Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For Emma Sweeney

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Author’s Note

I became an essayist by default. My first love was poetry, my second love was fiction, and my third and lasting love was the essay. It’s like a third marriage—you know that this is where you’re staying, where you’re going to work out your issues, for better or for worse. And yet, because we’re all only human, this very book has a couple of stories in it—“The Tomb of Wrestling” and “What You Seek Is Seeking You”—or anyway they were first published as stories. They are also essays, in their own secret ways, and the essays are also stories.

Several of the pieces here were published first by Tin House, and I am grateful to Cheston Knapp and the other Tin House folk, for their willingness to publish my efforts without undue fretting over genre. The Tin House magazine will be missed by me and by others, for just this quality of openness and flexibility.

My gratitude to Cheri Tremble’s loved ones, for their willingness to tell me Cheri’s story, and then to allow me the privilege of imagining my way into her final moments. Werner Hoeflich, similarly, shared his story with me in great precise and painterly detail, and then stepped back and let me imagine it for myself on the page. Thank you to these collaborators and friends.

Epigraph

One of these days

I’ll look at your face and find

The sad detailed imprints

Of the festival days

—Nand Chaturvedi, “The Cruel Festival Time,”
translated by Katherine Russell Rich and
Vidhu Shekhar Chaturvedi

Festival Days

Last Night

Something happened to her while she was eating, or right afterward. She began turning in circles and couldn’t stop. In my kitchen, in my car, and then in an examining room at the vet’s office. I sat on the floor with her while the vet stood leaning against the wall, watching us. I was crying, but he ignored that.

“You indicated once,” he said, looking through the file, “that we should let you know when it might be time.”

It wasn’t time.

“It looks like a brain abnormality, something that’s grown or shifted. We might wait a day or so to see what happens. But if this doesn’t stop…” He paused.

“Sheba, stop,” I said, and held her. She looked like Lady from Lady and the Tramp, only old; she was fifteen.

It was like putting your hand on a spinning top, but as soon as I let go, she began turning again. We used to call her Top Dog because she liked to sleep stretched out on our old black Lab, her head settled on his head, both of their eyes closed. Once, many years ago, the Lab had gotten carefully to his feet, made his way to the kitchen where my husband was cooking, and accepted a treat, all without disturbing the sleeping puppy draped over his neck. The Lab lived to be fifteen too. The marriage, fourteen.

I took my hands away to button my jacket, and she turned blindly for a moment on the gleaming linoleum, then bumped into the single leg of the examining table.

“It might be time,” the vet said, putting his foot out to stop her. Except for those neon running shoes, he was completely nondescript, like an actor you aren’t sure why is in the movie until the very end, when he turns out to be the killer.

At home, it didn’t get any better or any worse, Sheba following herself, nose to tail, around and around in a circle while I tried to keep her steady. My neighbor came over for a few minutes and watched, her eyes round and nervous. “This doesn’t look hopeful,” the neighbor finally said.

It was dark by then, and I was kneeling on my living-room floor in the lamplight, holding her and then letting her turn, holding her and then letting her turn. It was winter, but the neighbor was wearing flip-flops.

“Aren’t your feet cold?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, and went home.

We were used to being alone. Our house was small and dark, set into a hillside, but we had a stone fireplace and built-in bookshelves and a screened porch overlooking a blue lake, our own dock, and certain seabirds that didn’t seem like they belonged there, so we chased them away each morning, or, rather, one of us did while the other stood on a giant ornate piece of driftwood and drank coffee in her sunglasses, even though nobody needed sunglasses in Ithaca.

We had brought more or less nothing from our previous life—a few pictures, some ceramic bowls, a Turkish rug that we hardly noticed in our old, big Iowa house but that became, in the new house, a focal point, the last remnant of what used to be. Sheba began urinating on it sometime around midnight, a series of dark rings overlapping and intersecting one another. By one o’clock it was my turn to pee, and I ran to the bathroom and came back to find her spun into a corner and stuck there, bumping against the baseboard.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

“Sheba,” I said.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

“Sheba,” I said, holding her face in my hands. She looked back blindly and I saw suddenly that the vet was right, something had grown or shifted, blocking her in there all alone.

I’d always known I’d have to live without her someday; I just hadn’t known it would be tomorrow. Things fall apart. Here in the safe silence of Ithaca, I had forgotten that.

So we stayed awake all of her last night, waiting for the vet’s office to open, in the living room on the Turkish rug, in the kitchen next to her food bowl, and finally on the bed pushed into the corner, my body between her and the edge. At some point I couldn’t help it and let my eyes close, and when I did, it felt like I was turning, too, our lives unraveling like a skein of yarn stretched from Ithaca back to Iowa. I see my husband patting his chest and holding out his arms, Sheba jumping into them. I see the Lab wearing her like a bonnet on his head. I see her running under the seabirds as they fly along the shore. Don’t leave yet, I say to my husband, who leaves. “Don’t leave yet,” I say aloud in the darkness of the bedroom.

She used to sleep at the foot of the bed, and at first light, first twitch, she would crawl sleepily up to my pillow so that when I opened my eyes she was what I saw. The aging dog-actress face—still the dark eyes, still the long glamorous ears. Don’t leave yet. If I let go of her, she moves in wider and wider circles, getting close to the edge. Come back, little Sheba. We’re both close to the edge now, peering over it into the great metaphorical beyond.

And then dawn arrives, and then it’s eight, and I begin to move forward, into it, without thinking. I carry her down to the water and let her stand on the shore, the birds wheeling and making their noises. In Iowa she ran into a cornfield once and didn’t come out for a long time, and when she did, she seemed thoughtful. The Lab once went on a garbage run and afterward threw up what looked like a whole birthday cake, candles and all. I carry her back up the hill and the neighbor runs out of her house, half dressed for work, and opens the car door for me.

“Is it time?” she asks me.

“Not yet,” I tell her.

All the way across town, driving and holding her in the passenger seat with one hand, I think to myself, Don’t think. All the way from Iowa to Ithaca, eight hundred miles, she stood in the back seat on the rolled-up rug, her chin on my shoulder, and watched the landscape scroll by. I feel her humming against my hand, trying to turn, and then we’re turning, we’re in the parking lot, we’re here.

It’s time.

Werner

Werner Hoeflich spent the evening at his catering job, making white-wine spritzers and mixing vodka with Tab in a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park. There were orchids, thick rugs, a dog with long blond hair. He walked home late from the subway afterward, along the gated and padlocked streets of the Upper East Side. The trees on his block were scrawny and impervious, like invalid aunts.

Once, he had seen a parakeet in one of those trees, staring down at him, shifting from foot to foot. The bird had sharpened both sides of its beak on the branch and then made a veering, panicky flight to a windowsill far above. Most of Werner’s metaphorical moments were painterly—the juxtaposing of the wild bird and the tame tree, the shimmer of periwinkle, the splurt of titanium white that fell from it onto the pavement. He loved New York for its simple surprises, although in truth, Oregon and Iowa and Arizona and everywhere else had simple surprises as well. Cantaloupe-colored sunrises, banded cows, Dairy Queens, all kinds of things that didn’t include black plastic mountains of trash and the smell of dog urine. But on that night it wasn’t like that; it was cold and fresh on the dark streets. He rounded the corner and his building came into view, a turn-of-the-century tenement where, right about then—just before midnight, December 19, 1991—another kind of New York surprise was taking shape. Deep inside the walls, three floors below Werner’s apartment, a sprig of cloth-wrapped wire sizzled and then opened, like a blossom.

From the street it looked like a single building but it was actually twin tenements set next to each other and connected along the facade. Werner let himself into the entrance on the left, walked to the back, and climbed to the fifth floor, where he was greeted by his cat, Two. She trotted ahead of him into the kitchen to wait for her bounty, served on an unfurled bed of tinfoil—a pale smear of liver pâté and several translucent strands of sashimi.

Feet up, Werner dialed Eugene, Oregon, and had a nice conversation with his mother. He liked to call home late, when they were just getting to the end of their West Coast day and he was still energized, sitting in his skivvies in the over-hot apartment. The walls were bumpy and pocked, thick plaster reinforced with horsehair, but he had whitewashed them and hired someone to refinish the wood floors. They were hay-colored and gleamed in the lamplight. His paintings hung here and there, dark backgrounds with shapes emerging out of them—construction machinery, the camshaft of an ocean liner, simple tools, almost but not quite abstract.

When Werner finally slept that night, it was like sinking slowly through water, fathom by fathom, to the ocean floor. He might have been dreaming when the wiring finally ignited, carrying fire upward through the building. He thought he could feel things swirling in the darkness, but when he tried to reach for them, the weight of the water pressed him to the bed.

Sometime between four and five a.m., the tenants in 2C heard a heavy pounding noise in the ceiling, which then collapsed. Their upstairs neighbors in 3C heard the same sound and then their ceiling collapsed as well; they made it to the fire escape and began screaming. The 2C tenants left through the stairwell with their children, although the wife became paralyzed with confusion and fear and the husband had to drag her. In the panic they left their door open.

The fire engulfed 2C and billowed out into the hallway. Werner woke to the sound of screaming. He was next to an open window on a loft bed six feet off the floor. He sat up and pulled the string to the light, a bare bulb in the ceiling. Rectangular shapes jumped at him in the glare—wardrobe, doorway, rug. The screams were of a type Werner hadn’t heard before.

His brain spun like a tire that wouldn’t catch: the familiar terrain of his bedroom, the heavy scent of smoke drifting through the petals of the window fan, his own bent knees draped in a sheet.

He needed to get dressed and get to the street, help whoever was in trouble. He grabbed for his clothes but couldn’t find the first thing he needed, underwear. He turned, and then turned back. He could see them in his memory—stacks of brightly colored boxers as well as the other kind, folded neatly on a shelf—but there was something blocking him, an invisible membrane between Werner and the next step. He stood in front of the tall, impenetrable wardrobe. He had been awake for approximately fifteen seconds. The screams were loud and prolonged, people coming unhinged.

Without his underpants he couldn’t think.

It was a familiar scent, but distant—campfires in his past, in the Oregon woods. Boiled coffee, damp socks, Werner rooted to a stump, bow across his lap. Deer, someone had told him, needed at least two senses to pinpoint danger, some pairing of sight, sound, smell; otherwise they just stood there, uncertain.

Sound of screams, smell of smoke.

Werner bounded naked to the front door, flipped the locks, flung it open, and a wall of smoke hit him in the face. He slammed it shut, turned, and squinted into the apartment. More smoke was coming in through the living room. He imagined the roof and the street below. Werner had been awake now maybe twenty-five seconds and had his first coherent thought. He thought he didn’t want to be naked if he had to jump off the building.

He stepped back into the bedroom, and a dry, papery gray cloud consumed him. He dropped to his hands and knees and put his cheek to the floor. With this nearsighted, close-up view, he could see smoke curling up through the floorboards, black specks inside the tendrils like a flock of birds banking and moving together. Dark geese rising into the Oregon sky. He wasn’t going to find oxygen at the floor.

Time was starting to slow down.

His room was teeny and cramped; with the bare lightbulb, it looked cheap and garish, like a torture site. He pulled the cord to the bulb on his way to the window and then in darkness struggled to lift the sash. The window fan, set in the upper half of the casement, was blocking it. He thrust his fingers into the grating of the fan and tugged, but it wouldn’t move. For an instant he became an animal, tearing at the immovable fan, panic surging upward, overtaking him like flames.

He let go of the fan. His arms dropped to his sides.

Once as a teenager he had gone hunting on the land of a man who was his father’s patient. When his father introduced him to the man, Werner said, “Hi.” Afterward his father lit into him, uncharacteristically, for not being more respectful—he explained that when called upon to meet someone, Werner should step forward and extend his hand. His father, a physician, was gentle and decent; that was about the only time he had ever been sharp with his son.

Now Werner made a shift. He spoke to himself firmly but kindly, like a father. Werner, he said, you’ve got to calm down. You’ve dealt with this fan before.

He remembered—it was suspended from the top by two neat hooks he had put there himself. After lifting it free, then shoving both panes of glass up and wedging them tightly into the frame, Werner stuck his whole torso out the window, sucking in air.

Everything suddenly became crystalline and calm; he could breathe. He looked around, listening, and heard sirens.

“Building’s on fire! Call the fire department!” he yelled, leaning out the window.

Straight across was his building’s twin, silent and dark. Off to the left, in back of the buildings, was a vacant lot surrounded by cyclone fencing. Beyond that was Ninety-Sixth Street. Sirens but no fire trucks. Below him, flames were shooting out of the third-floor windows and curling around the edge of the building.

He lost his fear. He was completely in the moment, experiencing instead of anticipating. Time stretched like rubber. Fascinated, he wandered around inside each moment as though it were a cavernous room.

Summer job at a retread factory, endless deafening days in which the hours were earned slowly through an accumulation of stiff, stinking cords of rubber to be stamped and stacked and helpless, imaginary encounters with every girl in his high-school class. Ghost girls who joined him at his locker first thing and followed him out onto the floor. He had to brush past them in order to do his work; interference—one wrong move and your finger, hand, arm is gone. The clock would hop its minutes interminably and then suddenly everyone was poised, Werner and his colleagues, men in big gloves who had been out of high school for thirty years. When the buzzer went off, they were like a herd of steers aiming for a hole in the fence.

Get out while you can, they told him.

Sound clattered back into his head and he began to hear people screaming again, this time from the fire escapes on the other side of the building. Black smoke was billowing from the windows below. The fire was working its way up, floor by floor, the wind moving the smoke to the south, where the fire escapes were. His neighbors kept screaming, many voices, desperate and trapped. Werner was sure they were dying.

Beyond the end of the building and across the vacant lot, he saw a dozen or so people at the bus stop on Ninety-Sixth standing against the cyclone fencing and staring up at the building like people at a bonfire, their faces lit by flames.

He was still experiencing perfect clarity, assessing everything he could see in a clinical manner, sweeping his gaze from the people watching to the flames below him and the strands of black smoke funneling out the windows.

He could see two options. One was taking a T-shirt, wetting it, draping it over his face, then leaving the apartment and making a run for the roof. The other was crossing the living room to the fire escape and joining his neighbors in their cauldron of despair. The stairwell to the roof wasn’t navigable; he’d already glimpsed it when he opened his door. The living room was dense with smoke; if he did make it across, there was no way he’d get the window gate unlocked. It was new, put in when Werner was out of town, crisscrossed bars with a key the super had placed somewhere along the ledge above.

He was trapped, nearsighted and naked in a burning building. He reached behind, groping, and found the robe that always hung from the loft bed. He put it on without pulling his head back into the room. He leaned farther out.

Werner had said just that night to his friend James that he was sick of being a caterer and wasn’t going to do it anymore. He was thinking of taking a long-ago professor’s advice and becoming a fireman, a good job for an artist. Not that his fellow caterers weren’t artists too—painters, opera singers, designers—but this was 1991; AIDS and Reagan had happened and Werner hadn’t gotten out of the business when everyone else did. No matter how depressing it got, his coworkers growing gaunt and dying, the economy surging and plummeting, he just hung in there.

He had seen a man nearly lose a hand once, not at the retread factory but later, in college during a gymnastics meet, a friend whose leather grip had somehow caught in the apparatus when he went up and over the bar. His wrist twisted as he finished the revolution, and he hung there until they could climb up and unbuckle the glove. They laid him on the floor, and the hand looked so strange lying against the blue of the mat, the wrist bones jutting straight up, white and exposed, that someone put a Dixie cup over it.

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