American Purgatorio (11 page)

Together we walk to the house, the man leading the way. He and Linda are talking about work and people, and there's something strange, or at least I'm sensing something strange, and it isn't clear what it is until the man looks up, turns to me, and asks me who I am.

“I'm Linda's friend,” I say.

“Linda?” he says. Then holding up his open palms he says, “Welcome.”

His smile seems full of equanimity and acceptance, although it's possible it only seems that way. It's possible that only certain things, certain events or facts or people, get through the filter of his attention. Linda mentioned to me that her friend was losing touch, by which she meant he was losing his memory, and although he seems clear-headed, as we walk to the house I'm looking at the old guy, trying to discern any evidence of dementia or incoherence.

In the house there's a large, unlit fireplace, neat and orderly, and there's a desk by the window, neat and orderly and unused. The whole house is that way. The rugs are clean. At first we're all standing around, Linda and the old man exchanging different kinds of information, and at a slight pause Linda turns to me and says, “Would you like something?”

“You mean to drink?” I say.

“There's tea,” the old man says.

“I could use a little liquid,” I say, and it turns out the man has made some sun tea by leaving a glass jar of water and a tea bag sitting out on the back steps. “We have some in the refrigerator,” he says, walking through an archway dividing the front part of the house from the kitchen, negotiating his way around the various pieces of furniture.

I join Linda on the large sofa, crossing my legs. She adjusts the material of her pants. I'm sitting on a crack between two cushions and she's sitting on a third cushion, and both the padding and the springs of the sofa are getting older, and the whole thing is not absolutely firm and so the sagging of the sofa draws the two of us closer.

There we are, sitting on the lumpy sofa, listening to the clinking of glass in the next room, and even for me, involved as I am with the past, the present moment is taking my attention. The old man calls out, “I'm putting in a little bit of sugar,” and he returns with two glasses of tea with ice cubes. He's standing there, looking at the two of us, holding the tray, looking and standing, and she says to him, “Where would you like to sit?”

“I'm going to find your bathroom,” I say, standing up as he sits down.

Mr. V.—that's what she's calling the man—explains the way but I assure him I can find it. And I do.

I'm in the bathroom and Linda is in the fireplace room, and although we are separated by several walls, I imagine we're thinking about the same thing: each other. I'm wondering who she is, and if somehow she's responsible for the kidnapping of Anne, or the disappearance of Anne. And what about her friends? And bringing me up to this house in the forest? And this old man? What's that about? And I'm sure she's wondering who
I
am, this person who seems to be following her. And is he following her, or is she bringing him along? And if she's bringing him along, why? He seems like an honest person, the way he stands with his weight on one leg, his arm bent, but it doesn't mean he actually is.

When I come out of the bathroom, having been in a little world of my own thoughts, I'm aware that those thoughts have disconnected me from the world I'm standing in now. Like flies around my head, they're distracting me. There's always some thought, I think, and I try to push through the thoughts and come into the world. Which I do, briefly, looking at Linda, who's surrounded by pillows, sitting on the bedspread-covered sofa. I don't feel like sitting quite yet so I stand, with my weight on one leg, leaning against the fireplace.

The old man, Mr. V., is sitting in his comfortable chair, but he's sitting like a young man, legs spread, hands on thighs, looking intently and openly into Linda. I say “into” her because it's not just into her eyes. He's leaning toward her and you can feel the attention he's sending to her or washing over her. He's probably in his sixties or seventies or even his eighties and yet it's difficult to judge. He's thin, but his cheeks have the ruddiness of someone who's lived his life outside.

There's a bond between this man and Linda, and I don't know what
kind
of bond, but it's a bond. Linda occasionally turns to me, smiles, then turns back to the old man. I drink my tea. I'm still a married man, and I know I'm a married man, and I've made no overtures toward this Linda person, this person who means nothing to me, and may in fact be the villain in the story I'm right in the middle of.

I have, not only the memory of Anne, but the possibility of a future life with her. I believe in that future, and because Linda isn't Anne, I'm not really that interested in her. But because the man is interested in her, and she's obviously interested in the man, I'm starting to see the ease and fellowship happening in front of my face as a threat.

I try to say a few words or ask a few questions but I can't break the not-quite-palpable beam of emotional fellowship passing between them. It's not
my
emotional fellowship, and although I would want to be part of it, it seems to me a fellowship completely unattainable, or at least unenterable, and I feel now a definite wall separating me from what I want.

And maybe Linda can see this, because she stands and suddenly announces that she's giving me a tour. We walk outside and she begins showing me things, trees and mushrooms, and we walk to the old barn up the hill, a big insulated barn. The small door is unlocked and inside she shows me the cameras that were used when the man was actively photographing bats. The bats are all gone now and the barn and the studio are in disrepair. There are cages and lights and tripods and she explains how the bats would fly down, grab whatever food was offered, and the moment the food was snatched a trigger set off a strobe that flashed light and a photograph was taken.

She takes me into an office part of the barn and shows me photographs of bats, swooping down at millisecond intervals, their claws or talons reaching for morsels of food. Also on the wall, on a different part of the wall, are pictures of people, mainly women, including women in states of partial undress.

There's one particular photograph of a young woman and her apparently nude body. It's very artistic. A close-up. She seems to be standing on a beach, but its focus is the woman's back, with part of her arm and part of her breast and the ripples of her stomach as she bends toward the sand. I can see in the tilt of her neck something about her personality revealed.

At first I don't say anything, just walk along the wall, photo after photo, black-and-white, and then, when I get to the end, I say, “These are very beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“Is that you in some of them?”

“Some of them.”

“That one?” I say, referring to the photo of the person bending.

“There's no beach around here,” she says.

“It looks like you,” I say. Then I realize I have no idea, or only a vague idea, what she looks like, like that. “It could be a sand dune,” I suggest.

“Thank you, but I look nothing like that.” She ushers me away from the photos and out of the room. “There's an album of photographs,” she says, “back at the house.”

“Who took them?”

“Mr. V.”

“He likes you quite a lot,” I say.

“I love him,” she says. And then she adds, “How can you not?”

5.

At a certain point the man suggests that he and I take a tour of the barn, and although I've already seen the barn, I agree. We put on our coats, go outside, and it isn't raining, but the earth is damp, and the trees that have fallen over are soft and moist and rotting. The trail we follow leads up a hill, past rock outcroppings, and eventually to a barn—a different barn than the other barn—and I help the man slide the large wooden door across the entrance to this barn, and we let ourselves in.

“How many barns do you have?” I ask him.

“Just the one,” the man says.

It's filled with bales of sweet-smelling hay, and as we walk around the inside perimeter of this barn the man occasionally holds out his hand, and to steady him, I take it. He sometimes rests his hand, or the fingers of his hand, on my shoulder, and although it's just a normal meaningless gesture, I feel it has a kind of meaning, a kind of generosity, and because I am thinking about generosity and looking at the piece of gauze bandage stuck to his face, I'm not sure if I'm hearing what the man is saying.

“War?” I say.

“There's always a war,” the man says. “Or if there's not, then it's coming. Not out there”—and he points to his chest. “Here.”

I'm going to ask him to elaborate but the man moves on. In his mind he's constantly moving on, not stopping for understanding or for the acknowledgment of understanding. He's moving, and I follow him.

The wooden planks are unevenly worn around the swirls of knots in the wood. I ask the man, “Do you still have bats?”

“I thought
you
were the expert on bats,” he says, and he smiles.

And for some reason I smile back. “I thought
you
were.”

“Well, there you go,” he says, and laughs out loud, in a way that I find infectious. Not the laugh itself but the situation. I don't really know what, but something is amusing. And although I started out being jealous of his relationship with Linda, it's hard to be jealous of someone so genial. Although my usual modus would be to envy the man's seeming happiness, instead I can feel that seeming happiness making
me
seem to be happy.

I follow him through a narrow door into a structure with another door and we walk through that door and the old man starts climbing up the hay bales stacked in the corner. The barn is in disrepair. “Come on,” he says. And because I don't feel at the moment like climbing up a stairway of old straw, I ask him, “What's up there?”

“The view,” he says.

“Of what?”

“It won't hurt you,” he says, “I promise,” and he holds out his hand.

I would rather not have to depend on a withered old hand but I don't see a lot of options, so I reach out and the old man indeed pulls me up, into a small attic-like room. He closes the trapdoor and we find ourselves crouching in darkness.

As I wait for my eyes to adjust, I notice that my hands are raised, as if to defend myself. That's weird, I think, because there's nothing to be afraid of. I've been in pitch-black rooms before, but still, fear is not a logical thing. And it isn't until my eyes adjust and I can see the source of light that I know where I am and let my hands drop.

A camera obscura is a dark chamber with a hole on one side and that's what we're in. Projected against the opposite wall of the room is an image—mainly sky, a few trees—and something about the color of the sky and the depth of the sky, despite the inverted view, makes it seem completely real. The image isn't large but it's large enough to hold, in its indistinct frame, the whole world. I'm looking at the image, watching the world it portrays—removed from it and watching it—like watching something die. It seems at that moment like a world of possibility.

“I don't get up here much anymore,” the man says, and then he opens the hatch, and when we crawl out into the normal light, the possibility doesn't vanish.

We climb back down the hay and I don't mind the straw in my socks. I like it. I like everything. I feel energized, buoyed, and the feeling has something to do with the man, or the presence of the man, who is smiling, narrow-shouldered but erect, looking at me as if I am a source of pride. The watery whites of his eyes are cloudy, but the dark center, from behind which he seems to be looking, is bright.

When the man speaks, the words coming out of his mouth are reassuring, or have the intention of reassuring. For instance, “On the road.” He says these words out loud, infusing them with nobility, declaring them as a state of being. “On the road.”

“That's right,” I say.

“You were on the road,” he says, and he says it with a seriousness that stills me. He is looking at me.

“Yes,” I say.

“I can see,” he says. And it seems as if suddenly he's lucid. “Do you know what's happened to you?”

“You mean about my wife?” I say. And the man doesn't answer.

I think what he sees is some truth about me, not a secret inside of me, but what I am. And he can see that I don't know myself what that is, and so all he can do is stand there, with a bandage on his cheek, looking at me with his watery, compassionate eyes.

Once we're outside, I try to slide the barn door shut by myself, but it's stuck. I am trying to do a good deed by closing the door but I can't get it rolling on its rollers. Even with both hands, even leaning into it with all my weight, the gate doesn't move. At which point the old man holds the side of it, pulling it onto its tracks. He tells me to try again, and this time, on its rollers, the thing easily slides shut.

“Thanks,” I say.

“You'd do the same,” he says.

And then he starts walking, looking down at the path of his feet. When he gets to the house he turns around, having already forgotten who I am; but trusting whatever I am, he smiles and walks inside. I would like to follow. I like his house and I like him, and although I want to stay with him, I can't.

6.

As human beings we have an idea of who or what we are, and we like to keep that idea intact. And although this desire for a sense of self isn't a sin, like a sin we can get excessive about it. Two hundred years ago Keats spoke about the ability to live without definite answers and borders, and because I'm a man who makes adjustments, at the moment I'm willing to do that. At the moment I'm with Linda, following her directions, driving with her, and I'm willing to know nothing but what's in front of me, or in this case next to me, in the car. And not only am I willing to simply see her, I'm also willing to send her something, something reassuring. I'm trying, in some quasi-physical way, to send her something good.