“It’s just one little trench,” she shouted in her sweetest voice. “We could have a digging race. You start at one end, and I’ll start at the other, and we’ll see who gets to the middle first.” She can’t get out of the nursery school teacher zone sometimes. To be fair, those tricks used to work on him really well. He heard her footsteps retreating. She must have thought he’d gone back to the house, snuck by her through the woods instead of sticking to the path. The pockmarked cement of the wall made his back itch.
Danny couldn’t believe what Gwen had said, that some bloodsucker was after their house. What’s wrong with people? Should we have draped the place in black, like a giant covered mirror? Black sails on the sloop. Oh, but the sloop is gone. Maybe just hung a sign on the pier: “Do Not Disturb, In Mourning.” He turned his attention back to the pinecone. Seeds and symmetry were better things for him to focus on.
Avoiding thoughts of his mother had gotten harder and harder. At first, being at school felt helpful, the space, the sympathy. You are forgiven for falling asleep in class, or talking incessantly about the importance of wetlands in the midst of your Gothic literature seminar, or telling your TA that she has perfect thighs, or staying in your dorm room for days, for weeks. When you are twenty-one and your mother dies, there is a pause that exists. Like when you stay home sick from school and you have run out of things to watch on TV and there is nothing left to do but take a nap.
It was good to have permission to be sad, to have a nameable reason. But that pause, that grace period, was coming to an end. He could feel it happening, a hardening of things, of people. So he had to leave campus, because it wasn’t over for him, and he couldn’t stand to do what was expected of him.
Extensions turned to deadlines, phone calls turned to e-mails, a double room turned to a single. Finally, he decided to go and find time, to give it to himself. On any given day he could decide how much time he needed. He could tell people his mother had died the week before or ten years before. He had wanted a journey to real emptiness. The Grand Canyon.
In the four days it took to drive from Bard to Arizona, Danny had imagined standing right at the lip of the canyon, but, once there, a post-and-rail fence had kept him back from the edge. Someone had dropped a magnet in the dirt, an image of a red convertible parked at the rim of the canyon. Danny wondered why it looked better in the picture. It wasn’t what he had been expecting, at least not in a strict sense. It was beautiful and big. But some things are just too vast to be understood. It was easier to feel just a part of it through the TV screen than all of it through your skin. So the fifteen minutes he stood at the lip of the Grand Canyon felt too long. But he knew it was just long enough that he could say, without lying, that he’d been there. He had watched tourists moving along a path, black specks on a trail, ants in their farm. He couldn’t understand those people who wanted to hike down to its vascular center. Why would they want to feel the chill crawl over their bodies as they distanced themselves from the sun, to follow a path, past the striated sediment of millions of years in a few hours, on a mule led by a guy named Paco John who was from Michigan and wore a Baja? He wanted to feel time flow at its natural pace, not sped up. He did not want a millennia-lapsing hike.
But life away, life in small diners and campsites, when he was just another guy cruising through with no story, no dead parents, had been harder than he expected. He had been dropping a coin into the slot of a press-a-penny, cranking the wheel and choosing his image, when he was supposed to be taking his finals. He should’ve been in a room with graduated seating and chairs with the swiveling desk arm. He should’ve squeaked that arm down over him like the safety bar on an amusement ride, cracked his knuckles, and set three sharpened pencils perpendicular to himself. He preferred when things were perpendicular, though he wasn’t sure if that was a visual or auditory preference. He never liked the word “parallel.” It sounds snooty, preppy, too good for the other lines, he thought.
The canyon, with its irregularities and sunken verticality, seemed off-putting, like a fallen cake. It was something that could have been perfect, but had not worked out. What had been a great expanse of rock, or ocean floor, a plane of infinite axes, was now a mathematical mess. Even pressed into a penny, he could feel its incongruities.
After his fifteen minutes as a tourist, Danny had gone back to the car in the visitors’ lot. He had assembled a bologna sandwich from the contents of a small cooler in the backseat. It was his fourth day on the road. He had at least two weeks before they would expect to hear from him, four or five before he’d need to see them, eventually making his way back north to the house.
He sat facing sideways on the backseat with the door open and his feet on the ground. His forearms rested on his knees, as if the effort of holding up the sandwich with both hands was too much. He’d been feeling that way recently, that the small things were tiring. He could hike a mountain or fuck a girl, no problem (or, at least, the two times he’d done it there hadn’t been a problem), but parallel parking exhausted him, as did washing dishes or getting dressed. During the last cold snap of spring, he wore his duck boots all day, every day, sleeping with his shod feet hanging off his single bed. That meant wearing the same pants as well, being unable to get them off over the boots.
The school counselor had encouraged him to fuck those girls. He hadn’t said it like that, but that’s obviously what the guy meant by, “Maybe you should just be young, let loose, allow your guard to drop.”
So Danny took his prescription and he tried. First with his RA, who had been practicing her best shrink voice and poses on him, the earnest nod, the crossing and uncrossing of the legs. And then with his roommate’s girlfriend one morning when, having waited until her boyfriend left for class, she simply climbed out of one bed and into another. Her pure ballsiness was so impressive. He couldn’t help himself.
Neither hookup led to anything. The roommate moved out a few weeks before Danny left. He wanted to believe it was because of the girl, but he knew it wasn’t.
Danny hauled himself out of the pool, convinced Libby had finally given up. His knees ached from squatting for so long. He walked the perimeter of the pool, stepping over a fallen log woolly with lichen. He heard a screen door slam back at the house. It was late afternoon, someone would be getting dinner ready soon, pasta with pesto, mozzarella, tomatoes. They all ate what they always ate here. There were no diets, no new foods. Wasabi peas, a gift from a friend over for a drink, had been unceremoniously rejected as the friend’s boat pulled away from the float.