I am being called away. It’s Sonje. She’s knocking on the glass—it’s five already, gah—that separates this home from the air outside, and I am going to answer that door.
SATURDAY
Before I make some notes on the preceding passage, let me first say that Sonje makes an extraordinary bundt cake. When I left you last, she was knocking, wholly unannounced, on my sliding porch door of tempered glass. I was surprised but not all that surprised, because when you’re one of a pair at the cusp of something brief but strong you know when someone might arrive. Her hair was down, and her hair is a thing of such extravagance that I sucked in a quick breath. I hadn’t seen her with it down yet, and it was like something painted by a Wyeth, any of them—I thought first of Helga, because wasn’t she Andrew’s neighbor, and wasn’t her hair, though rust-colored, rendered strand by strand?
She drove us to Whitianga, her Volvo tight around the coast. She drove like a lunatic; she knew the road and its many turns, and even in the rain she slowed for nothing. We ate on the second floor of a casual place, tables without cloths, where we both had sea bass, after I confirmed—I had to make sure with the manager because the waiter couldn’t verify anything—that it wasn’t Chilean.
At dinner, in the soft light from the room’s corners, Sonje looked older. Her eyes, when she smiled, pulled a dozen tiny lines from her temples, I liked her more and though the food was plain it tasted fantastic. Her mouth was still full-lipped and while a baby downstairs wailed I wanted to be alone with her in her house, to see how she arranged her pillows. She was a banker, she said, or used to be. She’d also been a lawyer, almost a judge, and once worked in Connecticut for the World Wrestling Federation. She liked professional wrestling a lot.
“We have to go see it,” she said. We were now talking about the shape on the beach.
I didn’t want to.
“I can’t understand why,” she said. “You don’t seem like someone who’d be afraid of a shape on a beach.”
Back in her house, with all the lights turned on, she gave me a tour; the house was full of outsider art, much of it American, and African sculpture, which always looks the same to me, indistinguishable from anything you’d get at a flea market, but again, I know nothing. We walked in and quickly out of her bedroom and I understood but by the time we were in the second guest room, and she was pointing out the view from the shower, I couldn’t hold back and from behind I wrapped my arms around her and sucked on her neck.
This morning we walked over the dunes and down to where the beach was flat. The shape was no more than fifty yards away. I stopped and squinted at the shape. Sonje waited for me.
“You notice the colors in this country are so bright?” she said. “I was in Massachusetts last year, in February. There weren’t any colors. It’s not that there was snow, because there wasn’t. But it was monochromatic anyway. Just a kind of grey-brown everywhere. And I know it was winter and all, but I still missed New Zealand. It’s a kind of cartoon palette down here, wouldn’t you say? The ocean is blue and the hills are green. They keep the good colors handy.”
“You don’t think it’s a body, do you?” I asked.
She smiled and shook her head.
She hadn’t let me stay long the night before. We groped each other while standing in the shower, and for a time with her sitting on the sink, but she’d wrapped things up.
“That was needed,” she said, and led me to the door.
I couldn’t concentrate when I woke up, knowing she’d come over after breakfast to take me down to the shape. She had her theories about it, which she wouldn’t divulge, and she wanted to prove herself right. I hadn’t slept much; I fell asleep after getting home, but already the bed was stupid with just me in it, and I had to use the vodka and Orangina trick again, which brought me awake at six, before the sunrise, which came without rain.
Sonje was wearing shorts, blue plastic sandals, a long-billed baseball hat and her margarine scarf. We walked to the shape. It was bigger as we walked closer. If it was a person, it was a very large person, at least three hundred pounds. Still the body was laying on its side, but now perhaps a third of it was beneath the sand, and as we walked closer, the smooth blackness of the shape became dotted with sand, and what seemed to be hair. The shape was wearing black everywhere. I stopped again.
“Hand, you’re being irrational now,” Sonje said, and she took my fingers in hers and continued.
Within seconds we were upon it, and the smell was upon us. A farm smell, thick and meaty.
“I had a hunch,” she said. “There’s the snout.”
“I didn’t know pigs got that big,” I said. The thing was enormous, the size of a cow.
“Beautiful thing, though. Look at that coat. It’s still in good shape.”
“Don’t touch it!” I yelled. She was leaning down to touch the damned thing.
“I’ll wash up afterward,” she said.
And she did, and I was there.
SUNDAY
Sonje has a great walk. It’s slinky, in that her feet precede her shoulders, and she has a fluidity that’s reassuring. We played Hide and Seek last night, we really did, and it was one of the most oddly intense things I’ve ever done. We took it very seriously, and because neither of us knew my rented house too well, there were many places to hide. Afterward, still walking around the house, we drank most of a bottle of red wine the owners had left in the pantry, and eventually were laying on the couch, where we were temporarily too tired to move.
I’d been telling her about my work on Will’s book, and about that trip, and about Will generally. She asked if I missed him and I said yes, reflexively.
“That’s normal,” she said, and finished the wine. We were drinking from the bottle.
“I don’t miss my brother,” she said.
I hadn’t known that she’d lost a brother.
“He drowned two years ago,” she said, taking off her socks and placing them in a bowl of oranges I’d arranged earlier in the day, to impress her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I think I’ll miss him eventually,” she said, “but I’m not going to force it.”
It seemed like a perfectly logical answer that would have horrified most people. It was an answer that freed me, completely, too, because I haven’t missed Will in any familiar way yet. Will’s own account of his tears over Jack were a mystery to me, because I hadn’t shed many over Will. Maybe it hasn’t been long enough. There were times during our friendship when we didn’t talk for months, even six months at a time, and so far it hasn’t felt any different. Or maybe I just always figured he’d die young. That’s the most true I can be, but I have no idea why that’s the case.
“But it’s awful, I think, to die like that, in a dirty river,” Sonje said.
“Where did your brother die?”
“Out on that bay,” she said, and pointed through the dark window, past our reflections, where we could make out the pink horizontal line of the breaking surf.
“Jesus,” I said. If I had lost a brother here I would not return to this beach. I didn’t tell her this.
“I don’t come here for any ghoulish reason,” she said. “But I must say that it just doesn’t really move me one way or another. I don’t look out into that water and see Adam. He’s not some body for me anymore. Even if a body like his did wash up someday, I wouldn’t see that body as Adam. Does that sound strange?”
I shook my head and kissed her shoulder, half-hoping that she would adjust it. Where it was, it was digging into my sternum but I hadn’t wanted to interrupt her.
“My point,” she said, “is that for me there’s a difference between drowning alone, while sailing, on a clear bay, and dying in a brown river full of people. And with your mother! It’s so much worse.”
“Oh lord, that didn’t happen,” I said, blurted really, and it occurred to me that I haven’t told you this, either.
Will’s mom had been gone eight years when we left for Dakar. Thi
s is a fiction that I can’t be angry about, and one of which admittedly I could have relieved this text long ago. I have been writing this, as promised, in order, no looking back, and though I’d meant, time and again, to explain this part to you, I didn’t, and now I wonder if I’m somehow complicit in this particular fiction. Will’s mother was never available for phone calls while we were traveling. My shock at reading the first lines of this book, those giving birth to the fictional Jack, was only matched by my surprise and then sympathy when, in a few years, it’s implied that Will’s mom was alive and present at the point when Will was lost in Colombia. It’s my guess that even the ghostwriter was fooled at this point, because I have no doubt that Will wrote every last word, throughout this text, of the passages that render various conversations with his mother. I remember where I was—riding the Northwestern community train from the city to Milwaukee, on the upper level, trying not to touch the window, which was frozen—when I read the first conversation between Will and his mom, dead ten or so years. I dropped the book and my throat went coarse. I didn’t know, for so many years, that he was still so close to the grief. Or perhaps he wasn’t; perhaps he had to have the distance he did to feel comfortable rendering her again, resurrecting her in this form. But I couldn’t help picturing him, writing the story, with a pen on a series of spiral-bound unruled pages, and wanting to be able, as he did so, to tell his mother about the trip. She would have loved it all. She was a great lady; the story about Great America is true, though of course it was just the three of us, without Jack. She was a woman that always teetered close to the sort of parent who tries too hard to be liked by the young, though she never went over that line. She was comfortable with her age, with her role, and I came to understand that she went to arcades and Lasertag with us not because she had to prove her understanding of us, but because she plain liked that kind of shit. And so there she is, sort of, in these brief conversations, while her son traveled through Africa and while she was slowly slipping into senility. (Another fabrication: in life, she died of complications from surgery on a lymph node.) But even when she was scolding or harping, Will would have found solace in hearing her voice again, and it does sound like her, precisely so, even though I could hear little of her as I read, so preoccupied was I with this new insight into Will, and how badly, it was obvious, it was breathtaking, he wanted her back.
As would any mother’s son, especially if that son was the only child. His journal from his days after Cuernavaca, in Colombia, etc., incomplete as it is, also includes his mother as his constant companion. I don’t want to think that Will was losing himself or his mind; I prefer to believe that he was fictionalizing different things for different reasons, but anyway, only broken men and dictators can be made from the separation from their sole parent, and if that only parent is his mother, the extremes would seem more likely. So of all of Will’s fabrications, I want to emphasize that it’s this one that I understand the most, as much as it slashes my heart diagonally. We do know this: Jack is there so Will could write about pain. I see his mother every time he mentions Jack, and every time he lies awake, mouthing the words of a silent debate, he’s giving voice to his outrage that he’s still separated from his mom, and that they were picked on, singled out, when they had no one but each other to begin with. But this is just a guess. Another: I think the book as a whole is a sacrament of sorts, a physical representation, of too many things otherwise ephemeral—a social demonstration of a partly unknowable internal state, a messy combination of Twain’s shapeless string of absurdities, and something like that state of secular grace I was talking about earlier. Maybe all books are sacraments. Do we achieve a state of elevation, as we read and write? That’s probably a stretch.
There are things I probably won’t and can’t understand about him, and why he did what he did. You’ll continue to read now, knowing what I knew, what is true and what is less true, and I hope that his account still holds the power he intended. I’m of the opinion that its power might be increased, and am of the view that had he stayed straight from the beginning … well, you know my opinion about that. I believe in fact, and I believe in the plain truth told wholly—that the truth retold can be a net thrown around life at a certain time and place, encompassing all within, and that people can go out there, live as actors, work within their staging ground, do so with a soft heart; I want others to go out in the world with an idea, with intentions and means, and come back with a story about how their actions affected the world and how they themselves were shaped by the results. I have a belief that such endeavors can improve the world, however recklessly, especially when these people go forward and interact, give, solve, change the situations they encounter—and also, even those with no intentions of recording their actions. There’s nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn’t be reiterated. Friends, I urge you to find us hopeful. I urge you to find that we tried something, knowing nothing of the results. I remind you that we did freeze on a Latvian beach, which is pictured somewhere in these pages, we froze our fingers and knees and ears, in order to tape almost a thousand dollars in a rubber tire. And there is a chance that this money will not find the right new owner, and there is a chance that it’s still there, full of mold or now the home for some disease-carrying insect, and there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.
MONDAY
Sonje went back to Auckland yesterday, to the house she shares with her husband, who she hasn’t seen in two and a half months. I leave today and have things to do in Phuket when I get there. I will be good.
The pig is gone, the one that washed ashore behind this house. Today the morning was dry and clear again, and I stepped onto the deck, and where the pig was, there was just a low mound. I’m not sure if someone buried it there, or if the sand just built up around it.
The pig symbolizes nothing.
* Though the text as printed before and after my interlude is as Will wrote it, there’s no way, of course, he could have written that first page, being no longer with us, and therefore not close to a word processor. His manuscript was sent to the publisher before his second departure, for South America, and after his death there, they shopped the task of writing a neat opening paragraph to a writer of semi-fictions with a tendency toward the clever setup. The result speaks for itself.
MONDAY
I felt good and strong so we packed and left.
“You’re good?”
“I think so. I feel good.”
We rented a car from two young blond women in red jackets—we knew such comfort from those red jackets—and we told them we would drop it off in Riga, Latvia, the next day. We didn’t know if we could feel good about the day before.
“Your first trip,” the one on the left said, “should be to buy some coats.” She was frisky and correct. It was a dull but intense cold, and snow flurried through the city, changing direction in midflight, flakes swarming, losing their way, then finding a new paths.
We were going to three or four hours south, looking for poor on the way. We’d spend the night in Riga, and in the morning visit the Liv. Our guidebook mentioned the Liv, a Finno-Ugric fishing tribe five thousand years old, the descendants of which still lived on the west coast of the Gulf of Riga. There were only a handful of elders who could still speak the Livonian tongue, and we figured we’d go there, find them, give them the rest of the money—about $11,000. Then we’d swing back down, drop the car in Riga, catch a flight to Cairo, bribe a guard at the pyramids to let us climb to the top of Cheops and from there watch the sunrise come over the Sahara. Perfect.
At the café next door, as we waited for the car, we shared a local newspaper—on the fro
nt page a picture of a man, a hunter, standing above three dead animals, lynx or snow cats—and watched a meeting of three young businesspeople, all speaking English to each other with similar Eastern-European accents. We ate toast and jam. At the nearby bank, looking precisely like every bank in America, glass and steel and expensive signage, I cashed more traveler’s checks. I was so sick of my name it pained me. I wrote it on each one, my signature more and more deranged each time. The teller counted my money three times, quickly like a dealer, and handed it to me slowly, implying it meant more to me than her, which I wasn’t sure was true.
We left the city and turned on the heat. We still had no coats.
On the side of the road, in the trees, we began to see men. Every five or ten miles a man in the forest on a stump, sitting. They weren’t doing anything in particular. Certainly not ice-fishing—there was no water under their feet, just the forest floor. But otherwise it did seem to be an ice-fishing pose. We saw three or four and then a man of maybe seventy, closer to the road than the others, sitting on a box before a small but robust fire. A dirt road beside him led from the highway through the tall straight trees. I was driving. Hand was still watching them as we passed.