The horse leans into the shed wall like a drunk, mottled skull lowered, ears flat, eyes rolled deep and black in pained reverie. They seem turned inward to some hidden place where Edison was denied access. He strokes its flank and tells it sweet words and when those run out, curse words spoken sweetly, because his fingers are getting cold.
He tells himself that work is a solace. He needs to tell himself this, he decides, because there is so much of it: two cords of wood to split and stack, a roof needing shoveling, water to be hauled, and the shed would need mending too—the horse’s sleek weight had cracked the two-by-fours in the floor and south wall. He stares the task down from a distance, like a sailor falling in love with the sea. He’s not ready to throw himself into the midst of it.
He concedes this: the pulling of the wire brush down the horse’s neck to its finely muscled shoulder. It’s not dying, of course, but it’s in a world of hurt. Its hooves have softened and crumbled, first in a simple, almost graceful cleave, and then into a tree of puzzle shapes, spongy to the touch. When he tried touching one in October, when he first noticed, it splashed hot breath in his face, and by mid-November it wouldn’t let him touch them at all. The goats come close to the shed and it warns them off with a low, bullish grunt.
He isn’t sorry though. It had not even seemed like a choice so much as an instinct, some nerve twitch that had a flavor of self-preservation to it. He would not have been able to live with himself otherwise. The musher, she had stroked its muzzle and said she was going to buy it for dog food and it took Edison a moment to realize she wasn’t joking. The next thing he knew he was doing the math in his head, adding up the money in his savings account, his checking account, in the cigar box on the top shelf in the pantry. The musher begged off, told him if he wanted it that way then fine, she wasn’t going to stand in the way of love at first sight. “But that horse isn’t worth anything living,” she said, as it took the apple core from her open palm.
“You sure you want to do this?” the owner asked him. They had worked together on the roads in Sitka more than a decade before and still maintained a lazy kind of acquaintanceship. Edison had come there to buy some railroad ties—that was all—and maybe have a cup of strong coffee while they talked about the weather, and then there he was, saying sure, of course, as he shook the man’s hand. The musher was still there, watching, her flat red face unreadable. Did she think he was a fool?
The horse’s owner knew Edison’s story, or at least the bare bones of it, but that didn’t stop him from gripping his hand hard and smiling. “She’s good company,” he said. “You’ll see.”
Early December now and he climbs into the loft, attention split between the small window and his computer screen, blanket draped around his shoulders. The window frames the slanted birch trees in the gulley, the haze of stars, and the ice crystals webbed at the corners of the triple pane. The computer screen displays the usual messages from men in the Lower 48—in other countries too—describing their bodies, asking him how old he is and where he lives. Alaska, he says, and they ask the usual follow-up questions. Isn’t it cold there? Lonely there? He tells them the stories they want to hear and soon he becomes that person, and forgets about the broken shed, the broken hooves.
The red messages blink across the screen. So many people in the world who just want some kind of human connection. They want blowjobs and anal and much more, particular and peculiar things they can describe in minute detail, clinical as surgeons. You must feel like an outsider there, one of them types, the one who wants to duct tape him from head to toe. I picture you in Hawaii. I can’t picture you there in all that snow. It’s like picturing you on the surface of the moon.
I like it here, he types back, single-fingered because his hand is in his pants.
The man says he can’t imagine the happy girl from the photograph enjoying life in Alaska, but Edison tells him to open his mind. It’s just not burly men with beards. It’s not what you think it is.
But the man is right. Edison does feel like an outsider here, because of the color of his skin, or because of the way winter corkscrews itself down into his mind. It’s a feeling he’s grown to enjoy in an odd way, a kind of nakedness of the spirit.
Of course, the girl in the photograph is white. They’re always white, and always blonde and young, and he shares them and says, My nose looks too big in this one.
The man almost always says, You’re beautiful.
The men are all white too, or at least that’s how he imagines them, with button-down shirts and receding hairlines and a Coke always on the table. He’s not sure who is being punished—if the young, blonde body he’s making out of words is some kind of trap—and where fun comes into it, but it is fun, and when he’s finished he goes outside and pees in the snow.
But tonight, the man doesn’t say that he’s beautiful. The man, whose screen name is simply Shyboy, says, I’ve been to Fairbanks. I was in the military there for three years.
Very cool, Edison says. The blonde girl says it too. She is his puppet, but she’s also simply him, that part of himself he never named until he started fucking around on the internet. When he types the words, they come from the deepest, most sincere part of himself.
Shyboy’s history spills from his fingers. He plays jazz trumpet, was in the military band for years. Lives in Arkansas now. Married twice and has a kid who he loves deeply. Doesn’t get to see him as much as he wants. He’s into rape fantasies, forced tattoos, gagging an intelligent young girl with a bright orange ball. What to do with all of this? I have a tattoo, the girl writes back. It’s on my ankle.
The outside thermometer stops at twenty-five below.
The horse is in trouble, but it’s nothing life-threatening, so he loads the bed of his truck with trash and turns the key in the ignition for the first time all week. He lets the engine idle as he picks up summer’s trash—a broken plastic chair, stacks of beer bottles, stray wood scraps. It all goes into the truck, and soon he’s hurling the stuff, throwing it high and letting it fall. The bottles break and the chair clatters. He makes a reckless game of it.
The ice fog begins at Chena Hot Springs Road and he cuts his speed in half, then half again, as he slides down the long hill into the thick of it. He can see the blurred headlights of another car coming at him in the opposite lane, and then it’s past him and he’s alone again. What had he told them about the fog? That it was beautiful. Which it was. But you had to do an awful lot of mental acrobatics to make it that way, to fix it in your mind as something other than car exhaust and ice crystals. Amazing, they say, or incredible, or they just want to lick his body all over.
The body he’s created and then shared with them all.
It’s been two weeks since he’s come to town and he’s a bit disappointed in himself, disappointed in the town too, as he reaches the first traffic light and slows to a stop. But what was he expecting, some kind of revelation? He lets go of the cold steering wheel and pulls off his cap. The truck is finally warm enough that he can begin shedding layers. By the time he gets to the dump he’s gloveless and coatless.
He’s not alone, because someone else across the parking lot is poking at debris with a ski pole, collecting small treasures. He pulls on his hat and gloves—it’s the fingers that go first—and hurls trash into the nearest dumpster, calling up a terrific racket of metal and wood. The guy across the way doesn’t seem to notice, or if he does notice, he doesn’t care.
The men here are ugly. They don’t know how to treat you.
When did he say that? It was at the very beginning, typed out to someone he never saw again, and the guy had replied, I know how to treat you.
He spins the truck in a big arc around the lot before moving to the exit. The drunk girl at the Big I is practically dancing on her stool. She’s trying to convince the people around her that they should all head out to a strip club, but nobody seems interested. The men around her watch the TV, smoke their cigarettes, and drink their drinks. Maybe they’re a little defeated by the weather, maybe by her crazy energy, but mostly they just seem content. The girl has one foot on a chair, thigh spread open, and there’s holes in her jeans, bruises on her knees. If her hair wasn’t so long she’d be a boy, and a starving one, with wild, crazy eyes. She says something about every single person in the place being a big pussy.
Edison orders a beer and the bartender says, “What have you been doing with yourself?”
“You know what I’ve been doing with myself,” Edison says, because last month he made the mistake of mentioning the horse. He kicks his boots against the bar to clean off the snow, glances up at the TV in the corner. The drunk girl, she’s moving down the length of the bar, and as he glances at her face he realizes that he forgot to log off at home. His name, the name of the fake girl, is floating on the screen collecting messages. He fights the urge to slide off the stool and walk out. Instead he looks down at the burnished wood of the bar and tries to remember its story. It had been driven up from the Lower 48 on a flatbed truck, and it’s classier than the place deserves, ornamented with little birds and so smooth he places his palm on it just for the sheer pleasure of the surface touching skin.
She says, “Are you in the military?” but she’s talking to the redheaded kid next to him. They’re the only two people in the place under thirty and now they’ve found each other. Except that the kid doesn’t seem that interested. She ricochets off him and over to Edison. “Take off your coat and stay a while,” she says, and he realizes, yes, he’s still wearing his coat, his black hoodie pulled up Unabomber-style. The bartender moves away, down to the safe end of the bar.
“Black men,” she says. “Black men.”
He laughs like it’s a joke. He wants it to be some kind of joke.
There are a few men on his computer who say they’re Black, but he guesses that they are not, that they’re wearing that disguise just like he’s wearing his. They meet there in the Neverland between computers and exchange their lies and then they fuck him with their thick Black cocks. The clichés are a form of punishment, much more so than the tying of the wrists, the insults, the descriptions of urination. It’s like the story of a little prince who wanders through the kingdom in disguise and finds his likeness in a dirty beggar boy. He looks into the face of the other and sees himself and he gives himself over to it, surrenders to it, by switching places, by letting that other one inside his life.
When it happens he sometimes types, oh my god you’re so big.
The drunk girl touches his thigh and says, “I wander around, and I finally found the somebody who could make me be true and could make me be blue. It had to be you.”
He decides it’s stupid to drive the two hours into Fairbanks and not do grocery shopping, so he heads to the twenty-four-hour Safeway and walks up and down the aisles, collecting whatever catches his eye. It’s three in the morning and by the time he’s filled the cart he’s lost in a woozy euphoria. The girl at the checkout is the opposite of the girl at the bar, the drunken girl; she’s smart and sulky, with short black hair and a mumbled, “How are you tonight?” A nose ring, of course, and about eighty extra pounds. He’s trying to be a nice guy, but sometimes it’s hard.
The girl back home, the one he’s created, is like neither of these people. In a way she’s a solution to the problem posed by these people—more wholesome, but tougher too, and when she spreads her legs she never surrenders completely. There is always something held back, that part of himself he shares with the real world, with the grocery clerk, the bartender, the man who sold him the sick horse.
Imagine me with my ass in the air. Her skin is scrubbed clean every day, her experience unblemished by tragedy or failure or even a dull job like this one, working late at night in a grocery store in Fairbanks, Alaska.
When he gets home he finds messages from fifteen different men. Some of them he knows and others are first timers; some misspell practically every word and others are meticulous, right down to their punctuation. Alaska girl? Shyboy asks, where are you?
He types, I’m here.
The coronet is disintegrating into yellow pulp, but he only gets a glance before the horse pulls back, turns sideways, drives its hindquarters into the damaged wall. It’s a relief to see it cave completely, because now he’ll be forced to repair it. But the horse is the more immediate concern. Its eyes have turned to white and it’s making noise like a dying engine and he has to crawl beneath it and push up, hard as he can, before it even moves an inch. He considers its weight collapsing down on him, and he considers the temperature, and then he pushes hard, from his knees, and the horse lurches sideways and there’s nothing he can do, this is going to hurt.
But no, somehow the horse finds its feet. He falls to the ground, right on his ass, and the horse sidesteps a couple of feet away, looks down at him like he’s some puzzling little creature. His tailbone hurts. So does his wrist. The wall is splintered outward. He wants to weep, but instead he dusts himself off and stands. His wrist is throbbing, although it’s not bruised. He wants to tell them, I’m crying right now. I don’t know why. Sometimes I cry during sex.
His friend from the farm in Livengood calls and Edison tells him, “It’s fine. I think she’s doing better.” She drinks plenty. That’s a good sign, right?
And he tells Shyboy, I don’t like to drink but I like to dance. It’s hard to find men around here who are good at dancing. All the clichés about Alaska men are true. The military guys just want to fuck you and the local guys don’t even want that. They just want to fall asleep on top of you. But I love it here. I really do. Today I saw a raven I swear was the size of an eagle. It moved in low over my cabin and I thought it was going to land right on my stovepipe but it kept going.
I want you to wear your tallest heels when you talk to me, Shyboy says.
Okay. Okay.
The part about the raven was true, except that it happened last winter, and for some reason it had frightened him. It was like something from a dream, beyond reason, and remembering it was like remembering a dream too: the incompleteness of it. That was when he was seeing that woman from Delta, briefly, and calling to mind her serious face made him feel like a weakling. He had told himself that he would not allow her into his head anymore, because she was not that important at all. He couldn’t remember her last name.
Someone else messaged him and he tried something different. Black cock? he typed, but the man didn’t respond, and he had to get back outside anyway and feed the chickens.
Shyboy writes, You are the kind of person who everybody always thinks is doing fine. Then they describe themselves in vivid language, one kneeling, the other pushing himself into her face. It’s sort of boring and sort of exciting and he really should go outside. It’s two o’clock and in a half hour he’ll have to spread the chicken feed around in the dark. The day can slide right on past you if you’re not careful.
I love this. He can’t identify the source of his arousal. He’s in her head, thinking about the raven and then thinking about the man’s body, but he’s also in his head, and the sex is a form of retribution. He feels sorry for her, he feels sorry for himself, but he also wants it to be as painful as possible. He types, I’ve never, ever felt anything like this before. It’s December seventh, two weeks until the solstice and then everything will begin that slow spin backward toward the light. I have to feed the dog, he types.
I didn’t know you had a dog, and then, I think I’m falling in love with you.
The horse begins refusing water in late December. Its stool is a healthy shade of brown, sweet smelling, but it pushes its head away when Edison tugs it down to the bowl. He keeps his hand pressed to the warm skin, waiting for a message to run from its body into his brain. He feels like an idiot. He is an idiot.
This has become a performance that will measure him, and he’s completely unprepared.
He tells Shyboy an hour later, my mother is dying.
I’m sorry.
Shyboy’s replies are slow, which means he’s probably masturbating. Edison’s mother is alive and well in Atlanta, strong and happy, and she calls all the time and hassles him to come to visit, complains about the stiffness in her fingers. But the words he types on the screen seem as true as anything he’s ever said, and he reads them again, hanging there in the middle of all the filthy language. The reply comes slowly, and those words seem true too, as sincere as the words about spreading his legs, taking the thick cock inside. Outside it’s snowing now, and the birch trees have lost their uniqueness, the way they do every winter by this time. It’s hard to tell where one ends and the next begins, and it’s so beautiful he has to pause in his typing to consider it as a discovery. The window is small and blue. It hangs there like a mirror.
He says, The winter gets inside you here.
Shyboy says he can’t imagine what it’s like. He says, I would like to come to visit someday. We don’t have to do anything. We could just go out for coffee. We could just kiss.
My mother is the most important person in my life and she’s dying.
Okay.
I thought I wanted to save her, he types, but it wasn’t that at all.
A long pause, and for a moment he thinks the name on the screen is going to turn from red to blue and then vanish. That happens sometimes when Shyboy reaches his climax. He doesn’t like to stick around. But no, an answer finally comes back, a few words at a time. Sometimes I think you are lying to me. And then, Do you really live in Alaska?
Yes, of course, he types. I’m looking at it right outside.
And when he goes out there he is surprised to find the horse standing a good twenty feet from the shed, almost at the tree line, head bowed, side covered with hay. No miracle, because when he moves closer to it he notices the cut in its side where it pushed through the boards. It’s breathing heavily, and as much as he tugs at its bridle, it won’t comply and go back inside. It doesn’t take much for him to just give up and let it be. He ties it off to the fence with the rope and climbs into his truck, not bothering to let it idle before he spins out of the driveway.
The drunken girl is talking about her Thanksgiving, and the turkey she and her friends fried in a barrel. They stayed up all night eating and drinking and then slept the next day and when she says this there’s a light in her eyes like love. But where are those friends now? She’s here alone again, drinking a rum and Coke, crunching the ice at the back of her jaw. She tells Edison, “I remember you.”
“I was sure you would,” he says.
“You have a beard now,” she says. “It’s curly.”
“I had a beard before,” he says. “I always have a beard.”
The bartender is standing right there, listening to them talk while he rubs down the bar. He says, “He does. He always has a beard.” He’s smirking as he pours a shot. It’s thirty-five below out and people perform a little dance when they come inside, banging their feet, shaking their mitten hands. Some of their cars are still running in the parking lot, waiting for them to have their fun. They’ll run all night, or at least for a couple of hours, while they order a few drinks.
“You have an accent,” she says. “Where you from?”
“Georgia, originally. But that was a long time ago. I’ve been here longer than you’ve been alive.”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
“Well, I’m exaggerating then. I’ve been here eighteen years. I came up for some work and I just sort of stuck to the place.”
He feels like he’s required to say something funny or out of the ordinary, anything but what he is saying, which is mundane as a glass of water. But she seems interested. She’s leaning into him, practically falling against him, and he’s talking about the way it used to be in this town before it got all civilized in the early nineties. “You can’t imagine it,” he says. “I didn’t think twice about staying.”
The thing is, the story doesn’t make sense to him either, when he hears it aloud. He liked Atlanta, liked riding the buses with his teenage friends, a little gaggle of skin-and-bones boys with the same haircut, the same sneakers, the same slinky, overconfident way of walking. They’d ride in the C-bus up to the courts on Plymouth Heights, talking shit at the back, and play basketball all day, slump against the wire fence in the heat and talk more shit. He doesn’t tell the girl any of this, of course. It’s all he can do to talk to her about working on the pipeline. He feels like he’s lying, leaving out some essential piece of information, but he doesn’t know exactly what that particular piece might be.
“More money than I knew what to do with,” he says. “It was obscene.” He chooses this word carefully, but it doesn’t register with her. She’s laughing like he’s told a joke, like he’s boasting. That’s not it at all. He wants to be understood. There’s a point to his story.
They find her car around back and climb inside. The windshield is covered with fresh snow and there’s something disconcerting about not being able to see ahead, but he stays put while she reaches across him to the glove compartment and pulls out a plastic bag. “I have some shrooms,” she says, “but they’ll hurt your stomach a little. I have some other stuff too.”
It’s cold enough that the police won’t bother them. He knows what she’s thinking, so he says, “I’m hung like a Jap,” and immediately regrets it. At least she doesn’t seem to be listening. She has her hands on his crotch, but not gently. She seems ready to hurt him. Her jaw is set, her face as calm and unemotional as a soldier’s. “Maybe we should do the shrooms,” he says.
He feels impossibly far away from everything. They might as well be a mile underground, or orbiting the earth in a satellite. He looks to one side and sees some headlights flash on, then off. He touches her hair and says, “I think you misunderstood something.”
“I’m not a whore,” she says, “but I do want to see the money.”
“Then you definitely misunderstood.” But he keeps touching her hair. His hand runs down her face, her skin so pale, and he tries to cast it in his memory, as something indelible, like a feature of the landscape he sees every day. He tells her, “You need to change your antifreeze,” because the vents are still blasting cold air against his feet.
I met someone tonight, he tells Shyboy when he gets home.
A long pause that could mean one of a hundred things. Interesting, comes the reply.
A really nice guy, he types. He’s got a swimmer’s body. Long crazy hair. He works for Fish and Game and we just sort of hit it off.
Did you fuck him?
No. I like him too much. He’s inventing her, word by word. He’s saving her from some strange place. But he has to go there to do it. He types, I’m going skiing tomorrow. The snow is perfect for it. I like to go with my dogs.
Sometimes you have two dogs and sometimes you have one.
They begin to describe their lovemaking, but this time there are no props. Shyboy simply gives him a dense description of a kiss. It’s a beautiful description, actually, despite the couple of misspellings, and Edison can practically feel it. I don’t deserve that, he types. I’ve been horrible to you.
You haven’t. You’re gorgeous.
Would I be a horrible person if I wasn’t gorgeous?
You couldn’t be horrible if you tried.
He thinks of the woman from Delta again, looking for clues in shifting memories of their breakup, but there’s really nothing there to see. Maybe just a signpost driving him further back, to the other woman in Atlanta and the stupid things he said to her, but that could just be a false trail too. He types, I have never lied to you ever, and it’s true, it’s true.
Another description of a long kiss. Stuff the ball gag in my mouth, he types, but Shyboy won’t give him that. All he gives him is one kiss, then another, then another, each described in sentimental language. He types, I have to go to sleep.
The outside world is blasted white. He wades through it to the firewood stacked between two trees and begins to split. The cold makes it easy, and the logs crack and fly, one becoming two. He leaves them on the ground until he has twenty, twenty-five pieces, then does the difficult gathering work. His back hurts to stoop. The fire takes its time getting started, but soon it’s blazing, and he throws in scraps of bark, a cereal box, and watches them burn. The box collapses in on itself in a kind of beautiful surrender.
Four days until the darkest day of the year. Everything is still as if it were arranged in careful precision, the seven chickens in their coop, the three goats gathered by the exhaust vent at the back of the cabin.
Its body is a kind of stove too, a hot thing that draws him in. The horse lets him put his head against its side and then he is stroking its black marbled head and it is leaning to him the way it did with the wall, but more gently. It seems to know the proper arrangement so as not to do him harm. He pushes back, like leaning into the wind, and he knows the wet eyes are unseeing as stones. There is some place deep inside it, where the heat originates, where the pain resides, that grows every hour. He pushes his face to it. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then the solstice and the days run the other way.
It’s a kind of journey, toward that strange place, then the arrival, finally the trip home.
I want to tell you my real name, he says to Shyboy on Wednesday.
You don’t have to do that.
But he says that he does have to, sort of, but the name that comes out is Sandra.
You are probably a lie, Shyboy says, but I don’t care. I want to know you.
Edison talks about what he wants to do with his life, the adventures he wants to go on to Greece and Italy, her older brother stationed in Iraq. It’s fun to give him what he wants, but not exactly. It’s an act of kindness and it’s an act of revenge and even when Shyboy goes silent Edison keeps talking. He hasn’t talked this much in years. I’m sorry if I feel a little damaged. I know what I blame it on. It was an ex-boyfriend. He treated me really poorly. I never could trust people after that.
Liar, liar, Shyboy says, and Edison thinks of the Delta woman again, the way she bit her thumbnail when she told him he was a difficult person to be around.
You’re right. It’s not that. I want it to be that, but it’s not.
I was just teasing.
Now you’re the one who’s lying.
I’m trying to tell the truth.
Me too. This feels like the truth.
I know.
I just wanted to rescue her, he types, and he pushes himself back from the keyboard, considers his words, moves in close. Or at least I thought I did.
They begin to kiss, or at least their doppelgangers do, and then the ball gag goes in and the straps go on. This time it’s described slowly and tenderly, as if he’s making a present of her body. Then he splits her in two with descriptions of casual violence. Edison is outside it all, looking in, and inside it all, looking out, and the thought occurs to him for the first time that maybe it’s he who needs to be rescued. The fantasy shifts on the axis of this particular thought, and in his head he creates a third person, a handsome man, a good man, who enters and stops the proceedings, removes him from the rack and says everything is going to be okay. He is both the body wrapped tightly and the man freeing the body, lifting it in his arms. Shyboy is the villain, the abuser. It’s not difficult to think of him that way.
Are you enjoying yourself? the villain asks, and when Edison doesn’t reply, the name on the screen disappears.
“Admit you made a mistake,” the bartender tells him that night. “That’s all you have to do. You can borrow my gun.”
“Where’s that girl tonight?” Edison asks.
“Nora?” the bartender says. “Who knows. She might be across the street. She might be at the Midnight Mine.” He arranges a plate for him, silverware wrapped in a paper napkin, a bottle of ketchup. He switches out his empty glass for a fresh one with a quick shuffle.
There’s something comforting about watching a good bartender do his job.
“She’s a funny one,” Edison says.
“Meth addicts usually are.”
“She’ll be okay,” Edison says. “I have a feeling,” and he considers her in that dark car, looking at the windshield like she can actually see something. She’s talking, rambling, and he can’t figure out what the point is, even now, remembering it. What is she telling him? She’s telling him her life story, what has happened and what will happen. It’s enough to make him believe.
“I have a Remington,” Edison says, and the bartender nods.
So on Friday he takes the gun from the back of the closet and loads it and walks out to the shed with it pointed at the ground. He does not know how he will turn this into a story that makes sense, when he floats in the ether with Shyboy, where everything is just a story. But that doesn’t matter so much at the moment. It’s a beautiful afternoon, with the sun red and squat on the horizon, a new dusting of snow covering the landscape. The horse is waiting for him.
He’s not the person raising the gun at the heavy skull. He’s the person in the car, telling that sad meth addict girl that everything is going to be okay. He pulls back the bolt and sets himself and it’s so easy not to see the horse as anything but a simple target. It’s a form of rescue, he decides, or at least an act of kindness, but when he pulls the trigger he is not even there. It’s already a story, even as the horse’s dead weight hits the ground. His mother has died and everything is so sad and there are so many things he never had a chance to tell her.
But what comes out, hours later, is different. The words are like small accidents, but there they are, on the screen, and he can’t take them back. The ball gag is back in his mouth, but he’s talking, rambling almost. You’re right. I haven’t been completely truthful to you.
I know but I still love you.
I’m not what you think I am.
It’s okay.
He pushes something forward in his head, an idea of himself he’s partitioned off from the rest, and he types, I bought a horse. A sick horse. I was trying to save it, or maybe I just wanted to be with it when it died. He types another sentence, a description of the horse, but he taps backspace and erases it, replaces it with a better lie. And she’s doing good. I think I did it. She’s getting stronger. She’s drinking lots of water. I’m going to ride her once the damned winter turns the corner.
I’ve never seen a horse close up.
Beautiful animals.
I can imagine it, and you with her, riding her. That’s beautiful.
But I’m not what I seem.
I know and I don’t care. It’s fine. I know who you are.
Maybe I’m some crazy meth addict.
Edison forces himself to recall the kick of the Remington and the way the horse settled to the ground, as if getting ready for sleep, and then the girl in the car, with her staring, sick eyes. He tries to think of everything at once, holding their delicate weight as carefully as he can, and in his imagination, they are alive, pulsing deep inside him like his own stupid heart. And it’s a gift he can share with this strange man, this villain, who knows him so well, better than anybody has ever known him before.
You should see her, he types, close up.