Page 35 - WTP Vol.IX #3

problem: as tall as he is—not overly so, but tall enough—he has harbored the conviction of his being short in stature. Hence it comes now as something
of a curious revelation (any fresh news in this?) that he stands, in reality, a full head taller than his wife, this wife of two decades, and that he is looking down on her as she speaks these words to him. Among the most dreaded of his symptoms has been a spatial illusion, one that functions in something like forward and reverse. At times, he imagines that he is suddenly being distended, grown tall as a giraffe; more often, though, the earth beneath his feet opens up and he takes a terrible plunge. The endless fall will suddenly halt, and he is back in a blink, secure in his footing. Of these two symptoms, it’s the latter he dreads more.
Right now, his shoes are solidly planted on the gravel, although his legs feel heavy. Leaden. He can barely lift his arms.
“I’ve informed him,” she says, “that you might be go- ing into the hospital tonight.”
To this, Matt says nothing. It’s at this exact moment that Kevin steps from the kitchen and starts up to- ward them.
As Kevin grows nearer, Matt turns to Meg and says, “We’ll be a few minutes.”
He nods his wife away, awaiting his son.
Kevin is fifteen. Taller than Matt already, he is likely not to suffer in the course of his life from the er- roneous belief that he is shorter than he is. Slender now, if big-boned, with a frame yet to grow into, he still has that awkwardness that comes with speedy growth—over the past ten months or so, he has shot up many inches, and groans when they go anywhere from knees that give him torment: the classic grow- ing pains. Facially, he takes after Meg’s father Wilfred, dead some six years now: wide-spaced eyes and strongly molded cheek bones, his eyes a hazel color that can harden with displeasure but equally, or more
so, soften into a tenderness displaying care and vul- nerability. His son is less of an athlete than Matt has been in his lifetime, but he’s a game kid, eager.
When Kevin reaches his father, his eyes are neither angry nor demonstrative of tenderness. They’re wary, guarded—the look, Matt thinks, of a wild frightened animal trapped in confusion. The boy’s expression manifests his state of alarm: his mother’s news has drawn taut the fibers in his neck and set his braced teeth on edge. If emotions had a trace scent, it occurs to Matt to think, the air right around them would bear a musty, feral odor.
Kevin is a creature awaiting a blow.
Matt’s heart floods: floods for all that has happened just today, this very day. For all that has passed since that sight of burned grass coming down the hill toward Rydal. For all the news, the symptoms, the upsets, the consequences. For all the ways in which Kevin’s life has been wrenched.
“Hey. Go get the ball,” Matt suggests to his son. “Let’s play some soccer.” Till this very moment, he has had no thought of how to handle the situation.
~
Just those few hours ago—so hard to believe al- ready—he had sat in his car in the college parking lot, his whole body wracked, his every breath a struggle, his shirtsleeve rolled. The sharp blade poised.
It had all grown to be just too much for him. How could this have been?
He’d sat there in the car, pondering the maples that grew along the margin, noting how the early autumn light dappled things: shivers of sunlight slipping and sliding across the windshield and dashboard. Where had it occurred, the slippage that had brought him so suddenly to this, this ravaged condition, his married life in wreckage, his psyche upended by the startle
of it all? When did I become so fragile—no, so brittle? He could not account for it. And yet, of course, he could—his memory too keen. For every detail. Vo- racious in retention, of every injury, every outrage. Every fresh revelation.
For all that, he’d believed that he was going to get through it, find some branch above the current he could grab onto, hold onto long enough while the flood swept away. But then he’d gone and done this
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