“Go inside,” I tell him. “Bad weather is coming.”
He grabs my arm and holds on for a moment, his hand sliding from my wrist to my fingers. It’s the first touch I’ve felt since my husband died that caused a pulse of feeling in my chest, the last spark of a live wire before it goes dead. Oji squeezes my fingertips, then lets go. He stands and walks to the house, pausing by the door and touching his chest before going inside.
I rise and find shelter underneath a broad canopy of umbrella tree leaves. I watch several of Oji’s drawings blur into smooth patches of mud. The dirt surrounding the knotted roots is dry. I kneel and pick up an oval rock, the tip worn to a dull point. I push the rock into the ground and begin shaping the earth. I draw my monster with a great sharpened horn and peaked flames flowing from its mouth.
Lately I’ve been thinking of winter in Chicago. I can no longer remember the exact color of the snow — pure white or flecked with gray? I can only recall my husband and me moving inside a warm, low-lit house — the details of the house are gone from me too; I see a maze of bare walls and smooth floors that glow a pale blue — and the hushed sound of snow falling and banking along the sidewalk.
When I’m finished, I bend my fingers and look at my hands; my nails are packed with soil. The rain intensifies. Oji’s house becomes vague, a long shadow. Winds shake the leaves and for a moment I smell smoke. I concentrate on the scent, but it vanishes into the aroma of rain and tree bark, the way one life can collapse into another and different people can stir within the same body, like bats thrashing inside a secret hollow.
up high in the air
Just after the Fourth of July, my mother called to tell me she thought her hair was on fire. She lived in Nebraska, alone since my father drowned in the Platte River two years earlier. I hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving and, for the last month, hadn’t returned her calls.
“What do you mean you think your hair is on fire?” The apartment my husband and I shared was near the L and the floor shuddered beneath me as a train passed.
“I can smell the smoke,” she said.
“Do you see flames?”
“I can smell the smoke,” she said again.
“Maybe you should call the fire department.”
“I think I’ll go outside for a while,” she said, and hung up.
I walked down the hall and sat in the linen closet.
I didn’t tell my husband about the latest call. Just last week my mother had phoned to say my father had come home for breakfast, that his clothes were just a little wet and it looked like everything was going to be all right. But I did tell Dean, one of my summer school students. Since June, he’d been visiting my office every Thursday evening. He was a senior in college, an art history major; my etymology class was an elective he needed to graduate early. I’d been an assistant professor at the university for three years and always reminded Dean to ride the elevator to the eleventh floor, then take the back stairs down to my office on the seventh. I’ll be up for tenure in a few years, I’d told him.
“Have you ever smelled burning hair?” I asked.
He shook his head. I was naked and sitting on my office floor, the blue-gray carpet rough against my legs.
“It’s terrible,” I said. “It smells like disease.”
Dean was standing on the other side of the room, leaning against my desk, wearing only a pair of white tube socks. He had a swimmer’s body, lean and broad-shouldered, though he tended to slump. Sometimes I pressed my palm against the small of his back to correct his posture. After I told him about my mother’s call, he dropped his chin against his chest and sighed.
“It sounds like you should go back to Nebraska for a while,” he said.
Since the drowning, I dreaded going home. In the nights before my last visit, I was kept awake by memories of traveling to Nebraska for my father’s funeral, of the plane landing and looking out the window and seeing the Platte cutting across the state like a huge scar. My husband had come along, but spent the whole trip nagging me about visiting the cretaceous fossil exhibit at a nearby university museum.
“My mother’s neighbors have been bringing her dinner every Sunday night for the last year, and she has a cousin nearby too,” I said to Dean. “They’d tell me if something was really wrong.”
“She doesn’t scare you when she talks like that?”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course she does.”
It was then he walked across the room and held me, without desire, comforting me the way I imagined he might comfort his own mother. His skin was soft. He smelled like summer, like grass and sweat and white bar soap.
“It’s time for you to go home,” I said.
I found my husband lying on the living room floor, holding a photograph above his head. The sofa and glass-top coffee table were cluttered with newspaper pages, editorial cartoons from the Chicago Tribune, the science and technology sections from the New York Times. I asked if he’d remembered to buy more coffee filters and pick up my dry cleaning, and when he didn’t answer, I nudged him with the toe of my pump.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at a picture.” He flipped the photo toward me. It was black and white. From where I stood, I could make out small, peaked waves.
“Is that a picture of Lake Michigan?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a picture of something in Lake Michigan.” He sat up and pointed at a dark speck in the center of the photograph. “Right there. The monster is what I’m looking at.”
My husband’s career was going nowhere. In the spring, he’d left his job at the Lake Michigan Federation, where he’d been the assistant director of habitat management. After he’d been passed over for a promotion for the second time and dozens of academic presses rejected his book on the lifecycle of chinook salmon, he started spending weekends in his bathrobe and waking me in the middle of the night to discuss the injustices of academic publishing. He sent anonymous hate mail to the Federation and burned an issue of The American Scientist in the kitchen sink after reading an article about a PhD drop-out who had recently discovered, quite by accident, a new species of anemone.
Then one morning he got a call from the director of the Mishegenabeg Discovery Group, who wanted to offer him a position as expeditions manager, since he had extensive knowledge of Lake Michigan. Initially, he was skeptical of the group’s practices, but came home from his first meeting impressed by their equipment and organization. And then, only a few weeks after joining the Discovery Group, he told me the mishegenabeg had come to him in a dream.
“I was underwater,” he’d said. “Stuck there, but not exactly drowning, and I saw these huge eyes staring back at me. When I woke up, I thought about the sightings and disappearances that were reported to the Federation and how we always ignored them. I realized how wrong I’ve been.”
“What kind of disappearances?” I’d asked, still thinking about the dream he had described, of being trapped underwater, but not drowning.
“How about the fishing tug that vanished near Port Washington a few years ago,” he’d replied. “No distress call, no debris. Just gone.”
“There are dozens of wrecked boats at the bottom of Lake Michigan,” I’d said. “It probably just sank.”