At the last, Otto reconsiders. Maybe everybody does. The only benefit of aging is getting smarter about yourself. But the smarter you get, the more you question your past. On this day he wakes with a flurry of questions. A host of them. A chorus. (There ought to be a better word for it, he thinks. A hallelujah. Yes — he has a hallelujah of questions.) He lies on his back looking up at the blue light glazing the ceiling of his bedroom. Out of the blue, he thinks. And then: Is anything ever really out of the blue?
He narrows his eyes so that the light in the room wobbles, darkens. Blue bird. Blue blood. Blue eyes. Blue sea. Through the window, though, the world is black and white. Hard stillness of the bare treetops. Milk-white weight of the sky. The temperature has fallen. He thinks of the lake near the parsonage where he grew up, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. Winters there froze your eyelashes and sent spores of cold feathering into your lungs after each breath. Otto recalls the hiss of an ice skate blade cutting across the surface of that frozen lake, the chill like a bruise at the back of his neck where his coat gaped from his skin. The ache of warming up again after a long dark day in the worst weather.
God, yes, he thinks, rolling over, setting his feet on the floor. That warming up—how it burned.
He sits on the edge of the bed until the world orients itself for him, then maneuvers himself into some clothes, takes the stairs slow. In the kitchen, the calendar over the coffee pot tells him it’s January the twenty-eighth. There’s a big, red X over the day’s box. Yes, today, he thinks. It’s today. He has a tendency to lose track of the days now that there’s nothing structuring them, nothing keeping one from weeping into the next. The effect of this seepage of time is actually counterintuitive, though: it’s speed. “Today is January the twenty-eighth,” he says out loud, the pitch of disbelief in his voice. He wants to hear himself say it so that it registers, else in an hour he’ll be surprised again. He counts the remaining days of this month — onetwothreefour — in a single breath, flips the page. Picture of a blue glacier, slug of electric-blue water, flourish of some kind of arctic wildflower like a little river of white stars against the white snow. It was his little granddaughter, Anders’s youngest girl, seven years old, who sent him this calendar back at Christmas. Saskia is her name. She chose the calendar for her grandfather herself, her father reported. It’s twelve months of photos of wild Alaska.
“Why Alaska?” Otto had asked over the phone, and the girl had just giggled.
“Why Alaska, Sas?” he repeated.
The long pause of her thinking. “Because, Pop,” she said. “Because why not?”
“Yes, why not?” he’d said. “That’s a good reason.”
How he’d felt the pins-and-needles beneath his skin all the rest of that day. Why not? Why not? Why not? His granddaughter had jarred something loose in him. Had he forgotten that question? He thought he had. Somewhere in the swallow of the last few years, he had forgotten the why not.
Now, he waits at the counter while the coffee drips. He fries himself a single egg, which he lays carefully on a piece of dry toast, yellow eye up. He eats sitting at the table by the window, looking at the stretch of the property he bought after he left his marriage and came out here alone to this island—twelve years ago, though it feels like half that, or one quarter. In his head he is still new to this place, still figuring it out. In his head he is not eighty-six, but sixty. And he’d like to be even younger—forty, maybe, or even twenty-five. He’d like back that sweep of still-straw-colored hair on his head, that thirty-two-inch waist, that hum in his center that might be called desire. He’d like to start again and again and again.
For a second, he can almost feel it, too. He cuts into his egg, and it is as creamy as Easter morning on his tongue. He downs a swig of his coffee, and it is strong and black and wakes him up.
This is another thing about aging, though: that live-wire feeling never lasts long anymore. Once his plate is clean, he cannot conjure the drive to get up. His legs are leaden. His chest is heavy. So he sits and looks out the window.
It strikes him that it’s not just him — nothing is awake to the point of desire in January. There’s comfort in that. At least this morning, there’s a companionable silence coming from the woods. The pines and cedars that border his yard are quieted, all tipped with frost and the strict winter light. The bare deciduous skeletons of the alders and the birches and the maples stand rigidly still. And far off, like a shingle on the horizon, the sea is a solid strip of gray.
“What do you do out there all day, Dad?” his daughter asked all those years ago when he first moved out here on his own. He’d heard the soup of worry and resentment in her voice. He’d heard all her unspoken reservations about his age, the distance, his solitude. How could he confess that he liked to sit at the window and stare out? That this particular inactivity could keep him for hours, for whole mornings some days? It would have confirmed all her doubts.
“I’m fine, you know. I’m not the old man you think I am.”
“I don’t think that.” She was too quick on return; he’d hit the right fear.
“There’s plenty to keep busy with here. I won’t get bored.”
“I’m not worried about bored.”
“I won’t get lonely.”
Silence.
“I promise you. And, anyhow, loneliness is cathartic.”
One of the old islanders had told him that the phone company had run the cables under the sea to get them out here, and though he was dubious, he had imagined his words like slim fish swimming through the deep-water lines to her on the mainland, silver, peaceful, true.
But the other truth was that she hadn’t been entirely wrong to worry. He’d come to the island under a freeze of darkness. He’d just left his marriage and home, his teaching job. He was reconsidering it all, but also sinking. How had he not known before that loneliness could turn virus? That it could slow your thoughts in the same way cold slows the movement of water until that water becomes ice. He hadn’t before thought of ice and darkness as belonging together. Ice is bright, white, beautiful. But that vision was ignorant. In the months after the divorce, when he moved out here to the island, he understood that at the bottom of everything is absence. Absence of heat. Absence of light. Absence of desire. Absence of love. His father, had he lived that long, would have looked at him with shame and said that what he needed was God — that he’d turned away from God, and that was the absence he felt. Better to be absent from the body and at home with the Lord. But there’s no way to truly absent yourself from your own body. Or, rather, no way to absent yourself from the absences you feel in your body. Loneliness like a bruise that bleeds from the soft tissues of the gut to the surface of the skin and goes cold there. Apathy like a swelling weight in every limb. Head a frozen cloud. Silence growing like ice in the cave of his mouth. And at the pit of him, darkness, deep and galactic cold.
On some nights he stood at the same window where he stands now, unmoving, watching night fall. First the dark line of the sea bled into the lip of the sky, and then it traveled up and up, until the whole expanse — all he could see beyond the glass in front of his nose — was a liquid blue-black.
It’s Chaos, he’d think. Nyx and Hemera, battling again. Darkness as the result of a celestial violence. And, later, when dawn ripped the same sky head to tail with a slice of gray light, he would reconsider: But light is violence, too.
What a lot of sentiment, he thinks now. What a lot of poetic bullshit. He’s still prone to it, even now. He can’t help himself.
He hears his father’s voice at the back of his head: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the darkness of this world.
Otto shakes his head. Enough. He has to get up, do something, fill this day. He gets into his coat and hat and makes his way out to the car. It takes several minutes to warm the engine enough for the clouds on the windows to evaporate, and when he gets behind the wheel, his breath is visible. “Ha,” he says, normal volume at first, watching the word take the shape of a puff. Then, “HA!” Big plume. He waves it away.
On the road into town, he passes fields and bogs and the manicured geometries of people’s fenced-in yards. The frost has flattened the grass, turned it waxy-brown. A fawn-colored rabbit manifests suddenly from what a second before was ordinary ground and leaps ten-feet in front of the car. Otto swerves, swears, goes on.
In the sheep pasture near the firehouse, the animals stand in a cluster looking dumbly at the road, all their black faces following the car as it approaches and moves off.
In the hay field beyond that, the wheels of alfalfa spun in the summer have been blanketed for the season in white plastic. They’re giant marshmallows against the cream of sky, surreal and glittering a sheen of frost.
In town, Otto pulls into a spot in front of the grocery store. He needs—what? He sits in the car, willing his mind to move a little faster, but nothing comes to him. He should have written it down.
In the store, he walks the short aisles looking, hoping whatever it was he meant to buy will call to him when he sees it. Beans? Lettuce? Oranges? Wine? Yes — always wine. He puts a bottle of red and a bottle of white into his cart. Also a bag of onions and a bag of potatoes, a sack of bread, a jar of imported lingonberry jam — very expensive, but worth it — and a paper-wrapped bundle of fish fillets. He’s hungriest for these things his mother made—plain boiled vegetables, pickles, fish, good bread. He doesn’t taste as sharply as he once did, but it’s more than that — it’s comfort. Or maybe just retreat. Aging is time moving swiftly forward and backward at once. Chaos, never truly ordered. He is a fish in a bowl, swimming round and round and thinking every pass is new.
He has a memory of his ex-wife eating his mother’s pickled fish one Christmas when they were newly married—Ilse with her over-sensitive tongue and her superior gag reflex. Her face contorted at the first bite. Her cheeks flushed. When his mother turned away, she’d taken his glass of scotch and drained it to the ice cubes, drowning the briny taste.
At the time, Otto had laughed. Later, when he was looking for them, he saw it as a sign of their mis-match, his people never really her people. Now he thinks middle age overcomplicated everything for him. If he could wish back one aspect of youth, it would be the simplicity with which he received the world as a younger man. It was all still glittering then. All worth laughing at or swallowing or fucking. All of it. He’d like to fill with desire that way again—any desire—even if only for a moment.
At the checkout, he asks, “What day is this?”
The girl behind the counter is the big, dark-haired daughter of the store’s owner. Otto has been on-island long enough both to know this and to remember her as a little child. She’s probably almost twenty now, this girl, this woman. She frowns at him. “The twenty-eighth,” she says.
“Right,” Otto says.
“You okay?” She eyes him. He remembers her with black pigtails, cherubic cheeks. Today she wears her hair short and has colored it blue.
Interesting choice, Otto thinks. “Interesting choice,” he says aloud.
The woman frowns. “You okay? You alone here, or someone’s with you?”
“I mean your hair. I’m fine.”
She looks at him. “Okay,” she says, dismissive, and hands him his receipt.
As he leaves, he turns her question over in his mind You okay? No verb. Or okay the verb. Okay as a form of to be. A state of being, neither active nor passive. Existing. You okay out here alone? You existing?
He thinks of his daughter. She worries about this. How’s his safety? His sanity? His heart? She is a flurry of anxieties. Are you okay out there, Dad? Are you still okay to be left alone? When will you reconsider your living situation? That’s how she always puts it— his situation — as if he is an armchair, misplaced to the wrong corner of the room. To the wrong house.
“This situation,” he says as he backs the car out of its spot and pulls again onto the road. From the Latin ‘sitauatio.’ Meaning placement. Meaning location. He thinks: I am a fish in a bowl. Glassy bubbles rise from his mouth, bump against the windshield.
He makes a turn through downtown. The shops all have the closed-up look of the off-season. No tourists come out here to the island in the winter, and he’s grateful for the quiet of their absence. For the absence of the quiet. For the shuttering. Hibernation. He turns by the school, where the lights are on behind the windows. What day is it? January, the twenty-eighth. MondayTuesdayWednesday. People are at their weekday tasks. Is this Monday? He thinks so. The clock on the dash says eleven-fifty-eight. Morning spilling into afternoon. He looks up — sky like snow. Morning splitting open the middle of the day with its soft gray light. It moves and he is static, floating between here and there. He is in situ. He is in situation normal all fucked up. This makes him grin as he winds around a wide bend in the road. Dun-colored hillside. Sky meeting grass meeting mud meeting road. One turn after the next. Chorus of hillsides, singing him forward toward the sea, the sea, the sea. On the island, every movement is always toward the sea.
And then there it is, that sea — dark bottle green and matte, the usual glitter roughed out with the motion of the wind. Scrubbed with winter, the waves granulated with the churning of their salt.
His father’s voice again: And He overthrew all those cities, and all the inhabitants of those cities, and what grew on the ground.
He thinks, Pillars of salt. Pillars of salt. Look backward too long, and you’ll cry yourself a pillar of salt.
He swings the car into the beach lot, brakes more abruptly than he intends. He feels winded suddenly. His parking job is terrible, lopsided. His limbs feel jangled. Jangly. Jittering. God.
He reclines the driver’s seat. He needs just a minute’s rest.
Sometimes, when the weather is bearable, he gets out and walks this beach with bare feet, like a boy again. He fills his coat pockets with shells and fragments of rubbed glass and whorled brown whelk shells to send in envelopes to his granddaughter.
Sometimes, sitting here at the edge of this cold water, he remembers a warmer beach across the world. Years ago. A tiny town on the Mediterranean. A sea the color of a clear glass jar. They took a bus, he and Ilse and the children. (The children were still children then.) They stopped at a beachside bakery and bought bottles of soda and a loaf of meringue studded with pistachios. Pistache, the sign in the bakery said. Like mustache, Otto remembers saying, and his little daughter laughed. They took their lunch to the beach and lay on a blanket in the sand. The children played at the water’s edge. He took in the blue sky — cerulean, he remembers thinking. Such an odd word. Full of pomp. Full of beautiful sound — cerulean blue. Like an echo chamber. He could taste the words. He could taste the air, so full of salt. Ilse’s mouth tasted like salt when he kissed her, and when he pulled away, he felt jangled, loose-jointed. Jolted. That was desire, he thinks now—desire for more of that thick blue sky, more of his wife’s body against his own. More days exactly like this one. Or that one, rather, he thinks. He opens his eyes, sees this white sky. He’s getting muddled. The usual divisions of time are washing out. And it’s infuriating, really. It’s infuriating! Where he loses time, he loses reality. He drifts. He lets the fragments of his memories sift and reassemble. He uses his imagination to fill their gaps. And where his imagination diverges from reality, there is inevitable betrayal.
He closes his eyes again.
And then, out of the blue: You’ve betrayed me. His wife’s voice this time. No—his ex-wife’s voice. Ilse’s voice.
How did he tell her he was leaving? He can’t remember — not in detail.
It wasn’t an impulse — that much is true, even if it might have appeared differently to Ilse.
Out of the blue, she’d said when he told her. Why would you spring this on me out of the blue?
It’s a funny phrase, Otto has always thought — out of the blue. He assumed for years that it referred to falling—catastrophe or surprise dropping down on you, plummeting from the blue width of the sky like a bird. A buzzard arrived to pick your bones clean; or maybe a dove, holy and full of the Pentecostal flames of change. And there appeared to them tongues of fire, cloven, and they alighted on their heads. But now it makes much more sense to him to think of the blue as a deep night, an abyss, an absence. Chaos, far down and cold and too dark to see into. And then out of this — suddenly — certainty! Solid and brittle and flashing. Burning and cold. A splinter of ice through the gut. A tongue of ice, fated to melt.
“I don’t want to be married,” Otto had said. No matter what Ilse believe, the acknowledgement had been a long time coming.
This was October. This was twelve years ago. He was seventy-four. The leaves had just begun to flame out and drop. He had taken Ilse to lunch at a café downtown. He’d looked at her across the table, and could barely eat his food. She told a story about finding the neighbor’s cat under the car when she’d gone to start it that morning. What if she’d not noticed it? What if she’d just pulled out? She had her fork raised over her plate as she spoke — suspended — and he kept willing her in his mind to set it down. Set it down. He couldn’t tell her there, in public. They paid the check and left.
Afterward, he drove her to the waterfront. He’d do it there. The sky was high and white that day — just like this one. The water was a sheet of glare. He couldn’t look out the windshield at it without squinting. He rolled down the windows just enough to let the cool inside.
“I don’t want to be married anymore,” he said, and it was done, just like that. Hallelujah.
“I don’t want to be married anymore.” Is that how he said it? Or was it the harder, the more particular, “I don’t want to be married to you anymore”? He doesn’t remember.
On the way back home that day, after he told her, he had needed to pull to the side of the road so she could be sick. Her whole undigested lunch pooled on the gravel shoulder of the road. She wretched and wretched again, and Otto got out and walked around the car and tried to hold back her hair, but Ilse slammed her elbow into his chest. “Don’t touch me,” she had said. “You do this to me after a whole lifetime? You do not touch me.” She’d wiped her mouth on her sleeve and got back in the car.
How did he say it?
I’ve been asleep, and I want to wake up. I’m waking up.
No. How did he say it?
I desire something else. I desire desire. Something else out there is desire.
No.
I loved you. I did. I love you.
What would it matter, really, to remember? The moment of the split is not the divorce, just as the moment of union is not the marriage.
What does it matter if you meant to live without breaking things? If you meant to step gently? What conflicting impulses are these — gentleness and desire. They can’t live in one body peacefully. They never coexist well.
What has lasted is the image of Ilse as she looked that afternoon in October, sitting beside him in the car, her red hair fallen forward over her face, her hands over her mouth.
Out of the blue, she said, and it took Otto years to understand that what she was really asking him was How could you do this to me?
Out of the blue, she kept saying, but all he could hear was the pump of his own blood in his chest, thunderous, like water running again under ice. Like he’d been holding his breath for far too long. Like every suture of flesh holding his ribs together was splitting apart. And he could breathe deeply again.
Now, in the car, he is cold, tired. He could almost sleep. Clouds pass in the sky behind his eyelids. He imagines himself as a little boy crossing the yard behind the parsonage, passing the brick building of the church, running the length of the hay field beyond that. Running, running, heart in his throat, heat of exertion burning in his chest. Where’s he going? He tries to see it in his memory. Brown, wet grass. Winter grass. White clumps of melting snow at the base of each tree. And up ahead, a silver slash in the landscape—the lake. He’s running to the lake.
Dad! he hears.
He reaches the lake’s edge. His breath is a cloud in front of his face. His cheeks are hot. He presses his boot gently on the plate of ice lipping the lake. Bubbles. A visible flush of water rising. The melt seeping into the softening ice.
Dad! he hears again.
And then he can’t hold back the impulse to smash it. He stomps. A crack.
Dad?
Freezing water fills his boot.
In the now, Otto turns toward the window and opens his eyes. His daughter is standing on the other side of the glass, her face a welt of worry.
After that, there’s no more slipping. Sylvie has come, as she said she would. Red X on the calendar. Today’s the day. She’s angry at him for leaving the house when he knew she was coming. “Didn’t you remember I was coming?” she says. He worried her, being gone when she arrived at the house. She had to drive all over the island looking for him.
“It’s not such a bad place to take a drive,” he says.
“Dad,” she says. “Please don’t make this day harder.”
She makes him get into her car at the beach, says she’ll retrieve his car later. “Or Anders will. I’ve convinced him to come with me today. I thought you’d like us both with you.”
Otto sighs as he fastens his seatbelt. Both of his children, come for him. It shouldn’t feel like a betrayal.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t be driving anymore, anyhow.” She looks over her shoulder, backs out of her spot in the beach lot. “I thought you understood that it’s not safe for you anymore. You promised.”
“How could I get groceries otherwise?” As soon as he says it, he remembers the bag in the trunk of his car, the fish in its package. So be it. Let the car stink to high heaven. Let his son deal with that bit of inconvenience when he comes back for the car. Let this day be a little difficult for the two of them.
At the house, his son is waiting. There’s a suitcase and a cardboard box near the front door. “Dad,” he says. His voice cracks.
“You packed my books?” Otto asks. He looks at the box, tries to imagine what his son would believe he might need. How could he get it right?
“Whatever we’ve missed, we can come back for later. There won’t be a lot of space in your new room, but if you miss something, we’ll bring it to you. You just have to tell us,” Sylvie says. She’s all efficiency, whisking through the front room, checking that the lamps are off. Disappearing into the kitchen, where he can hear her clattering the dishes from the drying rack in the sink to the cupboards. She is her mother’s daughter in so many ways, responsible to the end. Responsibility as a way to fake control over the uncontrollable. Where he was desire, Ilse was always control. Or, rather, control was her desire, and his was desire itself. A conflict from the very start, though they couldn’t see it at the beginning. At the beginning, they seemed to complement each other, to balance. Sky and sea, they thought they were. And that wasn’t wrong.
Sylvie bustles out, her face set, her purse slung over her shoulder. “Ready,” she says to Anders, not to him.
“I don’t want this, you know,” Otto says. “I know that doesn’t change it, but I need to tell you. I don’t want this.”
His children say nothing.
For a moment, they all stand still, looking at one another. The light in the room is stale, flat, headed toward dusk.
Chaos, he thinks.
Sylvie crosses the room and draws the curtains over the big window. A sheet of shadow falls across the floor.
What would Ilse say if she were here? Ilse, all reason and brusque practicality. We’ve aged. We’re on the other side now, and that’s all there is to it.
“Where’s your mother?” Otto asks.
“Christ,” Anders says. “Let’s get him to the car.”
Sylvie drives. Anders sits beside him in the back, looking pummeled. There are silver-gray wallows below his eyes.
“You need to sleep,” Otto says, and pats his son’s knee.
“I’m okay, Dad.” Anders gives him a half-smile.
At the ferry, they just make the cut, pulling on last, just as the neon-vested attendant waves the line closed. There’s a thump as the blocks are set behind the back wheels of the car.
“You want to go up?” Sylvie asks. “I could use coffee. Or something. I feel weary.”
“I should’ve brought a flask,” Anders says.
“I wish you had.” She looks back in the rearview mirror, and Otto catches her eyes. Exhausted look of apology, duty.
“I can’t be in this car,” Otto says.
They get out. Anders helps him into his coat, keeps a hand on his back as he takes the narrow metal stairs one step at a time up to the passenger deck. It smells of cinnamon rolls, bleach, old coffee. Sylvie says she’ll get everyone a cup and find them.
“You want a booth or a seat?” Anders asks, but Otto is already making his way toward the doors outside, and his son follows him, pushes open the swinging door to the wind just ahead of Otto.
The cold nearly knocks him over. Gust like a wallop. His son holds his arm.
They stand at the rail looking out on the water. From here it’s black, opaque. The boat churns a froth that collides with the waves in a violent spray. Far off, the water isn’t still, but moving. It’s gathering its breath, drawing up and releasing, pleating and purling, rising in one heave and then rushing away from itself.
Otto thinks, I’m disassembling. I’m falling apart. And then, No. A snag in that doubt—lucidity, reason. He is entirely intact. He’s standing on a ferry deck beside his son. There’s wind in his face. The sky is just going dark, as it does every evening. In another twelve hours, the day will break again, send its runners of light down from the heavens, re-root itself once more to the earth. Light from light. This is just time passing. This is just the usual chorus of night retelling the same story. Nothing’s lost for good.
He hears Ilse’s voice again, steady, sturdy, certain as always. Everything passes, doesn’t it? she says. You reconsider what’s important. You find other things to do and love. You change. You keep going. That’s life.
Yes, he understands. That’s it exactly. That’s the whole of it. You keep going.
You keep going. You keep going. You keep going.