Forrest Gander: The Trace

Dale glanced over at Hoa. She had opened her book, her face stressed, lined around the mouth, and her lips chapped. She must have felt him looking because she raised her head, her eyes questioning. Dylan was croaking to them both. Dale caught her eyes and turned back to the road.

He wanted to ask her something to break the stillness. While he too often thought about what he was going to say before he said it, measuring out his response according to what he figured his interlocutor expected him to say, Hoa was completely unaffected and never beat around the bush. He liked the way she talked about ceramics, honestly and directly, without false modesty or pride. She figured if someone asked, they were interested. And that’s how she was herself. She didn’t ask questions just out of politeness.

“So,” he started. “Do you ever think back on mistakes you made early on? I mean after you started to work with Ray? Your first firings?”

She finished the paragraph she was reading and then dog-eared the page, putting the book on the floor between her feet.

“I don’t know,” she said, giving it thought. “You know, I’ve probably come to know myself as a ceramic artist mostly through my mistakes. So maybe they aren’t mistakes. I remember early on, I was shaping something on the wheel, and Ray told me that my strength was that I had a good sense of form. He said plenty of his students could throw. Or they had other techniques really worked out. But maybe because of my dance background or my reading, I saw things formally and that helped me. So he always encouraged that side of me instead of critiquing my coffee mug for being too heavy.”

“That first cup I bought from you was heavy. I liked the heft of it.”

“Yeah. Another student said about a thick cup I’d made that if I hit someone with it, they’d die instantly. And Ray happened to be there, and Ray handed me the cup and said, Why don’t you try it on him?”

When Hoa finished what she had to say, she didn’t ask Dale something in return. She looked out the side window. It occurred to her that people were wrong to call the desert monotonous or monochromatic. Most of it took on a lion-colored tinge, that was true, but there were variations in every outcrop — sandstone reds and basalt blues, creamy schist, and burned whites. Green shadings of candelaria, creosote, mesquite. Yellow exclamations of yucca blooms. She could look at it a long time without losing interest.

She glanced over at Dale again. His face was refocused on the road, alert behind his sunglasses. He knew she was observing him, she could tell. She caught the little tightening in his cheekbones and jaw that, over the years, she’d seen him perform innumerable times in the bathroom mirror. Pronouncing the angles of his face. She liked his face best when he wasn’t self-conscious. It was softer then, and its enthusiasms were easier to read. That was one of his great gifts, his expressive enthusiasms. From the way his body moved, graced with a ridiculous masculine confidence, to the way his mind did, empathetically, intuitively, he was as alive as anyone she had ever met. Which drew others to him. And exhausted him. She had seen him sagging with the weight of other’s needs. Students, colleagues, parents, friends. Not usually her own needs. But when their son was in the hospital, barely alive, Dale had somehow managed to carry her brokenness, staying positive for her sake, reminding her to eat, talking her down when she was losing her mind. Dale carried her the distance, for a month, until they were sure their son was going to live. Which is when he finally broke down. And by then, she was able to rise to his need.

Hoa had canceled everything, and Dale had taken an emergency leave for the rest of his semester, which was almost over anyway. They drove to Washington D.C., staying for the first week in a cheap hotel not far from the hospital. They called friends for help, for advice, for contacts. One friend, who was out of town for a while, offered them an apartment in Southeast. So they picked up the keys from a neighbor and moved in.

Every morning they would wake from drugged sleep, both of them depending on Ambien and Xanax. Hoa would shower while Dale picked up coffee and croissants from Peregrine Espresso. Or oatmeal from Curbside Cafe. They sat together on the living-room couch, surrounded by their friend’s books and records, going over plans for the day, making lists of which doctors they were seeing, which they wanted to get appointments with, where they needed to fill out forms in case they could get their son transferred to a private hospital. At 9:30, they’d take a taxi and enter the glass doors of the hospital into the bustle of doctors and nurses and also of others who had nothing to do with them, whom Dale and Hoa saw but didn’t see, who also came at the earliest possible time to visit their loved ones. Dale and Hoa showed the guard their passes, walking the sequence of corridors in order to take out their passes again for another guard at the elevator that lifted them up to the eighth floor. Declan was heavily medicated for the first week and mostly he slept. Hoa would stand at the bed staring at the movement under his eyelids. They were like minnows, she thought, wiggling over sand, iridescent and fleshy and alive. But when he did come awake, Declan was alien, interior, angry.

They sat with him and they grilled his doctors. Sometimes, Declan slept the whole day. Sometimes they thought he pretended to sleep. When he talked to them, it was only because he wanted something. He wanted out of there, but the doctors weren’t going to release him.

When Declan’s life was no longer in danger, he was moved to a lock-down unit with certifiably crazy people and a Chinese doctor who kept telling Declan how successful he could be if he concentrated on being good, making good grades, and finding a good girlfriend, platitudes that enraged Declan so much that one morning he leaped up screaming and physically threatening the doctor. He was immediately restrained by three big guards, shoved face down onto the bed in his doorless room, and given an injection in his buttocks while he struggled. All this as Dale and Hoa watched helplessly from the hall. Wanting to take their son’s side and get him clear of the madhouse, but scared out of their minds about his precarious state.

Dale contrived to project a positive attitude. He told Declan that they loved him, that they were there for him, that he could count on them. But Hoa broke down. She couldn’t talk to her son without trembling uncontrollably. Then Declan would close his eyes and Hoa and Dale would step out of the room and take a walk outside and talk about how it had all gone.

In the evening, when visiting hours ended, they went to various forgettable restaurants near the hospital. A Mexican place where they ate often enough for the waiters to remember them. A sushi bar. They drank before and during dinner and didn’t regret it then or afterward. Wine, tequila, sake. They needed the alcohol. They talked more about what the doctors had said. After dinner, they went back to the apartment and sat together until it was time to take their drugs. Dale went to the guest bedroom, and Hoa stayed in the living room with the light on, until she began to nod off on the floral Victorian couch. It was as though they had become radioactive, their skins so supersensitive, they couldn’t lie near each other.

For a month, life was completely encapsulated in their routine. If elsewhere people read newspapers and went to their jobs, if friends met for dinner, if fathers walked their daughters to school, if lines formed in front of Abercrombie & Finch where two half-nude models stood at the entrance joking with each other and letting customers ogle them, if anything at all was happening apart from Dale and Hoa’s desperation and their son’s suffering, they didn’t acknowledge it because it happened in another world than the one in which they existed.