Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“I wouldn’t want to,” he said, though I knew if he’d been alone he’d have done just that. Bobby had no talent for leaving things alone.

Our last stop was the cemetery. We drove to the tract where Bobby had lived, past the low flagstone wall on which the word “Woodlawn” floated in scrolled wrought-iron letters, the final “n” broken off but its silhouette remaining, a pale shadow on the stone. We followed the serpentine street, past houses that repeated themselves in threes, and parked at the site of Bobby’s old home. The house was gone, burned almost twenty years ago and bulldozed away, but no one had built anything in its place. This subdivision was not undergoing renewal. It appeared that the residents had annexed the property without formally purchasing it: a small garden was staked out, ready for spring planting, and a swing set stood rusting among the weeds. It seemed the Morrows’ holdings had become a sort of People’s Park in the suburbs of Cleveland. The others on the block, those who still lived in the fading jerry-built ranch houses with birdbaths or plaster dwarfs on their lawns, had appropriated it. I could imagine them gathering there at dusk, their children swaying creakily on the swings as the women planted sunflower seeds and murmured over the day’s events. It was slightly criminal, an unfounded claim made by people who were not prospering but only getting by, and as such the property had passed beyond reclamation. To own this parcel of land now you would have to wrest it back from those who had learned to care for it. If you leveled their tiny works and put up a new house you would be an invader, not much different from a colonial, and the land would be tainted until your house fell down again. This suburban quarter-acre had returned to its wilder purpose, and could not be redomesticated without a fight that would leave the victor’s hands stained.

“This was it,” Bobby said. Clare looked around incredulously. She had not expected anything so ordinary, although we’d done our best to prepare her.

We got out of the car and walked onto the patch of bare ground under the singular openmouthed gaze of a red-haired boy who had been digging in the dirt with a tablespoon when we pulled up. As we walked across, Bobby said, “Here’s where the front door was. And, like, this right here would have been the living room. That was the kitchen over there.”

We stood for a moment in the phantom house, looking around. It was so utterly gone, so evaporated. Sun shone on the bare earth. Clare bent to pick up a little beige plastic man crouched with a bazooka.

“This was the den, I think,” Bobby said. “Or maybe it was over there.”

We crossed the gully that separated the property from the graveyard, jumping the trickle of brown water that ran along the bottom. Bobby looked for a moment at a stone angel balanced atop a marker, the tallest monument around. She stood canted forward, on tiptoe, her slender arms raised in an attitude more ecstatic than solemn. I don’t imagine the carver intended her look of triumphant sexuality.

“There used to be a fence here,” Bobby said in a tone of defensive pride. “Our back yard was, you know, more private than this.”

I remembered that the angel had appeared over the top of the Morrows’ fence, floating among the branches.

“Mm-hm,” Clare said. She had grown quieter since we reached Cleveland. I couldn’t tell what was on her mind.

Bobby led us straight to his family’s graves. They lay some distance from where the house had been, in a newer section of the cemetery. Rows of markers continued for some fifty feet, and beyond that we could see the line where the advancing tide of graves ended and the unbroken grass lay waiting for those who were, at that moment, still alive.

“This is it,” Bobby said. His father, mother, and brother had similar granite stones, shiny and dark gray, wet-looking, carved only with their names and dates. We stood before the graves in silence. Bobby gazed at the stones with a simple and almost impersonal respect, like a tourist visiting a shrine. By now his mourning was over and he’d fallen away from the ongoing process of his family’s demise. They had sailed off, all three of them, and left him here. After a while he said, “Sometimes I wonder if there should be, you know, some kind of message on their stones. You can’t tell anything about them, except that they were related.”

“What kind of message would you want?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just…Aw, man. I don’t know.”

I looked at Clare, who was looking at Bobby with a mingled expression of wonder and uncertainty. I think until then she had not realized he was fully, independently human, with a history of loss and great expectations. He had presented himself to her as a collection of quirks and untapped potential—she’d all but invented him. Just as the hypnotist must see his subject as a field for planting suggestions in, Clare would have seen Bobby as a project whose success or failure reflected only on her. She was the one woman he’d slept with. She selected his clothes and cut his hair. Arranged marriages might have been like this, the bride arriving so young and unformed that she appears to absorb the union into her skin, her husband’s proclivities taken on and made indistinguishable from her own. Clare, the husband, must have seen for the first time that Bobby had had a life outside her sphere. I couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or dismayed.

After a while, we left the cemetery again. It seemed there should have been more to say or do, but the dead are difficult subjects. What’s most remarkable about them is their constancy. They will be dead in just this way a thousand years from now. I was still getting used to it with my own father. The whole time he lived I had thought in terms of how we might still change in one another’s eyes. Now we could not revise ourselves. He’d taken the possibility with him into the crematorium’s fire.

We got back into the car. I touched the two silver hoops I wore in my ear, looked down at my own clothes. I was a man in cowboy boots and black jeans. I wore ten black rubber bracelets on one wrist. I could still travel, change jobs, read Turgenev. Any kind of love was possible.

“Next stop, New York City,” Bobby said from behind the wheel. If he was not quite somber, he had grown more blank—it was his old response to sorrow. His voice lost its rhythm and lilt, his face slackened. I have never seen this in anyone else. Bobby could withdraw from the surface of his skin, and when he did so you suspected that if you stuck him with a needle the point would penetrate a fraction of an inch before he cried out. In these vacant states he said and did nothing different. His speech and actions continued unimpaired. But something in him departed, the living snap went out, and he took on a slumbering quality that might have been mistaken for stupidity by someone who knew him less.

I asked if he wanted to go by the bakery to see his old boss and he said no. He said it was past time to get back on the road, as if we needed to reach New York by a particular hour. I stroked his shoulder as we pulled onto the highway. I think we both felt defeated by Cleveland, its ordinary aims and modestly rising prospects. Perhaps others have a more agreeably definitive experience when they revisit their hometowns: those who’ve escaped from industrial slums or declined from pinnacles of great wealth or happiness. Maybe they’re better able to say, “Once I was there and now I’m somewhere else.”

We were all quiet for the next hour. Clare was so withdrawn I asked her if she was feeling sick again, and she told me no in an irritated tone. Pennsylvania arrived with its long steady roll of white barns and gentle hills. We drove along in a small hothouse of sourceless gloom.