Jono

Undeliverable Messages (Screw you, Matt Elliot)

2005-11-11T03:05:44Z

Here is an example of a story that includes writing in the second person, writing across gender, and an old dude who is not looking back. This is an effort to counter some really generous advice by one Matt Elliot. It can be found here and I disagree dammit.

Undeliverable Messages

THE PERSONS INVOLVED
AN OLD MAN, who is leaving home
AN OLD WOMAN, his wife, who has died
A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN, the old man’s neighbor, who helps him move
HER MOTHER, who has died
A YOUNG MAN, the middle-aged woman’s son, who helps his mother.
A YOUNG WOMAN, whom the young boy left months ago

YOUNG MAN to YOUNG WOMAN:
Sometimes, when I’ve been shoveling for a while, I think about girls. Since I was in middle school, I’ve been working on this guy’s sidewalk. It’s a strange sidewalk because it takes this sharp turn because he lives on a corner, but I’ve done it so many times that I can look up and see that I’ve finished one direction and started on the other without paying attention to the turn. Sometimes I’d imagine that I wasn’t doing it because my mom told me to help these old people, but was doing it for a girl instead. She’d be waiting back at the house for me, where it was warm and soft. It wasn’t sexual, just comfortable. It sounds really fucking stupid now that I’m older, but I still want a girl like that. I never thought about you as the kind of girl that I’d shovel for. You were crazy.
I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about you recently. I haven’t seen you for close to a year. The last I heard, you didn’t graduate. Did you ever really care about graduating? You’re rich, so does it matter? Normal people can’t just quit school with one semester to go, then come back to finish two years later and fucking fail. Remember all the jokes I made about how rich you were? You were a good sport, but maybe that’s one reason why I never understood you. You never had to work. My mom and I are helping this guy not just because we feel bad for him or because it’s the right thing to do, but also because he’s leaving some of the stuff to us. Furniture, plates, and rugs; my mom hands me boxes of stuff to take over to our house. I don’t feel good about it, but the guy wants us to have it.
He made me think about you once. I picked up a box that was marked as “heavy and fragile.” It was full of booze. The guy collected alcohol, so he had all this obscure stuff in weird bottles, and the only thing I recognized was a bottle of Scotch. It was Johnnie Walker Black. I heard him laugh as he came into the room.
“That’s good stuff,” he said. “Do you like Scotch?”
I laughed and started to put the bottle back, but he came closer and stopped me.
“Your mother’s upstairs,” he said quietly. “You can tell me the truth.”
“Oh,” I said. The bottle felt heavy in my hand. Johnnie Walker was in my hand again.
The old man waited.
“It’s good,” I said. “I don’t really know a lot about that kind of thing, though. I don’t drink much.”
“At college?” He laughed again. “What the hell do you do, then? Boys still get drunk with girls, right?”
I didn’t tell him that the first and last time that I got drunk was with you.
Do you remember that? I’d never really kissed anybody or been very drunk before, and when you came to my room, holding a bottle of Scotch and promising that you’d teach me, I was scared, but I went because I was twenty and it was long past time. I remember sitting on your bed and watching you light candles as if we’d known each other for more than a week and as if this was somehow romantic. I’d never really been in that situation before, but your voice was low and you moved slowly. I remember not moving my lips against yours at first. I remember gulping Scotch from the bottle. You were warm and soft. I was drunk. I remember leaving my socks on. I remember puking in your trashcan as you rubbed my back. I slid down to the floor to lie there for a second. I remember not being able to get back up, but you followed me down there. I remember waking up on the floor. You were next to me, but it was still the middle of the night. I couldn’t move much, but I saw that we still had underwear. You were still passed out. I was still a virgin. I dragged myself up to sit and see how you looked. In the light from the sagging candles, I saw that you were fat. You were fat, old, and crazy, but I wanted to learn on somebody that I didn’t care about, so I kissed your fat warm soft lips again and tried to shake your shoulders. I remember the bellowing moan that you made as you woke up drunk because I collapsed again at the sound. I stayed on my back for a few moments, lying there and trying not to listen, but I didn’t want anybody to think anything bad was happening, so I got back up and held you, and you stopped.
“Bed,” I told you.
“Yeah,” you said.
I dragged us back up to your bed, and when we both could move again, I asked if you still wanted to, and you said yes, and we did. In the morning, I cleaned up the trashcan for you, but I said that I couldn’t go to breakfast with you.
I don’t know if you still remember any of that. I hadn’t thought about it until I found the old man’s Scotch. I’m not proud of what I did, but I’m glad that I didn’t have to learn with the girl that I got after you. She isn’t anything like you. She’s thin, she’s blonde, and she isn’t crazy. She’s a great girl; she won’t sleep with me yet. I’m not ashamed of anything. You talked me into it. Everything was consensual. I don’t think it ended badly. Clearly, we both moved on.
Recently, I’ve wanted to tell you things that you never knew, but I’m not ever going to contact you again, and I don’t know where you are. You’ve probably forgotten about me, but if you haven’t, you might remember the nineteenth night that we spent together, the time right before spring break. Maybe you don’t remember all of it, because you came to me drunk, and you were still drunk the next morning. I know that you’d remember what happened afterwards.
When it was done, I didn’t get up to throw away the condom. We looked and saw that there was no condom, and I tensed up and became very quiet. You held me. I could still smell the Scotch on your breath when you held me and told me not to worry. You told me that you’d get your period over break.
I remember how you looked at me with big brown eyes on a soft face.
“I’ll take care of things if I don’t,” you said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry,” you said. You kissed me again and rested your head on my chest.
Don’t think that I didn’t appreciate that. You were crazy, but you had these moments when you were absolutely clear. After break, you did remember, and you did tell me that everything went okay. That was really nice of you, and that’s why you deserve to know. When you looked at me, could you see that I hadn’t had anything to drink at all? Did you know that I knew what I was doing the whole fucking time?
I’m not proud of it, but it wasn’t completely irresponsible. I knew that you were on the pill. You told me that you were clean. There wasn’t much risk of anything. You’d take care of it.
You have to remember the context. This was weeks after the first time, long after I told you that I couldn’t be your boyfriend and you’d agreed, but you were crazy, and it was falling apart. You said that you were fine with it, and that it was all that you expected, but then you’d pull out the passive-aggressive stuff, and if I wanted that kind of crazy, I could have stayed home with Mom. We’d said that we were getting tired of kissing each other. But despite that, you kept on answering your door when you knew that it was me. You taught me a lot, and I should thank you. I learned that sex didn’t mean much without love or some other kind of respect. And on that morning I was beginning to see that that was true. Do you understand? I was just trying to learn more. I wanted to know what it felt like, and you could teach me.
Don’t think that I didn’t feel terrible afterwards. I felt awful during that whole break. I wondered if I’d chosen something that I couldn’t ever take back, and if my life had switched directions without me even knowing. Did you know that that was why I couldn’t put up with the craziness any longer? I don’t know how you had taken it away before, but I got my guilt back, and I couldn’t keep on seeing you. Even after you told me that everything was fine, I had to put an end to it. A couple weeks later, an hour after I sent that e-mail inviting you over, I sent you another one about how we had to stop, and after that one for the road, that’s why I stopped. That’s why that had to be the last time that we talked.
It’s months later now. I’m back from school. When I shovel this sidewalk, I wonder if you’d understand me. I didn’t think about you, even though I was applying what I learned to the new girl that I found. She’s not like you. There’s something about you that brought out the worst in me, as if your fat and your craziness made me lazy and mean when I was with you. I can go out with her and feel comfortable. My friends like her. We haven’t had sex yet, but I don’t think that it’ll be like it was with you. I respect her. This could be love.
Now that I’ve told you what you didn’t know, tell me why I’ve been thinking about you. Why don’t I think about my girlfriend instead? At night, when I’m alone, why have I remembered the sex without remembering any of the million things that made us dysfunctional? If I stopped visiting you because it was corrupting me, and I understand why you made me crazy, why can’t I leave the memories behind? Teach me how to live with knowing that you were never crazy.

MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN TO HER MOTHER:
You’ve been dead for a hundred and seven days, but you had been gone for much longer. I think about that frequently. I think about you frequently. It’s hard for me on Sunday afternoons because I can’t call you. It’s hard to work on the garden because I know that yours is overgrown. It’s hard at night. It’s hard to walk by the clock that you gave me for Christmas seven years ago. It’s hard to hear organ music. It’s hard in the early morning. It’s hard to hear my own sister on the phone, sometimes, because she sounds like you. It’s hard in the middle of the day. It can be hard at any time, anywhere, out of nowhere for no reason. It’s still too hard. It should be easier now, after a hundred days, but the aching in the back of my mind for the past week reminds me that I still feel it like it’s raw. I shouldn’t worry too much about why this past week has been hard. I know why. I’ve been helping an old man who lives down the street.
I don’t think that you ever met him. I never spent much time over there. We’d go over there for cocktail parties sometimes, we let him hire our son to shovel his walk, but we were still never really very social with him and his wife. We knew that he’d been having health problems recently, and that she’d been taking extra care of him, but nobody thought that there was anything wrong with her. It was a real shock when she died in her sleep a month ago. She was only sixty-two, more than a decade younger than him. She looked fine. It was the first funeral that I’d been to since yours, and I knew that it would be hard, but there was no reason not to go. His daughter came from Portland with her little girl, who I hadn’t seen before. They had kids late in that family, but can you imagine what it would feel like to do that and then to die young, while they’re still so young? I never asked about it later, but I know that they’d been married for a while before they had their daughter, and she turned out the same way. I wonder how heavily that weighs upon him.
I’m helping him now. I’m helping him because I saw him pick up his mail a week after the funeral. His daughter had left. He was alone. I saw him bend over to pick up his newspaper. He looked tired. He looked like you did when you were getting sick. That morning was eighty-five days since you had died.
I forced myself to say hello to him and to ask him how he was.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“I need to do some things now, but can I come over to visit later on? This afternoon?” It was Sunday morning and I missed you.
“Yes,” he said. “Sure. Come over later. We’ll sit.”
Was it wrong? Was it wrong to visit this man if I did it not because he was my friend, but because I missed you? You’d been dead for months, but you’d been gone for much longer. Do you really remember what you were like then? How can I know when you were really gone?
He told me that he wants to leave his house for Portland. He knew a place close to his daughter. He said that he’d been researching it, and that he’d sent his daughter to look it over. Judging by the way that she spoke about it and from the pictures that he saw, the place was warm and soft. As I sat there, I knew that he couldn’t clean out his house alone.
“I don’t need to be there to know how the place will be,” he said.
“You’re right,” I told him. “The smallest signs can be enough.”
I’m sorry, Mom. Mom, I’m sorry. Do you understand me? I couldn’t do the same thing for you. I couldn’t be there then. I couldn’t really think about what was happening to you. I wasn’t ready. I had to go through a hundred days of regret first. Even now, it’s hard, but I’m doing it. It’s the right thing to do, shouldn’t I do that?
I told him that I’d help him with the house and everything in it, and I don’t regret it. He has a bad knee. He’s recovering from laser surgery. He needs the help. You know what the job is like, don’t you? It’s hours of taking a home apart room by room, helping him decide on the few things that he wants to take and finding a place for the rest. He’s been giving lots of things to me and my family, which is nice, but I know that it’s more stuff that will make me remember him later. He’s strong. He’s sharp. He isn’t crazy yet, but I know that he shouldn’t do it alone. You know what it’s like to get rid of your spouse’s clothes, but he shouldn’t have to take apart his whole house at the same time. Still, he’s been strong. He’s only keeping a few boxes. He doesn’t tremble when my son takes the rest away.
My son is helping. He’s really grown since you last saw him. I can see him shoveling from where I’m working now, and from behind, he looks like a man. He’s quieter now, but when he speaks, he sounds like a man. Sometimes, he’s like a man that I don’t know, but from the right angle, I can still see that little boy. You loved that little boy so much that it surprised me sometimes. I’ve got him taking the old man’s things away now. Do you think that he understands what he’s doing? It’s so easy for him.
Cleaning this house should be easier for me because I never lived here. It should be easier without the memories of what took place in each room that I destroy, without knowing the history of each thing that ends up in the trash. It should be easy, but it isn’t. Mary got your voice, but I got your active memory. I’m usually good, but I can’t go for too long without asking him where he got something, and after he’s told me, I can’t help but think about it. With those histories, my memory twists itself and fills in gaps that I couldn’t go through. The most painful times are when I’m going through his wife’s things, because they’re not too far away from your things. You would have liked her books. You would have liked her dresses. You would have lingered over the photos of her daughter, too. Do you understand me? Did you do it for your mother, or did you leave it for someone else too?
You always joked that you were mad at Daddy for dying without clearing out the attic like he’d promised, but you didn’t do it either. Would you have done it even if you hadn’t gotten sick? For the past hundred days, I’ve thought about what the last years of your life would have been like if the drugs worked. Would anything have worked? Could anything pull your mind out of what it fell into once your body started to fail? It used to bring me a kind of solace that you probably never noticed that Mary and I had to eventually stop bringing our kids to visit you because you couldn’t smile for them, because you didn’t notice that they were there at all. It used to give me a kind of comfort that you probably never heard us crying on the phone when you couldn’t string good days together in a row or when you asked us why we weren’t doing enough. I cried hardest for Mary, because she was the sister who never moved too far away from you. Because she loved you too much to leave you, she was the one who had to take you from your house, who had to check you out of psych wards when you’d been good and then who had to talk to the doctors when you fell back into them. Do you understand what we’ve left to Mary? I left her to take your house apart alone.
Tell Mary I’m sorry. Please try to understand why I had to leave, and then tell her for me, because I’m too ashamed to tell her myself, even when we’re on the phone on Sunday afternoons. Do you remember the last time that we were together? We knew that you couldn’t stay in the house much longer. You were having too many bad days. They were coming too close together. You weren’t safe alone, but neither of us could imagine bringing you to live with our kids. You needed too much. Mary had called me to come see that clearly, so she could get you out of there. She needed to be sure that it was the right thing to do. She needed help.
Do you remember that? Do you remember the last time that I fed you? The only way that I could do it was to imagine that you weren’t my mother. Mary and I tried to imagine that it was another woman who we held down, not the woman who we would remember being a nurse and force-feeding patients herself, not our mother who carried us when we were sick in the night.
“No,” you said, “no, take it away, let me go, let me go, let me go. Let me die.”
I held you tighter.
Mary forced the applesauce into your mouth. “It’s not her,” she said; “remember, it isn’t her.’
“I know,” I said, and I believed it completely.
As I held her, a bellowing moan erupted from the woman’s emaciated body. The sound was alien and unknowable to me, but I began to shake nonetheless at the animal pain within my grasp.
“It isn’t her,” I said to my sister. “She’s gone, it isn’t her.” I couldn’t look at the woman.
“It isn’t her,” Mary said. The sound continued.
I held the woman tighter.
The sound stopped.
My grip loosened.
The woman breathed softly.
Mary put the applesauce down.
I breathed softly.
“Girls,” the woman said, in your warm soft voice, “say, what’s for dessert?”
Mary and I froze. You looked at us again with eyes that I recognized. You must have seen your daughters fortified against you. We must have looked like we’d seen a ghost.
You smiled, and you started to laugh so hard that your body shook between my fingers, and I shook with you, laughing as hard as I could until we all ran out of breath together, and then you fell silent. You breathed slowly through lips spattered with applesauce. You fell asleep.
Do you understand why I had to leave? Mary must have understood eventually. I don’t know if she’s ever really forgiven me for it. I told her that I couldn’t do it anymore, and when she reminded me that it was time, that it was time to take care of our mother and her house, I hugged her and drove away. She still talks to me, but we’ve never talked about that night. We talk about everything that isn’t that night.
I had to leave because I understood that it was you all along. I couldn’t see you fall apart while you were awake. I couldn’t be there anymore, not if you never left me, not if you knew that your house was coming down around you, not if you recognized us as your body took your mind apart and kept only what it needed for its trip to the grave.
It’s been a hundred and seven days since I left home, since the day that you were no longer able to forgive me. Can you hear me? Can you forgive me? What should I learn from the things in this man’s house?

OLD MAN TO OLD WOMAN:
I’m leaving. I’m leaving our town. I’m leaving our possessions. I’m leaving our house. I’m leaving our home. My sweet love, I’m leaving you in the ground. I know that this isn’t what you wanted me to do. You were clear about that. You took care of me when I needed it. I needed it when my knee failed, I needed it when my eye went, and I needed you every moment that you were here.
Now, my love, you’re gone, and I don’t need you anymore.
Please don’t misunderstand me. You have been so good to me, and I tried to be my best for you. You know that. That’s why I can tell you that you were wrong before. You knew what I wanted. I want to go out west. I want to live near our daughter. I want to die while I see her child grow. All that was left for us here is the warm soft feeling of decay. The rot that takes everything we have came to me first. It challenged my ability to stand and see, and you were good to me when you helped me through it, but you treated me like I was already dead. I told you that I wanted to leave when I could see again, but you held me tighter in my bed.
“No,” you said. “No, you don’t understand, but it’s too much to give to her, we’re too much of a burden for our daughter and her little girl. I love her, I love my daughter, and that’s why I’m telling you that she deserves to live with lively people. Let our granddaughter be a child. Let her live without seeing us fall apart and worrying about when we’ll finally die. If we go, they won’t be protected from our bad days. If we love them, we can’t be selfish. I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of everything.”
Was that when I betrayed you? Was that when I told you that I agreed with you as I left you in my mind? I was too angry with you to bring it up again. I sent our daughter to look the place over and didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell you that she liked it. I didn’t tell you that she missed me.
After I could move my knee enough to walk slowly, I waited for you to leave the house. I knew that you and the doctor said that it wasn’t ready for much, but I didn’t care. When I knew that you’d be gone for a while, I’d take walks. I walked down the street, up the hill, and towards the woods, where I could see rotting trees shed their dying leaves. In the West, where she is, they have trees that are higher and older than any around here. They still stand strong. Our daughter and our granddaughter want to show them to me. I never told you about the trees. I’d be home from those walks before you ever knew that I was gone. I had already left you, and I was still too angry to tell you how much you hurt me.
I gave you silences, empty gestures, and a seething gap. Is that what killed you? I betrayed you, and I’ll carry that with me.
Forgive me because I’m still leaving. I betrayed our love, and I’m sorry, but I’m still leaving.
A woman and her son are packing up our house. I’m giving almost all of our things to them. They’re helping me leave you. They’ve been good to me. They’re quick to make it easier on me, so fast and so thorough that I can tell that they’re not just doing it for me. Nobody works that hard for the man down the street and his thing, not unless they revel in it somehow.
I need to see the West. I need to see the children grow before I die. I can’t stand knowing that memories that I could have made with these new people have wasted away. And Love, they should see my decay. I believe that when we lie to ourselves about our failings, when we relive our memories in hopes that we will somehow travel back to take a different path, we fundamentally betray the young learning minds within us that must live with their real decisions. I’ll carry my sins with me, but I will not re-enact them for the warm soft pleasure of their familiarity.
I’m leaving home for the West. I’m going to die there, but I will first drive alone across the country in my rotting body. It might wear me down by the time that I get to the girls, but they too should learn that every moment is their last chance. I’ll hug this woman that’s helped me leave our possessions behind, and shake the boy’s hand, and maybe, by then, they’ll have poured their guilt out into their labors. As I drive, I will listen for the sound of my tires against the road. I believe that it will sound like a bellowing moan.

BAH GOD UPDATE: Bushman

2005-11-03T04:36:22Z

Below are 16 haiku about this guy, who's been in San Francisco for decades, waits behind a bush in the middle of a busy sidewalk to scare passers-by and to panhandle the crowds that watch, and is awesome. They were part of a larger project and ended up being the only part really worth posting right now.

My old senior comp professor appeared to me in a dream last night and told me to "stop being so tenative" (we were climbing nets miles above the sidewalk), so here's to that.

Every Halloween
Mr. Bushman blends right in
Kinda drab, really.

Bushman v. Santa
Which one gives you what you want?
Who gives what you need?

Bushman, Chosen One
Why is this bush diff'rent from
all other bushes?

The Fourth of July
Did they know they would die for
Freedom of Bushman?

***

Bushman on the moon
Hired on by the Russians
Armstrong was surprised!

If Bushman's on a
sophisticated stakeout
could anyone tell?

Bushman the pirate
On the Bush-Boat he did sail
UGGA BUGGA ARRRR!

Bushman the snowman
waited until his moment.
The kids cried and cried.

***

Adam, Eve, Bushman
Satan approaches wrong one
snake jumps out of skin

Noah gathers pairs
upon the order of God
Only one Bushman

Tower of Babel
falls and Bushman forgets what
UGGA BUGGA means

The Lord Is Risen
after three days underground
Bushman scares him too.

***

I take thee, Bushman
Both in sickness and in health
but not your branches.

Bushman and myself
honeymooning in Maui
lost him in the green

Child of Bushman
becomes serious too fast
Peekabo - blase.

Bushman, we grow old
and your memory leaves you
I will feign surprise.

Pool Hall, Knuckleball

2005-09-12T04:41:58Z

The other day, an interview with Paul Newman. The interviewer brings up a line from a movie I never saw ("The Hustler").

[Fast Eddie is bothered because Bert called him a born loser]
Fast Eddie: Cause, ya see, twice, Sarah... once at Ames with Minnesota Fats and then again at Arthur's, in that cheap, crummy pool room, now why'd I do it, Sarah? Why'd I do it? I coulda beat that guy, coulda beat 'im cold, he never woulda known. But I just hadda show 'im. Just hadda show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it's great, when it's REALLY great. You know, like anything can be great, anything can be great. I don't care, BRICKLAYING can be great, if a guy knows. If he knows what he's doing and why and if he can make it come off. When I'm goin', I mean, when I'm REALLY goin' I feel like a... like a jockey must feel. He's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him... he's comin' into the stretch, the pressure's on 'im, and he KNOWS... just feels... when to let it go and how much. Cause he's got everything workin' for 'im, timing touch... it's a great feeling, boy, it's a real great feeling when you're right and you KNOW you're right. It's like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue's part of me. You know, it's uh - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood, it's got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don't have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. I can play that game the way... NOBODY'S ever played it before.
Sarah Packard: You're not a loser, Eddie, you're a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything.

I've heard the idea before. Everyone has - it feels good when you're "in the zone," when you're doing really well at anything, right? When I heard the line, I immediately flashed back to this book that I read in a crazy little Eastern Philosophies class in my crazy little high school - Musashi's Book of the Five Rings. Essentially, a samurai sort-of-guy explains how you can achieve enlightment by being extremely good at anything, using his own amazing skill at combat as an example. By devoting his life to beating the shit out of people, he learned to beat the shit out of people so effectively that he immersed himself completely into the activity, and the conscious mind whose cravings and insanities make us miserable fades away - we are mindless in action, one with the world, enlightened. Like the Hustler, he believed that anyone could do it with anything - through combat, art, bricklaying, anything - if you devoted yourself to it so that you existed as an extension of that. Through any activity, we can achieve a state of grace.

And I think that I've felt that, a few times, in flashes. Sometimes, writing flows out of me and it's an ecstatic experience, but painfully rarely. I've felt flashes of it a few times in a range of things: performing, laughing, working, flipping burgers. I can't devote my life to flipping burgers (career-wise, anyway), and I let the opportunity to pursue performing vanish unfulfilled rather than risk failure (a waste, a waste, and i'm trying to let that drive me now - "Better to live in hope than to never have lived at all"), so the most socially acceptable pursuit is writing. But then again, for every minute of writing in which I've experienced sheer joy, I've also experienced ten minutes (an hour, a year) of gut-wrenching fear and pain. Is it worth it? If I've spent these last few months knowing that writing could be my ticket out - that which makes me feel fulfilled (and were the girls a distraction from that gap?) - and wanting to make something of myself - but being too lazy or afraid to do actually do something, am I really cut out for it? Is it worth it? Would it work?

And I know that I won't be happy unless I try it and do it, but let's see when I actually write something new. She gave me a picture of a closed door when I graduated - and I know that I will always regret not trying to tear that motherfucker open if I don't follow through with this - and yet, and yet, and yet.

Anyway, here's another story. I wrote it before I really knew much about baseball, so there are things that I really regret about it now, to the point of writing this namby-pamby disclaimer - and yet, and yet, and yet. Forgive it, forgive me.

Knuckleball
Fall 2004

6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (Pregame)

“You’re real lucky, son,” the man said, even though he wasn’t my father and I wasn’t feeling very lucky at all. “I don’t care how much you hurt yourself. You’re the luckiest ballplayer here.”
“You’re lucky to have a choice,” my manager said. “Most of the time we’d just tell somebody that they’d either do it or they’re cut from the team and out of the organization. We shouldn’t be showing you any mercy. You didn’t tell us that you were tired and you blew out your arm. You’re a pitcher who can’t pitch. We should just fire you, but we’ll give you a choice. Fastball, knuckleball, or quit. When your arm strength returns, we could use you as a fastball reliever, but it’s clear that you don’t have the stamina to ever be a fastball starter. You probably wouldn’t go much past here with that, but you’d have a job. We’ve been told that you’ve got a good knuckleball. I know that nobody wants to be a knuckleballer, but we need one. With some work, you could probably start, and you might be able to go somewhere from there. Then again, you could always quit.”
He waited like I might say something to that, but I wasn’t going to say one goddamn thing about quitting and he knew it.
“You stay here in the bullpen for a few days and think about it,” he said.
He paused again, but I gave him nothing.
“You can save the talk for later,” he said. “Enjoy the game!”
“Thanks, sir.” I didn’t watch him leave.
I sat in the bullpen and thought about it. The knuckleball killed my father, and now it was coming for me.
When I was nine years old, we went to the ballpark. Dad and Mom were still Mom and Dad. He took us to see the Ithaca College Bombers’ Saturday doubleheader against the Clarkson Golden Knights because I was finally old enough to sit and watch the whole thing. He told me that baseball was completely different in person, but that was just talk. I knew that things would be louder and faster, and that you could feel the bat hitting the ball, but I couldn’t imagine how fast the pitchers threw until I was there to feel each fastball slam into the catcher’s mitt with the same thump that I’ve now witnessed thousands of times without ever tiring of the sound or its impact. I don’t remember who won on that Saturday, but I haven’t forgotten the foul ball that I lost towards the end of the first game. I watched it fly back into the grass behind our bleachers, and when Dad told me that I could go get it to take it home, I didn’t hesitate to jump down to the dirt from the edge of our row. I saw exactly where it had settled in the weeds, but I didn’t see the other boy running towards it until he passed me. He wasn’t any bigger than me and I was running as fast as I could, but he beat me to it anyway. He only looked at me for a second as he walked back, carrying my ball.
Mom squeezed my arm as I passed by her on the way back to my seat. “Don’t worry about it, Willy. He was probably just lucky enough to see it first.”
“He must have wanted it more,” Dad told me. He said that there would probably be another ball that would land nearby in the second game, but none came, and the balls I’d get later only felt like second-string replacements.

6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (1st Inning)

They gave my start to Keith Washington even though there was no way that he wanted it more than I did. Keith was just another pitcher. He wasn’t here because they thought that he could develop into a star or anything, he was just here to back up the guys who could go places. He was a pitcher without much of a future beyond being another name on the minor-league roster. It didn’t matter now. He was on my mound. It was his game to win or lose, but everybody knew that Bill Miller had already lost the game. If Keith failed, it would be my fault for not being able to make my start. If he won, maybe they didn’t need me anymore. Management knew that I knew that. They knew that I felt it every second that I sat out here with the other pitchers, dressed like I could go out and pitch when I couldn’t. They wanted me to watch him. They wanted me to want it without being able to have it. They wanted to force me to believe in the knuckleball.
Back when I was eleven years old, we all still lived on South Hill. Dad was finishing his third year with the insurance office. I still didn’t understand exactly what he did there. When I asked him, he told me that he basically worked to protect people from risk. Back then, he seemed like the kind of guy that could do it. After school I did as much of my homework as I could do before he’d come back from work. That got easier when Dad started to get back later. On this Thursday, I finished my homework and waited by the window. Mom told me that he’d probably be late, but I tossed my baseball and watched the road in case he came back early.
“He’s busier now,” she said. “Even if he says that he’ll be back early, you don’t need to wait for him. The office closes at four, but you know that he’ll be there until six or seven. Just go. Go play with other boys. You don’t need him anymore.” Mom had started working mornings again at the ad agency by then, and she’d start doing afternoons soon. The work made my parents move more slowly in the evenings, so that the inside of my house made me feel quieter than I ever had before. I always felt better when I was outside.
Dad didn’t get home until after dinner. “John’s son came into the office today to take John’s things,” he told Mom as he came into the house, and then he didn’t say anything else for a while.
He wanted to eat when he got back home, but he still came outside when I asked him to play catch afterwards. I didn’t want to rush him because we could still play under the new streetlamp, but I’d been waiting, so I had his glove ready when he put down his fork. We’d practice the fastball for a while. He’d set his glove in the different locations within the strike zone. I still liked to get it so he wouldn’t have to move his glove, and then I liked to feel his pitch land in mine.
“Are you tired?” He hadn’t had much to say to me that night, and I knew that work was long, but he never admitted to being tired himself. He’d just get inside and shuffle around slowly.
“No,” I said. “I’m still feeling good.” My arm was getting a little tight, but this was still mostly true.
“Okay,” he said. This was the part of the night when he’d switch to the knuckleball. Dad twisted his grip on the ball so he clamped down on it with his fingernails, and then threw it sidearm without flicking his wrist so that he’d release the ball without spinning it. The knuckleball came towards me slower than the fastball, but I never knew where it would land. It could change directions in midair like it was shaking up and down or wobbling side to side. I’d try to get my glove in front of it and it might suddenly drop down or rise up before I could react. If I missed the catch, it might land somewhere in the grass behind me. If I wasn’t quick enough, it could smack me anywhere between my feet and my face. Every time that we played, I tried to be as fast as I could, but the game always ended when too many hits on my body and misses into the grass slowed me down enough that I’d have to admit that I had to go inside. He’d look at me to ask me if I was sure. When I was, he’d go inside to read. Afterwards, I’d go into my room to lie on my back so I wouldn’t feel the bruises on my front.
As time passed, he started throwing more knuckleballs than fastballs. I’d get tired sooner and we’d finish faster. Sometimes, he was inside reading before dark. But while I got tired faster, he didn’t seem to have to work at all to throw the knuckleballs that I couldn’t consistently catch. Dad would make small talk while we threw the fastball, but he wouldn’t speak when he switched to the knuckler. Instead, he’d watch me and wait for me to recover the ball so that I could get it back to him so we could go again.
Today, he threw the knuckler and started talking.
“You remember John, right? The man that worked next to me?”
A knuckleball dove into the grass.
“Your mother didn’t want me to tell you that anything happened to him but you should know. You should know about it. . John was on vacation at Lake Champlain a few weeks ago. He was 57, but he was in good shape. He ran. He loved to run. It kept him in shape. He was on vacation and he was running. His wife was in the cabin waiting for him. He was perfectly healthy. Was anything wrong with a man like that taking a run?”
A knuckleball broke away, and then darted back towards my glove.
“He didn’t come back to the house. She was waiting for him and he didn’t come back. He had a heart attack. He was in great shape and he had a heart attack and now he’s dead. He was running, staying in shape, doing everything right, and now he’s goddamn dead.”
A knuckleball rose past my glove and flew over my head.
“He was in good shape. He ate right, he exercised, and today his son came to clean out his things. He did everything right and he’s dead. Willy, it doesn’t matter how many times this kind of thing happens, it never burns me any less. He did everything right and he’s dead. There’s no way to understand it. There’s no order to it. Your mother doesn’t want you to know, but it’s true. Sometimes, no matter what you do, all you can hope to be is lucky enough that your body doesn’t betray you.”
A knuckleball suddenly curved into my throwing elbow. It hurt so much that I couldn’t throw the ball back. He knew that I couldn’t catch the knuckleball. He knew that it tired me out. When he threw the knuckleball, did it mean that he sick of playing catch with me? What did it mean? I couldn’t return the ball or stop crying.
“Why? What are you – why – how are you doing that?” I didn’t want to stand up. I wished that he couldn’t see me in the streetlight.
I heard the low, full noise that my father made when he exhaled. “I was waiting for you to ask. There’s no reason to pretend that you can handle everything when you can’t. It’s stupid, Willy, and I was going to keep on doing it until you learned to quit. If you want to know how the knuckleball works, you ask me. Your mother doesn’t want you to know, but it turns out that the knuckleball is the way of the world.”
“How does it work?” My elbow throbbed.
He showed me the grip and explained that a ball thrown without spin is more susceptible to the natural turbulence in the air because the seams of the ball do not cut through the air but instead push off of its random currents and eddies. Depending on the smallest movements of weather and the pitcher’s ability to release the ball without spinning it, the knuckleball could either be completely unhittable or as hittable as a slow fastball. He fit my hand to the ball and showed me the motion, and after several tries, I threw one without spin. He’d caught all of the ones that spun, but this one curved away from him at the last minute. He told me that it must have danced on the currents of the air. My elbow didn’t hurt anymore, but the tears didn’t stop.
“Was there anything that you did? You weren’t controlling them at all, were you? Did you have anything?”
“No,” my father said. “Anybody can throw a knuckleball. It’s nothing special.”
They officially reassigned most of John’s duties to Dad. He got even busier. As time went on, Mom told me that he’d be too tired to play catch, and she was right. I stopped waiting for him to come back from work. He didn’t come looking for me, either. Soon, he signed me up for Kiwanis baseball. He didn’t tell me about it. I found out from a team assignment letter that came in the mail.

6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (3rd Inning)

Keith wasn’t fooling anybody. He didn’t have a fastball that could overpower someone who saw it coming, and they were beginning to stop swinging at the junk that they couldn’t hit before. They weren’t hitting it very hard yet, but they were making some contact and it was only the third inning. Most of the relief pitchers went yesterday, so if they had wanted to get Keith out of the game early, they would have had to use the good relievers again, which would burned them out even more for what could be a competitive game tomorrow. They left Keith in to get knocked around for a while. Our hitters weren’t taking very long to get out, so he didn’t get much rest on the bench.
“I’m sorry,” I said to nobody in particular. The other guys in the bullpen hadn’t said anything since Keith got in trouble and they apparently didn’t want to mess with the streak. I didn’t blame them. I hadn’t been thinking at all, really. It was my fault. When I exhausted my arm, I put him there. When I didn’t say anything about how it felt and went out to try to pitch again, I trapped him there. I knew that it was my fault, and I knew what I did wrong, but who could guarantee that a knuckleballer would do any better?
When I was fourteen, a neighbor told us that the old transmission plant up the hill never bothered to mop up the solvent that they used on the parts. They’d been using the solvent for decades, and we’d been living downhill for fifteen years. Solvents can seep into the ground pretty effectively, and they can run down the plates of the hill in imperceptibly flowing currents. The currents can then get caught in the plates’ pockmarks to form eddies and pools, where the trichoryletheline can diffuse upwards so its particles leave the ground to join the air. My parents didn’t know anything about the fluid dynamics of solvents when they got the house, but that didn’t stop them from managing to find a home that was directly above a toxic underwater pool.
After the neighbor left and Dad had gone upstairs, Mom told me how they found the house. Before I was born, they came to the neighborhood and found rows of available identical prefabricated houses. One of Dad’s friends had the connection to let them pick one before other people could, but when they saw all those houses that looked exactly the same, they couldn’t decide which one they wanted. Without any better idea, they stood between the two rows of houses at the end of the development. Closing their eyes, they embraced each other and began to spin counter-clockwise. After they counted to thirty, my father pointed with his right hand and they stopped. They opened their eyes and saw their house. At that point, I learned not only that my parents were people that relied on luck, but also that their luck was terrible.
Before long, we moved out of our poisonous house, but only Mom and I moved into the apartment on West Hill. They didn’t have anything else to say to each other, I guess. Dad found a place that was up the hill from the plant. I didn’t visit him until after he got the diagnosis. Mom and I spent far more time above the solvent pools and we were fine, but Dad had developed a rare throat cancer just from the nights and weekends that he was home from work. Then again, there was too much cancer in his family to even be sure that he could blame the toxins. Was he just lucky enough to develop it on his own? I got onto the high school varsity baseball team during the next year as a pitcher. Dad had lost his sense of taste, some of his saliva glands, a bit of flesh, and most of his energy, but he wasn’t dead.
When I visited him after the diagnosis, he told me a baseball story. It’s my favorite one. “It doesn’t really matter who it’s about or when it happened,” he said, “because it could be any pitcher at any time, but let’s say that it’s Sandy Koufax in the World Series against the Yankees. He had a great fastball and the best curveball in baseball. Unfortunately, it was cold that day, he was more than slightly injured, and for whatever other reasons he couldn’t get the right grip on his curve. He tried to work it out and he ended up walking a couple guys in the top of the first inning. His catcher was a little disturbed, obviously, and he walked up to talk it over with his pitcher.
‘”Sandy? Sandy, what the hell is going on with the curve, man? What do you want to do?” The catcher tried to stay cool so the other guys wouldn’t get too worried, but he was pretty shaken, and he looked towards Sandy for some kind of answer.
“I don’t know,” Sandy said. They stood there for a second, just staring at each other, in the middle of the World Series without a curveball.
When the umpire started to come up to break up their conference, Sandy spoke up. “Aw, fuck it,” he said. “Let’s just blow it by them.”
The catcher agreed and they went with the fastball all afternoon, and of course they won.” It was a nice story, but he didn’t tell any others like that after chemo started. He didn’t tell me any stories for a while.
It didn’t matter that I only heard it once, because that story got me through high school. Every spring and fall, I didn’t worry about anything but blowing it by whoever was up there. They’d figure out that fastballs were all I was going to throw pretty quickly, but that didn’t mean that they could do much with them. I wanted to win more than they did. I always wanted it more. There were a few guys that could hit me, but there weren’t too many in any one game, so I’d get along okay. I’d go until I was out of gas for the day, then I’d rest until the next week and I’d do it all again until the winter or the summer came, when I’d recharge. Unlike life, I told myself, baseball was an essentially simple game if you had the stuff. If you wanted enough, you had it. If you had enough, you lived through the game. If you didn’t, you were done.

6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (6th Inning)

Keith didn’t have it, but they left him in to save the other guys. We were down by six runs, so they had to leave him in through the seventh inning if they could, which meant that he was still two innings away. Nobody cheered for him. In between pitches, he bent over and let his throwing arm hang limp from his shoulders. When he shook his arm to stretch it out, sweat splashed in the dirt below his fingers. He brought the arm back up, shoved himself back into his pitching motion, then threw and hoped that somebody would catch the ball. Sometimes they did and his routine would perk up again when he felt rest coming. Sometimes they didn’t. If he was anything like I was, he didn’t know the score anymore. All he knew was the number of outs remaining.
When I was sixteen, Dad was going into his second year of being too sick to go to work. They helped with the medical bills, but what could they do for a man who knew that he was beaten? During one Thursday evening, I remembered what we’d done before, but I saw that he would now be too tired for catch. He agreed with me, sat silently for a minute, and then told me to find a chair and a wall. From a folding chair I set up by a streetlight, my father watched me throw fastballs against the wall of his building. The baseball bounced back towards my chest at first, and then gradually began to fall shorter as the outer layers of leather, twine, and cork fell apart. We found a rhythm in which I’d set my motion during his tentative inhales, then throw and recover the ball on the exhales. After a while, my dad started talking.
“Stay with the fastball because it’ll never betray you. It’ll never surprise you. If you control the fastball, it goes exactly where you want it to go until you’re too tired to throw it anymore.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The outside had fallen off some time ago, revealing fraying twine and cracking cork.
“That knuckleball I taught you was just fucking luck. Throw the fastball and your man might be good enough to beat you, but at least you didn’t lose for no goddamn reason.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The twine gave up and fell off.
“Don’t rely on luck because our luck is shit. Luck is shit. We were good people and we picked a house that looked like all the others and it poisoned me, and it still may have poisoned you. Luck is shit. Throw it harder.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The cork finally cracked apart. I looked at him and tore the rest of it off. In my hand, I held the rubber core.
“Blow it by them.”
A fastball hit the wall. It ricocheted off faster than any had before, and I didn’t know where it went until I head the sound of it hitting my Dad’s bald, poisoned head. He yelled as he crumpled in his seat so that his forehead crashed against his right knee, bounced once, and rested there. His pained moans didn’t fade until he ran out of breath. He didn’t move. I couldn’t move.
For a moment, that’s how we were – still and silent- until he wheezingly inhaled and began to pull himself back up. Clutching the spot on the back of his head where the ball hit him, a braying sound crackled through his shaking body that I soon recognized as teary laughter. After everything that he’d said, I didn’t understand what was so fucking funny.
On the way back to his house, I pretended that I hadn’t already heard the story about the pitcher who lost his curve. He died a few days later.
I was sixteen when I found the fastball that got me through high school and nineteen when I lost it. In between, I entered the first-year draft and was picked up in the thirty-eighth round by Boston. My mother followed me down to their development facility in Ft. Myers, Florida. Every five days, she saw me give them the fastball and she saw too many of them hit it. Every five days, I felt the games get longer as I tried to throw harder. Each time, I started with less and less.
When I was nineteen, on a Saturday afternoon, I went to the ballpark and warmed up even though my fastball wasn’t ready. I didn’t tell Keith while he caught for me in the bullpen. I didn’t tell anyone. Instead, I threw him the knuckleball. He laughed until it hit his neck, then he set me loose.
I stood on the mound and watched the hitter settle into his box. When he was set, he locked his eyes on mine so I would know that he was ready. He’d seen me before. He wanted the fastball that I didn’t have. I had a knuckleball that had never seen a hitter before, but could I make it be a strike? Before I threw, I blinked and saw a knuckleball float, wobble, then straighten out immediately before he hit it right back to me. I saw the shadow of another knuckleball dodge away the last second, and I heard it hit the glove. I saw another shoot past me to be dropped by my shortstop. I saw another fouled away towards the grasses behind the bleachers. I saw another miss his bat and find my catcher’s mask. I saw another disappear for a home run. I saw another miss the plate entirely. Finally, I found the grip, started the motion, and released. With no spin, the ball danced in the air and slowly spiraled towards the plate. At the second to last second, the ball began to break low and away. The batter flailed out of what must have been surprise and desperation. At the last second, the ball suddenly broke back towards the plate, where it hit his swinging bat. With a crack, the ball shot past me and bounced by the right fielder for a triple. I had inherited my father’s luck. Had the house poisoned me, too? My catcher came to visit.
“What the fuck was that? Where’s the fastball?”
“I don’t know. I’ll blow it by them.” I still wanted to win. I was a good man, and that should have been enough.
“Do it,” he said.
I didn’t want to see the next hitter, but he came anyway. I focused my mind, my legs, my chest, and my back on the next fastball, but there wasn’t much left in the arm. After the next few fastballs, my catcher didn’t bother with visiting anymore because the manager had figured it out. I’d always been tired, and I hadn’t told anybody. I’d blown myself out. They left me in to think about what I’d done.

6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (7th Inning)

Keith got the first out in the seventh inning. He’d told them about the knuckleballs in the warm-up. Later, the manager came to me in the bullpen and told me to think it over.
Keith gave up a hit. He bent down to let his arm flop down from his shoulder to where his fingers almost scraped against the dirt. He hung there for a moment, and then gathered his body to work towards the second out. As I watched him pull himself up - slowly, painfully – I didn’t feel my arm at all. All of the fatigue that I’d put there, all of the strength that I’d built up, all of the earth’s poison was gone. For a moment, I could imagine myself at twenty. I would dig my nails into the ball’s hide so that I could almost feel its rubber core. As I dropped my arm back, I would see nothing in my mind before I released the ball to float on indistinct currents. The ball might find a bat. The ball might find the ground. The ball might also find a glove, where it would begin to return to me. Keith recorded his final out.

Remember this

2005-09-09T05:06:39Z

Remember this years from now. It's about noon - you write your parents, you tell them that four job opportunities fell through, that you don't know what the fuck you're going to do, that you're depressed, discouraged, and scared. You miss her. In the e-mail, something that you write comes off as a sort of shot at your dad, who has always been good to you, you regret it as soon as it's sent. You feel terrible, but you have to hurry to make lunch now so that you can leave for work, and as you're doing that, your phone gets a message from your dad, who is calling, telling you not to be too depressed, that you have enough money to hold out for a few months, that you're going to be okay, and he sounds sad, sad for you, but he says that you're going to be okay. Halfway through the message, you start bawling, the first real cry in years. Minutes later, there you are, eating applesauce for lunch on the dusty couch in the dark room, your eyes still damp, an old man on the television watching and listening to a younger classical pianist. When the music stops, the old man speaks, and you realize that you are eating applesauce and watching Mr. Rogers alone, tear-stained and only temporarily employed. This seems like such a recognizable low point - something that you can remember years later and think look how far I've come since then, look at what I have built since then - and the ridiculous overwrought quality of this moment is so transparent that you begin to feel better. It's funny, right? Remember this years from now.

Here's another story.

Undeliverable Messages
Spring 2005
THE PERSONS INVOLVED
AN OLD MAN, who is leaving home
AN OLD WOMAN, his wife, who has died
A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN, the old man’s neighbor, who helps him move
HER MOTHER, who has died
A YOUNG MAN, the middle-aged woman’s son, who helps his mother.
A YOUNG WOMAN, whom the young boy left months ago

YOUNG MAN to YOUNG WOMAN:
Sometimes, when I’ve been shoveling for a while, I think about girls. Since I was in middle school, I’ve been working on this guy’s sidewalk. It’s a strange sidewalk because it takes this sharp turn because he lives on a corner, but I’ve done it so many times that I can look up and see that I’ve finished one direction and started on the other without paying attention to the turn. Sometimes I’d imagine that I wasn’t doing it because my mom told me to help these old people, but was doing it for a girl instead. She’d be waiting back at the house for me, where it was warm and soft. It wasn’t sexual, just comfortable. It sounds really fucking stupid now that I’m older, but I still want a girl like that. I never thought about you as the kind of girl that I’d shovel for. You were crazy.
I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about you recently. I haven’t seen you for close to a year. The last I heard, you didn’t graduate. Did you ever really care about graduating? You’re rich, so does it matter? Normal people can’t just quit school with one semester to go, then come back to finish two years later and fucking fail. Remember all the jokes I made about how rich you were? You were a good sport, but maybe that’s one reason why I never understood you. You never had to work. My mom and I are helping this guy not just because we feel bad for him or because it’s the right thing to do, but also because he’s leaving some of the stuff to us. Furniture, plates, and rugs; my mom hands me boxes of stuff to take over to our house. I don’t feel good about it, but the guy wants us to have it.
He made me think about you once. I picked up a box that was marked as “heavy and fragile.” It was full of booze. The guy collected alcohol, so he had all this obscure stuff in weird bottles, and the only thing I recognized was a bottle of Scotch. It was Johnnie Walker Black. I heard him laugh as he came into the room.
“That’s good stuff,” he said. “Do you like Scotch?”
I laughed and started to put the bottle back, but he came closer and stopped me.
“Your mother’s upstairs,” he said quietly. “You can tell me the truth.”
“Oh,” I said. The bottle felt heavy in my hand.
The old man waited.
“It’s good,” I said. “I don’t really know a lot about that kind of thing, though. I don’t drink much.”
“At college?” He laughed again. “What the hell do you do, then? Boys still get drunk with girls, right?”
I didn’t tell him that the first and last time that I got drunk was with you.
Do you remember that? I’d never really kissed anybody or been very drunk before, and when you came to my room, holding a bottle of Scotch and promising that you’d teach me, I was scared, but I went because I was twenty and it was long past time. I remember sitting on your bed and watching you light candles as if we’d known each other for more than a week and as if this was somehow romantic. I’d never really been in that situation before, but your voice was low and you moved slowly. I remember not moving my lips against yours at first. I remember gulping Scotch from the bottle. You were warm and soft. I was drunk. I remember leaving my socks on. I remember puking in your trashcan as you rubbed my back. I slid down to the floor to lie there for a second. I remember not being able to get back up, but you followed me down there. I remember waking up on the floor. You were next to me, but it was still the middle of the night. I couldn’t move much, but I saw that we still had underwear. You were still passed out. I was still a virgin. I dragged myself up to sit and see how you looked. In the light from the sagging candles, I saw that you were fat. You were fat, old, and crazy, but I wanted to learn on somebody that I didn’t care about, so I kissed your fat warm soft lips again and tried to shake your shoulders. I remember the bellowing moan that you made as you woke up drunk because I collapsed again at the sound. I stayed on my back for a few moments, lying there and trying not to listen, but I didn’t want anybody to think anything bad was happening, so I got back up and held you, and you stopped.
“Bed,” I told you.
“Yeah,” you said.
I dragged us back up to your bed, and when we both could move again, I asked if you still wanted to, and you said yes, and we did. In the morning, I cleaned up the trashcan for you, but I said that I couldn’t go to breakfast with you.
I don’t know if you still remember any of that. I hadn’t thought about it until I found the old man’s Scotch. I’m not proud of what I did, but I’m glad that I didn’t have to learn with the girl that I got after you. She isn’t anything like you. She’s thin, she’s blonde, and she isn’t crazy. She’s a great girl; she won’t sleep with me yet. I’m not ashamed of anything. You talked me into it. Everything was consensual. I don’t think it ended badly. Clearly, we both moved on.
Recently, I’ve wanted to tell you things that you never knew, but I’m not ever going to contact you again, and I don’t know where you are. You’ve probably forgotten about me, but if you haven’t, you might remember the night that we spent together right before spring break. Maybe you don’t remember all of it, because you came to me drunk, and you were still drunk the next morning. I know that you’d remember what happened afterwards.
When it was done, I didn’t get up to throw away the condom. We looked and saw that there was no condom, and I tensed up and became very quiet. You held me. I could still smell the Scotch on your breath when you held me and told me not to worry. You told me that you’d get your period over break.
I remember how you looked at me with big brown eyes on a soft face.
“I’ll take care of things if I don’t,” you said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry,” you said. You kissed me again and rested your head on my chest.
Don’t think that I didn’t appreciate that. You were crazy, but you had these moments when you were absolutely clear. After break, you did remember, and you did tell me that everything went okay. That was really nice of you, and that’s why you deserve to know. When you looked at me, could you see that I hadn’t had anything to drink at all? Did you know that I knew what I was doing the whole fucking time?
I’m not proud of it, but it wasn’t completely irresponsible. I knew that you were on the pill. You told me that you were clean. There wasn’t much risk of anything. You’d take care of it.
You have to remember the context. This was weeks after the first time, long after I told you that I couldn’t be your boyfriend and you’d agreed, but you were crazy, and it was falling apart. You said that you were fine with it, and that it was all that you expected, but then you’d pull out the passive-aggressive stuff, and if I wanted that kind of crazy, I could have stayed home with Mom. We’d said that we were getting tired of kissing each other. But despite that, you kept on answering your door when you knew that it was me. You taught me a lot, and I should thank you. I learned that sex didn’t mean much without love or some other kind of respect. And on that morning I was beginning to see that that was true. Do you understand? I was just trying to learn more. I wanted to know what it felt like, and you could teach me.
Don’t think that I didn’t feel terrible afterwards. I felt awful during that whole break. I wondered if I’d done something that I couldn’t ever take back, and if my life had switched directions without me even knowing. Did you know that that was why I couldn’t put up with the craziness any longer? I don’t know how you had taken it away before, but I got my guilt back, and I couldn’t keep on seeing you. Even after you told me that everything was fine, I had to put an end to it. A couple weeks later, an hour after I sent that e-mail inviting you over, I sent you another one about how we had to stop, and after that one for the road, that’s why I stopped. That’s why that had to be the last time that we talked.
It’s months later now. I’m back from school. When I shovel this sidewalk, I wonder if you’d understand me. I didn’t think about you, even though I was applying what I learned to the new girl that I found. She’s not like you. There’s something about you that brought out the worst in me, as if your fat and your craziness made me lazy and mean when I was with you. I can go out with her and feel comfortable when people see us. My friends like her. We haven’t had sex yet, but I don’t think that it’ll be like it was with you. I respect her. This could be love.
Now that I’ve told you what you didn’t know, tell me why I’ve been thinking about you. Why don’t I think about my girlfriend instead? At night, when I’m alone, why have I remembered the sex without remembering any of the million things that made us dysfunctional? If I stopped visiting you because it was corrupting me, and I understand why you made me crazy, why can’t I leave the memories behind? Teach me how to live with knowing that you were never crazy.

MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN TO HER MOTHER:
You’ve been dead for a hundred and seven days, but you had been gone for much longer. I think about that frequently. I think about you frequently. It’s hard for me on Sunday afternoons because I can’t call you. It’s hard to work on the garden because I know that yours is overgrown. It’s hard at night. It’s hard to walk by the clock that you gave me for Christmas seven years ago. It’s hard to hear organ music. It’s hard in the early morning. It’s hard to hear my own sister on the phone, sometimes, because she sounds like you. It’s hard in the middle of the day. It can be hard at any time, anywhere, out of nowhere for no reason. It’s still too hard. It should be easier now, after a hundred days, but the aching in the back of my mind for the past week reminds me that I still feel it like it’s raw. I shouldn’t worry too much about why this past week has been hard. I know why. I’ve been helping an old man who lives down the street.
I don’t think that you ever met him. I never spent much time over there. We’d go there for cocktail parties sometimes, we let him hire our son to shovel his walk, but we were still never really very social with him and his wife. We knew that he’d been having health problems recently, and that she’d been taking extra care of him, but nobody thought that there was anything wrong with her. It was a real shock when she died in her sleep a month ago. She was only sixty-two, more than a decade younger than him. She looked fine. It was the first funeral that I’d been to since yours, and I knew that it would be hard, but there was no reason not to go. His daughter came from Portland with her little girl, who I hadn’t seen before. They had kids late in that family, but can you imagine what it would feel like to do that and then to die young, while they’re still so young? I never asked about it later, but I know that they’d been married for a while before they had their daughter, and she turned out the same way. I wonder how heavily that weighs upon him.
I’m helping him now. I’m helping him because I saw him pick up his mail a week after the funeral. His daughter had left. He was alone. I saw him bend over to pick up his newspaper. He looked tired. He looked like you did when you were getting sick. That morning was eighty-five days since you had died.
I forced myself to say hello to him and to ask him how he was.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“I need to do some things now, but can I come over to visit later on? This afternoon?” It was Sunday morning and I missed you.
“Yes,” he said. “Sure. Come over later. We’ll sit.”
Was it wrong? Was it wrong to visit this man if I did it not because he was my friend, but because I missed you? You’d been dead for months, but you’d been gone for much longer. Do you really remember what you were like then? How can I know when you were really gone?
He told me that he wants to leave his house for Portland. He knew a place close to his daughter. He said that he’d been researching it, and that he’d sent his daughter to look it over. Judging by the way that she spoke about it and from the pictures that he saw, the place was warm and soft. As I sat there, I knew that he couldn’t clean out his house alone.
“I don’t need to be there to know how the place will be,” he said.
“You’re right,” I told him. “The smallest signs can be enough.”
I’m sorry, Mom. Mom, I’m sorry. Do you understand me? I couldn’t do the same thing for you. I couldn’t be there then. I couldn’t really think about what was happening to you. I wasn’t ready. I had to go through a hundred days of regret first. Even now, it’s hard, but I’m doing it. It’s the right thing to do, shouldn’t I do that?
I told him that I’d help him with the house and everything in it, and I don’t regret it. He has a bad knee. He’s recovering from laser surgery. He needs the help. You know what the job is like, don’t you? It’s hours of taking a home apart room by room, helping him decide on the few things that he wants to take and finding a place for the rest. He’s been giving lots of things to me and my family, which is nice, but I know that it’s more stuff that will make me remember him later. He’s strong. He’s sharp. He isn’t crazy yet, but I know that he shouldn’t do it alone. You know what it’s like to get rid of your spouse’s clothes, but he shouldn’t have to take apart his whole house at the same time. Still, he’s been strong. He’s only keeping a few boxes. He doesn’t tremble when my son takes the rest away.
My son is helping. He’s really grown since you last saw him. I can see him shoveling from where I’m working now, and when I can’t see his face, he looks like a man. He’s quieter now, but when he speaks, he sounds like a man. Sometimes, when he’s home from school, he’s like a man that I don’t know, but from the right angle, I can still see that little boy. You loved that little boy so much, maybe more than I sometimes did. You asked about him every time that you called until you didn’t call anymore. I think he’s fine. I’ve got him taking the old man’s things away now. Do you think that he understands what he’s doing? It’s so easy for him.
Cleaning this house should be easier for me because I never lived here. It should be easier without the memories of what took place in each room that I destroy, without knowing the history of each thing that ends up in the trash. It should be easy, but it isn’t. Mary got your voice, but I got your active memory. I’m usually good, but I can’t go for too long without asking him where he got something, and after he’s told me, I can’t help but think about it. With those histories, my memory twists itself and fills in gaps that I couldn’t go through. The most painful times are when I’m going through his wife’s things, because they’re not too far away from your things. You would have liked her books. You would have liked her dresses. You would have lingered over the photos of her daughter, too. Do you understand me? Did you do it for your mother, or did you leave it for someone else too?
You always joked that you were mad at Daddy for dying without clearing out the attic like he’d promised, but you didn’t do it either. Would you have done it even if you hadn’t gotten sick? For the past hundred days, I’ve thought about what the last years of your life would have been like if the drugs worked. Would anything have worked? Could anything pull your mind out of what it fell into once your body started to fail? It used to bring me a kind of solace that you probably never noticed that Mary and I had to eventually stop bringing our kids to visit you because you couldn’t smile for them, because you didn’t notice that they were there at all. It used to give me a kind of comfort that you probably never heard us crying on the phone when you couldn’t string good days together in a row or when you asked us why we weren’t doing enough. I cried hardest for Mary, because she was the sister who never moved too far away from you. Because she loved you too much to leave you, she was the one who had to take you from your house, who had to check you out of psych wards when you’d been good and then who had to talk to the doctors when you fell back into them. Do you understand what we’ve left to Mary? I left her to take your house apart alone.
Tell Mary I’m sorry. Please try to understand why I had to leave, and then tell her for me, because I’m too ashamed to tell her myself, even when we’re on the phone on Sunday afternoons. Do you remember the last time that we were together? We knew that you couldn’t stay in the house much longer. You were having too many bad days. They were coming too close together. You weren’t safe alone, but neither of us could imagine bringing you to live with our kids. You needed too much. Mary had called me to come see that clearly, so she could get you out of there. She needed to be sure that it was the right thing to do. She needed help.
Do you remember that? Do you remember the last time that I fed you? The only way that I could do it was to imagine that you weren’t my mother. Mary and I tried to imagine that it was another woman who we held down, not the woman who we would remember being a nurse and force-feeding patients herself, not our mother who carried us when we were sick in the night.
“No,” you said, “no, take it away, let me go, let me go, let me go. Let me die.”
I held you tighter.
Mary forced the applesauce into your mouth. “It’s not her,” she said; “remember, it isn’t her.’
“I know,” I said, and I believed it completely.
As I held her, a bellowing moan erupted from the woman’s emaciated body. The sound was alien and unknowable to me, but I began to shake nonetheless at the animal pain within my grasp.
“It isn’t her,” I said to my sister. “She’s gone, it isn’t her.” I couldn’t look at the woman.
“It isn’t her,” Mary said. The sound continued.
I held the woman tighter.
The sound stopped.
My grip loosened.
The woman breathed softly.
Mary put the applesauce down.
I breathed softly.
“Girls,” the woman said, in your warm soft voice, “say, what’s for dessert?”
Mary and I froze. You looked at us again with eyes that I recognized. You must have seen your daughters fortified against you. We must have looked like we’d seen a ghost.
You smiled, and you started to laugh so hard that your body shook between my fingers, and I shook with you, laughing as hard as I could until we all ran out of breath together, and then you fell silent. You breathed slowly through lips spattered with applesauce. You fell asleep.
Do you understand why I had to leave? Mary must have understood eventually. I don’t know if she’s ever really forgiven me for it. I told her that I couldn’t do it anymore, and when she reminded me that it was time, that it was time to take care of our mother and her house, I hugged her and drove away. She still talks to me, but we’ve never talked about that night. We talk about everything that isn’t that night.
I had to leave because I understood that it was you all along. I couldn’t see you fall apart while you were awake. I couldn’t be there anymore, not if you never left me, not if you knew that your house was coming down around you, not if you recognized us as your body took your mind apart and kept only what it needed for its trip to the grave.
It’s been a hundred and seven days since I left home, since the day that you were no longer able to forgive me. Can you hear me? Can you forgive me? What should I learn from the things in this man’s house?

OLD MAN TO OLD WOMAN:
I’m leaving. I’m leaving our town. I’m leaving our possessions. I’m leaving our house. I’m leaving our home. My sweet love, I’m leaving you in the ground. I know that this isn’t what you wanted me to do. You were clear about that. You took care of me when I needed it. I needed it when my knee failed, I needed it when my eye went, and I needed you every moment that you were here.
Now, my love, you’re gone, and I don’t need you anymore.
Please don’t misunderstand me. You have been so good to me, and I tried to be my best for you. You know that. That’s why I can tell you that you were wrong before. You knew what I wanted. I want to go out west. I want to live near our daughter. I want to die while I see her child grow. All that was left for us here is the warm soft feeling of decay. The rot that takes everything we have came to me first. It challenged my ability to stand and see, and you were good to me when you helped me through it, but you treated me like I was already dead. I told you that I wanted to leave when I could see again, but you held me tighter in my bed.
“No,” you said. “No, you don’t understand, but it’s too much to give to her, we’re too much of a burden for our daughter and her little girl. I love her, I love my daughter, and that’s why I’m telling you that she deserves to live with lively people. Let our granddaughter be a child. Let her live without seeing us fall apart and worrying about when we’ll finally die. If we go, they won’t be protected from our bad days. If we love them, we can’t be selfish. I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of everything.”
Was that when I betrayed you? Was that when I told you that I agreed with you as I left you in my mind? I was too angry with you to bring it up again. I sent our daughter to look the place over and didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell you that she liked it. I didn’t tell you that she missed me.
After I could move my knee enough to walk slowly, I waited for you to leave the house. I knew that you and the doctor said that it wasn’t ready for much, but I didn’t care. When I knew that you’d be gone for a while, I’d take walks. I walked down the street, up the hill, and towards the woods, where I could see rotting trees shed their dying leaves. In the West, where she is, they have trees that are higher and older than any around here. They still stand strong. Our daughter and our granddaughter want to show them to me. I never told you about the trees. I’d be home from those walks before you ever knew that I was gone. I had already left you, and I was still too angry to tell you how much you hurt me. I lied to you like I was a little boy. That’s how you treated me, but I should have done better.
I gave you silences, empty gestures, and a seething gap. Is that what killed you? I betrayed you, and I’ll carry that with me.
Forgive me because I’m still leaving. I betrayed our love, and I’m sorry, but I’m still leaving.
A woman and her son are packing up our house. I’m giving almost all of our things to them. They’re helping me leave you. They’ve been good to me. They’re quick to make it easier on me, so fast and so thorough that I can tell that they’re not just doing it for me. Nobody works that hard for the man down the street and his thing, not unless they revel in it somehow. Nobody’s so good to anybody these days, and certainly not for small rewards.
I need to leave home. I need to see the West. I need to see the children grow before I die. I can’t stand knowing that memories that I could have made with these new people have wasted away. And Love, they should see my decay. I believe that when we lie to ourselves about our failings, when we relive our memories in hopes that we will somehow travel back to take a different path, we fundamentally betray the young learning minds within us that must live with their real decisions. I’ll carry my sins with me, but I will not re-enact them for the warm soft pleasure of their familiarity.
I’m leaving home for the West. I’m going to die there, but I will first drive alone across the country in my rotting body. It might wear me down by the time that I get to the girls, but they too should learn that every moment is their last chance. I’ll hug this woman that’s helped me leave our possessions behind, and shake the boy’s hand, and maybe, by then, they’ll have poured their guilt out into their labors. As I drive, I will listen for the sound of my tires against the road. I believe that it will sound like a bellowing moan.

The mission

2005-09-06T01:56:54Z

At some point along the line, I stopped working. I'm not sure why, I'm not sure how. Maybe I used the work that I was doing for school as an excuse to not work outside of that realm, and maybe that's fair. Nonetheless, instead of filling the time with thinking about how I was going to improve in all of the areas that bothered me - I'm lonely, I'm too fat, I'm don't read enough, I don't write enough - I focused on the first problem as if it would solve the rest, as if another's acceptance of the way that I was would allow me to accept myself. For a while, this worked - I've always looked for something to obsess about, something that would fill the empty hours between every minute, and the long line of shes helped a lot.

But here I am now, after a summer wasted in sloth, after a year spent gradually becoming afraid of my own writing and my own growth, a year of looking toward you not like a man but like an addict. And if you're reading, I'm sorry - that's one of the factors that turned a good thing bad.

It's time to rebuild.

The people that I admire accomplished the things that amaze me through sheer sweat. The problem was believing that I could become the person that I wanted to be without the work that's always at the base of everything good. It's time to work. It's time to build the person that I want to become - not expecting results, but believing that the work itself purifies me. The work itself - reading, writing, exercising my mind and my body - is the good life.

Anyway, this journal is part of that. I need another reason to write, so here's one. Thanks for getting through all the rambling above, here's a story.

The Seeds
Spring '05

Dutch ran out of the yard and into the woods with the terrifying speed of a tall man who was too drunk to slow down, but when he fell on a root and passed out only a few feet from the edge of the porch-light, he slept on his stomach with his ass in the air just like a little baby. Rowan watched his friend collapse in the woods without feeling any need to turn him or to see if he was okay. He’d seen worse from Dutch before. Nobody else seemed surprised, either. Eiron was Dutch’s brother and he didn’t seem to notice, he just pushed some Old English empties off the table so he could carve something into a piece of firewood. Rowan took another drag and passed the joint to his mother. She looked like she was too comfortable on the plastic deck lounge to move.
“Mom,” he said to his smoking mother, “Mom, I’m eighteen now, and I have something to say about that. I love you and all that stuff, but I’m tired of school and I don’t want to go this year and it’s time for me to leave home and go do something else, like help Colin out at the cabin if he needs the help. I know that you’re mad at him because he hasn’t been home in a while but he needs the help and I can help him maybe we can both come back to visit for a little but only if I help him because he needs the help.”
Rowan watched her exhale and take a breath of the cool sweet September air. “Okay,” she said. He took the rest of the cigarette when she passed it back.
Rowan took another drag. “And I think that he would need the help, it’s harvest time and it’s a big job with everything that’s got to be picked before anybody else can find it and take it themselves and you want to be able to take that and dry it right but there’s still lots to be picked so it’s a big job and I think that he could really use the help.”
“Okay,” she said. He saw her reach under the stained white chair. She found the bag and rolled another cigarette.
“And he’s got the space. I don’t think that it would be much trouble to fit me in there because I don’t need much and I’m ready to work and that’s why you should let me go, that’s why you’ve got to let me go, that’s why I’m leaving.”
“Goodbye,” she said. “Say hello to him for me.”
Rowan understood.

Two days later, Rowan stood in the dirt at the end of his driveway, under some trees that weren’t going to show any colors anytime soon but must have been getting ready to think about it, and waited there for Eiron and Dutch. In the bag that he dropped in the dirt so it leaned against his bare ankle was a collapsible fishing pole with extra lines and flies, a stainless steel leatherman that he had somehow stained (with all twelve essential tools, including the bottle opener), a bigger knife, a few lighters, a fresh flashlight, a dusty pot and a dirtier frying pan, a steel spork, a small spade, a bag of pot, a sleeping bag that the man said was used in the Swiss army (even though it was just a normal sleeping bag), a pound of rolling papers, the cheapest water filter that anybody could find with a water bottle to pump it into, and then he’d added a compass just for the hell of it. What was taking them so long? Eiron didn’t have to be at the diner until three and it wasn’t like Dutch was going to school today. It didn’t matter. Rowan was in a goddamn great mood and that was the end of it.
When Eiron’s truck rolled up, Rowan had barely stepped into the slightly smoky cab before he started talking at Eiron, who drove fast through the cool crisp morning, and Dutch, who crumpled up in the bitch seat with no signs of bitterness.
“I’m ready, motherfuckers. This is it,” Rowan said. “I’m ready to work like a dog and sleep like a frog, way out there in the magnificent woods of Tioga County with my brother. I’m ready. I’ve got everything I need to stay out all day on the harvest trail, all day on the job until I go on back and sit with Colin like hardworking men do. I’m ready, motherfuckers, I’m ready. Look at my clothes if you don’t think I’m ready. Synthetic, bitches.”
“Where’d you get the money?” Rowan thought that Eiron was born skeptical and was pretty sure that he’d die the same way.
“I saved, asshole! How long have I been talking about this? How long have I wanted this? Maybe you smoke too much and your memory’s going. How old are you now? That’s a goddamn tragedy if I’ve ever heard one, nineteen and you don’t remember anything and you don’t listen.”
Dutch laughed so hard that he hit the top of the cab with the back of his shaggy head, and that was enough to set off Rowan and Eiron. It wasn’t until a while later, when they were turning down some dirt road or another that Dutch actually said anything.
“Will he have anything for us there?” Dutch spoke softly but melodically, as if he were singing along to tender idiot music.
“First rule of harvest,” Rowan said. “Don’t smoke away the crop.”
“Oh,” said Dutch. “How much longer is the trip, then?”
“Well, you might be able to take a little,” Rowan said. “Don’t worry.”

When they pulled up to Colin’s cabin to find Colin, they didn’t see him around. From where they were, the house was quiet and the world was calm. Rowan was pretty sure that he was probably out at some patch harvesting, and that he’d probably be back soon if they just waited. Eiron must have not wanted to wait because he yelped and before Rowan knew it the truck had turned around and they were driving fast away from the cabin.
“Did you see it,” Eiron yelled, “did you see it?”
Rowan hadn’t seen anything but a quiet house and a calm world and also some orange tape across the door that said something.
“Crime scene, motherfuckers!” Eiron drove so fast over the dirt road that the truck shook hard.
Dutch hit his head again but Rowan couldn’t laugh. “Crime scene!” Rowan yelled so loud that nobody could hear him. Somebody told, he thought. Somebody told or somebody saw and somebody found it and the police must have got Colin. Colin was gone. They must have found the cabin and caught Colin so now Colin was gone and everything that he worked for was gone and Colin was gone. Colin was gone and all he could feel was the shaking of the truck on the dirt road, which shook his eyes so hard that they thought about blooming into tears with the dying leaves.

Rowan handed the letter from the sheriff’s department to his mother. They hadn’t heard from Colin, and they didn’t want to go back to the cabin, so this was the first sign that he was really gone. After a few moments, he didn’t want to watch her read it anymore, so he got up to leave the room. As he passed her, she reached her right hand up and out towards his. He stopped, and she held it.
“Stay here,” she said.
He did.

Everyone lived through a long winter. Rowan and his mother sat at Colin’s trial and knew that he was guilty. She found Rowan a dishwashing job, which he kept. He was good at it because he could let his mind drift away with the steam. The standing still grated on him. He still saw Dutch and Eiron pretty frequently, though, and they weren’t the type to let any changes get to them. Sometimes, he’d smoke with his mother after work, and they’d sit there together in the cool dark winter night even as the supply ran short, and he’d think to himself that she was quiet like she had been before, but this new quiet was an aggressive kind of quiet that was louder than it had been before, and night after night it was the same way until the long winter had slowly begun to lose ground to a wet spring and one night when he was smoking with her after he was thinking of how it felt to walk home in rain-soaked mud earlier that day and at that point he thought to himself that they’d all been standing absolutely still for so long while the world wasn’t slowing down at all.
He explained this difference in speed to his mother but she didn’t listen enough to reply so he continued. “It’s that I’ve been doing the same thing for years, you know? How long did I go to a school that I hated and then come back here to wind down for sleeping so I could do it again? How long am I going to go to a job that I hate so I can come back here for some money to continue doing it? How long do I have to stay?”
“Welcome to the world, Rowan,” she said as she sat in the long dusty couch that wasn’t very different at all from the plastic deck lounge that had been outside.
Rowan thought about that for a little while. He thought it could be possible, but then he took another puff and he knew that it shouldn’t be, that he was too young to be held in this small dark cold house while the planet turned faster and grew warmer and spring came for real. Colin was gone but he was right to leave, he was right to try to live out there in the swiftly turning forest where he could move, so Rowan took another breath and spoke hot breaths into cool smoky air.
“I’m leaving,” he told his mother, “I’m leaving for the woods, I’m leaving soon to continue Colin’s work. They probably got the whole crop when they went to the cabin in the fall, but I have seeds. I have a bag of seeds that he gave me and I’m going to the woods, far out, so far that nobody will know and I’ll live there for a while so I can plant those seeds and in the fall I’ll stay there again for the harvest and I’ll sell it in safer places and nobody will catch me and I’ll have money, and you can have some, too. I’m leaving.”
His mother choked when she heard it, and she spoke like there was something still stuck in there that she wanted to dislodge. “Are you an idiot? Were you watching when they put him away? What if you’d been there like you wanted to be? You’d be gone too,” she said, “you’d be in jail too.”
“They won’t catch me,” Rowan said. “I’m going too far out, and I’m not going to use anything like a cabin that anybody can see. They won’t be looking because they already found Colin. Nobody will see me. They won’t find me, they won’t know anything, it starts with seeds in the ground that nobody can see but me, not you and not anybody.”
“You’d be there too, as much as a waste as he is, and I fucking love him and I fucking love you too and he won’t be the same boy when he’s out. You won’t recognize him, you won’t recognize me, and if you leave this house to go out there to do those things you will grow up wrong and bitter you goddamn little boy I love you and I loved him too much you goddamn little boys I loved you so much.”
Through the smoke, he saw her break down. She must have seen that he was serious. She must have known that he was leaving.
As he had before, Rowan waited for Eiron wearing his synthetic clothes and holding a beaten bag. Unlike last time, he also carried a small brown tent with a larger black tarp, a warm hat, some lengths of rope, a hatchet, a long brown poncho, a few days’ worth of dry foods, and a bag of a few pounds of tiny brown seeds. He got the seeds last summer, when Colin said to keep them in the dry house for him because the cabin had too many holes in the rain.
“Finally,” Rowan said to himself, “finally I can give the seeds back.”
Rowan drove with Eiron and Dutch away from his home, far past his brother’s ruined cottage, deep into the woods until they got out of the truck and started walking west. They walked west until they couldn’t see the truck anymore, then traveled a few minutes further before they stopped.
“Thanks, guys,” Rowan said, “thanks for everything you’ve done for me and my mom. Thanks for being good enough men to bring me here and to turn around and leave me alone out here in the wilderness where I want to be. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Goodbye, Rowan.” Eiron reached over to Rowan to shake on it before he turned away. When Dutch had done the same, they turned around and started walking east back towards the truck until Rowan spoke.
“Guys, meet me back here in a week and we’ll party out here. It’ll be fun. Bring your shit and stay the night.”
“Okay,” Dutch solemnly said.
“Bring some extra food and stuff for me, I’ll probably be out,” Rowan added. He gave them one more salute and turned away.
“You know,” Eiron said, “you should have brought a gun.”
Rowan stood in warm sunlight and had nothing to say.
“For protection,” Eiron said, maybe because he was older than Rowan and Dutch, or maybe he never really liked it out here and Rowan had never noticed.
“I don’t roll like that,” Rowan said.
“Well, okay. See you later,” Eiron said, and that’s when they turned and finally left.
Rowan looked around for a moment and saw that he was completely alone. He reached into the bag where he’d rolled the small amount that he’d had left into about fifteen last cigarettes, pulled one out, and took a drag.

The first day he had was really only an afternoon, blame the trip for that, but that’s still plenty of time to start. Starting was finding water. Starting was really investigating that water, smelling that water, looking for tracks, then moving on to find something bigger, something that moved. On the first day, cigarette in his hand, he saw plenty of light to work by under tiny green leaves and tinier buds that just weren’t there yet, and he smiled when he found something a little larger, something with a little bit of moving water, and he smiled at that because this would be the inexhaustible source from which everything else came, how much else did he need above good water? He walked away from the water a little ways, out of sight, so anybody there for the water wouldn’t see the tent and wonder why that tent was there and now that he thought about it he shouldn’t have set up the tent already, even if he’d found water, he should really only do that when the light’s going down and there’s not much to see the tent by, so when would that be? He must have had a little time, though the sun had moved since he started, so he took it all apart and took away everything on his back including the tent and took a drag and then started looking for wood. He was lucky that it hadn’t rained sooner, so the wood was beginning to dry and he found a little but not a lot and just about now was when the light was beginning to change. He gathered it all back up and set up the tent again not too far from the water next to his small pile of wood with some good starter wood and a few pieces of the hard stuff but none of it was enough for a good fire. He didn’t need one, not on the first evening, not when there were still a few things that he could eat from his bag that didn’t need a fire and so he spent the last few moments of the first daylight filtering good clean moving water into his mouth until he didn’t want any and then into the water bottle until it was full. He ran back to his camp in the very last of the first light. On the first night he lay there and waited, but nobody can fall asleep fast on the first night, not when there’s stuff to hear in the darkness, not when he’s never gone to bed this early, not when the world outside seemed so big. He lay there in his Swiss Army sleeping bag, then sat up and poked his head out to take company with a cigarette. Staring into darkness, he finished it and fell asleep eventually. One day gone and ten last cigarettes left.
On the second day he woke up too late. The sun had been up for a while, maybe a few hours, and somebody could have seen the tent and they could have reported it five minutes ago. He threw himself out of the tent and packed everything up as fast as he could, abandoning the pile of wood, and he was a little ways upstream before he realized that he was in the middle of nowhere and that he was an idiot and already he was hungry and thirsty and now tired from all of the running. He walked back down to the woodpile and exhaled deeply, then went back over to the stream to pump some more water, to eat a little more of the food that he still had, and to light a cigarette. Under the new spring greens he smoked and then he left for more wood so that he could continue his mastery of fire in this new and different place. A few hours gave him hunger and thirst but also a larger pile of wood, which he divided into four piles that he hid in buried caches around the campsite to throw off anybody that might walk by and see and with another drag he was sure that they would be. He pumped water and ate a little more of the food from his shrinking stash, but he had wood and that was enough of a start, so he spent the rest of the daylight finding herbs around the camp and looking for the little buried roots that he could bring back to wash and boil over a fire that he started with an old lighter and new wood. He still needed some of the food from his bag, but in the fading light of the second day he could light a cigarette and feel like wood and the first salad was enough. On the second night it was easier to sleep. Two days gone and only four last cigarettes left.
On the third day he woke up closer to dawn but still too far, into the relentless pounding of sweet spring rain that he knew would soak the wood that he left out and only dampen the rest that he left buried, and he could not take down the tent so nobody could see him because his clothes and his ponchos could not save him from getting soaked if he stayed out too long, so he sat in the entry of the tent, lit a cigarette, and watched the rain splash into the pot that he then filtered because he was bored and not thirsty. He had to eat more of the food from his bag, but he took another drag and he was pretty sure that the rain would stop soon. When it did, he left his camp to find more roots in the cold fertile soaked ground, and when the sun finally broke through the clouds he saw that it was afternoon, and that the third day would be a waste of wood, food, and weed if he didn’t at least find enough roots for tomorrow. He gathered roots and herbs for the rest of the day still angry at the rain, including later on when he yelled at it for making the best of his wood only slightly damp. At the end of daylight, when he was boiling the water for the roots, he ate a little more of the food from his bag and lit another cigarette, still angry under the dripping green buds of a cruel forest that won’t stay dry, and by the third drag he realized that it was his last cigarette. He was so angry that he had to smoke it on such an already unsalvageable day that he slept immediately after dinner.
The fourth morning came and Rowan couldn’t light a cigarette. He left his camp in the blue dawn light to take a piss downstream. As he unzipped and let fly, the sound of his piss hitting the water was loud against his ears, like the silences had crept up their volume and made noise seem louder. He began to think. A week ago he was at home. A week ago he had food and pot and a bed to smoke and eat in. A week ago his mom was there. A week ago he could hear her. Sometimes he’d hear her being angry at him, or talking about boring shit, but even if she wasn’t talking he could usually hear her around the house, moving and working and doing things. He could hear her inhaling and exhaling sweet smoke. Not now. What he was listening to now were the traces of their home that he’d digested vanishing as he pissed them away. The beginning of the end of his pot was washing down the stream, and the rest of it would leave him no matter how hard he tried. The world slowed down as he pissed, but it didn’t make it hurt any less when he got hungrier or thirstier. Slowly, irrevocably, home left his body in breath, sweat, and piss. What exactly was he inhaling now? What was she doing without him?
The morning got brighter. When he walked back to camp after the long piss he could hear the birds around him. Their calls were sharp. He was hungry, tired of roots, reluctant to get to the last of the food from home, and he wanted to kill something, so he found his fishing pole and returned to the stream.
He took off everything below his waist and stepped into the frigid morning water. Even though it wasn’t the best depth for fly fishing, he went in up to his waist so he wouldn’t leave his dick hanging out in front of the birds. The stream didn’t get much warmer with time.
“C’mon, motherfuckers,” he said.
No trout replied until he pulled in a big one that started strong and petered out. How did he forget a net? He grabbed the fish, which wasn’t tremendously bigger than the hand he held it in, and then bludgeoned it to death with the end of the rod in his other hand. It was easier to walk it back to the pot that way. Later, another came in. It didn’t start as strong as the first one did, but it was much angrier overall. It struggled for a bit, then swam forward with his line so he couldn’t catch up, and darted through his legs so that his line rubbed up against his body and he swore that it rammed his naked thigh on purpose. Still, he killed it and threw it in the bucket. When he saw them together – a big dumb one and a small angry one – he named them Dutch and Eiron.
Rowan laughed when he gutted Dutch and found another fly in his belly. He saved it for luck. Dutch and Eiron cooked up nicely for lunch. Hot and juicy fish-meat after several salads made the sounds of the woods much softer, and Rowan felt mostly happy for the rest of the day, which he spent gathering herbs and roots. He noted that today was the first day that he’d eaten only things that he got from the forest. Also, he pissed away more of the home that was left within him.
Rowan didn’t know exactly when he woke up in the fourth night, but he knew why. He puked out Dutch, Eiron, the salad, and probably some more of home, too. His stomach hurt. His arms and legs felt numb. Nauseated, he laid facedown in his vomit, Dutch, and dirt, and he knew that he missed his mother. Was she awake right now, or was she sleeping? Did she regret him like she regretted Colin?
Rowan woke on the fifth day and wasn’t hungry. His stomach still hurt, but it didn’t feel empty, so he moaned. He had a fever. Either Dutch or Eiron gave him food poisoning. It could have been both of them. Rowan suspected that it was the birds, who flew away from the vomit that they’d been investigating when he emerged from the tent. He stepped over the vomit on the ground and left for the stream where he could wash the dried vomit off his face. His stomach hurt. He was thirsty. His limbs still felt numb. He was pretty sure that diarrhea would come soon. He trudged to the stream that kept him alive so that it could poison him. He stripped naked. He threw his feverish body into the cold water. He treaded so that he could keep himself underwater for a moment. He opened his eyes to see where the waters went, and all he saw was sludge and fish suspended in nothingness. That’s where it all goes, he thought. Thirsty and surrounded by water that he shouldn’t drink, he pulled his head back into the air and began to piss. As he did, he imagined that it was the last of the pot that exited him and let him feel its warmth for one moment before it slipped downstream. He stepped out of the water naked, soaked, and sick. How could he forget to bring a towel?
He heard the crow before he saw it. It had scared most of the other birds into the surrounding trees. They watched it pick at Rowan’s vomit. He watched it too, for a moment, and then it turned and froze at seeing him. Rowan watched the crow’s bright black eye stare at his naked and fevered body. It looked straight at him without stopping. After a minute of seeing its stare, Rowan felt embarrassed. He felt embarrassed for being naked. He was embarrassed for intruding. He was a young boy in an old forest doing stupid things to get money and to get high. He left home for nothing. He looked away from the crow, exhaled, and then inhaled again. When he did, he could smell the lingering scent of the vomit that that crow was trying to eat. When he recognized that smell in the silence of the woods, he started laughing, harder and deeper than he had before, so hard that he felt queasy again, which got him laughing even harder at the stupid fucking crow that was trying to eat his puke.
“You’ll get sick, motherfucker!” Naked and fevered, he chased that crow away. Dutch would like this story, he thought. Mom would probably worry about how he was probably kind of sick, but then she’d think it was funny.

Rowan responded happily to the fever’s decimation of his appetite. It really helped him stay productive. He spent most of the day on a search for dry wood, but he spent a good chunk of the afternoon on finding roots that he forced himself to eat when the sun went down. His day and night were periodically interrupted by thirst and diarrhea, but the fever never let him feel cold or alone, so he slept soundly between the interruptions.
On the sixth day, he habitually reached for the bag of food before he remembered that he still wasn’t hungry. He thanked the fever and found a bag of seeds instead. He held the bag in his hand and let its soft weight fall into his fingers. It felt like his mother’s hand pressing into his, asking him to stay.

After the sixth day’s light had faded, he slept as his cooling fever slowly gave way to a ravenous hunger. Around his tent, in the darkness of a warming spring, nearly fifty little brown seeds slept in the ground scattered in five four-foot by four-foot patches of newly dug dirt, from which old roots had been taken and eaten so that new roots could grow. As he slept, Rowan dreamt of the fall, when the forest would be dotted with a hundred small patches of richly green leaves and buds that slowly shook in the breeze, ready to be harvested by whoever knew how to find them.
On the seventh day, Rowan rested. He woke up painfully hungry, but he had the last of the food that he brought from home, so he ate the last of that as he traveled to the spot where he would meet Eiron and Dutch. As he walked, he inhaled the cool sweet spring air and felt comforted. Somewhere, Colin breathed fresh air. His mother’s air might be a little stale, but she still breathed.
He sat in the dirt and waited for the truck. He heard it coming from far away. Rowan could hear the beginnings of music, too. Eiron loved Iron Maiden, and he was probably listening to “Run to the Hills.” Rowan watched them rise over the horizon and saw his friends slowly take form as two boys in a pickup truck carrying a gas grille, steaks, and malt liquor.
Dutch sprang out of the cab. “Rowan,” he said, “Rowan, I don’t know what kind of pussy shit you’ve been into here, but this is going to be fucking awesome. Let’s get trashed and sleep where we fall.”
“I missed you guys,” Rowan said, and it was true.
“She misses you,” Eiron said. “She called before we left. She wanted us to pick up her cell phone and bring it to you.”
The phone felt small in Rowan’s hand. Somehow, it smelled like pot.

Later that night, when it looked like Dutch was going to stay in the weeds that he’d fallen into, Rowan took the phone out of his pocket. Eiron was still awake and alert but Rowan didn’t care about that.
She picked up the phone on the second ring but didn’t say anything.
“I miss you too,” he said.
He heard the sound of her breath.
“I miss you too, but I’m not coming home yet.”
He heard her exhale slowly.
“Are you sick?” Her voice wasn’t happy but the phone felt warm.
“A little bit,” he said. “I ate a bad fish.”
“You are a goddamn idiot,” she said.
“I feel a little better now but maybe it’s just the booze.”
He heard her light another cigarette. He waited for her to exhale again but he didn’t say anything when she did.
“You’re going to be okay, aren’t you?” Her voice was warm and stale and filthy and he missed her and he was drunk but on the seventh night the silence between their breaths felt cool and clean.
“I think I will be,” he said.
“Asshole,” she said.
He couldn’t say anything to that.
“You little fucking boy,” she said. “I love you.”
“I started planting the seeds yesterday,” he said. “I planted them in tiny little patches throughout the forest where nobody will find them. They’re going to be everywhere but nobody will see them.”
“You come home after,” she said.
“They’re going to be beautiful,” Rowan said, sitting in the woods at night, sick but still alive.

The beginning

2005-09-06T01:18:59Z

Hello. Here's the first piece of prose that I wrote since the end of the thesis. There was a poem written on the spur of the moment at a wedding that was technically the first thing, and it was important to me, but it also kind of sucked and I don't have it anyway. This isn't fiction but what the hell, for the record's sake:

submitted for review:
The problem is not that I am alone, but that I ever believed that someone else could bridge the miles between me, myself, and I.

The solution, then, is nothing less than reshaping the ground upon which I live. The solution is to reunite the trinity: to bring body, mind, and dreams together into the self that will always be my companion. For some time, I've looked for a purpose that electrifies me into a state of belief. The solution is this mission of simultaneous excavation and construction: a capital project completed only in the death that vivifies us.