In Transit

What he had forgotten — and he had forgotten it the way a man forgets a tooth, not from ignorance but from refusal — was the ground.

He went out of the window at eleven forty on a Monday morning in February in the Cascade foothills and he crossed the back walk and the yard and the alley and he was, in that crossing, free in a way that no one who has not done it can be told about, and the thing he had forgotten was that the ground takes everything you are and holds it up for the world to look at.

Snow on a winter field is a ledger, and he was walking on it in bare feet, and each step printed him. Not his shape. Not his face, and God knew there was nothing to print, but the marks of a man: two round holes, one after another, going across Otis Pell's yard and out into the alley and up the frozen ruts of Vine Street and away, and any child in Bellhaven could follow them, and a child in Bellhaven did follow them, because Danny Wexler came down the fire escape of the feed store and stood in the alley and looked at the line of holes going up the hill and then went and told everybody.

So he learned the first thing he had ever had to learn since the night, two winters before, when he had stood naked in a dark room in Seattle and watched his own hands go away: you walk where the ground keeps no record.

He walked in the road. He walked the plowed edge where the county had been through with the blade and the gravel was bare, and then he walked the ditch where the melt had run, and then he walked the shoulder in the frozen slush that two hundred tires had already ruined, and the cold came up through the soles of his feet in the form of a pain so precise that it stopped being pain and became information, and the information was: twenty minutes more and the flesh of your feet will be the wrong color, and forty minutes more and it will be dead.

Half a mile past the town line he found the mill.

The mill had been Bellhaven's reason for existing from 1951 to October, and it had shut the way mills shut, which is to say badly and from the inside out: first the night shift, then the third line, then one afternoon in fall a notice taped to the gate, and now everything sat behind the chainlink the way a body sits in a room after everybody has left it. The paint shop was the last building, at the end of the yard, beyond the kill floor and the long shed. The state had put its fence around the waste ponds in 2011 and there were four of them, and they were still there, and in February there was ice on them the color of a badly made cup of coffee and nobody in Bellhaven would eat a fish out of the river downstream.

He knew the paint shop from the inside. Not this one. He knew the type: he had spent a summer of his adolescence in a shop like it — the long steel bench, the sheet metal, the booms, the racks of hanging parts, and the smell, which was the smell that had come up off Vera Pell's carpet and off the crates and off his own hands for two months and which was the smell of a particular chemistry and a particular century, and it was the first thing that had ever made him homesick for anything.

The door was ajar. He got in and he got into the corner behind the compressor, where the wind did not reach, and he sat down on the concrete with his arms around his shins and he did not, in that first hour, think about anything at all. He had gone through in the space of about ninety seconds: the fire, the bandage coming off his head, the face of the deputy, the window, the six feet of air. He was not going to get that back.

What he had, on the concrete floor of the paint shop at one in the afternoon, was this.

He had his body, which was invisible, and the invisibility was a condition with three terms. He had worked them out in the first month, in the room above the inn, and he had written them down, the way he wrote everything down, in a hand he would then have to remind himself he could not read in a mirror.

One: he could not eat in front of anybody, and he could not eat and then be seen, and the interval was longer than anybody thinks. Whatever went into him stayed lit up inside him until it was finished with, and his body was a glass case with a digestive system in it, and the length of the interval was between four and five hours. He had learned that on the second night, sitting in the dark and watching a dark knot — the first thing he had eaten in three days — move slowly down a tube he could watch all the way. He had not been able to look at it. He had looked at it for an hour.

Two: he could not let matter rest on him. Dust, ash, the pollen of the valley in spring, the mud of a wet road, the ordinary grime of a human day, all of it behaves on skin the way wet paint behaves on the floor of that shop, and once it is on him it is on him, an outline of a man, and he must wash, and there is no washing a man who is not there in a room where the water comes out of a tap and the tap has a handle and the handle weeps for thirty seconds after you let go of it.

Three: he could not sleep where a dog could smell him, and the valley had a dog in every other house, and by the end of the afternoon the valley would know more about him than he knew about it.

And the four hundred and something dollars in twenties in the brown envelope were in a wooden crate under the pallets in the woodshed behind the Wayfarer Inn, with his clothes and his boots and the three marbled notebooks, and he could not go and get them, because a man carrying a crate is a crate.

He got out of the paint shop at dusk and he went across the frozen stubble of the mill field and stood at the county road and watched four cars go by in twenty minutes, and then he went back and sat in the paint shop again, and that night he did the thing that he had known he was going to do since about four o'clock, and which he could not make himself do until full dark, which was to go back into the town.

Not for the crate. Bellhaven was awake. Bellhaven was standing on Vine Street — he could see, from the rise at the end of Mill Road, the lights of four vehicles down there by the Wayfarer and twice that many more at the corner, and Bernie Kaminski had his porch light on and the church was lit up on a Monday night.

He went back for clothes.

He went in over the Swensons' back fence on the east side of town, at the end of Mill Road, where the streets give out, and he crossed nine yards in eleven minutes and stopped in a hedge and stayed there while a dog went mad four feet away on the other side of a chainlink and then gave up. He took a canvas tarp off a woodpile. He took a man's work coat off a hook on a back porch and a flannel shirt off a line and a pair of socks and he took shoes off a rack by a door, and he felt, doing it, like a thing that has come out of the river.

He got out with a coat around him and the socks on his feet and no shoes, because a man's shoes are the one thing that cannot be hidden and cannot be washed and cannot be worn barefoot in snow, and he went back along the hedge line and across the county road and up to the mill and put the coat on and lay down behind the compressor with the tarp over him and slept for four hours with his mouth against his forearm and then woke up, because of the cold, and could not sleep again.

And lying there at three in the morning, with the smell of the paint shop coming up off the concrete and the line of his own breath going into the invisibility, he did the arithmetic he had been avoiding since the window.

He could not stay in the valley another day. He could not get the crate himself, because a crate floats. He could not buy anything, because a shop needs a person to buy it and he had no face and had, on his own person, eleven dollars and forty cents of the eleven thousand four hundred, which was in the woodshed under the pallets. He could not live on stolen coats and Newberg porch stoops for a month, and a month was nothing, six weeks was nothing, six weeks was the working minimum to re-derive it from the notebooks and buy a bench and buy the glass and find a place with a drain and a roof where nobody would notice the water bill.

So there was one thing he needed before every other thing, and it was not money and it was not the notebooks and it was not a face.

He needed a man to be him.

He needed somebody with hands to buy the bread and a mouth to answer the clerk and a name to put on the rental form and a body for the dogs; and he needed it in such a way that the man would not be able to leave, and would not be able to talk, and would not, on any morning in the eight weeks he was absolutely essential, get up and walk down the driveway of his own accord.

Lying on the floor of the paint shop with a stranger's coat over him and the tarp over that, he did the thing he always did with a problem, which was to take it apart until it stopped being a moral problem and became a design problem, and then to design it.

He slept again just before first light, and this time he slept well and without dreams, and he was still asleep at eight o'clock in the morning when the school bus came down Mill Road and stopped at the end of the driveway of the big dairy farm two fields over, and he was still asleep at nine when the farmer, who was a man of forty-one named Dale Sedgwick, came out of the farmhouse with his jacket half on and stood on the porch and looked at the weather and went back in and came out again and went to the barn.