Joyce Oates - Sourland

Here is a surprise: the man’s long-legged stride is a match for me on my crutches. Despite my so-called disability I normally walk a little too fast for other people especially women in impractical footwear — it makes me smile to hear them plead laughingly Jane! For heaven’s sake wait — but Tyrell Beckmann keeps pace with me, easily. Though he doesn’t seem very coordinated — as if one of his legs were shorter than the other, or one of his knees pained him. His head bobs as he walks, like the head of a large predator bird. His forehead is creased with the intensity of his thoughts & the corners of his mouth have a downward turn except when something surprises him & he smiles a quick startled boyish smile.

Already I take pride in thinking I will make this man smile! I have the power.

As we walk, Tyrell does most of the talking. Like a man long deprived of speech he tells me how as a boy he took out books from the Barnegat library — how he loved the children’s room, & read virtually every book on the shelves. He tells me about the writers he’d read since boyhood & most admired — Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London ( The Call of the Wild ), Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick — then in high school Henry David Thoreau, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Dostoyevsky — the Dostoyevsky of Notes from the Underground & not the massive sprawling novels. As a “mystic-minded” adolescent he fell under the spell of the Upanishads & the Vedantists — the belief that the individual is one with the universe. As a young man in his twenties he read Søren Kierkegaard & Edmund Husserl & at Union Theological Seminary — where he’d enrolled with the vague intention of becoming some sort of Protestant-existentialist minister — he fell under the spell of the theologian Paul Tillich who’d once been on the faculty there & whose influence prevailed decades later.

Tillich was a Christian, he says, for whom Christianity wasn’t an encoded religion but living, vital . So too Tyrell is a Christian in principle though he finds it difficult to believe in either Jesus Christ or in God.

“‘By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.’”

These beautiful words! I wonder if they are from the Bible — the Old Testament, or the New.

I ask Tyrell do these words mean it’s what people do that matters, & not what people are , or in what state they are born ; & Tyrell squeezes my hand, awkwardly & eagerly as my fingers grip the crutch — “Yes, Jane. That is exactly what that means.”

He has called me Jane . His hand lingers on mine, as if to steady me, or himself.

By this time it’s beyond dusk — nearly nighttime. We didn’t walk to the bus stop but as if by mutual consent we made our way behind the library parking lot along a path through tall rushes & dune grass & spindly wild rose & descended to the wide hard-crusted beach where a harsh wet wind whips at our faces & clothing. Here is the Atlantic Ocean — moving walls of jagged slate-colored waves — exactly the waves painted by Winslow Homer so precisely & obsessively, farther north along the Maine shore — in these waves a ferocious wish to sweep over us, to devour us.

Tyrell sees that I am shivering. Tyrell leans close to me, his arm around my shoulders. How clumsy we are, walking together! A man, a girl, a pair of crutches.

I ask him why he’d dropped out of the seminary & he says he was in despair, badly he’d wanted to be a “man of God” — to help others — while believing neither in God nor in others — & at last he realized that his desperation was to help himself — & so he quit. Living alone then in a single room on 113th Street, New York City — he’d broken off with his family in Barnegat Sound — went for days sometimes without speaking to anyone — took night courses at Columbia — found solace in his secular courses, psychology & linguistics — did research into the “secret language of twins” — the “social construction of twinness” & the “psychic ontology of twins” — its reception in the world.

“In some primitive cultures, twins are sacred. In others, twins are demonic and must be destroyed.”

“Why is that?”

“Why? No one knows why.”

From the subject of twins Tyrell shifts to the subject of the Hebrew Bible he’d studied — “deconstructed” — in the seminary; the compendium of writings — crude, inspired, primitive, surpassingly beautiful & terrifying — of an ancient people possessed by the idea that they are the chosen of God & hence their fate is God’s fate for them & never mere accident lacking in meaning.

“Essentially there are two ontologies: the accidental & the necessary. In the one, we are free. In the other, we are fated.”

“Are we! You sound very sure of yourself.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Jane! Please.”

“But why are you telling me these things? I don’t even know you.”

“Of course you know me, Jane.”

“No!”

“And you know why I’m telling you these things, Jane.”

“Why?”

“Because we are twins, Jane.”

“Twins! Don’t be ridiculous.”

The man’s calmness frightens me. His matter-of-fact speech. Though the wind is whipping at our faces, making our eyes tear. I want to think He’s mad. This is madness.

“Twins: in our souls. You know that.”

“I don’t know any such thing.”

“Yes. You know that, Jane. It’s clearer to me than any mystic identity of oneness in the universe. Just — us. We are oneness.”

“Oneness! That’s so — ”

I want to say ridiculous, mad . Instead, my voice trails off. I’m overcome by a fit of shivering & Tyrell grips my arm at the elbow, his fingers strong through the fabric of my coat.

Oblivious of our surroundings we’ve been hiking on the winter beach — a mile? Two miles? We turn back & retrace our steps in the hard-crusted sand.

The man’s heavy footprints, my smaller footprints & the slash-like prints made by my crutches.

No one could identify us, studying these prints. No one could guess at us.

The winter beach is littered with storm debris. Python-sized strips of brine, swaths of frozen & crusted ocean froth resembling spittle, or semen. Through a tear in the cloud-mass is a pale glaring moon like a mad eye winking.

The next time he asks, I will say Yes. You may carry me.

No one can understand how we are perfect together.

My stumps, fitted into the shallows at the base of his thighs.

My pale-pink skin, the most secret skin of my stumps, so soft, a man touching this skin exclaims as if he has been scalded. Oh! My God.

How do such things happen you ask & the answer is Quickly!

Those weeks of late-winter, early spring at the Jersey shore at Barnegat. Those weeks when Tyrell Beckmann entered my life. For there was no way to prevent him.

Saying Jane you are perfect. I adore you.

Saying I was born imperfect — “damaged.” There is something wrong with my body, no one can see except me.

It was so: Tyrell inhabited his body as if at an awkward distance from it. As if he had difficulty coordinating the motions of his legs as he walked & his arms that hung stiffly at his sides. Almost you might think Here is a man in the wrong body .

Confiding in me as I lay in his arms fitted into his body like a key in a lock.

So often in those weeks Tyrell came to me at the library, once I asked him where was his wife? & he said his wife was at home & in the mildest way of taunting I asked didn’t she wonder where he was on those evenings he was with me & he said she would suppose he was at the community college & I said oh but not every night! — & not so late on those nights — & it was then he said in a voice of male smugness: “She doesn’t want to know.”