On entering a tunnel and facing his reflection in the window, Kierk realizes he cannot remember the last time he shaved—has it been three months, four? He reaches down in the darkness and fiddles with the zipper of his bulging backpack, then forces the notebook between a tangle of boxers, socks, books, and crumpled paper. Everything he owns is either in this backpack or a member of the flock of books en route to New York in heavy cardboard boxes that he had packed early yesterday evening back on the cold concrete floor of the storage unit he had been renting in San Diego.
The bus shakes and something, some arrangement of perception—the familiar angles of looking out a window beyond the frame of a seat—had unlocked something inside him, a shuddering click that is felt as déjà vu. What about? His earlier dream? No. A memory. Another bus ride in New England, also in the summer heat, and then he is suddenly on the way to see the body, the corpse left when the grandmother on his father’s side had died. He had been eleven and Kierk’s mother, all hands bundled up in urgency, had rushed about stern-faced trying not to let Kierk see exactly how much of an inconvenience this all was. Then the two clamored, all in silent black and under the eyes of the other riders, into another hot and sticky seat, and then the shaking and grinding bus headed northward to Maine.
In his memory the body was a monolith at the front of a carpeted room, a wooden grin with horns of flowers. Kierk had trailed behind the dark figure of his mother, who with her hair up looked like a bust of Hypatia, sad and regal, moving among plebeians. Approaching the coffin the first thing that struck him, as only an eleven-year-old just coming to realize himself can be struck, was that they had put makeup on her. Kierk had often watched his own mother stand in the brightly lit bathroom and, as she called it, “get dolled up.” Kierk associated makeup with the unpleasant meeting of a towering and obtrusive figure—men who were always unnerved by this child, this child who was disturbingly articulate in his sarcasm, his barbed comments launched from behind the unassailable parapets his mother’s unconditional love provided. The men, white-collar workers pudgy from middle management, but good men in the end, couldn’t believe their luck to have met a single woman this vivacious and intelligently charming, and still beautiful (kept thin by mania: cleaning, working two jobs, taking care of three dogs, four cats, and responsible for providing Kierk with an intellectually stimulating environment and thus always taking it upon herself to learn a great deal about the Library of Alexandria, or read aloud every book in The Chronicles of Narnia series, or watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos with TV dinners on their laps). Under Kierk’s assault they began to dread those family dinners and the learned helplessness induced by Kierk’s subtle verbal dissection. But the biggest issue came from his mother and Kierk combined, because even when she purposefully dumbed herself down for the men in private she couldn’t maintain it when Kierk was around—she wouldn’t limit herself in his presence. So during those dinners Kierk and she would end up discussing some esoteric subject that Kierk at that age was interested in—Greek myths, proper Latin names for dinosaurs, Project Orion—and it would become apparent to the men that she would leave them because she was too good for them (she wouldn’t have, not a single one), so they would decide, inevitably, to leave her first. Or perhaps the men could sense that it wasn’t them in particular that she wanted, just someone, and although it is something to be sufficient, it is another thing entirely to be necessary. At the time of the funeral she was between such suitors, and when she stared down at this woman who had given birth to the man she had born a son to she felt something that to Kierk at that age would have been so complex and unknowable it may as well have been a sentence picked at random from the Principia Mathematica.
Standing there at the lower end of the coffin, his small hand on the smooth wood, the body before him seemed a fallen giant, and Kierk had begun to comprehend the personal momentousness that this should hold for him. Every decision, from moving to America when she was sixteen by taking a leap of faith away from Scotland (lost to history is that she was nearly gang-raped while waiting in a crowd at Ellis Island), to getting a job as a nurse during the war, where she had met Kierk’s grandfather at a hospital-sanctioned dance. He had been a patient at the ward where she had worked with returning veterans, but she had not been his nurse, indeed had never seen him, but he had seen her, watched her from his bed pass across the doorway in the corridor, just a glimpse really, and he had shown up to the dance with a bandage over his left eye and wrapped around the back of
