Dear Mr. Winkler—
Thanks for the snowflakes. There is no question they are handsome, another reason to be proud of Alaska.
Yes, yes, Grace is here, alive and well, all of that. I don’t know, though, if she’ll want to see you. She has a son, you know. She got married early and is already divorced. She never listened much to my advice.
Anyway here’s her address. Don’t tell her I gave it to you.
Grace Ennis
208 East 16th, Apt. C
Anchorage
I don’t think you’re a jerk, not anymore. Maybe an asshole. That’s a joke. Sorry it took me so long to respond; I’ve been out of commission the past few weeks.
Stop by if you’re ever in town.
Herman
As with Sandy’s box of returned letters, he held this letter in his lap a long time and the light changed around him and the shadows gradually extended their reach.
A sheet of paper, an answered prayer. His mind filled like a pool with a single memory: the morning, before dawn, that his mother died. Winkler was thirteen years old. His father had found her and rushed onto the landing. From his little closet-bedroom, Winkler could hear him hammering on the neighbors’ door, yelling about using their telephone. The boy pulled back his mattress and stepped carefully into the parlor. She was still in her chair, her shape rigid already, all wrong, her knees showing beneath the hem of her nightgown, the fingertips of one hand outstretched to touch one of the big windows. The clamor of his father shouting and banging on the landing was improbably distant, and the smells of that furrier’s storehouse-turned-apartments—foxes, lynxes, and the tannins that had been used on their coats—were suddenly, impossibly strong. The walls swarmed with ghosts; they drew out from beneath the furniture, from the radiators and the outlets, from the faucets and fissures in the beams, and the keyholes, and chinks in the plaster, the ghosts of minks and caribou, arctic squirrels and bears, marmots, moose, all these animals pouring into the apartment, hundreds of them, silent and invisible, but there nonetheless, walking about—the boy could feel them, he could smell them, he could all but see them. Their breath was on the windows.
They gathered around her in the darkness. She was so still. The animals stamped and fidgeted and flicked their tails. Her throat was stretched and her chin pointed at the ceiling, and her fingers were horribly motionless against the glass, and outside a brand-new quarter inch of snow had collected on the sill and Winkler had been grateful all his life that he had been given that moment with her, maybe one or two complete minutes, he and the animals and his mother, the only person who had really ever understood him, and he imagined he could see the animals taking her with them, solemnly and delicately, escorting the life out of her, something gauzy and illumined, like a jar full of fireflies, or the flame of a candle behind a curtain, her soul, perhaps, or something beyond words, and carrying it with them back into the walls of the building, heading for the roof.
Eventually his father came sprinting back in with the neighbors, and lamps were switched on, and the windows went black, and she was gone.
13
The Ford heaved down the ragged track. Naaliyah worked the brake, easing the truck and the Skidoo on its trailer through long patches of slush. Winkler watched an island of birch on a nearby hill, a slash of brilliance through the darker spruce like a seam of silver.
Several times they had to stop, rear wheels spinning, Winkler out of the cab and leaning into the rear bumper, cold air leaking from shadowy places between trees, the cages of insects stacked in the bed rattling beneath a tarp. But the truck always spun free, the trailer splashing through the ruts, as if their passage out of the valley was inevitable now, determined by gravity and the radiance of the day. As they descended the slush occurred less and less, and willows began to appear, wearing a haze of lime green buds, swaying in the wind.
Winkler rode with his old duffel between his legs and his prints of snow crystals stacked in his lap. Air washed over his lace and down the collar of his shirt.
It took only an hour or so to reach the Yukon. Above its vast reaches gulls wheeled and soared. Rays of light dropped from broken clouds. Blocks of ice as big as boxcars littered the banks, and among them were whole trees, stripped of bark and branches, the elaborate knots and elbows of their fiber laid plain. Out in the center, past the breakup ice and a thick line of flotsam, a clear brown channel—wide as a football field—pushed forward, driving great lenses of ice downriver, toward Circle.
It was five hundred miles to Anchorage. To their left, out on the thawed stripe of river, geese were landing, one after another.
Book Six
1
He rode the number 2 bus in a new suit holding a cheesecake in a box. A plastic price tag retainer was lost somewhere in the waistband of his pants and its end periodically stabbed his hip. He got off at Fifteenth and dug a torn phone book street map out of his pocket.
Five blocks, southeast. Traffic hissed unseen on A Street. It was afternoon, a gray sky, and the apartment complexes here appeared mostly empty, the residents at work or perhaps departed altogether. Sporadically a house was smart and tended, tulips or lilacs standing out front, but for the most part this was a renters’ district: clapboard multiplexes built on fill, or Sears homes plunked here decades before by pipeliners and rail workers, unimproved since conception, some still with horsehair or newspaper insulation visible between missing shakes.
If he had ever been on these sidewalks before, he could not remember it. Nearly everything in the city struck him as new: like mildew, Anchorage had germinated and colonized, crawling up Hillside, clustering around the lakes, roads thickening to highways, industrial lots reaching into muskegs. Dusty vehicles idled in long queues at stoplights; mirrored office towers squatted in vast parking lots. The Fourth Avenue Theater, where he and Sandy used to meet, no longer showed films: the auditorium a tourist buffet, the basement an out-of-favor museum.
But there was that old scent, too, rising in the wake of a delivery truck, or a quiet breeze at midnight, or the drip and gurgle of rainwater in the runnels: a smell of gravel and salt and gasoline, of trees and melting slush, a smell of Alaska in April. It was the place he had grown up in: gulls gliding over downtown streets, the sea boiling up Turnagain Arm.
Two-oh-eight East Sixteenth was one-story, weatherboard, five apartments in a row. Apartment C was in the middle. Other tenants had cacti or jade walruses or potted gardenias on the sills, nylon chairs in the weedy lawns out front, but not Apartment C, just the blinds lowered and the door closed. A simple braided-palm doormat. The stoop was unswept.
There was a child’s toy rolled under the hedges: a red plastic baseball bat, inflated cartoonishly along the barrel.
Across the street was a dandelion-choked commons with monkey bars, tandem swings, and a sign: RANEY PLAYGROUND. He retreated with his cheesecake and sat on the swing to the left, which was out of sight of her front door, but offered a view of her hedges, and the doors and windows of the apartments to the west: Apartment A, Apartment B.
The plastic tag jabbed his hip. He fidgeted. The cheesecake in his lap slowly gathered mass until it became a boulder, a bakery box filled with quicksilver. He could not take his eyes off the toy bat lying beneath the hedges. The cheesecake was driving his shoes into the earth.
A C on the door. Behind which lived his daughter and grandson. It was incomprehensible.
A dry cleaner’s van, rusted at the wheel wells, clattered past. The swing creaked. His mind ticked through the Grace Winklers he had met: New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee, New Mexico, Boise. The Grace with the Saint Bernards; the Grace with the cockatiels. There are many Grace Winklers and all of them are the real Grace Winkler. So in that way your journey will never be done. Jed had been right.
Yet across the street, behind that door, were a daughter and grandson he had never met. Couldn’t they be an ending of sorts?
In a minute he would do it. He would push himself out of the swing and ring th
e doorbell. Maybe she’d be disinterested, or baffled; maybe she’d be—more likely—angry. Maybe she’d embrace him; maybe she’d whisper: Finally.
The sky inched lower. Honeybees mined dandelions at his ankles. He dragged himself across the street. The swing drifted back and forth behind him.
The cheesecake was impossibly heavy. His shoes left damp prints up the sidewalk. Her rectangle of lawn was lank and unmowed and an urge rose in him to rent a rototiller, tear up the entire lawn and resod it. At least she could come home to that: trim rows of dark green grass.
A kit car turned onto the street, its subwoofer thumping hard. The glass half of Grace’s screen door trembled. Adrenaline surged through Winkler’s torso. He bent to the stoop and set the cheesecake on the mat. The doorbell was an arm’s length away. He would ring it. He could not ring it. The car slowed at the end of the street and then kept on.
His arms hung at his sides, useless. He backed away. When he reached the sidewalk he had to restrain himself from running.
Naaliyah’s apartment consisted of four rooms on the second floor of a three-story frame-and-clapboard cube called the Camelot Apartments. Besides her bedroom there was a kitchen, a fungi-splotched bathroom, and a closet-sized main room dominated by an orange corduroy sofa.
She kept most of her insects in a lab at school but there were still twenty or so insectaries stacked on the kitchen counters; she had emptied and repopulated them, leftovers from the Yukon-Charley mingling with new recruits: bark beetles, cabbage weevils, alpine caterpillars in their various instars.
“Save some money,” she had told him. “It’s no trouble. Wait till you get your feet moving again. I’m never here anyway.” Which turned out true: almost immediately she was gone, pedaling off to campus on a rusty blue bicycle, spending days and good portions of nights bent over her data at the library, or meeting with Professor Houseman, or squatting in front of a bush with her pocket loupe, surveying the fumblings and desperations of springtime insects.
He spent nights on the sofa. He kept his few clothes in a folded pile on top of the radiator. He taped his nineteen extant photographs of snow crystals along the wall above the back of the sofa. His nerite shells rode the molding atop the window. Naaliyah had let him keep the Stratalab—”They won’t miss it,” she said—and this he kept balanced on the wide lip of wainscoting.
His first nights had been the hardest: headlights traveling Northern Lights Boulevard, the occasional bleating of horns, footfalls crossing the ceiling above. Not since he was a child had he tried to sleep in such a noisy place. Each time the upstairs neighbors flushed their toilet Naaliyah’s entire apartment surged with the sound of it, an explosion of water, pipes not two feet from Winkler’s head guzzling it all down. He had nightmares that he was back in the bunkroom of the Agnita, the orange sofa yawing in the waves, the open ocean pressing at the apartment walls.
A strip mall was going up across the street and before five the workers started their cement mixer, its chain grinding steadily, cement thumping as it churned inside the drum. He’d wake and study the ceiling and listen: a sound like the sound of his own heart, turning over and over.
He shaved off his beard; he showered two and three times a day. Winter lingered in his joints, in his marrow. His eyes leaked fluid and he had to pry his eyelids apart with his fingers. Some mornings it took him two or three minutes to climb off the couch and to his feet.
He ate grapefruits, pears, once an entire half pound of sliced Muenster cheese. The dozen sensations of cold orange juice on his tongue could entertain him for fifteen minutes.
He studied the street map in the ACS Yellow Pages. He peered out through the blinds like a fugitive. She could be there, or there; she could be climbing out of that Plymouth, heaving that red laundry bag out of her trunk; that could be Grace in the sneakers with holes in her stockings; that could be Grace jogging past, in tights and a sports bra, headphones clamped over her ears.
He got a job. He took a bus to the Fifth Avenue Mall to buy proper eyeglasses and while there noticed a sign seeking an assistant lab technician. The store was called LensCrafters. The manager, Dr. Evans—a plump, mop-haired optometrist in silver-rimmed spectacles and a lab coat—frowned at him when she saw the doctorate on his application and hotel maintenance under work history, but said she was desperate and after a few minutes on the telephone with someone at “corporate,” hired Winkler then and there.
“But,” she said, “you’ll have to pick some different eyewear. We need our employees to wear the latest styles. You understand.” He acquiesced, opting for Calvin Kleins in black and honey acrylic, retrofitted to allow for his big lenses. Eyedrops, too—he had to squeeze them onto his eyeballs four times a day. Pathologic myopia, she said, which meant Winkler’s eyes were continually getting worse, and that it would not be safe for him to drive a car, information he didn’t need to pay $243 to learn. The lenses were so thick his eyelashes swept their undersides when he blinked.
Gary, a twenty-three-year-old twelfth-grader, trained him. Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, Winkler would ring up customers, inventory frames, bank prescriptions, reorder stock, and haul boxes to the Dumpster out back. (This latter duty would become his favorite, pausing out there after kicking the boxes flat, looking up at the sky, a few cirrus clouds passing above the mall walkway.) For lunches he rode the elevator to the fourth-floor food court and ate Thai Town or Subway at a table tucked among potted tropicals, gazing past milling teenagers to the little penny-choked fountain where a copper salmon spat water into a chlorinated pool.
It was nearly May now and in the afternoons kids were everywhere. School buses sighed past Naaliyah’s apartment, their windows jammed with faces.
Twice more he rode the 2 bus in the evening and walked the five blocks to Raney Playground and sat in the swing in a shirt and tie. “Would you ever…?” he’d ask, mumbling. “Do you think you could…? Any chance we…?”
He brought a cherry pie; he brought cream cake decorated with shaved slips of white chocolate. Each time they grew heavy as boulders; each time he left them on her mat without a note, without touching the doorbell.
Then the long ride back down Lake Otis Parkway to Naaliyah’s apartment. Then the two quarter-mile blocks in the rain to Baxter beside the unlit framing of the strip-mall-in-progress with plastic sheeting blowing and dripping and the cars of students and nurses and carpools and second-shift parents splashing past. Then passing again beneath the lintel of Camelot, the staircase with its tacked runner of worn carpet, the dust-furred fire extinguisher in the hallway, the wildly veined plaster of the stairwell, the naked bulb far above festooned with cobwebs.
2
Twelve days after arriving in Anchorage he bought a sleeve of daffodils and rode a taxi to the Heavenly Gates Perpetual Care Necropolis fourteen or so miles north of town on the Glenn Highway toward Palmer. A new kind of cemetery, the ad in the phone book said. A dust-to-dust project. Environmentally friendly. No metal vaults, no embalming fluids, plenty of open spaces.
The clouds were so thin that the sky was a searing, painful white. He kept his eyes down. Behind the twin-trailer office, a grizzled, cumulus-haired attendant with dirt under his nails smiled at Winkler and handed him a mimeographed brochure, something about the karmic importance of purchasing a tree to plant atop your loved one. Next to the attendant’s ramshackle beach chair was a Seattle Mariners beer cooler and an enormous gray Newfoundland. Winkler stooped to pet her and she doused his palm with saliva.
The directory was a booklet sheathed and clipped under a plastic cover like a junior high civics report. He found her name easily enough. Sandy Winkler. Plot 242.
The attendant had already circled it on a cartoonish map and Winkler set forth. The shadows of headstones huddled tightly against their bases as if shocked into submission. There were maybe three hundred outdoor graves, scattered across the hillside, and a small columbarium built from peeled logs. Some tombs were marked with stones or crosses; others with t
otem poles, or spirit houses—waist-high sheds like elongated doghouses, cheerfully painted.
Graves were adorned with American flags or plastic wreaths or nothing at all. New saplings had been planted in the dead midpoint of several plots, aspens, spruce, a few dogwoods. From the branch of one dangled a miniature biplane fashioned from pieces of Budweiser cans, rotating slowly on its tether of monofilament.
Sandy’s was simple and clean. Her headstone was granite and offered her name and the years of her life. It was clear from the placement in a high corner of the field, overlooking the gates and office, the small white-and-red taxi waiting for him below, and the highway, and receding hills beyond that, cleaving back all the way into the Eagle River Valley, that whoever had picked this plot had picked a fair one and Sandy would have been pleased.
Winkler stood over the grave for several minutes. No tears came and his thoughts were surprisingly empty and mundane. Swallows swung to and fro, feasting on gnats.
When he thought of cancer he saw a black throat; he saw ink soaking through a napkin; rot, eating a tree from the inside out. He wanted to ask: Was it hard? Was Grace with you? He wanted to say: I close my eyes and try to see you but it has been too long—the feel of your body and the look of your face is gone. I remember you had an isosceles triangle of freckles on your cheek. I remember you used to wear bulky sweaters to the bank and that your lips moved while you read. I remember how in bed you’d press the soles of your feet against my calves, and I remember the sickening sound of the door closing when you left my apartment on Wednesday nights. But when I close my eyes I see only reds and blues, the undersides of my eyelids.