I understood, eventually, that all along he had been concealing wild terrors of the mind. Some kind of waking nightmare, fighting to understand what before him was real. It was night; he slept; he woke; it was night again. Or was it? Surely divisions between day and night dissolved. His existence made as much sense as in a dream. He had no past and no future. There was a dinner roll on the plate, and then there was not. Had he eaten it? His wife was by his side, and then she was not. Where was his wife? Who was she, for that matter? His own being was mutable, a pappus pushed this way and that by the breeze, rising and falling, a being of immaterial lightness, an observer without sentience. I know what the end holds, Albert said. Oh yes.
Until the very end, Albert worked to maintain his ability to slip in and out of that day in Florida, and he experienced his memory of it with unusual lucidity. He heard the water that ran up over the coping in sloshing jolts and hit the concrete with a chirping sizzle. He smelled the billowing chlorine and the concrete. The wind that day was onshore, holding back the gnats, but the horseflies had come in powerful numbers and there were a couple of their finely figured bodies floating near the skimmer port. Tad, Tracy’s husband, was in the water. Through the glass he had seen the distended shape refracted on the surface and shot through the sliding door. His drink, iced tea, was on the counter where he had left it. That was his way, controlled, steady even in the nexus of a storm. He had been a football player at North Carolina, a massive man, the embodiment of everything John was not and so desperately wished to be. Useless miracle, Tad had trained as a paramedic in the off-season.
Tad’s mass had set the water rolling over the coping, where it was in rhythmic recoil by the time Albert, with the rest of the family, emerged, the concrete dark, the humid sear of hot chlorine everywhere. Tad had the boy clutched to his chest and he was plowing through the water toward the steps. He emerged from the pool, the water shredding in white channels around his legs. Tad could tell by the way the boy’s weight dragged through the water there was nothing to be done. That knowledge didn’t slow him because it was not a conscious thought—it was something he knew as he knew his own body’s balance point, and he was not aware that he was struggling against his own animal understanding as he laid the boy down on the concrete and put his mouth on the boy’s mouth, pinched the boy’s nose with pressure enough to close the nostrils, but gently because, again, without conscious thought, Tad meant not to cause the little boy any pain.
Albert had cultivated the ability to become Tad. That is, he could imagine himself in Tad’s body, his lips on the boy’s, the fear and anguish in his massive chest. He could inhabit in the same way, as in a dream, Tracy, Sydney, John, Fil, her husband, Skinner, their daughter, Beatrice. He could inhabit the boy’s mother. The boy. The boy, mesmerized by the strange skin of the water, the winking reflection of the sun. A horsefly riding the surface, and his frustration at not being able to reach the insect as it flicked its wings, his arm stretching, knees on rough concrete, the enclosure of the water as he tipped in and sank. The weird, not-unbeautiful moment of descent. Then the larynx snapping shut, the heart still beating normally, the brain, unperturbed, dawdling for a few more seconds. Then panic, a child’s panic, which is not fear of death but fear of separation from his mother, and he cries Mama, the water flooding into the esophagus, forcing the larynx into spasm, the trachea sealing off, oxygen level dwindling, the painful astringency of inhaling chlorinated water, the larynx pulling down yet more water, great gulps of water, the little hands seeking purchase, grasping at the cool liquid, thrashing, finding nothing to hold on to but water until it is over, his life is over. The boy hangs there, suspended above the bottom of the pool, and no one sees him. His blond hair spreads in a corona around his head. The surface of the water is smooth. The spirit leaves the body, and the body becomes a place as serene as deep space, and as cold and airless, a place of acute absence.
For Albert, it was a sharper punishment to plunge into the memory chest of the grieving mother, to sit in the discord of her inner sanctum, to hear nothing but the accumulated voices of the world’s every farewell echoing off the walls. At battlefronts, on train platforms, beneath hotel awnings, in airports, at prison gates, at hospital beds, across courtrooms, at gravesides. They resonated endlessly in languages known and unknown, Xhosa mixing with Giligudi, an Irish fisherman’s watery cry as he is pulled to the bottom of the North Atlantic, the Chinese miner’s to his family, scribbled on a cigarette package after the cave-in, the slave’s grievous, unspoken farewell to her children at the auction block. And not all tragedies. In balance and provocation, the tossed-off seeya as a roommate leaves for class, a see-you-in-a-minute run to the corner for cigarettes and milk, the paratrooper’s truncated Geroniii— as he hurtles away from the jumpmaster.
They mock her, Albert thinks, these farewells, all of them. It’s torture. There’s a keening beneath the collective din, and that’s her voice. She, after all, could not say farewell, because the boy never left. He was right there, wasn’t he, right beside her chair, arranging his stuffed animals in a row, speaking through them the concerns of his day. But no, he was not there. She’d failed to watch over her own son. Until the day of her own death she will call out that animal wail. Awake, asleep, she will never be without the sense that she’s left it undone, that the most essential part of herself is lost, drifting, stranded on an ice floe carried out to sea on the tide. A cliché? They exist to make horrors like this comprehensible.
Bronwyn was a good girl, trustworthy, and lost in the way of all Californians who abandoned that coast’s optimism for the great soldiering-on of the granite-willed East. She and John had gotten married in July 1968. She had a broad, substantial face that Albert liked. He approved of her shapely body, sharp mind, the unadorned beauty that wasn’t exactly innocence, but related. He saw what attracted John—the same thing that had attracted him to Sydney. Neither of them put up with any bullshit, and he could see that Bron kept John in check. He was erratic, an easy mark for provocateurs, a peculiar and dangerous characteristic for a New Yorker to possess. When introduced to Bron, Albert had recognized the iron will immediately. They carry it in their shoulders, women like that. There was a drunkard father back in California, or a dead mother, a brood left to fend for itself, something along those lines, and Bron would have been their protector. As it turned out, neither death nor drink had shaped the girl—it was the other thing, success, a father who had worked hard, provided for his family, prospered, and a mother who commanded equal respect, and exuded a sunniness that seemed to endlessly billow up from within her. Albert was as stupidly misled about his daughter-in-law as he was about his own son. It was a father-in-law’s hopeless enchantment with the girl who he feels is at least in part his own, part daughter, part lover, and who, in turn, should adore him back.
Her family was physically imposing. That was what you noticed first. When Albert and Sydney had taken the Breckenridges up on their offer to spend Christmas at their home on the Russian River, Albert felt as though he’d walked into a hallucination. The house, built from the ground up by Bron’s father and her brothers, was scaled to their maple-sized frames. The kitchen counter hit Albert high on the rib cage; Sydney, attempting to safely deliver a plate into the depths of the industrial-sized porcelain sink, had to stand on her tiptoes. The stairs were something from an acid trip, and although the furniture had been purchased in the world of standard sizes, the beds, four-posters built from wood cut on the property, each post a tree itself, bark intact, required visiting mortals to use step stools. Getting down in the dark for a midnight piss was a dangling, toe-waggling descent over the cliff’s edge. The bed was itself easily large enough to host a family of five. The damn robes were on hooks six and a half feet off the bathroom floor, and when he put one on it covered him like an evening gown.