Jollis grabs a bright red bottle and tilts it over the body’s chest. A shimmering substance pours forth, filling the cavity. Jollis sighs with relief and puts the empty bottle back on the shelf. “There,” he says. “That’ll do it. Which emotion is that?”
“Love.”
“Perfect,” says Jollis. “That should work out just—” As he speaks, the shimmering substance drains from the cavity, leaving it empty again. “What happened?”
“It got absorbed,” says Merriam. “By the heart.”
“Dammit!” Jollis grabs more bottles from the shelf. He pours them in one after another. Each time, the emotion is absorbed by the heart. As Jollis gets to the darker ones, Merriam tries to stop him, but he surges on, frantically emptying bottles until only one is left—a small, twisted vial the color of ash and flame. He begins to pour it, too, into the cavity, but Merriam pushes him away before he can finish.
“Jollis, that’s enough. It won’t work.”
Jollis drops the vial. He slumps, his countenance dimming. “We’re doomed.”
“But why?” asks Merriam. She is scared now. She has never seen him so distraught.
“Because it’s got a hole in it!” he cries. “And they’ll know it, Merry. They’ll feel it, and they’re going to constantly be looking for things to fill it with. They’ll eat too much. They’ll fall in love with the wrong people. They’ll hoard money, and watch too much television, and buy useless crap from holiday catalogs, like potato scrubbing gloves or a spoonula.”
“What’s a spoonula?”
“Never mind.” Jollis softens. He is more despondent than angry. “Don’t you see? Nothing will work. There will always be this void. No matter how they try to fill it, they will always want the one thing we can never give them enough of.”
“What’s that?” asks Merriam.
“More.”
Merriam feels hot tears gathering inside her, wanting out. She realizes she hadn’t thought it through. Not completely. “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” she says quietly.
Jollis sighs. “But why did you do it?”
Merriam glances out the window. “Because of that world,” she says. “I saw that beautiful world we made for them, and I was afraid they’d love it so much they’d never want to leave. So I gave them a little empty space, to make sure they’d come home.”
Elliot
(1981)
The leaves fall in a mad rush—an unruly circus of yellow, orange, and red—hurled down from the trees by a mutinous wind. It’s easy to get lost in it. I stand at the center of our little front yard, staring up at the long-limbed giants and the roiling cauldron of sky. My eyes fill with color, my ears with the sweep of air through the branches. The sharp scent of ozone heralds distant lightning. Nothing else exists, and a long moment passes before I remember who I am or what I’m doing out here beneath the front edge of an autumn storm. I am Elliot Chance. I am nine years old. I am catching leaves with my brother.
Action gets the glory, but most great endeavors begin in stillness. Leaf-catching is no exception. After the opening of the front screen door and the rush to the middle of the lawn, your first move is not to move. You stand frozen, gauging the speed and direction of the wind, feeling instinctively for any pattern in the bend and sway of the trees. Once all the data is collected, once it has run through you and blended with whatever else is inside you until the distinction between you and the storm begins to blur—and providing you do not forget yourself in the process—you do what every good adventurer does at the outset of a good adventure. You follow your gut. In this case, you pick that particular spot in the yard where you believe the leaves are most likely to fall. Once there, you bend your knees, keep your hands up, and wait.
Falling leaves do not, of course, drop in straight and steady lines. They are unpredictable, feisty, weird. They hitch and pause their descent at random, which makes them difficult to catch, but which also provides the best opportunity for catching them, because among those sharp turns and changes of speed and other machinations there is often a midair hesitation, a momentary hovering, when the little scrap of color checks its fall but doesn’t immediately replace it with anything. For a split second, it simply stops, and—if you’re close enough—a split second is all you need. Your knees uncoil. Your hand fires out. Your fingers widen to cast the largest possible net, and—
“Ha!” yells my brother, knocking down my outstretched arm with an impish glee. The leaf slips to the ground, uncaught. My brother laughs and rushes past me. “That’s a miss!” he shouts. “Doesn’t count.”
Dean is just two years older than me, yet it would be hard to imagine two more disparate styles of leaf-catching. We begin in the same way—two slight boys with hazel eyes, rushing out the front door, looking very much alike except for his light, sandy hair contrasted with my dark brown. Yet Dean doesn’t stop rushing. He is all bustle and bluster, jumping at leaves one after another like a young golden retriever dropped unexpectedly into a frenzy of skittish waterfowl. His misses far outnumber his makes, but this doesn’t seem to faze him. He moves so quickly from one attempt to the next that I would question whether he is even aware of the results, but for the fact that he proclaims his total catches after each successful one.
“Seven!” he calls, crumpling a yellow oak leaf in his fist. For Dean, leaf-catching is neither meditation nor exultation. It is a competition, pure and simple—one in which disrupting your opponent is perfectly fair, and loudly tallying your points is good strategy. “How many do you have?” he asks, while simultaneously diving for a catch, a feat that, I admit, is pretty impressive.
“Five,” I tell him.
I’m lying. I don’t know exactly how many leaves have been diverted from their paths and into my pockets, but it’s at least fifteen. Don’t get me wrong. I like winning. Winning feels better than losing, but both are necessary ingredients of the playing itself—if the playing is a competition, which it is to Dean. The truth is that my brother likes winning much more than I do, and I like playing with my brother. I enjoy watching him tumble around the yard like a happy clown.
“Nine!” he shouts.
The game continues until a flash of sheet lightning kindles the horizon. We stop and count the passing seconds. Five, before the sound of thunder reaches us, which we know means the heart of the storm is five miles away. The sky darkens, and what light remains grows softer and sharper. The world around us appears etched in bronze, yet it moves and breathes. Unnaturally so, it suddenly seems to me. The clouds gather so quickly they appear to have a purpose. The trees nod and tilt emphatically, full of urgent whispers, until I am certain they are aware of us.
“Dean, look!” I say, laughing. “The trees are alive. They’re trying to grab us!”
“Weirdo,” he says, not pausing to look. “They’re not alive.”
I am about to argue when the first raindrop strikes my head with a firm plunk. More follow—big, fat beads that multiply as the sky opens up. We are soaked within seconds. Dean is already running for cover.
“Game over,” he calls. “I win. No more catches. They won’t count.”