I made sandwiches with the bresaola from the antipasto the afternoon before and some of the gouda I'd cut thinner from the cubes. I tried to feed the boy some of the gouda and a little bread, but he wouldn't have any. I suspected it was the traces of vinegar, they clashed with the white bread—it was all we had—or maybe it was just an odd new combination of flavors he didn't understand yet. But what was left over would likely get lost in the refrigerator where things were perpetually being pushed back behind more saved food, this striated order of aging and forgetting—food saved until eating what was left at the far back was unwise. Like memory, the economy of our minds repressing one moment for the next and leaving the past like a set of traps that might go off at any moment.
I don’t remember where you were. I was with our son, this boy, and I can’t think of his name right now, but I had persuaded him to try one of the olives, a rather large green one with bits of herbs glossing it. It wasn’t the kind I usually liked, but I thought maybe he’d enjoy it. Maybe I was just giving him something I would never eat, which feels terrible to think about, really. I don’t think it’s true. His molars and canines had only started to come in. The teething had felt surprisingly cruel; really, it broke your heart, that mindless, unnecessary pain that seemed to exist only to entertain God. And the olive, it felt like a safe bet. He could chew it, right? Soft, and I thought maybe it would even be good for him, so I made it into an airplane and swooshed it down to him, and this worked almost immediately, but as he took it into his mouth, I realized the olive wasn’t pitted, and I suppose it was a fear of him choking, the abruptness of the force of my fingers pushed into his mouth—he began to cry in immediate and heaving ribbons, the shock of my unintended violence, his misunderstanding, had short-circuited meaning and intention, reduced the gap to a simple cruel jolt. And because he had only learned his first words recently (“Da” and “Mana” and “peejsh,” the last one we didn’t know the meaning of yet), other kinds of meanings, like the violent urgency of a concern, would be misunderstood. I held his head and could feel the heat of his tears, the dampness of his face in the crook of my forearm and against my chest. His hair smelled sweet, baby shampoo and perspiration. I remember of this time that his eyes were too young to have found a color yet; the retinas were still silver. This mercurial charge seemed to me to contain an infant lucidity that would begin to flush with color soon—I hoped it would be his mother’s, your, hazel over my brown—and with it, perhaps something in that coloring would be bound to the silver. Why otherwise would nature stage a time in life when our eyes were silver?
I held the olive and dug my thumb into the teeth marks the boy had already put in it, peeled the flesh from the pit, and showed him. See? I pitted a few of the other olives on the tray. I wanted to show him what I meant. He seemed to understand and calmed but turned his face away when I held another olive to his mouth.
His little T-shirt had a cartoon alligator on it—a popular children’s character from some show I didn’t think we’d ever watched. I don’t think the show was on anymore. This alligator had strawberry jam smeared over it from this morning, which for a moment hijacked my brain; I thought it was blood, blood from the olive incident, blood from the alligator. And I cannot say just yet why, but I thought, What if the last image, our last dream before we die, is from some small moment like this? Something easily forgotten in the fracturing life of one event after another, pushing time away—a minor thing charged with strong magic. The vanishing gesture lodged in an unconscious, pure memory: a cartoon alligator on a child’s T-shirt stained with strawberry jam that in the economy of terminal time would wait to be released, marking the gesture of a small misunderstanding—materialized in a story forming the sum of my life.
No. This never happened; it’s the wrong alligator. The wrong child, the wrong life. Sometimes I lie to myself because it’s the only clarity I seem to have when confronted by some terror no method of thinking can fathom. Lying meaningfully to answer certain sublime questions. Where the meaningfully is the new truth. A story.
This is the story of the alligator. About when I woke thinking the boy was awake and crying in the next room. When I woke with the anxiety of those olives and that I had been misunderstood and that this boy, my son, no longer trusted me—but there isn’t a little boy, there aren’t any kids, there isn’t a next room or a co-sleeper or crib or bed. There isn’t the blanket-tangled body of my wife in the bed beside me when I reached out and grazed her missing arm, her nightshirt not gathered up, her warm skin nothing but the cold flat sheet, my faith like a hallucination dispelled, replaced with the snap, like a shape, of terror in the stone indifference of the bed. I had been waking in the middle of the night with this kind of terror. Of your absence from my life pressing into the empty bed like some vision of a tunnel whose winding logic ends simply in a wall of absolute dark.
I woke, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom where the darkness felt curved over my head. I could feel it in my hair like a dark comb and around my darkened arms and shoulders, and though the cold smooth floor tiles were invisible in this dark, the cracks beneath my feet around the basin produced a smooth light in my mind as I relieved myself, the light and body sensation setting an equilibrium—a calm erasing the traces of urgency that lingered in the memory of waking with the terror of being so alone.
Down the hall, I felt around for the banister in the dark and stepped a couple of steps down the stairs, but my foot caught on the runner, and space tumbled around me and snapped at my head. The banister punched—I felt it in my solar plexus, and white light veined in my vision, a bursting glass bulb smashed in my body, and gravity disoriented the space around me. My body concussed, and I rolled off the sensation and down onto the floor in the living room. I recovered the flex of my lungs, heaved a little, and took small, sparing bites of air. In the endorphin flux, I saw the needle above the Hancock Building pinning storm warnings to the lowered sky’s gray matter. Road pulling under the taxi’s wet flicking wipers and beyond, dark and artificial luminance values quarreled with the evanescent damp night. I was in an old bulbous yellow cab to Revere, red lights tracing in the mist ahead, where in Charlestown by the navy yard, I realized the driver in the rearview mirror resembled Robert Lowell, who I think at the time already, though I knew so little about myself yet, had entered into some patron sainthood for my own troubles. We were crossing over some repaired, riveted pale blue enameled arm rusting around a crew where sparks blasted like verse reversed, glowing on a black page. This was Lowell’s old stomping ground, the recognition bursting like a glass bulb, a shot blasting hoary blue light in my chest, a creature opened and rising my body as if from a deeper bone within the deeper muscle of the room flexing around my scalp, crackling through my hair. An air freshener shaped like an alligator hung from the taxi’s rearview, with the word ALLIGATOR! printed over the back of the creature, the creature hanging just below Robert Lowell’s handsome, manic eyes. And I think now of how many times we probably die, how many times we give birth to a death given of ourselves—maybe we retain much of what we once were.
No. This isn’t the alligator story either.
I was downstairs at the base of the stairs, and the pain from the fall in the dark lingered, along with the disorientation of the floor, walls, and doorways. I’ve always liked the dark, how it forces instincts and memory to mark each step, and I followed these into the kitchen, where the night sky poured diffuse and glowing over the sink. I got a glass of water and took it into the living room, and this is, I suppose, where things started to split off, and the story of the alligator begins. It was happening now outside the house, though I didn’t know it yet, or it had happened on the stairs, and this I didn’t know, but I passed through the living room where the curtain had deformed the moon with veins of fractured light glowing on the grass. The street appeared wet, like the shore of some other place I knew not to be a part of my life here.
This was when I saw the long fat shape on the lawn. It crossed over the sidewalk like an enormous mechanical toy up the path toward my front door. The alligator, perhaps lost from some lake or risen up from a local aquifer or septic plant, a pet grown too large for its owner: a long, thick, and slow machine approaching with deliberation, as if sent to me. I tasted something ferrous in my saliva. I took a sip of water. The water tasted like iodine. I watched the weird creature on my lawn. The heat kicked on, and the house sighed and then groaned. I was too tired to sleep now, or maybe it wasn’t exhaustion but some agitated listlessness, my conscious sense shocked into tonic immobility.
I left the living room window, passed through the kitchen, opened the back door, and stepped out. The yard was how I remembered it, though it was dark, the yellowing tufts of saw grass planted by stray birds who came from the coast miles away. I stepped soundlessly around the side of the house. The alligator had come up to the front door and didn’t know I was now in the yard. A man stood behind the glass front door. The alligator seemed fixed on the man, and the man was me.
I came a little closer and saw myself say something to the alligator, and the alligator appeared to be listening.
And then he, the I behind the glass door, no longer looked at the alligator as he spoke. The man speaking behind the glass had turned his gaze to regard me, this version of myself looking back from deep in the front lawn. I took another couple of steps on the grass, the frost brushing briskly over my bare feet.
In the window, closer, my reflection joined the dim, glass image of the man behind it, the alligator’s long back exposed to me but also its face reflected in the glass, joining me, where we both resembled a trophy or statue of ourselves. The alligator’s tail flicked. As if the tail first sensed that I was approaching.
I went still on the lawn. I was in a room with my wife; our bodies, our hair tangled, the bed damp. She lowered her face; her lips were soft, and a burst light sealed in a glass bulb shattered in me, a memory of something like a shattering but not quite, a creature conceived in some deeper muscle of the bed, and this room, kinetic and latent, crackling through my hair.
I was craving a cigarette from years ago.
I had been moving toward the alligator, and the alligator had backed away from the door and dropped down onto the lawn, half of its body still cresting the sidewalk. It was close enough to touch. My reflection in the glass door remained, but the man there had left. I had the thought that he’d left the door, come out back, walked around, and was now watching me here from some vantage as I leaned down and extended my hand. I touched the top of the alligator’s forehead, the diamond stars of rough calloused skin. Its eyes glistened, still, as if dead. I could smell the magnolia, the swamp water, and wet cedar boughs. I smelled urine and the red juice and alcohol of certain tourist drinks. I was in Thibodaux or Houma or some in-between place with Susan and Jesse; we were site scouting a movie. The night before, we’d been in New Orleans at a bar overturned like a helpless turtle, where it felt like anything could happen, like it was still Storyville. A slight, delicate man had come up to a low table and sat on an ottoman beside us, and he charmingly told us he was a “zone therapist” and likely saw from our faces we didn’t know what that was; he said, “Reflexologist,” and again we didn’t really know what that meant. I liked the sound of his voice, it was calming. He said, “May I?” as if to show us. He said it so gently, reaching down to take Susan’s foot in his hand. He slipped her sandal from her foot. He said, “Your feet are lovely, aren’t they?” as if we all had always thought this too. And now two things were happening, one reflecting onto the other and then begetting a third creature—not zone therapist or a reflexologist, but a small charming man who got off on feet, on touching them, stroking them, tugging at the gentle muscles of the arch, pressing the toes between his fingers saying, “See?” “See here?” “See?” “Yes?” and he’d chosen Susan’s foot and this public arena, but also he was creating discomfort; this was the creature he was making, and it produced laughter like some somatic response to the surprise pressure, and, after all, no one had gotten hurt, we were going to make a movie, we were site scouting, we were looking at the land for shots, for scenes, and Jesse that day earlier had said, “My god, the light here,” and I remembered it too—the light muted by the damp white air, a brilliance shattering the heat that could not stop pressing into us—
I don’t remember how long I sat that night waiting with Susan and Jesse, waiting for the man to finish stroking her foot, but he was small, he wasn’t someone you could harm because he came off small and harmless. He knew this was a special power he had and—no that’s the third thing, maybe this expression of his power over us; maybe he knew, even then, that many years later he’d appear in a story about an alligator. A story about an alligator, no, really about death and one final image. The thought brought back, long forgotten in the murk but hardening and durable, reserved for just this—a gesture glancing, cascading off the foot of a woman I eventually married and have been with for a long time, and I have recently woken most nights with this anxiety, terror really, of all the forms of loss I think I can count with what math I have left. And I can say why I thought all of this matters, that I miss you even though you’re still here, your arm is, your body tangled in the comforter, the heat of your body in the morning beside me.
This is the alligator story. Earlier in the day of the night of the zone therapist, we were scouting the site for the film. We were on a small pontoon boat moving through the bayou; it was hot and wet, and as the boat slowed a hard flicker dropped and the surface of the bayou shattered—an enormous blue heron landed and reassumed a poise that seemed to me learned in prehistory, there among the reaching arms of the cypresses and the tangled snaking root systems, timeless, where the trees blended with the flora that helped hide a constellation of fauna, of mud snakes and ribbon snakes, bobcats and giant slick frogs, the warmth as if pooling stagnant with the stirring boat, and the guide said, “Heya, lookit o—,”and he pointed to an alligator floating in the water nearby. And he named it in pounds, estimating to impress us. I don’t know that it meant much; sure, we weren’t used to seeing alligators, so there was that. But I think now something else was happening, was lodging in the image of this moment. It was watching us there on the pontoon boat, from the shore, connecting to some watery limbus between my life and this alligator’s. Maybe the alligator saw itself on a lawn someday crawling up to a front door, shot through time. And maybe this is how we might believe in God. That long after having aged and died, eaten by the swamp so that the swamp might reproduce something that would someday eat and be eaten and eat and be eaten and so the cycle continued—another cycle in memory was born doubled inside my bland amusement on that boat. We’d spent the week scouting sites for a film. I was being anesthetized in the heat and the glare of brilliant white eyelashes of sun shot off the rippling swamp. A secretly perfect version of itself and all that experience and all experiences we’d had together then and all experiences we would ever have lodged like a tonic immobility to be animated years later: an image in my last moments of something odd and peaceful. The imagination of a final thought when I’ve been waking so concerned about everything. A final thought, a story of a teething boy able only to say “Da” and “Mana” and “peejsh.” The alligator given the agency of speech I will press against the stone of you, your weeping broken sense of some larger force like a body of water sluicing out of sight, fusing to the dark exposure of another story that seems necessary to write, which I had never meant to write but which feels impossible not to write, about you.