by Tod Goldberg
But we want it. Our bodies demand it. Our psyches will bend and twist until it is delivered. It is our contract as primates. We must have it.
So I’m fine with this. Molly can love whomever she wants.
I’m beginning to feel a little faint.
“Paul?”
I’m fine, Molly, I really am.
“Paul?”
I just need to sit down and sort this out.
“Paul?” Ginny says. “My God, you’re bleeding.”
My chest just itches, that’s all.
“God,” Ginny says. “You’re ripping your chest open again. Lie down. God.”
I’m fine. I really am.
GINNY FINDS THE iodine in the kitchen. We always kept it in the kitchen in case one of us cuts ourself.
“Why do you do this?” Ginny says. She’s swabbing my chest with a cotton ball.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Ginny stops swabbing and puts her hand against my cheek. “Paul,” she says, “there is never a reason to harm yourself. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I don’t want you to feel like you need to keep things hidden from me,” Ginny says. “I can handle whatever scars you might have. I’m a big girl.”
I know that right now is a time when I am supposed to tell Ginny that I love her.
“It started a long time ago,” I say.
Ginny nods her head and starts swabbing my chest again in silence.
I want to tell Ginny that we are capable of great cruelty to ourselves and others. In some cultures, gang rape is considered a legitimate way to punish lazy people. Orangutans routinely rape one another.
So a little scratching is no big deal. In the scope of human development, I’m just an aberration.
“When I’m upset,” Ginny says, “I like to go to the mall. That way, I know that I’m still alive. You know what I mean? If I walk through a mall when I’m pissed off about something, I see hundreds of other people. And I just start adding up what’s wrong with me and then multiply it by the amount of other people who are probably doing the exact same thing as me. It gives me perspective. It makes me feel like my problems are a lot less significant than I thought they were.”
I don’t say anything.
“Next time you want to hurt yourself,” Ginny says in between swabs of iodine on my torn skin, “you tell me and we’ll go to the mall and sort it all out. Okay?”
“I love you,” I say, because that’s what I know I’m supposed to say. Ginny kisses me once lightly on the chest.
“It’s nice you say that,” Ginny says, like she knows me better than I could have ever imagined.
Ginny finds some noodles in the pantry and starts boiling water for pasta while I continue looking through the house. I don’t know what I’m hoping to find anymore because I think I’ve already found enough. Maybe Bruce Duper knew all along and just wanted me to find out for myself.
Molly has gone off with some man.
In the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom I find a prescription for Zumax, an SSRI used to control her spirals. Like the Diorxel I found in the bedroom, it’s from a doctor’s office in Spokane.
Here’s the truth: Molly isn’t stable. I suppose there is a cause and effect to every illness, and for Molly maybe it was her husband. I’ve never really been sure. She wasn’t, isn’t, crazy. It came in waves over her, avalanches she called them, and for days she would be swallowed alive.
It would begin with a migraine that Molly said felt like there were tens of thousands of tiny people pounding on her head with claw hammers. She tried meditation, biofeedback, acupuncture, but nothing could stop the pounding. Then, when the migraine would finally begin to ebb, she would sink into this depressive hole.
That’s when the madness would begin: the marathon painting sessions, the pacing, the absence of clarity.
Molly would mutter under her breath while stalking from one end of our property to the next.
I told her that throughout human history we have been plagued by man-made disease. I told her that by being this close to uncluttered nature, she would eventually lose this disorder and become closer to her primitive self.
“I’ll start living in the fucking trees?” Molly said, hysterical. “You mean to tell me that I’ll start living in the fucking trees, you bastard? Is that why you wanted to live out here, so that you could turn me into a fucking monkey?”
“The pasta’s getting cold,” Ginny shouts.
“SO WHAT DO you think?” Ginny says.
“It’s very good,” I say. The pasta is terrible.
We sit at the kitchen table, the one Molly bought at a garage sale in Granite City, finishing our dinner. The sun has fallen and already the house is getting chilly.
“I want to take some pictures tomorrow before we go back,” Ginny says. “I’ve got a great idea for a Dawson’s Creek-style teen drama that would take place on a lake like this. It just seems like it would be an emotional haven.”
“We’re not going back tomorrow,” I say.
“Paul,” Ginny says, “I don’t mean to point out the obvious, but your ex has just gone off with some guy. I know you don’t want to think about it like that, but really, take a reality pill.”
“She left her prescription medication here,” I say. “Molly didn’t like to go to the grocery store, much less on some passion cruise, without her Zumax.”
Ginny shakes her head and starts clearing the dishes in silence. After a while she says, “I think you need to understand something. I’m here, and I’m alive, and, you know, I’m the present for you. Not Molly. I came with you because I was worried. Now it’s just starting to feel weird.”
“I can take you back across the lake tomorrow,” I say. “If that’s what you want to do, fine. Bruce can get someone to bring you a rental car and you can drive home. I’ll pay for it and everything.”
“You’re not getting it,” Ginny says.
I get it.
“There were footprints all over the backyard,” I say. “Anything could have happened. She could have been abducted for all we know.”
“By what?” Ginny says. “By what, Paul? A Yeti? A Bigfoot? Did one of those live bait bitin’ mackinaw climb out of the water and swallow her whole?”
“This isn’t funny to me,” I say. My chest is burning.
“It’s not funny to me either,” Ginny says.
I stand up and walk over to the sink where she’s scrubbing the dishes and wrap my arms around her. “Two days,” I say. “Just give me two days to find what I can find and then I promise we’ll leave.”
Ginny turns around and faces me.
Small blond hairs grow above her lip and along her jaw line. Her eyes are almond shaped and brown. There are freckles on her nose that turn red when she’s angry.
She puts her hands on my face, opens her mouth to say something, and I feel her eleventh finger, that last glimpse of animal that lurks inside her, that breathing, panting beast that I heard after we had sex—banged—on the side of the road.
It is all I can do not to run screaming into the woods.
“This is wrong,” Ginny says. “You know it, I know it, and Molly probably knows it. If she comes back here and finds us nesting in her home you’re going to have restraining orders and mug shots.”
We spend the rest of the night sitting by the fire drinking tea and eating crackers. I watch Ginny in the half-light nibbling on a Ritz and I think that what I have found here is a substitute. Give a starving heroin addict the choice of a pizza or a vial of black tar, he’ll take the tar, anything to quell the addiction. We humans are precise animals: our receptors for pleasure and pain are inexorably linked, their borders microscopic—causing us to ask for any stimuli possible in the absence of nothing at all—and so, as I watch Ginny and as I smile and nod at her and as I listen to her hum some nameless song, I think about her here in this house. I think about the sacrifices she has made to please me. And I arrive, finally, at something soli
d in mind. Being together can be worse than being by yourself.
Chapter 3
I wake up in the pitch dark and hear a man speaking. It sounds like he’s preaching. His voice is low and excited and I think that we must have left the TV on.
“What are you doing?” Ginny says, sitting up abruptly.
There’s no TV in the house.
“Don’t you hear that?”
“All I hear is you shouting about angels,” Ginny says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I must have been talking in my sleep.”
Ginny pats my leg. “Go back to sleep,” she says, “it was just a nightmare.”
“Right. I’ll go back to sleep.”
Ginny lies back down and is snoring from her mouth again in a matter of moments.
Molly claimed I constantly spoke in my sleep. “You curl up beside me and say the most loving things,” she’d say. “You tell me how much you love me, except that you don’t just say that. Sometimes you tell me that I smell like Christmas. Other times you say that when you were a little boy you dreamed of a person who would save you, and that it finally happened.”
“Inconceivable,” I’d say.
“Believe what you want, little boy,” Molly would say, and then she’d kiss me on the eyes. “But I know what happens when you’re dreaming, and one night I’m going to tape record it to use against you.”
When I’m sure Ginny is fast asleep, I get out of bed, slip on a sweatshirt, and walk outside. The air is frigid. We’re only a few days away from the first good frost of the season. I look up and the sky seems low—like the stars are within reach.
I breathe in deeply, and the scratches on my chest open enough to hurt. It’s a weakness, this scratching. I know all the reasons people abuse themselves. I know that women are more prone to slash themselves with razors, eat their hair, chew on their skin. I also know that I am part of the small percentage of men who must hurt themselves to control their anxiety. There are drugs that could help me, that would lengthen this ledge I walk on, that would help me remember what’s been lost. Precious Ginny, she never says a word. Precious Ginny.
I walk down to the dock and stand on the first wooden slat. The Boston Whaler bobs in the water ahead of me, and I think that it would be foolish not to look inside the old girl.
I’m in here, Paul.
Of course she’s not inside the boat.
“You’re not inside the boat, Molly,” I say. My voice sounds level. Like I’m teaching class.
The lake is quiet tonight, and as I walk along the dock toward the boat I wonder what it was like a thousand years ago. A million. Thirty million.
When did this lake become a lake? Did crossopterygians make the transition from fish to amphibian where I am standing? When the Mesozoic era ended, did the reptiles slither along the base of my house, searching for anything to sustain them? Did they leave their eggs—those tiny embryos that look like our own children—in my garden?
What about a week ago?
Did Molly stand here and kiss her new lover?
Did she run her palm across her soft belly and think about our child, about the eggs that grew inside her, expanded, moved, kicked, and finally found themselves real?
Two days ago?
Did her head fill with pain and suffering, so that she wished she could just unscrew it and toss it into the lake, back with the fish and the reptiles and the moss and the amoebas and the hydrogen and the oxygen and just start all over?
I have a friend at the community college, an astronomy teacher. He frequently corners me to tell me that at any moment the Big Bang could reverse itself. He tells me that the universe could be, at this very moment, going into a reflexive shock wave that would turn the galaxy inside out. He says that all creation would be erased, everything that has ever happened would have to start back up again in precisely the right order for any of this—this being human kind, planets, moons, everything—to have a chance of occurring again.
So at this place, at this point in time, anything could be happening. I could be a breath away from the end of the universe. I could be a second away from being a stain on the face of human evolution. My chemicals could be a millisecond away from mixing with a zillion other chemicals as the Earth was imploded and forced to begin anew.
I take a deep breath and wait.
It’s foolish to think I can change anything.
I climb into the Whaler and sit down in the driver’s seat. It is cold and covered in dew, but I sink into the familiar curves without hesitation. The key is in the ignition still, not a good sign or a bad one. We always left the key in the ignition. I turn it and watch the indicator lights flash on, alive.
The gas tank is full.
The radio cackles static.
I crank the key farther and the engine turns over, wispy gray exhaust coughing from the rear of the boat.
Molly and I used to take the Whaler across the lake to fish in the bass bog near Morgan’s Landing on the east side of the lake. I would spend the afternoon casting into the weeds and swearing while she sat with a hat on reading a book. On a good day, I would catch nothing. On a bad day, the Whaler wouldn’t turn back over when we wanted to leave and we would be forced to row our small dinghy into Morgan’s Landing in search of help.
Now the boat hums easily, the engine vibrating softly behind me. I walk back and look at it. There’s been a powerful new Johnson installed, its rotors clean and unscratched. It’s an expensive model, I think, not the kind you can find in Granite City. This looks like something you’d buy in Spokane or Seattle. Powerful and lean, it has none of the rough edges of our old rusted Evinrude.
I close my eyes and there’s Molly telling me that she doesn’t want to argue about a boat. When did that happen? Years ago, I think. Yes. It must have been years ago.
I sit back in the driver’s seat and turn off the engine. I keep the radio on and begin to toy with it, listening for voices. For a while I just follow the waves of static, examining the ebb and flow of the sound, the crashing billows of nothing.
I pick up the handset. I want to say something. I want to broadcast to the world of nothing on the radio a powerful version of my thoughts. I want to empty out my head into the wasteland and let the nobodies listening sort it out.
But nothing comes to me, no words, no visions, no memories, and so I sit there and wonder how many different ways there are to find forgiveness, wonder how many ways there are to get lost, wonder why only humans keep track of their dead.
THE CHIRPING OF birds wakes me. I’ve been asleep in the driver’s seat of the Whaler for hours. Sunlight filters through a thicket of clouds and makes the lake look glassy and shallow.
I climb out of the Whaler and walk back up the dock toward the house.
There are footprints leading from the dock toward the house. They run right next to the ones I left on my way down.
I sprint towards the front, shouting her name. I don’t want her to see Ginny. We’ll never work this out if she sees Ginny.
The front door slams open before I can reach it and Ginny stands there in a T-shirt and shorts.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Is she mad?”
Ginny stares at me, mouth ajar an inch.
“I would have warned you,” I say, “but I didn’t hear her.”
I try to walk past Ginny but she puts a hand on my chest to stop me.
“Are you still asleep?” she says.
“Of course not,” I say. “Is she okay? Is she hurt in some way?”
“Paul,” Ginny says softly, “Molly isn’t here. You’re dreaming, or hallucinating. I don’t know which.”
I turn back and look at the prints in the sand. There is another set leading from the house to the dock as well. I look down at Ginny’s feet and see that they are speckled with sand.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I came out to see where the hell you were,” Ginny says. “I was worried.”
“Don’t be,” I s
ay. “I just got restless during the night. I came out here to collect my thoughts and I just fell asleep.”
“You were talking when I got out to the boat,” Ginny says. “And you left the radio on.”
“I’m sure I was just dreaming.”
“You were saying my name. It was cute.” Ginny lets me into the house and I can smell eggs and bacon cooking.
“That smells good,” I say.
“You must be hungry,” Ginny says, “I know you hated the dinner I made.”
I grin. Ginny is smarter than I give her credit for.
“The bacon was in the freezer,” she goes on. “I hope it’s still good.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” I say.
“I’m not used to being domesticated,” Ginny says. “It’s good practice, though.”
Ginny goes into the kitchen to finish making breakfast, so I sit down on the couch and try to rearrange my thoughts. Of course those footprints weren’t Molly’s. What was I thinking—that she had just materialized from the water?
I know about how people die and about how people are born and about the scars they leave. I know how it feels when someone is gone completely.
Like our child.
I remember waking up the next day and having that vacuum sensation in my stomach. I remember thinking that all of my organs had been carted off and that my trunk was an empty hull, like a boat under construction.
We both wanted her. That was never an issue. We both wanted to be parents. We both knew that raising a child was a contract that could not be broken.
No one tested us to see if we were fit to be parents. But who would have thought otherwise? A young anthropologist and his wife the artist. Both educated beyond normal human need. If any two people deserved to be parents, it would be them.
Them. Like we are other people.
The truth, the real, bare truth is that we were no different from any other twenty-something parents: We drank, we smoked, we lied, we cheated, we fought until it seemed pointless and we fucked like tomorrow was guaranteed. If it had come down to us taking a test to become parents, we would have crammed, stuck crib notes under our watchbands and taken No-Doz to stay awake the night before the big exam.
