I was unused to such a skyline. It was sharp, pointed. I felt I might pierce my hand on the Chrysler or the Empire State Building; they seemed that defined, that close. I could nearly see into them: the off-hour office scenarios: in one building a band of young lawyers working this Saturday on an antitrust case; in another building a boss taking his secretary onto his lap.
Such clarity provides information we do not know how to take in, how to integrate. Faces are more exposed, we are forced to see the hundred deaths in them. Words are more vulnerable, fragile, sounds are magnified. Everything is exaggerated. Even a piece of paper can have a wounding edge. But this was the day chosen months in advance to celebrate the earth, and on the thousand mouths of those who gathered, the words “perfect,” “beautiful,” “lovely,” “exceptional” rose as they looked to the blue-egg sky.
My mother looked to me, then away, then back again quickly as if she saw some small feature of mine that had been hidden from her for seventeen years. My father studied Fletcher who, chosen by the high school to make a speech this day, was just approaching the podium. It seemed as if Father was seeing Fletcher clearly for the first time, seeing him with new eyes, and with these eyes he glimpsed something he hadn’t been able to see before; something came clear in his own mysterious life. Staring straight ahead, he was not the man who adored my mother and lived in her shadow, he was not the father of two children whose jacket ends were tugged even in sleep. He was not the wayward son, the disappointment. Looking at his own son he was someone else, a man of nature with a destiny, a free will. It welled in his chest and filled him with a great feeling of power and momentum. For a few brief moments I saw my father this way: a free man, an immense, important figure in his own life.
But in less than a minute something happened. The wind changed direction or the public address system hissed and the spell broke. It is I who cannot sustain this vision.
Though my mother’s shoulder touched mine and my father’s shoulder touched my mother’s, I was aware that something was already beginning to divide us, separate us. Fletcher seemed to recede before me, my parents to fall away. “Don’t go,” I said, but no one heard me. I knew that I would have to start talking louder, concentrating harder. Blocks of lucite or some other modern, clear material seemed to be forcing us apart. I feared it would cloud over and distort my eyesight. I feared that soon I would not even be able to shout through it. I should have investigated its terrible proportions more that day, touched its thickness and its edges before it grew monstrous, untouchable, unbreakable, without boundaries. My father, a tall man, found his knees constricted by the invisible slab. They knocked against it. Through it he looked at my mother and, sensing her uneasiness, attempted to calm her with talk. The tiniest details of everyday life could sometimes relax her. They looked at the light fixtures, changed since their last visit to the park. They noted the tourists, guessing their nationalities. They watched the colorful garb of joggers, talked about shoes, followed the horse-drawn carriages as they made their way around the park.
“That horse is so poorly groomed,” my mother said, pointing to a shabby brown one. “An animal like that should be cherished, not made to pull overweight foreigners on concrete.
“Where do they keep the horses at night, Michael?” she asked, and her voice was as high and light as a child’s. Once my mother got hold of an idea, she did not easily let go of it. She moved back and forth slightly in her seat. I knew as my brother neared the podium that she was imagining those old brown horses shifting from one leg to another in their tiny stalls.
“It is no secret,” Fletcher said, and she jumped, looking at me with animal eyes that darted wildly as if there were fire and she was a horse. I took her hand.
“I love you, Mom,” I said, and the “m” sound hung in the air. It reminded her, I think, that she was a mother, that next to her was her daughter, in front of her son, and she smiled slightly, if only for my sake; and as I watched her smiling for my sake I knew for no particular reason that somehow this was the beginning of the end. How ridiculous, I said to myself as soon as the thought formed; I did not know what it meant, it was senseless, melodramatic, and still I believed it.
“We are each of us alone,” I thought.
My grandmother, dead two years, would think that on such a bright day such thoughts were inappropriate: my brother giving a public speech, the sky an impossible blue. But my grandmother could not see beyond primary colors, and this sky had too much white in it to be a true blue. I watched Fletcher against this backdrop.
He is a little boy fishing in the lake, catching trout, then throwing them back.
He is a little boy waking early to find his turtles, which he left outside overnight in a pail of water, eaten by birds, a tiny leg there, a piece of shell, a head bitten off and left.
He is a little older, up late, caught already in the excitement of primary politics, watching the young senator win California, then moments later fall mortally wounded.
He is older, sitting in the woods collecting moss and putting it in a basket.
He is older, looking at mushrooms under a microscope.
And there is my brother, sometime in the future, slumped over the edge of a stage, dejected, but I don’t know why.
He felt himself to be falling. He seemed to be struggling as he spoke to maintain his momentum, to keep up his energy. He was floundering in shallow water. He was doing all he could to stay afloat. Those who did not know him could not have realized that he was having trouble, but he was my brother and an intricate system of attachments bound us in a way not even we completely understood. He was having difficulty. My magnetic brother, the person who could convince anyone to follow him anywhere, my brother, whom hordes of people had followed wherever he asked them to go, now panicked. As he began I saw him take a deep breath and shake his head. Like an athlete he had prepared for this speech, done jumping jacks, run in place, but he was not feeling it. Something was wrong. It might all slip away as he spoke. He might wander off or his voice might falter. People would pull back. People would think him insincere or weak. This is what I detected in him. He worried through the speech that he was somehow not connecting, not getting through, holding back. Only the audience reaction, the donations of money, the number of volunteers proved otherwise. He had moved his listeners, illuminated the problems. In some new way they would see the situation. He had succeeded. He sighed. He felt such relief that tears fell from his eyes, and his arms and legs went limp.
As we neared him I could see that tiny lines had already begun forming in his face. The shadows cast in the bright sunlight were long and dramatic. Now that his speech was over, his thoughts turned inward, growing darker, and they kept him separate from his earthly vision, and his own pleasure at what he had accomplished that day was diminished. For a split second he knew it. What he had sensed somewhere in the beginning of his speech now was clear: what he hoped for with every cell of his body would not come true. He sat alone perched on the edge of the stage, a dark hawk (dark as the sky was light), inconsolable.
It is late afternoon. He is an old man. He stares at the bright orange wall of the house. His eyes burn. He looks down at his hands. His palm twitches. He knows this means he will soon strike someone or become angry.