A Gate at the Stairs

  One had to get on with life, out of good manners if nothing else. My dad and I would strike up random conversation. “Seahorses give birth,” I would begin. “But they’re male. Why do we even call them male, if they give birth?”

  And my dad would be silent, driving, considering. Then he would speak. “Because they insist on it. They don’t want what happened to ladybugs to happen to them. These ladybugs have masculinity issues to beat the band!”

  I tried to laugh. I appreciated his trying to acknowledge me, be with me, though it had become difficult for him. Ahead of us ballooning clouds floated there absurdly, as if for a party that had yet to begin. Groups of geese crawled through the sky, their metallic honks declaring their departure south.

  We would stop somewhere to eat and do just and only that: stop and eat. We got BLTs and soup and then would continue on our way. The brilliant gold leaves and grasses, the drying roadside timothy and bluestem, all looked on a nice day like a hymn to sunlight, when in fact, if one actually thought seriously about the situation, the mechanism of their dialogue with the sun had been shed entirely. The honey locusts had gone first, raining shimmering trails of seedlings into the gutters of the streets in town. Then the yam-and ham-hued maples. A papery caramel of leaves or a trail of maize or both lined every road we were on. How like the end of love to leave a beautiful corpse. When they weren’t gold against blue, like something royal, the oaks bore the flat blackish red of a blood orange, and my father and I would drive along staring out at them through the windshield, each of us thinking our own thoughts. One evening migrating songbirds, oriented toward the moon, mistook a red-lit cell phone tower for their destination and we watched as they all shredded themselves in the tower’s steel supports. More disastrous love performed in symbols. As we passed, my father slowed down, then sped up again. Silence was not the worst thing, though it still contained sorrow and making-do. Here and there a rabbit scurried across our path.

  “Are rabbits nocturnal?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, why do you see them in the day as well?”

  My father was quiet for a long time. “They work in shifts,” he said finally.

  Fattening in the butt, shy, petty, carsick except in a truck, perhaps I was more suited to country life than I’d ever understood. When we got back at night, my father would slam the truck door and look at the vast and watchful sky. “That’s a hell of a heaven up there,” he would say. Inside he would sit before the nightly news, which had just begun a semimonthly honor roll of American servicemen, fresh-faced privates, killed in the Middle East. Their photographs were shown, a few at a time, in silence, with their names and ranks and hometowns printed beneath. They were the faces of babies, babies in hats, and on the rare occasion that there was someone older, an officer, my father would shout: “Aha! All right! They got a lieutenant colonel!” A light bird. Once a full bird—a colonel—elicited my dad’s bitter whoop. Each soldier’s face stared out from the glass TV screen like a sweet, accusing child in the good-bye window of a terrible, terrible nursery school. My dad began to smoke my mother’s cigarettes, Camel Lights, which had never affected her health very much, but which left him hoarse and hacking, at least at night; the brandy piled up near his chair, first in shot glasses, then whiskey glasses, then coffee mugs. The night we saw my brother’s picture in the honor roll we all just happened to be there together, both my parents and I, and we were stunned into motionlessness. Robert’s, too, was the face of a baby with a hat jammed on. The hat was absurd, conferring nothing but a dark decoration as if to anchor the composition of the photo. His eyes were caught in the headlights of something—foreign policy? a bored remark of the cameraman? the portentous burst of the flash?—and he was not smiling. “Robert looks tired in that photo,” my mother said finally.

  “He does,” agreed my father, who then turned off the television and left the room.

  The clocks were set back and the sun began to set at four. I opened up my laptop and began e-mailing Murph. She was taking the year off, working with schoolchildren in Baton Rouge. I told her about my brother, and she sent back a horrified and sympathetic e-mail along with a song she’d written for me. It was kind and stupid and full of death rhyming with breath, brother with another, war with core, cry with why.

  In my archives I stumbled upon the final e-mail that Robert had sent me what seemed so long ago—just last spring—and I froze when I saw it. How had I not read this? Why had I just shoved it away as if it were nothing? What was wrong with me? I was no guy’s sister. My eyes stung and shrank, but I opened it to see, in a blur, finally what it said.

  Dear Sis,

  I don’t know if you realize how I’m always watching you up ahead there in life, and how it has seemed to me you always know what you’re doing, and how I admire that. Probably it all seems different to you, and maybe this is just a kid brother speaking, but to me you have always seemed smart and independent and sure of yourself, figuring out everything. Or it looks like that. To me. Maybe it’s a girl thing, though let’s face it: you are very different from Mom. Perhaps I am more like her, because, I have to admit, I’m a little lost here and that is why I am writing to you. Right now I feel only your words could keep me from doing what I feel I may end up doing—and if it is not a good idea but mere desperation and confusion, then regret is on the way. And yet I think it is the right thing despite what some might say. What most people say bounces off of me. But you saying “DO” or “DON’T” might sink in. Nobody else’s remarks seem to register. Should I join the military? Will the army be a good experience? If they ship me right away to Afghanistan, will I regret it? or will I be glad to eventually have the extra tuition assistance to help Dad out in sending me to college, or even DDD! (Just kidding.) Remember what Mr. Holden always said in Science: Only in physics does gravity plus inertia equal orbit. Sometimes I know guys meet other guys in the army and when they get out they set up businesses together. What have you heard? Please get back to me with all your wisdom and advice ASAP! Talk me out of this, if you can!

  Love, your dearest and of course favorite brother, Robert “Gunny” Keltjin

  P.S.: Without my little string collection I’d probably go crazy.

  P.P.S.: That’s a joke.

  Once again I was struck by his written voice, which contained none of the haltingness or hesitant construction of his speech. When I looked up from my screen and turned to look out the window, I could see the autumn migration of the turkey vultures, with their uncanny ability to smell death and come clean it up for you, though this year they were a little late. A hundred of them glided in the sky without flapping, their feather-tips like fingers conducting the turns with hardly a motion.

  I wanted to go back in time. Just to send an e-mail—was that too much to ask? When Superman went back in time, when he flew backwards around the world at top speed, though he looked very tired, it still seemed as if he might manage a passenger, like those dolphins who give rides to kids. I wanted Superman to take me whooshing with him backwards around the globe. Just to send an e-mail. That was all. Not so much. But what would I say? What grammar, what syntax would hold together sentences in this whizzing flight back? Both my kids seemed always to love the feeling of flying. What punctuation as strong as aeronautic stitchery would I know to bring with me? The apostrophe in don’t held together by our bubble gum and seeds? It would do. For a moment or two.

  After letting it float like a dying dentist-office fish on my computer screen, I locked Robert’s e-mail back up in the archives and never looked at it again. The laws of metaphysics were sometimes sterner than the laws of physics: You can never go backwards. Though the scientists tell you that you can. No information can escape from a black hole. Though the scientists insist some does.

  The scientists and the comic books were in cahoots!

  Meanwhile, everyone else knew that things were simple and straight ahead: a life bumped around like a bug in a window, then one day just stopped.

&n
bsp; I knew from freshman physics that there was a quantum mechanics theory that allowed for something being dead and alive at the same time: if a particle could also be a wave, if it could morph and part company with itself, then an entire being composed of those particles could also go wavy and be in two places at once, heaven and hell, bar and ballpark, life and death. Parallel universes existed for all options. In theory. And observation of one universe was the only thing that deprived the other of its reality.

  Only a few other times did Robert make appearances. The first time I awoke in the middle of the night to find him pacing around my room in the dark. He was speaking. He said, “I keep waiting for it to hurt, but it doesn’t hurt yet. Maybe it will hurt later.” And then he added, “Apparently it’s an insult to the residents of the afterlife to ask where you are, to imply you’re not sure which place you ended up in. You’re supposed to know! You’re supposed to know just by looking! Without inquiring! But damn! It’s hard to tell!” Another time I found myself unable to sleep and when I sat up to get some water I saw that he was standing by my dresser, holding a sign that read YES I AM A MAN. Another time I awoke to find him sitting wordlessly at the foot of the bed. He looked the same as when he was alive except he was wearing a shower cap, a different one, perched back on his head, and he was holding the fake mannequin hand, turning it over and over as if it were an interesting stone he’d just found. He held it up to his eye and looked skyward with it as if it were a telescope. “Robert, what do you want?” I asked him, but he said nothing, perhaps because it had always been so—he had never known what he wanted, and now not even in death. I blinked my eyes closed and opened them again and he was still there. “Robert, what are you doing here?” There was more silence. I forced my eyes shut again and when I opened them, I said, “You mustn’t feel sorry for yourself!” He was still peering around the room with the mannequin hand. At that I closed my eyes for several minutes solid and when I opened them again, he was starkly, everlastingly gone.

  I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up. Sometimes I imagined that just before oblivion, as one lay dying, one got to have a brief farewell meeting with friends: one last dream drink in a cozy spot of the mind. Even sputtering hardware, before its final burning out, gave back its pleasures as best it could. There was a song! And wasn’t this a compelling trade, sensation for spirit and vice versa? This exchange was lifelong and perhaps heightened at death: the thirsty draped about the bubbler for a drop. These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.

  When I went into Robert’s old bedroom with my mother, to help her put his clothes in boxes for Goodwill, I lifted his winter coat off its hanger and a bat flew out the cuff and out of the room to nowhere we could find. That was the last life any of his clothes ever had, at our house at any rate.

  The holidays of fall had all merged like a suburban megalopolis. Halloween had bled into Thanksgiving, which had already become pre-Christmas, just as Kenosha had become Racine had become Milwaukee. Pumpkins had wreaths! Hunting season began on Veterans Day, and men who had never once been in the military dressed themselves in the bright color of circus lollipops and prowled the fallow farms for deer. Sex workers, whose high season was the hunting one, temporarily set up shop in a rented storefront on County H called Dance, Drink, and Din-Din, right smack next to Home Dollar. My birthday came, and because I was at last of drinking age, my father bought champagne and he and my mother proposed a toast. “To our sweet and lovely Tassie,” said my dad. “Twenty-one! Time flies so fast, I have to lie down just thinking about it.”

  I’d read once of a French geologist who had confined himself in a dark cave for sixty-one days, though when he emerged, he thought it had been only forty-five. Time flew! No matter what.

  “At least we got one of you out of childhood,” added my mother.

  “Gail,” my father warned her.

  “Sorry,” she said. Her face had become round and bloated. Mourning had widened instead of thinned her. Perhaps it was the calming pharmaceuticals she’d recently been prescribed. She now, behind her large glasses, had the double-triple face of the middle-aged, her most forward face, the one she used to have, framed again in yet another oval of flesh, a cameo of meat. In fact, fat had settled in around the entirety of her. Instead of going on a diet, she said, she would stick a wick in her belly and burn it off for Hanukkah.

  I googled the other Tassie Keltjin again, to see if something was being done to honor her increasingly distant memory, and if not, to see if people were even a little bit sorry that she had died. Perhaps they would be. Perhaps they should be. “If the universe is big enough, everything that can happen will happen, so that if we could look out far enough we would eventually discover an exact replica of ourselves.” This I had read in the paper. In the Science Times. It was like a cosmic version of the infinite number of monkeys who given an infinite amount of time ultimately write King Lear. Which in evolutionary terms was a scientific fact. When you thought about it.

  The other Tassie Keltjin was still dead and it was no big deal to anyone. No one was doing squat.

  After Thanksgiving, I went back to Troy. My father had begun experimenting with winter spinach grown in a propane-heated hoop hut. This kind of spinach—thick, tender, grown slowly—was in demand in Evanston and Chicago, where he hoped to sell it in time for Christmas. He smiled and said he hardly needed me, that I should get back to school before I turned into a damn fool.

  There were days I felt hard, bittersweet, strong. People died, but then if you forgot they had died, even for a minute, they could achieve a kind of immortality; that is, they kept on living, even though they were dead. My Suzuki back in storage, I walked everywhere. The gothic spires of campus seemed defiant thrusts at God, or poles for the stripping saints. Haughty Fatigue! The zoology quad, which we cerebrally called “the hippocampus,” was now being ripped up for some sort of construction and there were cranes and backhoes and concrete barriers to walk around. At the kiosks near the union I stopped regularly to read the film society posters.

  I found an apartment, one with a girl named Amanda Prague, who’d grown up in Pardeeville, Wazeeka, and Mukwanago, and she was, she announced, as if needing to get this out of the way, a quarter African-American, a quarter Oneida, a quarter Czech, a quarter Irish.

  “That’s a lot of quarters,” I said.

  “Sure is,” she said, nodding and shrugging. She needed a roommate, since the one she’d started with in September had gone home midsemester with mono. “You seem quiet,” she said. “If you want it, it’s yours.” So I signed on, wrote down her phone number for my own, and moved a few items into her empty room, which had a bed, a dresser, and a lamp. I added a quilt, a pen, and a clipboard: What else did I need? I would wait until later to ease her into the idea of my bass guitar. The storage bin a mile away still held not just the Suzuki but also the xylophone. I would stay mum about these as well, for now, though perhaps by March I’d be riding my scooter once more, like other girls I’d seen: helmetless and serene, with the angelic hypnotized look of the already dead, as traffic veered all around.

  Yet again, another December, and I found myself looking for a job. The low matte sky was like a black-and-white photo of a sky. Which made it seem strange rather than familiar; its strangeness was not made friendlier by its resemblance to a photograph. A vast and depthless sky should not resemble a photograph any more than it should resemble a rug. With the exception of occasional thoughts like this? I was hanging on. I had a new résumé printed up, and in addition to the Schultzes and the Pitskys back home I added the Thornwo
od-Brinks to my list of references. I did not rule out some dubious employment choices: a want ad that read Tap into Collective Wisdom, Make $ by Predicting Future Events; another asking for human subjects for a pharmaceutical company drug trial; or a position as the new “Bad Girl,” whom a guy could hire to write love letters to him so he could leave them around the house to make his girlfriend jealous. I also applied for a job that involved pretending to have certain physical symptoms, for labs and clinics involving medical students and doctors in training. “Describe some vague abdominal pain,” a man in a white lab coat commanded me.

  “It’s sharp for a few seconds and then it kind of goes splat and hovers for a little while behind my right rib—before it glides slowly, diffusely south.”

  The man was silent. “Is there nausea?”

  I was surprised by his question. Perhaps I was doing well at this. “No. Well, yes. Sometimes.”

  “Do you have acting experience?”

  “I feel like I do now,” I said. But I was not called back.

  One day, with a propelling pang, I ambled toward downtown. Along the lake, the slick black scalps of the water signaled a coming storm. I walked past Sarah’s old restaurant and saw that although it was closed, no one else had yet taken it over. There was a padlock on the door. The sign reading LE PETIT MOULIN was still in place, though the last three letters of Petit had been pried off—no doubt to hang on a dorm room wall somewhere. In the window the cheeses Sarah used to display beneath their glass covers were still there but were now curling, blueing, browning: the grana and govarti, the cocoa cardona. No one had put them away. The twelve-year-old cheddar, which on a good day was like sugared gold, was now cracked and snowy with mold. The white pasty goat cheeses had yellowed and greened. The restaurant had been closed up in a rush, and no one, not one person all fall, had cleared out the window. I stared at these decaying cheeses as if they were living things, dying unfed in a zoo, which in a way they were. They were misshapen and yet on display, a person’s collapse and sorrow concretized behind glass. Negligence in the restaurant world! I thought I saw in one of the goat cheeses the teeth marks of a rat. No doubt in this town someone had already written a letter to the editor about it.