Spring 1997

SOUTH DAKOTA

First I feel chilled. Then come the cold sweats and this tingling sensation up and down my arms like ants are crawling just beneath the surface of my skin. Except for that part the symptoms resemble the flu. I run a slight fever, too, and there is definitely nausea. But I keep right on talking, a real trouper. I don’t miss a beat.

If I seem fatigued, or disoriented at moments, it’s only because I flew in a couple of nights before. This explains the bloodshot eyes and the dark circles. As for that gaunt look, everybody knows skinny is fashionable in California. These are the things I want the students to believe but the truth of the matter is much different. I am a visiting writer-in-residence at the University of South Dakota, on leave from my permanent job at Cal State San Bernardino, and this is the first session of the first week of class. The month is March, and outside it is cold. Outside a thin layer of frost and snow covers the school grounds but inside this building, in this classroom, it is stifling hot.

I take off my sweater. Underneath I’m wearing a V-neck T-shirt, an old one, thinning, not long for the rag pile. But right now it’s hard to care about how I’m dressed. The sweating hasn’t stopped and the nausea isn’t going away, either. It comes in waves and the intervals between visits seem to be getting shorter. At some point I get around to the student story that we’re supposed to be discussing.

I know I read it carefully on the plane. The chair of the English department mailed it to me before I left San Bernardino, at my request, this story as well as several others, so that I would be prepared for the first week. No downtime. That’s the way I like it. They are paying me well and I believe that the students deserve their money’s worth. Then, an hour before class, I read it again. Ask me what it’s about now, though, and the best I could manage is a sketchy description of its main character, a young thief. I don’t mean this as a comment on the quality of the story, that I can’t remember it.

The fact of the matter is, I read a lot of stories. It’s what I do for a living, that and try to write them myself, and after a while I just forget, even the best ones. And my own, too, I especially forget my own. In this case, though, it is not a good story, because the writer doesn’t know much about thieves and is bent on sermonizing. I remember feeling that as plainly as the tingling sensation under my skin, those ants, and trying not to scratch at them.

The writer, a Ph.D. candidate in American literature, isn’t thinking like a thief. He’s looking at the character from too far away, a good distance for judging maybe but not intimacy, not understanding. I like to let the students have their say first so that my point of view doesn’t unduly influence their own, and after we’ve gone around the room, when everyone has had a chance to comment on the story, I raise my own concerns. I am careful with my words. I am conscious of how my criticism might affect the writer, and so I choose the gentler road, up and around the subject, even if it takes a little longer to get the point across. I want to be helpful. I want to be liked. There are ways, I believe, to express yourself without unnecessarily offending the writer.

When I’m done, a student raises her hand. She is a bright woman who later proves to be one of the more talented writers in class, and she’s upset.

“Let me get this straight,” she says. “According to you, we’re supposed to like this lowlife? All he does is go around ripping people off. I don’t see why we have to sympathize with him.”

Sympathy isn’t the right word, and I don’t recall using it. It’s understood that stealing is wrong. Thieves know it, too. That it hurts people, even themselves. What I want to know is that they might otherwise live respectable lives, or at least that this thief does. Make him a family man, a loving husband at one time. Give him a couple of kids and show him coaching Little League on the weekends. Or wrestling. That’s big out here in the Midwest. This man leads two lives and theft is a passion, a rush, a need that both sustains and destroys him. Call it compulsion. Call it a sickness. By any name there is no logic to his behavior, no sense or sensibility, and above all, though on the surface it may appear otherwise, his story is not a simple one of moral weakness.

These are the things I want to say. But I don’t. The hour is nearly up and the nausea has grown stronger. Dizziness sets in. I let the class go early and find an old bar on the edge of town, the kind I like best, where it’s always dark inside and the air smells sour from the night before. Nobody knows you here and doesn’t care to and these are the people I am most comfortable with. There are no judgments. We share a common bond. I have earned my place beside them.

The nausea subsides with my third shot of Kessler’s and soon the sweating and shaking stop. Those ants, though, they keep crawling because they want something else, something stronger that you can’t find very easily in a small town like Vermillion, South Dakota. It’s the meth, the speed. I ran out shortly after I arrived, and until now I don’t think I realized just how badly I needed it. That I am strung out.

The next day, when I come to in my apartment, it starts all over again. The tremors. The fever. I know what will help, at least temporarily, but instead of reaching for the bottle I wrap myself in a blanket and weather it out. I am sick of being sick. I am tired of living a lie. Of waking up each morning and looking into the bathroom mirror at the bloodshot eyes and dark circles and thinking only of the next drink. The next line. The next fix. Anything to make me better.

Change or die, I tell myself.

The fever breaks early the following morning. They say the first forty-eight hours are the hardest, and I want to believe it’s true, but I know they are only talking about the physical part of withdrawal. What’s left, when the shaking and nausea subside, is far more insidious. It doesn’t go away, either.

Not ever.

And that’s the point I’m at. Here and now. Present time, looking back on that morning in South Dakota when the fever breaks, and I bathe. I dress. Then I take the rental car out onto the highway and drive, just drive. The sun is rising and I’m alone on this road.

Beyond the town there is nothing but open field. The land is flat and dusted white with snow. A wind blows like the wind at sea, rippling where the yellowed grasses still cling to the earth, shining with frost. There is no obstruction but the sky, and the sky is big, the sky is limitless. Out here there is no place to hide, and I park the car on the shoulder of the road. I get out and walk into the fields. The wind pulls at me, and I feel it in my ears, a ringing, a burning cold. Snow off the yellowed grasses blows down the neck of my jacket and dampens my chest and I look out across the fields, out across the sky, and in that vastness, as I close my eyes, I see my sons. Andy. Logan. Nate. I see their mother standing behind them. I see my own mother and father and the woman who will one day become my second wife. I see my brother-in-law. I see my niece. I see baby Katherine, I hear her cry, the first gasp of life.

I see my brother and sister, too. I see them clearly, and they are smiling at me. The wind grows stronger. I feel it cut into my skin. I feel it lifting me. I feel it carrying the three of us past the boundaries of our lives, and in our parting, when I open my eyes and the land rolls up toward me, endless and distant, breaking like a surf across the sky, I see my own story come to rest at a moment of beginning.