“I try, Saul. It’s just that your hair’s so curly.”
“Right, right.” Saul saw his reflection in the mirror and closed his eyes as a reflex. He felt like asking Harold, the Lutheran, a moral question. “Harold,” he said, “do you ever wonder where your thoughts come from? I mean, do we own our thoughts, or do they come from somewhere else, or what? For example, you can’t always control your thoughts or your impulses, can you? So, whose thoughts are those, anyway, the ones you can’t control? And another thing. Are you happy? Be honest.”
The scissors stopped clipping. “Gosh, Saul, are you okay? What drugs have you been taking lately?”
“No drugs. Just tell me: Are your thoughts always yours? That’s what I need to know.”
The barber looked into the mirror opposite them. Saul saw Harold’s plain features. “All right,” Harold said. “I’ll answer your question.” Then, with what Saul took to be great sadness, the barber said, “I don’t have many thoughts. And when I do, they’re all mine.”
“Okay,” Saul said. “I’m sorry. I was just asking.” He tried to slump down in his chair, but the barber said, “Sit up straight, Saul.” Saul did.
Days later, Saul is asleep. He knows this. He knows he is asleep next to Patsy. He knows it is night, that cradle of dreams, but Earth’s mad lovelorn companion, the moon, is shining stainless-steel beams across the bed, and Saul is dreaming of being in a car that cannot stop rolling over, an endless flip of metal, and this time Patsy is not belted in, and something horrible must be happening to her, judging from the blur of her head. She is being hurt terribly thanks to the way he has driven the car, the mad way, the un-American way, and now she is walking across a bridge made of moonlight, and she falls. The door, Saul’s door, is being kept open for Elijah, but Elijah does not come in. How will we recognize him? Saul’s mind is not in Saul’s head; it is above him, above his yarmulke, above his prayer shawl, his tallis. When was Saul ever Orthodox? Only in dreams. Patsy is hurt, she lies in a ditch, and he has done this damage to her. Deer and doubt mix with the milky roar of mild lust on the Scrabble board. And here behind the barber chair is Giovanni d’Amato, sage of Cincinnati, saying, “You shouldn’t flunk people out of school if you’re going to get drunk and roll cars.” The sage is using his scissors to cut away Saul’s clothes. Saul the child is speaking to Saul the grown-up: “You’ll never figure it out,” and when Saul the adult asks, “What?” the child says, “Adulthood. Any of it.” And then he says, “Saul, you’re pregnant.”
Saul woke and looked over at Patsy, still asleep. He groaned audibly with relief that she hadn’t been hurt. What an annoying dream. He had never even owned a tallis or known anyone who had one. His parents had been relentlessly secular. After putting on his shirt, jeans, and boots, he went downstairs, and, after taking the keys off the kitchen table, he went outside.
The motorcycle felt quiet and powerful underneath him as he accelerated down Whitefeather Road. He had ridden a motorcycle briefly in college — until a small embarrassing accident — and the process all came back to him now. This one, Patsy’s new machine, painted pink and blue, 250 cc’s, was easy to shift, and the machine gave him the impression that he was floating, or, better yet, was flowing down the archways of dark, stunted Michigan trees. His eyes watered, and bugs hit him in the face as he speeded up. He felt the rear wheel slip on the dirt. He didn’t know what he was doing out here and he didn’t care. He had no helmet. He was illegal.
He turned left onto Highway 14, and then County Road H, also dirt, and he downshifted, feeling the tight, close gears meshing, and he let the clutch out, slowing him down. On the road the cycle’s headlight was like a cone leading him forward, away from himself, toward a possibility more inviting and dangerous. In the grip of spiritual longing, a person goes anywhere, traveling over the speed limit. The night was warm, but none of the summer stars was visible. Behind the clouds the stars were even now rushing away in the infinity of expanding space. Saul felt like an astral body himself. He too would rush away into emptiness. In the green light of the speedometer he saw that he was doing a respectable fifty. Up ahead the wintry white eyes of a possum glanced toward him before the animal waddled into the high grass near the road. Saul wanted to be lost but knew he could not be. He knew exactly where he was: fields, forest, fields. He knew each one, and he knew whom they belonged to, he had been here that long.
And of course he knew where he was going: he was headed toward the McPhees’, that damnable house of happiness, that castle of light, where everyone, man, woman, and child, would be sleeping soundly, the sleep of the happy and just and thoughtless. Saul felt blank, gripped by obsession, simultaneously vacant and full of shame.
He looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Their house would be dark.
But it was not. On the road beyond their driveway, Saul slowed down and then shut off the engine, holding on tightly to the handlebars as he stared like the prowler he was, toward the second-floor windows, from which sounds emerged. From where he was spying, Saul could see Anne sitting in a rocking chair by the window with their baby. The baby was crying, screaming. Saul could hear it from the road. And in the background, back and forth, Saul could see Emory McPhee pacing, the all-night walk of the helpless father. An infant with colic, a rocking mother, a pacing father, screams of infant misery, and now the two of them, Anne and Emory, beginning to shout at each other over what to do.
Saul turned his motorcycle around, pushed it down the road, then started the engine. He felt better. He could have gone to their front door and welcomed them as the official greeter of ordinary disharmony. I was always as real as they were, Saul thought. I always was.
On the left, the broken fences bordering the farmland quavered up and down and seemed to start bouncing, visually, as he accelerated. The lines on the telephone poles jumped nervously as he passed them until they had the rapid and nervous movements of pens on graph paper making an erratic heartbeat. Rain — he hadn’t known it was going to rain, no one had told him — began falling, getting into his eyes and dropping with cold precision on the backs of his hands. He felt the cloth of his shirt getting soaked and sticking to his shoulders. The rain was persistent and serious. He felt the tires of Patsy’s motorcycle slipping on the mud, nudging the rear end of the bike off, slightly, thoughtfully, toward the left side. Then the road joined up with the highway, where the traction improved, but the rain was falling more heavily now, soaking him so he could hardly see. He came to a bridge, slowed the bike, and huddled in its shelter for a moment, until the rain seemed to let up, and he set out again. Accelerate, clutch, shift. He wanted to get home to Patsy. He wanted to dry his hair and get into bed next to her. He couldn’t think of anything else he wanted.
A few hundred feet from his own driveway, he looked through the rain, only a drizzle now, and he saw, looking back at him, their eyes lit by his headlamp, the deer he had seen before, closer now, crossing his yard. But this time, there was another, a last deer, one he hadn’t seen before, behind the others, slightly smaller, as if reduced somehow. It was an albino. In the darkness and rain it moved in a haze of whiteness. Seeing it, Saul thought: Oh my God, I’m about to die. The deer had stopped, momentarily frozen in the light. The albino’s eyes — it was a doe — were pink, and its fur was as white as linen. The animal flicked its tail, nervously hypnotized. Its terrible pink eyes, blank as neutron stars, stared at him. Saul turned off the engine and the headlight. Now in the dark two brown deer bounded toward the west, but the albino stood still, staring in Saul’s direction, a purposeful stare. He gripped the handlebars so hard that his forearms began to knot into a cramp. The animal was a sign of some kind, he was sure. Only a fool would think otherwise. He felt a moment of dread pass through his body as the deer now turned her eyes away from his and began to walk off into the night. He saw her disappear behind a maple tree in his backyard, but he couldn’t follow her beyond that. He was trembling now. Shivering spasms began at his wet shoulders and passed down into his chest toward his legs. The dread he had felt before was turning rapidly into pure spiritual fright. Alternating waves of chill and heat rushed up and down his body. He remembered to get off the road. He pushed the motorcycle into the garage, kicking down its stand. He crossed the yard and reached the back door. The rain picked up again and sprayed into him as the wind carried it. In his mind’s eye he saw the deer looking back at him. He had been judged, and the judgment was that he, Saul, was only and always himself, now and onward into infinity. His boots were wet. They stank of wet leather. Outside the back door on the lawn he took the boots off, then his wet shirt and his jeans. It occurred to him to stand there naked. With no clothes on he stood in the rain and the dark before he fell to his knees. He wasn’t praying. He didn’t know what he was doing. Something was filling him up. It felt like the spirit, but the spirit of what, he didn’t know. He lay down on the grass. One sob tore through him, and then it was over.