Klee - Ivyland

CAL

I watch my brother from where the grass rolls down to trickling water. Shuffle through the first dead leaves. He and Phoebe turn to face me. Stare straight and blank. Want to sweep through and make them right. But this is what you get: tread time for one dissolving view.

How do we erase obsession? A riptide that punishes our struggle against it? Children are naturally smitten with anything that weds danger and secrecy, hints at discoveries unmade. The boy who worships Bigfoot cant fathom a Bigfoot hunter as laughingstock. The same confidence crumbles with age: pulled certainly, rapidly out to sea, the current works invisible.

People vanish. Always will. Some bend into nothing, lost in the wrinkles. Some burn away for no reason at all. A young woman, asleep, engulfed in 17 th century France. Her husband acquitted of murder. The 1960s fading, a meter reader stumbles upon some doctors ashes. A weary soul spontaneously combusted: black circle on the floor of her beachfront home. Shell have blown away when they come to see.

Each name reduced to dust in the black-and-white sketches and photos, pages of odd, ignored books. Little mounds of self-destructed person. In youth I traced these pictures and, when those grew stale, invented my own.

At night, riding my bike alonethey were always alone when it happenedI would release the handlebars, balancing, and stretch out my arms, trying to conjure the spark inside. I pedaled furiously, so that as I broke apart, the bikes momentum would keep it coasting in the wash of that rare still-working streetlight, ash running off the seat like the tail of a comet till I was gone forever and the spokes still made their inertial orbit. The bike riding itself in a cone of white. Then it would touch the edge of the pool, be enveloped in the flattening dark.

I dont know when the fantasy failed. I couldnt be one of these molten few. They had something I didnt: access, no choice. Saw flaws and gears behind the days. A vision that blossomed for decades but with age became overripe and unendurable. Strangers thoughts seeping through cracks, inverting life and sleep. Friends thoughts a torture all their own. Even loneliness must have failed. Sequestered in bare rooms, staring at walls, shadows liquid in barbaric theater, they would summon my loneliness the same way I called for their spark. They fared no better. Walls came tumbling down. Glistening ids and egos slithered in, shuddering in cool air, unhinging jaws and tasting gray matter.

And as we savaged their minds, eclipsed the real, gnawed on a hollowed rind of soul, the body took pity and forged a diamond flame within. Smoke bloomed out in painless Pyrrhic victory. All escape redirected here. A spectrum of blazing anti-time, incendiary space, blue inward electric waves. Exhausted spark became ash. Meager memorials left behind: a singed shoe, stripped bone.

*

Im standing in the moon landers airlock, watching distance between the surface and me diminishfirst imperceptibly, now by leaps and bounds. But the moon falls up at me. I pull the same.

I want to touch it, feel its powdered dust on my face, in my pores, in the whorls of my fingerprints. See it cling to the glossy white hair on erupting wrists, its grittiness in my rough chin sprouts. To taste true barrenness and sputter, die, drown in the tranquility, my brains lying next to me and one hand full of alien earth. My eyes cracked glass and overawed at the wasteland Ive come home to. My corpse will seem alive in a field so calm, a beacon in the gray.

Im surprised. A dream, the first I can remember, has stitched itself together from a hundred microsleeps, so incandescent and ripe with future dreads that it took days to recognize. It had actually happened. Aidan was there, toddling along, not wise enough to fear me, in that cheerful oblivion adults spend their lives trying to regain. He sidled along, only half my height then

Ive put aside the notion of not knowing him, the two of us passing on the street as strangers. A moments codes would yield that face no matter how well encrypted, a face that held the vestiges of an innocence I destroyed and pride neither of us could abandon. We might have talked again, I know, but it was the first note of contact that eluded us always, silence more easy than deliberate.

So: he toddled and I strode, each dragging a cheap plastic sled, beneath a bloodless slate thing that loomed above our town, hearing the friction in puffy snowclothes. As did countless children before us, we breathlessly awaited the moment when Floods Hill would reveal itself in blinding glory, shake loose the bordering trees and houses, become its monolithic self. It might be pristine, mythically unspoiled, or already ravaged by Flexible Flyers, jagged swaths of mud and grass shredding the white to lace. It could be overrun or deserted. Snow that had a crunchy skin but lay powdery underneath; snow that was uniformly wet, packable. The infinite designs and variations ran together and realigned as we walked, but no prediction was ever uttered.

One variant that never snaked through my head was the one we found. It was an invented outcome, transforming as the sky. There were no other sledders it appeared none had ever existed. It couldnt be understood till we touched it, and even when our ungloved fingers grazed the rough hoarfrost and the smoother surface beneath, it did not abolish our anxiety.

The hill was sheathed in ice. Pure, unmarked ice that warbled in three dimensions, making bulges and miniature alpine ridges, fault lines and tectonic plates, a geology all its own. In it were trapped tiny pockets of air, freeze-framed bubbles gasping for the surface but locked in time. Beneath, yellow grass bent in static breeze.

Its ours, is how Aidan summarized it all.

We were eager to ride: our plastic discs slid across the mutated hill with no resistance. I climbed at reduced speed, leaving Aidan to manage the tricky slope himself. Stumbling and losing traction constantly, the summit took ten minutes to reach. After a customary survey of the sleepy valley, I sat and launched myself.

Aidan was a blur. The trees melted sideways. Going too fast, I reached out to control the descent, but my gloves skimmed hopelessly over the ice, capturing ripples in fast-forward. The hill terminated in a line of trees, but I slipped through, flung farther, across a street they never bothered to plow, down the start of a second slope that plunged into the polluted creek. I slammed to a stop in iced high grass. In that dazed moment of blessed immobility, I turned back to see the path Id traveled, and thoughts came trippingly, taking in the dizzy height, the heart-stopping drop I sought.

Aidan was not yet halfway up the hill, not when I first turned round, not when I crossed the blasted street and started toward him. He faltered, lost altitude, gained some, lost his footing, paused. Starting again, he slipped, moved forward five feet, then dropped his sled. From a distance I watched him try to lunge for the disc while remaining upright, the contortions bringing his body down hard on the ice.

I ran, stumbling and bruising myself the whole way, seeing his shock twist itself into furrowed confusion and then a weary escalating cry. Aidan opening his mouth and producing no sound but surely crying. Then his breath caught and the siren flared up, hurt upon hurt, decibels carrying down the valley. Closer, I spotted the source, a candy-red crescent tented over his left eyebrow, brilliant and crisp.

His cry broke into labored gasps when I reached him and realized I knew no way to dampen the pain. I sat with him and held his shoulders and said I was sorry, sorry that I wasnt there, for bringing us, that the whole thing was stupid and come on, we can go. I touched the red with an ungloved hand and picked up its stinging warmth, then put my hand to the ice.