Doom. Hard to know whether it exists, but then sometimes you can feel it happening. When too much weight has congregated.
The motel is not in the center of town but out along the lakefront, discreet. He looks at the water as he drives, going slowly, not wanting to attract attention. Coots all along the edge, thin black necks pumping as they swim, always fleeing, the equivalent of rats. Everyone shoots them out of boredom and still their numbers are relentless. White bill making an easy target.
He wonders what she’ll be wearing. Hoping for lingerie beneath. Most likely jeans and a sweater. Most likely not made up. And has she just come from Rich?
She’ll treat him like a child, even though he’s older, smarter, has worked harder, knows more. But he has to go along with that, because she holds the keys to the kingdom.
“What am I doing,” he says aloud. “What are you doing, Jim? What is today?”
What else is there left to do? He hasn’t seen his friends. John Lampson, only a short drive from here, in Kelseyville, and Tom Kalfsbeck in Williams. Maybe one of them is the key. Maybe he’ll meet John for a game of chess and find something new, a sudden rush of feeling as they both bend over the board and he’ll realize he was gay all along and that was the cause of despair, and after they get together Jim will feel mental illness dissipate, find out it never existed. That’s the story he wants, something uplifting that reaffirms he was always good, something to make him innocent.
But friends don’t make us. They don’t have the power of family. And sex is despair and for Jim it is with women and particularly this woman, and things will never work out with her.
Facts. Important to stick with the facts. The lake doesn’t care, or the patches of tules or ducks or coots, or the gray sky above, or any of the people here. Facts are always lonely.
He pulls into the gravel lot. Only eight or ten rooms, ranch style from when he was a kid, painted light blue now but so many colors over the years. Small windows looking over the road to the lakefront houses and water beyond. One possible place, as good as any.
He walks to reception, doesn’t recognize the woman behind the counter. He’s been away so long. He used to know everyone in this town.
He pays in cash, just to slow the police down a bit. They won’t know at first who they’re looking for.
He walks the wooden deck along the rooms, old wood, a sidewalk from the Wild West, enjoying the heavy clomp of his boots, wishing he had spurs. At the end of every western some showdown, and what he loves most is the quiet then. The only real peace. Struggle all the way along, but right before the final gunfight all is calm and there’s room to breathe and everyone can be their best selves. They can love their families and be good to their friends, can be ready to die nobly, and can say pithy things. There’s a bit of humor finally. But he’s missing the rest of the cast. No one to have those touching final conversations with, no chance to make some thematic observation, something about how if it would ever just rain we could be clean, or this prairie was never meant for things to grow.
What he likes is the simplicity. Six-shooters and nothing to stop them, only leather and wood, nowhere safe, and the law no more than a badge, not SWAT teams in riot gear. Fate decided by individuals without waiting for a government larger than god. Now there’s no getting away, no riding a horse hard into the desert. Now there’s only a short time and chips all in. Once it starts it ends quickly.
The room is small and dimly lit, no overhead but only the two bedside lamps. Narrow double bed, the mattress thin. He wonders if they’ve been in this room before. Too long ago and back then he didn’t care which room. No dresser or desk. One small chair by the window, made for waiting, and so he sits there, curtains open, overcast light. Feels so sad, so relentlessly sad and lost, but he tries to experience it, last moments and the quiet and the easy sense, a new sense, that it won’t have to be endured forever. A calming.
This makes him worse, that it feels easier in the end. Unfair. After all he’s suffered, all the nights of insomnia and terrible pain and despair when he fought so hard to keep from pulling the trigger. And then to pull the trigger when he doesn’t feel that bad, but apparently that’s often when it happens. On a small upswing, when the suicide feels a bit better and has the energy finally to do it. He knows too much now about the patterns and statistics of suicide, watching himself and making commentary along the way. Another insult.
His mother’s Christianity never gone. Still this desire to be good even as he knows what he’s going to do. The main failure of his life, his inability to grab hold of that weed and yank it out. Wrapped around everything inside and in him so long it has become indistinguishable from flesh and feeling and thought, all that might be called him. Nothing can be separated out as his own.
The stranger who comes to town might as well be Jesus himself in every western. Never recognized by the townsfolk, always looked at with suspicion, but he’s here to deliver justice, defeat evil, and offer redemption. In his actions a model of goodness, because he has what no human can ever have, a solid core. The stranger in a western never changes, never can be broken, knows right and wrong absolutely and from the beginning and was born into the world this way and will leave untouched. This could never be Jim. He can carry the six-shooter and wear the spurs but inside he has no idea what to do and anything can change him at any moment and he can only read signs of himself later and wonder who he was, never know who he is.
Goodness, the most dangerous idea. That he should have been good, that’s what will make him pull the trigger.
He wonders if she’s not coming. Too long a delay. He can’t bear the drifting. He needs her to come now. He stands because maybe that will help. “You’d better fucking come,” he says. “You owe me that.”
The floor is wood, actual wood planks. Not some nasty carpet or plywood or concrete. He’s grateful for this at least. Uneven and painted dark blue but the real thing. Far too depressing if the end were on carpet.
“It will be real pretty,” he says, and he likes the sound of his voice, a bit of a twang. “Real pretty.” Her blood sprayed on the walls and his on the ceiling. Bits of bone and flesh. The blood running the planks and seeping down through gaps, darkening with time. The magnum so loud, though, it won’t be much time. That door will be open again in minutes.
He stood in her parents’ living room so many times, such a large space, carpeted, multilevel with glass sliders leading out to the pool. He imagines the glass was blasted by stray pellets. She would have been coming from the hallway, such a long and wide hallway it was kind of crazy, leading to four bedrooms and the large office that held a hundred guns in glass cases. The hallways dimly lit and the gun room with so many small lights to showcase antique pistols and hex-barreled rifles. Classic shotguns with the most beautiful carvings in their wooden stocks and even etched designs along the steel barrels. Each worth thousands, a few perhaps even more than that. A fortune in that room. Red velvet lining the glass cases, plush. And mostly a sense of weight. All guns so heavy before, the castings so thick. His .44 magnum about the heaviest pistol you can buy now, but slim and light by comparison to the dragoons. He thinks that’s what they were called. Fancy French names for some of the guns. Like old ships, so many names we no longer use.
He wants to know which pistol she picked, and why. Rhoda has never told him. Picked carefully or without any thought at all? No one will ever know that. And what about the shotgun? Something beautiful? One particularly meaningful to him? She must have had to listen to him talk endlessly about each of those guns. You don’t put together that kind of collection without obsession.
Rhoda’s old Datsun B210, dark green, pulls onto the gravel near the office. She’ll be asking which room. Wearing a yellow sweater and jeans, and he remembers that sweater from a photo of the two of them in Oregon, when the boat was being built, standing in front of the apartment complex. He had a beard then and hair getting longer, becoming a fisherman, dreaming of this perfect aluminum boat cutting through Alaskan waves and a life entirely free. Saying fuck you to land and cars and people, an early sign of the euphoria. A dream of escape, not understanding yet that there’s never escape while we still breathe.
No sound of her walking. Only tennis shoes, not heels. She should have dressed differently for this. Perhaps didn’t understand the importance.
He opens the door for her. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for coming.”
“You don’t look too bad,” she says, stepping inside. “I thought you’d look worse. But what happened to your face?” “A few scuffles with Gary and the woods.”
She gives him a hug, the shock of it almost too much, the feeling of warmth and her body pressed close to his, the overwhelming fullness. But her hand touches the pistol. “What’s this?”
He reaches back to pull it free. Solid in his grip. Loaded. He could just press it now to her neck and shoot down through her and she’d be done, unstrung and collapsed instantly. “I’ll put it away.” He sets it on the chair by the window. It can keep guard by itself. Anything might happen now. She might take it and shoot him, all reversed.
“You shouldn’t have that,” she says, and her arms are around him again. He wonders what this means.
“I know. But I’m not willing to leave it with anyone. It’s my insurance policy. Sometimes the only way I can get through the night is knowing there’s a quick way out. Just having it available. I need that. Having no way out would be unbearable.”
“Jim,” she says, her head pressed against his chest now. He closes his eyes. She’s holding him so tightly and this feels so perfect, he doesn’t know how he could have failed to recognize it before.
“This is perfect,” he says.
“Jim.”
“Really. Just feel this. We can go back. Forget everything. Just feel this now and you know it’s true.”
She lets go of him then and he regrets saying too much, losing her.
“Sorry,” he says, and pulls her to him again, but she pushes away.
“We should talk, Jim. We need to find a way for you to know that it’s over and that’s okay. Talk about how you move on from here.”
“That’s not the talk I want.”
“I know.”
He feels lost standing there separate, so he sits down on the bed and then lies back, closes his eyes.
She sits beside him. “I know you loved me,” she says. “But you didn’t really love me. And that’s why you’re going to be okay now. Remember what it felt like when we were married, when you had me completely, all to yourself, and that wasn’t what you wanted, not really. Remember the weight of that and how you felt trapped, how the months ahead were things to get through. Remember us on the boat, all those hours day and night, and Gary there, only the three of us, and how small that felt sometimes, how lonely. I know you want to believe in a dream of us, something to reach for when you’re feeling so bad, but it will help you more to remember there was nothing there. You will find love again, something that surprises you, but it won’t be with me.”
“No,” he says, but he doesn’t know what he’s saying no to. That there will be another woman, or that it was lonely with Rhoda, or just the enormity of having to find some way through. He’s been fighting for so long he’s exhausted. He can’t keep going. “I need to be done.”
“That never happens. You know that. We’re never done, even in the most stable life.”
“Lie down with me.”
She does that, to his surprise, and even puts an arm over him, which feels so much better. He tries to remember what it felt like on the boat, how it could have been empty or not enough. Narrow bed, barely holding the two of them, just behind the pilothouse. Everything below decks reserved for the fish holds and engine room. Gary’s bunk and an extra in that same room, no privacy, so they had to wait until Gary, and the deckhand if they had one, were on watch, and then they locked the door and he remembers the best sex of his life then. Something about being bucked in the waves, the constant movement, and the short, stolen time they had. He remembers her legs, so thin, and wanting her in his mouth, and remembers having to hold the bunk above to not be thrown.
When they slept, also, he felt so close to her. She was always right on top of him then. Like sleepwalkers having to rise every couple hours for the next watch, falling again so quickly, four or five times a day. An odd existence.
“I don’t remember that it wasn’t enough. On the boat. I don’t remember small or lonely.”
“You had times at the helm you just wanted to be alone. Didn’t want to talk with me.”
He tries to remember that, hundreds of hours staring at the high bow pitching through seas, remembers being concentrated and often grim and worrying about the boat, always some fear of hitting a log or the engine breaking down or the longline getting snagged, as it finally did, crumpling the drum and ending their chances, but he doesn’t remember not wanting to talk with her.
“Did that really happen?” he asks.
“Yes. It really did.”
“I guess I wasn’t there. I missed it somehow. It’s not in my memories.”
She puts a leg over him and scoots closer, her head on his shoulder. He has both arms around her now, and this is all he wants. How could it ever not have been enough?
Shitty little motel room and yet here’s where he could be happy. Just freeze this moment and keep it.
Damp smell of her hair, like the smell of a horse. Her forehead with the adult version of acne, just a bumpiness. She’s not really beautiful, and he’s always known that, but he’s drawn to her anyway. Kisses her forehead now and pulls her closer in his arms.
She seems responsive. He kisses lower, straining to reach her cheek, and she tilts her face up and offers her mouth, exactly as he would have hoped. This moment of willingness is what every man wants. Thin lips but he doesn’t care, feels only grateful.
Love. As close as he’s ever been, so it must be what love is. A tenderness, one hand cradling the back of her head, and he’s moaning, and instantly hard. And he can’t pull her close enough to his chest. But what if it has never been love at all? What if he has missed something basic? How would he ever know? If he’s never loved, he won’t know that.
What makes it seem not like love is the fact that he’s watching, still thinking about what’s happening. He’s still aware, also, that he would not give everything for her, no feeling of full sacrifice, no perfect selflessness. He loves her only because he wants. If she doesn’t give him sex right now, he will be unhappy, disappointed, angry, and will not feel love at all. And if some more beautiful woman came along, or even just someone available at the right moment, he would not be faithful.
There was a time with her early on, in the first year or two, when other women disappeared and he would not have wanted anyone else. That did happen. And why couldn’t that remain? It would have made things so much simpler.
They’re pulling at each other. Sex a kind of wrestling match with an imagined urgency, though no clock is running. He has a hand on her ass, and she reaches down for his dick. All the mechanics of it working and happening. He didn’t think she would be willing. He feels confused and lost, then he worries that will kill his boner, but her hand is keeping it up anyway, and then her mouth, and he doesn’t know why she’s doing so much, why she’s decided to give to him. None of it makes sense. She’s with a new man and wants to marry him.
Jim can feel his dick going soft in her mouth. He’s losing it. “Fucking thoughts,” he says. “Why can’t I get my head to shut up?”
She stops and comes back up to kiss him on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Jim.”
“I want it so bad,” he says. “I’ve wanted to be with you. But I can’t stop my head. It just always goes.”
“It’s okay.”
Jim has this long exhale, a kind of sigh and shaking, and then he’s crying. Eyes turned to soup suddenly and chest heaving, and he feels like he’s drowning, has to get up and go to the bathroom to blow his nose and hawk up all the phlegm in his throat. What a fucking mess.
She wraps her arms around him from behind, pressed all along his back, and he closes his eyes and stands there like that, arms hanging and held by her, and everything feels impossible. Sobbing out of control now, and no idea why, or which reason. Pick one of the dozen. Who cares.
“I’m not going to make it,” he says, and that makes him cry harder, the self-pity, and when he tries to hold it back he makes some kind of sound too high-pitched, embarrassing. “Squealing like a fucking pig,” he says.
“No, Jim,” she says. “You’re okay. I’m here now, and you’re going to be okay.”
“Here now but not tomorrow. With Rich tomorrow.”
To be held by her again, after so long. Her thin arms around him, and all the rest blocked from view. Only his own body to look at in the mirror, the way he finishes this life, splotchy red but generally so white from Alaska, no sun, no regular exercise, slumped at the middle and his chest dripping into boobs and his arms too thin. Hair receding and Adam’s apple sticking out and lines around his eyes, almost forty but looking like fifty. Despair and depression aging more quickly. He always looked young for his age but not now. An old man at thirty-nine.
His dick small and thin and sad, refusing, receding also. Lost in light brown hair. Curly everywhere, all over his body, so much hair on his forearms and chest, everything about his body so disgusting. He shouldn’t have to look at it. No one should ever have to. And to be fair, she wouldn’t look good in this mirror either. Harsh florescent light. Difficult to believe we can ever feel desire. Blindest impulse possible.
What’s strange is that he’s still crying but he’s also thinking and watching at the same time and feeling nothing. Someone else’s body crying, far away. There are two Jims, and the one not crying, the one feeling nothing, is the one to watch out for, but there’s no way to reach him. He’s never there. He just controls everything and makes everything seem fake.