First Steps

Martin woke earlier than normal and groped in the dark for his bedside table. His fingers brushed against Alice’s picture frame as he reached for the braille clock, probing for the raised digits. The clock had been one of many gifts given to him by well-intended friends who wanted him to know that they still cared for him and felt for his loss, but considered themselves too polite to admit that they did not know how to accommodate him in their lives now, and could not bring themselves to admit they were afraid to learn how. Martin’s fingers brushed the hands of the clock and traced them to the raised bumps that described numbers which told him the current time was a quarter past four. He rolled onto his back, arms and legs splayed out in an unintended imitation of his dream-backstroke, the sheets tangled around his limbs in detergent scented waves. Their constriction of his wrists and ankles was reassuring in an indefinable way as he waited to doze off again.

Sleep refused to return though, but Martin remained in repose for the better part of an hour. He had all but given up the ghost as he heard a key turn in the front door lock as Joanne—the cleaning lady whose early weekday morning services had been another gift from his friends—arrived to start her work. Though the bedroom had begun to grow stuffy, Martin refused to move, not even long enough to rise and open a window, even as the abrasive scent of surface cleaner wafted under the bedroom door and tinged his thoughts with lemon and ammonia. Here in the small hours before sunrise, Martin was afraid. It was an inexplicable, crawling fear that made his limbs leaden, made rising from bed even more of an impossible feat. Yet this morning, like so many mornings in the past few months when he had been woken from his dreams, sleep refused to return. His subconscious had taken to using the medium of his dreams as another avenue in which to remind him of the emptiness that had taken up residence in his chest, just left of center. So too had his emptiness colored his waking hours as he lay prone, as the walls of his bedroom had adopted the unpleasant habit of making him feel as if they were closing in on him until they had compressed all of the silence and still air in the room into a coagulated, hot mass that paced and curled, feline-like, atop his chest and weighed him down and sapped his strength and made his temples pound as he struggled to breathe.

On most mornings he had waited out his fear by burrowing under the covers where he curled up, protected by the childlike belief that layers of cotton, down, and coarse linen would protect him from the ghosts that waited for him in the corners of the room where the shadows amassed their miseries. Sometimes sleep would return then, but more often than not on mornings like this when Alice’s voice echoed in his ears, that comfort was kept from him.

As Joanne’s pleasant din moved from the kitchen (where, he could smell, fresh bread was now baking) to the living room, Martin was forced to accept that sleep would not come. The walls continued their inward creep, and he felt half-certain that if he were to reach over the side of the bed his fingers would come in contact with one of those walls and find it undulated and heaved like the flank of some great beast drawing breath.

The realization dawned on Martin that he could not stay here, holed up in that room haunted by Alice, to be tormented by the silence and the walls that compressed the air. He knew that to stay any longer was to go mad, and he was not ready to give up his sanity just yet. Still, the thought of going outside seemed equally as terrible; in the months that had passed since Alice’s burial, he had not set foot outside, existing instead as a hermit in the echoing rooms of his home, subsisting on radio programs or stories from Joanne he only half heard as his mind wandered.

He collected enough strength to hoist himself up. Through a series of steps and turns and sideways shuffling he had memorized and practiced with closed eyes when they had still been able to see, Martin went to the closet. Inside, he ran his hands over a row of his shirts, each washed, dried, ironed, and suspended on wooden hangers, their smooth cotton weave a braille map that guided him to the shelf where Joanne had arranged his sweaters into neatly-folded stacks so that he could retrieve one without much trouble. He pulled a heavy wool cardigan from one of the shelves, and as he pulled it on, his left hand got caught up in a twisted sleeve. With some effort he forced his arm through and his hand swung in a wide arc into the side of the closet that had been Alice’s, and as his fingers brushed the smooth silk of one of her blouses the small room became clouded with her perfume. The aroma of lilacs insinuated her presence within the small space, which soon took on the same oppressive, constricting feeling the bedroom had.

Martin choked back a sob as he tore from the closet, fumbling with the thick cardigan as he pulled it over his flannel pajamas. His right shoulder slammed hard into the frame of his bedroom door as he rushed from the room and, unbalanced, he bumped into the opposite wall, disturbing something—a mask or a picture, he couldn’t tell—as he tried to correct his course.

“Martin, you’re up early,” Joanne called from a corner of the living room, her cheerfulness such a force of nature all its own that Martin sometimes wondered if she had been paid extra for her enthusiasm.

“Need to take a walk—” Martin muttered as he fumbled for his coat on the rack and jammed his feet into an old pair of well-worn loafers he kept near the front door, which he threw wide open. Joanne made a noise behind him, but he had already grabbed his cane from beside the door and rushed outside without another word and let the door slam shut behind him with a bang that cut off conversation with the finality of a period.

Martin stood on the front stoop and a cold morning breeze blew up around him, filtering down to chill his skin through the gaps between the buttons on his coat. His hair, disheveled from sleep and now tousled by the air, tickled at his forehead as he imagined breath leaving his mouth in great puffs of steam. His ears twitched as they adjusted to the outside and filled with the sounds of a city rising from its slumber. Somewhere on the street a car sputtered to life and rumbled through the frigid morning air, where it turned a corner and merged into the distant susurrus of early morning traffic. Martin heard sirens; the piercing wail of an ambulance and a fire truck’s aggressive blare. The way they echoed around the distant buildings led him to guess that they were charging their way up Lake Shore Drive. Having remained cloistered inside for so long, he had forgotten how accustomed he had otherwise become to the chorus of an Autumn morning in Chicago.

Once Martin had become acquainted with the racket, a new thought took hold in his mind, and he shuffled his feet on the concrete of the stoop as he realized the gravity of his situation; that he had just taken his first steps out of his house, alone. A new panic threatened to take hold, and he groped in the dim greyness for the railing of his front steps. He turned back towards his front door, and on the other side he heard the muffled hum of a vacuum cleaner in the living room. He had forgotten his keys. He took a step towards the door, a hand poised to knock but paused, thinking better of it. He wasn’t ready to answer any of the questions Joanne was sure to ask about his behavior—in part because he wasn’t sure of his reasons, either. He knew she would be there for several hours still, so there was no rush.

Martin thought of just how many years he had spent working to get into this house and the great irony that now, instead, getting out of it had become his greatest desire. When Alice had still lived there, Martin had been so sure of himself, his place in the world, and how to walk within it. After seven decades of life, a little more than five of them working, more than four of them married to Alice, Martin had thought he had this life thing figured out. In the last few years, though, it seemed that life had been almost brutal in its haste to prove him wrong.

Martin and Alice had been inseparable, two halves of a whole. They had never had children; they had lacked the desire, and hadn’t had the time besides. Once married, they had been consumed by a mutual wanderlust that had been so insatiable that it had precluded any sliver of yearning to lay down roots. They had both worked hard and saved as much as possible, so that they could take vacations in the winter and summer. When the time had come to retire, they had traveled to any distant corner of the world that called to them. Alice had wanted to see as much as possible as soon as possible, always eager to set out on the next adventure, and would have been plotting new courses the moment they returned home.

That home, the one Martin now stood outside of, was a home in a more interpretive sense; it was a modest greystone in Old Town, the place that they had always returned to at the end of the day, and where they had paused for rest between trips. It had been a base of operations and a museum dedicated to the collection of their memories and, as such, felt more like a gallery than a lived-in space. Each room was a jumble of artifacts where precious items lay beside gift shop bric-a-brac, antique treasures sat on shelves beside snow globes that contained cheap plastic reproductions of famous landmarks—the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Liberty Bell, and so on. Each room was a riot of color, where vibrant prints of wood-cut ukiyo-e portraits of geisha and the celebrities of a Gion long past were hung beside photos of the iridescent blue waters and ethereal white structures of Mykonos, and vintage travel posters from Rio de Janeiro, Egypt, and Honolulu. Wood and clay masks from Gabon and Mwenge, bleached white by the sun or splashed with streaks of red and yellow paint made unexpected appearances in rooms, as if the walls had grown faces to keep watch over their contents. Each room was painted a different color, though because it had been a half-hearted attempt by Alice to lend theme and organization to their collections, the painting on more than a few walls had been left unfinished. Torn bits of blue masking tape still lingered in some of the corners long after the project had been abandoned.

Martin remembered a time he had come home from running errands one day to find all of the furniture of their living room massed together in the center of the floor, one and a half walls painted a muddy, rust orange-brown color.

“What do you think? Too much?” Alice had asked as she set the paint roller in its tray.

“It’s beautiful.” Martin had been caught off guard; he hated the color, but she always brought out the diplomat in him. “You were going for ‘mud wallow,’ right?”

Alice had twisted her face into an exaggerated pout at that, and had turned to examine her work. “It was supposed to match the color of that adobe we saw in Chile. The girl said it’d look different when it dried.” She picked at a streak of paint that had dried on her shirt. It was the same, ugly color. Alice frowned. “I think she lied.”

“Nonsense,” Martin said, trying his damnedest to keep the smirk off of his face, his voice level. “I happen to think it’s a lovely color when I’m not looking directly at it.”

Martin had then set down the bags he’d brought in and rummaged in one of them to finish unboxing a brand new digital camera he had gone out to buy for their next trip, a week visiting a pair of old friends in Tokyo followed by stops in Kyoto for dinner Kawadoko-style over a river; Hiroshima, and Kumano for a week of hiking on the legendary thousand-plus-year-old Kumano-Kodo. Under the pretense of testing the camera, Martin had taken a photo of Alice then, her unruly silver hair pulled back by a bright red bandana, her green eyes twinkling behind the rectangular lenses of her glasses, her jeans and white t-shirt streaked and speckled with the ruddy-colored paint. She had already been growing thinner then, but her clothes had hidden the sharper angles her body had begun to adopt. When his vision had begun to falter a couple years later, Martin had taken to staring at this photo before bed, memorizing it as he traced the blurring edges and dimming patches of color with his eyes. If he concentrated hard enough, he thought he could see the image resolve itself into the one that he remembered from that day. Even now, Martin still kept this photo of her, frozen mid-laugh, in the frame on his nightstand where its proximity gave him some small relief from the loneliness that had laid claim to his days and lengthening nights.

* * *

Now, perched at the top of the stairs, Martin thought of the events that had conspired to lead him to this moment: It had been the dream, the latest in a long thread that woke him well before dawn each morning and robbed him of sleep. It had been the quiet misery of the overwhelming emptiness of that bedroom that had driven him out the front door and away from the warmth of his bed. He thought again of turning back to knock on the door to alert Joanne to his presence, but the memory of the photo of Alice that watched him sleep from his nightstand kept him from going back. His resolve was strengthened, and he was braced by the cold morning air at the top of his stairs. He turned his back on their house and steadied himself with the railing as he took his first unsteady step down. He took another step, and another, and felt the strength of his legs falter as if he were learning to walk all over again. One final step and his feet were planted on the sidewalk. Martin adjusted his coat in an attempt to stave off some of the chill, then he extended the cane in his right hand and took his first timid steps down the street alone. Joanne had offered to take him for walks any number of times since the funeral, but each time he had shrugged her off. There was something sacred about these first steps, he knew, something that made them necessary to take alone as he re-entered the world at last. Martin had just hoped for a little more time. He had been patient but just as in life, Alice had been impatient. As he got further from the front door of the house, the stronger his longing for Alice’s presence, the familiar pressure of her hand on his arm, the sound of her whispered encouragements became. When she had been there, Martin had known how to walk.

He remembered how, when the strongest prescriptions of glasses were no longer enough to resolve his vision into anything usable, he had become soft-spoken and sullen, an ill-humored ghost of his former self. When objects further away refused to take shape, remaining formless masses of color and shadow, he had lost his compulsion to leave, an sought only to find comfort in the familiar realm of their home. Martin and Alice no longer went on their grand adventures—their daily walks around the neighborhood as Martin became acclimated to the use of his cane had become all the adventure either of them needed anymore.

Still, Alice’s hand on his arm in those days had held him steady with a strength he hadn’t known she still possessed; she tethered him to the earth. If he misstepped, she gently braced him and helped him guide his cane to the curb he had been about to trip over or the signpost he had been about to walk into, so that he could recognize those impacts as warning signs. She had been his weathervane; the way her voice carried to him had helped him divine the source of the wind, helped him focus his ears. As he had walked with her, he had begun to learn the way that the rumble of the city’s overlapping noises channeled down the brick and glass and asphalt canyons that separated each block and found that he could guide himself by sound, somewhat. Of course, he was getting better at using his cane as well, but no tool was infallible and she had wanted to be sure that he would have every possible means of getting around on his own. For her part, Alice had lost her impatience to get out to the far corners of the world and had been content to stay closer to home as well. She had lost still more weight, and fatigue had set in if she had been on her feet for too long.

* * *

Martin had become lost in his thoughts and his resolve began to weaken as he became aware of his surroundings again. It was still early enough that not many people were out yet, and the streets were so quiet that he became unnerved, certain that the silence in his bedroom had followed him and draped itself over him like a shroud. Blood pounded in his ears and the tapping of his cane became distant and hard to hear. Distracted, Martin stumbled on an uneven patch of sidewalk but he managed to save himself from falling by taking an awkward, lunging step that sent a jolt of pain through his knee. He tried to take another step, but paused when he realized he’d gotten off course in his daydreaming and that his stumble had disoriented him. He didn’t know which way he was facing anymore. He reached out with his cane in an attempt to reorient himself on the sidewalk, but met resistance from something too solid, too close, and the impact with whatever the object was nearly wrenched the cane from his hand. Martin turned to his right and again made contact with something solid, very close. By now imagining himself boxed in and growing frantic, Martin’s heart raced as he reached out, feeling for the objects that were obstructing his movement. A jolt of pain shot through his arm as he scraped the knuckles of his right hand on the rough bark of a tree. His left hand extended out into nothingness, and he felt a sudden twinge of fear that he had stumbled to the edge of some sudden drop and had only saved himself from a plunge and injury by sheer luck. He lowered his hand then and heard the dull thud of hand on aluminum as it came to rest atop the bulk of a parked car.

A white-hot surge of anger coursed through Martin then, making him clench his hands into fists and encouraged him to seek catharsis by striking the car with his cane until either the metal of the vehicle dented or his cane broke, whichever happened first. With a tremendous effort, restraint won out and Martin roughly wiped away tears of frustration with his coat sleeve. He wondered what Alice would think of the foolish old man who had gotten tripped up and had become so mad about it that he had nearly picked a fight with a car. He knew instinctively that she would think it was the funniest thing ever.

“Did you hear the one about the old blind man who forgot how to walk? I heard he had a nice trip.” Martin imagined ghostly peals of her laughter in his mind as he shook himself and straightened up. From the car and tree he reoriented himself, found his way back to the sidewalk, and continued his walk, now more cautious with his surroundings.

Once he had put some distance from the scene, Martin’s mood had started to improve and he slid into a steady pace and began to feel more comfortable about his excursion by small degrees. His thoughts returned to walks with Alice long past and the way he had listened to the bending of sound around the corners of buildings—here he passed one such corner and was met by the distant sound of rushing water, a fountain perhaps. The sound revived a memory Martin held deep within, and his body now seemed to be steering itself toward that sound until he found himself entering a park, one he recognized by the particular mixture of sounds that enveloped him as he followed the path inwards, past a stone and iron fence. Here, the spray of water from the many jets of water in the fountain was joined by the steady footfalls and even puffs of breath of morning joggers; the sleepy pleading of those who had been dragged out of bed by their dogs who, despite the hour socialized, chased each other, and rolled in the grass; the furtive sounds of a few homeless people who had set up camp beneath the trees at the park’s edges. All around the square of the park were tall buildings that muffled the noises from further out.

Martin found his way to a bench. The wood was cold beneath him as he sat, a chill that soaked through his coat. By now, the sun had risen high enough to peek between some of the taller buildings to the East of the park; as he tilted his head up, he could feel its warmth on his face, and he could distinguish it as a brighter form among the shadows. As the city came to life around him, Martin remembered a picnic he and Alice had set up here, in one of the larger patches of grass.

They had gotten into a fight, some small thing he couldn’t remember now but had been a big enough ordeal to leave them feeling resentful towards each other for over a week. They had stationed themselves at opposite ends of the house to avoid each other—Martin in the living room where he slept on the couch after falling asleep to the news, Alice in the bedroom where she purposely averted her eyes from Martin and sulked whenever he went into the closet to change his clothes—and whenever they had spoken they were curt and cold, each sniping at each other.

But Martin had gotten some bad news from the doctor, and, needing to commiserate, as well as sensing that something other than their squabble was troubling Alice, he had decided to extend an olive branch in hopes of restoring some measure of domestic peace. Alice had agreed, if grudgingly, but the tone of her voice told Martin she too was tiring of the conflict. Together, they had walked to the park—Washington Square! He remembered the name, now—in a sullen silence which lasted until they had reached the park and Martin had spread out the blanket, a heavy throw decorated with a bold plaid, and Alice had unpacked the food, a wedge of her favorite black peppercorn brie, tremendous wine-red grapes, potato salad (made with mustard), chicken salad, crackers, thick slices of toast, and a bottle of pinot blanc from their favorite vineyard in Sonoma (which they had last visited two summers before), and two stemless wine glasses. Feeling that their dams were faltering, Martin broke the silence.

“It… looks like I’ll be getting new glasses again. Doctor Rice said I’ll need a stronger prescription.” At the time, Martin’s hair still had streaks of its original brown among the silver. The news, of course, had been worse than that—the loss of his sight was going to be more aggressive than earlier thought, a diagnosis that left Martin feeling like he’d aged a decade overnight. He poured wine into the two glasses and held one out to Alice, and gave her a sidelong glance as he waited to see if she was ready to talk yet.

The Alice of Martin’s memory hesitated for a second, then took the offered glass as she met past-Martin’s eyes. She sighed. “I had that checkup with Doctor Lowe last week, and—” Alice took a sip of wine, and savored it for a moment. “I lost some more weight.” There was resentment in her voice, then. “Of course it was never that easy when I was trying.” Alice had moved around the blanket then, sat beside Martin, and laid her head on his shoulder. He ran his fingers through her hair, and she hugged his waist as she nuzzled into his shoulder.

Martin had felt his own tension leaving him then, and wrapped his left arm around Alice’s shoulders. He refilled their glasses, and raised his into the little half-circle of space formed between their bodies. “I did get some other bad news from Doctor Rice,” he said. Alice looked up, and Martin could see her eyes were red. “As it turns out, despite my best efforts, I really am getting older.” The last bits of tension between them had melted then, and Alice raised her glass for a toast. They both drank deeply, and then Alice had started to serve portions of the food, spooning chicken salad onto a slice of toast, next to which she placed a hunk of the peppered brie and a handful of grapes. She had already begun eating as Martin had started to serve himself.

“It’s not all bad,” Alice said between bites, “but I’d kill to be able to sleep a full night without having to get up to go to the bathroom.” Alice had gotten up to pull on a sweater then, one of Martin’s old cardigans, and then returned to her seat beside him, her plate rested on one of his knees. Her news had been worse, of course. Just as Martin’s sight was worsening, Alice had been told her cancer had been discovered late, was aggressive, and her options for treatment had been quickly narrowing. Neither she nor Martin had told each other the truth in that moment because they each wanted nothing more than to return to the illusion of normalcy and enjoy it for a little while longer.

* * *

Martin wiped a tear from the corner of his eye as the memory faded, leaving him alone and cold on the hard bench. He turned his attention to the fountain in the middle of the park. The steady hiss of the water was soothing, and he felt an easing of some measure of the tension that had been building within him over the past few months. It wasn’t much, but it felt like the first crack in the dam he’d built within himself as a means to survive the loneliness. He felt exhaustion set in, adding weight to every inch of his body. The wind changed direction then, and with it the smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafted to him from the far end of the park. He heard the muffled chime of a small bell as a door swung open and shut.

Martin rose to his feet and a soft grunt escaped him as his joints protested his movement after being out in the chill for so long. He slowly extended his cane, and set off towards the warm aroma. With each step, the shadows of the tall buildings moved over Martin. He knew that he would come back to this park again, now that it had offered him another memory of Alice. He thought then of those many trips they’d taken together, those grand adventures they had always been in such a rush to embark on. With some measure of amusement, Martin thought of his little sojourn he had made to the park on his own, and, having decided that it had been a fine adventure to take on his own, reached for the door of the coffee shop, only to find it was already being held open for him.