“Tell me you don’t miss sitting in front of me in the bath getting your hair washed,” she said. “Tell me that isn’t a better consolation for your sickness than this.”
“I have work to do,” he said.
“Tell me it’s not a better consolation,” she said. “Tell me you don’t miss my fingers in your hair. Let me show you.”
“No.”
“Let me remind you.”
“No.”
“Tell me,” she said, standing and moving with a fluid grace from her side of the booth to his, and lowering her voice so that it entered only his ear, “tell me you don’t miss your tongue in my pussy. Tell me you can make any sense of this world without that, without your lips on my pussy, making me come.”
Her words shocked him. They started an erection he didn’t want. He moved closer to the window to put distance between them.
“Tell me one of us should suffer without the other’s help. Tell me you’d let me wander off on my own, forget to eat, forget to bathe, forget the promises we made. I know you think you’re doing this for me. I know you think it’s saving me by freeing me up to live my life. But that’s not living. My life is you.”
So much of who he was was involuntary. The watering mouth, the stirring erection, the unbidden burning in his eyes. The only control over the coursing world that he retained in his littleness was his selfless refusal to turn.
“Tell me you don’t miss me,” she said. “Tell me honestly that this is working out for you, that you’ve found the best way to live with it, that of all possible solutions, this is the only one, and it doesn’t include me—you tell me that, Tim, and I’ll go away.”
He sat very still, like a sullen boy whose stunted brain lacked the resources to admit error and forsake the lost days for a better way.
With her arms around him, she pulled herself toward him, raising herself up a little on the hard bench so that her chin rested on his shoulder, and she fought her tears to speak as firmly as she had since entering, though he refused to turn to her even an inch.
“I’ve come a long way to find you,” she said, “and it took so much longer than I thought it would, too long, and the wait killed me, but I was patient, because I promised your daughter that I would find you and bring you home, and I promised myself that, too, no matter how you objected or what you said. And if I leave here without you, my heart will break. But if you tell me you don’t want me, if you tell me you still have to go it alone, then I will leave you alone.”
He sat silent and unmoving. Her chin was against his shoulder. He felt her hot tears.
She felt his reply in the vibrations of his body.
“I don’t want you,” he said.
She sat next to him for a while, unable to rise right away. Eventually she released him but remained in the booth beside him. Ella and the truckers glanced over at them. Angled away from each other as they were, he and Jane might have seemed enmeshed in some petty domestic squabble. Jane slipped a napkin out from under the silverware and wiped her face. Then she leaned back into Tim, put her arms around him and hugged him, kissed him on the cheek, on the temple, and stood up and left the restaurant.
Her embrace stayed with him. He remained sitting in the same position, unable to move. There was nothing he could do now to reclaim unawareness. He had lost to the other. The rest of the day was shot. He was just dithering now, waiting for the walk to take him, and, following hard after the walk ended, the struggle to find shelter. He was lost in this grim forecast when someone knocked at the window. At first he didn’t recognize her. She wore a simple red sundress and a pair of leather flats. The sundress was patternless and fell over her new figure. Her hair was long and layered and the natural chestnut brown it had been when she was a little girl. She was almost a different person, but he knew her. She stood close enough to touch. She waved at him. He looked at her, at his daughter waving through the glass, and without thinking of how ugly it might look to her, he raised his hand and waved back.
THEN THE LETTING GO
His condition never went into remission again, the walking never ceased. The nature of how he walked and his relationship to it as that thing which hijacked his body and led him into the wilderness (for everywhere was a wilderness to him who had known only the interiors of homes and offices and school buildings and restaurants and courthouses and hotels) changed over time, over a long adjustment and many misfortunes. The path itself was one of peaks and valleys, hot and cold in equal measure, rock, sedge and rush, the coil of barbed wire around a fence post, the wind boom of passing semis, the scantness and the drift.
He removed his medication from the labeled plastic baggies that had proven good for storage and transport. He placed the pills in a small pile on the floor of the tent. He poured water into the tin cup from the thermos and drank them down. Then he returned the baggies to the pack and rose to a squat. He released the air from the pallet and rolled it up and rolled up the bedroll and latched them tightly to the pack. Then he took down the tent. Finally it bulged fatly in its blue vinyl bag. He strapped it on top of the pack, so that as he walked, it hovered just behind his head. He loaded up the few essentials left by the campfire and doused what remained of the fire with creekwater. Then he set off under a full moon at the start of frost. He would look for some way to dispel his considerable energies in the downtime before a new walk began.
He came up from the arroyo and walked a mile down to an ATM. He withdrew enough cash to make it awhile. Then he walked across the street and ordered eggs and coffee. He stood up and took the newspaper from a nearby table, but none of it kept his interest. A strong breeze pressed against the plate glass and seeped diminished through the cheap glazing. Outside a woman was nearly halted by the wind and he heard a man’s laughter as he reached back for her arm. His food came. He ate a late breakfast as the cloudburst moved in. Then he was on the other side of the glass in his transparent poncho heading toward the coastal springs, into the wind.
In the past he could sleep anywhere, in the snares of frostbite and the hothouses of heatstroke, exposed to ticks, spiders, snakes, the insult of birds, the menace of authorities and of the evil intentions of men.
The decision one night to sleep on the side of the road had forced him into the back of a squad car and his God talk and end-of-days ranting combined with some old-fashioned disrespect ended him up in the psych ward under physical restraint. He was given a more effective cocktail of antipsychotics and forced to take it, daily, until his release, upon which time the importance of finding seclusion and providing protection for himself became intuitive again. That’s when he bought the tent, the bedroll and the new pack.
He established a rule never to linger too long at a campsite. He was not free to enjoy the ebb and flow of an hour, the leaves quivering in the wind, or the distant patch of drifting sky. Meditation and mindless wonder led to disaster.
He had once walked away from a campsite out of a valley and across a pine ridge, down an embankment to the foothills, where he awoke behind an Airstream in a designated vehicle area. Night rain on his skyward face woke him. He played back the image of the valley as it broadened and the tent receded. He had been forced to walk away from the few and only things he still possessed and they had taken on a value greater than any other man would have given them. The separation felt like heartbreak. He did not have the first hint how to return.
He searched for two days, and on the third day he started to withdraw from the medication, which was with his other things at the campsite. He became lightheaded and short of breath. He followed the arterial road into town and wandered around a Men’s Wearhouse where he sorted unhappily through the tie racks. He paid for a double-breasted suit and arranged for its tailoring in anticipation of an important meeting. He burrowed further into mental daze after returning to the park. He started talking to himself again. He scolded the other and prayed to God that the foot soldiers of His army would vanquish the chariots and trespassers of the enemy on the front
lines of battle threatening him with chaos and death. His steadiness defected on the rain-slicked switchbacks, and he was laid out on a picnic bench, soaked through and bleeding, when the ranger came upon him.
“We’ve been looking for you,” said the ranger.
“You have?”
“I’m with the angel mercenaries of God’s army and the bugle blowers leading the charge,” he said. “Here, let me help you.”
The ranger reached down and helped him to the station and presented him with every item of his illegal campsite, the tent and bedroll and backpack. He took his medication and slept on a cot in the back of the station and when he woke up the ranger spoke much more harshly to him, fined him for failing to obtain a backcountry permit and for camping outside the designated area, and never said another word to him about the army of God.
Thereafter he pitched the tent immediately after coming to the end of a walk, slept, and, upon waking, packed everything up again. To own something was to keep it on his back or risk losing it forever.
A sonic flock of stealth fighters zipped by overhead, the briefest of black apparitions. He walked past fields of mesquite and tract housing and came to a Verizon store where he bought the cheapest phone and a package of prepaid minutes.
He called her at least once a month, sometimes twice, to let her know where he was and that everything was okay, he was safe, and she called him, but his cell phone wasn’t always charged.
“We got twenty miles away from the Waffle House before I realized what a terrible mistake we’d made,” she said to him. “I told Fritz to stop the car and turn around, but you were already gone. Did we really think you knew better than we did what was right for you, that you even knew how to take care of yourself? We should have dragged you out of there. Anybody could see you needed help. I don’t know what we thought we were doing letting you stay there. I think we thought we were dealing with the old Tim. So I let twenty miles go by before I realized the old Tim was gone and that we had just abandoned a child. I stuck around after Fritz flew home and I drove around in the rental looking for you.”
He said nothing.
“I have looked for you from the window of a moving car for so long now, I still do it out of habit. Even now, even knowing you’re getting by, knowing you’re taking your medication, I still look for you when I get in the car. I think I always will. I do it hoping to find you and convince you to come home. I’m used to it now, not having you with me, but I still look out the window hoping to find you so I can follow you and we can start over. Is there some way of starting over, do you think, some way we haven’t thought of?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m just glad you’re calling,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay. You would like it here. It’s smaller than what we had, but for me it’s perfect. I could probably go smaller. Two hundred square feet maybe. I’m probably the only person in the city who wants a smaller apartment. Even Becka’s is bigger. People ask me where I live and I feel the need to lie. If they knew the truth I don’t think they’d trust my judgment as a broker. Sometimes I find myself describing the old house for them. I say I live in a house in the suburbs with my husband and they nod and don’t think anything of it. They look at me like of course you do, where else would you live?”
The free health clinic in a college town was in a squalid corner of hell. He was there for a simple refill. His neighbors in the basement waiting room looked drained and ghoulish in the fluorescent light. His name was called. He waited inside the exam room until the official walked in. The official had credentials that made him the nearest approximation to a physician in the building. He handed the official his medical file. The official asked him if he still believed that God was waging an insurgency on the frontlines of his mind to capture that territory for the soul. He was quoting from the file.
“I’m not so sure about God anymore,” he replied.
“It’s an interesting theory, though.”
“It wasn’t always a theory.”
The steady gaze that followed was unnerving. Silence filled the cubby in that warren of underfunded cubbies.
“God needs all the advocates He can get,” said the official.
The statement sounded like a challenge. There seemed a right reply and a wrong one. The official stared at him without blinking. He didn’t know if he was being tested for signs of continued madness or recruited to a cause.
“Of course He does,” he said finally.
“You can’t medicate the calling out of your life.”
“I never would,” he said.
He received his refills and took them to a pharmacy.
He passed up diners and hotels and the idle hour of rest in bars and bowling alleys because indulgence in the creature comforts during his downtime made him sluggish and contrarian when it came time to walk. He continued to think, “I’m winning,” or “Today, he won,” depending on how well his mind, his will, his soul (he did not know the best name for it) fought against the lesser instincts of his body. “He” or “It” or whatever you wanted to call it—but certainly not “I,” he thought—still bellyached for food, needed water, complained of soreness in the joints and muscles. He tended to its needs while trying not to spoil it. He made every effort to remember a time when he was not just the sum of his urges.
“I guess I don’t understand why it hasn’t gone into remission. It went into remission before. You’d expect it would go into remission again. And then you could come home and we could pick up where we left off.”
“That would kill me.”
“Why?”
“Because if it went into remission, it would come back, and I don’t want to have to do it all over again.”
“Do what?”
“Resign myself to it.”
“You wouldn’t have to. We’d make it work.”
“Go on with your life,” he said.
“And do what?”
“Sell houses,” he said. “Be happy. Remarry.”
There was a pause on her end. “I can’t believe you’d say that.”
“I’m out here now,” he said. “I’m doing what I have to do. You should do the same.”
He stood outside a big multiplex reading the listings and showtimes. He was not current with the popular reviews but he could distinguish from the titles the political thriller from the romantic comedy from the animated feature. He badly wanted to be inside. There was a comfy seat in there for him and plenty of warmth. The distraction of mindless entertainment promised to shuffle off a pair of hours that might have otherwise been spent dwelling dully on a bench.
Against his better judgment he bought a ticket. He lost interest within fifteen minutes and dozed. He woke up to the credits and walked across the hall to a different screen and sat down before a story of intrigue whose plot was more sophisticated for his having missed the first half. When that show was over, he exited the building and bought a second ticket. He saw another show and half of a fourth before he was forced out of the warm plush oblivion into a torrid pace more odious for the dumb comfort that had preceded it.
He resolved never to indulge himself again. Then he woke and decamped and felt the blank expression of eternity boring through him again, downtime’s merciless black-hole eyes, and in a small misfortune of time, he drank himself into a state watching a game on a bar TV.
After letting the dead battery languish a long time, he bought more minutes from an authorized retailer located beside a mattress store. He was unable to reach her on her cell so he tried her at the office, and there they informed him that she had left months earlier for another firm.
He dialed the number the old firm gave him and a casual voice answered. He was informed that Jane was on vacation and wouldn’t be returning for another week. Did he care to speak to a different broker?
“How nice,” he said. “Where on vacation?”
“I want to say Paris, but don’t quote me,” said the voice. “The south of France, maybe?”
&n
bsp; He stood in the snow-patched prairie with the ice-blue brook running toward the rafting centers and trailer parks, far from the south of France, far from Paris, and a wave of death washed over him. Not biological death, which brought relief, but the death that harrows the living by giving them a glimpse of the life they’ve been denied. Its sorrow was a thousandfold any typical dying.
He pocketed the phone and walked slowly toward the russet uplands rising in the distance. Ravines in the granite of a north-facing slope sprouted green fronds in feathered clusters. He leaned back against the rock face and felt like crying. She was only resuming life. In the many months that passed between phone calls, she had done just as he had told her. He had no one to blame for it but himself.
He walked about the prairie until he got a decent signal. Becka was on a tour bus when his call came in. “Hello?” she said.
“Is your mother on vacation?”
“Dad?”
“Where’s your mom?”
“Where are you?”
“Who cares where I am?”
“I do. Can’t you imagine I might be curious?”
“I’m in a field,” he said. “What more is there to say?”
She was silent. “Mom’s in France.”
“On vacation?”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“She’s on vacation,” she said.
“What’s the name of the hotel she’s staying at?”
She paused again. “Why do you want to know that?”
“I want to call her.”
“What for?”
“Did she go there alone,” he asked, “or with someone?”
Again she paused.
“Becka?”
“With someone,” she said.
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