The Dead Are More Visible (16 page)

She was no longer crying. Her face was grey. She stood on tiptoe and struggled to knot one end of the rope to the brass hook screwed into the ceiling for a spider plant that had died in the chilly dimness and been removed. Laurel moved toward the bar. Merrick pulled in his head. The grating of a stool being dragged away over the linoleum, then a faint wet sob, more a hiccup. He peered out again. Laurel was trying to balance her bare feet on the middle rung of the stool base as she stood wobbling, the seat’s edge crimping the backs of her bare thighs, her arms raised, hands fumbling with the rope. Merrick felt choked as if by the tie he liked to wear to church Sunday mornings but could never quite knot, so that his father, surly, eyes sunken small and red, had to be summoned to help.

Summon him now, he thought. Both of them.

But Laurel pulled back, settled on the stool, wept weakly, and Merrick let out his breath, yet he was still afraid of startling her, so he waited—a minute, two minutes—the time seeming to stretch into hours, the way a ten-foot drop will deepen to a hundred when you’re trying to do it—jump—and he saw himself back in the brutal sunlight up on the edge of the quarry where his sister and her gang always went. A month earlier he had followed them up to the edge, yet again, telling himself it was to watch over Laurel in secret, but really hoping they would notice him and ask him
over for a drink. Hunched, sunglassed and sweating in the tall grass, he’d spied her and the others sprawling in the unseasonably warm sun on the clifftop, a transistor radio and a two-four of Red Cap in the gravel among them. The Band was playing “Stage Fright.” Some of the stoners dozed and sunbathed. Laurel and her wiry boyfriend, who had a full tan although it was just May, sat face to face, legs pretzeled together on an open sleeping bag, sharing a smoke and a beer, Laurel gently reaching her hands along the boy’s side-burned face and inching up the bandana wreathed hippie-style around his long straight hair. Kissing his open lips. Merrick’s face scalding as the boy’s brown hand slipped into Laurel’s bikini top.

One of the stoners, skinny chest tattooed, sat up in mock umbrage, tore off his mirrored John Lennon shades and in what Merrick knew to be a parody of their principal’s Scottish accent (Laurel often mocked him at home) told them to mind their deportment or they would be passing the whole night in detention. And another boy, working off a beer cap with the blade of his pocketknife, said, “They just need a cool dip.”

They were all up now, ready to throw Laurel and her boyfriend over the edge, but the two of them raised their hands in genial surrender and got up, stretching like lean, limber animals and daring each other to go first. When the tattooed boy with the granny shades, his bangs so long they seemed to part around his sharp
nose, bent and clinched the boyfriend around the waist as if to trundle him over, Laurel coolly stripped off her bikini and with a whoop sped away toward the edge. In motion that way—naked, running—she was a stranger to Merrick, without a face or a name. As she moved he was flushed and anxious and then, as she leapt out into space, he gasped
Laurel
. His last glimpse of her was a starburst of long red curls splayed out by the momentum of her jump.

The boyfriend ran to the edge, looked down, waved. Merrick hadn’t heard the splash. Now the boyfriend turned from the cliff and peeled off his tight cut-offs, revealing dense black pubic hair and a long, half-swollen penis—larger, Merrick realized with a shock, than his father’s, glimpsed in the bath.

After the boyfriend’s jump, Merrick stumbled out of the grass.

“Who’s the kid with the monster shades?” a girl asked.

“Where?” said the tattooed boy.

Merrick couldn’t see the tattoo clearly. He took off his sunglasses.

“Oh, fuck, it’s Laurel’s kid brother again.”

“Tell him to beat it,” the girl said.

“She can do it herself,” the tattooed boy said, gesturing with his bottle at the cliff, where Laurel was just appearing, head and shoulders and small high breasts seeming to levitate over the precipice. She must have been climbing a steep path. Her bare skin still dripped,
glowed with the freezing water, the ice just a few weeks gone. The tattooed boy whistled and Laurel blushed from the breasts up and rolled her eyes and flitted over to her things and dressed with great speed, as if the bikini could warm her.

“Your kid brother.”

Laurel, fumbling behind her back, looked up with smudged, startled eyes and frowned hard, then blushed again. “What are you doing here, Merrick?”

“Don’t know,” he mumbled. Then he lied: “Came to jump, I guess.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” the other girl said.

“We’d be in it deep,” the tattooed boy said, “if he got hurt.”

Laurel stared at Merrick. She shook her head and looked skyward, long-sufferingly, the way she always did with their parents, then fastened her gaze on the clifftop. After a moment she shrugged, or maybe shuddered, and made a lopsided smile. “If he really wants to, he can try.”

“We’d be in deep shit.”

“Kid can hardly walk, Laur. He’s like hardly out of diapers.”

“Shut up, Cathy,” Laurel said. “Just shut the fuck up, okay?”

“Must be a hundred feet down,” the tattooed boy said and cocked an eyebrow over one mirrored lens, as if Merrick were an idiot incapable of decoding such grade-school irony.

The boyfriend appeared on the lip of the cliff, wet headband high on his forehead, sinewy torso clenched up and shaking, his penis retracted now, puny as a child’s.

“That your kid brother again, Laur?”

“I can do it,” Merrick said, and spat dryly. “No shit. I can.”

Someone gave a hoot of derision or excitement and the radio’s volume shot up: The Who, “I Can See for Miles.”

Laurel, still knotting her brow, reached out her hand. “Okay, Merr, come on. Don’t listen to those guys. It’s fun, I’ll show you.”

And she did. She led him to the precipice and she told him what to do and she told him again, then again, with dwindling patience, as he stood there for a full hour, stripped to his jockey shorts, sweating and trembling, eyes trained on his watch or on his lily feet or the scared, bloodless bump of his cock in the white jockey shorts, to avoid seeing the water far below as his big chance ticked away and the stoners sauntered up beside him and teased or encouraged him and one after another, with some hesitation, leapt. Laurel said it was just forty feet to the water, tops, all you had to do was tuck in your arms and go straight down, but to Merrick the drop seemed endless, sickening as that film he had seen at school: the camera in a jet fighter skimming low and fast over the desert toward the edge of the Grand Canyon, till the drop shudders into view and in a flash
the earth’s floor shears away and the abyss explodes under you and your breath is gone, your guts, you’re plummeting till the life-cord jerks taut and your parachute hangs you in mid-air—a jolt like the slap on a newborn’s back—and you breathe. Even the toughest of Laurel’s gang were a bit scared. It took most of them a minute or two, and two or three chugs of beer, to muster the courage for each jump, and when they did jump they would gangle and windmill their arms like third graders on a trampoline—though once they surfaced they were themselves again, cured, aged, by the waters, the way liquor could age you, absolve you of childhood—the tattooed boy coolly tossing his head to flick the wet bangs from his eyes.

After an hour they went back to their beer and left Merrick on the edge of the cliff, teeth rattling, loose limestone shards stabbing at his soles. In the distance past the city the river was a long, quivering blade carving up the sandbars, and beyond it the hills seemed to fold and crumple under waves of rising heat. Down on the water Merrick’s shadow looked scrawny. It seemed to move like an hour hand as the sun burning his neck and shoulders crossed the sky behind him and began to fall. But if Merrick couldn’t jump, he could not back away either, though Laurel, feet slung over the edge where she sat digging red fingernails into a beer label, was now trying to talk him out of it, telling him it was cool, the cliff was bigger for him than it was for them ’cause he was still so small, right? Shit, he was the brain on relativity.

Her brow and mouth began to pucker, harden. She grabbed their father’s sunglasses—they were hooked over her bikini top between her breasts—and stuck them on. He choked back a welling in his throat. For a few years they had hardly exchanged a word and now she was making this overture, offering him this chance, and he knew he could not shame them both and let her down.

But he could not jump.

Laurel got up and tilted her beer back and drained it and hurled the bottle out across the quarry. It seemed to fall for a long time. “Maybe you should be heading home, kid.” And as he nodded gravely and half turned, realizing his last chance was squandered, a stone flipped, jabbing his heel, and he lost balance, lurched forward and knew he was falling and that knowledge braced him with a kind of helpless courage. Laurel reached out to help him but he launched with his feet, arms flapping, and he was airborne—motionless it seemed—then gravity was roaring up through his bowels and belly and throat and the dark circle of the water was surging up at him like a maw. He whipped his arms for balance and kicked at the air but at the last moment he wobbled off-kilter, yelled and smacked the water at an angle not quite belly flat but bad enough, and when the roaring, the wild kaleidoscope of ice-green fragments, had wound down to a stillness, the sun’s heat was on his face and eyelids and from high above came the mewing of a gull. Lips were being pressed to his, breath flowed
into him in waves. He coughed wetly and heard Laurel close behind him, panting, then something eclipsed the sun and he opened his eyes: the tattooed boy’s granny shades goggled down through the long, bracketing wings of hair, his sunken chest a few inches away as he tried to nurse Merrick with a bottle of beer. Drinking the warm beer, Merrick eyed his chest tattoo: a conventional pierced, bleeding-heart design, except the thin black arrow was tipped at both ends.

“You all right? Fuck, kid, that was some belly flop. You cool?”

He nodded. Because he’d done it. Even if Laurel, they told him, had had to dive in and fish him out because he was too shocked by the impact and the cold to swim. And later as she walked him home she’d actually let him know how proud she was—maybe in part, he guessed, so he wouldn’t tell their mother what had happened, how he’d wrenched his neck and ankle and lost his watch and nearly drowned. As if he would tell. “At first I thought you just slipped, then I realized you were really jumping. But it looked so strange. Like there was somebody behind you pushing you and you were trying not to go off the edge, but this invisible thing was pushing you. And the way your arms were flapping! Fuck, Merr, I’m sorry to be … I’m glad you’re all right.” As she draped a sunburned arm around his shoulders (maybe less in sibling solidarity than to help him walk), he felt a grin surge up inside him and burst into daylight like a man surfacing from far below
after a perfect dive, arms raised, lungs inhaling the air in rapture and relief.

But that hour turned out to be an interlude, a singularity, not a fresh start, and in the weeks that followed he saw Laurel less than ever before. As if that day had meant little to her. As if the ripples caused by his jump—which to him had seemed seismic, he being the first in his school to do it—were for her soon overwhelmed by the churnings of some greater storm.

When she leapt off the barstool it seemed some invisible thing had shoved her, because the set of her face and body and even the last twitch before the fall all seemed to be resisting it—yet she did fall, and when the short noose jerked her with a tight, shuddering bounce, her legs started scissoring, a child in a tantrum, trying to kick away the stool or to climb back on. The stool toppled over. There was an echoing crash upstairs. Laurel’s hands clutched spastically at the pink rope tightening around her neck. Her pale face reddened, her eyes bulged, the trembling jump rope strained to its limit.

For seconds he had been frozen like up on the precipice but now, again, something shoved him out of the grip of fear, or whatever it was that held him. He was halfway to her, calling “Laurel, Laurel, please!” when he realized the rope was still stretching, like a piece of licorice pulled apart, his sister slowly descending to the floor.

The glass slipped from his hand and smashed at his
feet. Their mother was yelling from the head of the stairs. Laurel was lighting on her toes, clawing at the rope still squeezing her neck, glaring as he threw himself at her and gripped her around the belly to lift her and ease the choking, and a vision came of the two of them in the quarry, underwater, Laurel buoying him up through tunnels of turquoise light until they breached in a shock of sunlight and spray, he gulped at the air, she towed him coughing back to shore … Merrick heard her gasp. He looked up and she was scowling down as if to say,
Let go of me, you moron, get this fucking jump rope off my neck
.

Their mother loomed before them, a drink in one hand, pawing at her glasses with the other as if to clear a lens and discredit this hellish scene: her delinquent daughter half hanged beside the shattered barstool and her sunglassed ten-year-old drunk, cut open, kneeling in glass like shards of ice, as if he’d just hauled her up out of a hole in the river.

The last guests are gone and Merrick and Laurel clean up. She’s quiet now, tired, it seems, and sad. Partly it’s Kevin. For fifteen years he has been a solid part of their small galaxy of family and friends, a satellite of stable orbit, and now abruptly his orbit has changed and carried him off in a way that violates all the old logic, old laws.

Merrick is thinking of things in this way because of his own teaching and because talk of that day at the
quarry has reminded him of something the whole school believed then. Mr. Leung notwithstanding, it was a well-known fact that the quarry had been formed thousands of years before by a meteorite: a great flaming boulder billowing clouds of smoke had shrieked down through the atmosphere and stamped itself into the limestone, leaving behind a crater, scorched cliffs, a deep glacial-green socket of water that had spilled in from the river two miles off.