The Retreat

by David Bergen

  “Where are you going every morning?” she said.

  “To pee,” he said. He sat on his bed and removed his runners.

  “You’re gone a long time, Everett,” she said.

  Everett didn’t answer. The image of the Doctor’s ropey legs appeared and disappeared. He said, “I couldn’t sleep. I was walking.”

  Lizzy seemed to consider this, then she lay back down and said, “Oh.”

  Later, at breakfast, the Doctor asked Everett if he wanted to come by the Den. “Just a little meeting,” he said. “I like to get to know everyone here.”

  Everett looked around at the rest of the group. His father wasn’t present, he’d gone into town for building supplies. His mother smiled encouragingly. She said, “Of course he’d love to. Right, Everett?”

  Everett shrugged. He believed that the Doctor had seen him down at the pond, spying, and this was why he was to join him in the Den. He searched for a reason why he wouldn’t be able to go, but his mind was empty.

  His mother said, “You’d think he was going to his death. Don’t look so glum, Ev.”

  And so, after breakfast, Everett knocked on the door to the Den, and when the Doctor called out, he entered. The room was cool and dark. There was no fire, as Lizzy had said there was when she had come here. The Doctor was sitting in a canvas chair, holding a book. He put the book down and got up and pulled a chair over for Everett. There was a large desk in the corner of the room with papers and magazines scattered across the surface. The shelves on the walls held books and there were framed photographs, many of which were of the Doctor posing with people, both men and women, and always the Doctor appeared to be on the verge of a smile. There was a white owl mounted on the far wall and it was looking right at Everett, and though Everett knew that the owl was dead, the eyes disturbed him.

  The Doctor explained that there was nothing to fear, everyone in the camp had already sat, or would in the future sit, in the chair Everett now found himself in. “Not to worry. We are not bullies here, nor are we black-and-white thinkers. This place exists as a harbour from the world, a place to find the courage to affirm one’s own reasonable nature over what is accidental in us. I’m interested in the accidental. I’m also curious about how society works. Take a group of people and plunk them down in a village, a village that is created from scratch, and make those people live together. What happens? That’s what interests me. I’m not a social scientist. Neither am I a hippie who believes in free love or self-abasement or the willy-nilly taking of drugs for pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, I’m interested in pleasure as well as in denial and sublimation, but all these things are much easier to measure in this place than in the chaos of the city. And, I’m interested in communism. Not the communism of a centrally controlled government, but the machinations of a community. How do I take what I have that is special and share it with others? Take your father, for instance. His gift lies in his hands and in his ability to build things, to imagine a water system that will provide a shower for the community, and then to build it. One has to be clean, no? Or, my wife Margaret. Her gift is gardening. The tomato you had for breakfast was provided by her hands. You see?”

  “I didn’t eat a tomato.”

  “Maybe not, but you see my point. One gift is no better than another.”

  On the wall, behind the Doctor, was a barometer. And beside it was a photo of the Doctor on a sailboat. The Doctor was standing with his arms crossed and he was wearing a blue hat, and beside him was Margaret and she was holding a baby, possibly Big Billy. Everett had always wanted to sail.

  “What about you, Everett? What do you bring to this place?”

  Everett said he wasn’t sure. “I help my dad,” he said.

  “You admire him?”

  Everett said that he did.

  “Good. That’s important.” The Doctor paused and then he said that he too admired Lewis. “Your father is a fine, fine man. He is an independent thinker and he doesn’t like to be boxed in, and believe me, this camp is a kind of boxing in, isn’t it? But your father bears it because he loves your mother and that is what I admire. His ability to sacrifice his own wishes for the desires of your mother. You must notice this. And that, that is the biggest thing someone can do for another. Lay down his life, as it were. God knows, this community has its failings. We are not self-sufficient. We still have to buy milk in town. And flour. And when your mother breaks her wrist, we have to drive her over to the local hospital. We don’t live on the moon, and we can’t exist as if we lived on the moon. We have to be in the world. Do you like films?”

  Everett looked up. The question had dropped in as if from the moon. “You mean movies?” he asked.

  “Yes, movies.”

  Everett said that he liked watching movies.

  “Good. We want to have a movie night. As soon as we find a projector. I was saying to someone, perhaps your mother, that we needed more entertainment. And film is a great place to start. I would love to see a small orchestra as well. Your mother tells me that you play clarinet. You see what I mean?”

  Everett had begun to understand that there was no response required. He simply nodded. The Doctor continued. “We are travellers on this earth. Isn’t it curious that truth doesn’t fall from heaven to earth? At least, I don’t believe this. We have to beat our way through the bushes to find it, and what better place to do that than right here, where we are surrounded by actual bush. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you must go out there into the forest and hatchet your way to truth, but it’s a great metaphor for what we are trying to do here.” At this point he thumped his chest with a fist. Everett startled. He had no idea what the Doctor was saying, though he assumed there was a deep wisdom that he might some day understand. The Doctor’s eyes were bright blue and Everett, who wasn’t always good at gauging the age of people over eighteen, could see that the man before him was not as old as his father or mother. A clear light came from his eyes. He bent towards Everett and whispered confidentially, “And what do you believe?”

  Everett was trembling. He didn’t know if it was from the cool air in the room, or because Doctor Amos frightened him in some new way. The Doctor continued to whisper. He said that belief was not anachronistic. Belief took tremendous courage. He said, “I was considering shame the other day. Something we have failed to sustain in our lives. Shame is what makes us different from the dog or the cat or the cow. When we go to the bathroom, we close the door behind us. When we make love, we do it in the privacy of our bedroom. When we masturbate, we might feel shame, but it is only because we imagine being caught. Being seen. Do you masturbate?”

  Everett looked down at his hands, aware that there was a right answer, but he did not know it.

  “I do,” the Doctor said. “This might surprise you. Does it surprise you?”

  Everett was perspiring. He knew what the Doctor’s penis looked like but he could not imagine it hard and in the Doctor’s own hand. He wanted to talk of something else, or to have this meeting finished, but he did not know how to accomplish either thing.

  “Of course it does. Because I’m a married man. I’m an old man in your eyes. Though not that old, truly. Thirty-five is still young. The fact is, talking about this embarrasses you. You feel shame. Perhaps it is shame for yourself, or even some shame for me, because you like me and yet here I am talking about onanism. You should know the story of Onan, as you’ve been reading the Bible. It’s a tale of caution, though not necessarily true. Isn’t it interesting that this works this way? You’re looking at me as if I’m mad.”

  Everett found his voice and said, “No.”

  The Doctor nodded. He said that Everett should save himself because no one else could do that for him. Not Jesus Christ, nor Allah, nor Buddha, nor any other human who claimed to be God. “There is no theology or God to save us. There is no thing that will save us, save ourselves. These are things that may not concern you yet, but they will, and if they don’t, they should. Even as we speak, they should.�
�� He paused and became thoughtful. He said, “Last night I dreamed that all the people left on earth were on a raft on a vast ocean. There was not enough room on the raft and survival depended upon throwing someone else off the raft before you were thrown off. There was much wailing and violence. Babies were hurled into the water. Mothers. Fathers. Children. In the end the strongest were left, or those who found themselves by some chance in the middle of the raft. I knew I wouldn’t last, because I wasn’t strong enough, and so I took a rope and tied it to my wrist and fashioned a knot around part of the raft, and when someone attempted to throw me off, it was not possible. This is how I survived. And then I woke up.” The Doctor paused and then he said, “The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I know that one fate befalls them both. As is the fate of the fool, it will also befall me. We have only one life. Isn’t that right?”

  He looked at Everett with eyes that had been glowing minutes earlier but now seemed darker. “Do you trust?” he asked and Everett said, without thinking, that he did. The Doctor smiled and said that he could leave now. That was all. Everett got up and he stepped outside and stood on the porch in the bright sunlight. In the distance, beyond the Hall, he saw his mother hanging laundry, and she was singing. It was the same song the Doctor sang every morning as he bathed in the pond.

  And then, some days later, during the aimless hours before dinner, the Moll family arrived. They pulled up in a bus that was painted blue with various types of fish swimming on its sides. There were two daughters, Shanti and Dee Dee, and Everett immediately liked Shanti, the oldest, whose voice was smooth and barely audible. She was haughty and distant and Everett was pleased; he felt that he and she might have the same opinions on many different subjects. She called her father by his first name, Geoffrey, and said right off that she would not be sleeping in the cabin that the Doctor had offered the family. Geoffrey ignored her and said that they had heard of the Retreat from a gas-station attendant in town. He said that the possibility of a commune interested them and so here they were. He was standing in the shadow of the bus, swivelling his bald head to take in the layout of his surroundings. The Doctor had welcomed them; offered them the cabin, and then offered them dinner. Geoffrey said that the family had been travelling North America – they were from England – and they were making stops in various towns and villages along the way, where they put on plays in the evenings, like a touring troupe from Elizabethan times. He chuckled, looked about, and said, “This wild and wayward world.” Everett thought then that he resembled his daughter Shanti; they both lifted their noses slightly, as if they had smelled something unpleasant.

  In the afternoons, the girls managed to escape their parents’ grasp and join the Byrd children at the pond. Dee Dee wore a blue bathing suit, Shanti, black. They were one-piece suits, not at all like Lizzy’s bikini. Both of the girls were at first frightened by the water, which had weeds growing in it, close to the shore.

  “Is it safe?” Dee Dee asked one afternoon, and William ran in up to his waist and then back out again. “See?” he said, looking directly at Dee Dee. Shanti touched the water delicately with a toe. She made a face and said that she was used to swimming pools where the water was clear and you could see the bottom.

  “Just a bit of algae and weeds,” Lizzy explained. “Because it’s a pond and there’s no fresh water flowing in. It’s not dirty.”

  Shanti ventured out further so that her ankles were covered and she turned and motioned for Dee Dee to follow. All of them waded into the water, the two girls swimming out together to the middle of the pond. Everett pretended to be busy with something at his feet though his gaze followed the girls in the water, Shanti practising the butterfly while her sister treaded water nearby. A few minutes later, when they came up to shore, Everett watched Shanti as she stood, water streaming off her dark hair and down her front. He saw the sharpness of her hipbones and her small breasts pressed flat by her bathing suit.

  One evening, at dinner, the Molls joined the rest of the group at the long centre table and Everett found himself beside Shanti. She kept her elbows close to her sides, eating delicately, barely touching the carrots and rice. She liked meat, preferably mutton, her mother explained. The Doctor said that meat was a rarity here. What was eaten was taken from the land, and the only animals to be had were the bull in the pen that was waiting for a mate, and the goat that provided the group with a small amount of milk. “Can’t eat our provider of milk,” he said. “And sheep we do not have. Though we have thought of purchasing a cow from the Blaines up the road. This would be good for both us and the bull. And we have the boy who brings us chickens twice a week. And sometimes rabbits.” He looked at Lizzy.

  Everett imitated Shanti’s method of holding her knife with the right hand and the fork with the left. It was awkward, and he managed to mangle a carrot and work it up towards his mouth.

  “What kind of fancy knife work is that?” his father asked, grinning.

  Everett, his face heating, ducked his head.

  “Leave the boy alone,” his mother said. She was wearing a short red dress and a string of pearls. Her hair was swept up to reveal her long white neck. She had taken to dressing up for the evening meal, as if each occasion were a banquet. She usually put fresh-cut wildflowers in sealer jars and she always lit the stubby candles that she had found in one of the cabinets in the Hall.

  Everett wanted Shanti to recognize his mother for her beauty and sophistication. It might, he thought, make her notice him and want to be his friend. He leaned towards her and said that his mother had just finished reading a book by a Russian author that was eight hundred pages long. Shanti seemed unimpressed. She raised her chin; her small dark mouth worked at a tiny piece of carrot. She turned to her father and said, “Geoffrey, when should we put on the play?”

  “Wonderful. You have something to show us?” the Doctor asked.

  “Yes. Yes, we do. The play we might suggest is a hodgepodge,” Shanti’s father said. “A tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.” He lifted his eyebrows at Lewis.

  Everett sensed that his father did not like Mr. Moll. They seemed to be angry at each other. Once, in the evening by the fireplace, Everett had heard them argue about whether Shakespeare had actually written any of his plays. Mr. Moll was emphatic that he did not, and Lewis thought this was naive.

  “My daughter Lizzy is an author,” his mother said. “She writes plays as well. And poetry. And some fancy-pants prose.”

  “Don’t,” Lizzy said.

  Shanti tittered and made a face as if she had tasted something bad.

  “I have seen some of her writing,” Harris said, “and it is quite mature.” He rarely spoke, and so now to hear this announcement was quite a surprise. Everett was aware of Lizzy and how she stared defiantly at her mother, though she seemed pleased by Harris’s claim.

  Shanti said that she had written the play with her father. It had demanded so much work, she said, looking at Lizzy. Her nose was like a small button. Everett wanted to touch it.

  The Doctor thought it would be marvellous to see a play that evening. “Do you need help with actors?”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Mr. Moll. “It’s just a simple four-hander.”

  Lewis had called the play dire. The actors were like spent swimmers who clung together and choked their art. Though these had been their father’s words, Lizzy echoed them now. Everett asked Lizzy what dire was and she said, “Desperately bad.” They were in bed. Fish and William were sleeping. Lizzy was lying under a pool of light, writing in her notebook.

  He said, “Dee Dee was good.”

  Lizzy allowed that Dee Dee had played a good flirt, but that that was easy for a fourteen-year-old girl who was flirtatious in real life. “That’s not acting,” she said.

  In the play, Shanti had been a boy, Dee Dee a girl, and Shanti had wooed Dee Dee, who came from the other side of the tracks. Dee Dee’s parents, played by her parents, had forbidden any sort of relationship be
cause Shanti wasn’t a Christian. There was much arguing and tears, and in the end Shanti had become a Christian and the two lovers had gone out together. Everett had found Shanti quite believable as a boy, but he felt confused by his emotions as he watched because he was hearing Shanti’s voice and watching Shanti’s gait, and he was conscious of Shanti’s body beneath the flannel shirt and dark wool pants. She was angular and thin, with a narrow chest.

  “It’s not believable,” said Lizzy, “that someone would convert to Christianity in order to get laid.”

  “They didn’t have sex,” Everett said. “They just went out.”

  “You know what I mean,” Lizzy said. “Besides, the writing was terrible. Clunky and wooden.”

  Everett lay on his back and imagined a block of wood with words on it. He thought about Shanti with a moustache, pretending to have a penis. What a surprise then to find no penis when he undressed her. And so he put her in a skirt and then undressed her. At the edge of his sleep, she became a boy with a penis larger than Everett’s; they compared, and Everett came up short.

  The next day, down by the pond, Fish nearly drowned. It was late afternoon, and Lizzy and Shanti were arguing about comedy and tragedy. Lizzy said that the best stories were a mixture of both and that comedy only sharpened a tragedy. Everett was lying on a large flat rock close to the pond, eyes closed, listening. He admired his sister’s way with words and her ability to argue. At one point, she looked at Shanti and said, “You think that sneering is the way to win an argument. That’s stupid. I’m willing to hear a good point, but you haven’t come up with one.”

  Shanti said that the play the night before had been a good example of comedy. There was nothing tragic. All had ended well.