He is a young man wearing an old one’s face, so love can not find him. That does not stop him from dreaming of it. During the slow hours of his shift. At the end of a tequila lullaby. After putting his aunt to bed. These dreams always require him to be a different self, taller or richer or funnier, sometimes all three, so he likes himself less after dreaming them.
Forever is a long time to promise someone. He is not sure it exists, because if the scientists are believed even the universe is to end someday. When she calls, another brittle autumn has come and gone, and the desert is on the verge of frost. When she speaks, she interrupts a life which seems to take place through the opening and closing of doors. No matter what goes on in between, he ends up in the double-wide. He used to wonder what it would take to end up someplace different, back when questions hurt less to ask. Forever ago. So when she offers him marriage, in that brusque, charmless way she has, he doesn’t ask why, he just says, when, a softball if he ever heard it, and she says she can fly down tomorrow.
He likes the sound of that: tomorrow.
If he did ask her why; she would tell him a story about yesterday, when she looked out her window (past the ice ferns, the fog of her own breath) and saw an ICE agent shoot a woman in the face three times (one for every child she’d had) as she tried to turn her car around. Her body had slumped forward and the car accelerated right into a tentpole. She would say she saw that murdered woman and it made her as tired as it did afraid. Tired of pretending she wasn’t a part of the world, that it wasn’t happening right outside her window. That afternoon she went out on the street and people were packing snowballs. It was a little stupid, she thought, snowballs against 9mms, but sometimes the stupider thing to do was trying to be smart in stupid times.
Of course it is different for him. Less snowballs in the streets and more eyes on the ground. Half the guys have stopped showing up for their shifts and management is offering incentive pay to whoever picks up the slack. He uses the money to take his aunt to the casino. Cherries and clovers wink and promise a better life. While she plays, he drives. Back and forth across the desert. The sweep of his headlights reclaiming flashes of rock from the darkness. He gets five orders in. On the way home his aunt is wearing her old smile again. When he looks at her, he feels his heart condense to the size of a stone, and all along his spine radiates the pain of loving someone who is dying. He is afraid of the world to come, what life will look like bleached of her color.
She does not know any of this: not the desert, the stone-sized heart, nor the things he fears. This is okay, she reasons, because she does not know herself either. And anyway a man you don’t know is less likely to hurt you than one you do. If the studies are to be believed. On the plane ride over she hums Wagner’s chorus, and is shocked by the image of herself as a bride: the naturalness of it, the sweetness underneath. She is a young woman carrying an old one’s heart, so love has never found her before.
‘I have good news,’ he says, after he has wrapped his aunt in her favorite blanket, the one the color overripe olives. She begins preparing to smile. There are nights of her life she has endured just for the possibility of seeing him happy. She has waited twenty-seven years. She has always believed in someday. So when he tells her, I’m getting married, rubbing the back of his neck like he’s embarrassed by it, she doesn’t shriek or cry or demand a picture of the lucky girl. She just closes her eyes, and in the privacy of her own skull, remembers the Lord. For He is good; His love endures forever. Then she opens them to see the boy inside the man, the boy she loved like her own. ‘Adam,’ she says. Nothing else. The first man to walk the earth will not walk alone.
It was summer when they met, a fact that finds its way back to him at Terminal 1, Arrivals. He was younger then and thought the outside could change the inside. Half a year he whittled away in the city, playing chauffeur and chef and kingpin, and in the evenings he walked home under a sky containing all possible blues. Past pastel Victorians. On sidewalks adorned by snow-in-summers. Lights and lines electric overhead. He remembers feeling like he could press his thumb through the world. He remembers meeting her and now he remembers forgetting her. It seems a stupid thing to have done. The girl he finds waiting for him at Terminal 1, Arrivals is not beautiful (he would have remembered), not even pretty, but there is a spot on the inside of her wrist where he thinks his kiss could fit. She has brought only a backpack, which might mean she will stay.
The night before he dreamed them a witty back-and-forth: Do you usually propose to men you don’t know? I don’t know, do they usually say yes? But now the hour has arrived, her with it, and in the rearview mirror he sees too clearly the bedhead he couldn’t tame. Itches inconsolably for a drink. And there is something about her, too, the way she hums to the song on his radio, the tilt of her head against glass, that makes those ironies feel dishonest. He is gearing up to ask her So what do you do for work when she reaches for his right hand. Against his fingers he feels the cool press of a metal band. Something like hope unspools in his chest, illiquid and gossamer: there is nothing left to do but love her. The silence drags on.
He almost forgets to be ashamed. Almost. But then they are back at the double-wide. Paint chipping. Blinds drawn. Crumpled cans of discount beer littered in the gravel driveway. He feels the needs to warn her, somehow. Before she enters his house. Before she takes in the tundra of his life and spits it back out on the roadside. He catalogues his faults in his mind: two arrests, high interest debt, he is a maudlin drunk and two point five inches shorter than the average American male. ‘Two rules,’ she says. ‘Don’t lie and don’t hit me.’
‘That’s it?’ He turns to face her, her dark and startling eyes. She considers a moment, then adds, ‘Don’t hurt anyone. Not if you can help it.’ None of this is easy but then marriage is hard work. He offers a hand (to shake on it). ‘Tell me yours, first.’ So he counts the stars within himself, the dark sky, the absent moon, and says Don’t leave. ‘Not—not without telling me why.’ Crude—unvarnished—the words hang between them like a cross. The things he believes himself able to withstand, and the things he cannot. It is the most legible he has ever been to another human being. Those dark and startling eyes—what do they see? The answer is in her hand, which grasps his, and shakes once, slowly, up and then down.
Love: she doesn’t know anyone who’s stayed in it for long. From the outside it looks like dousing yourself in oil and handing someone else a match. Asking why fire hurts when it burns. From the outside, but you can’t know the world that way. Somewhere in this country there is a window she was on the wrong side of. She wants to step across to the right one. She carries this wish in her chest, right next to her old woman’s heart, and she wants him to carry it with her.
He is good at carrying things. Or getting things carried. He drives forklifts for sixteen fifty an hour, nineteen now the raids have started. Lumber and steel pipes and soil from the flatbed trailers to the warehouse floor. He drives his car and food shows up on people’s doorsteps, he thinks that counts. But carrying a person—their hurt, their weakness—he doesn’t know if he knows how. His aunt doesn’t count, she carried him first, she’s lighter than the breath of God. She thinks of him as a bird, something born to fly. In her presence he thinks of himself that way too. His wings a dream waiting to be remembered. On the steps of the double-wide, he says, She used to be a dancer…
She used to be a dancer but then she married his uncle. He went to school to do people’s taxes but quit to bust down their doors. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He always said it like that, the full name, no abbreviations. All his stories ended the same: they died or went to gitmo. Sure beats the cubicle… It was his uncle who poured him his first drink (a shot of clear vodka, like dousing himself in oil, handing himself the match) and got him his first job and sowed a violet garden on the surface of his aunt’s skin. But he didn’t know that then. Just that she used to be a dancer.
She will never dance again, but she can still laugh. The sound spins out of her like bell chimes, like Wagner, over ham and swiss sandwiches, orange juice in wineglasses. She laughs through stories of his childhood, the schoolyard fights, the skateboard, the scene in Star Wars he would rewind again and again. All her stories end the same: Now I can die in peace, his aunt says, and this time her smile is for them both.
He stops to check the time: 8:42pm. It is the longest she’s stayed awake in weeks.
His fiancée sings in the shower. Her fiancé snores in his sleep. Forever is a very long time.
The moon watches him wake. She sleeps on her side, he discovers, and on the inside of her wrist (where his kiss might still fit) there are satin lines, slightly raised and paler than the rest. It makes him as tired as it does afraid. He wants a bigger heart, a stronger spine. Instead he has this flesh which aches under its scarless skin. An insecticide feeling, that lesser ones die beneath. This is like one of his dreams, except he is not taller or richer or funnier, he is just him. Tomorrow he will work for nineteen an hour. Tomorrow he will drive to the courthouse. Tomorrow she will marry him, and forever may exist for love to find them.
Right up to the ceremony she is still trying to decide: is this the beginning or the end? There is a mother in a car on a street slush with snow and she is trying to turn, but she can’t, because of the holes they have put in her head. I do, she says. Of course, I do.
