The Switch

　

When I was four, I opened my eyes to the world: there was something around me and it was large and bright and mostly good. I didn’t feel large, nor did I think of myself as small. The scale of things was set by my hand, the backyard where I played, the size of the dog that jumped on me and licked my face.

We lived near the sea. My father was a giant with immense strength and a kind heart. My mother was the air that I breathed – she was everywhere, a soft and serene presence. I don’t remember ever wanting anything. Before I knew what I desired, it was there, provided to me. My little brother and I held hands as we walked on the sidewalk. The houses all had gardens and there were fat, bumpy-skinned toads in them and, in one place, an old lady and her husband had collected rocks from all around the country and embedded them among their flowers, rose-quartz, agate, and mica brittle as glass.

A boardwalk with pavilions was built along the beach. The pavilions were Moorish and stood on piers saluting the passing ships. We went to the movies on the piers and I was never afraid. My little brother cried in the dark, but I felt brave and powerful. A carousel revolved under a glass dome and the air smelled of salt-water taffy and hot dogs. Sailors roamed the dance-halls and, when the girls exited the Fun House, a jet of air wafted their dresses in the air. At the end of the boardwalk, a meadow filled with clean, white sand tilted down to the sea and tall brown buildings stood in the center of green lawns where old men and women were strolling. The dogs were all friendly. Sometimes, we ate lobster and clams and, my favorite, batter-fried shrimp.

A circus was coming to town. My mother promised my brother and I that she would take us to the circus. There would be a parade, my father said, with gilded coaches and chariots and fire-eaters marching among tigers and lions on leashes. My mother told us that the circus would come in three weeks and we waited anxiously for the time to pass. Many times, I asked my mother what I could do to make the time go by more swiftly. My mother said: "You don’t want the time to go by quickly. People don’t get that much time. You should enjoy each day."

When I went to bed, I slept dreamlessly. It seemed as if no time had elapsed from the moment that I put my head on the pillow to the instant that I opened my eyes to smell bacon cooking downstairs and see the sun shining through the window. The night didn’t even exist. I came down the stairs in my pajamas with little feet sewn in them and I knew that I was a prince and conqueror. Even 20 blocks from the boardwalk and the sea shore, I could smell the ocean and hear the promises that it made to me.

A block from our house, a small grocery stood at the intersection of two streets under a complex canopy of wires and overhead power lines – street cars used to pass through this area but I don’t recall ever seeing one of them. Next to the grocery, there was a small lot where some used cars for sale were parked. The fronts of the cars nudged up close to the sidewalk. Between the sidewalk and curb, there was lawn, a ribbon of untended grass running from a fire hydrant to a telephone pole that smelled faintly of creosote, the odor of distant western mountains with upraised arms lifting their passes into the sun. When my parents strolled the sidewalk, our dog on her leash, they paused so that she could sniff the base of the fire hydrant and a few dozen feet later, the utility pole. Cars blinked at us as they passed. At the grocery store, my father bought us ice cream packed into cones that we ate too slowly so that it melted and made our chins and hands sticky.

"How many days until the circus?" I asked my mother.

She said something kind and mysterious.

I couldn’t imagine the circus. It was too wonderful and I had no name for the excitement that I felt.

The dog lunged to the side. She had discovered something half-hidden in the grass by the curb. My little brother followed the dog’s wagging tail to inspect.

"What is that?" my mother asked.

"Some kind of lever,’ my father said.

A big metal bar, orange with corrosion, rested in the grass. The bar was flush with the curb and sod. I could see that the bar was contoured as if to fit a man’s grip. The metal lever looked like a gearshift in the buses that we sometimes rode to the beach.

My brother knelt to inspect the lever. It was hinged so that it could be pivoted upright.

"Don’t pull on that," my father said to my brother. He was trying to yank the lever upward. "We don’t know what it controls."

The dog was dancing with excitement at the discovery. My father pulled her away from the lever in the grass and we walked home. The sun was setting among the leafy trees on the avenues leading away from the sea to the green western hills. In the twilight, hidden birds sang beautiful melodies.

The next day, we came to the place where the lever was embedded in the boulevard grass. "Daddy," I said. "You should pull on that lever."

"We don’t know what it controls," my father said.

Trucks roared past. Someone had stapled bright posters for the circus on the telephone pole. The posters showed a tame tiger riding on the shoulders of a horse.

Night came again. Time paused, hesitating on the brink of darkness. My mother came to my bedside to say my prayers with me. I asked God to make the night pass in a single breath so that morning would be exactly adjacent to the last moment before I fell asleep. I wasn’t thirsty but, nonetheless, drank some milk. In another room, my father was giving my little brother a bath and he splashed water happily and the dog came to my door wagging her tail and, then, it was morning, the next day, and there had been no night at all.

After work, my father clipped the leash to the dog and we went for a walk to buy ice-cream cones. My father crossed the street so that we would not walk past the big, rusty lever installed in the boulevard grass. But on our way back home, we looked over the road and saw the lever, a dark slash in the grass wet with nightfall and dew.

More time passed. I went to Sunday School and told the other children that I was going to the circus. A picture of Jesus beamed at me. We went to the boardwalk. I heard voices coming from underneath the planks and bent over to look through the cracks between the boards – some older kids were hidden in the shadows beneath where we were walking. They had been swimming and their shoulders and chins were bearded with green seaweed. My father and mother drank bottles of beer and we ate fried chicken.

On the way home, my parents stopped by the lever hinged to its metal base in the grass.

"I don’t think it can be moved," my father said.

"You’re very strong," my mother reminded him.

My father bent and his back arched to make a dome against the afternoon’s light and, then, he gave a great "huff!" and pulled on the lever. It pivoted upward until he held it erect between his knees.

"Does it keep going?" my mother asked.

"No, it stops like this," my father said. The lever stood upright as tall as his thigh. My father’s face darkened.

"We can’t leave it like this," he said.

He leaned against the lever and, creaking loudly, it dropped back down to lie supine in the grass. The earth shuddered for an instant, a subtle tremor that we felt in our feet and spines. The sun overhead was no longer merely a bright place in the sky – it was glaring down at us. The trees cast shadows and their leaves were like shutters on a camera clicking as it took pictures.

The circus didn’t come to town. My mother said that it had gone bankrupt and that the clowns had lost their jobs and were wandering the desolate vacant lots by the railroad tracks where gypies made their camps and the horses and the lions and tigers and elephants had found new homes in cages in the zoo. But other children at Sunday School said that they had attended the circus and seen the acrobats somersaulting overhead and, so, it has never been clear to me why my parents broke their promises to us. I had the measles and was confined to my bed for a week or ten days and I could smell my face: it had a peculiar rotting odor, sweet and nauseating. When we went to the movie in the boardwalk pavilion, the big screen showed me a corpse with its eyes wide open and this caused me to shriek with fear. At night, I dreamed about being dead and unable to close my eyes and had terrible nightmares. The darkness went on and on and on and I licked my lips with fear and anxiety. I licked and licked until my lips were raw, outlined in puffy red inflammation. My father took me with him in the Rambler to the hardware store. He had some tubes from the TV that he was going to test in the tube-tester. My father told me to wait for him in the car. A man with cerebral palsy staggered past the car and I was afraid that he would come to take me away with him. I began to cry and I licked my lips until I could taste blood with my tongue. My father came back and was angry because none of the tubes had tested as failed, something that meant that there was a more profound and expensive reason that our television didn’t work. He said that I was a coward and slapped my face for crying.

When I was forty, I went back to the village where I had lived as a little boy to look for that lever. I thought that, perhaps, I could pull that switch out of the earth once more and reset things. But the town had changed and hurricanes had destroyed the boardwalk and, although I found much rusting metal embedded in the filthy weeds between the fractured sidewalks, there was no lever.