Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were washed down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trim line had their bark removed by the water pressure.
Sonny’s dad was still in his underwear, teeth chattering, and Sonny was washing around on his side in some icy bilge water, making noises like a jungle bird. The sun was down by this point. Backwash and wavelets twenty feet high were crisscrossing the bay, spinning house-sized chunks of glacier ice that collided against one another. Clean-peeled tree trunks like pickup sticks knitted and upended, pitching and rolling. Water was still pouring down the slopes on both sides of the bay. The smell was like they were facedown in the dirt under an upended tree. And Sonny’s dad said that that time afterward — when they’d realized that they’d survived, but still had to navigate through everything pinballing around them in the dark to get out of the bay — was worse than riding the wave itself.
A day or two later the geologists started arriving. No one believed the height of the wave at first. People thought that the devastation that high on the slopes had to have been caused by landslides. But they came around.
My wife fell asleep beside me, wrapped over me to keep me warm. We’re still on the floor and now it really is dark. We’ve got to be late in terms of picking up Donald from his play date, but if his friend’s parents called, I didn’t hear the phone.
One of my professors at St. Mary’s had this habit of finishing each class with four or five questions, none of which anyone could answer. It was a class called The Philosophy of Life. I got a C. If I took it now, I’d do even worse. I’d sit there hoping he wouldn’t see me and try not to let my mouth hang open while he fired off the questions. What makes us threaten the things we want most? What makes us so devoted to the comfort of the inadvertent? What makes us unwilling to gamble on the noncataclysmic?
Sonny’s dad was famous for a while, telling stories for magazines like Alaska Sportsman and Reader’s Digest with titles like “My Night of Terror.” I read one or two of them to Donald, which my wife didn’t like. “Do you like these stories?” he asked me that night. In the stories, Sonny’s mom never gets mentioned. Whether she was mad or dead or divorced or proud never comes up. In one he talks about having jammed a life preserver over Sonny’s head and then having forgotten about him entirely. In another he says something like, in that minute before it all happened, he’d never felt so alone. I imagine Sonny reading that a year or two later and going, Thanks, Dad. I imagine him looking at his dad later on, at times when his dad doesn’t know he’s watching, and thinking of all that his dad gave him and of all that he didn’t. I imagine him never really figuring out what came between them. I imagine years later people saying about him that that was the thing about Sonny: the kid was just like the old man.
I’m pretty sure I first encountered Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales in graduate school. I’d been poleaxed right around then by his Cosmicomics and especially Invisible Cities, and I remember buying Italian Folktales the minute I saw it, which was eloquent, given that it was the kind of hefty hardcover I assumed that only people like teachers, and not their students, could afford.
The last of the two hundred tales he’d compiled was “Jump into My Sack,” and any number of its elements stuck with me over the years. But maybe its most arresting aspect had to do with its protagonist, who starts out hyperaware of his own limitations—
“And what will a cripple like me do to earn his bread?” he wails when his father, facing famine, turns him and his eleven healthy brothers out into the countryside to try to survive there — and then feels with an equal keenness a passionately felt gratitude for the magical good fortune bestowed upon him by a fairy who appears as “the most beautiful maiden imaginable.” She not only cures his lameness but offers him two more wishes as well, which he converts to a sack that will draw in anything he names and a stick that will do whatever he wishes. He’s then able for years to provide for himself and for others with his good fortune.
“Do you think he was happy, though?” the story continues. “Of course not!”
It turns out he’s pining for his family members, whose loss his sack can’t replace (it can only retrieve their bones), and for the beautiful fairy. Waiting for her as an old man back where he first encountered her, he discovers Death instead. And her magic is even good for that. Her sack works to envelop Death and she reappears and offers our protagonist health and youth once more. And he refuses both: he says that, having seen her again, he’s content to die. He offers us, offhandedly and without explanation, that paradox: she means so much to him that he forgoes his chance to extend his time with her. She vanishes and Death reappears and takes him, “bearing his mortal remains.”
“Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay” hadn’t by any means originated as an attempt to rewrite that narrative. But I wasn’t very far into it before my protagonist’s debt to that earlier protagonist made me reread the tale. And there it all was: the notion of one’s self as already too hopelessly damaged to be fully saved by miraculous good fortune, and the sadness of all of that good fortune seized in gratitude, and yet at nearly the same moment inexplicably refused.
KATHRYN DAVIS. Body-without-Soul
IT WAS A SUBURBAN STREET, ONE BLOCK LONG, THE HOUSES MADE OF brick and built to last like the third little pig’s. Sycamore trees had been planted at regular intervals along the curb and the curbs themselves sparkled; I think the concrete was mixed with mica in it. I think the street was so new it couldn’t help but draw attention to itself.
The families living on the street came from all over, but the children had no trouble forming friendships, the boys’ based on rough-housing and ball games, the girls’ on a series of strategic moves, tireless linkings and unlinkings, the bonds double, triple, covalent like molecules. “Heads up!” the boys would yell when a car appeared, interrupting their play; the girls sat on the porch stoops, cigar boxes of trading cards and stickers in their laps, making deals. School was about to start. The darkness welled up so gradually the only way anyone could tell night had fallen was the fireflies, prickling like light on water. The parents were inside, presumably keeping an eye on their children but also drinking highballs. Fireflies like falling stars, the tree trunks narrow as the girls’ waists.
Occasionally something different occurred. One girl pasted a diadem of gold star stickers to her forehead and wandered from her stoop to get closer to where one of the boys stood bent slightly forward, his hands on his knees, waiting for another boy to hit the ball. This waiting boy was Eddie, who lived at the opposite end of the street from Mary, the girl with the diadem; their bond was exquisite, meaning it would never let go, though they were too young, really, to understand the implications. Once she fell roller-skating and skinned her knee and he stood spellbound, staring at the place on the sidewalk where he could see her blood. “I shouldn’t have let it happen,” he told her, even though he’d been at the dentist having a cavity filled at the time. When he described how much the drill hurt she gave him one of her two best trading cards, Pinkie, who she thought of as herself despite the fact that she, Mary, would never dream of wearing a hat that had to be secured with pink ribbons, not to mention the fact that she needed glasses and had mouse-brown hair and wasn’t especially pretty despite her nice brown eyes. Giving him Pinkie meant she had to break up the pair with Blue Boy, who she thought looked like him with his dark hair and soft lips and studiously downcast expression. But, then, she wasn’t sentimental like he was, either.
Bedtime, the end of summer. In the brick houses the clocks kept ticking away the time, chipping off pieces of it, some big ones piling thick and heavy under the brass weights of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway, others so small and fast even the round watchful eyeballs of the cat clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen couldn’t track their flight. The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees tossing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could break even the least sentimental human heart.
Headlights appeared; the boys scattered. The car was expensive and silver-gray and belonged to the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, a tall thin bald man with a small gray mustache who lived somewhere on the next block over with a woman everyone knew as Miss Vicks, the elementary school teacher, who also may or may not have been
