Less than a mile within the posted limits of our city, at the intersection where Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment used to be, a left turn parallel to the cemetery will bring you past the old gas station to frost on the weed-islands between which white-beaked dark birds dip down at dawn, and sunrise arrives half-seen above a wind-riddled thunderhead, hurling down slantwise rays through every wound. Mist-fingers grope up out of steely pools. Suddenly color returns to the world, silvers going red, lovely russets and greens introducing themselves, the long rays of light now floating on the cress. Across the levee, a file of ducks swims in the ditch of ice-colored water which once morning reaches it will return to algae-green. Back at West Laurel Hill, whose original wall commences two and a half miles from here, sun-rectangles and polyhedral shadows decorate the frosted grass between the plinths, and the headstones remain partially silhouetted against the rising sun. An approximation of their projections could be made with the most elementary mechanical drafting instruments; while here at the marsh the shadow-patterns remain too grand to be understood, supernatural powers being in fact so feeble that darkness owns greater power around rivers than around graves. Now warmth touches the railroad embankment, unfurling downward, releasing the mud’s smoky smell, until all the things of this world — those galls on that oak tree, the dead reeds, the hank of down from last year’s cattails, the clot of spiderweb, that snorting otter rolling in a sunny patch of grass, the meadow’s stripes of silver and russet — appear fixed in their true natures, as if a flashlight-beam would prove them to retain their present forms no matter how powerful tonight’s darkness.
A neighbor of mine once whiled away a summer here. I will not write his name.
His greyhaired ladyfriends still flattered him that his hair was not grey, merely greying a trifle at the temples. He avoided mirrors; and the neighbors with whom he was growing old treated him as if he were as young as they, so he returned the favor even though he knew that unlike them he truly was—or at least younger than he looked. One morning his stomach felt a trifle upset, but the next day found him as healthy as ever; and yet he seemed to be losing his appetite; he used to love bacon and eggs, and now the smell made him sick. The nausea descended like snow, almost imperceptibly coating the inside of his throat, piling up flake by flake in his chest and drifting down into his belly. For years he had been overweight, so this was actually fortuitous. He abstained from fatty foods more easily than ever before; and if his face began to draw in, well, didn’t that mean he’d soon be lighter on his feet? The doctor gave him four months.
The instant he was alone again, he sat down at his desk.
His best friend Luke had been a practical soul who took pleasure in errands checked off, a bare desk and taxes paid early. He gave away most of what he owned, dispatching each thing to whoever he supposed would use it best. They scattered his ashes in the mountains.
Before Luke, and partially coterminously with him, there had once also been a certain tall, skinny friend called Isaac, whom he never would have known were it not for Clara, who had loved Isaac in high school and still alluded sadly to the summer when Isaac went away, which is to say from everyone, and of course from Clara in particular. She must have just turned nineteen, which would have made Isaac twenty-one, so this neighbor of mine who now had four months left had been twenty-two and already engaged to Clara when she asked him to meet Isaac. At that time he dreaded new people, not to mention any boy for whom Clara evidently still cared, but he obliged her, as a peculiar result of which he and Isaac became close. Nearly forty years ago now (it must have been the spring after Clara threw him out), he met Luke, and presently introduced him to Isaac, who among other virtues declined to possess more than he could carry on his back. Luke guardedly admired this. Wherever he went, Isaac journeyed deep, and kept on going. He was hardy, abstemious, longlegged, cheerful if fidgety, generous if spendthrift, capable of opening his heart and therefore of exciting affection in others, particularly women; and, above all, light in his travels. His bugbears were dishonesty and uncleanliness. Narcissists readily fail to notice that honesty can be unkind, while filthiness derives no more frequently from culpability or innate foulness than from helplessness or brokenness. Isaac’s stellar fidelity to himself rendered him accordingly liable to fits of capricious extremism. Hence the summer when he went away, Clara’s seventeenth. Luke used to observe that whatever meanness someone committed elsewhere would eventually repeat itself at close hand, and in due course Isaac went away again, into the desert, where he decided to live out his life. Luke, who kept up a love of hiking literally to the end, was impressed, indeed, almost haunted by his example, and used to praise him, but that methodical breaking of contact with his old friends partook of cruelty, at least from the standpoint of my neighbor with the upset stomach, who had never respected the decisions of Buddha and Jesus, let alone (for instance) Clara, to abandon those who loved them. Isaac did not mind breaking women’s hearts; he felt what he felt, so why live a lie? When he went away from my neighbor, a woman told him to do it — for in between leaving women, Isaac made them his empresses. Perhaps what Luke admired the most about him was that he seemed never to regret himself. So Isaac went away, and my neighbor heard nothing of him for years. Presently, by some accident (Isaac needed help in obtaining antibiotics), they became friends again. But once my neighbor began to get fat, Isaac grew contemptuous. For his part, the fat one imagined that he had done a lot for Isaac, materially and otherwise; loyalty was his particular fetish, which must have been why he remained faithful to all his many girlfriends. One night after a certain favorite had jilted him, he sought to express his grief to Isaac, who knew her moderately. It was sad, no doubt; the fat man felt quite weak just then; he nearly wept while relating his pain to Isaac — who promptly went away from him for good. Somewhere on the other side is a gentler valley of milky-green rivers whose broad rapids enclose many-ledged islands upon each of which a skeleton may sun itself, but whether or not Isaac got there I cannot say. Were one to know a spiderweb only by glimpsing it edge-on, that would still be understanding of a sort; therefore, he and Isaac comprehended one another. To Isaac’s way of thinking, he must have been as flabby and unclean as he looked; while to the fat one, this second betrayal was unforgivable, not that forgiveness was relevant. In point of fact, the fat one was goodhearted enough, like most people of his temperament; and had Isaac ever called upon him he would have been as agreeable as he supposed he had been to Clara (who, I must admit, had gone away not thinking highly of him). Who are we, then, the inhabitors of our courteous actions, or the happy perpetrators of our malignant fantasies?
Over the years the recollection of Isaac became apparently indifferent to him; he did not mind when Luke invoked him; and when Luke commenced giving away his possessions, it even comforted him to imagine his friend as entering into the situation of Isaac, who, having already disencumbered himself of his one piece of furniture, a mattress, slept for a final handful of nights on the carpet of his rented room, and was now, in the space of a quarter-hour, loading everything he owned into his backpack, preparatory to striding forever into the wind of the white canyon. If such could have been in even the most metaphorical sense Luke’s destination, then his passing out of sight (let’s say into the relative brightness of the lunar highlands) escaped being terrible. Of course my fat neighbor knew it to be terrible and worse; all the same, when his own turn came, he found himself preparing to unlock his desk, so as to make disposition of what was most precious of all his treasures — namely, the letters from all the women he’d loved.