Where Earth Meets Water Read online

  The next morning seems to dawn earlier than the previous ones. Lloyd is covered with a thin film of sweat and he mops himself off before stretching within the confines of his tent and poking a tentative toe outside. It is brisk, but he is starving, so he rolls his thick cabled sweater on and pulls on his boots. There is the sweet, strong sugary smell he has smelled on the previous days, like syrup bubbling over a hot stove. The sun is just beginning to peek over the mountain on the opposing side and there is that same bird he’d heard at daybreak, but there is another sound, like a gentle slapping over the water. It is rhythmic and capable and Lloyd follows it downstream, where twenty feet away the man from the general store is fly-fishing. He has on the same lumberjack shirt, along with heavy black waders and a brown sheepskin cap with earflaps pulled low over his eyes. Slap, slap. The man reels in a fish, unhooks it with ease and sends the rod sailing back over the coasting waters. Slap, slap. It is still too dark to make out the features on his face, but there is a determination to his stance and the way he holds his rod. It hangs outstretched for mere moments before he reels it back in and drops the next fish into a bucket. Lloyd walks down the bank, holding on to the branches to steady himself as he approaches the fisherman.

  “Morning,” the fisherman says, as though he has been expecting Lloyd all along. “You better grab your gear. They are just begging to be breakfast.” Lloyd peers into his bucket. Under a foot of river water, four brown trout hang despondently together.

  “Aren’t you going to eat them?”

  “Sure.”

  “But...the water?”

  “Keeps ’em fresher. I nail ’em on the head when I get home. Pow. They don’t know what hit ’em. If you let ’em breathe up until the last minute, their insides are fleshier.” The man reels in his rod and comes up to where Lloyd is squatting, his waders squishing softly in the riverbank. He unhooks another fish and lets it splash into the bucket.

  “So, what does one do on a solo bachelor party?”

  “Just, you know, some quiet time with our purple mountain majesties. Live off the land. Gather my thoughts.”

  “Must be some slave driver, your old woman.”

  “Malina? No way. She’s one of the easiest people I’ve ever met. No fuss, no drama. I’m the woman in the relationship.”

  The man raises his eyebrows.

  “I’m Saul.”

  “Lloyd.”

  “Another kindred spirit saddled with an old-school name. Where’d yours come from?”

  “Great-uncle.”

  “Holocaust Museum.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My parents went to Washington, D.C., on their last-hurrah trip before I was born. Now I’ve heard they have this stupid name for it: babymoon? My mom was eight months pregnant, and when you go to the museum, you get this passport of someone’s profile, to follow them throughout and connect with the experience, and my mom got a six-year-old boy. Saul Cohen. He had two sisters and his father was a jeweler. In the room where they have all the shoes? That’s where her water broke. She said it was a sign.”

  “Forgive me, but that’s kinda morbid.”

  Saul shrugs. “My namesake. And I’m not even Jewish.” He pulls the sheepskin cap off his head and chucks it to the ground next to the bucket. He fluffs his hair out with his fingers, the springy curls bouncing into an arc over his head.

  The campsite is just beginning to awaken. Excited shouts and squeals emerge from children who have ventured down to the water’s edge a few hundred feet from where Saul and Lloyd stand, poking their toes into the rushing water and flicking one another. The sun is just over the mountain now, casting a shadow beneath it. It appears bruised and swollen with the potential of the arriving day.

  “Look at that,” Lloyd says. “The mountains really are purple.”

  Saul chuckles. “Ah, city boy. I knew you were going to be work. You have so much to learn.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “All your gear is brand-spanking-new.” Saul holds his hand out. “I gotta get these fish cleaned up and on the fire. How much longer are you out here?”

  “End of the week.”

  “Maybe I’ll teach you to tie some knots. I’ll see ya.” Lloyd shakes his hand before Saul grabs his bucket and hikes back up the grassy knoll.

  * * *

  This morning, Lloyd hikes up to the peak overlooking the canyon. It is a dry, hot day, and the lizards skitter about him as he finds crevices in the dusty rock to grip with his fingers and the toe of his boot to haul him up. He lost the trail half an hour ago, but he can see the dip between the two mountains creating a pitcher that the sun will pour into at dusk. A hawk circles lazily overhead and he stops to watch it as it coasts over the layers of wind. It’d be nice to be carried, he muses.

  Somehow, between fishing and Saul and his decision to climb, an incessant pounding has taken hold in his brain. Thump, thump, thump, as though he has spent the night in an all-night discotheque where the music reverberated against his skeleton. With each level he ascends, the pounding wanes, until it is a slow, dull hum at the back of his palate. What if the thumping were to interrupt the delicate balance of inner-ear fluid and he were to lose his footing over the side of the mountain? He will fall, catching on craggy points of rock until his body is eventually claimed by the gorge and the running river below. He shakes the thought off and climbs higher.

  From here he can see the entire forest spread out below him. The winding river with its elusive brown trout. The flat-faced boulders that children use as slides. The unpainted log cabin where Saul is surely peddling wares with his amused grin.

  “O bee-yoo-ti-ful, for spacious skies,” Lloyd sings. It seems appropriate to serenade the scene. Everything is static; no wind rustles the trees from Lloyd’s vantage point and even the burbling river seems to have paused from where he sits, high above, well, everything, it seems. The landscape is awaiting homage, a sacrifice, its cheek turned up for a proffered kiss. It seems like the perfect place to let go. But can he do it? It has been fighting him but this place would be a perfect place of release. Can Lloyd overcome the soft matter that coaxed itself into his chest years ago and let it sail into the gorge below? Because that’s what it is: a soft bundle of tissue, not a hard ball of resentment or bitterness. Lloyd likes it there. He has never tried getting rid of it in the past. But he loves Malina. And he wants her. He wants her as his partner for the next half century. He wants to make love to her and listen to her gripe about injustices and NGOs and priorities. He loves her. So he has to let go.

  He remembers his first encounter with Malina. He was sitting at a bar in the Mission on a raucous Thursday evening. The thrum of the crowd was pushing closer to where he sat perched on a wooden stool. A man lurched past him, inebriated beyond control, and he leaned over, one hand on his thigh, another on the wall, as if about to vomit. Lloyd watched him as he panted softly and leaned back against the wall, as though it would suddenly grow arms and embrace him. He was careful to avoid the passersby as they careened toward the bar, laughing loudly and ordering more. Lloyd shook his head.

  “Like china in a bull pen,” he murmured to himself. At his ear he heard a soft tinkle, like glass being shattered. A woman had laughed at his ear, a petite woman with hair pulled back so tightly that he could clearly see every contour of her face, every pore.

  “That’s pretty good,” she said. “I was going to go with ‘like a scared rabbit in a foxhole.’” He turned and saw her face fully now. She looked bemused. “What else you got?”

  Lloyd raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Well,” he said, “see that couple over there?” He pointed at two men engaged in an animated though loving debate.

  “Slurring as though his tongue had grown fur.”

  “Pitching from side to side as though caught in a squall out at sea.”

  Lloyd pointe
d at four girls standing in a circle, chattering all at once. “Henhouse at daybreak.”

  “Ooh, nice one.”

  He laughed. “I’m Lloyd.”

  “Malina.”

  “Can I get you a drink? ‘He was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.’”

  Malina laughed. “Absolutely.” And though she’d arrived with the henhouse at daybreak, Malina sat in Lloyd’s proffered seat, where they analogized and spun metaphors together for the rest of the evening. It was what they did from then on, to break the silence after a particularly fierce argument or misunderstanding. It was their way to concur with one another and leave the world aside.

  He leans back against a rock, propping himself up on one leg. He sees Malina’s clever, patient face and her oversize horn-rimmed research glasses nestled in her curls as she turns around from her desk to smile at him. He sees her hands reach out for his, guiding them to her lips as she admonishes him for going away for a whole week without cell phone, without connection, without friends. He sees her as she laughs with her friends, piled together at a crowded sidewalk table with dogs tied to chairs, sipping wine. He’d seen her once at such a brunch. It was her “girl-time”—that was the word she’d used. But he’d gone to the restaurant where they were meeting and watched her as she interacted with her friends. It was no betrayal to how she interacted with him, but he loved seeing that side of her. It was the same side she showed Lloyd. She was the same all over, without hard angles or hidden agendas. He was filled with an even deeper love for her as he watched her trace her finger over the stem of her wineglass and heard the immediate surprising laughter that ensued as one of her friends said something that he couldn’t hear. Lloyd focused on her dining partners, how they looked into her eyes when she spoke, their bodies turned toward one another in a respective acquiescence. That was friendship, Lloyd had thought. Presence.

  Suddenly, the peace that has filled Lloyd up to the peak of the mountain turns to anger. It takes over his throat first, a hard lump causing tears to prick at the corners of his eyes. He is angry at Karom. Why isn’t he here? He is his best man, for Christ’s sake. The fact that he hasn’t invited him or even told him about the plans for this camping trip doesn’t factor into Lloyd’s thoughts; Karom should anticipate his needs. He should know better. And he will show up only hours before the wedding. Lloyd needs him now, has needed him always. Lloyd has never asked anything of his friend.

  Even that time, that one time that Lloyd had lost control at the Midsummer Night’s Dream cast party in college, throwing up backstage behind the Grand Theater, which only hours before had been transformed into a sprawling forest, complete with real pine needles and tree trunks. Even that time, he had never asked Karom to leave his post, where he was fraternizing with the fairies—still clothed in ethereal translucent costumes—to hold him up and take him back to their dorm, where he’d coaxed three glasses of water, an Advil and two pieces of sandwich bread from Lloyd’s stash in his closet into him. He didn’t even know that Karom knew about his stash—his “in case of hurricane/earthquake/nuclear bomb/terrorism” stash. He poured Lloyd into bed on his side, tossed out the few wads of crumpled-up paper in his trash can, filled it with a few fingers of water before setting it beside his bed and rubbed his back while Lloyd moaned dully. Lloyd didn’t know how long Karom sat at his bedside, but he didn’t go flitting back to the fairies; when he awoke a few hours later to stumble to the bathroom, Karom was curled up in his own bed a few feet away from Lloyd’s, hugging a pillow and sighing in his sleep. Lloyd hadn’t asked to be taken care of then, but he wants it more than ever now.

  Lloyd replaces the ball in his chest and glances back down at the river. He turns back toward the way he climbed. It is time for lunch.

  * * *

  In the spring of the second semester of each school year, there was what was known around campus as Hiker’s Hooky. The dean would ring the large Liberty-like bell in the main green, the sound clanging across the university. Just in case students lived in the upper arches of North Campus, where the ivy feathered across buildings in thicker clumps and the grass grew to knee level, emails would alert students that there would be no classes on this day. The day was chosen at random, based on whether the dean needed an extra hour of sleep or wanted to extend her vacation in Cape Cod, or simply because she’d waited too long and any longer and they’d be into the deadening days of final exams and theses that rendered students captive to desks as they pored over papers, lab rats and musical scores.

  Traditionally, all the students were meant to take the college-sponsored buses to Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, to hike from a few allotted points. The vans would disperse students at the base of the mountain, halfway up or at the summit, where they could finally stretch their legs and welcome the yolk-colored sun as it peered out over the ridged spine of the Taconic Mountains. The buses left at the crack of dawn for the three-hour drive. For the most part, the freshmen adhered to this tradition, radiating eagerness as they climbed aboard, claiming seats together according to dormitory and sports divisions, but the sophomores usually took their hooky into the city, taking over Harvard Square, walking along the Charles or shopping downtown. The juniors stayed on campus, taking advantage of the empty campus to do shots in the common rooms or on the quad, running around recklessly and jumping into the pond half-clothed, whereas the seniors mostly hung to themselves in rooms, writing theses or visiting the sanctity of the labs to finish research or finish their incomplete syllabi.

  In their first three years, Lloyd and Karom had missed the opportunity to hike Mount Greylock. As freshmen they had both fallen asleep in the library studying for their first round of midterms, Karom for statistics and Lloyd for macroeconomics. The bell had resounded on campus but the two had snored, blissfully unaware, their heads on the wide wooden desks under the vaulted heavy wooden eaves of the library. The librarians had arrived in the morning to nudge them awake, but they had already missed the buses. Realizing their only other choice was to keep to their rooms for the rest of the afternoon continuing their studies, they’d timidly but courageously joined in with the juniors’ festivities. Their sophomore year, they had traipsed about the city with their friends, playing pool in developed pockets of industrial Kendall and eating garlicky twirly pasta in the North End. When they were juniors, Karom had had a huge research paper due, and though Lloyd had caught up with all his work, he’d pretended to need a few hours to revise his French for the oral examination the next day in order to keep him company in the library once again.

  So during their senior year, when the bell rang and awoke them—this time in their beds in a dorm in North Campus—they both decided to brave their luck with the freshmen, their keen faces straining toward the front of the bus, chattering away the whole time with the tinny sounds of Top 40 music echoing from portable CD players.

  When they’d gotten to the base of the mountain, where the bus let some hikers off before it wound its way to the top for the less outdoor inclined, Lloyd and Karom decided to disembark and hike the whole way up. Lloyd had worn hiking boots expressly bought for activities like this. His parents had sent them from Switzerland. The boots were creaky and stiff; he should have at least broken them in while walking around campus or the city. Karom wore old running sneakers, which were comfortable but unsupportive. They were the only two who decided to start their hikes from the base. It might take them hours but they had the time until the buses departed again at 8:00 p.m. that night. As they started on the winding footpath up the mountain, Lloyd barely kept pace with Karom’s long strides. Karom walked effortlessly, stalking up the incline like a mountain lion, his head down, determined to reach the top before sundown, while Lloyd capered in tow a few feet behind, straining with effort. When they paused at the trail break that led in three different directions, Karom turned to look at Lloyd, who was panting, small beads of sweat at his temples and slicking back his blond hair, whi
ch glinted in the sun. His T-shirt was soaked through and his sweatshirt was tied in a droopy knot at his waist.

  “You okay, man? Should we slow down?”

  “I’m good, I’m good. The air is so fresh. I guess I’m just not used to it,” Lloyd said.

  Karom sat down on a log, picking at some dirt from under his sneaker.

  “Come on, let’s take five.”

  Lloyd sat down obediently next to him, huffing the air out of his lungs and trying his best to bring his breathing back to normal.

  “We didn’t bring any sustenance,” Lloyd said. “No water or energy bars or anything.”

  “I was thinking about that. But I just remembered—I went on this foraging hike once in Central Park. I learned how to dig up mushrooms and truffles and the differences between the poisonous ones and the ones best for omelets. I bet we’re sitting right above a tasty snack.”

  “Central Park? Get out.”

  “Absolutely. There are over two hundred mushroom species found in the park alone.” Karom told him about the unexplored parts of the park, the Ramble, where swarms of birds nested in the fall on their way down south. If you visited the gnarls of branches overhead at just the right time, it sounded as if you were in an aviary. The cheeping and tweeting was miraculous, and once, Karom had timed it so that he lay down in the underbrush in a carpet of dead leaves as the birds swelled to a symphonic peak and he’d felt as though they were lifting him by his arms and flying him overhead. He told him about the hidden upper pond that few visited, where a family of raccoons had clambered down from their nest in the crook of a tree branch while he and his parents were picnicking in the midafternoon heat one weekend afternoon, a line of masked marauders obstinately prancing past them on eerily humanlike paws. He told him about the forest in the north end of the park, far away from carousel music and carriage rides, away from balloon vendors and bicycle rickshaws. The forest in which he himself had gotten lost a few times, although the area encompassed only a few city blocks. The trails within these woods were narrow and untrodden, silent and insensate, and it was under these tall, limber oaks that Karom had discovered the trove of fungi and allium that sprouted like candy within.