“It’s seven,” says Irv, handing her the coffee and flopping down into the chair by the window. “I realize you got here first and this is your call, but for my two cents, I say we first visit Frank Allman, learn what’s what and take stock, and then we’ll see if the police have a boat on the lake. I figure they must. We’re out of our jurisdiction, but these guys won’t mind if we take a peek. I bought Marcus a blueberry muffin. Does he like blueberries?”
“American blueberries are different than Norwegian ones.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Ours are smaller and blue on the inside. Yours are bigger but aren’t blue.”
“Our blueberries aren’t blue enough for you?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell Maine.”
“It was nice of you to bring my brother your inferior muffin.”
“Like I said, it’s all going to work out just fine.”
By nine o’clock in the morning the three young men who had been camping near Marcus had waved their goodbyes to him, packed their canoe, and left behind a patch of flattened thistles and a black char of ash. Marcus—finally alone—walks among the stones and fallen marshmallows and stands in the spot where they’d laughed last night. Hands in his pockets, he takes refuge in the absence of those same sounds.
Nearby, two black crows are tussling over the remains of a hot dog coated in dirt. The tube of meat splits into uneven pieces and each crow takes flight with its own share.
Marcus kicks through the needles and leaves at the campsite. Raucous they may have been, but the campers didn’t leave behind anything that wasn’t biodegradable. They were, ultimately, good kids.
The lake is dimpled by a breeze, as gentle as a confession. The sea birds bob with their backs warming, their feathers dry and glowing. The rain did not reach here last night. The thin mist on the lake is only the morning’s haze. It will burn off. There is a deep blue above that will soon scorch the world when the angle is right. For now, though, he breathes in the morning.
He could be done with it immediately and he knows this. Guns are good that way. In the eye, the mouth, the temple. Painless and instantaneous. It isn’t even scary, really. The brains are blown out before the sound wave of the bullet even reaches the ear. Which doesn’t matter anyway, because by then there’s no brain to process it.
The Taurus .38 revolver is in the same orange backpack he brought to America eighteen years ago; it was that and his guitar. It is a pity not to have it here too, but he left it behind in his room because he knew it would make him too melancholy and possibly rob him of the courage for what needs to be done. The sound of picking a C chord and transitioning to an A minor using the C/B note is simply too beautiful to be halted and replaced with a gun. Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” begins this way. Marcus knew he didn’t have the fortitude to move from that sound to death. The distance would be too great.
So: The stage is set. All that is required now is for the player to perform his part. It is a one-man show without an audience. What, then, is he waiting for?
A completeness. A sense of the whole. A resolution. A return to the tonic. A way to close off this life before ending it. This is what he doesn’t feel yet. There is something left undone.
Marcus would laugh at the idea if he could. How remarkable that a need for aesthetic balance can fend off death itself.
He was told once that the wavelength of a note is precisely half as long when played one octave higher. This makes music a physical presence, not only a learned convention. The mind actually rebels at sonic discord; the absence of harmony can cause actual physical pain. Could that be true for a story, too? And if for a story, what about a life?
Jeffrey’s? Lydia’s? His own?
The gun is heavy. It is beautifully made.
He is surrounded by harmony and balance and composition. It is why he has always liked it here. Remembering makes him part of that.
Karen called Lydia when they were in Montreal. Jeffrey had been dead for four hours before she had been able to dial.
Lydia was alive for two more months.
During those two months—from the distance at which she kept him—he watched her decline.
It was different from his mother’s decline. In their house, when he was a little boy, Astrid was calm and quiet and withdrawn. Her motions and activities were ritualistic and mechanical. The way she washed dishes. Washed the clothing. Corrected his homework. Marcus watched Lydia suffocate under the pressures of injustice and hopelessness around her. It was a suffocation born of history but felt in her throat. This was not his mother’s death. That was only personal. She had been in charge, despite the cancer. She had chosen to emotionally remove herself from life. For Lydia, life was being ripped away and torn out.
Sigrid—little Sigrid—had barely noticed. Sigrid hopped into her mother’s arms in the mornings and complained and demanded like little children do; she rattled off stories as she turned herself into a mannequin with clothing flying on and off—this matches, this doesn’t, where’s the one with the flowers?—as her mouth produced a flurry of ideas, each featherweight and irrelevant on its own, but together becoming evidence of a contented child living a present-minded life. Growing. Alive.
Marcus does not remember himself that way. He was older. His arm was broken and wrapped in a cast with a blue coating. He understands now that he projected the literal feelings into a metaphor and came to see his mother like a statue, as immobile as he was—the cancer a calcification working its way outward, her skin hardening into a moon-pale stone. She would occasionally ask him about his broken arm but he said only “It’s fine.”
