Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,24

a spool. “Yeah,” he said, “Girls too.”

It didn’t bother me that he had seen the girls naked and maybe had sex with them. I was only envious of all the places he’d visited. I’d been to only eight states—mostly with my father. Jack had been to twenty-six—always alone.

He shoved a messy wad of change into his pocket. “I wrote a song about it.”

“About the balloon?” I asked.

“About how you weren’t there to see it,” he said.

We sat in the third row and followed the wafting oil globs on the movie screen. Jack removed his black journal from his coat to show me the stuff he’d collected and recorded and all the songs he’d written for me during his trip. His drawings were compact and obsessively detailed, mathematical almost, like da Vinci’s. Most pages had variations of the same landscape—upside down and tilted. Like a vortex, like water down a bathtub drain.

“That’s in the Tetons,” he explained solemnly. His group had to cross a ridge with tremendous drops on each side, and there was this yellow plastic tag nailed to the point where some guy had fallen off. “It would have been so easy, Evie.” Jack used my name for emphasis, and I listened with care. We were low in our seats, so low that people behind probably couldn’t see our heads, only our knees propped on the chairs in front of us. I held his bicep with two hands wrapped around his red windbreaker. “The free fall. I would have shattered and spread.” His hands pushed out in two opposing directions, “Like, distributed.”

“Re-distributed,” I said. “Like back to raw matter.”

“Re-distributed,” he said, “Exactly, yeah.”

I liked the idea of marking the place where a life ends as opposed to the place a corpse is buried. And also the idea of leaving remains uncollected. It’s bad enough being dead, but it’s worse to have people see you dead, to have living hands feel a dead you, jostle and dress you, push your stiffening arms into clean sleeves and cry over your blood-drained body. At a wake or funeral, people say a dead body is “at rest,” but actually, it is working. The corpse assists the living, it stops time. It helps to postpone the reality of loss. It’s hard to know which is worse, never seeing a loved one again or seeing them again packed with fixative and formaldehyde, with plastic and whey and alkalis and binders, and hearing people mutter, She looks so peaceful, when what they really mean is, She’s stuffed like a glycerol scarecrow. Probably that mountain climber’s spirit was drifting motionlessly like an eagle soaring in place. Flags flap that way, blowing grandly to nowhere.

“I missed you,” Jack said.

I’d missed him too. I took a handful of popcorn, then brought my fist to his mouth, pushing some kernels gently in. He ate until he reached my hand, which he bit lightly. The projector jolted on, and his face flashed to blue snow.

“That death marker thing is cool,” I whispered to cheer him. Jack could be quick to turn, and suddenly he seemed down. “Instead of cemeteries.”

“Ah, forget it. It’s a bogus idea. There’d be bodies everywhere.”

“Not bodies. Markers. Bodies get cremated.”

“True,” he said with new interest. “Highways would be littered.” We hated highways.

“I want my marker to be suspended in midair, only not hitting the mountainside, just like if I died of shock during a fall from a peak. Or maybe projected upward like the Batman logo, if that’s even possible.”

“Sure it is,” Jack speculated, “if you got shot out of a cannon.”

“But you’d have to be a clown to die like that.”

“That would blow,” Jack said. “Dying as a clown.”

I asked him where he would like his marker to be.

Jack said, “Right here.” He touched the inside of my elbow.

One time after Jack and I met, I mentioned him to my friend Denny. Denny and I were lying on the steps outside the barn. The door behind us was open, and light from inside seeped out to form a pale pond around our reclining bodies. We were like seals on an iceberg.

“Seals are fat,” Denny said. “Besides, it’s July.” He was breaking pieces off of sticks and throwing them at fireflies. “Let’s be shipwrecked. On an atoll.”

When I had to pee, I went behind the barn. It would have taken too long to go to the front house, and I never knew when Denny might just take off. He was private with his personal life, and he