Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 18
And then Levi rushes over to break us apart. He’s moving fast, and then he’s down at our feet. We all crouch down. All six hands are on him, trying to flip him over but pulling him opposite directions. Then he’s over, face up. His eyes are filmed over and his face, without the girding of his permanent smile, flattens and pools.
I used to think of emergencies as these character-galvanizing events, these moments when life does a casting call and shows a person for who they truly are. The timid and mousy become commanding heroes, barking instructions, and the brash in everyday life shrink into impotence and hysteria. So once the situation becomes plain—that Levi is in very bad shape, and that an ambulance will have a hell of time getting out here in time, meaning we have to drive—I watch as I’m moved, as if by the impatient hands of a director, into the role of the stunned, incoherent bystander, whose every move is an impediment and liability. I can’t take my eyes off of Levi, who is in and out of consciousness on the floor. I feel like the whole problem is my perception, and if I could just bring Levi into better focus—make some sense of his moaning, reassemble his sliding features back into their familiar formation of gentle, pleased bemusement, all would be solved.
Lucinda and Dee are speaking in short, efficient barks to one another. Dee grabs my shoulder and pushes me back.
“Dad, Dad! Does your car have gas?”
I tell him yes, and I can hear, in my voice, a scary sluggishness as I’m now on Levi time, the slow-down of catastrophe. Dee shakes me, pulls me up, and the two of us lift and halfway drag Levi to the car. The sun is Indian-summer bright, and the slight heat brings out flavors in the woods—musky animal hair, the yeast of last year’s thickening leaves, the ferment of overripe berries. The incongruent outdoors makes our carrying of Levi seem celebratory, a triumphant king paraded around by his footmen. We get to the car, and Dee morphs into an engineer, an expert in all the ways an inert body can be arranged into the tight space of a midsize sedan’s back seat. He delivers rapid fire orders, tells me where to grab Levi, the pounds of pressure I should apply to each pull.
“Sit with Levi. Keep his head up so he doesn’t choke. If he stops breathing, yell out. Got it?”
I climb in and prop myself against Levi’s listing body. He turns his head and flutters his hands toward me. The car screeches away from Chautauqua, down the steep dirt road with all the switchbacks. Lucinda sedately narrates the route while Dee pilots the car, his eyes fixed and flat in the rear view mirror.
Levi falls onto me. Each of his breaths barely strings to the next. His head is on my lap, his eyes flutter back and forward. Expressions appear—slight smiles, squints, a pop of surprise widening his eyes and mouth—then depart, erasing more of his face as they go, like a wiping hand. I put my hands on either side of him, trying to keep him still, but his head feels like it’s losing mass, emptying with each of his rough breaths, as if breathing were draining his substance rather than sustaining it. My own breath shortens and I feel the clutch of panic around my heart, something I last felt running around the city looking for Dee, sure that a pile of rags and fast food bags was his dead body. Even when it wasn’t, I slid to the ground, cutting my palms on glass and junk all around me, huffing in short shallow breaths like some dog, frantically sniffing the life out of some primo scent. I focused on the creased and warped image of a cartoon dolphin on a McDonald’s bag, the kind of bland commercial image that doesn’t admit of life or death or anything, until I was finally able to get up.
Dee hears my breathing, and so does Lucinda. Dee catches my eyes in the mirror.
“It’s okay, Dad. He’ll be fine. People can look really bad and be okay. Just stay calm. That’s your only job right now.”
The car bounces and rolls. I put my arm over Levi and hold him. Dee turns on the radio. It’s one of our songs—Levi’s and mine—that I’d been listening to on the way to Chautauqua. Levi’s voice fills the car. He sounds both melancholy and luxurious, like someone blinking tears back and smiling into a warm sun. The song is “When We Turn Away,” a lament I wrote after my breakup with Joyce.
And when we turn away
I see all the city lights
the beach we never made it to
the flowered dress I thought of buying you …
Dee begins singing, in a buttery tenor, a voice I’ve never heard before, a voice perhaps reserved for those moments when no one is listening closely. Lucinda joins in with a bright soprano with a shrill edge, a dangerous voice that soars and shears. And then I’m singing, very quietly, in a little flat drone. I’m a bad singer with terrible pitch—that’s why I’m the lyricist—and I can’t recall the last time I sang, even to myself. I don’t ever sing my own words. But it helps me breathe. Each note is making me exhale a little longer, each pause cues me to breathe in.
The road gets rougher, and we’re pitched into a series of blind turns. Dee stops singing. His forearms are so tense on the wheel that they shiver. I’m in no shape or position to offer comfort, but I want to say something.
“This is the worst part. Just this part of not knowing what’s going to happen. I think hell is waiting to know if you’re going to hell or not. The waiting’s the hell.”
“Dad, that’s about the least comforting thing you could say.” He catches my face in the mirror and shakes his head. Lucinda chuckles as if she’s just smashed her finger.
Levi blinks up at me, recognition lapping over his face and receding. His voice, even in this ragged whisper, sounds sure.
“It’s still a good line.”
THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
DAVID WALTON, Evening Out
LEIGH ALLISON WILSON, From the Bottom Up
SANDRA THOMPSON, Close-Ups
SUSAN NEVILLE, The Invention of Flight
MARY HOOD, How Far She Went
FRANÇOIS CAMOIN, Why Men Are Afraid of Women
MOLLY GILES, Rough Translations
DANIEL CURLEY, Living with Snakes
PETER MEINKE, The Piano Tuner
TONY ARDIZZONE, The Evening News
SALVATORE LA PUMA, The Boys of Bensonhurst
MELISSA PRITCHARD, Spirit Seizures
PHILIP F. DEAVER, Silent Retreats
GAIL GALLOWAY ADAMS, The Purchase of Order
CAROLE L. GLICKFELD, Useful Gifts
ANTONYA NELSON, The Expendables
NANCY ZAFRIS, The People I Know
DEBRA MONROE, The Source of Trouble
ROBERT H. ABEL, Ghost Traps
T. M. MCNALLY, Low Flying Aircraft
ALFRED DEPEW, The Melancholy of Departure
DENNIS HATHAWAY, The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket
DIANNE NELSON, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
CHRISTOPHER MCILROY, All My Relations
ALYCE MILLER, The Nature of Longing
CAROL LEE LORENZO, Nervous Dancer
C. M. MAYO, Sky over El Nido
WENDY BRENNER, Large Animals in Everyday Life
PAUL RAWLINS, No Lie Like Love
HARVEY GROSSINGER, The Quarry
HA JIN, Under the Red Flag
ANDY PLATTNER, Winter Money
FRANK SOOS, Unified Field Theory
MARY CLYDE, Survival Rates
HESTER KAPLAN, The Edge of Marriage
DARRELL SPENCER, CAUTION Men in Trees
ROBERT ANDERSON, Ice Age
BILL ROORBACH, Big Bend
DANA JOHNSON, Break Any Woman Down
GINA OCHSNER, The Necessary Grace to Fall
KELLIE WELLS, Compression Scars
ERIC SHADE, Eyesores
CATHERINE BRADY, Curled in the Bed of Love
ED ALLEN, Ate It Anyway
GARY FINCKE, Sorry I Worried You
BARBARA SUTTON, The Send-Away Girl
DAVID CROUSE, Copy Cats
RANDY F. NELSON, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
GREG DOWNS, Spit Baths
PETER LASALLE, Tell Borg
es If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism
ANNE PANNING, Super America
MARGOT SINGER, The Pale of Settlement
ANDREW PORTER, The Theory of Light and Matter
PETER SELGIN, Drowning Lessons
GEOFFREY BECKER, Black Elvis
LORI OSTLUND, The Bigness of the World
LINDA LEGARDE GROVER, The Dance Boots
JESSICA TREADWAY, Please Come Back To Me
AMINA GAUTIER, At-Risk
MELINDA MOUSTAKIS, Bear Down, Bear North
E. J. LEVY, Love, in Theory
HUGH SHEEHY, The Invisibles
JACQUELIN GORMAN, The Viewing Room
TOM KEALEY, Thieves I’ve Known
KARIN LIN-GREENBERG, Faulty Predictions
MONICA MCFAWN, Bright Shards of Someplace Else