That morning Jim feels a bit better. It lasts a few hours. When his mother comes into the kitchen, he’s able to say hello and ask how she is.
“Oh I’m fine,” she says, hugging herself in her bathrobe because the bedroom is cold. His parents have slept in separate beds since he can remember, narrow single mattresses and blackout blinds never opened during the day, the room a cave, unheated and unlit. Her bathrobe is baby blue and ancient.
She lights the stove and sets the kettle. Spoons Pero into a mug while she’s waiting. Some chicory coffee substitute. The water steams and boils almost immediately, reheated twice already by his father, and she pours then adds sugar and milk. Stirs with a spoon from her station, standing at the sink and staring at the pomegranate tree and petunias and fence.
“You can come over here, Mom,” Jim says. “Look at the lake.”
“Oh I’m fine,” she says.
“Really, how come you never get to look at the lake? How many thousands of hours have you stared at that fence?”
“Jim,” she says. “You always make our lives sound so small. I’m happy looking at my garden in the morning.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I guess the lake is still kind of bright anyway.”
“Yes. And I see it plenty every day.”
“That’s okay.”
“But what are you thinking when you’re standing there?”
“Oh nothing important.”
“There must be some repeated things. What is it that you’ve thought of many times while standing there?”
“Well, I don’t think anyone wants to hear that.”
“I do.”
His mother sighs and stares at the fence or petunias or whatever. She raises her mug to take a sip.
“I’m leaving today,” Jim says.
“Today?” she asks.
“This morning. I’m going to see John Lampson and then have my appointment with the therapist in Santa Rosa at the end of the day and change my ticket to fly back to Alaska earlier.”
“You don’t need to do that. You can stay here.”
“I can’t. I didn’t sleep all last night. I laid out on the pier and then in the apartment over the garage and I just can’t have another night of doing that. It’s too long.”
“It was because you saw Rhoda. Don’t see her and you’ll be fine.”
“Do you actually believe that?”
His mother doesn’t answer, and she still hasn’t looked at him.
“So last chance,” he says. “What are your thoughts? What happens when you’re standing there?”
“I think of a lot of things. The ladies in the church and where we’ll go for lunch.”
“No daily scheduling stuff. I mean other thoughts or memories.”
She sighs, and her head is shaking. She obviously doesn’t enjoy this at all, but he doesn’t feel like stopping. He wants to know. “This is your last chance,” he says. “I’ll be up there in Alaska and I may not come back.”
“You better come back,” she says in a low voice, staring down at the sink now, or maybe at her hands.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t like this. But okay. I remember when the flood was up over the driveway, all water out there, and I worry sometimes. I think about my history degree. One unit short. Only one unit. Would my life be different? And I worry about you kids, all three of you. Ginny with the problems she’s had in her marriage, whether Gary ever will get married, and all that’s happening with you, so bright and nothing went like it should and I don’t understand why. All you had to do was not destroy it. If you had just let your life happen, it would have been good. That’s all you had to do, just nothing, just not get in the way.”
“Thank you, Mom. It’s good to know what you’re thinking.”
“Is that enough?”
“Yes. That’s enough. Thank you.”
“Because I could trot out a thousand other things if you want, memories and thoughts, all that’s supposed to be mine. We’re supposed to be able to have our thoughts. We’re supposed to be allowed that, without being picked at.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Your family’s not here for your entertainment. All of this is real.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. It’s true I just feel like prodding, since nothing matters. And it doesn’t matter what you say. Dad said a lot this morning. You wouldn’t have believed it. But that didn’t matter either. I’ve hit some new stage, where everything’s too late. I’ll be interviewing myself now as I raise the pistol to my head. So what are your thoughts now, Jim?”
“Stop it!” she yells. She’s hunched over the sink, her fists clenched at her breast, and then she leaves quickly, back to the cave of her bedroom.
“I don’t know what to say to that,” his father says. “You know what you’re doing. And then you do it anyway.”
Gary comes in. “What happened?”
“I’m just a shit,” Jim says. “I upset Mom. I pushed too much. It’s time to leave. We’re going now to John’s place, then to Santa Rosa and I’m going to see the therapist today. Then fly tomorrow. I can’t stay any longer.”
“We’re not going today.”
“Well I am, with or without you. I’m making three phone calls and then I’m splitting.”
Jim goes into the dining room and grabs the green phone. He hates that it’s green. He dials for the therapist and it just rings. Lazy piece of shit arriving late to work. So he asks the operator for the number of Alaska Airlines, then he’s on hold and standing in the middle of this house that seems like a raft right now, something that could tilt and become unmoored. He has to get out of here.
Someone finally answers, and he’s able to change his ticket to fly out tomorrow morning, connecting through Seattle and Anchorage.
Then he calls John. “I’m coming over right now,” he says. “Leaving Lakeport in about ten minutes.”
“You don’t sound good,” John says.
“I’ll seem worse in person.”
“Well then I look forward to seeing you soon.”
“You betcha,” Jim says, and he hangs up because what more is he supposed to say? Just making the last rounds. He calls the therapist again and this time gets his secretary. “Tell that miserable fuck he’s seeing me this afternoon. I don’t give a shit if he already has other appointments. I’m leaving for Alaska tomorrow morning and I need to see him one last time before I blow my head off.”
“It’s okay, Jim,” she says. “Everything’s okay.” It’s clear she’s been given training for exactly this situation. He doesn’t really care. He gets the appointment, which is what he wanted, and then he hangs up the green phone for the last time. He won’t ever have to use it again.
He walks into the kitchen to say goodbye to his father, puts a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Dad. That was the best gift you could have given.”
“Not too late,” his father says. “You can pull it together. Don’t ever think it’s too late.”
Gary comes in carrying his duffel bag. “Okay,” he says. “I don’t like this, but when has that ever mattered?”
“That’s right,” Jim says, and he pushes past and out the metal door and down the narrow steps a last time. All the world burning away just behind him now, vanishing. This house will be gone when he leaves, and then this road and town and lake and these mountains, all gone.
John has a nice place in Kelseyville. Big house set back from the road, old trees and plenty of shade. He owns a pharmacy and has done well. And he hasn’t detonated his life at any point. His wife, Carol, comes out on the porch to join in the greeting. She’s wearing a white dress with blue polka dots and a blue sash and could fit into their high school photos.
“You’re a step back in time,” Jim says to her. “You look like our high school dreams.”
John chuckles. “That’s my wife you’re talking to. But yeah, you’re right. The girls then did look similar.”
“And she’s not much older now than they were then.”
“Jim,” she says, smiling. “You’ll have to stop that. You’ll make me shy.”
“Well you look beautiful,” he says. “And John you have the perfect life. Look at all this.”
Their son comes out the door then.
“Holy crap,” Jim says. “He’s even bigger now.”
“Crusher,” Gary says. “Definitely the biggest strongest baby I’ve ever seen.”
“Toddler,” John’s wife corrects.
“Linebacker,” John says. “Well come on inside. We can’t just stand out here.”
Inside is even nicer, the dream of a home and family, dark wood and big leather couches with John’s kills spread over them, bobcats and bears, mule deer and elk. Puffy handmade throw pillows and smiling photos everywhere. His rifle, a .30-06, hung over the wide fireplace. A life built on every day repeating, every day being exactly like the last, something Jim has never been able to endure.
“Would you like lemonade?” Carol asks.
Jim is looking at the floor, made of old railroad ties sanded smooth and polyurethaned. All the knots and spike holes and lines of grain. He rubs the toe of his boot over it, Gary’s boot really, and can’t touch the wood. A world encased below, holding events from a hundred years, every day of the sun rising and all the rain and everything else. In an epoxy bubble like an ant in amber.
“Yes,” Gary says. “We both would.”
Jim sits on the couch and lies back, resting his head on bobcat, not as soft as he would have hoped. The hairs harden over time, maybe just from dust. His own hides up in Alaska all bristle now too.
The dark beams above, an open roof like in a cathedral, triangles on stout posts. “Is the wood up there old too?” he asks. “Or just stained?”
“Left rough and with about half a dozen layers of dark stain,” John says. “A kind of antiquing they can do to make wood look old. They beat it up for a while, gouging and splintering the surface and maybe digging too deep with the belt sander. Like all of us in our woodworking class. We were ahead of our time.”
Jim grins. “That’s pretty funny. We did do some excellent antiquing without knowing.”
“Lakeport’s finest, to fill the castles of Europe.”
“Is that what all this is, to look like Europe, like something as old as that?”
“I don’t know. That or the Wild West. Must be one of the two. I guess I have no idea what we’re trying to look like here.”
“My whole life is like that, based on some dream but who knows which one.”
“Is this where I get out my tears?”
“That’s why I came to see you,” Jim says. “You’re the only one with a sense of humor about this. Gary is more like a grumpy nanny.”
“Thanks, brother. As I go up to Alaska with you to babysit, and meanwhile leave my whole fucking life behind, I’ll be happy to know it was worth it because you’re so grateful.”
Carol arrives with the lemonade in big glasses with pink straws.
“Where’s the umbrella in my drink?” Gary asks.
“I’ve never even had a drink with an umbrella,” Jim says. “What a sad sucky small thing I lived. I did nothing.”
“Not too late,” John says. “Go down to Mexico. Hang out on the beach for a while. I think you should do that right now and not go back to Alaska. Get some sun and go swimming in the ocean. Eat fresh fish and find a señorita. And because of the IRS, don’t come back. Make us visit you down there.”
“You’re right,” Jim says. “Really. That is exactly what I should do, and yet I’ll be getting on that plane to Alaska.”
“Is Gary going with you?”
“Yeah. I’ll have to change my tickets too,” Gary says. “Extra hundred bucks probably, because I’m a rich teacher who cares nothing about money. You fat cats don’t care, but a hundred means something to me.”
“A hundred still means something to me,” John says.
“I’ll pay you back for your ticket,” Jim says. “And you’re in my will, so you’re about to get half my share of the ranch, the other half to my kids. And cash if there’s anything left over after the IRS.”
“They’ll want everything,” John says. “You have to set up a trust or they’ll take the ranch.”
“Maybe too late for that.”
“Hey!” Gary says. “How about think for a second what you’re talking about?”
“I think he knows,” John says.
“That’s what I like about you,” Jim says. He closes his eyes and enjoys the lemonade, fresh squeezed with crystals of sugar not yet fully dissolved.
“Game of chess?” John asks.
“Yeah,” Jim says, opening his eyes. “That sounds good.”
This is their ritual. Sit here for a bit of chitchat then go into John’s study and play one or two games for about three hours. Usually his kids are waiting here the whole time, going crazy with boredom, but this time it will be Gary.
“Entertain yourself,” Jim says to him.
“I’ll count my blessings,” Gary says. “That should get me through a couple hours.”
More leather in the study, big desk, a small chess table, a globe old-timey with ancient maps, California distorted and Alaska missing. A brass telescope. Bookshelves to the high ceiling and a ladder that slides along them. “Are you a count or a duke or something?” Jim asks John.
A wood duck mounted on the desk, prettiest of them all, blues and greens and reds.
“You’ve got me thinking,” John says. “It’s true this is supposed to be Europe. But I’ve never even been there.”
“We have no idea why we want what we want, or who we were supposed to be.”
“Do you just say those things, or do you actually think them?” John has these small round glasses that make him look smarter. Stocky build, strong, so it’s hard to imagine he’s been near a book, but the glasses make it seem he’s some kind of natural philosopher, come in from the hunt or lumberjacking to hold forth.
“I lie awake every night,” Jim says. “I sleep maybe a couple hours. Then I fall asleep again during the day. I was doing that at work, missing appointments. And all I can say about my thoughts is they’re like mud, or silt, whatever might be in layers and shift around, gathered on the bottom. I get part of one and it’s stuck to another, without beginning or end, and all they have is weight, finally, no shape. Imagine you dive down and grab at the mud with your hands. That’s what trying to understand is like. You get all you can hold in your hands, but that’s not the whole thing and isn’t even a part of it, and as you come back to the surface it’s all streaming away into the water. What you lift out at the end is only enough to make your hands dirty.”
John smiles. “It’s making you more interesting at least. You should have had your sleepless nights earlier.”
“I was boring you before?”
“Let’s just say you were never introspective. When I asked if you were sure about marrying Elizabeth, you wouldn’t discuss it or even think about it. You had a plan, and you were doing the plan. Your whole life was like that, even when we were young, in grade school. You just always had a plan.”
“That wasn’t good.”
“No it wasn’t. The plan has worked for me, for some reason, but it never worked out for you.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know. Luck?”
Jim sits in one of the leather chairs at the chess table. He feels overwhelmed. The idea that he always had a plan, and that that was the problem. “The plan is what got me here,” he says. “Having a plan, that was the problem all along, because it was never my plan. It was only what I was supposed to do.”
“Seems kind of simple to blame your whole life on that. And maybe it was your plan.”
“No. It’s not too simple. It’s the truth. The truth is always simple. I was a good person. I did what I was supposed to. But then I did what I wanted, and the two don’t match.”
John sits across from him and leans forward with his elbows on the table. “Then just do what you want from now on. That’s simple too, right?”
Jim closes his eyes and leans back in the chair. The pain radiating and pulsing. There might be some way here, but he can’t focus. “I can’t let me be the bad me. I think the good me went on too long,” he says. “I can kill it only by killing everything.”
“Since I’m your friend, now is when I step in and say that’s not true and don’t do it.”
“But what do you believe?”
“I believe you’re going to kill yourself as soon as you get back to Alaska.”
“Do you think I have a way out?”
“Yes. As easy as just taking a breath. But you won’t do it. The same thing that made you valedictorian will also make you pull the trigger. You can’t pull out once you head into something. You’d be disappointed now if you didn’t blow your head off. It would be a failure, not accomplishing a kind of goal.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yes it is.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I’ve never seen you not finish a plan.”
All the chess pieces lined up and waiting, carved wood. The idea of making each move and thinking out all the possibilities before making the next, this just seems overwhelming, because it’s what he has always done. Carefully thought about each step of his life and thought through all the consequences, and it turns out all that was wrong, the entire method wrong. “How was I supposed to think?” he asks. “If it wasn’t like chess, going through and eliminating every possibility to finally make the one move that seemed to be the only safe one, what was the method supposed to be?”
“How we feel, and a bit of faith,” John says. “I think that’s how. But sometimes that doesn’t work either.”
“You’re good on analysis but short on answers.”
“I can’t live someone else’s life.”
Jim feels so exhausted. He lies down on the floor, padded by carpet. “I think that was the euphoria stage,” he says. “While we were talking. That was my high. I didn’t even notice it. But I just fell off the cliff. I’m miles lower now.”
“Let me get you a pillow.”
“Okay,” Jim says, but he’s still falling in waves of pain and pressure, and this is what lies underneath all the talk, this is the bedrock he’s made of now, and he knows there’s no hope of anything new. He knows where he’s going, and the only mercy now is that he’s so exhausted he may sleep.