Diminution
OUTSIDE MY WINDOW there’s a weedy patch of ivy where songbirds peck for worms and grubs and hapless potato bugs. They hop and preen, fluffing out their feathers, and sometimes stand like tiny statues doing nothing at all. One day I was staring at the songbirds, trying and failing to write, when a friend messaged to say he’d been invited to speak at a book festival in Atlanta. He asked if we might hang out, since I live only an hour away, and I said sure, I was happy to drive in for the day. And when he told me he would be put up in a hotel and wouldn’t mind if I crashed there, I said why not.
What I didn’t tell my friend, who’d published several books, was that I too had experience of the festival. Years ago I’d paid for space in its so-called New Author Showcase Tent, where ten copies of my lone book were stacked on a twelve- by fifteen-inch area of tablecloth along with postcards and bookmarks provided, at my expense, by the book’s publisher. I dropped off my ten books at a basement desk in a suburban public library where the festival had a sort of triage station. The dour woman be-hind the desk seemed annoyed by the pesky New Authors, so I filled out some paperwork and made myself scarce. Then, after the festival ended, instead of driving back to collect my ten unsold books, I asked my friend Mila, who lives in Atlanta, to do it for me. But Mila booked an audition and missed the two-hour window specified by the woman in the library basement. I emailed the woman and called and left messages, hoping my books might be stashed in a corner or even left on the street, but the woman told me my books had been donated along with all the other unsold books whose authors hadn’t claimed them. She reminded me of the paperwork I’d signed. But when I asked where the books were donated, she told me she didn’t know, which meant (this is what I said to her) she’d actually recycled the books, hadn’t she? Or had she simply trashed them? She hung up on me.
Unable to get a seat within the tent where my friend was on stage with another young author, I stood in back and watched him hold forth, to laughter and applause, on a colorful episode in the research that went into his most recent book. Afterwards I waited until he had shaken hands and mingled for maybe fifteen minutes before I approached to say nice job, I enjoyed the talk. I wanted to ask how it felt to be listened to by so many, but I didn’t want to embarrass him by calling attention to the difference in our stations. He was a big writer with deadlines and editors and cigarettes near at hand, whereas I was at best an over-serious hobbyist, at worst a coddled homemaker not unlike Nora in A Doll’s House. He introduced me to the other young author, a pale woman who didn’t make eye contact as she complained about the heat, and afterwards the three of us went to dinner and drank. My friend and I drank quickly, as we had in college, and when it was time for the other young author to leave, or so she told us, my friend hugged her in a way that caused me, standing on the other side of a high-top table, to reassess the shape of his body: it was bonier than I remembered, and somewhat stooped, and most of all smaller.
Throughout the drinking, which continued at the hotel, my friend kept mentioning a talk he wanted to go to the next morning, Sunday, the final day of the festival, by “an Australian man of letters.” I told my friend I’d get him there no problem, nine wasn’t early. But the next morning he lacked the strength of will to rise from bed, let alone to be loaded into my car and driven along the narrow curving streets of Atlanta. Instead, at my suggestion, we walked to breakfast at Muchacho on Memo-rial Drive, near the BeltLine. After watching my friend poke at avocado toast for half an hour, I suggested we take our coffees to-go and walk to an independent bookstore I’d been meaning to check out. My friend agreed.
The bookstore was in East Point, less than a mile away, but to reach it I led my friend a mile or so down the BeltLine to an ice cream shop where I offered to buy us both ice cream (he declined) and let him watch while I took lusty bites of some-thing chocolate streaked with peanutbutter and marshmallow. Between bites I held forth on the BeltLine project and rails-to-trails more generally. I had run along many such trails, I told him, since my homemaking schedule allowed for daily exercise and the consumption, for fuel, of enormous meals.
Propelled by such fuel, I led my friend back up the BeltLine to Glenwood Avenue, whose sidewalk was under construction, causing us to step in and out of the busy road and the muddy lawns of houses and ramshackle apartments. My friend kept falling behind, which I blamed on his ill and empty stomach until, glancing back, I saw him teetering like a drunk or (and this seems to me more apt, in retrospect) an adolescent unfamiliar with his changing body.
We arrived at the bookstore several minutes before it opened, so we loitered on the shadeless sidewalk, where I stood, arms crossed, while my friend sat on the curb with his little legs flopped out on the street. Inside, my friend browsed books for only a few minutes before sitting down on a pouf meant for children while I continued to browse, bought used copies of The Borrowers Afield for my daughter and Book Three of 1Q84, and soon we were back on the road. I meant to ask my friend, who was childless, if he’d ever read Mary Norton, which might have led to a conversation about children’s literature and the vivid sylvan worlds to be found in it, but my friend was busy watching his step.
A bit later I mentioned a good record store in Little Five Points, but by then my friend didn’t seem to care where we went. The Sunday event at the book festival would be missed, he seemed to understand, and he followed me in silence along Moreland Avenue, which happens to be one of the most unsightly, least pedestrian-friendly roads in a cluster of otherwise pleasant neighborhoods on the east side of Atlanta. And as we strode along the treeless street, the sun above nearly reaching its apex, I wondered if we should be talking more—we were old friends, weren’t we?—but my friend fell further and further behind.
By the time we reached I-20, I had put such a distance between myself and my friend that he might not have seen the car exiting the highway nearly strike me. But later, as we began to descend beneath an overpass where the narrow sidewalk was separated from four lanes of speeding traffic by a flimsy crooked bar of railing, I heard him say in a high, huffy voice, “This doesn’t seem safe.” I turned my head, intending to tell him he wasn’t in Brooklyn anymore—this was the sunbelt, a hellscape of cars—but my friend wasn’t there. I was confused until I heard the scuffle of shoes and looked down to see him nearly running, his little arms cocked and swinging. I said nothing, feeling sorry, and tried to slow down. I even walked behind him for a stretch, not wanting him to trip and roll beneath the rails into the path of a car whizzing past. I began a nervous, decreasingly coherent monologue about urban heat islands and the rewilding of empty lots. We passed gas stations and graffiti-covered concrete walls and ripped-open bags spilling garbage, and by the time we were standing in line outside the record store (there was a Covid-related customer limit), I was in conversation with myself on the nature and use of so-called pocket parks. When at last I stopped talking, I heard my friend chittering like a squirrel and watched him pop off one shoe to rub with quick little hands at his tiny pale foot.
I barely remember the inside of the record store, so distracted I was by the condition of my friend, who stood on tip-toe to peer inside peach crates full of records. Afterwards we found our way to the Carter Center, the Freedom Trail and back to the BeltLine, which we followed into the heart of In-man Park, where several times I had to steer my friend by his shoulders off and onto the path in avoidance of roller-bladers and shambling tourists and children on scooters and bicycles. At some point a man in front of us turned around to photo-graph his family and nearly tripped backwards over my friend, who, startled, darted into a patch of trees and piedmont boulders arranged to be sat upon and climbed. I went after him, but he wasn’t hiding anywhere I could see. I called his name. Nothing. I walked deeper into what wasn’t just a patch of trees, I now saw, but an urban wood where overgrown hollies gave way to pecan and hackberry trees and at last to towering pines. The spongy pine straw blocked weeds and invasive shrubs, opening sight-lines, so I hoped to see my friend crouched be-hind a boulder or running zigzag between tree trunks or partly buried in straw, but all I saw were beer cans and chip bags, lost socks, a waterlogged diaper. I crossed a creek, gray and scummy, its water poisoned by ancient tannery runoff or zinc leached from decades of ditched tires; I was beginning to lose my bearings. I wondered if my friend could have shimmied up a pine tree and been watching me from above, studying my re-action, but to what purpose? Was this his rebuttal of something I’d said? Something I’d thought? I tried to cleanse my mind of the envy his career sometimes caused in me. But it wasn’t just his career; he was charming and had stylish clothes, sumptuous thick hair; women loved him, professors too, strangers at bars. No, no, cleanse your mind, I told myself. Think loving thoughts. Be pure!
Whether this hysterical effort had anything to do with what came next, I don’t know, but after a period of staggering around while waving my arms as though conducting an invisible orchestra, I noticed a carved wooden mushroom, knee high. It was exactly the sort of twee, hippyish decoration that normally repulses me, this mushroom, but I went towards it, and sure enough my friend was curled around its stalk, meagerly sheltered by its cap. I knelt to press my ear to his little mouth and heard breathing. He was asleep. And he gave no resistance as I lifted him into my arms, where, like a skinny baby, he leaned his tired head into my shoulder as I retraced my own frantic steps back to Inman Park.
I was happy to carry him. Having his tiny wizened face so close to mine might give us a chance to talk, I thought. But he stared into the space above us, where dappled sunlight shone through the pines, the pecan and hackberries, the hollies. It was as though he had moved beyond language, or as though his body, which seemed to stiffen as we walked, was transitioning from flesh into something harder and more sacred.
By the time we got back to the hotel, he had to check out. His flight was at three. Setting him on a coffee table in the lobby, I offered to drive him to the airport, but he insisted on taking the train. I might have made a speech about how this wasn’t Brooklyn and who knew when the train would show up, but what worried me, really, was picturing him alone in the dark empty station, where, yes, he might have saved a few dollars by slipping through the bars, but at what cost? What if he, like the plastic trinkets my daughter finds on playgrounds, disappeared from one world only to emerge, after months or years of disuse, in the distinct separate world of another child? Also, how would he manage his rolling bag?
In the end I called Mila, who still owed me a favor, and who supplemented her work as an extra on TV by driving for ride-sharing companies. Fifteen minutes later her pearly Corolla was parked outside the hotel, and Mila, seeing my friend, made no comment; she simply raised his bag into the trunk and removed from the trunk a booster seat that she placed in back for his use. After I buckled him in and set his phone on his lap, he offered a cheerless goodbye and I waved them off, feeling some misgivings. My friend was married to a mutual friend from college not known for her patience, and I could imagine her having warned him, after learning of my possible involvement in the trip, not to make bad choices.
I was driving home when Mila called, as I hoped she would, to say my friend seemed to have recovered somewhat. Right away he was fooling around on his phone, she said, and by the time he got a call from someone, his hand was large enough to raise the phone to his ear. He spoke to this person (his agent?) about his failure to meet a different person (the Australian man of letters?), and of course there was mention of me. Mila spared me the details, but I could imagine my friend complaining to his agent or wife or apologizing to another festival-attendee for missing him or her at this or that stimulating literary event in order to march along hot ugly roads with me, an older, less reputable friend who had reached out from his past (I heard him say all this in the reedy, vaguely menacing voice of a fairy) like a sickly, rotted claw. By the time he got out of her car, Mila said, my friend looked pretty normal. I thanked her, and she said for the hundredth time she was sorry about the books.
Still driving, I pictured my friend on the plane, laptop in lap, having paid for wi-fi in order to pitch an editor or revise a short piece for a highbrow magazine. But probably he was sleeping. I know from living with my daughter that growth is exhausting, nutritionally demanding, and requires much sleep. I might have imagined that diminution requires the opposite—that it causes extravagant expulsions of energy through talk and laughter and jittery unfocused movement, as with chipmunks and prancing lapdogs—but the actual experience had been stranger. Remembering the feeling of my friend lying stiffly in my arms and the obscure expressions that passed across his shrunken face, I tried to compose in my mind a piece of fiction where people shrink to nothing as so-called Nature regains its primeval dominance, but my thoughts kept returning to the songbirds. Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk and staring out the window at the weedy patch of ivy, I’ll study a robin or black-masked cardinal and believe we’re gazing at each other until I realize, from a twitch of its head, that the bird doesn’t see me at all; that it sees through me and beyond me all the facets of its own world, which overlaps mine only barely.
-Bradley Bazzle
