Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,159

in order to drown, you need to hang by the degenerate edge of the sea. I remember her, pleading into the faces of friends, but for nothing. Who did they see when it was not herself that she showed? What was it they wanted when her lack outweighed her capacity, her desperation exceeded her gifts, her competence eluded her? If she was loved, it was because it’s easier to be lovable than to be honest. If she loved in return, and it’s not impossible that she did, it was a thin sort of love, emaciated and apt to vary, a love that would not alter his design or fracture his standing. Often I regretted the confusion I caused.

Of course there were angels—there are always angels—people with the soul capacity to see beyond your mask, who come forward to say something meaningful to the purity in you. But no one possessed the power or the will to move me from my circle of sorrow.

If there are rules for finding your way through darkness, I tried to follow them. I tried to behave my way out of pain. I gave away the little I had, unencumbered by a desire for reciprocation. I had no reason to lie, no agenda to keep me from listening. My small assurances were trusted, and it gave me a numb sort of gladness that those closest to me valued my attention. And yet that attentiveness was not without flaw; it was limited and erratic, governed by arbitrary factors such as dreams and the seasons, cars and passing shadows. I would be moved suddenly to sadness and detached from the requirements of time. A color or noise, a texture or smell. A reflection or a trivial wind, or sunlight receding menially against a building. Sometimes I would get almost to where I was going, only to turn home again. Back home, wherever it was that home happened to be, I would sit in the gentle coma of my affliction, thinking of Rourke.

This is not easy. This is when my youth escapes me, when I age, with everything shutting down. These are years without accident or incident, when the end of each day is determined before it begins—when there is no possibility of seeing him.

There are people you hear about, laborers who knead the guts of the earth for poor reward, people too indigent, too cowed by cold and hunger and lightlessness to object to the conditions of their existence. They drink themselves to sleep, and why not? Certain conditions are not meant to be tolerated, certain states are so deprived of tenderness that you discover the meaning of hell. Hell is only loneliness, a place without play for the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is presence?

33

“You can’t bring that bird in here.”

The bird twitches lamely in my scarf. Mark approaches from the couch, dropping his Wall Street Journal, crossing over.

I don’t understand. I say, “It’s already here.”

“You can’t keep it here. It’s full of disease.” He ushers me onto the terrace. “Set it free.”

I look down twenty-five floors. I say, “It can’t fly.”

“It’s a bird,” he says. “It’ll figure it out.”

Mark doesn’t know about birds. We once saw a documentary about condor eggs stolen from their nests and hatched in captivity. The narrator said that those eggs were the last, and the risk of them being eaten by predators was very great. In the movie, puppet bird heads nursed chicks through rubber gaskets in incubators, and wildlife technicians scaled mountains to set fattened chicks in place of the eggs they’d stolen. The camera remained on the babies as they sat blinking and shivering, awaiting the likely rejection of their mother.

“Why are you crying?” Mark had asked. “They’re being rescued.”

He could not conceive of the depth of the mess. He could not see the calamity of a genetic last chance, of having your offspring stolen because you cannot be depended upon to provide. In his way, he tried to help.

“Let’s fly to Washington, D.C.,” he suggested soon after, “to see the cherry blossoms. And the zoo.”

On the airplane the stewardess in first class catered to us. Her tag said Jana. When Jana bent, she bent low. She served us croissants and fruit salad with real silverware and mimosas in real glass, and when we dropped things like sunglasses or sugar cubes, she retrieved them. Jana seemed to think she could get something from us, or anyway, from Mark, like maybe