The View From the Seventh Layer

  Olivia worked at the map stand in exchange for her rent at the cottage, her monthly utilities, and the small salary her father paid her. He called the salary her “bonus.” He gave it to her in a plain white envelope each and every Friday afternoon, even during the months when the map stand was closed. She opened the stand each day at eight o'clock, unlocking the cash register and raising the awning. Sometimes, in the morning, when the wind was blowing just right, the sun caught only the tops of the waves, and it looked as though a thousand bars of light were following one another over the water into shore. There were days when she thought she could not bear to stand behind the counter another moment, but this was the truth: whenever she had some time off, she did not know what to do with herself. Toward the end of the tourist season, when the docks were busy only on the weekends, she liked to spread her maps open on the counter and trace the shoreline with her finger. The image of the island's loosely textured mesh of roads surrounded by the pale blue ring of the ocean always made her think of an old, torn fishing net. The net was ready to snap at any moment, and it caught only the slowest and least clever of fish these days. The fish were lifted from their avenues of water into the piercing blue air, where they thrashed their tails and struggled for breath. Every so often, after the 3:15 rainstorm, Olivia would close the stand early and walk home with her hands at her sides, weaving like a butterfly through the shining field of umbrellas.

  She had been living on the island for eight and a half years. Every Tuesday afternoon the widow Lorenzen would rent the latest action movies from the new releases section of the video store, and every Tuesday evening Olivia would hear her yelling at her television through the window screens. “Fire! Fire!” she shouted, and “Kill the son of a bitch!” and “Right there! He's right behind you!” She liked Bruce Willis, Jet Li, and Harrison Ford, she said, but she hated Keanu Reeves and “all that supernatural stuff.” The most formidable insects Olivia had ever had to coax outside for her were a pair of dragonflies. When Olivia asked the Entity where it came from, it explained that there were twelve layers of space, of which the average member of the human race was aware of only four, though mystics, small children, and mathematicians occasionally caught a glimpse of the fifth or the sixth. The Entity told her that it came from the seventh layer. In the seventh layer of space, it said, the past was indistinguishable from the present, so nothing was ever truly lost, and nothing was ever truly irreparable. The Entity fell quiet as it caught sight of her face. It cocked its head and asked her, “Do you need me to help you?” And Olivia realized she was crying. People who read Tolstoy find it difficult to be alive because they are reasonable, while people who read Dostoyevsky find it difficult to be alive because they are not. In Judy Cossey's yearbook she wrote: When we were in the eighth grade, I found a love note from David Diehl to you on the floor of Miss Mount's room, and I kept it in my purse for more than a week before I slipped it back into your locker.

  Winter on the island was drowsy and temperate, a few short months of easy sleeping and cool wind gusts that carried the spindrift off the waves and sent it drizzling down over the beachfront shopping lanes. During the winter Olivia spent more time sitting outside on her patio, leaning back in her rattan chair and listening to the traffic on the street. The cars rolled by with a soft hiss of their tires. The bicycles gave off a barely detectable rattle of spokes. On the last page of the story Olivia recalled reading about the man who could hear the race cars in his walls, the protagonist discovered that the wood in his house was rotten with termites. She could never remember where she had originally read the story, or who it was that wrote it. Sometimes, when she was feeling well, she would set a winter evening aside to stroll through the island's Historic District and on out to the grassy rise of Norfolk pines. It was the kind of place where children chased one another through the trees and teenagers lay on picnic blankets with their hands inside each other's clothing. People smoked cigarettes, and picked flowers, and had conversations, and everything happened as though she weren't even there. She was like the ghost of the moon in that half hour before the sun fell, hanging imperceptibly in the branches of the pine trees. She would not have been surprised to learn that she had become invisible.

  She began walking home soon after the street lamps were lit. It was important to her that she have an hour of silence in the house before she took her pill and prepared for bed, a time when nobody would place any demands on her and she would place no demands on herself. There were lamps on the streets of the island that were still filled with the breath of the glassblowers who had originally created them, and as she made her way home, she thought of them suspended in neat rows above the cobblestones, perfect little bubbles of captive history. She always hoped that she would not find the lights on inside her cottage. And, if she did, she hoped that it was only because she had forgotten to shut them off—that and nothing else. Her fingers twitched as she unlocked the door, like grass blades springing upright behind the treads of a tire. This was what the Entity had told her when her tears were finally extinguished—that there were seven layers of space between itself and the foundation of the universe, just as there were seven layers of skin between the open air and the inside of the human body. Then it touched the hollow of her neck, and she gasped as she felt the heat scorching through her skin. The sky outside the portal was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  She had been on three first dates since she moved to the island. Two of the first dates had taken place in the very same week, when she was still working as a maid for the house cleaning service and had not yet broken the momentum she was sure would sweep her away to another place. Eventually, after some time had passed, she would form the habit that all shore dwellers had of hearing the ocean without noticing it, but in her first few months on the island she could never quite ignore the crashing of the surf. Night and day she felt as if she were lost at sea in a wooden raft, the waves lifting and releasing her again and again. The first of her first dates was named Richard Jackson. He spent their entire dinner telling her about the approaching age of digital consciousness, when the human mind would be subsumed inside a framework of superpowerful computers. He spoke in a thick chain of technological acronyms—CPU, MIS, LAN—and after a while, Olivia grew bored and bewildered and began interjecting various acronyms of her own into the conversation: “I'm worried about the MSG in this BLT,” she said, and “I had a PYT who worked for KFC, but he turned out to have an STD.” A long time ago there were people who used to tell her she was funny. The second of her first dates was also named Richard—Richard Pheby—and though he slipped his fingers under the table to make a spidering gesture on her knee, and she liked the way he smiled at her, he did not kiss her when the night came to an end, and he did not call her again.

  The hurricane sirens went off every Wednesday at noon. She had weathered one major hurricane and three minor ones on the island. There were some things she would never get used to. She still flinched every time the horns began to wail. In the Midwest the sirens were called tornado sirens, and on the West Coast they were called air raid sirens. The one major hurricane that had swept through the island since she had been there—Carla, it was named—filled the streets with sand and tore a sheet of embossed tin off the roof of her house. For the next few weeks, until a good wind set it free, she watched it shining and swaying inside the coronet of the palm tree across the street. In Jared Serveert's yearbook she wrote: I can see your backyard from the roof of my house. Once, when we were kids, Kim Olsen was spending the night with me, and we climbed up there and watched you doing leaps on your trampoline. A few days after the sheet of tin came loose from on top of her house, a leak developed in her kitchen ceiling, passing a steady drip of coffee-colored water onto the linoleum. Her father sent his handyman over to repair the damage. The handyman wore a Harley-Davidson cap and a T-shirt that read NO JESUS, NO PEACE. KNOW JESUS, KNOW PEACE. He told her, “This primer works real good, boy, but let me tell you, you stand in those fumes too
long and you're definitely killing off some brain cells. That's why so many painters are alcoholics. They walk around buzzed all day long.” He made her open all the windows before he left. The widow Lorenzen cornered him in the driveway and asked him to help her kill a spider she had spotted crawling under her refrigerator—“a big fat, juicy one,” she said. The next day, when Olivia's father came over to examine her kitchen ceiling, he stood on his tiptoes and prodded the plaster with his fingers. “The man may be an imbecile, but he does excellent work,” he announced, and he paused to scratch his jaw. “Not a damp spot to be found.”

  The leak had left a puddle of brown water on the linoleum that Olivia had to soak up with a few dozen paper towels. She was lucky, her father told her, that the water had fallen over the open floor and that nothing important had been drenched. In the kitchen she had her microwave and her food processor. In the living room there was her couch and her aloe plant and her stereo. The bedroom was where she kept her books, her TV, and the sandalwood jewelry box she had bought for herself when she graduated from high school. The jewelry box was painted a bright jade green, and it exhibited an image of a white-breasted nuthatch on its lid. Inside, it held her earrings and her bracelets and the gold necklace she had not worn since the Entity brushed its fingers across the hollow of her neck and wounded her with the heat of its touch, which was what people did when they wanted to love you. Once, she was standing on top of the Greek restaurant looking through a pay telescope when the shadows of the clouds on the ocean began to flash with a range of colors that broke and swirled as she tracked them across the water. The effect lasted only a few seconds, and afterward, she could not be sure it had happened at all. When her time ran out, a black gate snicked shut inside the telescope, and the lens immediately went dark. The sound reminded her of the silver blade of the novelty guillotine her father used whenever he wanted to clip the ends off his cigars. Olivia had read somewhere that the brain sometimes remained conscious for several minutes after a person was decapitated, and that the head of Charlotte Corday had blushed and given an angry sneer when it was slapped by her executioner. She could picture the expression with no trouble at all.

  Her third first date had taken place just last year. This one was not named Richard, but Cason—Cason Copeland—and she never would have gone out with him at all had it not been for her mother, who had made her promise that she would make an effort with the next man who showed some interest in her. “You keep trying to change yourself from the inside out, but it doesn't work that way, honey. People change themselves from the outside in. You have to try, Via.” So she had met Cason Copeland for sushi and drinks at the little Polynesian restaurant by the sculpture garden, and she had listened to his stories about the commodities brokerage he owned, smiling when he seemed to be making a joke, and she had tried—or at least she had tried to try. After they ate, he suggested that the two of them go dancing, and though Olivia didn't really feel up for it, she remembered her mother telling her, “What you do is pretend that you're up for it, and if you pretend well enough, you'll find that you are.” The club Cason took her to had a live DJ and a tequila bar. It was one of her spinning days, when she could hardly turn her head to the side or roll her shoulders forward without feeling that she was about to topple over. She knew she was in trouble when she found herself looking for the mirrored ball above the dance floor and realized that there wasn't one. The dance floor was covered with scuff marks that looked like the impressions that car tires leave in the sand: tiny tires with tiny treads. You could see them only when you were lying with your cheek pressed to the boards. People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically. Olivia remembered the sound of Cason's voice apologizing to the other dancers as he lifted her up off the floor. “Sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry about this.” He wrenched her out of the club and sent her home in a taxi. Later, when she looked in her bathroom mirror, she saw that the entire left side of her face was smeared with an oily black dust. She was too tired to wash herself clean. That night, as she slept, the dust came off in flakes against her pillow.

  The map stand was built of cypress and heart pine, and was painted a salmon color that seemed to glow in the light of the marina. It looked flimsy, barely finished, and people imagined when they saw it that the first big storm would rip it away, scattering the pieces for hundreds of yards along the shore, but Olivia had watched it survive through all four hurricanes without so much as a cracked board. Once, she had come to work to find the lock hanging loose from the gate, and she was sure that thieves must have broken in and taken the cash register. But the only things missing were a box of thirty-six Mars bars and the LEAVE A PENNY, TAKE A PENNY cup. Four brass screws were standing in a row on the counter, their rounded ends pointing into the air like the noses of performing seals. When the locksmith arrived, he jiggled the lock and told her, “See, what you've got here is one of those crummy little Wal-Mart jobs. My guess is that whoever took your Mars bars there gave it a good tug and it just plain fell off. You folks need to get you a nice solid industrial lock, is what you need.” Another time someone—Curtis Judkins, she presumed—spray-painted CURTIS JUDKINS DID THIS on the stand's back wall. The spray paint was a sickly fluorescent orange. Her father had the boards recoated by the end of the business day. As far as Olivia could tell, the structure had an unending capacity to withstand assault without suffering harm. It was as though it presented itself so modestly to the world that the world had decided it was not worth destroying. In the summer she liked to listen to the rain drumming against the awning as the latest batch of tourists scrambled for shelter under their jackets and umbrellas, in the shops along the beachfront, and beneath the tarry brown wood of the docks.

  The only people Olivia spoke to regularly were her father, her mother, and the widow Lorenzen. She had overheard the occasional conversation, though, and spotted the occasional glance, and she knew that she was considered unusual by many of the islanders. She was aware of the things they said about her. They examined all her most shameful impulses—every fantasy, every fleeting thought—then passed them along to one another as if they had really happened. There were rumors that she stole from the grocery store, that she stabbed herself with pencils, that she urinated outdoors, that she slept with older men, that she had long conversations with herself when she thought no one was listening. She had never told anyone about the Entity. It had assured her that she would always be able to tell when it was nearby because of the variation in the color of the shadows the clouds cast on the water. It said that she should look for a pattern of iridescence there, like the designs she had sometimes noticed on the inner bindings of expensive books, except that the marblings of color would appear in every possible shade of blue, from the softest of azures to the darkest of indigos. This was what she saw when she looked out over the ocean: gulls diving into the waves, boats with their sails belling out in the wind, and, every so often, a Coast Guard vessel thundering out toward the open water. People who read Tom Clancy would not approve of Olivia—neither her weakness nor her sorrow.

  One late-September Sunday, after the widow Lorenzen had returned home from church, she found an infestation of reddish brown insects with clear triangular wings in her foyer. She called Olivia over to get rid of them. “There must be hundreds of them, crawling all over one another,” she said. “Filthy things.” Then she paused as she thought of a way to describe them: “It looks like a grasshopper and a mosquito got together and had babies.” The insects were flowing over the small patch of tiled floor around the front door, spilling apart and then merging back together. They looked like the rain of static on a dead TV station. The widow wanted Olivia to kill them, but instead Olivia borrowed a broom and used it to sweep them out onto the porch, where they staggered around in a sunstruck daze. Half an hour later, they were back in the foyer. And half an hour after that, they were dead. Olivia was sure that it was her fault. The br
oom had broken their legs, or it had ruptured their hearts, and the injury had killed them. She was carrying the husks of the insects outside on a dustpan when a blast of wind sent them whirling off toward the palmetto barrens. People who read Tom Wolfe feel that they have never abandoned their ground, that it is the world around them that has snapped free of its foundations. The sheet of embossed tin that the hurricane had ripped from her house had sailed almost half a block after the wind lifted it out of the palm tree, landing finally in the pool behind the public kindergarten. Olivia paged through her copy of Insects of the Greater United States when she got home and discovered that the bugs were neither grasshoppers nor mosquitos, but mayflies. She felt sick to her stomach. Here was a group of insects that had been permitted only one day of adult life, and she had taken it away from them. If only she had known what she was seeing, she thought. If only she had been just a little bit smarter, just a little bit more careful. The kindergarteners liked to pretend that the sheet of tin roofing that had landed behind their school was a door to another world. They heard the splash when it fell from the sky. They called it “the moon portal.” They dared one another to dive to the bottom of the pool and open it.

  Most of Olivia's favorite people on the island were strangers to her: the woman who drove the car with the missing windshield, the old man who sold bird whistles he had carved into the shape of finger bones, the little girl she had seen burying Oreos on the beach and then watering them with a plastic bucket. Why was it that the people she liked best always seemed to be the ones who inspired odd looks from everybody else? They were like those deep-sea creatures with watery, transparent skin: you could see the soft little jerking beans of their hearts, you understood that the very thing that was supposed to protect them was the thing that made them vulnerable, and you knew that you couldn't help them, so you decided to love them instead. Sometimes, when Olivia was working, she filled entire days watching out for her favorite people: they were everywhere, the people she loved but could not help, like a linked chain stretching from the early morning into the late afternoon. There was the man who scraped the moss off the hulls of the boats when he thought no one was looking. There was the woman who sat on the same bench every day, flossing her teeth and staring out at the ocean. There were the twins who always stopped at her stand after school ended to buy two packages of Now and Laters—lemon for the girl with the pink backpack and cherry for the girl with the blue. Olivia could not remember whether she had read it in a book or seen it on a wildlife documentary or simply heard it in conversation somewhere, but one way or another she had picked up the idea that armadillos always give birth to identical twins. The story was almost certainly a myth, though. She traced the shore of the island on one of the maps. She watched the clouds making shapes against the sky. Her mother called her on the first Sunday of every month. The time difference was only two hours, but she could never recall whether the clocks ran earlier or later on the island, and she always seemed to think that she was rousing Olivia out of a sound sleep. “I'm not ringing too early, am I?” she asked, or “Am I calling you too late?” This was the truth: it was almost never too early. The pills Olivia took helped her to go under at night, but they did not necessarily allow her to sleep through till morning. Sometimes she would lie in bed for hours waiting until it was time to get up. She had become skilled at recognizing the first signs of morning. To begin with, the frogs and the night insects fell silent. The earliest of the cars went hushing down the street. The paperboy's bicycle rattled up the widow Lorenzen's driveway, and the paper landed on her porch with a flat little smack. The first few birds opened up their lungs as the farthest rim of the sky grew pale. But it was not until the great ball of the sun appeared that the curtains in her bedroom began to gather the light. Sometimes Olivia had already gotten out of bed to make her coffee before she remembered that she could hear the ocean. Her mother told her that there were times when the only sound she could detect from her window was the wind trickling through the orange trees like a cool, lazy stream. “Why don't you come down to São Paulo? Move in with Graciliano and me?” she asked when she called. And then, later, “What did you say, Via? Paris Stories? I've always wanted to read that book.” And then, later still, “I can't believe you're still speaking to that son of a bitch.” On the few occasions when Olivia managed to sleep through the night, she would wake to the sound of her alarm going off, or her father opening the door, or the wild rooster who nested across the street screaming bloody murder.