Misty explored the offensive possibilities of literal nose thumbing. “What’s the metanarrative?”
“Oh, this thing Gaby and I were throwing around. The narrative logic that sits behind a story, I guess. Whatever distinguishes narrative from, like, litany. Or accident.”
Misty ashed out the window. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“You are too young, my dear. I shall tell you when you’re older.”
She looked at a make-believe watch on her wrist for a few seconds. “There,” she said. “I’m older.”
When I had asked Misty whether she was all right, the two of us drinking on my first night up, she said she was, why did I ask? I don’t know, I said, the grad-school thing. First of all, it was summer, she explained, and her apparent listlessness was an insufficient ground to assume she’d dropped out of school; but yes, as a matter of fact, in the second place, she had left urban planning behind because, well, it was your typical M.A. utopianism, without the faintest hope of meaningful praxis, preparing you for little more than the enviable future of fighting starved pit bulls for jobs in municipal administrations that amounted to years of testing a brick wall’s material durability with your head. I told Misty I’d never known her to let practical considerations get in the way of a rash decision. She sighed. “I guess I’m looking for love,” she said. And I was about to say, Sure, but do you think it’s just going to walk in the door one day? But what did I know. In my own way I was waiting for love too — not an object of love, not an instance of it, but perhaps love itself.
It was bright and sunny the next morning when Misty and I took the whaler out to the islands to hunt for chanterelles. On the way we passed skerries of sunbathing seals, as dun and tubular as slugs. They turned their heads to regard us. Misty sat up front and by the time we arrived the cigarette in her lips was wetted to extinguishment in the spray. I told her to throw the anchor in, and we watched as it sank into the emerald murk. The rope uncoiled, chasing after it, then slipped discreetly over the gunwale and disappeared itself.
“Whoops,” Misty said. “Shiiiiiit.”
We regarded the traceless surface of the ocean for a minute, then we sat there and laughed. We laughed for a good long time. Finally we dragged the boat up onto the beach, tied the painter off on a large rock, and did our foraging.
Later, when I told Ruth what had happened, she said, “So we lost an anchor. Forget it.”
“I think we can find it,” I said. “Wait till it’s low tide, you know.”
“Okay. But why?”
She was right, of course, in the sense of prudence or necessity, but I felt a poignancy about the anchor, a desire not to let things slip away. I can’t explain it. I couldn’t quite bear to think of our trusty nine-pound Danforth lying there for centuries, millennia—forever perhaps — wondering when we were coming back for it.
I thought Cynthia might understand, but when I told her she just said, “You’re an idiot.”
And yes, she wasn’t wrong, but where would we be without idiots? When would we laugh?
By evening, when the bats emerged, Misty had organized a betting pool in the house. You could bet on our finding the anchor or our not finding it. Everyone wanted in on the action. “Your grandfather’s doing a little better tonight,” the nurses would tell me before slipping five-, ten-dollar bills in my hand. “Against,” they said.
Percy, the longtime gardener and groundskeeper, said, “There’s no way to orient yourself. You’re not going to know where to look. Shore’s night and day at different tides.”
“Care to make it interesting?” Misty said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It’ll be plenty interesting when I have to fish you out.”
In a subtle way the house, which had been merely busy, came alive at the prospect of this unnecessary act. We had something to talk about, to grin about, something to anticipate that in its silliness, the pointlessness of its derring-do, resisted the seriousness of death. I told my grandfather about the endeavor and he nodded a little, like what I was saying made sense, but then, as comprehension set in, he raised his eyebrows and shook his head, echoing Cynthia’s verdict in his way.
“Why?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. Why anything?
The issue with the bats was that we had no idea where they were getting in. That and they upset the nurses. You could track their progress through the house by listening to the nurses’ screams, then judging the direction and the muting interference of the walls. They seemed to know when we ate dinner too, for it was most often then that Misty and I had to excuse ourselves, dabbing mouths with napkins, and cross into the old wing, where a nurse would stand pointing dumbly to the site of our present visitation. They must have been coming in during the day, hiding themselves in curtains and crown moldings until it was dark and the time had come for them to cast about the house like inebriate demons.
The bats were one more act in the circus our lives had become that summer. A fey carnival cast in shadow. The particularity of moments, the deceits of memory. A Chris Marker mash-up. Cirque Sans Soleil. There would be emus in the zone. I am sure it was only me who felt this. I had a way of digressing into minutiae, fixating on the feel of confluent ephemera while the world moved on. Ruth correcting the newspaper in red pen; Cynthia video-Skyping with her dogs in L.A., neurosis-ridden rescues who suffered crippling and dysphoric separation anxiety (or so she claimed); Misty’s habit of hiding framed pictures, marshmallow men, and beetle carapaces in my bed. I relished missing the forest for the trees; it was a significant part of why I had become a writer, all the stillbirths of pregnant moments. And yet in the weightless disconnection I felt that summer from all we have been taught will sustain us, I saw this tendency of mine achieve a kind of apogee, this inability or refusal to distinguish between studium and punctum, until all I saw everywhere were the dissipating freeze-frames of life, instants of salient and perverse meaning, of felicity, contradiction, the inexhaustible poetry of juxtaposition, the eclecticism that with acts of curation becomes sensibility. Sitting on the stone wall below the crab apple trees, the pale decaying fruit scattered at my feet, in the right light, the sun still crisp but low enough to sieve through the west-lying trees, I could convince myself, for instance, that I was not a person, or rather not the specific person I enacted within a web of expectations and memories, that Cynthia was not an “artist” or Misty a soul adrift, that the present did not situate itself inside a time or date, that these were instead phantoms imposing themselves on the ceaseless flux, the ever-becoming, and that my grandfather was not dying but simply living another, different day, was not my grandfather, was not who I believed him to be, certainly, but was also an elusive quantity to himself — that, in short, all the words we had for everything added up to a catalogued death sentence of the discrete, turning the raw matter of experience transactionable at the cost of making experience itself inaccessible.
The night before Misty and I set out for the anchor I awoke in blackness to a cold wet breeze flowing in through the window. I wasn’t tired, though I couldn’t have been asleep very long. I didn’t check the time, knowing instinctively that it was hours before I could reasonably get up. I heard my grandfather in pain below me, the ebbing and flowing of an irrepressible ache. And what are you to do with that? What really can you do? Did I wish him to feel released, in the manner of Montaigne, who says we should pass from life to death with the equanimity with which we first passed from nonexistence to life at birth? Was it loving or selfish to wish him that? Loving or selfish to want him to live just as many of these gruesome days as he could? I wanted both for him, even as one wish negated the other, and what I wanted most was just to believe he wasn’t alone in his pain, in the inner confrontation with his own dissolution, I wanted to believe there was someone watching, keeping vigil with him on the level I couldn’t.