Look At Me_ A Novel Part 10

... And once all this was up and running, many more businesses came to Rockford, and it became famous for its manufacturing.

Moose closed his eyes. She was a sweet girl, his niece, so eager, grabbing at each thing he said like a seal lunging for fish, but what did she do with it? Where did it go in her high school student's brain?

"The basis of mechanics, as I think we've discussed," he said, "is the conversion of force ..."-he paused for emphasis-"into motion."

Charlotte hardly listened. Reading aloud to her uncle, she had at last begun to awaken from the drenching torpor that had befogged her from the moment she'd driven away from Michael West's house. Exactly seven days ago. Since then, ordinary life had become intolerable, a denial of her link to him in every detail: her blue room, her fish, the garden hose coiled on the patio, her parents across the dinner table-each of these was a stone added to the several she already carried on her head.

After school, she would ride her bike past his house. Once, she went around back and found a handkerchief-sized lawn, a locked shed, a peeling picnic table. She dragged the picnic table to a window (replacing it precisely afterward, fluffing up the gra.s.s she'd crushed), then climbed on top and peered inside the house. Shadows, streaks of sunlight. Almost no furniture. The strangeness of it moved her. Yet Michael West did not feel the bond between them; she was nothing to him. A girl who had cried in his kitchen.

But here in Moose's office, the distance between herself and the math teacher began to seem porous, negotiable. Some rhythm she'd felt in his presence was sensible here, too. Charlotte noticed her scalp tightening over her head as she forced herself to listen to her uncle, and then a single phrase-"conversion of force into motion"-latched in her brain. She sat up very straight. Force into motion! It was a matter of forcing Michael West into motion, making him love her as she loved him. The answer was power. power. Mechanics. Abruptly it made sense. Mechanics. Abruptly it made sense.

"Of course, certain kinds of mechanization had existed for centuries," Moose was saying. "Water wheels, for example, date to the first century B.C B.C...."

"Windmills," Charlotte muttered, tapping her feet.

"Very good!" he rejoined, gratified by even this slim show of partic.i.p.ation. "And we've talked before about mining, one of the earliest industries ..."

She was watching him in that odd, expectant way, and Moose was silenced, enervated by the mult.i.tude of steps (millions, too many to ascend, or perhaps he simply lacked the stamina) that gaped between Charlotte's tentative, familiar observations and even the first faint vibration that precedes sight-the first ghostly penumbra of the vision. I'm waiting for something to happen I'm waiting for something to happen, she'd told him once, which had excited Moose for perhaps an hour, until he reminded himself that the phrase could mean almost anything.

"You know," he said, "my head is aching a little."

"I have some aspirin ..."

"No. No thank you." He held his head and waited for Charlotte to suggest a deferral. This code functioned beautifully among his college students, the most seasoned of whom were so accustomed to Moose's "headaches" that they took to their feet sometimes at an inadvertent ma.s.saging of his brow. But Charlotte held her ground, and Moose sensed-G.o.d help him-that she was maintaining her orange plastic chair out of a desire to speak with him about some matter unrelated to the Rockford Water Power Company. And in light of her earlier symptoms of distraction, it seemed possible-nay, likely-that the matter Charlotte wished to discuss with him was personal. G.o.d help him! But she was his niece. And his pupil! If she wanted help, he had to help her!

"What I need," Moose said, "is a walk. How does that sound to you?"

He locked his office door and led the way from Meeker Hall into a small wood behind it, dense, deciduous, spiky with half-denuded trees-a mere soupcon of what Rockford (or "Forest City," as it had once been known) must have looked like in 1852. In the strong, rather bitter wind, shriveled gray leaves clattered from the trees. Moose wore a red scarf Ellen had given him last Christmas. Charlotte crunched behind him on a narrow path, working to a.s.semble the courage to ask his advice.

At last her uncle paused, and Charlotte turned to him, raising her voice. "Uncle Moose, if a girl loves someone, a-a guy," she veered away from "man," at the last second, "how can she make him feel a longing for her?" feel a longing for her?" She had reprised this phrase of Michael West's so many times that it came out lightly salted with his accent. She had reprised this phrase of Michael West's so many times that it came out lightly salted with his accent.

Moose laughed as if he'd been kicked-such generous, delighted laughter that Charlotte couldn't take offense. "No one's asked me a question like that in oh, Jesus ... how long?" he said, with s.h.i.+ning, joyful eyes. "A hundred years, I think."

They were standing beside a thicket of saplings, and Moose shoved his way into their midst, holding two trees aside so Charlotte could climb in after him. "Here," he said, mas.h.i.+ng leaves under his black shoes. "Unless I'm wrong, there's a creek just past here."

Her uncle led the way, stamping through dry gra.s.s to the edge of-yes-a creek, where shallow water purled around rust-colored rocks and dropped into a dark, still pool. Moose went to the edge and leaned over, peering into the pool. Then he squatted beside it. "As a kid, I used to fish here," he said.

"What did you catch?"

"Minnows."

He closed his eyes. Remembering his youth was a vexed experience for Moose; he understood that as a boy he had lived in blindness, but he knew, too, that some pain, an ache that nowadays accompanied him through each minute of his life, was yet absent. When Moose imagined himself as a child, he pictured a boy watching him across a doorway, through a screen, and a bubble of sorrow would break in his chest, as if he were seeing someone who had died or vanished inexplicably, a milk carton child, as if some vital connection between himself and that boy had been lost. And despite all that Moose knew he was achieving now or trying to achieve, still he felt-inexplicably-that he had failed to fulfill the promise of that little boy, and was being visited by his unhappy ghost.

Ellen, he knew, shared his sense of the broken promise. It was one of many reasons Moose avoided his sister. If two people saw it, did that not make it true, in some sense?

"Uncle Moose?" Charlotte said. For long minutes he had squatted by the pond watching speckled brown fish jaw the surface, during which she had gone from hoping he was marshaling his thoughts to answer her question, to believing he'd forgotten it, and her, altogether.

"Yes!" Moose turned, looking up at her with bright, wet eyes. What had they been talking about? He was disconcerted, lost in the pitch and roll of his thoughts ... she wanted something, but oh, G.o.d, what was it she had asked him? And in his eagerness to know, his guilt over having forgotten, Moose looked carefully at his niece in a way he almost never looked at anyone, searched her face with eyes keenly focused. He saw her: a worried, hopeful girl who looked younger than her real age, breaking a leaf into sections. And for a moment it was Charlotte, not Moose-the-boy, who gazed at him across the threshold of that imaginary door.

"Follow your desire," he said, with a force that startled even himself. Surely this would answer whatever it was she had asked; it was the credo of innocence, of blindness-of boyhood happiness without the ache. Moose wanted that happiness for Charlotte. To set her free, he wanted that. To release her into the blind, supple pleasures of ordinary life, a life he could hardly imagine anymore, much less remember. A life he scorned and envied. "You're young," he said. "Go enjoy yourself. Grab pleasure wherever you can find it."

"But what if people turn against me?" she said, standing very near him under the trees. "What if they laugh?"

"Then leave them behind," Moose said, rising to his feet. "Don't let them shame you; shame is the world trying to break you, and you have to resist! You have to resist!" His own words galvanized him, and he surged on. "Don't look at yourself through their eyes-don't. Or they will have won, because ..." He paused, then lunged forward, vertiginously. "... Because we are what we see."

It was the first time Moose had spoken these words to another human being. He had imagined it happening differently, a grand pedagogical denouement. No matter. Here, too, they would serve.

He felt a sudden peace. We are what we see We are what we see.

Charlotte was staring up at him. In her look Moose saw the faces of his students at rare times when a swell of emotion still took him in cla.s.s, energy coursing from his fingers, the top of his head. He would feel their attention tighten around him and experience a whiff of euphoria, an old, half-forgotten pleasure from a time when he was someone else.

"Follow my desire," Charlotte said. "That's what you think?"

"Wherever it may lead."

Moose let her go, opening his hands in the cold fall air, releasing her into the world, the blind, peaceable world where he no longer seemed to have a place. "You have nothing to fear," he said, "nothing." Then added, "It's your only chance at happiness."

Michael West stood inside a house of white brick, a modern-looking house whose whiteness brought to mind whitewashed houses on a cliff. He closed his eyes and breathed the memory: white walls, a sea pale as milk, wind that left on the skin the finest layer of salt. He allowed himself one memory each day, and did not permit it to evolve beyond the immediate senses. He almost never remembered people. He believed he could make himself remember nothing, if he chose, but believed, too, that things suppressed entirely had the power, in some cases, to explode.

"Can I get you another drink?"

It was Mindy Anderson, mistress of this white house where the annual Parent-Teacher c.o.c.ktail was taking place. A thin woman with a long nose and wispy blond hair. She was terribly concerned about his happiness.

"Yes, please," Michael said. "Another beer would be great."

Since his arrival in Rockford, he had begun for the first time to drink alcohol, and he was blown away by the sheer pleasure of being slightly drunk. The floating sensation alcohol induced, the belief that one could do anything; how well matched these sensations were to his present gigantic surroundings-houses like s.h.i.+ps, supermarkets bigger than the biggest mosques, vegetables, mailboxes, all enlarged beyond belief, to the point of comedy. Miles and miles of parking lot. You could build a city in the forgotten s.p.a.ces between things. Being drunk made him feel more American.

A couple approached, the woman large in the way that couches and refrigerators were large, dressed in a loose floral pantsuit that hopped around her like a collection of eager pets. "Someone told me you're Mr. West," she said in a tone that made him long to say she was mistaken. "My daughter, Lori Haft, she's in your algebra cla.s.s."

Now the husband pitched forward and introduced himself, a big man who wheezed a little when he breathed.

"Lori, yes," Michael said. A girl with golden hair and long thin legs like tusks. Could this truly be her mother?

"I'm concerned about her grades," she said, narrowing her eyes. Her hair was short, cut close to the head. Michael felt a pulse of anxiety. He knew this woman: the fool who sees everything. She had dogged him throughout his life, though more often she appeared as a man.

"Please. Tell me your concerns, Mrs. Haft."

"Well, she studies like mad, but she says you don't give her any idea what's important. She doesn't understand you." Her eyes crackled with suspicion.

Any threat, even a small one, like this, induced in Michael West a calm that was almost like sleep. "I feel that I'm being quite clear," he said. "But perhaps not enough."

"Perhaps," she said with faint mockery, as if the very word proved her point.

"If she will meet with me after cla.s.s, I'll review with her what is important."

"Really? You'd really do that?" There, a relaxation. She was selfish, finally; selfish above all else. Nearly everyone was.

"If Lori takes the initiative, I will be available."

"Abby Reece says you're from California," said the woman. "But you sound foreign."

Mentally, he cursed her. His accent was so slight, as long as he avoided words he hadn't practiced. Soon it would be nonexistent. Of course, he hadn't yet developed an individual voice; his phrasing and diction were copied from TV and the people around him. His grammar was cautious, studied. But eventually a voice, too, would come. It always did.

"I've lived abroad for many years," he said.

"Where is it you're from exactly?"

"Smithton. It's near L.A.," he said, and then, as if she might not understand, "Los Angeles."

Of course, an evasion like this would be pointless elsewhere in the world; people identified one another by dialect, family, accent. But in America, there was always someplace else. And Michael West had a gift for languages and accents-more than a gift, he could not resist them. They acted upon him like magnetic fields, unmooring his speech from the landscape of his own past and reconfiguring it in the image of his immediate surroundings. Accents were history; an accent declared I come from someplace else. I come from someplace else. But for Michael West, the past was gone, pulverized into grains of memory too fine to decipher, or to leave him with any sense of loss. But for Michael West, the past was gone, pulverized into grains of memory too fine to decipher, or to leave him with any sense of loss.

"And where is it you spent all those years abroad? Mexico?"

He had a sensuous fantasy of seizing her proud, bloated head and pus.h.i.+ng his gun into the loose underside of her chin, watching her expression collapse into fear so abject it looked like tenderness. "France," he told her, squas.h.i.+ng the 'a' so flat that it broke in half and occupied most of the word. You want America, there it is, he was thinking.

Mercifully, another woman who was friendly with this one came along, and Michael was released. He went to the window and gazed outside at the odd arrangement of lawns: one of short green gra.s.s, a second of long dry brown gra.s.s. They met behind the house in a line. He closed his eyes, releasing himself to the exhaustion that had consumed him ever since his arrival in Rockford, Illinois. Each night, he antic.i.p.ated sleep like a meal.

"We're thinking of doing the whole thing prairie." Mindy Anderson, at his side once again.

"Prairie?" It was not a word he knew.

"See, we did this patch as an experiment," she was gesturing at the brown half of the lawn. "I think George thought it would be too wild, but I love it. Of course, it's half-dead now."

"How does it work?" He asked the question tentatively, always reluctant to acknowledge the vast dark s.p.a.ces in his knowledge. But instinct told him that this discussion concerned fas.h.i.+on, not substance, that not knowing was all right.

"Well, they have the basic mix of gra.s.ses. Then you pick one of the Wildflower Moods. I picked 'Rainbow,' you should've seen it in the spring and summer, it was every color you can imagine, but subtle, too, like-like real wildflowers in a field. Oh, shoot, people are leaving. Excuse me."

Good, he thought, people were going home. Soon he could sleep. Prairie. Prairie was gra.s.s, wild gra.s.s that was fas.h.i.+onable for lawns. "We're doing the whole thing prairie," she'd said. Doing prairie. Doing prairie. Softly he murmured, "Have you ever thought about doing prairie?" But no, the stress was wrong, the grammar too formal. The sentence had to lean. "You ever thought about doing prairie? You ever thought of doing-" Softly he murmured, "Have you ever thought about doing prairie?" But no, the stress was wrong, the grammar too formal. The sentence had to lean. "You ever thought about doing prairie? You ever thought of doing-"

"Don't talk to yourself. Talk to me."

It was Abby, smiling. Abby Reece, an English teacher whose wavy dark hair was faintly streaked with gray. Her eyes, too, were gray, wide and thoughtful and easily hurt. Four times, Michael West had taken her to dinner. The last was two nights ago, and they had seen a movie-his first in many years. He had gone to the theater the day before to observe the process: ticketing and concessions, restrooms, seats; the less he knew, the more conversancy he required to be at ease. And when he returned to the theater, with Abby, it had all been familiar, like second nature. The movie concerned a doctor who begins to think that his patients are animals. Pigs and sheep lay in hospital beds. Michael hardly knew what to say about it afterwards, but this seemed not to matter. "Yuck," Abby proclaimed, and they had returned to her house and lain on her metallic blue bedspread and had s.e.x-his first time in some months-while her children slept. Afterward, while they drank tea in Abby's kitchen, the children had appeared, two of them, like little ghosts. Michael hadn't seen them before; Abby didn't want him to. They were very small. In their presence, he felt the stirring of a memory, which he snuffed. Abby hustled the children away. "I'm sorry," she'd said at the door, as he was leaving. "They almost always sleep through the night."

Abby Reece brought with her a life; her small house, her two children and slender gray cat, her collection of antique dolls with china heads. It could become Michael's life, too-overnight, the way restaurants appeared on State Street fully formed, a.s.sembled from plastic parts that arrived in long boxes stacked on trucks. He had driven to these building sites in the middle of the night and watched the crews at work. Each part was numbered. Even banks could be built in this way. The indoor music, he'd learned, was beamed down by satellite to all incarnations of a particular store or restaurant, so that in New York and Atlanta or Los Angeles, the same song would always be playing. "I say we blow this pop stand," Abby said.

"Sure," he said, dissatisfied by the way the word caught on his teeth. Sure Sure.

Good-bye, good-bye. So very nice. He shook hands with the host, a rich jowly man whose five children were either students at Baxter now or had been once. "Such beautiful art," Michael said, eyeing the smears upon the walls that looked like s.h.i.+t, or snot.

"We're glad you're here and we hope you'll stay," the host said jovially.

"Thank you," Michael said.

In the car he took Abby's hand. Her hands were strong, a mother's hands. At night he imagined them touching him.

"I've got to let the sitter go," she said, "but you could stay for dinner." Perhaps because he had already seen her children.

"I think not," he said. "I'm so tired."

She smiled through her disappointment. She was a good, trusting person. He had given her the impression that a tragedy had befallen him, a dead child, a dead wife. He had not been specific, and she was too polite, too respectful to ask what exactly it was that had caused him to abandon one life and begin another. Like most people, Abby a.s.sumed that only a catastrophe could cause a person to do such a thing, but Michael West had done it more than once. There was a freshness in leaving behind one life for the next, a raw, tingling sensation that was one step short of pain. An imperative of the mind and spirit had reshaped the facts of his life like tides rearranging a sh.o.r.e. And in each new life there was Abby, awaiting his arrival-more than one Abby, sometimes-people with empty places beside them where Michael could stand and look as if he belonged.

They pa.s.sed two McDonald's, but he had trained himself not to look at them in the presence of other people. He had never been inside one.

Michael pulled into the driveway of Abby's house, a small one-story made of yellowish brick, indistinguishable from thousands of other houses in Rockford. "You want to come in for a minute?" she asked, from politeness this time. Expecting him to refuse.

"Sure," he said, testing his p.r.o.nunciation once again. He wanted to prolong the presence of people around him another few minutes, to put off his solitude. With solitude came exhaustion, sleep, but underneath that sleep, running through it in the form of urgent and disturbing dreams, were the questions he would have to answer as soon as he was rested: What was he doing in Rockford, Illinois? And where was the conspiracy he had come to America to destroy?

Abby looked surprised, pleased that he would come in. Her husband, Darden, had bolted to California two years ago with a young woman in possession of a false nose, a false chin and two false b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Except for occasional grudging payments, he'd had no contact with Abby or his children since that time. Michael had to forcibly curb his curiosity about this man, Darden Reece. What had he hoped to find in California, and had he found it?

Abby opened the front door and the two children, Colleen and Gavin, tumbled toward her across the room. Michael glimpsed the babysitter quickly hang up the telephone, and winked so she would know he'd caught her. She had long orange fingernails and was chewing a ma.s.sive wad of gum that bulged in her cheek. Her age-sixteen, he guessed-reminded him of the other girl, the one who had followed him to his house.

Without thinking, Michael lifted Colleen into his arms, a mouse of a girl, feet sticky with something from the floor. Abby, who was paying the sitter, looked up startled, but glad, too-glad he'd wanted to lift her daughter. Michael held the wriggling four-year-old girl and felt how easily she could become his own. People were vines awaiting the chance to cling-Colleen's sticky feet on his s.h.i.+rt, her small arms around his neck, her mother standing nearby, watching them with anxiety and hope. So easily, one could slip inside of other people's lives. Gavin, the two-year-old, clung to Michael's leg, and Michael lifted him, too, so both children squirmed in his arms, and he felt a pull deep as gravity, an exhausted longing to relax, to lie down here with this woman and her warm, squirming children and never leave. Then he extinguished the thought. It wouldn't work; his soul was too small. Most peoples' were large and soft, engorged with sensations and needs that would have made life unbearable for Michael West, like trying to function with his stomach cut open, holding in guts with both fists. His own soul was tight and hard, white as a diamond. People saw in it whatever they chose. That was his gift: to be blessed with a soul that promised whatever people wished, and yielded nothing.

He knew what would come of "settling down," how welcome it would feel at first. But if he were to marry Abby Reece and move into her house and go to church on Sunday mornings with her children, if he were to "barbecue" and feed the cat and take up golf, all the while, his hard white soul would be burning slowly through the soft tissues of this new life until finally it would pierce the last layer and he would find himself outside it. No matter how many layers a life contained, his soul would eventually work its way through the outermost one, and take him with it.

Abby had gone to the kitchen to start dinner. Still holding the children, Michael leaned in and told her he was leaving. "No!" Colleen cried, and Gavin imitated her without understanding, "NO. NO!" They clung to his neck like frantic monkeys when he tried to release them.

"Kids," Abby said sharply, and they let go in a single motion. When he set them down they stood quite still.

She had poured a package of microwave fettuccine into a gla.s.s bowl-powder, noodles-and was adding water. "Sure you don't want to stay?" she asked lightly.

At the door, Colleen hugged Michael's legs and kissed both his knees. He did not lift her again.

He drove quickly to his house, a tiny two-story which was the precise opposite in atmosphere of the one he had just left. Abby had never seen his house, and she would be shocked, he thought, by its emptiness. Right now, the house suited him perfectly.

Tired. Exhausted. Bushed. Beat. Colloquial English lacked sufficient vocabulary to express the enormity of what he felt, had felt for months, ever since his arrival in this place. He reached for a beer, then changed his mind and poured a gla.s.s of milk, which he took to his room. There was a bed, a dresser and of course a TV set, that American treasure chest. He watched the programs that everyone watched, and when he wasn't watching, he listened-for accents, facts, common knowledge. Sometimes he had trouble distinguis.h.i.+ng between TV events and real ones; certain things on TV could not happen in life, even in America. He showered down the hall, listening to shreds of TV sound through the running water, and with his hair and body still damp, he lay down on the bed and glanced at his book of j.a.panese erotica, then decided against it. Too tired. He felt a moment of regret for not having stayed with Abby; he longed for s.e.x with a human being. But s.e.x, not love; not Colloquial English lacked sufficient vocabulary to express the enormity of what he felt, had felt for months, ever since his arrival in this place. He reached for a beer, then changed his mind and poured a gla.s.s of milk, which he took to his room. There was a bed, a dresser and of course a TV set, that American treasure chest. He watched the programs that everyone watched, and when he wasn't watching, he listened-for accents, facts, common knowledge. Sometimes he had trouble distinguis.h.i.+ng between TV events and real ones; certain things on TV could not happen in life, even in America. He showered down the hall, listening to shreds of TV sound through the running water, and with his hair and body still damp, he lay down on the bed and glanced at his book of j.a.panese erotica, then decided against it. Too tired. He felt a moment of regret for not having stayed with Abby; he longed for s.e.x with a human being. But s.e.x, not love; not making love. making love. It was too much work. It was too much work.

In the middle of the night, the doorbell rang. Michael woke in a paroxysm of fear and leapt to his feet, which made p.r.i.c.ks of light flood his head. For a moment, he felt close to pa.s.sing out. But already the calm, reasoning part of him was restoring order: if his compatriots had tracked him down, then so be it. He had always known they might. Still, anxiety cracked through his limbs when the bell rang a second time.

He pulled on his jeans and pushed his Walther into the waistband, against his stomach, not that a gun would be any use if they had found him, but it made him feel stronger. He pulled a s.h.i.+rt from a hanger and b.u.t.toned a couple of b.u.t.tons, enough to cover the Walther, then stepped nimbly into the empty room at the front of the house, the room from which he could glimpse whoever was standing at the door. Someone thin, female. In the moonlight, a red bicycle gleamed against the gra.s.s.

He descended the stairs and opened the front door. It was the girl, holding a bowl of fish.

He experienced a wave of relief so immense it made his eyes sting. He felt as if the girl had brought that relief, irrational though this was.

"h.e.l.lo," he said, dizzy from the sudden calming of his heart.

"Hi," she said, and held out the fishbowl. There were three fish, smooth and brightly colored: crimson, vermilion. They looked like flowers. "These are for you."

"Thank you," he said, taking the bowl from her. He felt half-asleep, the exhaustion already flowing back around the shards of his panic, reclaiming him. He opened the door and led the way into the kitchen, where he set the fish on the table. When he turned on the light, he noticed how bad its color was, green almost. He would get a different bulb, or else a shade. Something to filter the light. The fish b.u.mped very gently against the sides of the bowl.

"They're cold," the girl said.

She wore a jean jacket and a white s.h.i.+rt underneath, a man's s.h.i.+rt much like his own. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore gla.s.ses. Her cheeks were red. "You carried these fish on a bicycle?" he asked.

"I only need one hand to steer," she said. "You should keep them by your bed."

"And why is that?"