Long for This World Tapa dura - 2003

Detalles

• Título Long for This World
• Autor Michael Byers
• Encuadernación Tapa dura
• Edición First Edition
• Páginas 448
• Volúmenes 1
• Idioma ENG
• Editorial Houghton Mifflin, Wilmington, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
• Fecha de publicación 2003-06-09
• ISBN 9780395891711 / 039589171X
• Peso 1.64 libras (0.74 kg)
• Dimensiones 9.26 x 6.44 x 1.35 pulgadas (23.52 x 16.36 x 3.43 cm)
• Library of Congress subjects Domestic fiction, Psychological fiction
• Número de catálogo de la Librería del Congreso de EEUU 2002191292
• Dewey Decimal Code FIC

1

It was a big old pleasant high school gym, built in the twenties and not much disturbed by renovation. The iron rafters met at a shallow angle at the roofline, and the tall windows were made up of a dozen big panes, each reinforced with chicken wire, and the two ancient clocks sat on opposing brick walls, ratcheting their works forward with an audible whir, hiss, clunk. The gym smelled nostalgically of varnish, sweat, and paint, but it was not an obsolete or shabby place. An electronic scoreboard reading garfield — visitors — quarter — fouls — time out had been added on the east wall, and a recent grant from FareWatchers.com had supplied the courtside officials with a new Huston-Marke computerized scoring system, a sleek blue box that sat beneath the long scorers’ table and extended its heavy gray cables to an outlet hidden under the bleachers.
The purple Garfield bulldog, wearing its studded collar, snarled up from the court’s center circle, and the backboards were regulation glass, and the nets were in good repair, and when the boys played here a riotous, explosive sort of crowd would gather, and the breakaway rims actually got some use, and once in a while — once a decade or so — someone would appear who was so obviously superior to the rest of the boys that his future would be discussed with the frank and half-informed calculation any phenomenon inspires. The boys’ team often played in the state tournament and had won it six years ago, and its purple banners hung from the rafters, drifting sideways when the big purple entry doors were left open to the hall.
But tonight the girls were playing, and very few people were there. From his seat midway up the home bleachers Henry Moss could see almost everyone who had come out of the rain to watch — a hundred or so people, including his wife, Ilse, and son, Darren, who sat directly in front of him, a row below, so he was looking down into their hair; and Sandra, his daughter, who was on the court, holding the ball with her back to the hoop, wearing the stern and thoughtful expression of someone taking apart a complicated bomb. The girls’ team was not nearly as good as the boys’ — in fact, they lost almost every game they played — but Sandra herself was very good, the starting center, and despite the team’s terrible record she carried herself up and down between the baskets with a kind of preoccupied confidence that plucked at Henry’s heart and made him lean down now and then to grasp his wife’s shoulders. She would pat his hands and hold them for a second before letting go. It was not an uncommon gesture there; the team was so bad — so unwatchably bad at times, really — that nearly everyone in the gym was related in some way to one of the players. So it was a tender and familiar gathering, on the home side, anyway, under the old painted roof, and Henry was faintly conscious of the fellow feeling that surrounded him. A girl made an unlikely shot, or rolled her eyes in some characteristic way, or wiped her mouth in a gesture of embarrassed happiness, and somewhere in the bleachers Henry sensed someone’s heart rising; there would come a bark of surprised laughter or a few beats of applause while the team fell back ten points, twenty before halftime. Even Darren would applaud his sister when he felt like it, though Henry suspected it was largely to draw attention to himself. He cupped his hands and shouted, “Go, Moss!” when she had the ball in the post, and when she stood at the foul line, her knees bent and the ball resting easily in her big, practiced hands — resting, resting — Darren would wait in silence until she cocked her elbows and sent the ball feathering through the net, when he would shout down at her, “And one!” with his newly deep voice, the voice of a stranger.
Behind them at the top of the bleachers tonight were a dozen or so children too young to be left at home alone but old enough to throw crumpled-up paper at each other, and occasionally at Henry. After being hit twice in the head, not accidentally, he had had enough, and he made his slow way up to the top of the bleachers, where the benches were deeply gouged with graffiti, blue and black, name after name: Michelle Grigo Peeper LaShelle VeeVee Ashlee Adam Brad LaVonn. The children, seeing that he was there to stay, moved off to the other end of the stands and eventually through the open purple doors into the long empty hall outside, where they could be heard chanting, “Got no money, got no friends, got nobody that he can —” and then something he could not underrstand.
The crowd below him was clustered into groups of five or six, with a small population that circulated from group to group, making the rounds. As he watched, Darren, just turned fourteen, stood and maneuvered down beside a clutch of thhhhhree girls, who after a moment burst into laughter at something he had said. His boy! Darren was not a handsome kid — his jaw was too long and seemed packed with teeth, and his eyes sat very deep in his skull, as though someone had pressed them in with a thumb. Henry had looked exactly the same at fourteen and had spent most of his adolescence staring at girls longingly from across the room, but Darren was different. Fearless.
Henry’s wife tipped her head back, looked at him strangely, upside- down. What are you doing up there? her eyebrows asked.
He shrugged. Nothing. Enjoying the view. Up close, the iron rafters could be seen to have been painted dozens of times, white over white over white, and a faint tapping on the roof was rain. When he peered down through the slats of the bleachers, he could see in the looming darkness below a discouraging litter of potato chip bags, soda cans, miscellaneous papers, odd articles of clothing, but it seemed to Henry a secret, alluring kind of place, way down there and out of sight, the sort of hideout he would have liked to investigate if he were not fifty-one, a father, and an eternal source of potential humiliation to Sandra and Darren. So he stayed where he was.
After a few minutes the chanting children came leaking back in from the hall, and one by one they ducked under the bleachers. Everyone knew they were not supposed to be there, but no one stopped them from running back and forth forty feet below him, ducking through the steel supports and laughing at the sight of a hundred asses on display in rows — laughing and laughing, until someone’s mother finally corralled them and distributed them to their various parents in the stands.
At length Henry’s wife rose and climbed to join him. She was tall — she had given Sandra her height — and wore a white turtleneck and white jeans. “I do not foresee a comeback,” she announced. She was Austrian, her accent smoothed by eighteen years of American English. “You look very sinister up here, like that man in The Parallax View up in the catwalk. Did you see that?” “I think we saw it together.” “I mean Darren. Did you see him go down to those girls?” She leaned closer. “The one on the left, farthest from him, has been looking at him all night. Isn’t she pretty?” “That’s Tanya. She was at his birthday.” She put a hand on his knee. “He’s not handsome, but he is smart,” she said. “If it’s done the right way, it can be very attractive.” “Does that count as a date?” “I don’t think anybody actually dates anymore, I think they just all clump together like that and go around in a big . . .” — she searched — “a big herd. He said he was going down to check on something and then he just went right down and sat next to them!” She shook Henry’s leg in excitement. “He’s so much braver than I was, Henry — he must get it from you.” “I think he gets it from your mother.” “What a terrible idea! Don’t tell her, she’ll just hate him all the more. How awful it must be to have us here in the first place. I’m sure the only reason he came was because he knew Tanya was going to be here too. Good for him.” “What’s she doing here?” “Maybe she knew he was going to be here. Or maybe he’s developed some kind of mind control device. Henry, you should ask. I’m going to cry if they kiss.” “She is pretty.” “He’ll grow out of that poor face of his,” she assured him. “He’ll end up looking normal.” They sat together in silence for a minute, listening to the rain overhead. It was a driving, solid rain; it had been raining for weeks and weeks. Sandra scored, then watched the other team race ahead of her for an easy basket while Marcia Beck, the Garfield coach, looked on with her arms folded.
“You realize if we stay too long up here together talking, people will think we’re having some kind of marital troubles.” “I like it up here. Nobody chucks stuff at my head.” “I promise I won’t chuck stuff at your head. Oh, isn’t it exhausting, even thinking about being a teenager again? Please, darling.” She stood, took his hand. “Come be old with me.
We’ll sit far away and not disturb him.”

It was January, wet but strangely warm, unnervingly so, and with the four of them in the car the windows quickly fogged. “What were you doing way up there on the top step?” Sandra asked him as soon as they pulled out of the lot. “I looked up there and I was like, What is my dad doing?” “I was trying to get onto the roof.” “So you could jump, I guess, thanks a lot.” She leaned forward and spoke almost directly into his ear, too loudly. “By the way, that ref is totally incompetent. He used to do JV games and he was okay but now he’s doing varsity and he thinks he’s all that and he doesn’t even know the rules half the time. He kept saying things were sideouts that weren’t and we were like, That’s not a sideout!” She had Henry’s round bland face but Ilse’s long, articulated body, and after games she was almost always hyper like this; other times she hardly spoke at all. “Who was that up there with you?” “That was me,” said Ilse.
“No, before you.” “Just a bunch of kids.” “No, I mean there was somebody else up there with you, some grownup.” “It was just your mom.” “Before her.” “No, honey,” he said, “there wasn’t anybody else up there.” “Yes there was,” she insisted. “There was some guy sitting next to you with a white shirt.” Ilse turned to him, looked back at Sandra. “That was me, darling.” “I know what you look like, Mom, duh.” “She thinks you look like a man,” Darren said from his dark corner.
“No I don’t, Mom. I saw you going up there, but this was before.” Ilse turned to him again. “Henry?” “You’re seeing things, baby.” “I am?” Sandra’s voice was quieter, confused. “That’s weird.” They drove on in silence. Christmas lights were still up in a number of houses, and they bleared through the foggy windshield. It was a Friday night, not quite ten o’clock, and in the neighborhood around Garfield the low-riding cars were out in number, parked in the fluorescent glow of the gas stations or thumping past on their way downtown, the windows tinted black, the chrome wheels shining. Henry did not find them particularly menacing but someone must, he imagined.
“Seriously, there wasn’t anybody up there?” his daughter asked.
“No.” “Really? It was some blond guy.” “Honey, that was me! Never mind. I can see I’ll have to get a new haircut.” “I’m not trying to insult you, Mom.” Sandra leaned forward again, her hands draped over the seatbacks. “I like your hair, it’s totally feminine.” “It isn’t too puffy?” “No, it’s nice! It’s soft.” She touched it. “I wish mine was like that.” The neighborhood got more expensive as they went toward the lake. The houses grew larger and were placed farther back from the street, and the trees were taller and included some truly immense firs and cedars, majestic old trees that had been spared the saw a hundred years ago and now could be seen from blocks away, towering over everything. The two hemlocks on Hynes Street were both enormous specimens, six feet across at the trunk and at least eighty feet high, with broad spreading branches that dropped millions of tiny needles all year long. Now and then during big storms, upper branches would come loose and fall to the street, broken, like huge green wings. The neighborhood had debated cutting the trees down, but so far they had both survived, and Henry was happy about this; he liked them, the oceanic sound they made in a good wind, the sheltering sense of them above the houses, the shade, the size of them, the way you could stand at the base and look up into them and let your eyes climb from branch to branch. A big tree is like a house, he would think, looking up into them, and like anyone else he had a fondness for big houses.
“You’re lovely,” he told his wife when they parked.
She smiled faintly. “Don’t you start,” she said.
Their own house, standing within needle range of the bigger of the two hemlocks, was a smallish, haphazardly kept, shingled gray structure that needed paint and possibly a new roof, though neither was likely to happen anytime soon. They were saving for college, and while they earned good salaries, they weren’t rich, and the amount of maintenance required to keep any house in fighting shape was, for Henry and Ilse, not worth the money or the effort. Squirrels lived in the eaves, and the baseboards were all coated with dust and the plaster was crumbling, so a good hard rap with the knuckles could set off a long, disintegrative trickling within the walls, and the basement was a warren of unlabeled storage crates and defunct equipment that for some reason was too valuable, too interesting, or too loaded with sentimental value to discard.
Most of the sentimental stuff belonged to Henry, it was true, and though once in a while he felt an impulse to rid himself of unnecessary things, he could not contrive, when it came down to it, to really find anything completely unnecessary — not his high school graduation gown, though the purple polyester had gone brittle with age and smelled chemically strange, as though its component materials were gradually separating from one another, not the old corduroy driving cap he had worn to medical school but that was now too big for him (he had had a sort of Afro in the seventies), and not the keys to his first and now long-vanished car, a green Dodge Valiant station wagon on whose radio he had first heard “Here Comes the Sun” while driving across North Dakota.
None of the things in the fifteen or twenty unopened boxes could Henry bring himself to discard. Did he love himself so dearly as this? He did, he supposed, but he felt it was a more or less harmless vice. And the children added their own things, their heaps of books and rollerblades, and Darren in particular seemed to undress himself at random around the house, so his long skinny T-shirts and battered sandals showed up everywhere, and Sandra had five or six gym bags and grabbed whichever one was at hand and left the others to sit and ferment delicately — she did not sweat much — here and there.
For all this the house was not disorderly, exactly; Ilse was precise with the family accounts, and Henry was a meticulous scientist with a famously tidy office. But their energies were spent elsewhere than at home, and though he and Ilse both noticed that the carpet was dark and grubby and the foyer was a heap of discarded shoes and the attic was a disorganized clutter of still more boxes and put-aside toys, Henry didn’t care. Tonight he emptied the trash, and that was enough. He took a hat from the rack, carried the bag with him into the back yard.
It was a warm, wet January night, getting warmer. Above him, the mountain ash was bare of leaves, but how long would it wait before it was convinced that spring was on the way?
Three pear trees and a ragged ditch full of ivy separated them from the Nilssons, whose back yard abutted their own; in the ivy lived a population of Hyla regilla, the Paci.c tree frog, little inch-long creatures encased in a taut green skin that had the bright reflective glossiness of oil paint. The frogs shuffled through the ivy and lurked under the pear trees like a kind of fallen, inedible fruit, and often, especially after a big rain, they would arrange themselves in sixes and sevens on Henry’s driveway, panting as if desperately sick, peeping with a frightened insistence, Hell-o? Hell-o? Hell-o? It was unsettling to see. Henry — he was a geneticist — knew that chemicals in the groundwater were breaking down the zona pellucida of the amphibian egg, and that increased levels of ultraviolet radiation were introducing into the amphibian helicase a deadly rate of mutation, and that there was nothing he or his wife or anyone could do about any of it, really, except sit around and worry about what seemed the precipitate decline of the world, which Henry already did plenty of anyway. It was too warm, the warmest winter on record, warm enough for the frogs to be singing like this in January. If he stamped his feet he could scare them all back into the safety of the lawn, but a minute later they would creep back out into danger, seeking on the hard flat concrete something Henry could not imagine. Their own demise. Their own relief. He hated to see anybody suffering, even these dumb old frogs who didn’t have the sense to look after themselves anymore.
He lifted the lid of the plastic can and dropped the garbage in. Shuffled his feet to silence the frogs.
But when he put himself to bed, their song had begun again.
“You’re sighing,” his wife told him.
“I am?” “See? That. That was a sigh.” “Those dumb guys are out there again.” She rolled to him, lifted herself on her elbows, peered down into his eyes. From six inches away her big face was a dark moon, her yellow hair standing on end around it. “Henry, I don’t really look like a man, correct?” “Correct,” he said. “Do you really like my new hair? Sometimes I think it makes me look just a little bit like Michael Landon.” “He had nice womanly hair.” “But it’s something about my face — it looks strange lately. I think my nose is getting bigger or something.” Zumsing.
“I don’t think so.” “But,” she countered, “have you actually measured it?” “Have you?” “I’m afraid to. I think it will tell me two millimeters per week — welcome to Big Wide Nose Land,” she said. “Now you have to stop sighing. You can’t do anything about the frogs, sweetheart, they’re lonely for love.” “They’re out there right now, it’s crazy.” She thumped his chest.
“Don’t I try to dress nicely?” “You do.” “Don’t I paint my toenails sometimes?” “Baby, you’re beautiful.” “Maybe I’m not beautiful, but I am big and powerful,” she said, and levered herself on top of him. “I can squish you like a bug.” “Say that again.” “Like a bug,” she said. Lie-ek ay-a bugg-a, exaggerating. “Did you know you were moaning in your sleep last night? Again?” “I was not.” “You certainly were! You were lying there moaning like a mummy.” “I was?” “You were.” “Like the Mummy or just a mummy?” She considered. “I think like the Mummy. I think you were having a dream.” She lowered her head to his chest. “Actually, you sounded very sad.” “I’m not that sad.” “Was it a dream?” Her head was warm on his chest. “I don’t remember. ” Last night was a blank to him, but he worked with sick children, dying children, and it was possible the work had been spilling over into his dreams. A favorite patient of his, William Durbin, was going to die soon, and he was only fourteen — only as old as Darren.
Fourteen! It was a horrible thing, but it was going to happen; there was nothing anyone could do about it, nothing in the world. “It’s probably just William,” he said.
His wife said, into his chest, “Poor William. I’m sorry, darling.” “I know.” “I don’t want you to be sad,” she said.
He reached behind his head, closed the window, embraced her again. She was heavy, but it was a nice weight. She was as tall as he, no taller. They matched. The room was quieter now, dark. Patterns from the streetlight danced on the ceiling. His wife, heavy on his chest, an anchor, a shield. “I know you don’t,” he said.

Copyright © 2003 by Michael Byers.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

"A wise story of ethics and family affection...No one is overdrawn, everyone is as real and worth knowing as he or she can be...Deep and real." Kirkus Reviews, Starred

"Compassionate, richly detailed...[the] characterizations are so vivid and convincing that they are nearly hyper-real..." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"Hooray for [Michael Byers'] grand scope and compassionate voice." --Karen Valby Entertainment Weekly

"[Byers] displays a virtousity with figurative language that puts him in a class with such new American masters as Charles Baxter and Antonya Nelson." --Thomas Mallon Atlantic Monthly

"'Long for This World' . . . is a piercing scientific and familial romance. . . Byers effortlessly conveys the quick pivots and non sequiturs of familial byplay." --Kerry Fried The New York Times Book Review

A first novel wise beyond its author's years.
The Chicago Tribune