Naomi Mandel
I’m lying on my back at the bottom of this hole in the ground and I’m getting all freaked out and nervous because I can tell that the sun’s going to pass in the sky above my face and hit me right smack in the eye. I hate that. I have to squint for what seems like forever before the sun moves out of the way and the rim of the hole casts a shadow over my face, and I have a headache for hours after. Red spots in my eyes. Sure, I could turn my face away, shift in the dirt, lie on my side and face the wall for as long as it takes. But I haven’t moved in days and my bones and muscles have stiffened, and I don’t feel like peeling myself off the bottom of this hole even if I could. Besides, the ache of the cold and damp has settled inside me like a friend I don’t want to disturb.
So I’m lying here, hating the sun. I can see the rim of the hole get brighter and brighter and my eyes, unused to the light after so many dark nights down here, start to contract and squint and I can feel the headache coming on. My entire body tenses, like you do when you know you’re going to get hit, and the sky gets hot and white and when the sun slams into my eyes it feels like a freight train. “Damn,” I mutter, “damn, damn, damn,” my voice coming out a whisper and like sandpaper in my throat but the sound itself surprises me, I haven’t spoken a word since I’ve been down here, must’ve been a couple of weeks, I lose track of time.
And that’s when it happens. A welcome cool shadow as if someone has gently laid a wet cold towel on my forehead. At first I think it must be a cloud or maybe even an eclipse. My face, which I realize has been clenched like a fist, unclenches. I open my eyes, there’s some sort of round black object between the rim of the hole and the sun, casting a shadow over my face. At first I just lie there, my body relaxing, I’m gazing up at the miracle, not even thinking to speak.
“Hey, what are you doing down there?”
It takes me a while to realize she’s talking to me, I haven’t heard another voice in so long. “Hey,” she says again after I don’t answer, “you want to come up out of there or what?”
I shift my legs and try to sit. The comfortable ache in my bones wakes up and is mad, my entire body is one big stabbing pain. “Ah,” I say, involuntarily.
“Gee, it talks.”
I swallow some spit and clear my throat. “Help me out of here.”
She reaches a hand down and when she does her head moves out of my line of vision and the sun hits me in the eyes again and makes me reel. For a moment I can’t see at all, I’m blinded by all the light and the pain, and I just wave my arm around above my head till she finally catches on and grabs my hand and pulls. Her hands are dry and warm, and I realize how cold and clammy my own hands must feel. I’m still too stiff to move, and she pretty much pulls me out of the hole like you would pull a bucket of water out of a well.
I’m standing straight up on solid land, facing her. She has golden blond hair and a golden blond face and clear, sky-blue eyes. I’m still holding her hand and I can’t figure out if it’s her touch or the sun that’s warming my entire body, killing the old ache, feeling good. The blood starts to move again, sluggish at first and then pumping, my feet and fingers are tingling and the top of my head feels like it’s going to float away. This must be how plants feel in the spring. I take a deep breath and swallow a couple of times before I can say, “Hi.”
“Hey.” She has absolutely even white teeth and her hair glows in the sun. We just stand there, looking at each other. I’m wearing the same clothes I first went down into the hole with. I glance down at my hand in hers and see that it’s filthy. My face is probably coated with mud. I’m disgusting. The silence gets strange after a while and she pulls her hand out of mine. I remember my voice and clear my throat again and say, “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
She turns and looks like she’s going to walk away, she actually says something like “See you around,” and I grab for her, manage to get hold of her hand. “Wait,” I say, “Wait, please. Don’t go.”
She squints at me, blue eyes almost lost in golden lashes, then it looks like she’s made some sort of decision because she moves her warm fingers in my chilly, filthy hand till she’s holding me, not the other way around, and she pulls me after her to the coffee shop across the street.
We sit outside on the patio. I’m drinking coffee with a lot of milk and sugar in it and I don’t feel cold anymore at all. I smile at her. “You’re a lifesaver,” I say, “this is great.”
“My pleasure.” She’s relaxed in the chair opposite me, we’re both sitting in the sun, she has golden hairs on her arms as well and I have never seen anything so beautiful. “So,” she’s saying, “what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.” I cup my hands around the warm cup of coffee and look out across the street at the dark empty spot of my abandoned hole. I feel a tug of nostalgia or something but then I meet her clear blue eyes and I have to smile again. “I don’t know,” I repeat it, and suddenly not knowing feels like a relief.
She looks away and then back at me. “Well,” she says, and stops. She thinks about something, I can feel her making up her mind, and finally she says, “you could come with me, for awhile, at least, I guess.”
We sit there together in silence. It’s been a long time since someone has offered me a gift and this one is so vast and lavish that I don’t know what to say. She smiles and adds gently, “That is, if you want to.”
“I’m going to clean up,” I tell her. “Be right back.”
She stands up at the same time I do and we move towards each other and she raises her face up to mine and I bend my face down to hers in a gesture as natural and as easy as if we had perfected it over years. The inside of her mouth is smooth and living, she tastes like fresh rainwater and my hands are on her shoulders which are warm from the sun and her tongue nestles with mine like a handclasp. I pull away first and look into her eyes. “I love you,” I tell her. She hesitates a minute and then says, “I love you too,” and I can tell from her voice that she means it.
I leave her then and go inside. The bathroom at the back of the coffee shop is dark and cold after the sun on the patio and there’s no mirror, so I can’t tell how bad I look. I grab a bunch of paper towels, wet them down a little and clean my face, my neck, and my arms up to the elbows. I wet my hands and run them through my hair, my palms come up black so I do it again and again until most of the dirt is gone. The cold is starting to get to me and I figure this will have to do for now. Walking out of the bathroom I notice that the back door to the coffee shop is missing, there’s just an open doorway there and you can look through it into the street behind the coffee shop and the day outside, and I figure I’ll slip out and warm up a minute before I go back to her blond head on the patio. I go out through the doorway and stand there, just breathing in, feeling space, the sun is warm on my back and my feet have stopped tingling and my eyes are pretty much used to the light. Across the street behind the coffee shop there’s what looks like a construction site and I walk over a little bit to check it out.
I can’t tell what they’re building but it’s something big. There’s a lot of noise and activity and whistles and machines and black exhaust smoke from the tractors and clouds of dust everywhere but as soon as I see it at the far end of the lot I know what I have to do. I walk straight through the site, people are shouting at me and some kind of horn is blaring and I think I hear her screaming, way back behind me, but there’s so much noise and I’m so intent on getting there that I can’t really tell. The hole is just right, a little muddier than the last one but wide enough and deep. I go down into it without looking back, and the noise and the smoke and the clouds and the screaming shut off as if I had walked into another, quieter room and closed the door behind me.
I settle down at the bottom of the hole and shift myself so that my face is pressed into the dark smooth soil and my back is to the sky, and I wonder why I never thought of this before. I can stay down here forever and when the light comes at me I can just push my face into the earth and close my eyes. No more red spots, no headaches, no more lying there helplessly hating the sun. Of course, my back will get blistered and sore in the summer but the sun will feel good in the cold winter mornings and besides, the warm sun on my back will remind me of her. I push my face further into the cold, dark ground, I can feel the old familiar ache come back and settle in my bones, I close my eyes and almost laugh out loud at the utter absurdity of that idea. As if I needed the sun on my back to remind me. I will always remember the sunshine girl. Who ever heard of forgetting the woman you love?
Naomi Mandel is Professor of English and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island. She now writes mostly nonfiction. Her most recent book, Disappear Here: Violence After Generation X, asks what the Nevermind generation has to teach us about today’s world of media ubiquity, online activism, simulated sensation, and jihad.