“Julie,” I implored, “just listen to my side of the story.”
“Julie? I am in disgust of you,” she said. “You do not listen. I am a doctor, and I will have you know that I have traveled around the world, all the way from Vlotovnya, to rid myself of a man such as yourself.”
I moved to the stool beside her.
She stood to leave.
A current of panic went through me. I needed to explain that I did like corn, that lima beans were important, that it was wrong of me to walk out on her.
“Don’t go,” I said.
She reached for her bag. “I have a self-defense spray,” she said.
I dared not speak as she pulled on her rabbit-fur coat.
She took her sweet time shouldering the bag. “I am leaving now, and you will stay away from me. Tomorrow I lecture, then return to North Dakota, and I never see you again.”
She casually left the bar, exaggerating the toss of her hips, and, without looking back, turned the corner into the casino.
I wandered the gaming floor in a kind of daze — dealers pushed chips across bolts of green felt, waitresses lofted trays of small dirty glasses, and an old man accidentally activated his panic button. It seemed everyone in the world was here, bumping me, talking loudly, knuckling me with their breath, jabbing me with elbows of body odor. Everyone was here but the people who mattered.
In a scene out of the Old Testament, I watched as old people lined up to spin a great wheel. Their heads slowly turned as they watched the word “Cadillac” circle past, and the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was Julie’s husband, ditched on the other side of the world. I named him Ivan, and I figured he and Julie had been professors in the same Soviet agriculture department. The poor bastard, I thought, stuck in some Siberian icebox of a university, wondering where was his Julie. His office probably reeked of untold test tubes of pollen samples and crawled with a zillion spore cultures. I pictured him driving one of those sad, communist-made Ladas. What scared me, though, what made my knees go weak with speculation, was the way Julie was certain that Ivan deserved to be left, that he just wasn’t good enough to merit her presence. This is what sent me looking for fresh air, though I wasn’t fast enough. Before I even reached the casino doors, I was thinking about my mother.
Outside, the cold hitched in my lungs, and it seemed the backhand of winter had struck while I was inside: a dry, fuzzy frost coated cars whose bellies dripped black icicles, while the panels of pickups appeared haloed, their iced-over fenders glowing gray in the stupor of industrial lights. I tromped past a tour bus dieseling in the dark, its driver reading a paperback by the running lights, and as I walked between rows of cars, the night became quieter and blacker, and all the more cold for it. It was on a night like this that my mother broke her leg, and I had always thought that it was those weeks of housebound convalescence that gave her an opportunity to rethink her life, that allowed longing and regret to take hold. Some great adventure called to her, I’d always assumed. Something out there completed her, and without it she could never be happy. This is what sent her down our driveway, swinging aluminum crutches.
The truth is certainly less romantic: at some point, my mother realized she’d married a small-town rogue, and, sitting at home with an elevated leg, she must have also understood how needy and fearful her son truly was. She seemed happy during her convalescence. She had me dramatize scenes from my Marley’s Great Moments in History reader. She volunteered to play the instrument-handing assistant in my chemistry-set experiments. Yet I realize now that some part of her wasn’t really there. She knew she was about to leave, and as she orated Cleopatra’s lines, as she handed me the beaker of sulfur, her imagination had surely made the advance passage.
I made my way among the cars, turning sideways to squeeze between recreational vehicles that filled six spaces apiece. You could feel the slope of the blacktop here, and runnels of salt water cut through the tire-packed snow, making their way toward the storm drains ahead. I would never get my mother back. I knew that. Even if I found her — and I wasn’t looking — you don’t just make up thirty years. All I wanted to know were the details of her life. What color were her fingernails, and did she still bite them? Did she like anchovies? Did she still wear that amber ring?
The stars shone clear and stark. Out in the far reaches of the lot, I began wondering what had become of all sorts of people. Where was Jim Toggleson, my lab partner from school? Where was Susan Preston, who tutored me in statistics and always stapled tracts on Mormonism to the homework she returned? If you don’t know what became of someone, if you don’t attend a person’s funeral or hear word from a friend of a friend, these persons who float from our lives attain a kind of immortality, always hovering around the next corner. By closing your eyes, you can attach to them any set of attributes: the various chairs he reclines in, the soda she might sip from, the dreams they have of you they can’t remember in the morning. This brings me to life’s great paradox: for someone to truly be a part of you — to live in your thoughts, roaming your memory and vision, occupying planes of hope, nostalgia, and speculation in your mind — he or she must be wholly inaccessible to you.
Twin corrugated pipes jutted from the end of the asphalt, and I followed the sound of black water to their mouths. In the dark, I lowered myself down an embankment and began walking toward Eggers’ fires, my legs sinking in powder that refused to pack. I thought I heard the plush thumps of an owl’s wings as it ghosted the snow for white rabbits. Is there a spookier sound? There have been many nights in the years since that I have heard such wings and doubted they’re truly extinct. I began walking faster, kicking my feet free from deeper snow; suddenly I ran into a three-wire fence.
It bounced me backward, landing me flat in the snow. I sunk into the powder, my breath rising, and then, clear and obvious as the stars above, I had a vision of the afterlife of Homo sapiens: I saw a galactic ice sheet so vast and barren that, stumbling through the cold, you might only encounter another soul once in a lifetime. But this is eternity, a billion lifetimes, and though you walk endlessly alone, eventually you’ll cross paths with everyone you lost touch with, every person who stood beside you in a grocery line, every distant uncle and forgotten friend, every human that’s ever been. You walk and walk and fall and walk again, and when, at last, you near the warmth of another human heart, regardless of their race or language, age or appearance, you clutch them for all you’re worth.
The stars looked away from me.
Then I realized a face was staring down, oily and fire-blacked.
“Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said. “I knew you’d change your mind.”
When my eyes came into focus, I asked, “What are you doing here?”
“You were yelling for me,” he said. “I came running.”
Eggers helped me out of the snow. He threw an arm around me.
“I’m warming Keno,” he said as we made for the fires. “Soon those tired bones will sit right up, and maybe he’ll tell us a scary story.”
Trudy was sitting by the fires. “Did you get that drink, Dr. Hannah?” she asked.
I sat where Eggers had a large, matted skin spread across the thawing mud.
“Trudy’s finally taken me up on an invitation to spend the night,” Eggers said.
“The GTO’s out of commission again,” Trudy said. “It might just be the throw-out bearing, but I won’t know till I drop the tyranny. I removed the license plates, which keeps the wreckers from towing you right away.”
The ground was steaming. I reclined. My whole body relaxed in the old fur.