1
Imagine watching the raw footage of every minute of your life—what you were seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, including moments you barely noticed or didn’t notice at all—then imagine entering that stream at random and trying to recognize where you were, what was happening. Would what had seemed important still seem important in the same way? Would what had seemed trivial, or had never even registered, seem rich with interest now that you were viewing it so close up and with such urgency? The flash of life from dead matter, mineral to plant, plant to animal, animal to human with mind and soul or at least the idea of mind and soul—there were all these miracles presenting themselves every second of our lives and then there was the destructiveness of that summer, that year, the years to follow.
I hadn’t seen my neighbor Diana very much lately—she was busy with work as she usually was—but that evening both of us happened to have had a free moment at the same time. I had just gotten off the phone with a curator who wanted to ask me a few questions about Malika, and it was confusing, as if for a moment Malika were still alive, and I was in this kind of a fog when I wandered down the path, past the house Diana rented part of, toward the pond. The house she rented in was a yellow bungalow with reclaimed junk in the front yard, old desks and chairs and stereo consoles that her new boyfriend Sebastian seemed to be making a habit of refinishing in a slow, mostly imperceptible way. Diana was my age, late forties or early fifties, someone who had been through a lot (I knew too much about her from being her next-door neighbor), and since the advent of Sebastian, she had bloomed into some version of who she’d probably been a long time ago. Sebastian was maybe twenty years younger, with a muscular build and kinky blond hair, and he went around shirtless, like a TV star from the ’70s. He’d told me once how much he liked older women, the character in their faces. I didn’t know where he was that afternoon, it was just Diana, who was down at the dock when I got there, hoisting herself up onto the planks after a swim, a tattoo of a cresting wave on her belly just above the waistline.
“The damn geese,” she said. “All this shit on the dock. I don’t know what to do about it.”
She shook water out of her hair, then wrapped herself in an old beach towel the color of split pea soup.
“Not really my skill set,” I said. “How was the sailing yesterday?”
“Fine. Windy. Nothing great. I don’t weigh much, so I’m not much good in the wind.”
“I thought wind was kind of the point.”
“Kind of. Kind of sort of.”
Her gaze was suggestive sometimes, flirty, Sebastian notwithstanding, but there was hostility buried in it that I don’t think she thought I could see and maybe couldn’t see herself. She always thought I came from Brooklyn, which I guessed had something to do with the color of my skin. This kind of friction was worse now, since the election that fall, though I doubted Diana voted that way, if she voted at all, unless she did, smiling suggestively at me as she had before.
“August,” I said.
“We’re going to grill tonight, if you want to come by.”
“You and Sebastian.”
“And some of his friends. They’re all coming from the city. He’s on his way back now, he just finished a job.”
“I’ll try to stop by.”
“Well, keep it in mind.”
“Thank you.”
“You going in?”
“Yeah, right now.”
The pond was more than two miles across—I’d heard people say it looked like New Hampshire or Vermont, which were places I had never stayed in long enough to actually see. I think what they meant was the pond was surrounded by pine trees—very thick in the distance—as well as deciduous ones—oaks and maples and tupelos. Diana feared the pond was dying and that one day it would truly die, an algal bloom would kill all the fish—the egrets had already stopped roosting in the trees in the evenings—but for now there were still perch and even some bass, despite the chemicals leaching in from people’s lawns, and in at least this diminished sense the pond survived.
I dove straight off the dock, reaching forward and hitting the water at just the right angle, and swam underwater for as long as I could. It was warm, though still cooler than the air, and swimming through it felt purifying. When I came up, I was facing the deepest part of the pond and the nearest trees were very far away, and because there were no houses on that side, it was like I had traveled many miles (to Vermont, perhaps) instead of just swimming forty or fifty yards. The water was blue when you looked across it at the distant shore, but when you looked up close it was striated with white and gray waveforms that moved and regenerated endlessly. I thought about the curator who had called about Malika earlier. As I got older, I had more, not less, trouble locating myself in the changes I’d gone through—maybe everyone felt that way at my age, though perhaps they didn’t feel that the changes were so senseless. The curator was writing descriptive text about an artist’s book Malika had made called Darkadia, after a fictional island nation, part Caribbean, part New York City, that constituted the book’s purported “subject.” I saw now that it was really Malika’s outsider vision of Manhattan, that she was trying to see the city around her from an estranged perspective that might reflect her own alienation and fear, but it also reminded me of the New York I had first encountered when I came here from Israel when I was ten (my mother and I started off in the Village, before giving up and moving, yes, to Brooklyn, then Queens). I told the curator that back then Malika and many other people we knew felt a violent culmination coming, not another September 11 but something domestic aroused or revitalized by September 11 that would pull everything apart. Malika had talked about her project as a kind of “negative fantasy,” an imagined apocalypse in place of the endless cycle of violence and amnesia that was America’s actual history. It was a release, in other words, albeit a negative one.
I had lost the thread of this swim. I realized I had been treading water for quite some time now without even being aware of it, without seeing anything around me, and for reasons I didn’t really understand. I looked back at the dock and it was still there, now empty, Diana gone. The trees were barely moving in the light breeze, and the sky above was piled with billowing clouds, white and gilded at the edges. I kept swimming. The tupelos’ leaves had already turned color, red against the deep green of the thick forest behind them. When I turned around, the blue water of the pond and the hazy trees in the background were like icons of themselves.
Malika’s brother Jesse had tried to call me while I was at the pond—I knew now why I’d become upset while I was swimming. It was not the curator, or even Malika’s memory, but the premonition of the missed call. The female robot had left a voice mail and my phone had transcribed the message, starting somewhere in the middle:
seven if you would like to permanently block your number from receiving calls from this facility press six for balance and rate quotes press one to accept charges press two to refuse charges press seven if you would like to permanently block your number from receiving calls from this facility press—
I hadn’t seen Jesse since last Christmas—we became close only after Malika’s death, or because of it. He had grown a new beard, which he kept neatly trimmed, thanks to a friendship he’d made with the inmate barber. The facility’s walls were two-toned, the lower third, because it got dinged the most, darker, to spare the paint from showing wear and tear. We sat in the visiting shed and made jokes and gossipped—Jesse was always in good spirits when I came—and both of us had sandwiches and a soda. The glint of hope now was that he had applied for clemency that spring. The glint of despair was that he’d applied two years ago, we had gone through the whole process, and he’d been denied, and so he was reluctant now to go through that all over again. I couldn’t just call him back now—that was the problem—so I sent him an email. I told him about coming across Diana down at the dock in her bikini, then the vexed thoughts about Malika while I swam in the pond. I told him about the curator who had called. It always felt like I was writing from another world, which I was.
Don’t lose sight of what you can’t see, I closed, a paraphrase of something Jesse himself had said to me once.
I went out to my backyard, looking at the trees until I began to see them. There was a wooded lot beyond mine, all oaks, and I had lived with them for a while now, they had never failed me. Even when I heard the cars on the main road, I could still take something from how the trees’ leaves moved or didn’t move according to the air. The largest one grew five stories high, its branches spread out like predatory arms, all of its leaves toothed like something primeval. Behind me was a modest lawn and behind that a half circle of daylilies that I’d inherited from the previous owner. I didn’t know what a daylily was until I bought the house. A daylily’s flowers bloom and die in one day.
The house where Ana was staying was across the giant oak trees from me. I’d been seeing Ana for about three months then.
There was a place I liked to buy fish, and I took Ana there that evening after she got back from work and changed her clothes. The fish shop was a shack built on the edge of an inlet where the boats would dock and unload their catch. From the parking lot, you could see the inlet itself, silver beneath the sky, fringed with reeds, and you could smell the briny air and hear the seagulls flying toward the abandoned coast guard station down the road. Inside, there were rubber mats on the water-drenched floor where Ana and I stood. All along the wall beside us lay whole fish arrayed on ice—silver, pink, gray, yellow—their dead eyes black and rimmed with green. We kept touching each other, even in the fish shop. She wore what I now knew was called a huipil, embroidered with large pink roses on a black ground. Hers was a modern version, which went well with her cutoff jeans, the loose threads coming down in strands on her thighs. I felt us glaring there in the line, the counterwoman working the register before iced vats of mussels, clams, cockles, steamers, crabs. Men in aprons and high rubber boots worked at the cutting tables and sinks, filleting fish with their knives, and I felt our conspicuousness modulating my voice into something mesmerizingly calm, as I asked the woman what had come in fresh today. I had made rice at home. They sold bok choi, so I bought some bok choi. They bagged the scallops and filleted the fish and packed it all in ice and we walked back outside to my truck.
“Ceviche,” I said. “They have that in Mexico, but what about sushi? I’m not trying to sound ignorant.”
“There’s sushi everywhere.”
“There’s tacos here but they’re not really tacos. What I mean, is the sushi there any good?”
“I don’t know. Compared to what? There’s sushi everywhere in the world.”
“Your friend is still coming out next week. Jack?”
She looked out the window, not answering, her hand still entwined in mine. “How can you not know him? He’s your neighbor.”
“Does he like sushi?”
“You’re being stupid.”
I’d been reading the Bible that summer, which I do from time to time, and I’d just gotten to a part in the book of Exodus where Moses, having fled Egypt, marries a wife who knows nothing about his past and gives birth to a son, Gershom, which means “stranger in a strange land.” This was how I often felt that summer with Ana.
When we got back to my house, it smelled sour inside from the vinegar in the rice. Ana followed me into the kitchen, but there was nothing she could do to help, so I asked her to go put on some music. She connected her phone and used her streaming service to play something she liked, electronic, probably from Venezuela or Mexico but I had no idea. She was gone for a while and when she came back I could taste smoke on her lips from the joint she’d lit up. She looked up at me and my eyes moved from her eyes to her fingertips and back. I felt her body through the huipil, her leanness not as hard and articulated as Malika’s had been. I pressed my fingers to the vertebrae just above her waist, then smoothed my hands down over her ass to her thighs, which were bare beneath the cutoffs. The huipil was from Mexico but she was from Venezuela. In four weeks, she was returning to Mexico City, where she and most of her family had resettled several years ago after fleeing Caracas. If you walked through my backyard into the woods, you could pick up a hiking trail that went for miles through a nature preserve, all the way to the bay, but first you had to walk across a few people’s lawns, and that was how I first came across Ana, walking through these other people’s properties, which always made me feel a little furtive, even at that time of year when there was hardly anyone around. It was May, still ugly out, damp and cold, and a neighbor’s dog, Chloe, started barking when I saw Ana and she saw me. She wore a fur-trimmed coat that went down to her knees, not looking at me but at Chloe, who continued to bark and was now rushing up on her. Despite her small stature, Ana had a strong presence—I saw that immediately in the way she stood with her hips a little forward, clapping her gloved hands and then reaching toward Chloe, beckoning, not scared. I introduced myself and told her I lived back through the woods. The trunks of the trees were soaked black with the previous night’s rain, the first grass coming up through the road’s sandy clay. She was standing next to a pile of old records and books that she must have cleared out of the house. I offered to get my truck and take it up to the dump for her.
“Jack said they’d come pick it up,” she told me. “He said I should just leave it there.”
“Who?”
“Jack, your neighbor. My friend. You don’t know him?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
I knew almost no one in the neighborhood, apart from Diana and her landlord.
She had gone solemn in the kitchen now—I had taken her hair out of the clip, and it hung on either side of her face and for some reason that made her look sad or vaguely lost. There was something regressive about the attraction between us, I thought. Sometimes we spent so much time together that we didn’t sleep or eat. It wasn’t that we were fucking all the time, a lot of it was just me listening to her talk. I would try to put together something closer to an actual picture of her, but I’d get distracted by a new piece of information, then miss the next one while I was trying to synthesize it all. She liked to talk and I liked to listen to her voice. I had made abstract paintings and I liked certain forms of jazz, and this was something like that. I left the fish and the knife on the counter and we went into the bedroom.
She was naming places she’d been: India, Thailand, China, Brazil, the list so long that she trailed off and I asked her to tell me one thing about each of the places at random. ...
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