Four Little Keys

Sitting in the library, it seemed like the best plan was to put the entire business out of her mind. It would be better, she thought, if the rest of the semester – the year, her life – went by without another thought of all the nagging questions planted during her conversation with him last week. She was a person completely independent of all the forces around her. She was a force of nature, a creature unimpeded by the pressures pounding on everyone else. She was a rock, she was convinced, and nothing would shake her from the path, the path she had chosen, the road she had been on for something like half her life.

Then they sat innocently talking about life and family, but he kept making sharp turns, doubling back into her carefully constructed world when she was least prepared. The conversation lifted long-hidden questions up from under the crinkling leaves and blew them in her face like the bellows at the fireplace. She returned home and settled onto her old course, only with lurking, devilish doubts scooting between the study carrels and mocking her like schoolchildren in a strange neighborhood.

If she stopped to let herself think about it, the doubt broke through her fierce resolve – the trait in her most admired by her father – and ran roughshod over her carefully composed emotional architecture. Things were to move through the approved channels in this structure. Emotions weren’t admitted on an ad hoc basis. There was a process. She would flag these steps along the way in her conversations, saying, “I’ll have to think about this more,” and literally queuing it up for deeper reflection at some designated later hour. This was the way of maintaining control, and not in an unpleasant way.

To be sure, she wasn’t a cold or distant person. Rather, she enjoyed the sensations – from head to heart – that accompanied the emotions she felt deeply – unconventional feelings she characterized with unemotional words like “connection” and “synchronicity” and “grace.”

And this distracting, infiltrative feeling now, this was the first one to breach her defenses in quite some time, the first to mount such a campaign not merely to call the question about a relationship or a job, but rather to put all of it on trial.

The library was useless, she thought as she walked across the crumbly path to her apartment. This strange little half-loop of apartments had been her refuge for months and months, shared with friends and strangers alike. Living in the half-life of graduate school – too much work to call life easy, nothing like a career to convince people she wasn’t somehow slumming – she found the people accepting. They had seen graduate students come and go, but some never left, slipping into the brackish world of academia like a pair of worn-out shoes.

People around her here had long reconciled the idea that they wouldn’t know her long; she was destined for greatness, despite her unsurpassing modesty. She believed in the plan, and she made that clear. Her footfalls – sometimes coming fast as she hit the fine gravel for a morning run – echoed around the courtyard with a sense of purpose.

She reached the outer door of her little building, and stopped short, as if someone called her name. She half-spun and felt her pockets for her four little keys on a ring, and nothing was there. The bag on her shoulder was quickly searched, then the smaller bag inside that one, but no keys were revealed. She stood still for a moment. The functional part of her immediately knew to retrace the steps, back along the crumbly path, across the block of slightly shabby university-owned housing where untenured professors bring their acolytes for harrowing peeks into the world of academic dead-ends, over an ocean of asphalt for continuing education students, through the unguarded night entrance for library employees and heavy library users and back to the carrel where she began her reverie.

But her feet wouldn’t move. Rather, she stood stock still, feeling like the air flowing into her lungs was just enough to keep her alive. She wasn’t gasping for air, but she felt that any movement – any expenditure of energy at all – would have brought her to her knees. Her mind was unmoored and alit on a story her grandfather told about a Spanish superstition that a man who survives four attempts on his lift is protected by God. Her grandfather had joked that there were better ways of getting closer to God than dodging all these bullets. She knew she had kept everything together despite adversity and suppressing the wanderlust that nipped at her heels. But the tiny sliver of instability, the chink in her armor barely noticed after their conversation last week had grown somehow. She felt a chill and glanced up through a lock of hair loosed from her barrette. The clouds she knew were hovering overhead shifted silently to reveal a mottled half moon that looked as if it was shining for someone else.

To sit still, he thought, would be a great gift. To cease this numbing, jittery peregrination, zig-zagging for this reason and that to talk and talk and talk would be a kind of peace he hadn’t felt in a long time. It was his own fault, of course, this life of movement and jawboning. His restless soul had been trained by fears and an inner voice never satisfied to keep moving, not making much of anything from the people he knew to the places he connected. Just go and go, never stop, like a shark, moving forward to drag water into its lungs.

But here, in this desolate airport, trapped in the hours-long gap between stand-by flights, there was no possibility of movement. The goddamn building was a circle and he had wandered it once and then twice before giving up on being different from the few other airport waiters. The absurd time of day, his flat batteries and read magazines meant there were no distractions, no strangers in the airport café, nothing to steer his mind away from her.

He didn’t even have a right to be disappointed. Nothing in their brief interaction had given him anything like a stake. It’s just his way to zero in on the person least likely to give a damn about his opinion and forge a connection, as if he craved deep inside a person who would challenge his thinking and push back on his inflated persona, forcing out the air and making him gasp, feeling something.

They talked late into the night, meandering through a range of shares and keeps, and handing over both, for some reason. She unsettled his illusion of outer calm when she drilled into the ideas he had floated casually about the nature of the human connection most call love. He described, in language he hadn’t used before, the little rivulets he had sensed but not witnessed that course through person when that emotional link is created. He switched easily between pronouns to maintain ambiguity, and found himself describing an unwieldy hybrid of puppy love and vertigo. His brief description maybe lapsed into a form of ham-fisted poetry, but her gaze never wavered.

He stopped, and figured he had said too much, or lost her somewhere a hundred circular words back. Her expression was skeptical and focused at once. The air filled for a moment between them with something almost palpable like doubt or guilt or regret. He wasn’t sure if, in that instant, he had crossed some boundary and mistakenly revealed the broken man within, or perhaps made a new friend into an enemy somehow. She remained silent, looking mostly into his eyes while her brow furrowed slightly.

“I’ll have to think about this more,” she said, after shifting her body slightly to face him directly.

The four little keys were missing and frozen for the moment in the space between going inside and finding the keys, she stood staring at the moon’s mottled light falling elsewhere in the little courtyard. The word “reflect” and its derivations hung in her Broca’s brain as she stood with her hand lingering at her waist, all her bags having dropped to the ground, somehow. The sliver of uncertainty he had somehow slipped past her elaborate defenses was metastasizing, exploding into a kind of full-blown paralysis, and she felt lost. The two thousand feet of sidewalk, gravel and macadam might as well have been ten thousand miles. She was rooted to the spot, and her ordinarily nearly inexhaustible energy suddenly disappeared, like the water that rushed violently out to her beloved ocean when the rusty municipal floodgates opened without warning.

First she thought he was mocking her gently, pushing back on her ideas about people and love because she was younger, and kept her parents’ relationship on a pedestal. She refuted this position absurdly by revealing more than she planned – more than she normally would to a good friend let alone someone she barely knew. She confessed momentarily without shame that this idealized relationship was built on a shaky foundation, and he seized on this without malice to dig deeper into his ad hoc thesis about the elusive nature of love, even for those whose lives were inexorably linked. His arguments – a rhetorical stroke of luck, he admitted – folded comfortably back into each other, reinforcing earlier doubts he had evinced about the way people make decisions about their lives and then won’t subject them to revision. None of this was new for her, and if she had the ability to step outside herself at that moment she surely would have seen his careless episode of devil’s advocacy as simply that. But standing on the gravel path a few feet from her door, absorbing all those doubts and questions and comparisons like body blows, she wasn’t capable of any such defensive maneuvers. Her stomach lurched some, she mentally recorded, and the fine hairs on her arm were standing up, but not from the cold.

He walked home feeling ugly and wondering if he had made a fool of himself. It was not a feeling he enjoyed. His mouth tasted ashy from too much wine and the hot dry air from the fire, and no doubt from talking. The fearful sensation that he had angered her, or snowed her under with his possibly insane ravings, or portrayed himself as a black-hearted skeptic all played in his mind as the snowfall picked up.

He was talking to her, and he was responding to her, but he was equally troubled by the dialogue happening in his head throughout. His life was this struggle to stop moving, to moor itself, to be at rest. As a squall of snow danced in the sulfur streetlight, his quick pace carried him past an break in the row of cabins separating him from the creek in the valley below. The sound of the water -- amplified as it bounced up the valley's steep ascent -- snared him and his heard turned slightly toward the muted roar. Even this pause felt like a failure.

When he was a boy, he feared the basement of his home, believing irrationally that once he began the voyage up the staircase, he could never tarry. He was to pound up those 13 steps without so much as a hiccup to impede his progress. Every time -- every single time -- he climbed those stairs, an image took vague shape in his head of some shadowy evil a pace, an inch, a hair behind him and ready to pounce if only he would hold his step for an instant.

Some time passed, possibly, or maybe it was only a minute or two. The door behind her opened and the spell was broken when her downstairs neighbor said, “Hey, V_______.” She recovered slowly, mumbling inside herself as she bent to pick up the bags. From a few inches closer to the ground, she could see the four little keys maybe ten paces back along the path, looking dull in the sulfur streetlight and somehow dodging the cold light of the moon.