of space. And, in any case, I know the bank steps well from years of using them pre – sight loss, nothing to it, six wide stairs of—what? Not marble, maybe sandstone—and just as I’m to the first step, feeling for the drop, this hand takes my elbow and a voice says behind me, Let me. I push back slightly, saying Back off, because I hate help most of the time and especially when I know the place and layout and have the whole thing premapped in my head, yet even more so when it’s a clammy hand on me, a sopping wet palm. Then next thing I’m going through the air and there’s an explosive flowering of sparks in my eyelids (a classic flowering of sparks, probably from the pressure of the brain striking so violently against the cerebral sac), or not so much the eyelids but back near the center of my brain. Then I’m being transported to the hospital, waking to the jitters of bad truck shocks over the potholed main streets (another ability one learns with sight loss is naming streets based on pothole thuds and thumps and various brands of pavement and blacktop—there is a shocking inconsistency in the various grades of paving materials, a conspiracy of gradients), feeling on my way to the hospital partly used and violated because there is still a cold sort of faint impression on my elbow, the point where I think the man touched me—and his voice is hovering in my ear, that Let me. And then I’m being tended in critical care, hardly hanging on, with severe hemorrhaging (I’m told later) and a very bad contusion along my temple.

Near-death experiences abound. I’m angelic. I’m lifted through the joists and beams of the hospital and am flying out over the town. I’m fully vested with sight. The Hudson is fantastically blue. It hooks to the west near Indian Point, the domes of the power plant spewing steam. To the south through the milky haze of a summer day is the thin gray conjoined monolith of the World Trade Center on the horizon; and to the left of it, the needle point of the Empire State Building injecting the sky. Holy. Holy. Holy. I’m vested with visions. I see it all.

It is this vision alone that has sustained me through it all, kept me alive. It is this vision—because it was so good and pure—that I count as actually seeing. It makes me want to thank the man who helped me down those steps, to offer him my hand, to plant a check for at least a thousand dollars in his hands. It is true that before the fire rose up to take my eyes I was so used to seeing the open vistas of the Hudson that I hardly knew I was seeing them and took for granted the simple sight of the Westchester shore. Sailing a boat itself is an extremely visual experience, much more than people would ever imagine: the luffing sails always in need of trimming, those small little wavelet ripples along the taut cloth near the top of the mast, the heeling of the boat against the horizon.

This blind guy was just about to take a tumble—I mean quivering right over the edge of the steps, not even bothering with his cane, tucking it up under his armpit, because he was using both hands to stuff some bills back into the narrow bank envelope and was having a hard time because the bills were soft and finger-worn, like a sow’s ear (or as soft as chamois). He was approaching the steps a bit sidelong, just about to the steep and narrow risers—built to look grand and stately when seen from the street. Being versed in architectonics, an engineer expert in spotting structural deficiencies, I noticed the disharmony in the whole setup, which included this man who was going toward the steps as I moved about two yards behind him. Then he did a frozen midair poise, a stasis, holding there, his seersucker suit wrinkled around his hips, a big stain of yellow across the back of the coat (one of those stains that appear when you pull the coat, reeking of moth flakes, out of winter storage). I knew the man not by name but by his reputation as the owner of the old boatyard, who had suffered from a freak accident (according to some) or by foolishness (according to others), spackling down a gluing compound while igniting a Camel Light and thereby creating a massive cloud of dull blue flame that devoured his boat and his eyesight. As a divorcé (everyone knew), he carried a lonely demeanor along with his blindness; by this I mean beside his blindness or compounded by it. You could tweeze this aspect out of him if you tried hard, separate it the way a prism might separate light, so that you knew his wife, Janice, who had remarried and might be seen picking her kid up from the front of school at times, hadn’t just left him because of the blindness (you gave her the grace of that doubt) and probably had left him for much better and clear-cut reasons, one of which was his nasty temper. He was seen taking a hammer to the last of his boats, a blue-trimmed day cruiser—blindly groping his way over the hull and smashing the bulkhead before one of his yard hands grabbed him from behind and subdued him. Rumor has it that it took at least five men to get him calmed down. He fought like a man who couldn’t see, clawing the air with his fists, kicking whatever he could, clutching whatever was there to grab. Perhaps this gave me pause, this violent tendency—or the hearsay of it, the rumor itself solidifying into something larger than this man. Rumor also had it that he hated like hell to be helped in any manner and was prone to taking his cane to the side of your head if you did so much as offer up a careful hand on the elbow, and had even fought valiantly against a warning device to help guide the sight-impaired across the streets of our fair town. The fear that he might slam his cane into my brow restrained me. I did nothing. I waited half a second and let him take that step. I did give a bit of a warning shout, just before he went down. It was a squeak, my wife said, like air being released through the taut neck of a balloon. Off he went into the air, head over heels. My shoes felt heavy on the steps. I went down and cradled his heavy head and stated firmly that someone should call 911. You’re not going to hit me with your cane, I was thinking, you’re not going to hurt anyone. But I was saying, You’re gonna be all right, pal. It’s going to be all right buddy. You ain’t slipping away from us yet. Hang in there. Hang on. Help is on the way. It’ll be here soon. Don’t move. Don’t move at all. Just stay right there and breathe easy. Take nice easy breaths. Don’t go. Don’t go at all. Just a few minutes and you’ll be on your way.

BLOWN FROM THE BRIDGE (#ulink_fe3933c6-75c1-5961-8ebd-f2f633ffa7bd)

A small car had blown from the bridge. He heard it in a news report, but when it happened, exactly, he can’t remember—and now it’s like any old news report, nothing but a premonition. A small Toyota compact was swept from the bridge during one of three days of high winds. (This was back when small Japanese-built cars were a novelty, and many in Michigan shrugged and said, “See what buying one of those little tin shit cans will do to you?”)

A fine drift of snow moved over the meeting point of two massive, surging bodies of water; it covered the lurking currents. He imagined the car floating down, making a swan dive into the icy reaches.

Those currents battling each other between two great lakes at the Straits of Mackinac, pounding past St. Ignace, surging along Nine Mile Point. Into this unimaginable fury of currents she falls, angelic with her hair lifting up and her face settled into terror and then grace (it’s five or so seconds before she hits the water) or whatever you want to call it as for the first time, perhaps in years, she becomes completely placid, almost joyous. The car hits the choppy foam and lingers upright until it lists (some might say romantically) to one side like a great ship sinking, the water spilling the rubber seals, cracks, anyplace it can until a bubbling froth no one will ever see rises up and she’s gone. All that in two minutes. There are those who have stopped on the narrow span, one of the longest suspension bridges in the world, braving the wind, to gaze down at the dark water. They wave and point, finding nothing in the surge and snow and night-dark except perhaps what they imagine to be a glint of fender, a fleck of what was but is now completely gone—rising out of the blinding wind and snow.

That day she went down to the Lower Peninsula to visit X, who managed a food market in Traverse City. They went driving, two lovers alone. Now they’re parked in his tan Chevy Nova at the end of Mission Point. See them? Her boyfriend has his pants shackling his ankles and she has her shirt above her shoulders. A beastly, dark night, raging gusts rock the car on its shocks. The words whispered aren’t much different from the radio noise, vows floating over static, meant more to tickle the timpanic membrane than anything else—and gooseflesh on her arms proves to him that his breath in her ear is arousing, and the words she speaks, with her lips against his neck, don’t come anywhere near his ears, but he feels them anyway, a soft, moist flutter of lips and tongue. It is the solitude and joy in this stuffy car in the center of the absolute rage of the elements that amuses, draws us to them, makes us wish there might be some way to pluck her out of the car, to warn her of her pending fate. Twenty yards down the sand, Lake Michigan churns wildly with the same violence that sends supertankers to their grave, and yet they are going at it, finding handholds, testing new courses with their fingers. The external rage of wind that will in a few hours send this girl’s car off the bridge now helps them to feel that the only solace and relief and safety in this world lies in the intermingling of their bodies, while outside the earth breathes hellfire.