Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

He forces his mind back to the brown car, and the cloud that seemed to follow them. Hours and hours like this, him and her, side by side and separated only by a hand brake, wondering why life had thrown them together. In the memory they see in unison with one pair of eyes, they eat, drink, and feel the same things without knowing each other at all. The only time their attention divides is when they make love and his eyes are to the pillow and hers to the ceiling. Even then some curious and serendipitous force nudges a sperm towards an egg and the creation of a new pair of eyes begins, new shared eyes. Who knows if this is love; it might as well be, it has the ingredients.

Then they are at the Allegheny County Courthouse. Helen stands on its Venetian Bridge of Sighs, eyes closed, freckled eyelids flickering as thoughts pass behind them. On one side of the bridge, he remarks, is the courthouse: here are the free and the godly, those who pass judgement. On the other side is the jail: the imprisoned, those who have been judged. The Bridge of Sighs is a moral structure, and he, as an architect, is becoming interested in just this: the morality, the honesty of a building. And his wife opens her eyes, shakes her head, and tells him that a Bridge of Sighs is no more about morality than is a bridge between motorway service stations. She warns him gently: one should hesitate to cast aspersions. A person's morality is usually a two-way journey — it just depends which leg of it you catch them on.

He takes her hand; they are not on the same wavelength. Never; she is always a frequency above him, and as if to prove the fact he is about to begin humming out the Buddy Holly in his head when she starts quoting something from Song of Songs, chapter five. My beloved's eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of water, washed with milk —then tells him that she believes she is pregnant.

He picks her up and spins her around, conscious that this is precisely what a man must do for his wife when confronted with such news. Does he feel joy? It might as well be joy, the buzz and panic of it, and the sickly feeling that he is falling into something that has no clear bottom. Then her spinning feet smash an empty bottle left on the ground, at which she struggles free of him and bends to pick up the pieces. He crouches to help.

“Jake,” she says. “We'll call the baby Jacob, after you.”

But he disagrees, having never seen the point of fathers and sons sharing names when there are so many names to choose from, and as an alternative he suggests something else, he doesn't remember now what.

“Henry, then,” Helen says. “We'll call him Henry.”

“What if he's not a boy?”

“He is, I dreamt it.”

It is not that these surfacing memories just come. No, he casts around for them even when not exactly conscious of it, he forces himself into them and wears valleys through them. He plays games trying to connect them and establish a continuity of time. If it was their honeymoon they were newly married: this is what honeymoon means, a holiday for the newly married. He can nod in satisfaction about the clarity of this knowledge and can then move on. His wife was called Helen. If it was their honeymoon they were young, and he had completed his training, and Henry was conceived.

Here again is Helen, her bare shoulder beneath him and her hips sharp against his; she was only twenty then. They are in bed, then in the car. There is a hand brake between them; she lays her left hand on it idly and he can see the ring finger, calm and static against the rush of road.

The news on the car's transistor radio reports that a monkey has just come back alive from a space mission, and images have been captured from the spacecraft. Inside Helen's womb Henry is a solitary blinking eye. Helen says that flight is the most excellent invention and that, through photographs, it will allow the earth to see itself from outer space.

“If nothing else,” she tucks her hair behind her ear, “mankind's existence is utterly justified by this gift it will give to earth, the gift of sight, a sort of consciousness. Do you understand me?”

“No,” he contests after a pause. “Not really. But it sounds thoughtful.”

Buddy Holly is still possessing his mind, and the tin-can voices from the radio (the word monkey sounding so strange and primal in that modern car on those wide roads). There is a sense of continued but happy absurdity at the way, with all the millions of people in the world, he is now Helen's and she his.

The pilot turns the biplane to the left and the airfield comes into view. “We're going to begin our descent,” he shouts, pointing downward.

Very well, he thinks, staring again at the man's collar. The plane seems to pull back slightly and slow. Even up here, unhinged and feeling like a puppet swinging from a string, he finds the reserves to worry over the loss of that word. Leather? No, no not leather. But something like leather. The word skein comes to mind but he knows that isn't right, skein is just a word dumped in his brain from nowhere; a skein of wild swans, a skein of yarn. It is not about forgetting, it is about losing and never getting back — first this leather word and then the rest, all of them.

The moors spread ahead of them, and behind them Quail Woods is being disassembled tree by tree. One must be careful, he thinks as he turns from the man's back and strains to see the land below, not to become too attached to what is gone, and to appreciate instead what is there. He eyes the small neat grids of houses below and finds, as he always has, that these spillages of humanity are not to be scorned for their invasion on nature but are to be accepted, loved even; he names some of the streets in his head and maps the area with compass points and landmarks, his hands now clasped to his knees.

At the point at which he expects the plane to descend, the pilot suddenly turns its nose upwards to the empty blue sky. “One last dance!” he shouts. The wind rips through the cockpit as they change direction and the prison appears way down below at a tilt, as if sliding off the surface of the earth. Looking down briefly he sees, perhaps, a figure waving. Henry said he would look out for him and wave. He lifts his arm in response, less edgy now and more exhilarated by the air smashing against them and the disorientation as the plane lists and the scenery changes faster than the mind can map it.

They make a large, noisy loop. He feels sick and young, thinking abruptly of Joy in her yellow dress and blinking to find the vision gone. Joy, joy! Nakhes, as his mother would once have said when she still allowed herself some Yiddish. His mother would have loved Joy; would always have thought he made the wrong choice. He sits back and looks up, for the first time, to the sky.

As the plane slows it descends, too sharply. And with the slowing comes fear. He looks at his watch. For a moment he fails to understand what the watch hands are doing, where they are going or what for. He studies them like a child. Twenty to three, twenty to four, something like this. I have been unwell, he means to say to the pilot, as if to imply to himself: I am no longer unwell. It is impossible to accept that you will never be well again, and everything you have will be lost. A man is not programmed to think this way, he will always seek out the next corner and look around it in expectation that something, something, will be there.

He has been told not to think about it, and his son buys him a half-hour flight for his birthday so he can block it all from his mind. “What?” he says. “My birthday?” “No,” his son corrects. “Your — problems.” And he kisses him, all his plain, unscented good looks released from their misfortune for that one moment in that one simple exchange. Henry no longer has to stand on tiptoes to reach his cheek. How old is Henry, he wonders, and for that matter how old is he? When is his birthday? What year? He can't remember at all.