The One-Eyed Man Read online

  I drank coffee and considered what next. It wasn’t as though I were going to hold a yard sale, and in the Prius it would have taken fifteen trips to the dump to get rid of everything.

  If you’re in need of what firefighters and professional arsonists call an accelerant, you can do much worse than 127-proof whiskey—though I would advise you to take care when setting it alight. Because when I dumped my last two bottles on the pile of Sarah’s belongings and put a match to it, the flashover leapt at me like an apex predator, claiming all the hair on my right arm as well as most of my eyebrows. I fell back onto the grass, the scorched-dung smell of my own follicles wafting around me as a six-foot flame rose from the top of the pile. The lowest branches of the willow tree waved in the sudden updraft, their leaves beginning almost immediately to wilt and crisp, and a dozen startled chickadees lifted into the sky as one, chirping angrily as they arced away.

  I got to my feet and recovered my coffee mug from the grass. Here and there in the neighboring buildings figures drifted to the windows. Hands drew venetian blinds aside, and eyes stared. My neighbors had reason to rubberneck: in addition to the willow branches, which were now beginning to blacken, the power line feeding electricity to the house ran directly over the fire, and was starting to sag with the heat.

  I ran to retrieve the garden hose from the side of the house. Cranking the spigot produced only a limp arc of water that wouldn’t have been sufficient for putting out a hibachi grill. But it was all I had, so I dragged the hose to the front yard and, using my thumb to concentrate the stream, began spraying down the tree and the main fire in turns. Not surprisingly, this was of little use. One by one the willow leaves flashed into starbursts of flame, and then the twigs that held them began to catch. I managed to extinguish a few of these, but soon more tiny fires flared to life in the upper branches, above the range of the hose. These coalesced on the left side of the tree’s crown, really crackling now, growing exponentially larger, reaching for the uppermost branches and the sky beyond.

  By the time the fire engine showed up, accompanied by a police cruiser, the willow was properly ablaze, and the power line, its insulation melted away to reveal bare aluminum cords, had slumped down to rest in the burning pile of Sarah’s belongings. Across the street people gathered in groups of three and four to watch as the firefighters dragged hoses up the driveway and through the gate in the fence.

  “You,” one said, pointing a gloved finger at me. “Out of here!”

  I did as I was told, sidling past helmeted men and into the driveway, where I was met by a police officer with wraparound sunglasses and short blond hair.

  “This your place?” she asked.

  “It is,” I said.

  She put a hand on my forearm and stepped toward the road. “Come with me,” she said.

  I followed. We moved a few paces away from the fire truck so we could hear one another over the growl of the diesel engine.

  The officer turned toward me and removed her sunglasses, revealing blue-gray eyes like a sled dog’s. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” she said.

  “Just burning a few things,” I said.

  In the yard, two firefighters unleashed a torrent of water on the willow tree while several others looked on.

  “I see that,” the officer said. “What I want to know is why.”

  “I don’t need them anymore,” I said.

  To me this seemed a simple enough explanation, but the officer continued to stare. After a few moments she turned her head to watch the firefighters work. “Usually when people don’t need things anymore, they take them to the dump,” she said.

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m sorry for not thinking this through. The best explanation I can offer is I was in a sort of ecstasy.”

  She looked at me again. “An ecstasy,” she repeated, her eyebrows bunched together.

  “I’m prone to swoons of emotion, lately,” I told her.

  The tree fire succumbed quickly to the wilting force of one hundred gallons per minute, and the willow, now black as a charcoal briquette, wept streams of water onto the lawn. The firefighters withdrew from the yard, allowing the pile of Sarah’s things to continue burning unchecked.

  “By any chance, sir, was this ecstasy brought on by alcohol?” the officer asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “In fact, the moment it happened I stopped drinking.”

  “But you were drinking before.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d been very sad.”

  “You guys just going to let that burn?” the officer shouted to the firefighters.

  “There’s a live wire in there,” one of them said. “Can’t put water on it ’til the power company shows up.”

  “Perfect,” the officer said under her breath. “Sir, I need you to come with me. You’re going in my cruiser until I can figure out what to do with you.”

  As we walked toward the back of the patrol car, an electric buzzing started directly overhead, loud enough to make both me and the officer startle. Everyone on the street looked up in unison to where the transformer on the telephone pole at the end of my driveway had begun to spit and burn.

  “Hey, get out of there,” a firefighter hollered at us.

  No sooner had the words left his mouth than the transformer exploded, a blinding blue flash like the death of a star. The officer and I hit the ground, our hands over our heads, as the gawkers on the other side of the street ran for cover. Sparks cascaded down, painful as bee stings where they alighted on my forearms.

  “Goddammit!” the officer yelled. I stayed silent, reasoning that in light of the exploding transformer, nothing I could say was likely to improve my situation.

  Firefighters pulled us to our feet and led us away from the telephone pole. When she’d gathered herself the officer pushed me against the trunk of her cruiser and secured my wrists so tightly they would bear seams for hours after the cuffs came off.

  For a while after that, from the backseat of the cruiser I watched everyone else watching the fires—Sarah’s things and, now, the telephone pole, which burned like an oversized candle. Eventually two cherry pickers from the power company arrived, yellow strobes flashing. With the electricity cut the firefighters dispatched both blazes quickly, and an odd sense of anticlimax presided—no deaths, no destruction worthy of anything other than a few column inches in the local newspaper. Firefighters wound hose and onlookers went back to wherever they had come from. The tree and the half-burned pile of Sarah’s belongings sat there, sodden and charred, now about as interesting as fallen leaves or a bunch of cedar mulch.

  It seemed almost certain that I would be spending some time in jail.

  But in this matter I had a surprising advocate: Art, who showed up as if conjured and stood outside the cruiser talking with the officer. He cajoled and gesticulated. He crossed then uncrossed his arms. He listened intently, nodding his head. He pointed to me, then my property. He held his palms up and pleaded. After maybe five minutes of this, the officer, grim-faced, opened the cruiser door, pulled me out by the elbow, and spun me around to unlock the handcuffs.

  “Against my better judgment,” she said, “I’m only going to give you a summons. You’re very lucky your friend showed up when he did, or you’d be getting booked right now.”

  “How did you know?” I asked Art.

  “Always got the scanner on,” he said. “I’m a world-class nosy Nellie.”

  “You will show up to court,” the officer said to me, placing the handcuffs back on her belt. “You will be responsible for the damage to the utility pole.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, rubbing my wrists.

  “You will most definitely have other fines and fees to pay, and you will pay them.”

  “All of that. Thank you, Officer.”

  “You will never set anything on fire again. Not so much as a tea light candle.”

  “Lesson learned, for sure,” I said.

  She stared at me a moment longer, then got
into her cruiser to write up the summons.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked Art.

  “I told her,” Art said, “that you were a recent widower, that you’d pretty much gone down the rabbit hole, and that given those circumstances it behooved her to cut you some slack.”

  “I don’t need any special favors,” I said.

  Art laughed and clapped me on the back. “Broheim,” he said, “if anyone in the history of the world ever needed special favors, it’s you.”

  “Things are different now,” I said.

  Art ignored this. “What a fantastic mess, K.,” he said, grinning at the scene in the yard. “Truly glorious. I mean seriously, man, what the fuck is this about?”

  “The most amazing thing happened,” I told him.

  • • •

  Later I set out for the public library, to learn everything I could about everything I could. Even in my sudden rapture, of course, I understood that no person could take in the entirety of human knowledge—but all the same, I intended to try. Every waking moment not spent at work or on the mundanities of existence, I read. I ignored mail, phone calls, the increasingly concerned overtures of friends. Like a competitive eater dispatching a mound of hot dogs, I devoured biographies, histories, science texts, whole sets of encyclopedias. I traversed the condensed Oxford English Dictionary in three days, all of Thomas Jefferson’s writings in two, the important Greek texts in four. I felt the sloughing of my ignorance as a physical thing—a burden lifted, like a morbidly obese person shedding pounds steadily through sweat and privation—and yet understood that I still knew nothing. There was so much more. A whole literal universe. The library was so large, and yet so small.

  • • •

  When I called Peggy the next month to say I was flying back home for a visit, she responded in typically gruff fashion. I’d been in her daughter’s life for two decades, and she’d come to treat me the same way she treated her children, Sarah included, which is to say with a mixture of affection and impatience—emphasis on the impatience.

  “What possible reason could you have to come visit, K.?”

  “I want to talk.”

  “You were just here two months ago for the funeral,” Peggy said. “Besides, we’re talking now.”

  “I’d rather tell you this in person.”

  “I’m going to be honest with you, hon,” Peggy said. “This seems sort of rash and crazy and like maybe you’re not dealing well with everything.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “Dealing well. With everything.”

  Peggy sighed. “I’ve been trying to kill myself with cigarettes for forty years but still managed to outlive my daughter, K.,” she said. “I’m drinking too much, not sleeping at all, and sometimes I’m so sad I want to rip my eyeballs out. Other than that, I’m doing great.”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “You didn’t outlive Sarah. Not at all.”

  Peggy was the sort of woman who avoided entering public buildings because to do so would interfere with her smoking habit. She picked me up after the short flight, but I had to make my way outside baggage claim to find her at the curb, Winston Light smoldering between her fingers on the steering wheel. We drove along the throughways and side streets of my youth, past the high school Sarah and I both graduated from, the McDonald’s where we both worked (badly in need of an update, its arches faded from golden to a washed-out yellow), and the cemetery where she was now buried. Winter’s grip on New England, ever tenacious, had not quite yet loosened, and the gutters and parking lots were lined with crusts of dirty snow. By the time we got to Peggy’s house I smelled like I’d smoked a pack of cigarettes myself, and Peggy was already threatening to turn the car around and take me back to the airport.

  I managed to make it inside, though, where Peggy poured us both a Rumford Martini, a cocktail peculiar to the place of my upbringing in the same way the blue-footed booby is peculiar to the Galápagos Islands. Equal parts coffee brandy and milk, with ice optional, the Rumford Martini was also known as Fat Ass in a Glass, which fact Peggy tacitly acknowledged by using skim milk instead of whole.

  We sat opposite one another at the kitchen table. Between us, directly beneath the five-bulb combo ceiling fan/light fixture, rested a large glass ashtray with which you could have killed someone in any of half a dozen different ways. The ashtray was empty, and as clean as if it had just been purchased. Peggy never let butts sit in any of the dozen trays around the house. Burning cigarettes had a clean, pleasant scent, she claimed, while butts just festered and stunk up the place.

  To my nose, burning cigarettes didn’t smell any better than old ones. But if you were smart, you did not argue with Peggy about such things. About most things, in fact. As was being demonstrated now.

  “You’re like those little assholes who come to my door every three months with their backpacks and their name tags,” she said through a scrim of smoke. “How someone who’s only nineteen years old can be ‘Elder’ anything is beyond me. And never mind Jesus preaching to the frigging Aztecs. Give me a break.”

  “How do you know so much about it?” I asked.

  “Sometimes I let them in,” she said. “Gets slow around here in the winter.”

  “But there’s nothing in what I’m saying that you have to take on faith, Peggy,” I said. “It’s all been proven. That’s the difference.”

  “What you’re saying,” Peggy said, “makes even less sense than Jesus preaching to the Aztecs.”

  “Just because your mind experiences time linearly doesn’t mean time is linear.”

  Peggy lit a new cigarette with the butt of her old one. She stubbed the butt out in the ashtray, picked the ashtray up, emptied it in the garbage can, rinsed it under the tap, dried it with a hand towel, and set it back on the table. By the time she was finished, the new cigarette between her lips had accumulated an inch of delicate gray barrel, which she dispatched into the ashtray with one deft tap.

  “That cigarette,” Peggy said, hooking a thumb toward the garbage can, “is gone. I smoked it to the filter, and now it’s in the trash. Soon it will be at the dump, where it will rest with the coat hangers and dirty diapers and shopping bags for all eternity.”

  I shook my head. “It’s just not true,” I said.

  Peggy pointed at me with the index and ring fingers of her cigarette hand. “Let me tell you something about Einstein,” she said. “He knew he was full of shit.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She took a long drag, exhaling smoke as she talked. “He said it’s possible to describe everything scientifically, but that there wouldn’t be any point. You could think of a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure, but why would you, when you can just listen to it instead? In other words, K., how our minds experience things is the important part.”

  I sat there a moment, staring, trying to excavate a response.

  “You’re not the only one with a library card, kid,” Peggy said. She tapped her cigarette in the ashtray and gazed at the darkness beyond the kitchen window.

  We were quiet for several moments. Then Peggy turned her eyes away from the night and looked at me in a way she never really had before. “My daughter is dead,” she said. “What you’re doing is hurtful and stupid and will only make things worse.”

  “You’re wrong, Peggy,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Why should I expect you to listen now? You never have before. Neither of you ever did.”

  We sat there in silence. I lifted my glass, took a sip, and made a show of smacking my lips. “Good Rumford,” I said. “Been awhile.”

  “Has it?” Peggy asked. “Or have you always been drinking one, since before you were born and after you died, across all space and time?”

  That was pretty much all Peggy and I had to talk about, at that point. I cut my visit short by a day.

  • • •

  The implications of relativity were also the wellspring of my troubles with Ali
ce, Tony’s wife—and by extension Tony, and really everyone I knew, now that I’m on the subject.

  After I got back from the trip to Peggy’s I called Alice and asked her to join me for coffee. We met at the shop near my house and made small talk while we ordered, then went outside to a little courtyard scattered with wrought-iron chairs and tables. Once we’d sat down, Alice’s face grew solemn. She took off her sunglasses and put her hand over mine on the table.

  “How are you doing?” she asked, a strained, sympathetic smile on her face.

  “I’m doing great,” I told her.

  “You don’t have to be stoic on my account, K.,” she said. “Sarah was my friend, and I miss her, but I’m here for you.”

  “Really,” I said, “I’m fine, Allie. That’s why I asked to meet, actually.”

  So I told Alice about that afternoon in the backyard, about Einstein and Besso and all the reading I’d done since, and I invited her to share the comfort in knowing how time and the universe actually functioned. At a certain point Alice started to cry, and I was glad because it seemed like she understood. When I finished talking she gathered her clutch and sunglasses, hugged me, said to take care of myself, and left me smiling in the bright morning sunlight.

  Tony called that afternoon.

  “Buddy,” he said, “what the fuck?”

  “What the fuck, what?”

  “Einstein. Space-time. Alice is ready to have you committed. Or at least send you to one of those grief camps.”

  “Grief camps?”

  “You know. Go off into the woods for a weekend. Talk about your loss. Release some butterflies to symbolize something or other.”

  “I don’t need that, Tony.”

  “Nobody needs that.”

  “No, I mean I’m fine,” I said. “Better than fine.”

  “That’s what Alice tells me. She also tells me you seem crazed. Maybe manic.”

  “I thought she understood.”

  “She’s too polite to say you upset her. So I will. I know it’s hard, man, and I wish I could do something to help. But this is nuts.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it.”