by David Vann
No light at the edges of the curtains. Darkness. And so it was no longer day. He had slept, and for how long? She could have dug her way out by now.
He got up quick, pulled on shoes and shorts and stumbled down the stairs through the kitchen to the back lawn. Moonlight, the shed lit up in relief, a dark hulk outlined in white, the bone trunks of the orchard arrayed behind. The sky enormous above. He listened but heard only the ringing of his own blood and breath and realized he still had the earplugs in. So he yanked them out and ran closer to the shed, heard wood hitting wood.
He was panicked, couldn’t focus on where the sound was coming from, but he saw a plank sticking out, a long slat protruding several feet at the bottom, still attached at the top.
The plank next to it sticking out a few inches, and she was hammering from the inside. The planks wide enough she could slip out if she freed two of them. Very close to making her escape.
No, he said. But she was pounding more quickly now, probably using one of the wooden walnut screens.
He ran around to the toolshed, stumbling through pits he’d made in his shoveling, the earth soft and caving, and when he opened the shed, he couldn’t see a thing in there. He needed a hammer, but the tools were a jumble. He felt wooden handles, but everything too big. Damn it, he said.
He ran back around the shed, the dirt itself wanting to slow him down, the entire planet conspiring against him, and he tried to push at the plank she was freeing, tried to push it back in with his hands, but he was too soft. The jolt of her hammering from inside. He kicked at the bottom of the wood, slammed his shoulder, pounded with his fists, but it was hopeless.
He tried the other plank, the one freed except at the very top, and pushed that back in, grabbed the edges of it with his hands, but the nails wouldn’t line up with their holes and he couldn’t see. And then she mashed his left hand.
Galen screamed. His fingers mangled. His mother yelling a kind of war cry. He held his wounded hand and tried to look at it in the moonlight. The fingers still there, but she’d crushed them with something hard, the corner of a walnut drying rack, and it hurt so much he couldn’t breathe. The pain rising like fire.
He tried not to run. He walked fast and carefully into the house, into the bathroom off the kitchen, flicked on the light and could see all the way to white bone on his middle finger. No, he said. He was sobbing, his face wet with tears, and he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t call anyone.
He tried to move his fingers, and that made him yell again in pain, but they did move. Nothing severed, but he could see bone and ligament and there was blood and the skin all bunched up to the side and he felt like he was going to faint. He leaned against a wall and looked away from his hand. Don’t look, he told himself. Hang on.
She was going to escape. If he didn’t get out there and nail those planks down, she was going to escape. He didn’t have time to do anything for his hand.
A flashlight, he said. I need a flashlight, and then I need to find a hammer.
He had dumped all the drawers from the kitchen and pantry and entryway, so any flashlight would be out in the pile on the lawn. Shit, he said.
He went out there and it just seemed hopeless. A huge pile of crinkled photos and all the crap underneath. He felt around with his good hand, held his left hand in the air, a horror of pain, blood dripping down his arm. So many shapes in the pile. Things plastic and metal and rubber and paper, and the moonlight no help at all. Kneeling here on the lawn, his mother hammering, about to escape, his hand destroyed, he was doomed. He was going to prison. There was no way out of this. Then he remembered she kept flashlights in the trunk of the car.
He ran to the kitchen, where the keys were hanging, got to the car, opened the trunk, and felt around in her box of emergency supplies. The jug of water, food bars, emergency blanket, and two flashlights. He grabbed one, flicked it on, and ran around the house past the fig tree. The beam jagged, the world revealed in patches.
Dirt in relief, the shed a whirlpool and he was circling it, pulled toward the old wood, sucked toward the center, toward his mother, the earth canting to the side.
He washed up at the toolshed, marooned at its door, darted the beam around and found hammers hanging on a wall, everything arranged. Grabbed one and dropped the flashlight, fought back against the current, the hammer held high like an instrument of war. Aaah, he yelled, slogged along the wall until he could attack the plank she was trying to free.
Galen kicked at the bottom edge with his foot, hunched against the flood and rammed with his shoulder, hammered at the spot where nails met crossbeam. The holes not lined up. Driving the nails in fresh, and that would be stronger anyway. Black wood, old, but it was thick and strong enough still, a hand-sawed plank. Rutted and grooved on the surface.
His mother pounding from the other side and screaming. He could feel the impact. But he kept hammering, drove the two big nails all the way in, then bent down and battered the lower nails that met another crossbeam inches off the ground. He could smell the dirt and realized there was no flood at all. Marooned in a desert. The dirt in motion, though, difficult to keep his footing. All this noise in the middle of the night, but they were alone. No one else in this world.
He drove that plank flat, leaned back and roared into the void, his battle cry, his triumph, and ran into the orchard, wielding his hammer and his mangled hand, terrible appendages both, his claws that could tear at the ceiling of the world and bring it down, the earth cresting beneath him, the furrows moon-painted, and he ran again, leaped from furrow to furrow. The pain a pulse in the pattern, and the rage rose in him and he wanted to kill.
He ran the furrows until he landed full tilt against the plank that was loose, slammed it full body and fell back and rose again to rage against it with his hammer. His mother pushed from the other side, but she was nothing. The nails sinking in, and she could not stop him.
The nails singing higher and higher as they shortened until the blows were flat, the plank was flat, and she had no escape.
You are where you are, he yelled. You are where you fucking are. And then he ran to the pile of old cast-off wood stacked against the hedge. Abandoned wood from ten years ago, from fifty years ago, home of rattlesnake and lizard.
Aaah, he roared at the wood, and he slammed the hammer down, beat at the loose boards to send everything scattering, snake and lizard and spider and anything else. Get the fuck out, he yelled.
The pile a thousand shapes in moonlight, a burrowing of shadow. He pulled a long piece, an old board with nails sticking out, dragged it back to the shed by tucking it under his arm. His left hand maimed and useless, he tried to hold the board against the wall using a knee. He wanted it parallel to the ground, about four feet up, to run across all the vertical planks where they met the crossbeam. He’d make a giant seat belt. To free any plank, his mother would have to free a dozen all together at once. She’d never be able to do it.
He couldn’t hold the entire board up, so he tried to get one end at the right level, pinned against the wall with his thigh, and he hammered but the nails poking out the other side were gnarled and ancient and all going different directions. They only scraped and bent and made the board bounce.
Damn it, he said, and let it drop into the dirt. He grabbed the flashlight at the toolshed and walked back to the woodpile. The fury had gone out of him. Just gone suddenly, and he felt so sorry for himself, for his mangled hand. He would need to clean it, and wrap it, and he couldn’t imagine even touching that area.
The flashlight flattening the woodpile, showing dusty gray, the nails orange. Not a single clean piece of wood, nothing easy.
Galen flicked off the flashlight, walked toward the trees and lay down in a furrow. Held his left hand on his chest, careful. He didn’t know why he felt so lost suddenly. As if there were nothing to live for.
The stars fading, the sky a deep dark blue, the earliest sign of day. The dirt at his back still warm from the last day, the dry dead weeds al
l around him motionless, and what was coming was a scorcher, a day without breeze, a day in an oven. The air already warm and waiting.
He didn’t want to see the sun. He wanted it not to rise today, and he thought he’d be willing to spend the rest of his life in this time of day right here, with the sky a beautiful dark blue and the air warm and the moon going down. A near darkness, everything present but not fully formed, the entire world in a state of becoming but not yet arrived. That would be the best time, the best kind of moment to hold forever. He would like that.
But instead, the very worst was coming, he knew. The sky would wash out and bake and the earth would set on fire with no air to breathe and he’d hammer at misshapen pieces of wood as his mother screamed in her cage. That was what he had waiting for him.
So as the sky began to lighten, as the dark blue became a lighter blue and shifted toward white, he rose and took off his shoes and shorts and stood naked, ready for the immolation, ready to be engulfed in fire, and he stepped over the rough ground to the toolshed. He searched along small shelves, able to see now, until he found nails, sturdy steel nails four inches long. He grabbed the nails with his good hand and walked over to the wall.
The old board lay on the ground with its twisted nails reaching upward, and he understood now that the other side was flat. He’d been on a fool’s errand before. He set his hammer and nails close along the wall, then lifted an end of the board, set its flat face against the shed, and reached down for a nail.
He’d have to hold the nail in place with his left hand. There was no other way. He tried to use only his thumb and pinkie, and he tapped the nail very carefully with the hammer. If he missed, the pain would be unbelievable.
He could hear his mother crying. He needed the earplugs again. But he tapped at the nail, then let go and swung carefully, measured blows, drove in the first nail.
You’re not getting out, he said. I’m nailing a band around the entire shed, all the planks linked.
I’m your mother.
You’re the one making me do this. And that’s fine. You’re the last attachment, and so it makes sense that everything should feel like hell.
I’m your mother.
Galen lifted the other end of the board and made sure it was lined up with the crossbeam behind the planks. He had to nail into that beam.
People are real, Galen.
He held another nail with his thumb and pinkie, tapped lightly. That sound of metal on metal, the sound of what people were, makers of metal. He could be making coins, minting right here at the shed. Stamping his own image, and why not? The world was only what each of us made of it. His coin would be known as The Galen. A perfect task for becoming. Coins were just like that dark blue sky, the day about to be.
Lightening quickly now, though, the heavens washing out, everything taken away too soon, all comfort, a test. He would be tested today, he knew.
He walked back to the woodpile for the next piece. No need to choose, because he’d have to use them all. A two-by-two this time, very long and light and perfect for the task. He dragged it into place, held one end up against the planks, set his nail and tapped. No stamp for the design of his face, but each coin individually tapped, each one a sculpture, civilization slowed down. A final recognition that the hordes did not exist. There was no one to make coins for. Beyond this shed and this dirt and the hedge leading down the lane, beyond the orchard and the high wall, there was no one. Galen let his breath slow, a long exhale. There was no one. He could relax, let the attachment go. The pain in his hand, also, an illusion. If he focused on his exhale, the pain paled. It receded and curled away like the snake it was.
I need water, she said, her voice a rough breath. He could hear now how dry it was. But he needed to focus on this new meditation, the hammering.
Each nail individual, metal worked by machine but not perfect, not without variation in how the tip had been sheared or the head formed. Lines cut on the shaft, also, and in this light, there was no shadow. Light as a presence, without source or direction or heat, a cold illumination that was general, and it was only in this light that you could see the true shape of a thing, the fullness of a nail. The robust presence of a nail. It might as well have been sixty feet high. Peering at it up close, it became enormous. A shape-shifter.
Galen held the nail with thumb and pinkie. His blood no longer dripping, clotted now, beginning to scab, and it looked a dark iron red in this light. The skin that had been bunched and torn seemed no longer a part of him. It would dry and fade and fall away. What was exposed now would be covered, and soon it would seem almost that this had never happened.
Chapter 24
It was tempting to think of those first shafts of light as fingers as they reached into the leaves of walnuts. But this was a second rising. That was important to remember. The first, the light, the illumination, was a gift. The second, the actual presence, was something else. The second rising was samsara. When we grew old enough for sex, that was our second birth, and that birth was a deformation, a reshaping from the clay of the first birth, and who we became then was something we had to run from for the rest of our lives.
Galen pressed back against the shed wall, stood with his arms out and his eyes closed and waited for the moment he would be blasted by the sun. Nailed to the cross. We were all sacrificed, every day, and no one could do it for us. That was the truth.
Water, his mother said.
Shh, he said. I’m focusing.
I’m going to die. If you don’t let me out, if I don’t have water, I’ll die.
Shh, he said.
Your mother is going to die. Your own mother.
Galen tried to focus only on the sun. He could feel its presence higher on the shed wall, could feel the radiation of that sudden heat. In moments, it would tick downward and set him on fire.
You were named after a doctor, Galen. An ancient Greek physician. You were supposed to help people. You were supposed to be different.
He thought of the earplugs. They were over on the lawn, or he could look for new ones. But he didn’t think he’d make it back in time for that first sun. It was rising quickly, but we should call it lowering, the rays of light levered down onto us, a giant seesaw balanced at the edge of the globe. He could feel the wood burning above him. So he held on, tried to just ignore her.
Galen.
His shoulders getting sore from holding his arms out. He didn’t feel he could hold them up much longer. Come on, he said. Come on. He wanted to feel his sacrifice. He wanted to feel the shape of the cross as the sun hit.
I won’t report you.
Shh, he said. He felt it, finally, in his hair, across his forehead, the heat, the burn, but not as hot as he had imagined. The power he had imagined was not there. He would not be set on fire, only warmed a bit, disappointing as always. The sun a cataclysm, billions of atomic bombs going off every moment, but it was too far away, just like everything else. Everything he wanted to reach was always just outside of his grasp. The world a small emptiness, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Galen let his arms fall, his shoulders burning hotter than the sun, stupidly. The sun moving down over his face and neck and onto his bare chest.
I won’t report you to the police. I won’t say anything. And you don’t have to move out. We’ll just go back to the way things were.
Yeah right, Galen said. The minute you’re out, the cops will pull up, and they’ll chase me down and put me in chains or whatever it is you said.
I’ll sign something. We can write something.
My fingerprints are on the lock, just like you said. And you’ll show them you haven’t had any water. You’ll say I made you sign. You’ve made it all impossible.
The sun moving down his chest, and the air already warmer. Not the sudden fire he wanted but instead a gradual cooking in an oven. He was going to be baked, and there was nothing glorious or interesting about that.
We can figure out a way, his mother said. We ju
st have to work together.
The work I have to do is nailing these boards, he said. So you can’t pull your little stunt again. And I have to do it before the day gets too hot.
Galen, she said, but he walked away into the orchard, lay down in the dirt and rolled in it, used his good hand to cover himself completely with dirt, rubbed it into his skin, into his hair, gave himself a coating against the sun. He would not wear clothing again. That was his decision. He would wear only dirt, because dirt was his meditation, and he needed to not ever forget about dirt.
Good smell of dirt, and of weeds. He crawled along the ground, careful not to put any weight on his damaged fingers, using his palm instead, and smelled, and there was one smell stronger than all others, pungent, not a sweet smell, and he found it, finally, along the edge of an irrigated row near a walnut trunk, a place of more water and shade. A pale green that was bluish, almost, and a velvety sheen to the leaves. A plant he had never noticed before, and he didn’t know its name. It seemed so unlikely here, made possible only by the irrigation. A plant almost flat, its leaves reaching out along the ground like the legs of a starfish. A roamer, come from another world. The orchard suddenly new, a place he had never seen before.
This was the key, finding the new world within the old. The bitter stinky plant a perfect reminder. Somehow he had never noticed this powerful smell, never seen this unlikely, lush and velvety plant in the midst of all the dry weeds. And this was exactly what he needed to find in the dry husks of all the illusions of self. Something more pungent than self, something more unlikely and from farther away.
Galen lay beside the plant because he knew the irrigation system would turn on soon, and he wanted to be here when the water released. He wanted to feel this plant reaching for the water. Brother plant, he said. Almost time to drink. And he realized he was so incredibly thirsty himself. And starving. But that could be ignored. That was only the body.
