Chapter Eighteen: Accidents in Time

After Felix left she straightened up the house, made the bed, washed the dishes. The stale air was making her a little nauseous but she brushed it aside and determined to make the phone calls to Fairbanks and Winnipeg, where she left messages (it was still night in both places). The Cryovac was more involved; they said they’d send her the forms, but recommended a cooling off period for review. Without rancor she thought, putz. He wasn’t just following policy, he had absorbed policy. Even the most inane procedure was like food to this guy, necessary and self-evident. He became indignant, defending the realm of policy. Even the aliases, the virtuals, took offense. Dr. Tarlton was the perfect example. His feelings were genuinely hurt by her diatribes, and she felt bad about them in retrospect, despite the fact that he had earned her scorn and ridicule; she did not simply bestow them upon him. Intellatrawl Dr. Tarlton, a man at work. A button pusher and a voice, great healer, relay to the latest research. It felt good to be sane.

She hated being mad. It appalled her, she was disgusted. Images made her flinch. The degradation, the infantile dependency. And the self-involvement. Everything she despised stared back at her from the mirror, as if she had suddenly embodied all of her judgments of the world. It was incapacitating. She had always been the most capable person she knew. Incapacity was in itself debilitating. But she didn’t care about that now. She had no feelings left. Madness had been the acts of other false voices and people. The only thing to do was forget about them and move on.

Now that Felix was in the garden things clicked into place. Plans she had nursed for years were coalescing, not around paranoid fantasies, but around reality. She had a sensation of being larger than herself. Sometimes she walked around and it was like she wasn’t there at all. The things that passed her by seemed to disappear from sight.

When she first got back from the hospital she was alone all the time. She liked it. She had always been solitary, yet she didn’t know what solitude actually felt like. Being alone so much had numbed her to the pleasure. Even in the garden, she roamed the paths by herself, down to the lake, with only with the black sand, and the bears, who let her sit beside them while they pawed salmon out of icy rivers, for company. But then she began to long for an other, and it came about without reflection, desire, conflict or regret. And Felix found Sammael. Now there were three.

Paregane was like that. It didn’t even exist in its own right. Effort vanished. Before, what could she think about, before? When feeling was an effort. What was it all about? Mercurial change, ambivalence, tortured her; like an old rock in a stream, she was the stunted spectator of her own accidents in time. Relationships, work, passed before her like theorized objects subject to inscrutable forces. Nothing acted by itself, all were passive. In a different mania, the opposite: even inanimate things were possessed by wayward spirits. Electrons, protons, nitrogen, water, Deoxyribonucleic acid, lead crystals, amoebas, rats. She had no meaningful role to play in reality, and reality held a special grudge against her. It was both blind and hostile. Or there was that voice who saw self-pity and helplessness as failures of the will, not even tragic. Every thought she had canceled out some other.

As far as she was concerned, Paregane was going to be just another nail in her iatragenic coffin. Instead, she awoke light of heart. She didn’t even understand what was happening. Happiness, clarity of perception, seemed mad. When Felix noticed the smells he said so, but she was too afraid to mention them. The odors were obviously real. But the perception of strong smells meant you were crazy.

It took a few days to figure out the rules. She knew the difference and knew that she knew it. The difference was in how she felt at the points where she touched the world. They used to be like little pinpricks of fire. In the eyes, the spine, sometimes twitches in the fingertips. Blue sparks trailed her along in her peripheral vision.

She and her skin were not at war now. Her senses were not a sheath. Flesh touched air and did not feel strange.

With her sanity subject to proofs, she was suspicious of Felix. He could turn her in if she didn’t behave. So at first she played it safe. Didn’t mention things. But as soon as he left in the morning she went around gathering evidence: sniffing like a dog, trying to detect the source of the smell. She got rid of the most obvious things first, perfumes, make-up, deodorant. These she scooped into garbage bags and disposed of, along with all the medicine in the house. But it wasn’t just scented detergent or dish soap; it was soap itself, the lye and fat. The manufacture of lather. She could smell the melted lard of sheep and cows. It was in the sheets, the dyed cotton and linen clothes, the ticking in the futons, the ceramic frame, the air and water filters. She couldn’t throw them all out. It was the odor of the world, of mass transit, people clinging to each other, interacting swarms of molecules. Human smokestacks, tailpipes, and discharge tubes. The characteristic effluents of life. The garden had opened her senses up and then the dualities of her life multiplied. The divisions of childhood, how things had grown, one out of the other.

She could not bridge her present to her past. The whole trajectory seemed wrong. But she couldn’t figure out where things went wrong, where the bifurcation occurred. Who or what was to blame? When she was mad, there were days when permutations of that question went back and forth in her brain. It could start anywhere. If she hadn’t married Felix she could have just picked up and gone. He was to blame for their moving to New Jersey and then Rockland. He wanted the pod, the embryos. Pods and embryos had not been part of the deal. Pods and embryos were diseases of the mind. But she went along. She could blame her mother for forcing her to go to college. The therapists assured her that her desire to stay with them was an infantile wish. Well maybe the division lay within her. Maybe she was the fused product of superfetation, a hybrid of spirit and animal, self-divided and at war. Or perhaps it was philosophical, the split in the subject was a linguistic artifact. When she became a grammatical subject her being was sundered into world and self. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The succession of the patriarchy. Christianity. The Industrial Revolution. Global warming, global disaster. The Big Bang was the first separation. Before that, all was whole.

There were voices for other things, but not the question of clades. Clades were debated by her alone.

She knew it was not Felix. He was all she could be sure of. It was horrible to watch him become more beaten by the day. He was afraid of her. He shrank away from her. She had no choice but to convince him to come to the garden. Until he did she would never have him. And without him she couldn’t imagine moving forward. She was close to it now, close to Alaska. It was really happening.

She could remember nothing before the age of four, when she first went off to The Ochs Academy For Girls. Not even the pain of the first separation. She spent summers and holidays on the water with her parents. Her parents were the heroes of her life. When they died, the lights went out. Up to then she half knew what she was doing. It was a taunt, a taunting with failure. She didn’t bathe because it was offensive. But the deaths turned the lens around. There was a vacuum. She disappeared with them.

At school she felt her parent’s world shining through into the dark dormitory. Eyes shut, head pressed back into the pillow, she smelled the burning fuel and felt the boat pull out into open water.

Riding in their entourage of eleven boats was like getting kidnapped by pirates. There was the big barge, black, with a red bottom and a white bowline, piled high with the haul; and the small barge, where the crew lived, and the tug that could pull both. The family stayed on the houseboat and used the launch to get around. And then there was the square crane, grey, with its fat coil of cable wound on a spindle behind the pilothouse. An oil lamp hung from the ceiling. She loved to sit at the wheel and work the levers, raising and lowering hooks and chains to the divers, searching for junk. The engine groaned and pulled whatever it was, a car maybe, out of the mud, a huge putrid mane of rusty water falling off the fenders.

The crew cursed, smoked and drank. Only the pilots stayed from year to year. Men and women with attached ears, cleft palates, eyes half hidden by the skull, third nipples, webbed fingers or like her, extra toes. The shower was a hose pumping lake or river water out. They adored her. They let her ride the trash barge, sit on the sorting boat by the rusty machine parts.

She always saw her father out on deck, bare chested, in his shorts, two holstered automatics and a machete on his tool belt, snug beneath his belly. He had a shaved, square head, a face broad featured and dark. His arms and legs were covered in scars, cuts and burns. He had an arrogant stride and even on a big boat appeared to be controlling it with his feet. Her mother was tall too but tough and wiry. She was fair complexioned and had a sort of permanent sunburn that only became apparent when she stripped down to go for a swim and looked like she was wearing white shorts and a halter top.

They were the last of the wildcat salvage operators plying the inland waterways. A hundred years before there were dozens like them on every lake and river. They’d band together for a big job, like Buffalo and Cleveland, words for jobs that became legends, passed down crew to crew. They were born to it, families that disdained city life as it reassembled on high ground behind levees and dikes and along canals.

They knew most everything worth salvaging had been salvaged. School was the only way their daughter would get ahead in the world and where they lived there were no schools. Money was not the problem, her parents were rich enough. But it would mean sending her far away, to be among people much different than themselves.

At Ochs there weren’t many four year olds, and they all slept in a room with Miss Todd, who was also their teacher. She must have been only twenty years old. In the morning she bathed them in a big porcelain bathtub with brass fixtures. There was an iron casement window in the bathroom with warped panes. In the spring she could watch the sun rise through the colored glass from the tub. Miss Todd made them tea with honey and lemon when they were sick, and read books and sang songs.

Sometimes she cried and she learned to hide the tears. At bedtime the dark was unfamiliar, silent except for sirens and mumbling voices. She longed for the rocking boat, the raucous sounds of her parents and crew on a nearby deck drinking and singing dirty folk songs around a barrel fire. Her bed had two small windows with curtains and she could see their red faces and the sparks tailing into the wind. There was the sound of frogs and insects, and barge horns, her mother’s hand on her back. She never got used to falling asleep at school, it was always like she was falling, with the sounds of chores and the coughs of little girls, into nothing.

Girls that started as young as four were marked as lifers. They ran the show and got the privileges. Each year she attached herself to an adult on staff, a teacher, a cook, a custodian and in later years, the young women who supervised each floor of the dorm. Best friends changed from year to year. She was always, both by nature and inclination, aloof. She fell into books the way Alice fell into the rabbit hole. By fourth grade she found her niche as a story teller, wrote plays and mean, satirical lyrics to the old camp song tunes they learned in music class. The girls stayed up nights listening to her fantastic tales of adventure on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, confected with gothic details of pirates, and cannibals of grateful corpses returned from the dead to help the child who buried them.

She was a pudgy kid who loved to eat and lived for the cafeteria where all four hundred of them sat three times a day with their pale blue composite trays full of soft, sugary pancakes, artificial mashed potatoes, fried chicken croquettes and extruded pot roast.

The food on the boat was so different! Her parents shot and cooked their own meat. They always had a fishing line out, a shot gun and a rifle ready at hand. Veronica cleaned the fish and plucked the geese and ducks. Her mother butchered the deer and pigs, which her father brined and smoked in fifty-gallon drums. They traded for flour, oil and salt, for rice and vegetables, at the landings. Four o’clock was quitting time. The whole crew cleaned up, scrubbed the decks, coiled the ropes and greased the chains. They showered under the hoses, men and women alike lathered against the low sun. The first drink out on the deck and they were like crowing cocks. At six o’clock they cut up the meat and onions for the stew and cooked corn bread in iron pans.

Her parents tried to arrange things so that they could spend the end of summer trading on the upper Mississippi or Lake Superior. By day they hit the markets and in the evening pulled into a tributary or cove to camp out. They built a huge fire of the dead trees that dotted the old inundated shores.

At ten she left Ochs and moved on to the sister school, ten k away, Payne Prep. The same year her parents decided it was time for them to settle down in the summers and chose a spot on the south shore of Lake Superior, at the mouth of the Mad River. For six years running they made camp there, every June, and stayed till school began again in September. That was where she met Charlie, whom she would always remember as an eleven-year-old boy, wild and hairless, with dirty hands and feet. His parents lived on high land, up from the river’s mouth, in a two-bedroom cabin. They were teachers, grew corn in the summer, rode the teaching circuit in a sailboat.

It started out with him hanging around at the edge of camp the first year and after a while he was water skiing and swimming off the boat with her. He took her inland on his motorcycle, over rough backcountry roads. Half naked, they jumped in haylofts, stole corn and cooked it in the husk over a grubby fire. The next year they picked up where they left off and by August were sneaking whiskey and beer in the woods. They were wild together. She got to know his family, sat in their kitchen on cold mornings drinking coffee. There was a wood fired range and a small pot bellied stove. It smelled like wood smoke and biscuits. Corn and chilies were drying in the rafters.

Each summer they ran farther and harder, until she was fourteen. That was the summer she arrived with a crush that had agonized her for a year and they, that first day, kissed. By August they were screwing in spots they once prized for catching frogs and turtles.

In the fall she returned to school, tanned as black as her father, her oceanic eyes radiant and rowdy. She donned the pleated grey dress, white button down shirt, skinny red tie, black stockings and white sneakers and fell into place. The other children came from very wealthy families. Her parents had quite a bit of cash, but these were the children of diplomats, or regional executives with country mansions. A few were from frontier families anxious to keep their daughters out of danger. They were all of them more refined; manners that came naturally to them she had to learn to perform.

Veronica was never ostracized. She played soccer and lacrosse and was a gold medal swimmer. But her true worth to the other girls was forbidden knowledge. She was the ball buster, the one who said there was no Santa Claus, and then the one who taught them how to french kiss and drink hard liquor. She used her lawless beautiful summers like cash. Tales of barefoot escapades on the bluffs, rattle snakes and sixty-nine with Charlie beat out the Swiss Alps.

The summer when she was sixteen she didn’t go home but went with a friend to her family’s ranch out in Montana. For the first time in her life she was lost. She had no idea what a servant was, and didn’t know a thing about fancy china or different forks for different foods. All she knew was to sit up straight, chew with her mouth closed and keep quiet while the parents mumbled about state politics.

Veronica missed Charlie. She missed the smell of river mud and alcohol fumes and grease, of fat back frying while the sun crested the dark tree line and rose into a coral colored sky. They were in the middle of mountains, beautiful, storybook mountains. She always imagined them with snow on top, but it was so hot and dry the mountains were covered by swirling clouds of dust.

All her friend did was lie on a couch drinking cappuccinos and eating potato chips and boiled hot dogs without a bun. After dinner the whole family went for a swim in the indoor pool. They weren’t allowed out of the house–too dangerous! –except for riding lessons.

Riding horses was the only freedom she knew then. After a while she started to sneak out at night to smoke and drink with the stable boy. One night, very drunk, they rode horses around the corral and she was thrown and knocked unconscious. The stable boy ran off, leaving her on the ground, where she was found the next morning. With a terrible hangover and a concussion they packed her off on the first train east to Chicago.

None of it terribly bothered Veronica; she didn’t care about the stable boy, except for the betrayal of leaving her on the ground, though even this was understandable given the circumstances. She would miss the horses but couldn’t wait to return to the Mad River and Charlie. Every day on the ranch she had spent long, languorous hours daydreaming about their excursions. She took endless showers and masturbated obsessively.

It was one of the few times she could remember her parents being angry. Her mother glared out at the light blue water of Lake Michigan, not turning to look at her, as she staggered up the swaying metal gangway, too weak to carry her bags. Her father marched down to the dock and grabbed them as if they weighed a kilo and tossed them onto the deck, then wordlessly untied the launch and they took off. It wasn’t till dinner that any of them spoke.

Two days later they arrived at the landing but Charlie wasn’t there. “Don’t bother looking for him,” her mother said, “he took up with some other girl.”

It was true. Charlie wouldn’t even look at her. He had some weak, whiney little towhead two years younger than him following him around. It was the first time anyone had broken her heart and she swore it would be the last. She spent the rest of the summer in bed reading Shakespeare.

From then on at school she drifted apart from the other girls. The friend she had visited was scared of her and the others let her go without protest. She immersed herself in English and in history, got straight A’s, and spent all of her free time swimming laps. The laps burned off her baby fat. She grew strong and sleek, her face aging slowly into a smouldering, remote intensity.

Now in the summer she worked hard on the boat, fishing, cooking, repairing rope and chain. She studied old maps with her father under alcohol lamps at night. Her hands got hard with calluses, her nails chipped and cracked. At night she stayed up late with the crew singing and drinking, listened to the stories she had heard as a child as a distant mumble, about men dying in whorehouses, shootings and stabbings, snake and scorpion bites. She was now, in the eyes of her parents, an adult.

And she read. Books now completed her life. The adventure was on the water, the work was in the wool skirt, but the roaming, the world, was in books. She read anything about the sea. Conrad and Melville, Homer. She fantasized that she would live on a boat with a man who was her friend and occasional lover, reading books all day.

They had never been obviously protective of her and yet, when she thought about it, the decision to settle down on the Mad River came just when her breasts had become little bumps and the hair came in under her arms. She was rarely alone. Her mother was always three steps off, her father always coming around the corner. Her father was not a violent or quick-tempered man. He ruled his crew with humor, generosity and charisma; no one stayed long who wasn’t loyal. Still, she was a beautiful young woman and no one ever hit on her, they never even looked at her wrong. But then, she reflected, a man like her father didn’t have to do a whole lot to inspire respect and fear. He dominated everyone he came in contact with with his presence alone, backed up by the pistols and the machete on his tool belt.

Years later she asked her mother about it. “Good lord,” she said, letting out a hard laugh, “we was mostly afraid of you takin’ up with one of the crew. That’s why we put in at Mad River, hoping you’d find some farm boy to run around with.”

When she was young, she did as she was told. She loved the water, wept when she left it and her parents, then loved school. But by the end she had this secret life. It was subterranean, a line of thought that threaded her days. She never imagined herself anywhere but on a boat. Her parents weren’t always there. She would be wild and free.

The shuttered light of libraries, the green hallways and barred windows would be gone. There’d be no janitor sweeping the halls and mopping the stairs. There’d be no stairs at all, just gangways and ladders. And no people telling you what to do. The schedule would be work, up with the dawn, and seasonal. She’d follow the sun on its path across the tropics. Winter in the gulf, summer on Superior. She knew she could do the work; she wouldn’t be a drag on the family. But her mother wouldn’t allow it. It was a fight. It was many fights. She brought it up formally. It spilled out of her in a torrent after provocation. She had never fought like this with her mother. It was frightening. She trembled afterwards, took long angry swims. Leaving created a visceral agony. It got into the marrow of her bones, a sort of whistling emptiness and silence. Her ears rang and her eyes started with tears. She lay in her berth gripping the sides of her stomach, teeth clenched. They were wrenching her from her one dream, the thing she had always behaved for. The term was up. She didn’t exist to live out her mother’s plan. In the end they chased each other around the upper cabin, shrieking. She had to go to Columbia.

That first year was like any other year. A new school but no uniforms. The city. She was so angry she didn’t speak. Men didn’t interest her. They spoke to her all the time but she felt nothing. They looked stupid, they were weak and awkward. The girls were no better. Her studies were overwhelming. She thought because she had read a lot she’d be ready for college but she hadn’t counted on not being able to concentrate. Her thoughts were scattered. She read but she read all of the wrong things. Days and weeks went by she couldn’t account for. Payne and Ochs had been grim but nestled in a faux arcadian setting. The dorms were old stone buildings, laid out around a quad. There was a horse farm on one side and estates on the other. The city scared her. She had never been in such noise and darkness. It was hot. The fumes burned her throat.

She spoke to no one but her teachers. She was always afraid. The more silent she was, the more afraid, the more immobile and intimidating her face became. People noticed her. She stood in doorways staring into rooms. The shadows wrapped her shoulders and cut across her chin. The green eyes were hidden in a cave like stalactites.

She first noticed Felix in her sophomore year. He was seated alone at The Luncheonette, reading a cheap hemp paper and drinking black coffee. He had a peculiar expression on his face. It made her smile. After that it seemed he was always with a different woman. Then he started to turn up places. The bookstore, the amphibatrain, a reading. One day she saw him with a woman and felt jealous. Why? So she followed him, considered him more carefully. She learned his schedule, showed up where he would be first and then leave when he got there. She had no idea what she was doing. One day he noticed her. Their eyes met. She saw the tiny burst of light in his cornea. He was done for and she knew it. Rather than run away she walked towards him. He smiled and said I’m Felix. She could not explain that. The hooks. They were never where you looked. She hadn’t spoken in years and suddenly she was walking with this beautiful man, talking. They were like Othello, seducing each other with words, stories out of books and life. They charged themselves with a future, the places they would go when they were done. Canada, Alaska, New Zealand. Road or river, so long as they were on it, so long as they were free.

It was their last moment of flux. They had seduced each other with their dreams, had enfolded themselves with their books. But when the job in Jersey came, she stepped up to it. They went that way together. She got good at taking on swine like the Cryovac man. She got paid to push. But sales meant nothing; it was a way to live. She had never let it die out of her mind, the hope of one day going back home. Alaska. A dream deferred, cashed in. She put on a lime green strapless dress with a choke collar, a lightweight tan raincoat and a pair of webbed, red bike shoes and left the house.

She parked her bike and walked to the supermarket. During the day the only people about were forty years older than she was, or parents with small children. Mostly they ignored her. At one time the harridans who knew her business stared and whispered or gave pitying looks. She didn’t care. She was glad to be out of Intellatrawl and would be glad to be out of Rockland. Paregane was great but she would be glad to be rid of it too, once they were out west living the way she wanted to.

The supermarket was cold and the sweat dried quickly off of her forehead. She loaded her cart with milk for breakfast, a loaf of bread, and, after hesitating, a stick of real butter. The smell of oleo made her retch. It looked like vaseline. A vacuum pack of coffee and something for dinner. Salad for two and what? The hot dogs lay in their packages. There was something about extruded meat she would always love but she couldn’t subject herself any longer to the vile taste. She was not much of a cook and they had so little money. It was cheaper than restaurants.

Soon they would have some money again and a real selection of foods. One of them would have to learn to cook then, or they’d starve.

The fish case was dispiriting, it smelled bad and yet she was drawn to the trout, shrink-wrapped in cellophane with lemon slices. Saliva filled her mouth. She was airborne again, arcing into the sky off that rock. The water raced by beneath her and she worked with her whole body, swimming in the sky, banking up as the opposite shore approached and then, diving down head first into the water, spearing a fish. Then, bursting upward, exhausted, sucking in the air.

She grabbed two packages of trout and scrutinized the label for instructions. It seemed simple enough. One ate it with salt, lemon and butter. That would go nicely with a small salad and toasted bread. With a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc it would be just like a restaurant.

At home she unpacked the saddlebags of her bike and put away the groceries. Then she did something she had never done before and was unable to explain. She took a second pill of Paregane and lay down on the bed to take a long nap. She was hoping to go to the lake with Sammael and fly.