Of course it was too late. You couldn’t simply plant grass in St. Louis and design the simplest of headstones. There were too many dead. A technical problem. But a headstone could shrivel into a narrow granite pin, with a name inscribed vertically. Didn’t that solve the issue? Of course it didn’t, because no one even knew what the issue was. And whatever slick and welcoming thing she and Roy built for the plaza, there would still be a graveyard beneath it, the way there is a graveyard beneath everything. It would just take generations of people to find it, clawing down into the earth year after year until they touched stone.
A fog of birds passed over the Eberlee Plaza in St. Louis on the morning the memorial opened.
Helen sat at some distance from the ceremony. Roy had said that she was, of course, expected to be there, and here she was, alone on a bench with a perfect view of what she had wrought.
The birds didn’t go away. They swished and darted and soon struck a steady, gliding orbit over the plaza, a kind of dark and clotted halo, like barbed wire in the air. Had they come for the sweet sedatives that were no doubt pumping into the area from underground cylinders? Would the dosage be too strong for a bird, and was there any concern about this? Was anyone in charge of the most basic shit?
Helen sat, by chance, just across from the long, snaking plywood wall of the missing. The weather over the last two years had done a job on the wall. It was mostly stripped of posters by now. The remaining posters were scarred and wind-bleached and almost impossible to decipher. On a few, the photos had eroded but the text had endured, so there were blank sheets that simply said “Missing,” with a white space below, as if it were the white space itself that had vanished and could no longer be found.
When the ceremony began, she saw Roy. He looked good. Half the size of the large, sweaty men who surrounded him, as if he were a child being herded by giants. He was shaking hands, talking, laughing, and several times, as Helen watched from the bench, she saw Roy applauding vigorously, even though no one, as far as she could see, was speaking or performing. It was just her husband, alone in the square, clapping his hands as hard as he could.
Mostly Helen watched the birds, which seemed bizarrely determined, certain of something that she would never know. There was a theory of bird vision that came to mind: that birds saw the world through a grid, bisected down to the finest detail. Not a mosaic so much as a shattered image, with white tracers boiling in the spaces in between, or so Helen imagined, so that all the bird really saw was a kind of luminescent netting. Aglow or afire or whatever. No need to poeticize it, but still. Sort of hard not to. You didn’t see the mouse, if you were a bird, but a mouse-shaped mesh of light that contained it. She was butchering the science, she knew, but this was the general gist. A kind of shining wire bag we’re all trapped in, which might explain some things, right? Or, Helen thought, deepen the mystery. It was a structural view of space, and it treated objects as an afterthought. Objects described the light, not the other way around. Yes, it was speculative, since, whatever, it posited the sensory experience of a goddamned bird, but it seemed to have been endorsed by some of the more distinguished eggheads from expensive, self-regarding universities. One particular scientist claimed that this bird vision revealed the true, unmediated world, something that we humans couldn’t handle. We humans! Helen thought. Us! Is there anything we can handle? Our desire for sense and order, our sentimental belief that we are not hurtling through space in tiny pieces, has served as a kind of biological propaganda for our visual apparatus, leading to the sentimentalized, so-called whole-world on view in front of us.
In other words, fear, and more fear, and, yeah. Wouldn’t there one day, just by chance, Helen thought, be a little person who came along and didn’t feel afraid? Someone who saw this world of speeding pieces just as it was? Wasn’t that bound to happen, and what on earth, she thought, as she watched everyone walking past her into the mirage, was taking so long?
2
The Boys
It happens. A close relative dies. One who lives elsewhere. And then some time has to be set aside, even if no such thing is possible. Because of work, because of a lack of funds when it comes to traveling. And also because of one’s own dear family at home, a husband and two daughters, who need to be fed and petted and listened to and tolerated. Even just ignoring them or quietly loathing them takes its toll.
In this case the family member was my sister. She was in for a routine surgery, or so I was told. And you have to wonder what surgery is ever routine. As you live your life, you will, on occasion, be cut open and explored. It is what life is, part of the routine. Perhaps we should not be surprised. A knife will slice you open and some wunderkind wearing gloves will reach into the wound, with corrective fingers, one expects, and grope around. This is what killed my sister. The wunderkind reached too deep, reached the wrong way, the body crashed, and everyone wore black.
My husband brought me flowers. The kids cried, although they hardly knew her. My own reaction was delayed, to this day, really. It may never come, at least not in my lifetime—which doesn’t mean I didn’t love the hell out of her. Of course I did. Of course of course of course. I was her sister and she was mine, always—or so we had said long ago. We’d sort of stopped saying it. We had our own lives to chisel up. In some small way I was stirred to action. I had just been so bored, and now someone had died and I was needed and maybe we’d all be knocked out of our habits into a better, realer world.
I flew out to the so-called mountains where my sister and her husband lived with their children. Two little boys who spent their lives in toy helmets, so far as I could tell. They were not allowed to wear them to bed, but this turned out to be a struggle, a bit of a battleground, and some nights, with a mother newly dead, they won this war with their father and went to bed all suited up, ready to survive a nighttime clobbering. They had a game they played, and it involved sticks—store-bought sticks with lights and triggers on them. The helmets kept their heads safe. Without them they’d have killed each other already. When I was near them I almost felt like I should be wearing one myself. I’d met my nephews before, of course, but they seemed to regard me as an animal they could not ride. What was an aunt even for? What did I mean to them? I supplied presents that suffered too much from an educational vibe, and no goodies, and my fun factor was decidedly low. Where had my fun factor gone? Had I ever had one? Their world must have been filled with people like me: curious beasts lacking in magic, unable to entertain them. Could we be eaten? Could we be killed for pleasure? It seemed they had yet to decide.
I didn’t have boys myself, and I’d like to think that my profound indifference to them had influenced the moment of conception of each of my two girls. It is not that boys were filthy, or brutish, or dumb and unsingular. One might have said that of anyone, of any age, of any gender. It is, as they say, a routine assessment of the human being. It’s just that little boys always seemed terribly expendable, a product of nature that was meant to exist in excess, so it could be endlessly culled by other forces. Boys themselves seem to know this. The so-called death wish is apparent in their behavior, which is often entertaining, but only from a distance. Some creatures have a low survival rate, and so the world produces far too many of them, and as they fight among each other to live they grow more savage, more base, more dull, and the winners, the survivors, are distinctly unappealing little beings. Which isn’t to say that some of them don’t turn out lovely, with smooth, unknowable bodies, and voices of debilitating power, and a kind of broad indifference to remote suffering that allows great historical changes to take place.