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.
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.