Lydia Davis - Break It Down

The suitcases were out in the early sunlight before the door of the house, the taxi I had hired was bumping over the dirt road toward me, and I was really on the point of leaving, when I thought I might have been too hasty. It would be wrong to go without saying anything to the young man who had been my friend, whose name I did not even know. I paid off the taxi driver and told him to come at the same hour the following day. He gave me a doubtful look and drove back down the road. The dust swirled up behind him and settled. I carried my suitcases inside and sat down. After I had spent some time wondering how to find my friend, I realized that of course I had been foolish, that I had pointlessly committed myself to one more day in these hostile surroundings, that I would not be able to find him. The directors would be annoyed when I did not arrive at the office, they would worry about me and make an attempt to reach me, and would be completely at a loss when they did not succeed. As the morning advanced I became more and more restless and angry with myself, and felt that I had made a terrible mistake. It was small comfort to know that on the following day everything would go forward as planned, and that in the end it would seem as though this day had never passed at all.

During the long, hot afternoon, small birds fluttered in the thorny brush and a sweet smell rose from the earth. The sky was without clouds and the sun cast black shadows over the ground. I sat in my business suit by the wall of the house and was not touched by the beauty of the land. My thoughts were in the city, and my imprisonment in the country chafed me. At supper time there was nothing to eat, but I was not willing to walk to the village. I lay awake cold and hungry for hours before falling asleep.

I awoke before sunrise. I was so hungry that I felt I had stones in my stomach and I looked forward to eating some breakfast at the train station. Everything outside my window was black. Gusts of wind began moving the leaves as the sky became white behind the black bushes. Color slowly came into the leaves. In the forest and closer to the house bird songs rose and fell on all sides. I listened very intently to them. When the rays of sunlight reached the bushes I went outside and sat by the house. When at last the taxi came, I felt so peaceful that I could not bring myself to leave. After some angry words, the driver went away.

Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, I sat in my business suit beside the house, as I had sat the day before, but I was no longer impatient or eager to be elsewhere. I was absorbed in watching what passed before me — birds disappearing into the bushes, bugs crawling around stones — as though I were invisible, as though I were watching it all in my own absence. Or, being where I should not be, where no one expected me to be, I was a mere shadow of myself, lagging behind for an instant, caught in the light; soon the strap would tighten and I would be gone, flying in pursuit of myself: for the moment, I was at liberty.

When evening came I did not know I was hungry. Lightheaded with contentment, I continued to sit still, waiting. Driven inside by the cold and the darkness, I lay down and had savage dreams.

The next morning, I saw a figure at the far edge of the nearest field, walking very slowly across. My eyes felt as if a long emptiness had been filled. Without knowing it, I had been waiting for my friend. But as I watched him, his hesitation began to seem unnatural and then it frightened me: he weaved back and forth over the furrows, put his nose up as though sniffing the air like a spaniel, and did not seem to know where he was going. I started to meet him and as I drew closer I saw that his forehead was wrapped in bandages and that the skin of his face was an awful color of gray. When I came up to him he was bewildered and stared at me as though I were a stranger. I took him by the arm and helped him over the ground. When we reached the house he pushed me aside and lay down on my bed. He was trembling with exhaustion. He had lost so much flesh that his cheeks were like pits and his hands were claws. He had such fever in his eyes that I thought wildly of going to the village for a doctor. But after his breath had returned to him he began speaking quite tranquilly. He explained something at great length while I sat uncomprehending by the bed and listened. He made several motions with his arms and finally I realized he had been in a hunting accident. During all the weeks that I had been reproaching him so bitterly, he had been lying in a hospital somewhere.

He continued to talk on and on, and I found it hard to concentrate on what he said. I became restless and impatient. After a while I could not bear it any longer. I got up and paced stiffly back and forth in the room. At last he stopped speaking and pointed to one corner of the room, under the window. I did not understand, because there was nothing there but the window. Then I saw that he was trying to point to the drawing board, which had been dismantled, and that he wanted to see my blueprint. I unpacked it and gave it to him. Still he was unsatisfied. I found a pencil in my pocket and gave it to him too. He began drawing on the blueprint. After a short time he had covered the entire paper, out to its edges, with complicated forms. Standing over him and staring, at last I recognized a tower and what might have been a doorway among the tangle of lines. When he had filled the page, I gave him more sheets of paper, and he continued to work. His hand hardly paused, and what he drew had the complexity of something conceived and worked over during many solitary days. When he was too tired to move the pencil any longer, he fell asleep. I left him there in the early evening and went to the village for food.

Returning across the fields to my house, I looked at the red landscape and felt that it was deeply familiar to me, as though it had been mine long before I found it. The idea of leaving it seemed to make no sense at all. Within a few days my rage and disappointment had ebbed away, and now, as in the beginning, each thing I looked at seemed only a shell or a husk that would fall away and reveal a perfect fruit. Though I was tired, my mind raced forward: I cleared a patch of land by the house and put up a stable there; I led black-and-white cows into it, and nervous hens ran underfoot; I planted a line of cypress trees on the edge of my property, and it hid my neighbors’ house; I pulled down the ruined walls and with the same stones raised my own manor, and when it was finished, I looked upon a spectacle that would excite the envy of everyone who saw it. My dream would be realized as it was first meant to be.

I might have been delirious. It was not likely that things would end that way. But as I stumbled over the field, sinking deep into a furrow with one step and rising to a crest with the next, I was too happy to suspect that at any moment my frustrations and disappointments, like a cloud of locusts, would darken the sky and descend on me again. The evening was serene, the light smooth and soft, the earth paralyzed, and I, far below, the only moving creature.

He was so quiet, so small and thin, that he was hardly there. The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they did not know. Or where he came from, or if he would leave.

They could not guess where he slept at night, though they searched for a depression on the couch or a disorder among the towels. He left no smell behind him.

He did not bleed, he did not cry, he did not sweat. He was dry. Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun.

They hardly saw him: if they entered a room, he was gone like a shadow, sliding around the door frame, slipping over the sill. A breath was all they ever heard from him, and even then they could not be sure it hadn’t been a small breeze passing over the gravel outside.