“Probably not, technically. But I’m not losing that crew. Too hard to replace.”
“So you don’t know what caused the change of heart.”
“Nothing they’re willing to share. All I have is some bureaucratic gobbledygook about new information and my options for redress. That’s a laugh.”
“They might just want to double-check. Sniff around a little, write a report, hit the town and go back with tales of drunkenness and cruelty.”
She scooped up a handful of smooth rounded pebbles and tossed them at the water. I heard two or three plunks.
“That’s an uncharacteristically optimistic thing to say,” she noted.
“Always been a fan of a half-full glass.”
Some more time went by, which Amanda filled by tossing pebbles into the bay. Eddie checked in on us, licking our faces to make sure we weren’t dead. His breath was perfumed with the dross that collected along the bay shore.
“I’ve always just done what I’m supposed to do,” said Amanda. “I bought all the bullshit about how to be a person, and all that’s ever come of it is crap. I used to have nothing and life was crap, and now I have so much, and it’s still crap. Tell me why I should keep trying to make something worthwhile out of all of this …”
“Crap?”
Amanda was a person I always had a hard time getting into focus. That was my fault, not hers. Even when she was right in front of me, or like now in profile, something about her or me made it impossible to know if I was really seeing her at all.
“I’ve been getting into Kant,” I added. “Maybe he knows.”
“Who else reads all the books the rest of us tried to avoid in college?”
“You need to meet more retired fighters. The heavyweights are a bunch of crazy existentialists. Just love
“That’s sounds more up my alley.”
“Not if you ask me. If somebody said, ‘What’s up with that chick Amanda Anselma?’ would I say, ‘Oh, you mean Ms. Abject Fatalist? Ms. Existential Despair?’ No, probably not.”
“I can’t believe it. You’re actually trying to cheer me up.”
“That’s what I do. Spread cheer wherever I go. A mission from God.”
She laughed a not entirely cynical little laugh.
“Weren’t you the one who said God had a lousy sense of humor?” she asked.
“No. I said God wanted to be a practical joker, but had trouble coming up with jokes that were actually funny.”
“Maybe only to Him.”
“Another question for Sartre.”
“Maybe he knows why God doesn’t want me to develop Jacob’s Neck.”
“With all due respect, I think the Almighty’s got other things to do. The answer to that is entirely within our ability to grasp.”
“So you think there is something going on?” she asked. “Not just rotten coincidence?”
“Rotten, yeah. Not sure about anything else.”
“Meaning you’re only partly sure, but you’re not going to talk to me about it.”
“Engineers keep half-baked hypotheses to themselves.”
“Oh, now we’re engineers. Do they read Kant?”
“Only the empiricists. In between crossword puzzles.”
“Let me know when one of those hypotheses is ready to come out of the oven.”
“Only if we get to celebrate.”
“Half-full glasses all around.”
Eddie and I escorted her back to her burned-out house. I opened the door to the Grand Prix so Eddie had a place out of the way to curl up, which he was more than happy to do.
I spent the rest of the day helping Amanda and her crew pick through the charred remains and assess what might be saved. She was expecting experts to come by the next day, which is why she wanted to clear out as much of the clutter and destruction as possible.
It looked to me like the first-floor joist system and a big part of the northwest corner were salvageable. As were all the mechanicals in the basement. I pointed that out, which I pretended cheered her up a little.
It was dusk when we made it back to Oak Point. I’d dragged my homemade Adirondacks out to the edge of the lawn facing the Little Peconic at the first hint of warming weather. It was too cool for rational people to sit outside and drink, but that’s what we did anyway, which speaks to the prevailing state of our rationality. Amanda even had a special concoction her friends in the City had stuffed into her suitcase, a customized cosmopolitan mix featuring Absolut Citron and pomegranate juice.
“What a thing to do to an innocent vodka,” I complained.
“Vodka’s never innocent, and even empiricists need to try something different once in a while.”
It wasn’t bad if chilled properly, especially after the second or third glass. And the air wasn’t as cold as it should have been, or maybe we were warmed by seasonal expectations, reflected back upon us by the iridescence of a moonlit Little Peconic Bay.
“I think I’m getting hungry,” said Amanda eventually “It’s all the pomegranate juice. Whets the appetite.”
“I’m too loopy to cook. But I bought lots of cold edibles that’re in the fridge.”
“After I wash this crud off of me.”
“Agreed.”
I went down the basement hatch and turned on the water to the outdoor shower. The faucets were already open, so the water would be warmed up by the time I stripped off my clothes. There was still a slight danger of freezing temperatures, so I was pushing the timing a little, but next to sleeping out on the uncomfortably chilly screened-in porch in early spring there was nothing like a stupidly frigid outdoor shower.
It was too dark to see the cloud of vapor, but I could feel it when I stepped into the enclosed shower stall. I stood motionless under the scorching stream for a few minutes, lost in the feeling of the water as it steamed away the day’s accretion of stress, effort and avoidance.
I kept soap and shampoo in a little cedar cabinet mounted to the wall. I think I was about to reach over to pop it open when a tiny click, like the snap of a very thin glass straw, went off somewhere deep inside my head. A shrill ring followed the click, which would have drawn more of my attention if my throat hadn’t choked on the air and my heart rate hadn’t suddenly ripped into a thudding staccato. The floor of the shower stall began rocking like a washtub caught in a ship’s wake, sloshing up and down at random forty-five degree angles. And then all the way to ninety degrees and over I went, my left shoulder absorbing most of the fall.
The phrase “my heart beat right out of my chest” ran across my mind as I felt the pounding heartbeats interrupt every shallow breath. The shower stall by now was rotating like a carnival ride, and all sense of up and down, side to side vanished. The ring in my ears was escalating into a siren. I somehow made it to my hands and knees, feeling the slippery redwood slats that formed the floor.
The world continued to turn and spin, but I stopped caring about that and concentrated on slowing my heart. I wondered, how much can it take? Can a heart actually beat itself to death? I sat on the floor and wedged myself against the wall, steadily slowing my breathing, cupping my hands over my mouth to retrieve CO2.
Then I suddenly couldn’t breathe. My throat clamped shut and the siren in my head began to crackle, and then decayed into a wet scream. A scream no one could hear because it wasn’t audible to the world. It was all inside my head.
Another voice was in there, too, questioning, is this it? Is this what we’ve all been waiting for? Is this how the end feels—hot, wet and naked, screaming silently into your hands as you wait for the final ball of incandescence to burn it all away?
I didn’t get the answers, but I was still producing questions when I heard another click, or more like a dull thud, that instantly caused everything to go black as time, as consciousness and further interrogatives flicked into oblivion.
