Man in The Woods (19 page)

“Why are you up here?” Ruby asks, plopping down next to Kate and immediately sticking her finger into Kate’s seltzer, trying to capture an elusive floating grape.

“Just looking,” Kate says. “Making sure everyone’s having a good time.”

“It’s the best party of all recorded human history,” Ruby says, and the diction of this is so inflated and unexpected and so theatrical that it startles a groan out of Kate. “It is, I’m not kidding,” Ruby says, and struggles for a moment as Kate puts her arm around her shoulders and pulls her closer. Ruby submits to her mother’s embrace, gratefully: she likes being touched.

A sudden and inexplicable silence descends upon the party. It is as if everyone who has been talking has come to the end of their thought at exactly the same instant, and everyone who was about to reply has taken an extra moment to breathe.

“My mother used to say when the room went suddenly quiet, ‘An angel just passed over,’” Kate whispers to Ruby, and the girl lifts her eyes, as if she might really see an emissary moving across the rooms. In the two seconds of quiet, Jackson Browne can be heard.
Doctor, my eyes have seen the years…

And in an instant of ice-clear certainty Kate knows that when midnight strikes and all the computers that are responsible for keeping everyone sane and alive fail or don’t fail, the end result will be basically nothing. We are not being kept alive by algorithms of 1s and 0s, we are not creatures of some cosmic mainframe. Y2K is going to be a bust, a big letdown posing as a huge relief, a sore disappointment that we will agree to be pleased about. All the precautions, the hard drives copied, the larders filled, the flights postponed, the water stored, the personal information photocopied, the bank accounts emptied into floor safes, wall safes, mattresses, the candles and the kerosene, and the firewood, all those apocalyptic speeches from our leaders—it was all a desperate attempt to find some meaning, a predictable narrative. The hour will come and it will pass, and the only horror of it will be just that—another hour will have passed, and after that another one will, and then another. Y2K will be soon forgotten. The things for which we feverishly prepare aren’t generally the things that actually happen. Our undoing comes waltzing in through another door altogether…

Kate takes her daughter’s hand; it feels warm and sticky, and Kate has a surge of love go through her as powerful as a wave at high tide. “Come on, baby, let’s join the others.” As they make their way down the steps, her eyes meet Bernard’s. He offers a brief, courteous bow in her direction, and lifts his glass of red wine in a silent toast. To her, to the party, to all of them, to the new year, to life.

The dirty dishes and empty glasses and the scuffed floors and the flattened pillows and the tilted picture frames and the cherry-scented pipe tobacco smoke and the finger-smudged windowpanes and the crushed cashews and the slight stink from a piece of punk wood in the fireplace, which will not burn and will not go out, and the listing Christmas tree with its shimmering ganglia of tinsel—the entire archaeology of the late twentieth century still occupies the downstairs of the house, while Paul, Kate, and Ruby and Shep sleep upstairs in the twenty-first.

It is four a.m. on the first day of the new millennium and the computers of the world are working every bit as well as they were the day before. Kate shakes Paul’s shoulder and he reaches for her, unconscious but warm, so warm.

“You have to get up,” she whispers to him soothingly, and then with considerable urgency when he fails to move. Paul pushes the covers back, stumbles out of bed, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. Unlike the coddled men she has known, Paul knows that sometimes you just do what you are told and there’s no time to ask why. He knows that the little creaking sound may well be telling you the ceiling is about to collapse and the snuffing, huffing noise is not your tent-mate’s heavy breathing but the sound of a brown bear’s hungry approach.

“What’s going on?” he asks her, without a trace of sleep in his voice.

“I think we should get rid of your computer.”

“Now?”

She nods.

“I need it for work. I’m getting wood from all over the world.”

“I’ll get you another one. Everyone’s asleep. It’s a perfect time.”

“I was asleep, too,” Paul says.

“Who’s to say the police haven’t been monitoring who goes to certain Internet sites? You keep on asking the Internet to give you information about the thing. And it’s all on your hard drive.”

“I’ve erased what’s on the hard drive.”

“It’s all still retrievable.”

“But that’s not going to happen,” Paul pleads.

“Why should we take any chances?”

Not many minutes later, after a whispered back-and-forth, which would have gone on for much longer, and may even have had a different conclusion had not Kate begun to cry, they are in Paul’s truck heading to Route 2B (or not 2B, as Kate so often calls it), which winds out to the landfill. Kate holds Paul’s computer on her lap, watching as the moon-bright frozen trees and snow-covered roofs of the new millennium flow past.

“What if Ruby wakes up?”

“We’ll be home in ten minutes,” Kate says.

“That’s really not so,” says Paul.

“Okay,” she says, “fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. I don’t care. Shep will keep an eye on her.”

Paul sees the greenish iridescent flash of an animal’s eyes on the side of the road a few yards in front, and slows, waiting for whatever creature it is to make its move. A house cat, white and brown, with a bushy tail and shaggy ears, clambers over a snowbank and races across the road.

Paul watches the cat streaking across a long expanse of frozen lawn, making its way toward the pale yellow porch light of the house of Magda Tunis, who had appeared at the party on snowshoes, wrapped in homespun scarves, her long, graying hair brittle with frost, full of her upbeat New Age wisdom: she was in the camp that was quite sure Y2K was going to be earthshaking, though hers was not so much a doomsday scenario as a wrenching but ultimately liberating transformation, and when the new millennium began and no one sprouted a third eye and no wave of overwhelming love swept over the guests and, after the pranking teenagers pulled the breaker switch and dunked the house into a bracing moment of darkness, the lamps continued to glow, the stereo continued to play, and the furnace continued to chug, Magda strapped on her snowshoes, rewrapped herself in scarves, put a few crackers in the pockets of her ski parka, and left.

“Sometimes the things we want to stay the same change real quick,” Paul says, “and the other stuff we wish would disappear just sort of hangs out forever.” He winces. He has never felt self-conscious about speaking, but with Kate he often struggles for words. She is never at a loss for a word, sometimes it seems as if she practices what she is going to say before she says it, maybe saying it to herself, or saying it out loud in front of a mirror. He doesn’t mind. It’s sort of wonderful, basically. It’s making her famous.

It’s so wonderful to be with a man who doesn’t want to compete with me
, she once said, and her face showed immediate regret and the wish to not have said that. But it was fine with him. The idea of competing with her, or begrudging her her success, her following, her large and increasingly frequent paydays was so alien to him that nothing she could say about it would register with him. He would never in a thousand years read as many books as she has, and it would never occur to him to browse the Oxford English Dictionary as a way of relaxing, as he has seen her do with his own eyes.

“Go on,” Kate says. “Tell me what you were going to say.”

“It’s nothing,” Paul answers. “I don’t even know.”

In fact, he was going to recount a long story about his time in Alaska, of returning to a camp on Barter Island and finding a little pool of twenty-weight motor oil in the snow, six months after Ed Bluemink, for whom Paul was working, had accidentally spilled it. But Paul is unsure of the story and what it might illustrate—things hang around for a lot longer than you think?

“Here we are,” he says instead, gesturing with his chin as they approach the Leyden Landfill. The days and the hours of operation are posted on a red-and-white sign hammered onto a ten-foot locust pole; the headlights of Paul’s truck brush across the letters. Paul stops his truck a foot or two in front of the thick chain that droops across the landfill, a frostbitten, stubborn smile. A few snowflakes dance in the tunnels of light his headlights carve into the darkness.

“This is nuts,” Paul says, registering it.

“Just do it for me,” Kate says. “Indulge me.”

Paul shifts the truck into park, pulls on the emergency brake; this way he can keep the engine running so he’ll have someplace warm to return to and the headlights can light the way. He reaches for the laptop. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says.

“Oh no, no, I’ll come with you.” Kate half-turns away from him, shielding the computer.

“I don’t really see you as a landfill type of person,” Paul says, hoping to cajole her into some sort of compliance, though he has never succeeded in doing so in the past.

“This is my idea,” Kate says. “And I don’t want to sit all by myself in this truck in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe we should just go home,” Paul says.

“No, let’s get rid of this thing,” Kate says. “We have to, Paul. You left footprints in those woods, tire tracks, everything. And what if something else happens?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. But something. Something to bring them to you. Maybe just to question you. Why would you want to have a computer that they can look at and find out that you’ve been trying to get information about that guy? Why would we leave a loose end when we both know full well that it’s there? It’s what the generals call contingency planning.”

“Well, we’re not generals,” Paul says, “and the stuff you plan for isn’t always what happens. Look at how everyone was going on about Y2K, and here we are.” He gestures at the vast and placid sky, with its scatter of indifferent stars.

“Let’s just get this done. Ruby’s home all by herself.”

They step over the chain and make their way along the snow-packed path to the landfill, with the headlights of the idling truck at their backs and the lit snow fluttering around them like a frenzy of moths. On either side are drooping hemlocks, their boughs heavy with winter. The access road to the landfill is pristine, without tire tracks or footprints, and in an unspoken bit of caution they drag their feet through the snow, hoping to make their prints illegible. Paul relieves Kate of the computer and she links her arm through his. With her free hand she reaches into her parka pocket and pulls out a flashlight.

“You think of everything,” Paul says.

“I hope so.”

The flashlight bores a hole through a darkness made tumultuous by snow, and they make their way to the edge of the landfill, a three-acre pit covered with snow and dirt. “This is just for the garbage,” Paul says. “The one back there is for appliances and household items. We may as well do this right.”

They pick their way along the edge of the first landfill and approach the second, smaller pit. Here the refuse is uncovered. Kate points the beam of her flashlight down at the tangle of refrigerators, lamps, washing machines, rotisseries, toasters, space heaters, snow shovels, and easy chairs. If there are other computers down there, none are visible as Kate sweeps the light over the tangle of junk. “Okay, here goes,” Paul says, and is about to throw his computer down into the pit when Kate stops him.

“Not like that. We should break it.”

He doesn’t see why, but it will take more effort and time to argue the point than to do as she suggests. He places the laptop onto the ground. “I am so sorry,” he says to her.

“It’s okay,” she says.

“No, it’s not. I did a terrible thing and every day is a little bit fucked and I’ve pulled you into it.”

“I want to be where you are,” Kate says.

“I’m in the darkness,” he says.

“I know. Me, too.”

He pulls her close and kisses her. It is as hungry as a first kiss and as solemn as a kiss good-bye. He is kissing every part of her, her happiness and unhappiness, everything that has ever happened to her, he is kissing the day she was born and the day she will die. It is almost unbearable.

Off to the side, whoever has plowed back here has left a long slur of dirty snow, into which are embedded stones and rocks. Paul dislodges a rock about the size of a soccer ball with his ungloved hands and straddles the computer with the rock held over his head. “Maybe step back,” he says to Kate, and she does what he asks her to, and it strikes him with all the chaos of conflicting cardinal emotions that the two of them have never before been so deeply in the wrong together and never have they been so close.

He throws the rock down, and it bangs against the hard blue plastic shell of the computer, and to both of their surprise the machine withstands the blow. The plastic cracks but the machine is intact. The blow’s energy has fueled the once stationary machine and it spins to the left and begins to slide toward the open pit of the landfill. “Kate,” Paul says, and she quickly moves her feet to intercept the laptop and to keep it from flipping end over end into the jumble below. He retrieves it, carries it a safe distance from the pit, and smashes the rock down on it again. This time the destruction is successful. In a primal crouch, Paul hovers over the splintered machine, pulls it further apart, throwing one piece after another into the landfill.

“All right?” Paul says. Kate nods.

There is a strain to her breathing.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Paul says. “That time in the woods? I keep on thinking or remembering or maybe just imagining that I wasn’t alone.”

She stands closer to him. “I’m not surprised,” she says, finding her voice.

“You’re not?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “Because there
was
someone there that day, and he’s with us right now, too, in this stinking landfill on the first day of the Second Millennium.”

“What do you mean?”