20. Gray Escapes

Three days, gray everywhere I looked. The bridge glinted because it was a brighter shade than the water, the sky—or the air, as shorn as the branches and growing colder, sharper each day, like a dull ache that throbs into pain.

Brutal, endless winters began with November days like those. And that year was no exception, except that I had no way of knowing that. I knew only that I’d felt as brittle as the wind breaking against waves under the bridge as cables wound around each other, carrying lots of people away from this place, this block—or through it, so they’d never have to see it.

The cold wasn’t so bad. At least it gave me a chance to cover myself—mother never had to tell me to put my coat or gloves on. No, I didn’t mind it when I got to cover everything except my eyes.

In those days—not so long ago, really—nobody wore sunglasses except movie stars and gangsters. Mother’d never wanted me to become either, and she didn’t have to worry about that. But with nothing to cover my eyes, the steely reflections that surrounded me were too much sometimes. I asked whether I might be going blind; it was the one time I can recall my mother using the word “foolish” in reference to me. Sometimes tears’d flicker down my face—really, I wasn’t crying. I wouldn’t’ve—at least, not about that, the secret I never told her. But I’m sure she always knew.

It was turning into a secret from me, too. Already, at an age when one is much too young for nostalgia, the previous year—when it seemed we were spending weekends going to and from the cemetery—already looked like a paradisiacal garden about to be lost. The sunlight and warmer air of the previous season, the previous year, had already begun to grow diffuse and ephemeral, like the illumination of dreams,, which is the very reason that season’s light didn’t seem as harsh and relentless as that of the following year, separated from me and its source by glimmers of clouds.

The previous year, my grandfather—the last man on this block related to me—died. Actually, he’d died in the spring, at the very beginning of the season, on a day not much different from the one I’ve been recalling, and it wasn’t so much his death as his absence that I noticed. Even then, when people I knew were “away”—and somehow I thought that was where my grandfather was—I could take solace, in surroundings. To this day, there’s no light that comforts me as much as the flickerings that follow the autumnal equinox in cemeteries.

But it seemed that in the following year, I saw no such light—only lines reflected in opaque mirrors. And I couldn’t escape: You can’t, as long as metallic reflections surround you. You’ve no choice but to cover yourself in the iron gray cloak that wraps around the hills and treetops, no matter what clothes you gathered after you’ve been taken naked but unable to scream into a place where a window opens in directions from which nobody else can see you.

Then you come back out. You’ve been told not to talk about it, but that wasn’t necessary because you won’t know how to for a long time. You won’t remember why, or if, thee was a reason why your body reacted as it did.