The Removed(11)

*

On my day off, I rode my bicycle to the library. Even when I wasn’t working, I would often come in to use the computer, since I didn’t have one at home and mainly used my phone online. At the computer I watched a video of a tiny coconut octopus underwater, enclosing itself in a clamshell. The tiny octopus moved slowly across the floor of the ocean, unraveling its tentacles around the clam and climbing into it before closing it.

“The shells serve as a shelter for these octopuses off the coast of Indonesia,” the narrator said.

I watched the video over and over. I don’t know why I was so captivated. It might’ve been the gracefulness with which the octopus enclosed itself, the way it moved so slowly, so certain of its goal. In a way I found it soothing, almost meditative. I wanted to believe that my goals were as important and necessary as this task seemed for the octopus. Why did it need shelter at that moment? Was there a predator lurking nearby, or did it simply feel the need for privacy and isolation, the way we humans need our privacy?

When I got off the computer, I headed downstairs to the basement and saw an old Native man, probably in his seventies or so. He wore a sleeveless shirt and baggy pants and had a cane with him. His hair was mostly gray and hung down to his waist. He was filling up his thermos at the water fountain. Something about him caused me to stop; perhaps it was that he looked a little like my grandfather, but this man had scars on his cheek, and I found myself staring at them.

“A bear cub scratched me a few weeks back,” he said, noticing me. “I was in the Rockies when I saw the bear. It looked peaceful, harmless, calling for me to reach out for it, to help it. But when I bent over to pick it up, it slashed me across the face. I didn’t get angry. What good is anger? What good is vengeance?”

“You look like my grandpa,” I said. “He lived to be one hundred and three.”

His gaze was intense. “My brother always wanted to live to be one hundred. The other day I visited him at the cemetery on the hill.”

“I have a brother there, too.”

“Buried?”

“Yes.”

He finished filling his thermos and turned to me. “I saw a young man walking around by himself. Maybe it was your brother’s ghost.”

He laughed at himself, took a drink from his thermos. But his face held a sadness, somewhere between longing and pain.

“I’m Sonja,” I said.

“Wado, Sonja,” he said. He nodded and wished me a good day, limping away with his cane.

I watched him disappear among the shelves of books, thinking how odd the encounter was, but that was always happening to me. My whole life I’ve felt I had strange encounters with people, so much so that in school I once made a list of strangers who came up and talked to me or asked me random questions. Maybe there was something important this man possessed in his spirit, manifested for me, but what message was he bringing?

I went outside and sat and waited for Vin to come out. They almost always came outside around this time. I wanted to finally meet him, and I considered, in a moment of excitement, crossing the street and going right up to the door and ringing the bell. Soon enough, though, Vin and Luka came out. They started walking down the block, so I followed them down Main Street to the fall art festival downtown. The festival was on a blocked-off street full of tents and booths, crowds of people, a stage with some teenage girl playing an acoustic guitar and singing a country-and-western song. Poor girl, she wasn’t a very good singer, and not many were paying attention to her. Vin and Luka walked ahead of me, stopping to buy snow cones. They walked from tent to tent, Vin holding Luka’s hand. I trailed far enough behind that I wouldn’t be conspicuous, but close enough that I could see them when they stopped at a craft table. I walked past them, shielding my face behind others, then stopped at the next tent and browsed watercolor prints from a local Cherokee artist, an older man wearing a bandanna. I ran my hand over bracelets and necklaces and saw him glance at me. I bought a threaded turquoise bracelet and stepped away. At the craft table, Vin was looking at his phone while a woman helped Luka make something with colored paper. I wanted to be that woman, to kneel down and help Luka make crafts and color on paper. After a few minutes I left and went home.

I lived in a small house down the road from my parents. I was glad I lived close to them, since Papa was seventy-four and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. For weeks he had been paranoid about someone watching their house. One night he sat on the deck for three hours, keeping a lookout for a burglar, until he finally fell asleep. I hated seeing him this way.

He never said much to me, even before the Alzheimer’s. Truthfully, we hardly ever talked at all. I wouldn’t say he ignored me, but he was more interested in Edgar, especially after Ray-Ray died. With me, he liked to just sit on his deck in silence and look out at the lake, the moonlight reflecting in the water. He always told me to pay attention to nature because it was usually crying out to us. We watched squirrels run across the grass. We listened to cicadas. Leaves fell from the trees and played in the wind like pale birds.

I DECIDED TO INTRODUCE MYSELF to Vin that night. I was at the Branch, where I had seen him perform several times. This night I felt bolder for some reason.

I sat at the bar and had a few glasses of Tempranillo while his band played their set. Vin sang only a couple of songs and mostly played electric guitar in the band. I would say they were of average talent, though the college kids enjoyed them. When they finished their set, I felt an urge to assert my presence, to make myself visible to him. I am a woman with shrewd eyes and a slender chin, and I felt confident that Vin would like me once he met me. I didn’t mind being older than guys I dated. The French writer Colette was in her forties when she was rumored to have had a sexual affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson. How magnificent she was, a woman who wrote so beautifully about sexual energy and desire, a woman I very much wanted to be like. I wished I could be like her without worry of being judged.