By the time I got to college, Maureen was just a story I told. The thing about breaking your neck is it humbles you in a hurry. It’s hard staying arrogant when you have a halo brace screwed into your skull, when a nurse comes each morning to empty your catheter bag, when your father pulls your lip down so he can brush the bottom teeth. By the time I realized that I might have missed a real catch in Maureen, I didn’t want to interfere with my favorite memory.
That Monday morning I decided such hesitation was cowardice. I was going to find her. All I knew was her Christian name and her teenage face, but I had a plan.
It was October and only one cloud stretched across the morning sky, a fish-skeleton floating toward the western horizon. I drove to the supermarket in my new Toyota Land Cruiser and bought a bag of Hershey’s Kisses as good-luck charms. Returning to my car I saw a record store in the same strip mall, so I went in and bought London Calling on compact disk. Joe Strummer’s guitar still sounded good and I thumped the steering wheel with the palms of my hands as I got on Route 202 and headed west. After crossing the Delaware I stopped in New Hope and tracked down Thomas Sweet’s. I paid for my ice cream with cash this time and ate it while staring through the windows of the ubiquitous antiques shops. Antiques still bored me, I was relieved to note.
North Wales was as I remembered it, except that the hardware store and the ninety-nine-cent store were gone, replaced by a Sam’s Club. I drove out of town to where the farmland began, hoping to see the exact spot where I had first met Maureen on her bicycle. It took me five minutes to realize there was no chance I would find it. And what if I did? What was I expecting to discover there, a bronze marker commemorating the meeting?
I drove back into town and stopped at the barbershop. Inside the barber sat alone on his swivel chair, reading the newspaper. He stood up when I entered and gestured for me to sit. I wished that I needed a cut, the barber could have used the business, but I’d had one a few days before.
“I’m just looking for the high school,” I told him. “You know where the high school is?”
“Which high school you want? Kulpsville?”
“Isn’t this North Wales?”
“Sure is,” said the barber. “But there’s no high school here. Nearest one’s in Kulpsville. Just hit the 202 north a couple miles. You’ll see the clock tower from the road.”
When I got to Kulpsville High the day had gotten warm enough for me to leave my coat in the car. The football field lay adjacent to the parking lot, the cheerleaders were practicing, and I thought, hey, cheerleaders. I walked over to watch. The way I walk these days, most people can’t tell I ever had a bad accident. My strides are shorter than they used to be, and my back gets stiff when I’m tired, forcing me to shuffle along like an old man, but for the most part I make my way without much trouble.
A few lanky boys were sprawled in the bleachers, drinking Yoo-Hoo, flicking the bottle caps with their thumbs and catching them. They watched me approach.
“How’s it going?” I asked, sitting down in the front row.
The boy sitting closest to me wore sunglasses and a beaded necklace and had bleached-blond hair. He wasn’t planning on saying anything but I stared at him until he mumbled, “What’s up?”
I realized that I was being an asshole, that I didn’t belong here, that I had been a cool kid once but that didn’t matter at all to the new cool kids. So I waved good-bye to the boys and could feel them watching me, wondering what that had been about. I walked onto the football field. The cheerleaders, pha lanxed on the cinder track, stared at me suspiciously. The smell of cut grass, the painted yard markers, the cleat marks in the turf—it had been a long time since I stood on a grid-iron. The scoreboard still recorded last week’s game: Marauders 17, Visitors 0. The local boys played good defense.
Inside the school building was the old familiar smell: sweating adolescents, ammonia, drying paint, coffee, chalk dust, and chewing gum. The entry hall served as a large trophy room, glass cases filled with tarnished bowls and statuettes, plaques on the walls commemorating athletes now dead or middle-aged. Carved pumpkins grinned at me from the window ledges and the doorways were trimmed with orange-and-black crepe paper. I walked down carpeted corridors and up narrow staircases, the wooden banisters burnished by thousands of children’s palms. The walls on the second floor were festooned with old photographs: team pictures, class pictures, ornately framed portraits of dead teachers. There were hooks for hanging book bags, red exit signs, ancient water fountains.
At last I found the library, a cramped room featuring a short row of bookshelves and lead-glass windows that hadn’t been washed in years. Students pretending to read squirmed in plastic chairs that lined the walls. The librarian sat at her desk, inserting new magazines into plastic covers. She was young and clean-looking, her black bangs cut straight across her forehead like the hairstyle of Chinese girls you see in old pictures. She smiled up at me.
“Could you tell me where to find the old yearbooks?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, standing up. “Alumnus?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you graduate from Kulpsville? I was a ’90.”
I wanted to tell her that I knew what alumnus meant, that her one-word question had confused me as it might have confused many intelligent men, but I just said, “No, I’m looking for a friend.”
She nodded as if people constantly came to her looking for old friends, as if that were her real job and the Dewey decimal system and snot-nosed kids were just a cover. I followed her to the back of the library where she unlocked a door and led me into a dusty inventory room. Cardboard boxes sat on metal shelves. She knelt down beside a stack of yearbooks.
“The Kulpsville Marauder, 1959 through 1998. What year did your friend graduate?”
“Around 1987 or 1988, I guess.”
She pulled out four yearbooks and handed them to me. “He’ll probably be in one of these, then. What’s his last name?”
“Her last name. I don’t know. That’s what I’m looking for.”
The librarian laughed. “The two of you aren’t very close, I take it.”
“We were for a while,” I said.
She told me to take as much time as I needed and then left me alone. I wondered if the Mahlus High librarian would be as friendly to Maureen if she came looking for me. I placed the four yearbooks on one of the metal shelves and started paging through the 1987 edition. Whenever possible I work standing up—sitting puts too much pressure on my spine. Even if I wanted to I could no longer drive all the way to California.
There was no way of knowing if Maureen had attended Kulpsville, but it was the best chance I had. I glanced at each senior portrait quickly, all the eager white faces staring up at me, the boys in jackets and ties, the girls in dresses with their hair all done up. None of them were Maureen, so I turned to the 1988 edition and started on the new batch of seniors. Adams, Allison, Appleton, Bardovi, Besser, Bischof—there she was. Maureen Black. She smiled with her mouth closed to hide her chipped teeth. Her freckles were invisible in the black-and-white photograph and she looked more elegant than I had remembered. Below her name was a concise summary of her high school career: Soccer (captain) 1,2,3,4. Cross-country 1,2,3,4. French Club 3,4. Literary Guild 3,4. Photo Club 4. Casino Club (founder and president) 1,2,3,4. . . . Minx and Lan we’re finally gone! Peace to FXO and SB! JJ, you’re guilty, fess up . . . MB: ‘if a double-decker bus crashes into us . . . ’ Thank you Coach Smith for everything . . . Mrs. Wilder, you were right, blue skies ahead! Au revoir, Pennsylvania . . .
I know I’m a fool but I wanted to see myself in her coded farewell. I wanted to see LZ: where are you, big man? Rescue me! But there was no reference to me, as there had been no reference to her in the Mahlus High yearbook. We had come together for an afternoon and that was it.
I replaced the books and returned to the librarian. She smiled up at me again and touched her Chinese bangs. “Did you find your friend?”
“Yeah, thanks. Do you have a phone book handy?”
“Sure.” She opened one of her desk drawers and pulled out a thin White Pages. “Who was she, anyway?”
“Maureen Black.”
The librarian hesitated and then handed me the phone book, as if she were giving me something very valuable and she wasn’t sure that I was trustworthy. “Maureen Black? Class of ’88?”
“Yeah, you know her?”
She stared at me for a second before speaking. “That girl died years ago.”
I turned to the B pages and started looking for Black. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“I knew Maureen Black,” she said softly. “I played soccer with her. She was murdered by her boyfriend in Las Vegas.”
I glanced around and saw that all of the students in the library were watching us. They gripped their pens and listened to our conversation. Above the librarian’s desk hung a poster of a muscle-bound cartoon superhero wearing a purple uniform emblazoned with lightning bolts. He held one finger to his lips. Shhh!!! read the legend below him. Everyone in the room was hushed, waiting.
“That’s not true.”
“I’m sorry,” said the librarian. “It was big news around here. You can look it up in the microfiche if you’d like. We have The Montgomery County Sun for the past—”
I dropped the phone book on her desk and the noise echoed through the room. “You’re lying.”
The librarian stood up, walked around her desk, touched my elbow. “Let’s talk outside for a minute.”
“Maureen Black is alive.”
She shook her head. “Her boyfriend strangled her and then shot himself. It was in all the papers. Her mom lives over in North Wales. Honestly, it’s not the kind of thing I’d make up.”
“Take it back.”
The librarian’s mood was changing. Her natural inclination to sympathy was giving way to something closer to fear. She took a step away from me and I knew that my size was beginning to register on her. The anger was racing through my body, carried in the blood, coiling in the muscles. I could feel the old power return. I wanted to tear the school building down, to rest my hands against the support walls and push, keep pushing until everything collapsed, until all of us were crushed beneath the falling masonry.
“Take it back,” I said to the librarian.
She held up her hands as if I were pointing a gun at her. “Sir? Please, I’m not sure what you want.”
“She’s alive,” I said quietly. “She lives in Las Vegas. She’s the best blackjack dealer in the city.”
“Okay.”
“Say it.”
“Sir—”
“Say it or I’ll break your fucking arm.”
There were tears in the librarian’s eyes. She searched the room to see if any of the students were going to help her. One of them was thinking about it, a thick-necked kid in a denim jacket, but when I looked at him he slid back in his chair and lowered his eyes.
“She’s alive,” said the librarian, her voice trembling. “She lives in Las Vegas.”
“And she’s never coming back to Pennsylvania. You’ll never see her again.”
The librarian started to repeat that, too, but I left her standing there, surrounded by her books and magazines and gawking students.
Walking out of the school I kept expecting a security guard to lay hands on me. I would have thrown him through a wall. Nobody approached me. I pushed open the front doors, went back to my car and drove home, the unopened bag of Kisses in the passenger seat.
Maureen was a fighter. She would have kicked him and bit his wrist and clawed at his face. She must have known what was happening. There must have been a moment when she saw her lover’s face change, when he ceased to be her lover and all recognition faded from his eyes, when all the complexities burned away and he wanted nothing except to end her. He must have slammed her against the wall, his hands squeezing her throat tighter and tighter, until finally she must have quit, even Maureen must have quit, as the piss streamed down her legs and her lips turned blue and her feet stopped kicking.
I still can’t get that picture out of my head. When I come home from work I turn on the TV and watch sports highlights and drink beer and I cannot get that picture out of my head. It makes me hate my own mind, this sick mind, conjuring an image I have never seen and haunting me with it. I knew the living girl, her chipped-tooth smile, her jinni’s laugh, but I can only imagine her now in agony, stripped of dignity—the gruesome last pages of a story I should have stopped reading in the middle. If I hadn’t gone back to North Wales, Maureen would still be alive; she would have survived in my ignorance and prospered.
I didn’t tell my father the story of my ride with Maureen in the Eldorado until I was lying in a hospital bed with a broken neck. Dad knew Dr. Byrnes and he would have been furious to hear that I stole the man’s car for a day. But after the accident, when dad took a sabbatical from work so that he could be with me, we talked about all sorts of things that never would have come up otherwise. I learned about the girlfriends he had before mom; and what it was like growing up Polish in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn; and about the best man at my parents’ wedding, who was killed in Vietnam, and whom I was named after.
So I told my father about taking the car from Tommy, and dad shook his head but then he laughed. “I always wanted to drive that car.”
I told him the whole story, and when I got to the part about the refrigerator lying in the middle of the road, and how I dodged it at the last second and then warned the guy driving behind me, my father asked, “And then you went back for it?”
“What?”
“You went back and moved the refrigerator out of the way?”
I had been telling the story for five years and nobody had ever asked me that.
“Dad,” I said, “it was a huge refrigerator.”
He looked at me in the hospital bed, my shrunken body, the halo brace screwed into my skull, and then he looked out the window. “You could have moved it.”
I could have. I wonder how many other drivers swerved around it without stopping, congratulating themselves on their fine reflexes. I wonder if that evening a young man sped over the dark country road, toward a girlfriend he would never kiss, toward a collision he would never see coming.
DE COMPOSITION
Winter, and the bombs are falling. Safe here, safe for now, twelve feet below the dead grass, twelve feet of concrete, lead and topsoil between the explosions and me. My food and water supplies were to last for eighteen months, according to earlier estimates, but those calculations are no longer valid. I am constantly thirsty.
When news of the initial hostilities came over my radio, the announcer’s voice lowered by the occasion’s gravity (I imagined him alone in the studio, a heroic figure bravely manning the microphone), I gathered the final requisites from my house and proceeded to the backyard toolshed, where my shelter’s hatch is concealed from the eyes of strangers. All the neighbors knew that my hideaway existed; covert excavation proved impossible. They mocked my midnight burrowings, of course, but good-naturedly, coming out onto their porches to watch my labors. Three years of spare time produced this bunker, and all the work my own: the wiring, the ventilation, the closed-cycle plumbing unit. Great entertainment for the neighbors. I was the local lunatic, but harmless, and they took some pride in my madness. Save room for me, they would shout, grinning down from the hatchway as I toiled below, pouring concrete or laying pipe. In the final months, as overseas disturbances flared into battles, as the rhetoric escalated from warnings to ultimatums to declarations, as the possibility of peaceful resolution began to fade, the neighbors pretended they were not concerned, smiled at my hysteria, attempted to convince me that my fears were imagined. Don’t forget the can opener, they would shout, and laugh. I did not forget the can opener. I sit here, twelve feet below their ashes, and pray they died painlessly.
Every morning I wake to limited prospects. My bunker is gray concrete. The walls are
separated by five strides. Early in the war I followed a rigorous exercise schedule, a brutal series of push-ups, sit-ups, and deep knee bends designed to maintain fighting form in case I had to defend my shelter from intruders and, equally important, to combat the adverse physical effects of voluntary captivity. But several months ago I decided that the increased caloric demands of such rigorous exertion, and the consequent depletion of my larder, posed a more immediate threat than sloth. And I no longer fear the attentions of survivors.
Time has become a game for me. The objective is night and the comfort of sleep; the obstacles are the hours. Each day is divided into tightly scheduled periods—any deviation from routine results in mandatory punishment: a spoonful less protein supplement, for example, or, if the violation was particularly egregious, confiscation of my weekly chocolate bar.
The early morning is devoted to an extensive revie1w of my facility’s equipment. The air filters, water tank, generator, and closed-cycle plumbing must be constantly inspected, cleaned, and, when the situation warrants, repaired. Out of necessity I have become an expert repairman, master of all my machines.
Electricity is a luxury. A single fluorescent bulb lights my space, but only when required. I eat in darkness, I meditate in darkness, I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work at the computer, as now, the monitor provides sufficient illumination for typing. The machine drains a great deal of energy. Only one hour of operation per day is permitted, and that is the favorite hour. All other hours are servants, scrubbing and scouring in preparation for the coming time, the sixty minutes of blue light. A portion of the good hour is reserved for writing, transcribing the lines that have already been scratched out on paper with a pencil, or, more frequently now, composed in my mind. Due to a procurement error, only one pencil was interred with me; the yellow wood has been whittled down to a matchstick. But as is so often the case, deprivation inspires greater efficiency. I recite the words I plan to type, measuring the syntax, securing whole passages in memory’s vault.