Fragile (22 page)

“Why do you have a gate, when the walls can't keep anyone out?” She has asked him this before, but she tries again, to see if he will give a different answer.

“I like the way it looks.” He reaches above his head and presses a button on a small box clipped to the sun visor, like opening a garage door. “I always wanted to drive through a gate when I arrive at my home.”

They roll to a stop for a moment, as the gate rises up. Gates can keep people in just as easily as they keep people out of the rubber flaps that protect the opening from which the conveyor belt emerges, another black suitcase slithers into the world, nearly identical to the rest.

Tris watches one bag push through the flaps and lurch towards him, brown with pink and slate blue circles in a mod sixties op art pattern. Mesmerizing, he stares at it and forgets to look for his own bag. Lack of sleep has put him in a trance. He cannot even believe he is here. The red-eye flight made nightmarish by a woman sitting next to him with the overhead light on all night, filling out page after page of a Japanese puzzle book consisting of grids of numbers. At one point, he asked her what she was doing, and why.

“To pass the time,” she said, still scratching in another numeral even as she spoke. “It keeps my mind sharp.”

He slumped against the bulkhead by the window and tried to get some sleep. But the sun rolled around and blasted its absurd and sublime light through the cracks around the window shade, and soon the fifty-minute layover in Chicago came, with just enough time to trudge through the never-ending terminal, closing his eyes as he rode the moving sidewalk from one concourse to the next. The twenty minute flight to Middlesborough on a half-empty plane is not even there for him to remember—he must have slept.

Laura is probably sleeping still, in bed without him; she will wonder where he is when she wakes up. He left her a note in the kitchen, but the note is a lie, a vague half-truth about an emergency at the food processing plant in New Jersey. Of course, he will go to New Jersey later on today, but he did not tell her that he is stopping here in Middlesborough first, and it gives him that old feeling again of being in the wrong place; always he is somewhere he should not be. Another black bag
comes through the flaps and jolts along the conveyor belt. They travel around in a circular loop as the weary passengers watch them go by, and every now and then a hand reaches down and snatches one of them up. Some of the bags do not get taken; they make the entire circuit and go through another set of flaps into the unseen realm behind the wall. Those bags will come back again on the other side.

Perhaps he should forget the whole thing and go home is far away from here, and I am far away from him. The machine grinds on, the wooden wheel of the mill is taking people in and grinding the grist with the sickening sound of bones being crushed. Where did the child who was crying go?

Two hands, two arms, come up from behind and wrap themselves around me. The hands are cold, the arms hold tight around my shoulders; turning to see what this is, there is only a current in the night. I try to shrug it away, but it is slippery smooth, like the darkness I walked through when I entered this place. Of course, this is the presence that called to me. It reaches around and tugs at something deep within my chest. In effect, it feels as if I am being turned inside out, as if I have been opened up and something is being torn from me and extracted. I cannot see what this is, in the stifling darkness, but the other senses more than make up for blindness—taste and smell and touch combine into one sensation that works here. The thing that has been ripped from me is a ball of tangled black and red resistance, a wet, acrid taste, a fullness in the mouth, with loose cords of flesh all covered in esters black as tar. It is smaller than
smaller than a shoebox, bound up like a knot, a spiral core of tight-woven muscle and tendons hanging. It is true, every manner of pain comes from within: I had no regard for my life on earth, yet here I am, encompassed in darkness. All the promises ever made to me have come to nothing. I want to cry out as that child did before, and perhaps I do but cannot hear it, all I hear is the slippery presence whispering my name in the book where everyone is supposed to sign when they first arrive. The foyer of the funeral home has been appointed with fussy, uncomfortable-looking armless chairs that no one ever sits on. But the room is cheerful enough, the August sun hangs high in the heat of late morning, and every object in the room is pulled into distinct clarity by the abundance of its light. Tom has led the girls to the large parlor on the right where the ceremony will be held. It is filled with rows of these same armless chairs, upholstered in faded satin. Tom and the girls stand on the verge of entering, tentative, waiting for Holly to join them. She watches them for a moment, the backs of their heads together in innocence, and sees that Tom has taken the girls by the hand. It is frightening for them, perhaps he senses, to be here in the presence of death.

The open register rests upon a waist-high stand, its pages expansive, crisp, lined with blue rules where all those who come and only visit sign their names. Holly takes up the golden pen from its holder and looks at her girls standing with Tom, holding his hands, and signs her name,
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Dunham,
trying it on for
size of the building is smaller than he remembered, all of our memories are inflated by the feelings we deposit inside them. It is not the same, standing here in front of the building on the steps of the monument, the precise point where he imagined himself standing when he started sketching it a few days ago. For one thing, a ten-foot-high chain link fence has been erected around the building, to keep people out, and the structure is surrounded by the machines the demolition crew will use to tear it down. A giant crane towers over it, with a battered wrecking ball dangling from a cable. There are other machines here too, bulldozers waiting to pile up the rubble. The building is shabby, worn out, the limestone façade encrusted with car exhaust and pigeon droppings—why not get rid of it, make way for something new?

He had expected to feel a wave of nostalgia standing here, the same torrent of sights and sounds and emotions that made him angry with his wife over the weekend, but seeing the building in its current state has drained all those treacherous visions from his head. Now he is simply tired, his eyelids fuzzy and sore from the truncated night of travel he just endured. Thinking about the past, all those days gone by when he was here with Amelia and Louise, when they were young and still had everything to live for, fills him with a fatigue so heavy that he must sit down on the steps of the monument. He closes his eyes and reaches his arms to the sky; small bones in his neck crackle as he tilts and rotates his head. He yawns luxuriantly, stretches his arms to their fullest extent, and opens his eyes to inspect the old theater and its adjoining hotel one last time. He has always had
a ruminating interest in things that have been abandoned, and the current state of this well-loved building interests him from this aspect, the actuality of it compared to the way he has always pictured it in his mind's eye.

The storefronts that lined the first floor on the hotel side are vacant now—the spot on the south corner where the drugstore used to be has empty plate glass windows and a neon H
AAG'S
sign that will never be lit again. The elaborate marquee that juts above the theater entrance delivers a final message to the small throng of onlookers who have gathered to inspect it: T
HANKS FOR THE
M
E MORIES
, the hand-placed letters unevenly spaced. Tattered curtains linger in the upper-story windows on the hotel end. He had heard that it no longer operated as a hotel, but had been converted in recent years to a nursing home, an unfortunate indication that the building had assumed the same downward spiral of decline as its elderly residents.

In the package sent by the high school alumni committee urging him to attend his class reunion, the invitation mentioned that the theater was seldom used these days, mainly for ceremonial banquets and special occasions. It noted that the last live performance on the main stage was a production of
Hamlet
by the Horace Mann High School Drama Club on October 17, 2004. The last motion picture shown to a paying audience at the theater was
The French Connection,
more than thirty years ago. It was a fabulous place to watch a movie. He can remember sitting towards the front and craning his neck up at the enormous screen from the plush purple seats—filling his entire field of vision with images from the film. But he no longer lives here—
he long ago abandoned this city where he was born. The young people who do live here now probably look at this place as an eyesore, a pocket of blight at the center of their business district. The twin cupolas at either end of the building have turned green with oxidation; otherwise the building appears structurally sound. He can imagine the high cost of upkeep though, the outrageous heating and cooling bills for a half-empty building. Perhaps there is asbestos insulation to deal with. It is time to get rid of it. They will probably build something better here, a flawless new office building that will give people a place to work and reflect the statue of the lady at the top of the monument in its gleaming glass windows.

Everything must come to an end. Sooner or later, every animal, building, and person must make way for another one to take its place. When his plane was landing at the Chicago airport, he saw from the window on the final approach an abandoned road in the middle of the airfield that appeared to lead nowhere, a washed out yellow stripe still visible down the middle, the many cracks in the pavement spawning weeds. He wondered where this road once led, at one time probably a two-lane country highway that traversed a rural landscape of farms and modest houses. A place somebody once called home. Like the theater, the road had outlived its usefulness. Tris wondered how long ago it had been abandoned. And whose job it was to make the decision to scrap it?

More onlookers have gathered on the steps of the monument to gawk, office workers and shop clerks thankful for this diversion from their routine. Tris stands up again and yawns.
Workers with orange hard hats cluster around the base of the crane, motioning to the man who sits in its belly to operate it. Everything must go. That's the thought that enters his head. And now is the time. He flips open his cell phone and sees that he is running late, always running late. The funeral will be starting soon.

He came here with every intention of seeing her one last time. But observing this building has made him understand that this place is no longer part of him. He can never recapture the moments that he lived here. If he went to the funeral, everything he ran away from all those years ago would be dredged up again. Who would be there, Louise and her indigent sons? Why on earth would he want to face them again? Elmer died years ago. And Amelia now is dead and gone. There is no reason to put himself, or her family, through something like that.

One of the workers wearing a white hardhat—perhaps it is the foreman—approaches the fence and shouts for people to stand back. They must retreat across the circular plaza to the sidewalk that surrounds the monument and watch from there. More people have gathered in front of him, so Tris moves up a couple of steps to get a better look. From nowhere, as he turns again to study the building, an image of Amelia as a young woman shoots through his head, like a vision that has been dropped on him from the great height of the crane. Amelia, standing in profile, for an instant pausing to say something, as she walked across the dining room of the old house on Dearborn Street, the side of the double she lived in growing up. There are many people gathered at the table; it is a holiday dinner
of some sort—not Christmas or Thanksgiving. In his memory, it has more the raw, damp feel of Easter on an April day when flurries of snow crowd down from the low clouds. Amelia, in profile, had what they called back then “a figure.”

She must have been fourteen or fifteen, just entering high school, with hips that narrowed to a waist and modulated out again to her breasts held high by the push-up bras in favor in those days: A figure. Not like the skinny, muscular young women he sees now at the fitness rooms in hotels, running on treadmills and lifting weights so their arms will have sharply defined triceps and their bellies will be flat and hard as a teenage boy's. Amelia stood there, for a moment, one tick of the clock, and her profile moved him to love her. It was at that moment that the chance experimental groping that had taken place once or twice during their childhood adventures was transformed into the realization that he was actually in love with her, beyond the infantile sensations of pure sex, beyond a passing hormonal attraction: He loved her because she was like a calm, deep pool of water, reflecting back to him the absolutely best image of himself he could imagine, the image of himself that he always wanted and expected to see. She could mirror back to him everything he did and everything he wanted to become because her actions were completely un-selfconscious, as gentle and unassuming as the bending frail branches of a tree buffeted by the wind. She never, in his experience, thought to build herself up beyond what she actually was, she never sought to be anything more than this simple and pleasant girl going about her business, enjoying each day—and she did have an appetite for enjoying
each day. She loved to eat, and she loved her movies and the garden in the back of the house, and it became clear to him, even as he saw her figure outlined against the breakfront stacked with serving plates and mismatched pieces of crystal and a porcelain vase limned with red peony blossoms, that she loved him too.

In the very next moment, in the instant when his vision of Amelia standing in profile is about to take another step, he hears a creaking sound of rumbling iron machinery and looks up to witness the spinning mass of the wrecking ball slam into the façade of the Lyceum Theater, knocking chunks of limestone from the rows of windows that line the fourth floor, shattering the subtle and intricate rhythm of the structure forever. A thin haze of dust is released as the dislodged chunks of stone fall to the earth. A firehose suspended from the midsection of the crane sends a spray of water towards the gash in the wall, to disperse the plume of dust that has been extracted from the broken stone face of the building. The sparse crowd on the monument steps, some of whom are armed with video recorders and phones that snap pictures, lets out a low murmur of appreciation for the power of dead weight slung along an arc. The crane operator jerks the machine back on its tractor treads, eliciting a high-pitched beeping noise as a warning to whomever may be behind it. Maneuvering the truss of the crane away from the building again sends the wrecking ball back, back, a cruel pendulum that hangs for a moment at the highest point, then, inevitably, returns along the path of destruction, thumping against another section of the wall. The walls are coming down,
the structure that held these memories together for so long is broken. Make way! Make way for the new priest at St. Monica's, I have only been here in this parish for three months now; I was not even here for Easter or the Annunciation. Yet, I must fulfill today one of the most solemn duties that a parish priest can do.” Holly can see, even from the fifth row of chairs, where she and Tom and the girls have respectfully taken up their position at the rear of the small gathering of relatives and friends, that the pastor has a thin gloss of sweat in the channel between his upper lip and his nose. His complexion is dark, and the suggestion of a beard is evident, a shadowy crescent from the sideburns across the shallow ridge of his cheekbones. He is young, perhaps in his early thirties.