Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

We learned why the following week, when they returned. As David, who’d arrived at Tamarack State six months before Leo and had once worked in Mexico, explained the implications of the newly published document the newspapers called “the Zimmerman telegram,” Miles listened impassively. David read out loud the German telegram as it had been translated and printed in the papers, six weeks after it was sent:

Berlin, January 19, 1917. On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this attempt is not successful, we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona…

It hadn’t been even a year, David reminded us, since Pershing took American troops into Mexico in pursuit of the revolutionary general Pancho Villa; hardly a month since those troops had withdrawn; the Mexicans were eager to pay the Americans back. On a map David showed us how easily that territory might be reclaimed. We thought of Canada, just a few miles away, and how we’d feel if the Germans had proposed an alliance with them. The war, we understood then, was here.

Some of us drifted away when David finished speaking, while others continued talking in twos and threes. Only the handful of us clustered around Dr. Petrie noticed how, as Miles made his way toward us, he stepped as if the bones in his feet had been shattered. Six inches, six inches, six. Finally he reached our group and stopped.

“I have to tell you,” he began, his eyes fixed on Dr. Petrie’s chest. The pause that followed was long enough to silence the rest of us and make us turn toward him.

“To tell you,” he tried again.

Dr. Petrie reached for his hand. “You don’t feel well,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

Miles backed a few inches away. “My friend was killed,” he said quietly. “My friend in France. I wanted you to know.”

“Not Lawrence!” Dr. Petrie said.

Miles nodded. “Gassed,” he whispered.

Seth began to cough as the rest of us wondered whether to draw closer to Miles or to leave him and Dr. Petrie alone. We kept our places. Still looking at Dr. Petrie’s chest, Miles said that since hearing the news he hadn’t left his room, until today.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Petrie said, gently touching one hand to Miles’s jacket. Behind him the rest of us mumbled our regrets; this was the first personal thing Miles had ever told any of us other than Dr. Petrie, and we didn’t know how to respond. “I’m glad you were able to come here.”

“It’s what got me out of bed. I missed you. I missed this.”

Embarrassed, but also touched, we continued to stand there clumsily. After a minute, Miles took some folded papers from his jacket pocket and handed them to Leo, who was standing closest to Dr. Petrie. “Lawrence wrote this not long before he died,” Miles said of the first sheet, gesturing to Leo to pass it around. “You can see…”

Not what he saw, probably: but as each of us in turn read the scrawled words we grasped that the letter was terrible. Reluctantly we took the second sheet, this one the letter from Lawrence’s father announcing his son’s death. Together they were so sad that we didn’t know where to look or what to say. Pietr rubbed his eyebrows, Arkady mumbled a word. Seth, still coughing into a paper handkerchief, stepped away. Leo put the sheets in Dr. Petrie’s hand, as if he couldn’t bear to give them back to Miles himself. Dr. Petrie kept up a steady murmur of consolation but the rest of us were useless. We could not, after all, touch a man like him, and we had no idea how or if he prayed.

TO OUR SURPRISE, Miles returned the following Wednesday and sat mutely, very close to Naomi although not touching her, during Jaroslav’s explanation of cinematography cameras. Until a few years ago Jaroslav had worked at a studio in New Jersey, repairing and maintaining their equipment, and although he didn’t have a camera he was able, with a few sketches and some strips of paper cut to the width of film stock, to show us how the film spooled on rollers between the two magazines tucked inside each camera box. He diagrammed the sprockets and the corresponding perforations in the film, and also the clever mechanism that moved the film in synchrony with the opening of the lens shutter, exposing it at the rate of sixteen frames per second. Our eyes, he said, when confronted with images shot and projected at that speed, magically converted stillness into motion.

We listened eagerly, some of us taking notes; we loved our movie nights, which never came often enough, and it was a pleasure to know more about what we saw. Polly and Bea noticed, despite their absorption, the way Naomi kept shifting away from Miles’s legs, which occasionally tilted in her direction. Zalmen and Abe saw, instead, the way that Miles, despite his recent loss, tried to concentrate on Jaroslav’s explanations.

“In its essence,” Jaroslav continued, “cinematography freezes light, storing it like ice in an icebox. During projection, the light is released again in measured quantities, animating what would otherwise seem dead.”

He paused while Sophie, who had recently relapsed, coughed, choked, coughed more violently, shook off Bea’s whispered offer of help, wiped her running eyes, and subsided. Then, thoughtfully, he tried to link his subject to what Miles had taught us. “Perhaps,” he said, “the reconstruction of living action from still images isn’t so different from the effort to reconstruct creatures from fossilized bones.”

“That,” Miles said unsmilingly, “is a preposterous analogy.”

Arkady and Sean exchanged glances and Lydia frowned as Jaroslav paused, his feelings clearly hurt. He hurried through the rest of his presentation and then left the room, in the company of Pietr and Abe. The rest of us filed out more slowly. Often we left our sessions elated, hovering in the corridor or in front of the windows to talk more about what we’d just learned, but Miles’s comment squelched us. He was grieving, we knew. His words had been instantaneous, unconsidered — but somehow seemed worse because of that, as if all along he’d found our presentations foolish but no longer had the energy to conceal it. Halfway down the hall, in front of a freshly painted exam room, Nan said to David, “He probably didn’t mean to do that.”

“But it’s who he is, ” David replied. “That’s the trouble.”

Behind them the solarium had emptied out except for Leo, who’d stepped into the alcove to the left of the fireplace, and Miles, who a minute later came to stand beside him. Leo was gazing out the window, and he jumped when Miles said, “Won’t you be late for your supper?”

“I didn’t know you were still here,” Leo said.

“I can’t go anywhere until Naomi’s ready. She wanted to talk with Eudora about something, so…” He gestured toward the pair outside, walking in the frozen garden. “I wish she wouldn’t keep me waiting like this.”

Leo, who’d stayed behind simply to watch Eudora, nodded absently.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Miles added, clicking his fingernails against the window as if Naomi might hear him. “Especially not now. Last week I got some letters that Lawrence wrote me and never got the chance to send. One of his friends found them and mailed them on. It’s so — reading words he wrote months ago, hearing his voice in my head when I know he’s gone — I can’t explain what that feels like.”

“I’m sorry,” Leo said, meaning it despite his absorption in the scene below, and his annoyance at the way Miles had treated Jaroslav.