“How many barns do you have?” I ask him.
“Just the one,” the man says.
It’s filled with bales of sweet-smelling hay, and as we walk around the inside perimeter of this barn the man occasionally holds out his hand, and to steady him, I take it. He sometimes rests his hand, or the fingers of his hand, on my shoulder, and although it’s just a normal meaningless gesture, I feel it has a kind of meaning, a kind of generosity, and because I am thinking about generosity and looking at the piece of gauze bandage stuck to his face, I’m not sure if I’m hearing what the man is saying.
“War?” I say.
“There’s always a war,” the man says. “Or if there’s not, then it’s coming. Not out there”—and he points to his chest. “Here.”
I’m going to ask him to elaborate but the man moves on. In his mind he’s constantly moving on, not stopping for understanding or for the acknowledgment of understanding. He’s moving, and I follow him.
The wooden planks are unevenly worn around the swirls of knots in the wood. I ask the man, “Do you still have bats?”
“I thought you were the expert on bats,” he says, and he smiles.
And for some reason I smile back. “I thought you were.”
“Well, there you go,” he says, and laughs out loud, in a way that I find infectious. Not the laugh itself but the situation. I don’t really know what, but something is amusing. And although I started out being jealous of his relationship with Linda, it’s hard to be jealous of someone so genial. Although my usual modus would be to envy the man’s seeming happiness, instead I can feel that seeming happiness making me seem to be happy.
I follow him through a narrow door into a structure with another door and we walk through that door and the old man starts climbing up the hay bales stacked in the corner. The barn is in disrepair. “Come on,” he says. And because I don’t feel at the moment like climbing up a stairway of old straw, I ask him, “What’s up there?”
“The view,” he says.
“Of what?”
“It won’t hurt you,” he says, “I promise,” and he holds out his hand.
I would rather not have to depend on a withered old hand but I don’t see a lot of options, so I reach out and the old man indeed pulls me up, into a small attic-like room. He closes the trapdoor and we find ourselves crouching in darkness.
As I wait for my eyes to adjust, I notice that my hands are raised, as if to defend myself. That’s weird, I think, because there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ve been in pitch-black rooms before, but still, fear is not a logical thing. And it isn’t until my eyes adjust and I can see the source of light that I know where I am and let my hands drop.
A camera obscura is a dark chamber with a hole on one side and that’s what we’re in. Projected against the opposite wall of the room is an image — mainly sky, a few trees — and something about the color of the sky and the depth of the sky, despite the inverted view, makes it seem completely real. The image isn’t large but it’s large enough to hold, in its indistinct frame, the whole world. I’m looking at the image, watching the world it portrays — removed from it and watching it — like watching something die. It seems at that moment like a world of possibility.
“I don’t get up here much anymore,” the man says, and then he opens the hatch, and when we crawl out into the normal light, the possibility doesn’t vanish.
We climb back down the hay and I don’t mind the straw in my socks. I like it. I like everything. I feel energized, buoyed, and the feeling has something to do with the man, or the presence of the man, who is smiling, narrow-shouldered but erect, looking at me as if I am a source of pride. The watery whites of his eyes are cloudy, but the dark center, from behind which he seems to be looking, is bright.
When the man speaks, the words coming out of his mouth are reassuring, or have the intention of reassuring. For instance, “On the road.” He says these words out loud, infusing them with nobility, declaring them as a state of being. “On the road.”
“That’s right,” I say.
“You were on the road,” he says, and he says it with a seriousness that stills me. He is looking at me.
“Yes,” I say.
“I can see,” he says. And it seems as if suddenly he’s lucid. “Do you know what’s happened to you?”
“You mean about my wife?” I say. And the man doesn’t answer.
I think what he sees is some truth about me, not a secret inside of me, but what I am. And he can see that I don’t know myself what that is, and so all he can do is stand there, with a bandage on his cheek, looking at me with his watery, compassionate eyes.
Once we’re outside, I try to slide the barn door shut by myself, but it’s stuck. I am trying to do a good deed by closing the door but I can’t get it rolling on its rollers. Even with both hands, even leaning into it with all my weight, the gate doesn’t move. At which point the old man holds the side of it, pulling it onto its tracks. He tells me to try again, and this time, on its rollers, the thing easily slides shut.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You’d do the same,” he says.
And then he starts walking, looking down at the path of his feet. When he gets to the house he turns around, having already forgotten who I am; but trusting whatever I am, he smiles and walks inside. I would like to follow. I like his house and I like him, and although I want to stay with him, I can’t.
6
As human beings we have an idea of who or what we are, and we like to keep that idea intact. And although this desire for a sense of self isn’t a sin, like a sin we can get excessive about it. Two hundred years ago Keats spoke about the ability to live without definite answers and borders, and because I’m a man who makes adjustments, at the moment I’m willing to do that. At the moment I’m with Linda, following her directions, driving with her, and I’m willing to know nothing but what’s in front of me, or in this case next to me, in the car. And not only am I willing to simply see her, I’m also willing to send her something, something reassuring. I’m trying, in some quasi-physical way, to send her something good.
But how do you do that? How do you wish another person well? It’s probably not so difficult, but with her I’m having a little trouble. And the trouble is Anne. I need to believe that Anne will remain in my life, but at the moment Anne’s not here.
Linda and I are driving deeper into the woods, into steeper, more rugged country, and at a particular turnoff she tells me to pull over, and I pull off the main road onto a rutted dirt road and we drive up that road until we come to the end. We get out of the car, walk up through a trail in the grass, and arrive at a clearing at the top of a hill. There’s a metal structure, with a platform at the top, a lookout above the trees, open to the elements.
“There’s the view,” she says. “Up there.”
And then she walks down a slight incline to another part of the clearing. There’s a pool, a reflecting pool made of stone, abandoned now, covered with lichen and moss, built by human hands a long time ago. There’s a shallow layer of water in the pool and she doesn’t walk in the water at first. Instead she walks along the stones describing the pool’s perimeter. The sun is shining enough so that she feels like taking off her shoes, which she does. She’s dancing from stone to stone, and she knows I’m watching, and although she doesn’t know who I am, it doesn’t seem to matter.