Moonglow (2022)

[preface: this story originally appeared in 2009 and was a short arc about a fractured friendship. This version is quite a bit longer and has a somewhat more complex storyline. And...it has nothing whatsoever to do with the 88th Key! Enjoy.]

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Life can be strange. Or strangely predictable, but who knows, really, when all is said and done. Some feel that life is simply the result of random chance, that coincidence is merely what it appears to be, while others believe in fate and destiny and the hidden hand of God. This split, what some see as a dividing line between chance and destiny, is often hard to see within the jumble of everyday events, yet perhaps it is that very invisibility that may account for the strangeness of a few unique encounters we stare down from time to time

Because some of these encounters may reveal themselves, in the fullness of time, to have been strangely unpredictable — even when we think we've seen something inevitable, even predictable at the time. You can get a kind of feel for this dividing line when you stare down these encounters, but once again it is the unpredictability of chance these chance encounters that often leads us astray. Or reason and faith may blur the line deliberately, if you can wrap your head around that concept.

As in: just when you think you've really got a handle on things, when you can finally see the true and righteous path ahead - that's when everything you've taken for granted seems to vanish in the shadows, right there in the moonlight. All your paradigms shift, the earth heaves underfoot — leaving you breathless and all too often unsure of your judgement. Maybe when your children grow up and leave the nest, begin lives of their own — but their lives take an unexpected turn. Or an uncle you hardly knew leaves you his prized Bill Evans collection — on vinyl, for heaven's sake — which would be swell if you hadn't given your turntable to the Salvation Army...like maybe fifteen years ago. What happens then? Where does this new path lead, and will you take it? Will you take a chance, or will you fall back into the comfortable?

But maybe your spouse bails on you and apparently for no reason other than he or she wanted a change of scenery, but a few months later you find out she has been doing it with your best friend — and for the life of you nothing about your life makes sense anymore. All the basic assumptions you held dear about your life — little things like where you were going to live and who you were going to live with — all of those cherished assumptions go up in smoke.

Yet as the earth heaves underfoot the righteous path ahead seems to dissolve in tepid mists of gray ambivalence, and you lost sight of the way forward. You fall into a hole. Grass so green it used to hurt your eyes turns to somber autumn leaves, suddenly dry underfoot and like you, dying — because now, just like you, there is no longer any doubt that dying leaves are without a care in the world. And when you start to feel sorry for yourself you tell yourself that you should be so lucky, that maybe the fate of leaves rustling in the Moonglow isn't really so bad. But have you considered that, perhaps, that's because you've forgotten on which side of the line you used to stand...? Do falling leaves care about faith and reason?

So your wife is gone and now there's nothing left but to knot your tie and go back to the grind. Despite it all you go to work and do your job — you soldier on despite those lingering feelings of ambivalence. Maybe you realized you were tired of the grind but suddenly too old to start over. Besides, you tried that once and it made no difference, because you've always carried around your unhappiness like a turtle carries his shell; wherever you go it follows right along with you, the load you cannot shake — just like those shadows you wish would go away and leave you be.

But...isn't life strange? Somewhere along this path you were on you had begun to believe that your own happiness had grown intertwined with another soul passing your way. Intertwined, with her shadow, perhaps. Two shadows, if you will, standing in the Moonglow. Two leaves, falling.

So yeah, hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work you go. Up at seven and get the coffee on, shower and shave and tie the noose around your throat one more time. Yet why does the coffee still taste the same — the same as it did in that other life. When life seemed new and full of the moment. When your leaves were bright and green.

But life ain't so new now, is it? Not after she left. Not after the house grew quiet and still. Nothing tastes the same, not even the life ahead.

Your hair is quite a bit grayer this year, isn't it, but don't kid yourself. That's white hair up there now, Slick. The crow's feet astride your eyes, your 'worry lines', are a little deeper too, but do really care?

Your wife calls you. Make that your ex-wife. She sounds all wrong, all kinds of unhappy, and for a moment you feel kind of happy as you bask in her misery. Then she's crying and you remember what those tears used to taste like. Your old friend, she tells you, who also happens to be her new husband, is in the hospital and he's been diagnosed with some kind of rare bone cancer. He has a few months "at most" she tells you. But why doesn't that hurt? Can't you feel pain now, or has that too fallen by the wayside? Did she take that away from you? Or do you really, maybe deep down inside, hurt for her? And for your old friend? The friend who stole your wife?

You don't know what to say so you say all the things you're supposed to say at times like this. Things like "what can I do to help?" or "Gee, I'm so sorry to hear that." And who knows, maybe you meant what you thought those words were supposed to mean. You're not happy now, that much you do know, but you really don't give a shit what she feels now. Do you? It's all an act, and you know it.

No more shadows in the moonglow. You know that much is true because you've seen it with your own two eyes. You've felt that pain of falling and now you have nothing left for her, for them. Maybe she knew that. Maybe she had to try.

The academic year is at an end. School's out and this is going to be your first summer without her since third grade. The last few days of classes come and go and you walk from campus to your house. Exams are tallied and grades submitted, then you pack a suitcase and grab your old Nikon and hop on the T to head over to Logan. It's time to run, and no one runs quite like you do.

Walk up to the Swissair counter and tell the toman your name. Hand over your passport and collect your boarding pass, and you've gotten all about falling leaves. You settle in a second floor seat on an old 747 and look at all the bags being loaded down there on the concrete and for a moment you wonder how so many people can fit inside one metal tube. Then you ask yourself 'why would so many want to? Why are so many people running away?'

Maybe because, after all is said and done, there's not a lot of difference between you and them? Walking the same path — maybe even in the moonglow, right? Together, our feet shuffling through fallen leaves? There aren't any lines dividing us, not really. We're all just a little confused. Faith and reason have left us breathless and unsure of ourselves.

A polite young thing comes down the aisle and offers you a moist, warm towelette and a glass of Champagne and you stare at the bubbles, wonder where they're going in such a hurry. 'The same place I am,' you tell yourself with an ironic little smile. All of us, all on the same road. Bubbles and all.

An hour after takeoff the polite young thing rolls a silver cart down the aisle and serves you freshly carved prime rib and creamed spinach and what, you wonder, could possibly be more absurd. A hundred years ago your immigrant grandparents were sailing to America across this same God forsaken ocean, and here you are going back in time, making the same journey in reverse while a polite young thing serves you prime rib while flying along inside a metal tube at six hundred miles per hour. Life has become so fucking absurd, hasn't it? But when was it ever not?

You land in Zurich early the next morning and walk out of one metal tube and into another metal cube and then it hits you: you haven't taken a breath of fresh air in half a day and now you have to take-in this conditioned crap called air for another few hundred yards. Absurd. Even taking a breath has become an act of audacious absurdity.

You take an escalator down to the basement and activate your railpass and hop on the local to the main station by the river in downtown Zurich — and before you know it you're inside yet another metal tube breathing even more conditioned crap and now this just seems plain silly. You get off the train at the main station and look at the departure board and there's an express to Interlaken leaving in a few minutes so you hop into the lone First Class carriage and find a nice single seat just as the doors close and the train pulls slowly from the platform. And you're breathing canned air again, aren't you? Inside another metal tube?

You wander inside a jet-lagged haze of stale coffee and another dreamless night, burning eyes focused on urban sprawl then open pasture that springs up out of nowhere. Another polite young thing comes by with more stale coffee and you nod thanks, because...why not? You've been on this train a hundred times before and yet it almost always feels the same. Like home. Maybe because your grandparents moved to America from here long before the war. The first one. When you finished school you worked here, first with the Department of State, even if this was the least foreign posting in all the world — to you, anyway, and then with the UN. All that led to a job in the White House, and those were the worst days of your life. Until recently, anyway.

You still have family here, in Wengen. They used to keep a small dairy herd; now they manage small herds of tourists. You visit them as often as possible because for some reason these pastures and valleys still feel like home. America, you realized once upon a long time ago, is a country of the unhomed. Lost, perpetually wandering. No conception of the past — because there is no past. America has always been about discarding it's past along the short cut to reinventing itself.

Interlaken glides into view and you smile at the pristine lake rimmed by towering peaks. You get off the train and grab a taxi for your usual hotel, the stately old Victoria Jungfrau, and once in your room you call your cousin, Elizabeth, and let her know you're in town. Plans for the evening are made and you take a nap with the windows thrown wide open to the fresh mountain air. There's nothing stale now, and you feel at ease for the first time in months.

Tradition reigns supreme in these ancient valleys, and no one understands how you can be so suddenly divorced from a woman you promised to spend your life with. It makes no sense to your family here; most came to Georgetown for the wedding and when things like divorce happen people's expectations change. Marriage is a forever kind of thing, and this uniquely American predilection for reinventing oneself seems particularly grotesque to them. Your cousins simply don't understand the why or the how of such things. Even less so once they figure out that you too don't understand. When you tell them that the best man in your wedding betrayed you, they understand even less. The subject is quietly changed when they read the pain behind your eyes, because all your life you've been like an open book to these people.

Your favorite cousin is a little more empathetic, but then again she would be. She was famous once, a ski racer and a kind of icon in her own way. Now she is the rather stately looking matron of a family of young ski racers; her husband is an architect but he also runs the family owned network of hotels in Wengen and Murren. They are established here now, because they have always been rooted in the loamy soils of these valleys. As they have been for millennia.

And you miss that sense of belonging to a place. You can't understand why your grandparents left this valley. It makes no sense — because constantly reinventing oneself is a relentlessly exhausting ordeal. Like you can never just be — because you're always too wrapped up with becoming.

You walk with her the next day, to the home beside the lower pastures where your grandfather once lived. "You seem so unhappy," she tells you. "Why don't you come home now?"

"Don't think I haven't considered it," you tell her. "But I'm an American now."

"That's a foolish state of mind," she reminds you. "You always seem so happy when you are here. You were born here. You are still a citizen."

You walk through the old home. It is spotless, of course. Pristine. Family still lives here but today they are working the high pastures — now that the snow is gone.

"This is your home," she reminds you and the words almost hurt — because you know the truth behind them. And the impossibility within.

You slice apples and cheese in the sunshine and talk about her children. She wants to know more about what happened. To your marriage. Because she really doesn't understand how something so right could fall apart so suddenly.

And it's impossible, this talk of coming back to live here. You're too different now. You'd never fit in. The hearts and minds in this valley are wrapped in granite, covered in snow, and you'd never be able to break through all that ice. Because you don't want to. Because what they have should remain unsullied. Marriage is good, or at least it used to be. Marriages shouldn't fall apart but when you are constantly reinventing yourself everything falls apart. Marriage has been the bedrock underlying everything in this valley — for a thousand years, so who are you to bring that contagion here?

You walk along the same old trails your fathers walked along and the earth underfoot pulls at you. You pass a farm and there are puppies for sale, Bernese Mountain Dogs. Big, boisterous tri-colored puff-balls full of big, loyal hearts. You talk to the people there and one of the pups seems to be following you around the yard and you can feel him calling out to you. You stop and pick him up and hold his face up to yours and the joining is instantaneous, sudden—like a slap on the face. He is yours now, and you are his. The decision is made, final arrangements set aside for another day. You walk away and are quite happy with this decision. Perhaps it's time to leave all that other life's nagging questions behind. All those fallen leaves.

Like...Tom was your best friend? For years. And you left without talking to him even once, even when you knew he was going to die. Soon. Did all those years stand for nothing, not enough for even a simple 'goodbye?'

And your wife? Your ex-wife. She was your best friend too, once upon a time, and when she called to tell you her new husband was going to die you knew she wanted to hear comforting words from you.

Did you meet her need as you'd met so many of her other needs? Was that why she left you? Solid, relentless work ten months a year followed by a couple of months of unrelenting wanderlust? Did you leave her in the dust of all the broken dreams you'd spent so many years ignoring? Did she hurt so much? Did you hurt her so much? Or was it too hard to see as you fell?

So here you are on the outside looking in. Did your grandparents feel this way, once upon their time? What made them run away from this valley? What makes you need this place? Why do you keep coming back for more?

Is it because sometimes you fuck up, even with the best intentions stuck halfway in mind? You crossed the line between faith and reason one time too many and couldn't find your way home? Like maybe you've been digging a hole for yourself for so long you've lost sight of the fact that you can't stop digging. You kept on digging even when you knew you were dead—or maybe you were just dead wrong. You could hide from the consequences of these questions during faculty meetings and even with your students, but who knows, maybe you were pretty good at keeping them from yourself, too. But Margaret knew the consequences — because she lived them. And she knew, in the end, what your silence really meant. Maybe she just got tired of waiting for you to see the truth. Maybe she lost faith in reason.

And it was about that time started to fall apart. Like that time when some smart-ass student came around and asked a really profound question — something mind-bending like 'Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?' — and you were left so completely befuddled by the question that not even another pint of Guinness could clear away the rain in your brain. Because maybe you'd lost your faith in reason, too? So...you started to fall. With a helmet.

You figure out the details of importing the puppy to the States and the day finally arrives. You pick him up early in the morning and your cousins take you to the central station for the train ride back to Zurich. Swissair allows him in the cabin — as long as he remains in his little nylon carrier — but really, just how much trouble could he possibly be? He's just a puppy!

The very same polite young thing came around with her towelettes and Champagne and she cooed when she saw Odysseus in his little red carrier, then she asked to hold him. You were only too willing, weren't you? She was, after all, a rather cute polite young thing.

Yet so too was Odysseus, and soon enough all the other polite young things came around for a coo and a cuddle. You even broke the rules and held him in your lap during takeoff, and he watched the world rotate away before it disappeared beneath layers of falling clouds, just before he turned and licked your chin.

Such a good natured pup. Such a loving bundle of joy.

The polite young thing wheeled along her cart of prime rib down the aisle once again and this time she even offered up a slice or two for your puppy and as soon as you unzipped the top of his carrier cute little Odysseus exploded upward like a sea-launched ballistic missile, careening forth with the velocity of a schizoid kangaroo on speed, ricocheting off the curved walls of the upper deck before landing at the top of the stairs just outside of the cockpit — where he dropped a Boston-sized turd the color and consistency of creamed spinach — before bounding down the gracefully curved stairway that led to the main passenger cabin below.

You followed. Not particularly gracefully as you stepped in his steaming turd, but you flew down the steps in record time — just in time to see your pup racing towards the coach cabin at the rear of the airplane, with two more polite young things already in hot pursuit.

They chased the wretched creature down one aisle of the 747 all the way through the coach cabin, and Odysseus arced around the aft heads — pausing there thoughtfully to dump another load — before coming up the parallel aisle on the other side of the aircraft. The pup really seemed to be enjoying this game, too, and lots of people were laughing and having a fine old time. Until you caught him, anyway. Then, after you managed to get him into his carrier again you looked at the remains of your lunch on the cabin floor before walking to the head to clean his crap off your shoes. No one seemed to think your puppy was particularly cute by that point, least of all the polite young thing left to clean up his mess all over the cabin.

But another plate appeared and the polite young thing even sat beside you for a while, playing with the puppy, of course, while you ate.

"Perhaps he didn't want to leave his home," she offered — politely — after you told her about the pup and your grandparents and all that. "Maybe that's why he is so anxious."