The air cold and damp, and no visitation of god and no crowd or carnival gathered. Jim’s life still without event. The problem is the struggle against nothing. And the pain in his head.
He can’t lie on the float and just feel each curl of pain, so he’s up again, without even making the decision, and climbing around the spiky barrier then over the fence. No car passing to see him. He crosses the street to his parents’ house, where he’s parked the truck in the drive, and continues past to the garage, flicks on the light to see all the antlers, all the bucks they’ve killed over the years.
Patches of hair still clinging to dried hide. Most looking bleached by time but a few racks still dark with velvet. He’s never really understood velvet. Some protective covering when the antler is growing, mossy, but why not regular? Why do only a few have it in the fall?
Each of these sets of antlers was supposed to be a memory, a record, and he was there every year since he was a boy, but they’re all so similar he can recognize only a handful. So many guttings, the ripping sound of a knife through hide, impossible to locate each and connect it to the correct antlers, impossible to remember if this was in the lower glades or bear wallow or the burn and who might have been there and who took the shot. Even his own he wouldn’t be able to claim now.
The dust in here making his sinus headache worse. The cold too. The bone of the skull so delicate, all the chambers, endless division, paper thin, visible on the underside of every trophy here, but what he doesn’t understand is where pain and pressure come from, how they’re possible. Each chamber fills with a mucus, and even if it’s infected and green and thick, so what? It’s still only snot. There’s no pump to pressurize. It’s not like hydraulics on a boat. It must be that nerves are made too sensitive, lying just over the wafers of bone.
All the mysteries of pain he’s seen in dentistry, the patients who are not numbed by the first shot or even the next, the irregular pattern of nerves, unmapped and out of place. It should all be very simple, the one trigeminal nerve on each side of the face, in three branches, to lower jaw, upper jaw, and forehead. But it’s not always that simple. One shot to block the mandibular branch and all pain to the lower jaw gone. He can drill away in tooth and bone and only the sound causes terror. But then a patient appears whose pain is not blocked, and Jim is reduced to witch doctor, all science gone and stabbing into the dark.
Ghost pain, also, teeth that hurt long after, weeks after, when there’s no reason or even a tooth left at all. Only the desire for pain. What is Jim supposed to do then? The term used for mysteries is “atypical facial pain,” which just means who the hell knows. And what is he supposed to do for himself now? Knowing this pain comes from another branch of the same nerve that reaches into his lower jaw is not helpful. Semilunar ganglions the most beautiful half-moons shining just beneath the skin of his temples, the face a divided sphere, but the spaces are so vast. When he closes his eyes, he cannot believe all of this is happening within a few inches. Comets of pain flung in arcs and burning out only to be reborn again, and all from the tiny weight of a bit of snot. His patients would not believe how small their cavities are. No one could believe.
He presses the nerves under his eyebrows, digs in with his thumbs, but the relief is so momentary and seems only to add weight, the pain strengthened. Codeine could take care of most of it, leave him pukey and dizzy and deadened, but the pain has lasted too long. He can’t take codeine for a year. At this point he can only suffer.
He pulls the string to turn out the light, a hundred beasts vanished, and climbs the stairs, pushes the door open to the apartment above. Weak light in here, yellowed, and everything seems so small.
Bed with the oldest mattress, thick and caved in the center, a back breaker. And only a single. A real trick to sleep with anyone here. No sheets on it now, only its cover, which is a pattern of pink roses, just like everything in the bathroom in the house. Windows above unable to open, suffocating in summer. Bathroom a broom closet in size, plywood painted white, essentially unfinished. But this apartment was perhaps the only place he felt true freedom. Young enough then, and though he didn’t have Gary’s luck, still he felt possibility, and his parents in the house could have been miles away.
He should feel freedom now, but the IRS after him is probably what kills that most. Knowing they will never stop, never forgive, never even understand that what he was doing was not supposed to be illegal. A scam for doctors and dentists in Alaska, a slick guy coming around and telling them all the tax benefits of a corporation in South America. And it was legal at first, but then it changed, and no one bothered to tell Jim. Or maybe he kind of suspected, if he’s to be completely honest, but why hand over all that money to the IRS? When was that ever something he’d agreed to? What right do they have?
If he could put the entire government on a fireworks barge and push them out into the lake and light the fuse, he would. Every rocket pointed downward so it would explode in place. He wants all of them to just die. A rage so complete there’s no way to express it. Even the magnum not enough.
Jim lies down on the bed. Thick layer of dust, terrible for his sinuses, but the pain is already complete, so how can it be worse? He’s moaning, because when it hits this stage there’s only moaning, and thoughts no longer form or follow, and all that’s left is time.
The bare light bulb humming, another torture, moth wings fusing to its surface. Too many things. Rhoda, the IRS, his divorces, the sinus pain, his job, the empty new house, winter, this trip that has not made things better at all. He was making it through the weeks until this trip, a kind of finish line, but now he can see all the weeks waiting after it, and no change, no improvement. The doctor was supposed to help. And Rhoda, and his family, seeing his kids, getting away from winter and loneliness and insomnia and work, but it’s no easier here. He’s no closer to seeing a way through. How to stay alive long enough to where life becomes something wanted again.
What’s clear is that he can’t stay another day with his parents. Two nights impossibly long. He can’t get through even this one.
So Jim lies there for the next hours waiting, his back slumping, all his body getting sore in the mysterious way a bed hurts us only if we’re not sleeping, and finally, long after it should have arrived, the sky through thin curtains becomes dark blue and then a lighter blue and Jim rises insubstantial, a ghost from lack of sleep, feeling the outlines of his body and outlines only. Careful down the stairs and into the house. His father already there in the bay window, sitting in his usual spot, lights off, watching the lake for signs of day.
Jim sits beside him. The water out there absolutely calm, undisturbed by any ripple or wake, blue glass. “Beautiful,” he says, but of course his father doesn’t say anything.
The mountains on the other side brightening at their tips and fusing. The sun a soldering gun to weld earth and sky, all turning yellow white and too hot to look at. The surface of the lake a mirror to reflect this burn, water disappearing and become only light.
His father still staring straight ahead, face lit and eyes narrowed, some scientist looking into a nuclear blast and not wanting any shielding, waiting for the shock wave and the superheated wind.
“I tried, Dad,” Jim says. “I guess that’s what I want you to know. I didn’t just cave in. I fought for hundreds or maybe thousands of hours.”
“It’s not a fight,” his dad says. “It’s just life. You just do it.”
“That’s not enough reason.”
“We never needed a reason.”
Ripples in the light now, bright mirror become liquid again, the heat raising a wind. And a boat passing far out, dark line of its hull and wake, a fisherman out for bass.
“I don’t know when a reason became needed,” Jim says. “I guess that’s the problem, the moment that I needed one. Who knows why that moment happened.”
“The whole thing’s a sack of shit. All of life. Nothing is what it was supposed to be. But you still don’t end it.”
Jim can’t believe his father is talking. “How is it a sack of shit? Your life.”
“I stab myself with insulin every day. I eat diabetic ice cream. I have no good friend left. I sit here staring out at the lake, fat as a toad. I haven’t had sex in decades. I don’t believe, but still I have to go to church. I know too many people in this town, and if I run into anyone at the supermarket or gas station, I have to remember the names of their kids. I was supposed to be a better father, a better husband, a better Christian, a better dentist, a better man. I grew up running traplines, and the truth is I would have liked to spend my entire life out in the woods away from people, but I had to talk with them every day and I still have to talk. I’m supposed to smile, too, but I don’t think that has happened in a decade or two. Every year is only time to pass, nothing to look forward to. Heard enough?”
“Wow. Yeah.”
“And I’m not talking about putting a gun to my head. I’ll be here until I stop breathing, because what you’re talking about is not an option.”
Jim puts a hand on his father’s arm. “Thank you, Dad.”
“I hate everyone here,” his father says. “That’s the truth. I never told anyone that. I never even really thought it in a sentence in my head. But I hate all of America and everything it is. I served in the navy and so did you, but my father was Cherokee, and we come from leaders who accommodated, who tried to make peace, and they lost everything. All was taken. They signed the treaty that led to the Trail of Tears. I spent decades here fixing everyone’s teeth and talking pleasantly with them, and I could never say who I was. So everyone can burn. The whole place. The entire country.”
“I had no idea.”
“Yeah. That was the point. No one could have any idea what I was thinking. They still can’t. I’m only telling you so you wake up. It doesn’t matter if you’re suffering or if your life didn’t turn out the way you wanted. You continue on anyway.”
“But why?”
“You don’t ask that.”
“And why can’t we ask?”
“Look where it’s gotten you. Real great, the asking.”
“But the question is still there.”
“No it’s not.”
“I have to admit I’m stunned. I’ve never heard you say so much.”
“Well that’s enough I think.”
“Okay.”
The lake on fire, far too bright to look at, but his father is staring anyway, his desire for immolation. A terrible choice, the worst choice, to hate every day but continue on for decades. Jim will not do that. He will spare himself that.
Jim tries to stare at the lake but it’s so bright it might as well be made of aluminum. Jim remembers the fresh plates of it stacked in Oregon for the boat, oiled mirrors blinding, hot even through gloves.
Heat radiating through the window, and his father still wears that hunting jacket. He’s refusing the world, refusing to blink or turn away or take off his jacket or do anything at all but suffer and stare.
“I’m not sure it matters,” Jim says. “I came here to be helped, to see my family, and you just helped me. You told me the truth. You weren’t absent as you’ve always been before, and what you said does relate directly to what I’ve been experiencing, the same anger, the same desire to see it all burn, the same sense of not belonging and of time as something to get through. And yet it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help me at all. I can see now that the trip was pointless. Even if you give me exactly what I need, it doesn’t do anything.”
“You don’t need help. You just do your life. That’s it.”
“Yeah. That’s the part where we’re not the same. I do need a good reason. I’m not going to suffer each day just to keep on suffering.”
“What did you think life was going to be? Where did you get this idea that you’d be happy?”
“Well from everyone, from everything. We’ve always been told that.”
“No we weren’t. You weren’t. Not by me, at least.”
“That’s true.”
“Stop being a baby. And stop talking about it. Just do what you need to do.”
“Thanks. That’s real helpful.”
“It’s the most helpful thing I’ve said. Imagine we’re hunting. You’re down at the bottom of The Burn or below Bear Wallow, and you decide to just not hike anymore. You don’t feel like going uphill. Where does that leave you?”
“I don’t think it’s the same.”
“How is it not the same?”
“Well if I hike I know I can get to camp, where I have a bed and food and everything else, but in real life there’s no camp. We just hike uphill and the hill keeps rolling back and you find out there’s more hill.”
“You think too much. You forget that if you don’t hike you’re stuck in the brush with the sun out and no real shade and your water gone and no one there except maybe a rattlesnake or two.”
“That’s a better situation than what I have now.”
“Self-pity. You have to stop that.”
“I know. It’s more dangerous than anything else. But how do you stop self-pity?”
“Like everything else, you just do.”
“That’s the part I’m missing.”
“Then stop missing it.”
“That’s the same thing.”
His father sighs then and takes off his baseball cap. He closes his eyes, rubs at them, and then scratches his bald head. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“Thank you for trying. I mean it. I appreciate that you tried.”
“Yeah.” He puts the cap back and raises his eyes to the burn, and Jim knows this is as much as he’ll get, the conversation over now. Is there some way he could just stop? Is there some switch inside, something activated by will? Can he listen to what his father has said and let it work?
A jet boat goes by with a skier attached, a huge curve of spray lofted every time he carves a turn. Jim always loved skiing. What if he did that every day? He could buy a boat and keep it at the green pier. Wake in the morning, talk with his dad, then go out on the water.
His father clears his throat. “I know I never say this, and that I should have said it, but I love you, son, and I don’t want you to go. That’s the last thing I’ll say.”
Jim is stunned. He’s never heard this before, not once in his life. He stares into the blaze of the lake along with his father and has no idea what to say. He’s been offered everything now. His father loves him, his kids love him, Gary is trying hard. Rhoda was kind to him. If he can let all of this sink in, maybe it will do something. “Thank you, Dad,” he finally says. “I love you too.”