Bravery
by Jake Zucker
He’d kept lists his whole life: favorite scenes in movies, miles he’d bicycled, books he’d read and television episodes he’d watched. Marble notebooks, Excel spreadsheets—lately he’d kept his reading records in a simple Word file with columns separated by subtle maroon lines. Sometimes he posted the records online but he suspected no friends cared a whit what books he read or movies he watched, so off the web he’d pulled his data and back onto his desktop it would stay, all his pretty maroon formatting for his pleasure only, no one else’s. The surface under the white sliver of his nails was splintered and uneven like a grater. If he just chipped away at the splinters with the sharp edge of his nail clippers the skin would become smooth and grow in clean… But he kept clipping, his pointer nail whittled pathetically down almost to the cuticle. If another person got too near, he’d keep his fingers in a fist to hide what he’d done to himself. Two nights ago he watched A Cry in the Dark. He opened the Word file and saw the title at the top of the page, just where he left it. Good. Good. Sometimes he was certain others could tell what he was thinking about—that even when his body and face were still, his eyes must dart back and forth in consideration of the right method, right file format, right maroon. I should try obsessing in front of a mirror, he thought. I should just start obsessing there just to see what it looks like. But that would be impossible—he couldn’t turn it on like that, he couldn’t turn it off.
Though he was a prodigious finisher of books and films, he could not read nor watch while on a bus, and for the past two days he’d been traveling and settling in at his parents’ home. Christmastime. His niece had just turned three years old, so not technically her first Christmastime but perhaps the first she’d remember for years thereafter, and though he was Jewish he did not wish to be absent from the milestone, no matter the destruction that a holiday break in his structure might cause him.
His name was Alexander; his niece—the daughter of his sister—was named Corinne.
The night he’d arrived home, he’d stood in his old bedroom where his niece had wandered, put her on his shoulders, and pretended just for a moment he could not find her. “Grandma? Grandpa?” he asked his parents. “Has anyone seen my niece?” he asked, and the girl cackled. Cackles were as much as he could get from her; around strangers (and uncles, apparently) she became non-verbal. The adults set Corinne in front of the television, then spoke about whether her shyness was clinical, though all the while Alexander thought about Excel formulas that could generate titles in italics and how he might better keep track of television series he started but decided not to finish. (Lately he’d stopped reading magazines and newspapers entirely for the same reason: no easy way to keep a record.)
The village’s population numbered just over sixteen hundred, making it—this “outer borough” of Albany, New York, he sometimes called it—approximately three thousand times smaller than Boston, Massachusetts, where Alexander lived two hundred miles due east. He had walked to elementary school every weekday even on the days it snowed near Christmas, back when it snowed near Christmas.
“Just twenty minutes,” his sister said. “Take her to the playground for twenty minutes. Let her burn off steam.”
And so he took Corinne to the elementary school playground on Christmas morning. The getting would be good today, he said, with no competition for the slides and swings.
Though he was a prodigious finisher of books and films, he could not read nor watch while on a bus, and for the past two days he’d been traveling and settling in at his parents’ home. Christmastime. His niece had just turned three years old, so not technically her first Christmastime but perhaps the first she’d remember for years thereafter, and though he was Jewish he did not wish to be absent from the milestone, no matter the destruction that a holiday break in his structure might cause him.
His name was Alexander; his niece—the daughter of his sister—was named Corinne.
The night he’d arrived home, he’d stood in his old bedroom where his niece had wandered, put her on his shoulders, and pretended just for a moment he could not find her. “Grandma? Grandpa?” he asked his parents. “Has anyone seen my niece?” he asked, and the girl cackled. Cackles were as much as he could get from her; around strangers (and uncles, apparently) she became non-verbal. The adults set Corinne in front of the television, then spoke about whether her shyness was clinical, though all the while Alexander thought about Excel formulas that could generate titles in italics and how he might better keep track of television series he started but decided not to finish. (Lately he’d stopped reading magazines and newspapers entirely for the same reason: no easy way to keep a record.)
The village’s population numbered just over sixteen hundred, making it—this “outer borough” of Albany, New York, he sometimes called it—approximately three thousand times smaller than Boston, Massachusetts, where Alexander lived two hundred miles due east. He had walked to elementary school every weekday even on the days it snowed near Christmas, back when it snowed near Christmas.
“Just twenty minutes,” his sister said. “Take her to the playground for twenty minutes. Let her burn off steam.”
And so he took Corinne to the elementary school playground on Christmas morning. The getting would be good today, he said, with no competition for the slides and swings.
*
Starting from his parents’ house—his old house—on Crescent Street, it’s an eight minute walk. Past the post office from which he’d collect the family’s mail and return home with the stack of letters at the end of his long school day, at two p.m.; the one-room library right beside the school; the local branch of J. P. Morgan/Chase. Idyllic. Not a lick of bullying or poverty. Whatever shameful memories he carried he’d buried with safe-space meditation, rewind therapy—shoved them back deep in the amygdala where they belonged.
He passed the navy blue steel markers put up by the Historical Society about this-or-that town father’s this-or-that stone foundation or farming field. (The town’s founding by Dutch Europeans dated back to the 1630s, and the Historical Society, moved by mild early-America connections to the Revolutionary War, put up fights against too much building, renovating, disturbing cemeteries. Compromises were made between vinyl siding and the erections of signs like these that Alexander knew verbatim.) The darkwood playground with its groundcover of sliced-rubber shavings—perfect for accidental tumbles—looked just as it had when he’d been a child, except, of course, smaller. The light—drab, white air beneath the drab blue sky under wide clouds. He’d never once set foot on this playground on Christmas day, not in all these years, and he worried Corinne would bang her head in the catacomb tunnels inside the wooden castles, but she wouldn’t, the playground wasn’t small to her.
It was not her weight on the swingset that startled him, though the weight on the chain turned the swingset bolts back and forth each time she swung, and Alexander found it easy to imagine a finger caught between the links. Back to his notebook. A lined, sewn marble notebook with perforated pages, the size of a passport. He pulled it from his pocket. Whereas before he would email himself any corrections he needed to make to his records, now he was trying to be less tied to his phone, so any changes that needed making he’d jot down and return to at a later moment. Was it two nights ago, A Cry in the Dark, or three? Did the library keep track of date-of-return? Whom could he ask? No librarian worked on Christmas. Sometimes he checked out many more books than he could ever read in a month, then stuck some immediately back in the drop box, where he liked to think a pneumatic tube would pop each volume back to their place on the shelf.
Corinne’s swinging didn’t shock him awake, attentive, didn’t shock his head up. What shocked him was the duo. Just the slightest frost on the grass outside the playground announced their approach with crunch noises, and when the new small boy breached the playground’s borders he jogged silently on rubber toward the swingset.
The boy’s mother—Alexander assumed she was the boy’s mother—kept her blonde hair tucked behind her ears with no hat or headband, her face flushed red with cold. She wore less than Alexander and even he was underdressed. The last week of the calendar year and here we had a lunatic, wrapped only in a cardigan. Alexander breathed; his breath hid the woman from him in a momentary white curtain. But when she breathed he saw no white air. (Later, when she’d tell him she’d spent time in Wisconsin, he’d think to himself, Of course.) No need for her to yell “Take turns!” or “Share!” as parents yelled these days, what with the playground facilities so empty.
She had her books, this woman. Six? Seven? However many, stacked one atop the other they amounted to nearly one foot tall. He could not see the covers clearly—she sat several yards away and, regardless, his eyes were weak—but he could see the white call-number stripe at the base of each spine. She read one page from the book at the top of the pile, closed the cover with a thwump, set the book aside, then moved onto the next one on the pile. Again: she’d read one page… thwump.
“You’ll let me know if anything bad happens,” she said.
Alexander looked at the books, looked at her, back at the books.
She did not look up. “I’m kidding,” she said. “I always keep one eye on the kid.”
The boy swung next to Corinne. He jumped off the swing and ran laps around the swingset. He looked about twice Corinne’s height, barely half Alexander’s.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
The woman didn’t move.
“What’s your… method?” he asked, louder.
This she heard, but did not break gaze from the text before her. “I start at the top and move left to right,” she said. She caught him looking at her piles and followed his gaze there too. “I just give a few a try before picking, I guess,” she said. “No harm in that. It’s free.”
A heat came from the taller pile of books, the ones she hadn’t touched yet. Any frost around the pile had melted, leaving a one-inch border of dark wood like a frame, a moat.
“How do you keep track?” he asked.
“Of what?”
“Of what you try.”
She smiled at him the way young teachers smile at children, the young teachers who’d smiled at him in the elementary school building beyond the playground. “Well,” she said. “There are only two piles. I can keep that straight.”
“But… globally?” he asked.
She looked down at the book again. She made a noise, like hmm. Him? A hum? “I guess I just remember what I’ve tried. And if I don’t remember it’s like it never happened so there’s no harm trying it again.”
The woods beyond the playground, behind Corinne’s swingset, he always thought of as the dirt bike woods, but he’d never seen a dirt bike in there, just an unbroken acreage of pine trees and foot-wide trails he remembered as white sand, glacial deposits. From the bow of the playground’s wooden pirate ship one could see over the short treeline at the woods’ perimeter and into the first yards of trail. In a few years—about eighteen more inches—Corinne would be tall enough to see into the woods from the apex point of her swing. (Now, on her own steam, she could only power herself over a little arc four or five feet forward and back.)
But Alexander had never been to the playground on Christmas—a snowless Christmas—and with the trees bare he saw just beyond the treeline what had never been there thirty years before: a pipe. A water pipe, a sewage pipe. Rusted red like it’d been sprouted from the ground, untended for decades.
“What do you do for a living?” the woman asked him.
Alexander closed his eyes. Opened them. The pipe had not moved. “I’m living off my savings right now,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I always wanted to say that.”
“Oh,” she said again.
“Mostly I’m in Excel sheets all day. It’s my preoccupation. Occupation. Excel cells. Excel cell cells.”
The pipe, he thought. It had not disappeared.
A sudden urge to devote his entire attention to what the woman on the bench—someone with her own responsibilities and compulsions—might say. It occurred to him that he should take passing interest in his niece’s whereabouts, too.
Just twenty minutes at the playground, Alexander’s sister had told him. Can’t you just give us that?
The woman laughed a young teacher’s laugh at Excel cells cells. He realized that this woman, being approximately his own age, would have recognized him if she’d grown up here, meaning she had not. He asked her what she did for a living.
He passed the navy blue steel markers put up by the Historical Society about this-or-that town father’s this-or-that stone foundation or farming field. (The town’s founding by Dutch Europeans dated back to the 1630s, and the Historical Society, moved by mild early-America connections to the Revolutionary War, put up fights against too much building, renovating, disturbing cemeteries. Compromises were made between vinyl siding and the erections of signs like these that Alexander knew verbatim.) The darkwood playground with its groundcover of sliced-rubber shavings—perfect for accidental tumbles—looked just as it had when he’d been a child, except, of course, smaller. The light—drab, white air beneath the drab blue sky under wide clouds. He’d never once set foot on this playground on Christmas day, not in all these years, and he worried Corinne would bang her head in the catacomb tunnels inside the wooden castles, but she wouldn’t, the playground wasn’t small to her.
It was not her weight on the swingset that startled him, though the weight on the chain turned the swingset bolts back and forth each time she swung, and Alexander found it easy to imagine a finger caught between the links. Back to his notebook. A lined, sewn marble notebook with perforated pages, the size of a passport. He pulled it from his pocket. Whereas before he would email himself any corrections he needed to make to his records, now he was trying to be less tied to his phone, so any changes that needed making he’d jot down and return to at a later moment. Was it two nights ago, A Cry in the Dark, or three? Did the library keep track of date-of-return? Whom could he ask? No librarian worked on Christmas. Sometimes he checked out many more books than he could ever read in a month, then stuck some immediately back in the drop box, where he liked to think a pneumatic tube would pop each volume back to their place on the shelf.
Corinne’s swinging didn’t shock him awake, attentive, didn’t shock his head up. What shocked him was the duo. Just the slightest frost on the grass outside the playground announced their approach with crunch noises, and when the new small boy breached the playground’s borders he jogged silently on rubber toward the swingset.
The boy’s mother—Alexander assumed she was the boy’s mother—kept her blonde hair tucked behind her ears with no hat or headband, her face flushed red with cold. She wore less than Alexander and even he was underdressed. The last week of the calendar year and here we had a lunatic, wrapped only in a cardigan. Alexander breathed; his breath hid the woman from him in a momentary white curtain. But when she breathed he saw no white air. (Later, when she’d tell him she’d spent time in Wisconsin, he’d think to himself, Of course.) No need for her to yell “Take turns!” or “Share!” as parents yelled these days, what with the playground facilities so empty.
She had her books, this woman. Six? Seven? However many, stacked one atop the other they amounted to nearly one foot tall. He could not see the covers clearly—she sat several yards away and, regardless, his eyes were weak—but he could see the white call-number stripe at the base of each spine. She read one page from the book at the top of the pile, closed the cover with a thwump, set the book aside, then moved onto the next one on the pile. Again: she’d read one page… thwump.
“You’ll let me know if anything bad happens,” she said.
Alexander looked at the books, looked at her, back at the books.
She did not look up. “I’m kidding,” she said. “I always keep one eye on the kid.”
The boy swung next to Corinne. He jumped off the swing and ran laps around the swingset. He looked about twice Corinne’s height, barely half Alexander’s.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
The woman didn’t move.
“What’s your… method?” he asked, louder.
This she heard, but did not break gaze from the text before her. “I start at the top and move left to right,” she said. She caught him looking at her piles and followed his gaze there too. “I just give a few a try before picking, I guess,” she said. “No harm in that. It’s free.”
A heat came from the taller pile of books, the ones she hadn’t touched yet. Any frost around the pile had melted, leaving a one-inch border of dark wood like a frame, a moat.
“How do you keep track?” he asked.
“Of what?”
“Of what you try.”
She smiled at him the way young teachers smile at children, the young teachers who’d smiled at him in the elementary school building beyond the playground. “Well,” she said. “There are only two piles. I can keep that straight.”
“But… globally?” he asked.
She looked down at the book again. She made a noise, like hmm. Him? A hum? “I guess I just remember what I’ve tried. And if I don’t remember it’s like it never happened so there’s no harm trying it again.”
The woods beyond the playground, behind Corinne’s swingset, he always thought of as the dirt bike woods, but he’d never seen a dirt bike in there, just an unbroken acreage of pine trees and foot-wide trails he remembered as white sand, glacial deposits. From the bow of the playground’s wooden pirate ship one could see over the short treeline at the woods’ perimeter and into the first yards of trail. In a few years—about eighteen more inches—Corinne would be tall enough to see into the woods from the apex point of her swing. (Now, on her own steam, she could only power herself over a little arc four or five feet forward and back.)
But Alexander had never been to the playground on Christmas—a snowless Christmas—and with the trees bare he saw just beyond the treeline what had never been there thirty years before: a pipe. A water pipe, a sewage pipe. Rusted red like it’d been sprouted from the ground, untended for decades.
“What do you do for a living?” the woman asked him.
Alexander closed his eyes. Opened them. The pipe had not moved. “I’m living off my savings right now,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I always wanted to say that.”
“Oh,” she said again.
“Mostly I’m in Excel sheets all day. It’s my preoccupation. Occupation. Excel cells. Excel cell cells.”
The pipe, he thought. It had not disappeared.
A sudden urge to devote his entire attention to what the woman on the bench—someone with her own responsibilities and compulsions—might say. It occurred to him that he should take passing interest in his niece’s whereabouts, too.
Just twenty minutes at the playground, Alexander’s sister had told him. Can’t you just give us that?
The woman laughed a young teacher’s laugh at Excel cells cells. He realized that this woman, being approximately his own age, would have recognized him if she’d grown up here, meaning she had not. He asked her what she did for a living.
*
They exchanged names. She asked Alexander if he’d gone to school “out there in Boston” (he did not remember telling her he lived in Boston, though he must have) and she said she “had a cousin who went to school out there. Brandeis.”
“Brandeis,” he repeated.
“Did you go to school out there?” she asked.
“Not Brandeis,” he said.
“I just meant any of the Boston schools. Boston College or something. But it sounds like no.”
She explained her system, again: she checked out a stack of books at the library, picked the one whose first page interested her the most, then never gave up until the last page. “I think I lied,” she said. “The books I read all make it into my diary, somehow.”
Alexander thought of column width and gutters and how such a diary might look on a web or print interface. Autoresponsive iFrames and CSS and Excel formulas.
“I do something like that,” he said. He put every new book or movie he watched atop a Word doc—the titles in black, the dates completed in dark gray—and used a plugin to populate the data to a personal web page. The link’s accessible, he said, to anyone who wants it.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “I found a perfect maroon.”
He continued. He wiped his nose and eyes. “But when I picture myself actually using it, it’s like my skull is going to come apart.”
When he pulled the tissue from his eyes, he saw that the woman stood, covered her chest with the book in her arms. Her mouth was a line and she looked straight to the boy she brought with her, who was safely balancing on a rubber tire far on the other side of the playground, far from them both. “That sounds very upsetting,” she said.
Alexander turned toward her and leaned back on the railing that separated the playground from the parents’ benches. “How,” he asked, “did you get books from the public library on Christmas?”
She let out an empty-steam breath and said, “You caught me.” There, finally: her lips curled back to a smile. She’d picked up her books on the twenty-third, she said, and had been saving them for Christmas, keeping them on her bedside table like a child with gifts under the tree. “I guess I have my own system, too.”
She’d studied out in Wisconsin, she said, not the state university in Madison but what she called a “rink-a-dink” liberal arts college that cost thirty-five thousand dollars a year, the name of which she wouldn’t tell him because she was sure he’d not have heard of it, a glorified teacher’s college, studying drama or set-design, and at some point Alexander stopped listening and stopped thinking about Wisconsin or steam-breath or even his lists. Just beyond that first treeline he saw the pipe again and was sure—as sure as one could be at a distance of thirty-odd yards and with a playground between—the pipe was smoking.
“Brandeis,” he repeated.
“Did you go to school out there?” she asked.
“Not Brandeis,” he said.
“I just meant any of the Boston schools. Boston College or something. But it sounds like no.”
She explained her system, again: she checked out a stack of books at the library, picked the one whose first page interested her the most, then never gave up until the last page. “I think I lied,” she said. “The books I read all make it into my diary, somehow.”
Alexander thought of column width and gutters and how such a diary might look on a web or print interface. Autoresponsive iFrames and CSS and Excel formulas.
“I do something like that,” he said. He put every new book or movie he watched atop a Word doc—the titles in black, the dates completed in dark gray—and used a plugin to populate the data to a personal web page. The link’s accessible, he said, to anyone who wants it.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “I found a perfect maroon.”
He continued. He wiped his nose and eyes. “But when I picture myself actually using it, it’s like my skull is going to come apart.”
When he pulled the tissue from his eyes, he saw that the woman stood, covered her chest with the book in her arms. Her mouth was a line and she looked straight to the boy she brought with her, who was safely balancing on a rubber tire far on the other side of the playground, far from them both. “That sounds very upsetting,” she said.
Alexander turned toward her and leaned back on the railing that separated the playground from the parents’ benches. “How,” he asked, “did you get books from the public library on Christmas?”
She let out an empty-steam breath and said, “You caught me.” There, finally: her lips curled back to a smile. She’d picked up her books on the twenty-third, she said, and had been saving them for Christmas, keeping them on her bedside table like a child with gifts under the tree. “I guess I have my own system, too.”
She’d studied out in Wisconsin, she said, not the state university in Madison but what she called a “rink-a-dink” liberal arts college that cost thirty-five thousand dollars a year, the name of which she wouldn’t tell him because she was sure he’d not have heard of it, a glorified teacher’s college, studying drama or set-design, and at some point Alexander stopped listening and stopped thinking about Wisconsin or steam-breath or even his lists. Just beyond that first treeline he saw the pipe again and was sure—as sure as one could be at a distance of thirty-odd yards and with a playground between—the pipe was smoking.
*
He never asked who the little boy was to this woman. Son? Nephew? Maybe a Christmas day babysitting gig, unlikely as that was. Like asking a woman her age, asking about a child she didn’t introduce was a no-no—the kind of story that might’ve begun or led to somewhere awful, not his business.
He found Corinne in the porthole of the pirate ship, her face pointed toward the parents’ benches and the school. The weather, the sky—nothing had changed in the thirty minutes since they’d arrived. Drab, gray snowless sky that would show from ten until four each day until March. In two years, Corinne would attend here every weekday and wouldn’t stop for another six grades thereafter. Alexander walked the gangway from the rubber ground and onto the ship, crouching into what he always thought of as the gally, where his niece stood at the porthole. She didn’t turn to face him, looking out her window nobly like a captain.
“Corinne?” he asked her, and she faced him.
“Did you meet that little boy?” Alexander asked her, and she nodded.
“Do me a favor?” he asked. “Breathe for me?”
He couldn’t tell if Corinne understood him but she breathed.
He breathed as well. He filled his lungs with the cold air and held tight for a count of five, then releasing the air slowly, at the same pace. “Again, Corinne,” he said. In for ten seconds now, out for ten. Their breath clouds dissipated immediately but he imagined their white strands rising to the roof like the tobacco smoke from sailors’ pipes.
She followed him up the stairs to the open-air deck. The powers that be had mounted a wooden spyglass that faced the swingset. Alexander crouched and looked into the eyepiece. It was solid wood, fake all the way through.
“Do you see that, Corinne?” he asked. “See what’s in the woods?”
“I see the woods,” she said.
“Do you see any pipes?”
“Stinky pipe,” she said.
“Hmm,” Alexander said. He was still bent at the knee from looking through the toy telescope, and he squared himself toward Corinne and grabbed each of her shoulders. He did not dig in with his nails; rather, he curved his awful nails into his palms and held her with his fists.
“I want you to listen to me, Corinne,” he said. “There is no stinky pipe. There cannot possibly be a scary, stinky pipe here.”
Corinne repeated after him: “Scary pipe.”
“No scary pipe, Corinne. Can you say, ‘No pipe, Uncle’?”
“No pipe, Uncle.”
“Good. You’ve been here before, yes? To the playground?” Corinne nodded.
“Any scary pipes?”
“No pipe, Uncle.”
The pipe was leaking. From this closer distance he could see the smoke but also a deep crack right through the layers of rust. It leaked bathroom tiles. Rectangular objects spilled out from the crack into a pile on the white trail. Each tile maybe a foot long, half a foot wide. Solid black tiles. Solid white. On one, an illustration of a tree. Each rectangle that poured from the sixfoot crack in the pipe no greater than one inch thick, and on the thinnest side of each irregular cube was a white strip with a bit of black text. Numbers. Call numbers. Alexander’s diagnoses, informal though they were, never correlated with hallucinations. Not tiles at all.
Library books.
“Breathe,” he said. “Breathe, Corinne.”
He opened his eyes and looked straight at his niece’s face. He saw the same thin mouth as on the woman he’d met not one hour before.
The same drab sky.
The same dark brown wood that made this pirate ship had made the castle and the bleachers and the base of the swingset, the same shade as when he’d been Corinne’s age, even younger.
“It used to say Fuck this shit on the hull,” Alexander said. He asked her, “Did anyone paint it over?”
He found Corinne in the porthole of the pirate ship, her face pointed toward the parents’ benches and the school. The weather, the sky—nothing had changed in the thirty minutes since they’d arrived. Drab, gray snowless sky that would show from ten until four each day until March. In two years, Corinne would attend here every weekday and wouldn’t stop for another six grades thereafter. Alexander walked the gangway from the rubber ground and onto the ship, crouching into what he always thought of as the gally, where his niece stood at the porthole. She didn’t turn to face him, looking out her window nobly like a captain.
“Corinne?” he asked her, and she faced him.
“Did you meet that little boy?” Alexander asked her, and she nodded.
“Do me a favor?” he asked. “Breathe for me?”
He couldn’t tell if Corinne understood him but she breathed.
He breathed as well. He filled his lungs with the cold air and held tight for a count of five, then releasing the air slowly, at the same pace. “Again, Corinne,” he said. In for ten seconds now, out for ten. Their breath clouds dissipated immediately but he imagined their white strands rising to the roof like the tobacco smoke from sailors’ pipes.
She followed him up the stairs to the open-air deck. The powers that be had mounted a wooden spyglass that faced the swingset. Alexander crouched and looked into the eyepiece. It was solid wood, fake all the way through.
“Do you see that, Corinne?” he asked. “See what’s in the woods?”
“I see the woods,” she said.
“Do you see any pipes?”
“Stinky pipe,” she said.
“Hmm,” Alexander said. He was still bent at the knee from looking through the toy telescope, and he squared himself toward Corinne and grabbed each of her shoulders. He did not dig in with his nails; rather, he curved his awful nails into his palms and held her with his fists.
“I want you to listen to me, Corinne,” he said. “There is no stinky pipe. There cannot possibly be a scary, stinky pipe here.”
Corinne repeated after him: “Scary pipe.”
“No scary pipe, Corinne. Can you say, ‘No pipe, Uncle’?”
“No pipe, Uncle.”
“Good. You’ve been here before, yes? To the playground?” Corinne nodded.
“Any scary pipes?”
“No pipe, Uncle.”
The pipe was leaking. From this closer distance he could see the smoke but also a deep crack right through the layers of rust. It leaked bathroom tiles. Rectangular objects spilled out from the crack into a pile on the white trail. Each tile maybe a foot long, half a foot wide. Solid black tiles. Solid white. On one, an illustration of a tree. Each rectangle that poured from the sixfoot crack in the pipe no greater than one inch thick, and on the thinnest side of each irregular cube was a white strip with a bit of black text. Numbers. Call numbers. Alexander’s diagnoses, informal though they were, never correlated with hallucinations. Not tiles at all.
Library books.
“Breathe,” he said. “Breathe, Corinne.”
He opened his eyes and looked straight at his niece’s face. He saw the same thin mouth as on the woman he’d met not one hour before.
The same drab sky.
The same dark brown wood that made this pirate ship had made the castle and the bleachers and the base of the swingset, the same shade as when he’d been Corinne’s age, even younger.
“It used to say Fuck this shit on the hull,” Alexander said. He asked her, “Did anyone paint it over?”
*
He sometimes wondered if he’d have been like this without the internet. Hypertext. Sharing. Sharing had ruined him—the threat of sharing, the threat of visibility. The threat of: Reading too many books of the same author in a row. Too many movies of the same genre. Too many entries of the same length across the page, even when adjusting the margins and going with—and here he had to look up the jargon--monospaced fonts, characters of equal width. Sometimes he thought about splitting books and television series and movies into different lists so that asymmetrical consumption—too many of one kind in a row—wouldn’t drive him to recalibrate the balance of what he watched and read. The log showed him it was time to change, meaning it was the log—not him—that drove behavior. He kept a secret Word file (DeepTunnelHistory, he’d named it) more expansive than his standard record, with room to log his judgements.
(1) A Cry in the Dark — the cutaways to the Australian public are a masterstroke, expanding the world of the film (nationally) beyond what could just be a domestic drama centered on the death of Baby Azaria, tasteless indeed
He couldn’t bear to look at Item 2 and Item 3 and beyond. He typed all this because he wanted credit for finishing, like a child in school. He typed because he missed conversation, welcome ears—maybe he feared too much the unwelcome ear. To look beyond the first Item destroyed him; the list was distant yet embarrassing like a mistake someone else made.
He’d told his sister, Sascha, about the log one day before, in some spirit of Christlike or new-year unburdening of secrets, and after thanking him for his honesty she said, “But I already knew about all that.” Had he already told her? He didn’t think so. She said, “You didn’t need to.”
By ten p.m. on Christmas night they were the only two awake in their parents’ home. The last two-thirds of A Christmas Story played on TBS. The house, unlike the playground, had not shrunk in the years between his childhood and the present moment, for the simple reason that he visited often and his growth—his height—changed so incrementally that the home of his youth accommodated his memory. Their parents were retired—their father from the schools and their mother from health administration—not that it mattered to Alexander: this was Christmas, and Mom and Dad would’ve been home from work even during their decades of employment for the State of New York. Not even his bedroom had changed; soon Corinne would sleep in it herself, but for now she was small enough to sleep at her parents’ feet like a dog. Corinne could sleep on the couch when she’s older, Alexander thought—he did not care for others, even a niece, sleeping in his room—or Sascha could just take her whole family back to their own house, a hundred seconds’ drive away.
“This thing you do,” Sascha said. “Your notebooks and your diaries. Showing them to people as though anyone else cares. It’s like those perverts who show their dicks on the subway.”
“They have subways here, now?” he asked. “I thought subways were only for people who leave.”
He sipped a dark, Christmastime vintage of beer, scented to evoke the smell of pine needles. On the screen: the BB gun, the bunny snowsuit. Sascha had turned on the movie just in time for Flick to freeze his tongue to the metal pole. What percentage of the movie will he have seen tonight? Alexander thought. For purposes of his record, did it “count”?
“This is the last Chanukah before Corinne will want every toy she can see,” Sascha said. “The lights go on at age four.” Sascha sipped her own beer; she and her husband had recently celebrated a vasectomy, so no surprise pregnancy for her. “I think I’ll hate her a bit, after that.”
Alexander pretended—hoped—she’d said something else.
“But I suppose I’ll just pity her,” Sascha said. “The toy consumption period isn’t the worst part. The worst part is now. Our age. Seeing all the trash you accumulate. The shame of all childish things.”
The day was long, quiet, and the beer made Alexander dreamish and tired. “I don’t want toys anymore,” he said.
Sascha blubbered her lips into a motor sound. “I wouldn’t think so,” she said. “You’re not a child.”
The room was warm, felt like eighty degrees, but he shook with a chill. “Books,” he said. “Toys. Art. It’s a piece of you, on the shelf. You have to put them in boxes when you move—keep them from getting bent and dusty.” Both she and Alexander had never moved their trinkets from their bedrooms: movie posters, medals from gymnastics, track and field, pastel toys from television shows so ancient that Corinne showed no interest in even touching them, comic books in bags and boards. A wasted fortune. He couldn’t tell why Sascha willingly slept in there.
“Maybe that’s why you still rent,” she said. Her husband, Greg, had been the most popular boy in her school class—a star back on the serviceable football team and a defensemen in lacrosse, a student body officer of great renown—and they purchased a home equidistant from both sets of grandparents, seven-tenths of a mile each.
“I’d like to buy one day,” Alexander said. “Maybe I can if they ever lock up Greg and his bosses at J. P. Morgan and throw away the key.”
“You know, that’s a terrible game you played,” Sascha said. “‘Has anyone seen Corinne?’” Sascha lifted her hands over her head. “Terrible to pretend she’s gone missing,” she said. “Without her, I… What’s the point?”
(1) A Cry in the Dark — the cutaways to the Australian public are a masterstroke, expanding the world of the film (nationally) beyond what could just be a domestic drama centered on the death of Baby Azaria, tasteless indeed
He couldn’t bear to look at Item 2 and Item 3 and beyond. He typed all this because he wanted credit for finishing, like a child in school. He typed because he missed conversation, welcome ears—maybe he feared too much the unwelcome ear. To look beyond the first Item destroyed him; the list was distant yet embarrassing like a mistake someone else made.
He’d told his sister, Sascha, about the log one day before, in some spirit of Christlike or new-year unburdening of secrets, and after thanking him for his honesty she said, “But I already knew about all that.” Had he already told her? He didn’t think so. She said, “You didn’t need to.”
By ten p.m. on Christmas night they were the only two awake in their parents’ home. The last two-thirds of A Christmas Story played on TBS. The house, unlike the playground, had not shrunk in the years between his childhood and the present moment, for the simple reason that he visited often and his growth—his height—changed so incrementally that the home of his youth accommodated his memory. Their parents were retired—their father from the schools and their mother from health administration—not that it mattered to Alexander: this was Christmas, and Mom and Dad would’ve been home from work even during their decades of employment for the State of New York. Not even his bedroom had changed; soon Corinne would sleep in it herself, but for now she was small enough to sleep at her parents’ feet like a dog. Corinne could sleep on the couch when she’s older, Alexander thought—he did not care for others, even a niece, sleeping in his room—or Sascha could just take her whole family back to their own house, a hundred seconds’ drive away.
“This thing you do,” Sascha said. “Your notebooks and your diaries. Showing them to people as though anyone else cares. It’s like those perverts who show their dicks on the subway.”
“They have subways here, now?” he asked. “I thought subways were only for people who leave.”
He sipped a dark, Christmastime vintage of beer, scented to evoke the smell of pine needles. On the screen: the BB gun, the bunny snowsuit. Sascha had turned on the movie just in time for Flick to freeze his tongue to the metal pole. What percentage of the movie will he have seen tonight? Alexander thought. For purposes of his record, did it “count”?
“This is the last Chanukah before Corinne will want every toy she can see,” Sascha said. “The lights go on at age four.” Sascha sipped her own beer; she and her husband had recently celebrated a vasectomy, so no surprise pregnancy for her. “I think I’ll hate her a bit, after that.”
Alexander pretended—hoped—she’d said something else.
“But I suppose I’ll just pity her,” Sascha said. “The toy consumption period isn’t the worst part. The worst part is now. Our age. Seeing all the trash you accumulate. The shame of all childish things.”
The day was long, quiet, and the beer made Alexander dreamish and tired. “I don’t want toys anymore,” he said.
Sascha blubbered her lips into a motor sound. “I wouldn’t think so,” she said. “You’re not a child.”
The room was warm, felt like eighty degrees, but he shook with a chill. “Books,” he said. “Toys. Art. It’s a piece of you, on the shelf. You have to put them in boxes when you move—keep them from getting bent and dusty.” Both she and Alexander had never moved their trinkets from their bedrooms: movie posters, medals from gymnastics, track and field, pastel toys from television shows so ancient that Corinne showed no interest in even touching them, comic books in bags and boards. A wasted fortune. He couldn’t tell why Sascha willingly slept in there.
“Maybe that’s why you still rent,” she said. Her husband, Greg, had been the most popular boy in her school class—a star back on the serviceable football team and a defensemen in lacrosse, a student body officer of great renown—and they purchased a home equidistant from both sets of grandparents, seven-tenths of a mile each.
“I’d like to buy one day,” Alexander said. “Maybe I can if they ever lock up Greg and his bosses at J. P. Morgan and throw away the key.”
“You know, that’s a terrible game you played,” Sascha said. “‘Has anyone seen Corinne?’” Sascha lifted her hands over her head. “Terrible to pretend she’s gone missing,” she said. “Without her, I… What’s the point?”
*
Light shone in the night. For safety, the village kept its streetlamps turned on well past sunset, not that Alexander needed them. He could have made his way down these shoveled sidewalks to the playground blindfolded. The cement square panels jutted their crooked edges inches out of flush alignment—the same uneven ground of which he knew each step, dating back to his mornings walking this path to elementary school and later as a teenager jogging these streets to lose his baby fat, a weight never to be seen again. Step on a crack, break Mom’s back. Some of the sidewalk’s squares had stayed shattered for decades, their fissures coming to points in the center as though twelve-inch volcanoes had erupted beneath them.
He could not find the pipe in the woods. It had finally snowed, and Alexander kicked at where the pipe was but could not find it under the new and somehow-already hard-packed layer. The books themselves had melted into the snow, seeped somehow into the soil. Alexander chipped at the earth with his toe. Somewhere here he would find dirt bike trails fossilized from mud into stone. But no: the snow and ice were too deep for him to touch the earth. He had a train booked back to Boston for the next morning and worried this thick new dusting might block the tracks.
He lowered his body to a push-up position—he was wearing mittens—and hovered his head one inch above the ground where the burst pipe was. He turned, faced his eyes to the playground. The lights there stayed on all night too, and from the snow he could see the bow of the ship.
His pipe ran from the tube system in the library right through the playground, and Alexander walked it—here, above ground, he retraced the pipe’s path back to the public library, walking with his arms spread to a T and his feet one in front of the other, heel-to-toe, as though it was only the pipe beneath him and not playground rubber, parking-lot concrete, school-yard lawn. He walked a tightrope, a balance beam.
He leaned the entire weight of his body into the library’s glass-plastic transparent door, and breathed. His chest pushed against the glass-plastic, pushed it infinitesimally concave. Under his coat he wore a scarf and wished he wore another. The extra layer would have pushed farther, breached the clear door deeper. Baffled by chemistry and physics, Alexander figured the cold air would make the pane brittle, likelier to crack from his mass. Miss Wisconsin better be better bundled now, he thought, then smiled: surely she was safe somewhere inside.
He faced into the periodicals section, two wooden shelves on which magazines stayed propped up vertically by the back-issues behind them. No lights inside at midnight, but the streetlamps outside reflected off the glossy covers. A dark-red leather chair held its ground between the magazine shelves. This was hardly a “reading room”—just a corner in a library itself no larger than a six-walled cube. Nothing like the Boston Public Library on Dartmouth and Boylston, with acres of stacks and reading rooms that had become almost his second office. Here in the one-room he’d be lucky to find any privacy or Wifi.
Every person in the world despised their work, felt no connection to their labor, no prospect of career advancement, felt that the expenses of their lives—food, rent—were fraudulently exorbitant. These facts of life he’d been told one thousand times. Put two drinks into any man over the age of sixty-five—be this at a wedding, funeral, or airport bar—and he became duty-bound to tell you: what you’re feeling now is normal, counts. Everyone is fraudulent. Everyone picked the wrong major, dug their heels into the wrong coast, worked a job that left them listless and longful for five p.m. like the young men in commercials for Monday Night Football. Then: zip! poof! No more job. The life to lead was elsewhere. Even Sascha and even Greg thought themselves frauds, hated with frauds’ heat, which explained why Sascha said what she said about Alexander’s journal and the predators on trains. (In fairness to her, she apologized after the movie finished.) The crisis—the zip-shrunk economy—is not new, never new. No one has ever believed they lived in the glory days of the American empire. Kick dirt in another’s path so your own might run a little smoother. He was thirty-eight years old. The regret was prevalent, the fraud was prevalent. Divorce was prevalent as a flu.
Somewhere in this wasteland one hundred fifty miles from the Canadian border, the Republican sheriff patrolled the streets in a cowboy hat, on horseback. Alexander did not know at what hour the man’s shift started on Christmas night, Boxing Day morning. Ironies abounded around strict dichotomies—hero/villain, Canada/America, liberal/conservative, horse/cruiser—but only if you took as an axiom that dichotomies must be strict, that categories are absolute as borders, borders absolute as concrete walls like unbroken sidewalk panels propped-up vertical. Alexander’s eyes and brain pulsed in the dark like the Plexiglas under his back-and-forth weight. Stop. Enough of that dichotomy: eyes versus brain. He tightrope-walked back to his parents’ home, afraid that, if the sheriff caught him outside, the horse might breathe fire.
He could not find the pipe in the woods. It had finally snowed, and Alexander kicked at where the pipe was but could not find it under the new and somehow-already hard-packed layer. The books themselves had melted into the snow, seeped somehow into the soil. Alexander chipped at the earth with his toe. Somewhere here he would find dirt bike trails fossilized from mud into stone. But no: the snow and ice were too deep for him to touch the earth. He had a train booked back to Boston for the next morning and worried this thick new dusting might block the tracks.
He lowered his body to a push-up position—he was wearing mittens—and hovered his head one inch above the ground where the burst pipe was. He turned, faced his eyes to the playground. The lights there stayed on all night too, and from the snow he could see the bow of the ship.
His pipe ran from the tube system in the library right through the playground, and Alexander walked it—here, above ground, he retraced the pipe’s path back to the public library, walking with his arms spread to a T and his feet one in front of the other, heel-to-toe, as though it was only the pipe beneath him and not playground rubber, parking-lot concrete, school-yard lawn. He walked a tightrope, a balance beam.
He leaned the entire weight of his body into the library’s glass-plastic transparent door, and breathed. His chest pushed against the glass-plastic, pushed it infinitesimally concave. Under his coat he wore a scarf and wished he wore another. The extra layer would have pushed farther, breached the clear door deeper. Baffled by chemistry and physics, Alexander figured the cold air would make the pane brittle, likelier to crack from his mass. Miss Wisconsin better be better bundled now, he thought, then smiled: surely she was safe somewhere inside.
He faced into the periodicals section, two wooden shelves on which magazines stayed propped up vertically by the back-issues behind them. No lights inside at midnight, but the streetlamps outside reflected off the glossy covers. A dark-red leather chair held its ground between the magazine shelves. This was hardly a “reading room”—just a corner in a library itself no larger than a six-walled cube. Nothing like the Boston Public Library on Dartmouth and Boylston, with acres of stacks and reading rooms that had become almost his second office. Here in the one-room he’d be lucky to find any privacy or Wifi.
Every person in the world despised their work, felt no connection to their labor, no prospect of career advancement, felt that the expenses of their lives—food, rent—were fraudulently exorbitant. These facts of life he’d been told one thousand times. Put two drinks into any man over the age of sixty-five—be this at a wedding, funeral, or airport bar—and he became duty-bound to tell you: what you’re feeling now is normal, counts. Everyone is fraudulent. Everyone picked the wrong major, dug their heels into the wrong coast, worked a job that left them listless and longful for five p.m. like the young men in commercials for Monday Night Football. Then: zip! poof! No more job. The life to lead was elsewhere. Even Sascha and even Greg thought themselves frauds, hated with frauds’ heat, which explained why Sascha said what she said about Alexander’s journal and the predators on trains. (In fairness to her, she apologized after the movie finished.) The crisis—the zip-shrunk economy—is not new, never new. No one has ever believed they lived in the glory days of the American empire. Kick dirt in another’s path so your own might run a little smoother. He was thirty-eight years old. The regret was prevalent, the fraud was prevalent. Divorce was prevalent as a flu.
Somewhere in this wasteland one hundred fifty miles from the Canadian border, the Republican sheriff patrolled the streets in a cowboy hat, on horseback. Alexander did not know at what hour the man’s shift started on Christmas night, Boxing Day morning. Ironies abounded around strict dichotomies—hero/villain, Canada/America, liberal/conservative, horse/cruiser—but only if you took as an axiom that dichotomies must be strict, that categories are absolute as borders, borders absolute as concrete walls like unbroken sidewalk panels propped-up vertical. Alexander’s eyes and brain pulsed in the dark like the Plexiglas under his back-and-forth weight. Stop. Enough of that dichotomy: eyes versus brain. He tightrope-walked back to his parents’ home, afraid that, if the sheriff caught him outside, the horse might breathe fire.
*
He did not return to the playground, and wouldn’t for another eight years, not until Corinne walked across the stage on her graduation day to Dutchmen Regional Middle, the same junior high school of which he was an alum. Alexander remembered his own elementary graduation day—the gymnasium stage a lacquered and lighter wood than what’s outside—and he knew hers, like his, would be indoors.
Back to Boston, this time by train. At the Albany-Rensselaer station, sunk into a plastic seat tilted back just enough to warp his spine irrevocably, he watched a monitor with departure and arrival times. The screen was a standard television set, a Philips, capable of at any moment switching gears to a broadcast station. A Christmas Story, maybe—one last airing for stragglers. The screen could show him anything, and he looked away so as to avoid the question that might follow: How might I log what it shows me?
On the other side of the room: a spinner rack just inside the entry to Hudson News. Stephen King. The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. Those Signet paperbacks so cheap that retailers must only sell them at cost, if not a loss. He had fantasies of loading up on pocket-sized books and hopping a train to Oregon, tossing each creased and broken paperback into the seat opposite him as soon as he finished. Treating each book like a napkin from the cafeteria. He might as well dream of being an astronaut.
According to the People cover, Sandra Bullock was leaving her husband. Heat filled Alexander—the same heat that filled the books on the playground bench. Nothing in the world interested him more than this divorce, but what would he do with such an item? What would he do with the issue of People? The article itself?
His rent check: $2,035 a month. Employment in Boston. Boston itself. Not one fact of his life felt tenable.
A train’s path curves, a set of tracks is never straight, but this was what he imagined: a thoughtless, straight east. Board the car, hope for an open seat by the window with no stranger next to you, the conductor could just press a button and send us all straight toward the Atlantic Ocean. Alexander had not thought about work for three days and would not for one week more. Six more mornings until New Year’s Day. This will change, he thought. Only one more week of this.
He did not know triumph, but he pointed toward triumph. Turn—twist your spine. Stare at the monitor. The fire exists but what exists need not control you. The fire cannot harm you, cannot protect you. Read about Sandra Bullock and flip the page, read about Gabourey Sidibe, Kate Winslet, know you’re closer now to one of your homes. Let the pages gather beautiful dust. There is nothing in the world to fear.
Back to Boston, this time by train. At the Albany-Rensselaer station, sunk into a plastic seat tilted back just enough to warp his spine irrevocably, he watched a monitor with departure and arrival times. The screen was a standard television set, a Philips, capable of at any moment switching gears to a broadcast station. A Christmas Story, maybe—one last airing for stragglers. The screen could show him anything, and he looked away so as to avoid the question that might follow: How might I log what it shows me?
On the other side of the room: a spinner rack just inside the entry to Hudson News. Stephen King. The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. Those Signet paperbacks so cheap that retailers must only sell them at cost, if not a loss. He had fantasies of loading up on pocket-sized books and hopping a train to Oregon, tossing each creased and broken paperback into the seat opposite him as soon as he finished. Treating each book like a napkin from the cafeteria. He might as well dream of being an astronaut.
According to the People cover, Sandra Bullock was leaving her husband. Heat filled Alexander—the same heat that filled the books on the playground bench. Nothing in the world interested him more than this divorce, but what would he do with such an item? What would he do with the issue of People? The article itself?
His rent check: $2,035 a month. Employment in Boston. Boston itself. Not one fact of his life felt tenable.
A train’s path curves, a set of tracks is never straight, but this was what he imagined: a thoughtless, straight east. Board the car, hope for an open seat by the window with no stranger next to you, the conductor could just press a button and send us all straight toward the Atlantic Ocean. Alexander had not thought about work for three days and would not for one week more. Six more mornings until New Year’s Day. This will change, he thought. Only one more week of this.
He did not know triumph, but he pointed toward triumph. Turn—twist your spine. Stare at the monitor. The fire exists but what exists need not control you. The fire cannot harm you, cannot protect you. Read about Sandra Bullock and flip the page, read about Gabourey Sidibe, Kate Winslet, know you’re closer now to one of your homes. Let the pages gather beautiful dust. There is nothing in the world to fear.