I grabbed more tools and some cellophane-wrapped lobes of food until my canvas satchel was stuffed.
On a hook beneath the klieg lights hung the quilted coats for a meat locker.
I took one, tested the fit, then layered a larger coat on top of it.
I required a hard shell over my skin. I couldn’t be sure what I would encounter down below in the tunnels.
Because that’s where I was going. Down the hole and out of there forever.
Above me somewhere, in a bed, plugged into support machines, or perhaps plugged in no longer, was Claire.
For the second time now, instead of staying to help my wife, I went the other way.
I looked at no one, then stepped into nothing.
I plunged down the Jewish hole of Forsythe in free fall, the underground wind rushing over me so sweetly it seemed that, perhaps, as I fell, I might have been in bed, too, and if I only rolled over, just rolled over a little bit farther into the darkness, breaching her side of the bed, I could maybe hold my Claire again for a little while, hold her so tight that perhaps it would not hurt so much when together we landed in the world below.
PART 3
46
Yesterday morning I left Esther resting on my cot and walked out into the swale to collect wood. She would not miss me, perhaps not even know I was gone. I chose a southerly trail and jumped through the brush and shittings until I found a nest of felled branches, then took my time striking them into pit-size pieces for burning.
It is late autumn, I think, three years since I dropped down the Jewish hole at Forsythe and made my escape back to the old hut, where the feed has long since snuffed out. The hut makes a small home for me now. The orange cable has gone cold.
I have not kept faith with the calendar. My timekeeping is promiscuous at best. Perhaps it’s already winter and the climate is only slow to frost.
I am not so troubled by the season; it’s the shrinking of light that gives concern. The darkness of this New York has grown more severe lately, blotting up from the soil before the sun has even withered off for the day. It’s a soaking darkness, cold on my body when it comes.
The pretext for my outing yesterday was wood, more fuel to warm our forest hut, but in truth I was looking for something else. Something that will help Esther. What I was seeking is small and it has a face and it breathes so prettily, in little wet gusts of air. Often it comes along willingly. It harbors a medicine inside its delicate chest.
One day, when Esther has healed, when she can sit up and see, when she can tolerate my presence as her caretaker and endure me, if silently, I would like to take her on a tour of this valley in the woods behind her old house.
I can show Esther where I kept watch of the quarantine for so many months, years, the bench I built into the mud, the blind of trees I thickened, branch by braided branch, so I would not be discovered. I can point to where I sat, mime how I looked out across the river until my face ached, hoping to see her behind the town gates.
A more difficult story to reveal to Esther will be how, when I first arrived home—if such a word can apply to our Jewish hut—I contemplated going into the old neighborhood after her. I weighed the risks, keeping her safety in mind, then finally decided against such an incursion. I knew Esther was inside the child barracks and close to a failed immunity—her age was simply no good anymore, and we all grow up to speechlessness now, don’t we?—and I knew she’d soon be released without any perilous invasion by me.
What’s the mime for such a rationalization? I would have saved you but I knew I didn’t really need to, since you were probably going to be released soon. My body lacks the finesse for that kind of message. Those contortions are beyond me. Instead I might stare into space and let Esther see—she’s a smart young woman—that the issue is pretty fucking complicated.
One might argue that, absent of speech, deprived of all communication, a father dissolves. The title finally expires, and the man probably follows. You don’t strip away a father’s title and expect the man to live. A former father is just a man who once had a duty to answer. Perhaps he can barely recall what that duty ever was. It nags at him as something he forgot to do, something he did only poorly. Fatherhood is perhaps another name for something done badly.
Perhaps it is better now to liken a father to an animal parent. Certain caretaking is observed, but when the offspring matures, alienation and estrangement set in. Rivalry. The youngster grows preternaturally angry at the father, for some reason angrier at the father than at any other creature, and the father opens a small hole in his chest to accommodate this anger, which flows in rapidly. An emotional ecology is observed, with the energy composted and renewed in the chest of the man. A deep, circular structure is satisfied with the anger returning to its creator, who probably is not equipped to hold it anymore. He must release it through new activities in the world.
It is problematic to father alone. By this I do not mean without a wife. That can actually be simpler, finer. A single authority, a clear chain of command. None of the agonies of partnered power, although I’m confident that Claire will soon join me here at the hut. Instead I mean it is difficult to father without an actual child. How exactly does one father when no child is to be found, and yet the father has not finished his work, has fatherish urges he wishes still to discharge, since he did not do so enough when he had the child on hand? It is a central question.
Now that Esther has returned to me, my fatherhood will be evident to her in even the small touches, and not a word will have to escape my mouth. Esther will come to enjoy the woods behind her old house, find the resources she needs, perhaps one day consider this hut her home. She’d never been allowed at our hut before, couldn’t even know about it. Now it is hers. She will appreciate the steps I have taken to ensure her comfort.
We need to get her well first, that’s all. This is what I do not, cannot tell her. I know what words do, and I won’t subject her to our fatal language. We need to fix her up and get her back on her feet.
Newcomers to muteness are not always pleased. I know this firsthand.
On the cot I have forced open Esther’s eyes, stared into them. Her forehead is not just cold to the touch. Cold is not the word. The skin of her arms is slack. Her lips vanish into her face. They are paler than her cheeks.
I will admit that there were days when I first had Esther back in the hut, only a few weeks ago, leaving mugs of soup on the stone post for her, putting bread, dusted with salt, near her sleeping face, when I could look at her for the wrong number of minutes, an extended scrutiny that wore down my joy and left me unsure of who it was I had brought home.
It was marginally possible I’d rescued, instead of Esther, a stranger with a different name.
The hair was not really the hair of Esther. It was flat, brown, indoor hair, the kind more often found hidden beneath a person’s clothing. Under this girl’s tongue I felt the tough, dead skin. LeBov’s Mark. We all had it. A tongue fallen too long into stillness, hardening now in the mouth like a bone.
And Esther’s body? I did not have pictures to compare this girl to, but I shouldn’t have needed them. A picture in the wallet is for others, for boasting, not for the goddamn father himself, who has a picture of his children burned eternally into his mind, correct? Was she shorter than I remembered? Something was wrong. When I recalled Esther, it was now with a smeared face. Where was the smell I could not even describe to you? Life among the worded children had rubbed my daughter in the scent of too many strangers. It gave offense. It did not reach deep enough inside me to trigger my good side. I wanted a sharper dose of recognition. I worried that my paternal instincts would not ignite as long as I suffered this doubt.