Ice, El Amor, and the Geometry of Guilt
In the belly-sweltering, no AC-room where I teach Contemporary
American Literature here in Tallahassee, I tell my students
anecdotes from my life to illustrate key concepts, such as the Fear
Narrative Archetype and how I was attacked in Iowa by a four inch
fruit bat that I swear wanted to shred me with its vicious horror movie
teeth, or with the War Narrative and loss of innocence, how I
walked in on Kristin Winters in the bathroom when I was six and realized,
to my horror, that girls peed, that they were human beings, that I
couldn't ignore them forever. Here, though, is the story I never tell them.
We were out, my brother and I, in late November, walking the frozen
riverside that led to the actual falls beside the community bank in
Menomonee
Falls, Wisconsin, marveling how the ice encased the branches like
silver moccasins. We played an imaginary game of baseball, running
between
the trees, throwing baseballs of snow at unseen runners, laughing
as the snowballs hit trees, shook a clatter of ice to the ground in a sound
not
unlike the cheering of a crowd. We smacked home runs, we stole
second
and third, we took bows at the plate. Go deep-high fly to center my brother
yelled, and I did, right out into the heart of river where the ice was
clearest. I jumped for the ball and snatched it in gloved hands, but the ice
spiderwebbed beneath me and I went down, straight in, pile-driven
feet-first like a person who's fallen from a plane and hit ground standing
up.
Here's what I remember: light, unbearable light, estranged from any
body, any source, then a heavy wind and sounds that might've been
someone
yelling, their words misshapen in my ears, the noise dour and pale as
the coldest midnight the arctic has ever known. Light receded
unaccountably
into blue, then black, then nothing, as I went under in the last loud
rupture of bright. In winter, sap withdraws into the upper reaches of
maples
to keep from freezing - this is what I'd tell my students. I'd try to
contextualize it in terms they knew, like cold as the water Leonardo
DiCaprio
warned about in the movie TITANIC, or colder than the damp tomb-
cellar in Poe's Amontillado story (which we'd read). I can see their reaction
now, how Frank yawns and stares at the sororiety brunette, who
ignores
him and thinks of sleep, how she'd like to fall into a bed and take her
hangover
head-on. Only Shannon, the skinny girl with hair the color of a milk-
weed pod, would understand. She'd been in car wreck, face-planted into
the windshield and broke her arm, her collarbone, her nose and lips,
a week after her wreck, all she could say was the darkness drew back on
itself,
like an animal licking a wound - I wasn't even there. I'd nod and tell the
rest
of the story, how my brother inched on his belly across the ice, screaming
for help (which didn't come), and by slow degrees, got his hand to mine
which emerged from the water like a beacon, a neon blue flag, the dark
tongue
of a burgundy lily, and he pulled, yanked, tugged me loose from the
jaws of ice until we were somehow on the riverbank, panting there on the
snow,
death avoided like bills accruing in a mailbox you refuse to open.
I saved your life, my brother said, and in those words, I heard pride,
eagerness,
those unwavering flames that had been snuffed after he'd been beaten
up by the high school kids, then caught for stealing a week later. Here's
the
part I have never told. The water was four feet deep. I could've stood
and had my shoulders out of the water. I could've grabbed the tendrils of
that
willow that arched so gracefully over the water, pulled myself out.
Of course, I didn't tell him there on the snow as the afternoon droned on
like
a sleepy wasp in the air. And so I burned alone then, now, with this
truth for which there is no balm. But this is the promise I make to my
brother
and his wounded pride, who needed so desperately for this to happen.
I could've stood, I could've saved myself, but no, Aron; I would've wormed
to the bottom on my belly into the coldest imaginable ooze and waited
for your saving hand to summon me back, like the stiff fingers of Lazarus
reaching for the sky, that fragrant weight of forgiveness we both need.
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