Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (7 page)

 

Kathy is waiting for me in the bus. She's got the news on the big wall-mounted TV, sound down low, and has a strained look on her face. When I duck inside, the weatherman is pointing to a red pixilated mass that is moving in fits and starts across a map of the state. She looks up at me and rearranges her face into a smile. “Just a summer storm,” she says, reaching up to touch her earrings. “Nothing to worry
about.” She sounds as if she's trying to convince herself. Clicking off the TV, she pats the space beside her on the couch. “Look at you,” she says, her voice changing when I don't sit. “Rough.”

I walk back to the bedroom and lie down on the water bed without taking off my muddy boots. I hear her get up and start to make coffee. The rain comes in waves on the roof. It sounds like a hell of a lot more than a summer storm. It sounds like a wrathful sea.

“You're not sleeping in that truck tonight, Cole, baby,” she calls back, running the water, opening the cupboards, banging around. It all sounds so forcedly cheerful that my mood goes dark like a burnt-out bulb.

“Got any other ideas?” I say to the wall. “Think Bob will mind if I shack up here?”

She's quiet, then says, “You could get a hotel.”

The thought of driving into Thunderbird in the rain, past all those lighted houses, navigating the inevitable strip, finding the chain motel with its Shriners candy machines in the lobby and brochure rack of local attractions—it leaves me with a black hole of loneliness deep in my center.

“Cap's tight,” I say, probably too quiet for her to hear. “There's worse things.”

She comes in with two mugs of coffee, her rings clinking against them, squeezing sideways through the narrow door. She sits on the edge of the bed, sending a little wake rolling under me. A water bed in a bus, of all the things. She says
she likes it, sleeping while Bob is driving, the little currents comforting, like the womb.

I know there's a part of Kathy that believes this bus will keep her young. That if she and Bob only keep moving, the odometer will spin on it, not her. As little kids, Clay and I thought that if you could just manage to keep your feet off the ground long enough, the world would revolve underneath you, and you'd come down in a different place than you left. We would take turns with a ruler, jumping as high as we could. Later we were fascinated with our grade school textbook's explanation of the speed of light. A story of twin brothers. One travels in a spaceship to distant galaxies and returns to find that while he has not aged at all, his brother is an old, old man. There was a cartoon illustration of the two of them face to face, an exclamation point in the air between them, the one who stayed behind with a beard like Rip Van Winkle. Clay and I discussed these things often, up past our bedtime, whispering in the darkness of his room. Atomic forces, galactic maps, the theory of relativity. His voice electric with excitement, my mind tripping over itself, trying to keep up with his.

I reach into my back pocket. “Present,” I say.

Kathy gingerly takes the necklace from me and holds it between her fingertips. She turns it over and over, her lips tight. “Where'd you get this?” she finally says.

“Doesn't matter,” I say, and cross my arms behind my head, feeling suddenly expansive. “It's for you.”

She looks at me, one thin eyebrow raised, then slides a painted fingernail along the edge of the heart. It springs
open like a door. Inside, there's a tiny picture of a baby, a red-faced newborn in a blue cap with a pinched, wrinkled face. We both look down at it, silent. The picture is small, no bigger than my pinky nail, but it suddenly feels as if there are three of us on the bus.

Snapping it shut, she hands it silently back. I take it, avoiding her eyes, and shove it deep in my pocket, as deep as it will go, wishing that it would disappear. I close my eyes and see the girl's grip on the bleachers, imagine the necklace swinging with each of his thrusts until it fell to the ground. A baby. It could be anyone, of course. A nephew, a cousin, an old picture of her brother, the one gone off to war. There is something tragic about it, the picture. But maybe it's just that look that newborns have, when it's hard to tell if they're alive or dead. I can feel Kathy watching me, waiting.

“You know that's someone's treasure,” she finally says.

I keep my eyes shut and nod. Or the baby might be hers. No hope, then, of escape. Parked him with her mother the weekend of the fair so she can pretend for a day or two that she's free.

“I don't get you, Cole. What are you doing here? You've got your whole life ahead of you. You should make a home for yourself. Settle down.”

“I like the road,” I say, opening my eyes. Looking up at the close ceiling, the faux-marble panels and light fixtures, the words ring as hollow in the bus as they do inside my head.

She sighs. “But don't you ever think about the future?”

“I don't think about next week.”

“Well, you live your life like that, Cole, baby, and one morning you'll wake up and it will have passed you by. Like that,” she says, and snaps her fingers. “Believe me.” I shift and look up at her hovering above me, her eyes sad and heavy. A sudden rush of rain pounds the roof, and a worried look passes over her face. No matter how far or how fast she travels, Kathy will grow old. She
is
old. I can see the wrinkles breaking through her thick makeup, the gray hair in her braids. The sagging flesh under her arms, gravity's toll.

She leans over as if to kiss me, but instead tries to fluff the pillow behind my head. In the penumbra of her smell, warm and soapy, I'm pushed down through fathomless depths, weighted with lead. The bed sloshes underneath me. The narrow walls of the bus are close and final as a casket. I jerk my head away from her and swing my feet onto the floor. The rain falls with the sound of tearing pages. In the lulls I can hear Bob's uncertain chords, his curses and false starts. I stand up on shaky legs, sick to death of other people's tragedies. To be carried away by a giant bird. There could be worse things. Everything and everyone on earth growing smaller and smaller, as all of it fell away.

“I've got to get out of here,” I say.

Kathy sits up and slides her hands between her knees, trying to smile, to smooth it over. “Baby,” she says, reaching out, and I step away, knocking into the flimsy closet door and sending a cascade of clothes out onto the floor. The rain roars on the roof. “Where on earth do you think you're going?”

 

The wind rips the door of the bus out of my hand as I dive out into the pounding rain. Pulling the collar of my shirt up around my neck, I duck my head and run down the empty path. Shouts and the beeps of backing trucks on the midway pierce the thick sound of the torrent. But none of it has been broken down yet—the rides are still up, the Ferris wheel looming above the crouching booths and trailers. Along the strips, figures in raincoats load pickups and tires spin in the mud. I run away from it all, out towards the dark field. The wet grass grabs at my legs, slowing me down, but I keep running until I'm at the tree line, and then I turn and look at the carnival, a somber city in the distance. When I pull the necklace from my pocket and let go, I expect it to be carried away on the wind. Instead it drops to the ground like an anchor, and I have to grind it into the mud with my boot to be rid of it. I want it never to be found again. Buried. Lost for good.

I'm the one who stayed. The brother with the beard. Clay reached escape velocity fifteen years ago, when he crashed his car that night, out on the dark road. I'm starting to think he was the lucky one. I stop and lean down on my knees, try to catch my breath, let the rain hammer me. The rain-swept field is desolate as the open sea. Virginia. Even if I was to turn around, drive east a thousand miles, pull onto the old road and down our driveway, I'd walk up a front path that leads to nothing, the house torn down months ago to make
room for the new neighborhood that is rising up in the pasture where we spent our afternoons. Just Clay, me, and the old oak trees. And now the trees are gone, too.

“This is Illinois,” I say, to steady myself. “My feet are on the ground.” I crouch there, repeating it, until the rain stops. It stops abruptly, as if I have somehow willed it to, and in its place comes a thick, strange stillness, as if the palm of a giant hand has flattened over the field. Everything stands still—the grass, the leaves, the sky. I stand and look up, the towering dark clouds frozen. Clay had another favorite theory. If you could go up in a plane and travel around the equator at one thousand miles an hour, the speed of the earth's rotation there, the sun would appear to hang still in the sky. No past, no future. As long as you could keep up your speed.

“But,” he'd say, frowning. “But there's a rub.” It would be an illusion. Down on earth, the sun would be rising and setting, the clocks ticking away. Life would carry on without you.

Headlights come at me across the field. It's a cop car, bumping and straining over the uneven ground. The window rolls down as it pulls alongside me. Without stopping, a bull-faced sheriff leans out into the still air and jerks his thumb up towards the road, mistaking me for a straggling reveler. “Son,” he says. “We've got a tornado warning in effect. We've sent everybody home.”

 

Let it come, I think, running back up to the midway. Let it rip through. Let it wipe the field clean. Let it carry all
this away. Up on my strip, my table stands alone, the tarp blown off my boxes, everything soaked. Dub's tent is gone, the only thing left an overturned folding chair. I can see a steady line of rigs leaving Camper City, pulling out onto the road, headed for God-knows-where. The rain starts again, all at once, pounding, and then the wind, picking it up and slashing it around. What I said to Kathy, about liking the road. That was a lie. The road—what it really is—eight lanes of grinding semis barreling west with spent uranium, east with old-growth timber, hauling shit-caked cows and microwave dinners, feeding the mad frenzy of this country—it all moves too fast. I've been thinking we'll just spin off our axis and out into the center of space. Hell, Thunderbird, Illinois, might be the first to go.

I run up the deserted paths of the midway, where rides and booths have been forsaken, left to the mercy of the wind. Flat-beds sit parked at abrupt angles next to the rides, some of which are partly dismantled, some still standing, the wind whistling through scaffolding. Paper plates, cups, and gnawed drumsticks spill out of overturned trash cans. A balloon caught on the side of the Haunted House beats itself against the wall, as if trying to break free. A loosed tarp swoops towards me on furious wings. I duck and it flings itself on down the path. I run past the Ferris wheel, where the plywood clown that kids must be as tall as to ride has toppled over and lies sideways, grinning, in the grass. The wheel shudders and groans. The carriages rock and glow in a flash of lightning. The wind shoves me along from behind.
My heart takes over, pounding, shouting from my chest.
Get out of here,
it shouts when I look up at the swaying wheel.
Get out of here,
it shouts, and the moaning steel struts of the Gravitron and Tilt-a-Whirl and Zipper all shout it too. Stumbling, I run through the rain towards the remains of Camper City, no idea what I'll do when I get there. Pull out on the road and try to outrun it, or lock the doors and watch it come. Either way, I've got nowhere to go.

But then I round the back loop, and see them. A ragged pack of boys, weaving through the abandoned booths. They're passing beer cans, trying to light cigarettes in the whipping wind. They must have hid when the cops came through, first brave, then reckless, defying the lightning. Now they're swaggering through the rain, invincible. And ahead of me, up on the carousel, girls in wet T-shirts sit astride the still horses, passing a bottle in a wet paper bag. The horses' nostrils flare, eyes and manes wild, legs flung out, suspended in mid-flight. Behind them, all of the sky is gathering itself up at the horizon, bloodred, feathered. The wind seems to hover above us. “Look!” I yell, pointing, but my voice is snatched away by the wind. The Ferris wheel groans, lamenting. “Get out of here! Go on!” But none of them even notice me. The girls cackle, their hair plastered to their faces, their eyes black with smudged makeup. The boys strut over, swing themselves up onto the horses, and shake the rain from their hair. They're all laughing, shouting, singing, celebrating as if they know something no one else knows. As if on the other side of that terrible horizon there's a new world coming when
this one goes, a world where everything lost will be restored, and everything made whole. One of the girls, dark-eyed and wasted, sees me and reaches out, saying something I can't hear over the din, and I strain to make out her lips.

“Come on,” she's saying, “come quickly, come, come—”

Shell

I meet the herpetologist on the bus. Rush hour is in its deepest throes, a snowstorm has clamped down on the city, and the bus is packed with people in bulky coats, impatient and aggressive at the end of the day. Trapped at the center of the crush, I am starting to doubt that I will be able to hold it together all the way to my stop. Then a surge from behind sends me sliding into the man in front of me, and the flaps of a cardboard box he is holding pop open. I find myself looking down at a turtle, its shell mapped with orange and yellow and green.
A turtle!
I say as he gently folds the flaps back down. Then, shocked to hear myself unlock a door to conversation,
Do you mind if I see it again?
He opens the box just enough for me to see inside.
Are you particularly interested in reptiles?
he says kindly.
Absolutely,
I say, though it isn't true. I just want to keep looking at the turtle, which has drawn its head inside its shell, so utterly still and complacent in the midst of the chaos of the bus.
It's rare to meet young people with an interest,
he says.
Oh, yes,
I say quickly, thrilled to be considered young. Then I look up at his face and realize how old he must be himself—gray beard, eyes big and watery behind thick glasses.
I'm a professor,
he says,
at the university. I've written a book you might find interesting.
He pulls a card from his pocket and points to the address with a shaky finger.
Drop by any time.

Classification

Most nights, I don't sleep. Instead I lie in bed and page through my list of dread and regret, starting with my childhood and ending with the polar ice caps. Everything in between I file into something like schoolroom cubbies, marked with labels like
DISASTER
and
DESIRE
. When my husband left, he told me he hadn't been happy in years.
Happy?
I thought.
We're supposed to be happy?
I was under the impression that no one was truly happy, given the raw materials we have to work with in this life. Since he's been gone, I keep the lamp on all night. I'd rather lie awake in the light and keep an eye on his absence than reach out in the dark, thinking he's there. The fact that I may do this for the rest of my life is unclassifiable, too much to bear. When the list comes to this I get up and sit
at the kitchen table and watch the snow, the snow that seems always to be falling.

Navigation

After looming for weeks, the day of my office Christmas party arrives. Every year it is the same. We all bring our husbands and wives to a third-rate steak house and get drunk and have a gift swap. The husbands and wives stand around making awkward small talk, and we all compliment one another on how nice we look out of our office clothes, drinking swiftly and heavily, sick to death of one another. At the center of all this sits an enormous, blood-rare roast. Last year my husband stole a bottle of vodka off the bar and we snuck out to the back alley, where we wrapped up in his coat and tried to name the constellations we could see between rooftops. The thing I was most grateful for: he could look at any situation, no matter how dire, and instantly know the best way to navigate through. If I was lucky, I'd be pulled along with him. At five o'clock someone comes by my cubicle and reminds me brightly, for the third time today, about the gift swap. I can see those gifts—the scented candles, the plush toys in Santa hats—already tossed in the garbage and on their way to the landfill. I reach into my bag for an aspirin and find the herpetologist's card.
I just remembered,
I say to no one in particular.
I have plans this afternoon.
I pull on my coat and hat and go, stumbling through the exhaust-stained snow, the wind slicing through my clothes. The university looms
on a distant hill. When I finally arrive, it seems deserted, nothing but an expanse of iced-over parking lots. It takes a while to find the building whose name is printed on the herpetologist's card, and just as I am about to give up I see it, a low industrial structure that sits on the edge of the campus like an afterthought. Inside, the halls are ill-lit and empty. I follow the signs to the herpetology department. Down one flight of stairs, then another, then another. With each flight I grow warmer, strip off a layer—coat, hat, sweater, scarf. By the time I have found the herpetologist's office, deep in the basement, I am breathless and damp with sweat.

Anticipation

When I knock, the herpetologist flings open his door and beams at me, ushering me in. The tiny room is tropically warm, one wall lined with aquariums that glow with ultra-violet light.
This is my office,
he says proudly,
and those are my anoles.
He is wearing battered khakis and sandals with socks, as if he has just come from a jungle expedition. The anoles give the room a frantic energy. They puff and posture, do push-ups, circle one another warily. Their bodies are sharp and lizard-like, the dulled green and brown of sea glass, and fans of brightly colored skin hang from their chins: red, purple, blue.
Do you want to hold one?
the herpetologist asks, eyes sparkling. When I step closer, their faces seem wise and irascible, and as they swivel their eyes I get the sense that they are sizing me up. But the herpetologist has already pulled the
mesh cover off one of the tanks and is watching me, expectant. I reach in and make a halfhearted show of trying to catch one, my hand sending streaks of panic through the tank. I look at him and shrug.
Like this,
he says, and I see his hand slip in like a stealthy animal. Suddenly, an anole is clasped in his fingers, its head between his thumb and forefinger, tongue flickering, as startling as a bright scarf conjured in a magic trick. I gasp, my lungs blooming with the warm air, and find I've been holding my breath.
You've got to anticipate,
he says, grinning.

Raft

I come home to a red light flashing in the dark of the living room: a message on the machine from my husband. I have to play it twice—his voice is slurred and halting. This is how it has been for several months: when he gets drunk, he wants to work it out. I call him back and tell him to come over, willing to take him any way I can get him. He arrives already bristling with defenses, a cape of snow on his shoulders. As we stand there in the living room, hashing it all out, I try to keep it together by fixing my eyes on the snow, watching the flakes turn to drops of water and then disappear into the fabric of his coat. A brand-new coat, I notice, and I am side-swiped by an image of his new apartment, where I've never been, all the furniture I know he has treated himself to—top of the line, paid on credit, same-day delivery, as if he can buy his way back to a beginning. Exhausted, I collapse into him,
and he pilots me towards the bed, but when we make love I feel as if I am struggling for a grip on a slippery raft, trying in vain to pull myself up. Afterwards, we are lying side by side, not touching, when he turns to me and flexes the mattress with his fingers.
I know why you can't sleep,
he says.
It's obvious. What you need are individually wrapped coils.
When he falls asleep I turn on the light and watch his eyes flutter in a dream. I imagine all his women, in there with him. I close my eyes and picture them, one by one, lingering on the torturous details: their optimism, their young skin, their white teeth flashing as they smile at him across his expensive new bed. But in between, I find I keep seeing the herpetologist's office. Familiar, like an ill-used back room of my mind: the glow of the lamps, the dust-cloaked bookshelves, the anoles—a many-colored bouquet.

Adaptation

On the coldest day of December, the heat goes out at work. I sit hunched at my desk, freezing, my hands pulled up into my sleeves, dreaming about the tropical warmth of the lamps in the herpetologist's office. I get up, switch off the computer, and go. Outside, a thick sleet is falling, turning the city the color of asphalt. The cold air slices through my clothes. When I arrive I try to think up a reason for why I've returned, but the herpetologist takes my coat without question and in fact seems overjoyed to see me.
Let me show you the lab,
he says, clasping my arm.
Is it as warm as your office?
I
ask sheepishly.
Warmer!
he says.
Come on.
Our shoes squeak on the linoleum as we walk down the long hall. No one else seems to be around. He opens the door of the lab with a key on his crowded ring. At first, the room seems full of empty aquariums. Then, slowly, as the herpetologist leads me from one to the next, the animals reveal themselves. There is a sidewinder and a hellbender. There is a chuckwalla from Texas that, when it sees us, rushes between two rocks in its habitat and puffs itself up until it is wedged tightly in. There is a nightmarish creature from Australia called a thorny devil, with spines that have spines. Its Latin name, typed on a card taped to its aquarium, is
Moloch horridus.
In the next cage, a giant Gila monster sleeps under a heat lamp, its sides pooled out around it,
POISONOUS
! written in red on its card. A brilliant green gecko uses its tongue to wipe its eyes. The herpetologist's face is shining.
All these diverse adaptations, with one common goal,
he says.
To live to see tomorrow.
He turns abruptly towards the back of the room, tripping over a cardboard box full of crickets.
Come here,
he says, motioning, and I go to him and watch a barking tree frog, an impossible, unnatural yellow, delicately eat a fly out of his hand.

Natural History

My husband and I sit side by side on the couch in the light of one lamp. We say the same things we always do, slicing back through the scar tissue in one another's heart.
I've always felt,
he says,
that you never had any hope for us.
I stare at
the puddle of melted snow around his boots by the front door, no idea where to begin. My hopelessness extends to include the entire human race. We've mortgaged our lives, ruined the planet, and with modern technology rendered ourselves nearly obsolete. What is there to hope for? Who is equipped to take on what's to come? I saw our love as a fallout shelter for the future, and thought he did too. But all along he'd been with other women, with whom, he told me, he could have fun.
Fun
. When we make love I stare up at the ceiling, already imagining him pulling his pants back on, sliding into those boots, sneaking out soundlessly in the morning while I squeeze my eyes shut, feigning sleep.

Night Vision

I come home the next evening to find a dark snake draped across the foot of the bed. Motionless, waiting for my next move. I freeze, thrilled to the sheer shock of it. My pulse rips with terror and delight. Fingers quivering, I switch on the light. But it is only my husband's limp black sock, left from last night. Caught where it landed when we pulled off our clothes once words had failed us, as they always have.

Spadefoot Toad

Walking home from work, I go far out of my way to pass the university. I descend the steps to the herpetologist's office with as much sense of purpose as if I have been given my
own key. He is at his desk when I arrive, and he looks up from his papers and tells me about the spadefoot toad.
You're lucky to see one in the wild,
he says.
They burrow deep, deep in the ground. They've been found, unharmed, among the embers of brushfires. And,
he says, dropping his voice, leaning in close,
they freeze solid in winter. Solid. Like an ice cube. You could actually pick one up and throw it against a wall, and it would shatter.
As he says this, he makes the motion one would make to dash a frog against a wall, as if sidearming a tennis ball. His glasses slip off with the effort, and he fumbles for them with both hands. The silence that follows is intimate and close. Startled by this, I search his face, wondering if he notices it too. His gray beard is etched in red, annals of his younger self. Suddenly I want to tell him everything, things I have been afraid even to tell my husband.
I tried to kill myself once
, I say.
When I was young. I jumped off a bridge into a half-frozen river.
The herpetologist is quiet for so long that I wonder if I shouldn't have said it, then wish I could take it back. Finally he says,
And were you shivering, when they pulled you out? Of course I was shivering,
I say, confused. He nods.
Trust the body, not the mind,
he says, smiling.
The body loves itself.

Habitat

On Christmas Eve, I end up at another party. Every instinct says not to go, but it's no time to be alone, I keep telling myself, and there's a possibility my husband may be there. I manage to get myself into a dress and a pair of panty hose
and go. By the time I arrive, tight packs of people are already impenetrably formed around the room, plates expertly balanced, voices tinkling. I find a drink and arrange myself near the hors d'oeuvres, where I keep an eye on the door and stab my drink with its tiny straw. As time wears on, my panty hose sag around my thighs, hobbling me there. I watch the faces around the room, wondering how everyone can be having such a good time, given the devastating stories I'm sure that they too all saw on the six o'clock news. The only thing keeping me going is the Christmas tree, which smells like bracing outdoor work, well-being, and fulfillment. The hostess comes over and offers me another drink.
The tree smells lovely,
I say, motioning to it across the room.
Oh!
she says gaily.
It's a spray!
and sweeps away to fill my drink. I carry myself like a broken glass to the dark of the corner, where at least I can yank up my sagging panty hose. Sliding behind the tree, I see the holes in the plastic trunk where the wire branches screw in. A new low, to be failed by a tree. I grasp a bough between my thumb and forefinger for balance and find that I am nonetheless searching its needles for any sign of life, hoping for anything, the blink of an eye, a flash of a disappearing tail.