by Rick Bass
Later in the afternoon, they found a patch of wild strawberries and crawled through them on their hands and knees, sometimes plucking the tiny wild berries but other times bending down and grazing them straight from the plants.
They kept contouring around the mountain. They surprised a doe and fawn, who jumped up from their day bed and stood staring at them for the longest time before finally flagging their tails and cantering off into the woods.
***
The pieces of the puzzle began to come together slowly. They heard the faint sound of a road. They found a skein of rock, an outcropping, similar to one they had seen earlier in the day. They followed the strike of it a little farther up the mountain, believing themselves to be too low. The sound of the highway grew closer, disturbingly monotonous and familiar, yet they moved toward it, knowing their clothes to be somewhere in that vicinity, and when they finally found them, having come full circle around the little mountain, they sat down on a boulder in the last angle of light and stared for a while at their crumpled and folded clothes, not wanting to climb back into them, and they studied the cleft, the passage, beneath which so much had happened.
They marveled at the notion that if, or when, they walked away from it, the memory of it would be held bright and strong within them for a long time, but that after a longer time—after they were gone—the memory would begin to fade and lithify until it was all but forgotten, invisible: that even an afternoon such as that one could become dust.
They dressed only because they had to and walked slowly down toward the sound of the road. Soon they could catch the glimpses of cars, colored flecks of metal, racing past on the road below, caught in glimpses between the limbs and leaves of the trees. Their own car, with the green canoe atop, waiting as if resting, ready to rejoin the unaltered flow of things. Descending, again.
Presidents’ Day
JERRY AND KAREN WERE two weeks shy of their seventeenth wedding anniversary when an acquaintance of Jerry’s, Jim, called to say that he had fallen down while splitting wood and detached a retina, losing sight in one eye. He had driven himself to the emergency clinic, where he had been referred to an eye specialist in Spokane, four hours away. Jim had been an officer in the navy but was retired now; he was forty-eight. He was old-school, unaccustomed to and uncomfortable asking for anyone else’s help. On his drive to Spokane, the retina had occasionally shifted back into a rough approximation of its proper position and, for a few seconds, Jim would again be able to see out of that injured eye, a vague haze of gray-white light, before everything went black again.
In Spokane, the examining surgeon, a twenty-year navy man himself, Dr. Le Page, had canceled the ski trip he’d planned with his teenage son to perform the emergency reattachment surgery. Unable to find a nurse on such short notice—it was Presidents’ Day—he’d had his son fill in, still attired in his bright skiwear, complete with bob-tasseled jester’s hat.
That had been four days ago, and Jim was supposed to lie on his back several hours of each day, perfectly still, while the retina, that thin filter between the brain and the outside world, tried to reattach itself to the back of the eyeball. Because Dr. Le Page forbade Jim to drive, Jim was calling to see if Jerry might be able to run him back over to Spokane for his first checkup to see if the retina had fully attached. Dr. Le Page had told Jim that there was 895 percent chance that everything would be all right and they’d be able to turn around and head right back home.
Jerry was surprised, and slightly flattered, that Jim had asked him for help. He told Jim he’d check with Karen but, although he didn’t tell Jim, he suspected Karen would fall out of her seat in her eagerness to get him out of the house.
If their story was not the most ancient in the world, it had to be running a close second: the end of love. The flat water where the shore is no longer visible, and where all wind leaves the sails, and the sun hangs overhead for days, without moving, in a bright burning haze, a searing ball of light, nothing more. A place where both will and navigation fail, as does the imagination, and where the two sailors, the two castaways, finally have no choice—none—but to turn upon each other: a place where each has finally become the other’s prisoner.
One sailor—suppose he is a man much like Jerry—rides in the bow, and in the doldrums’ heat feels as if he is burning at the stake. He turns in the seat of the little boat and tries to speak to the other sailor—she might be a woman much like Karen—but it is as if no sound comes from his mouth, or if it does; as if the words fall into some chasm before they ever reach her, across even that short distance.
Suppose that a hundred, or ten thousand lashes, however faint or light each one might be on its own, have mounted across the years: ten thousand little lashes or harshnesses or taking-for-granted ignorings, for every one small and dwindling kindness. Will you fold the newspaper more neatly when you’re done with it, can’t you do anything right? Why must you lift the lid of a pot on the stove to see what’s cooking when it should be evident to anyone with any intelligence by the damned odor alone that I’m cooking rice, and that it’s sitting there steaming, as it needs to do, and that now you’ve let all the steam out? And, goddammit, you bought the wrong kind of milk at the grocery store, I told you to get the one percent with the blue label at the top, not the fucking one and a half percent with the red label! Don’t you pay attention to anything, can’t you observe what’s in the refrigerator each day?
Panicked, the one sailor stares at his attacker, his critic. We’re stranded on open water, he wants to whisper, we’ve got to pull together—but mid-sea, she can no longer hear or even see him, and instead stares right through and past him. The man—yes, certainly, it is Jerry, and perhaps he is not the only one—continues to feel that he is burning at the stake; he is filled with despair that she is wasting the moment, wasting the last moments.
They float.
Occasionally the sailor in the stern shifts her focus, notices that the passenger in front is speaking to her, or is trying to speak to her. She can’t be sure, but the expression on her face makes it appear that he is asking something of her—that he wants something from her, something she doesn’t have anymore—and even though she can no longer hear him, she can see that he keeps asking, and it makes her hate him. There’s nowhere to put the hate, however, on such a wide, flat sea, and so she just holds on to it, and the boat grows more leaden.
He tries to be more perfect, or less imperfect. Despite the fading tenure of their years together, he buys her flowers each day that he is in town. In cold weather, if she is to go out somewhere in her car, he makes a point of warming the vehicle up for her and backing it sufficiently far out of the garage so that the fumes from the idling engine do not build up in the garage, but not so far that she has to walk out into the snow. But one morning, when she’s running late, it turns out that he has positioned the car so that its door brushes against the garage wall when opened, thereby limiting somewhat the space available for her to slip in behind the driver’s seat; and because she has an armload, that morning—a purse, a shoulder bag, and a cup of coffee—she exhales her familiar sound of exasperation, shakes her head, and mutters, once again, How hard would it be, really, to do something right the first time?
She’s a beautiful woman, even now into her mid-forties—in some respects more beautiful than ever, and it’s true that people have always all but fallen over themselves doing for her—often she needs not even to make a request, but simply look or suggest or, sometimes, point, in order to urge the doer along. But Jerry, more than anyone, knows she has also a beautiful heart, that it, that great heart, resides like a mask behind a mask beneath a mask, and that only he can see far enough back there—past the false or surface beauty, and then behind the false or surface anger, buried just behind that skin’s beauty, all the way to the contemplative tenderness he knows is still alive far within her.
Jerry is a stonemason—a creative enough occupation but one in which, always, limitations and stress loads are unde
rstood—the rock, or span of bricks, able to do only certain things, in the end, and able to achieve only certain effects and certain goals, within reason. There are no miracles in his job, only the daily cumulative force of showing up each day and putting in one’s careful and cautious hours as precisely and diligently as possible, with the shape of the work manifesting itself not in any one hour’s or one day’s labors but over the course of the project’s entirety.
And it’s not always out-and-out war; there’s reason for hope. Karen’s an artist, and possesses an artist’s volition, sure, but just as frequent as the pustulous outbursts of frenzied rage and fear (he thinks) at the proximity of his ponderous, outsized heart are the long stretches of silence and invisibility; as if neither time nor matter exists, as if the days and nights are not rushing past, being funneled down a drain; as if there is no urgency; and as if Karen believes Jerry is content to receive, forever, those faint lashings and faint withholdings.
Still, the calm water, horrible as it is, never lasts.
Occasionally they stir, and fight like crows or magpies, squabbling over the last of that water, Jerry believing she still has some left in the vessel which she is not sharing and Karen knowing that she does not.
“You make me puke,” the one sailor cries to the other one on some of the days when her numbness fades and she returns to war. “You repulse me.”
And always, he retreats and sits on the other end of the boat, bow or stern, and watches the horizon, as he has for so many years now, still hoping for a shore, and still—amazingly—believing that there is another shore out there.
***
When Jerry asked her if she minded if he drove Jim back over to Spokane, at first Karen didn’t understand what Jerry was saying. She had to ask him to repeat himself twice more and couldn’t figure out what Jim had to do with it: why someone whom Jerry didn’t know that well would have to request help from another person who, if not a stranger, was neither a committed friend. She didn’t understand the depth of the need, the seriousness of Jim’s situation.
She watched Jerry slip out of the boat and into the warm sheen of flat water. Something caught her attention at the corner of her vision—she frowned, squinted, turned her head to look at it—and when she returned her gaze to the ocean before her, the calm sea, he was gone, leaving not even a ripple.
***
When Jerry picked Jim up at his cabin before first light, it was foggy and the roads were covered with a glaze of ice that glinted in their headlights. They had to drive slowly, and in the last wedge of darkness before dawn, deer tiptoed back and forth across the road in front of them, returning to the daytime sanctuary of the woods after having ventured earlier in the night down to the river’s frozen edge for a drink of water from the current’s fast-flowing center. The deer trotted back across the glassine road on tiny black hoofs, slipping occasionally, their eyes glowing red in the headlights.
The retina is the last screen through which any incoming light passes, before flooding into the brain, where the light proceeds to tell its stories and be processed, stored, and filed as memory and knowledge; because the eyes are so important to a sense of orientation, any disruptions to them can send the body into a state of extreme confusion. Not knowing why, the body often responds with an agonizing form of nausea, not unlike the throes of seasickness, trying to purge anything and everything it might have taken in, on the off chance that that’s what’s causing the problem.
Jim was seized by this nausea from time to time and would ask Jerry to pull over to the side of the road so that he could retch. Sometimes Jim would have nothing left in his stomach to hurl, and would succeed in vomiting only a thin trickle of shining drool; other times he would be able to make it a short distance into the woods, stumbling down the twists and turns of frozen deer trails, before expelling, in coughs and gags, the detritus of his stomach.
Jim’s face was still swollen and bruised from the previous surgery—the injured eye, the left one, was still almost completely shut—and he wasn’t much company, though he tried to be stoic about it, riding upright with his head held in his hands, swaying with the road’s rough passages, and making random conversation in the lulls between pain and nausea.
He told Jerry that he’d had all sorts of medical repairs done to him just before he got out of the service, to take advantage of the full health care offered by the navy. He’d had knee surgery to pick out all the little fragments of cartilage that had been floating around behind his kneecaps, and had had both ACLs tightened and tuned while the surgeons were working in there. He’d had six crowns put in by the dentist—Jim’s teeth flashed and gleamed like a minefield when he smiled, so much gold and silver that it seemed his mouth, and his smile, would be heavy from carrying so much weight. He had a tendon reconstructed in his elbow, too, and a bulging disk removed from his backbone, and had never felt so good. He’d had radical orthokeratology performed so that his vision had been twenty-twenty, and the doctor had noticed the beginning of cataracts, so he’d repaired that problem, too, implanting translucent plastic disks in the place where the cataracts had once been. The cosmetic effects of this surgery were strangely troubling to Jerry, for sometimes when the light hit Jim’s eyes at just the right angle it reflected off those plastic disks set behind the cornea, causing Jim’s eyes to shine not unlike those of the deer that passed before their headlights.
“In many respects, I’m like an entirely new man,” Jim said. He laughed. “Older and better. Who would’ve believed it? Except for this darned eye.”
Jim had grown up in the sand hills of Nebraska, dreaming of the ocean. “I’d always been restless and daring,” he told Jerry. “When I was in high school my friend and I stole a plane from the county airport, even though we didn’t know how to fly, and we crashed it. That’s how I first hurt my back. I went back the next year, got my pilot’s license, rented one legal, but then crashed it, too—flew it through a power line.” He lifted his arm to show Jerry the scars. “Had to have a steel plate put in my arm. It sets off the metal detector in airports.” He tapped his teeth. “Sometimes my teeth pick up radio waves, too. Late at night, driving in flat country, I can pick up those big high-powered Christian stations.” He laughed. “Talk about hearing voices in your head! Drives me fucking crazy, sometimes. Driving out toward Nebraska once, going back to visit family, I couldn’t make the broadcast stop, so I had to turn around and drive back up into the mountains, and wait there for daylight, for the station to go off the air. It’s funny sometimes how much you take peace and quiet for granted: how nothing can be sweeter than just a little space and time where you’re not hurting or in anguish about anything.”
Jerry nodded. In the last couple of years he had taken to going out by himself to a little cabin he’d built away from the main house and reading by candlelight for an hour or two, and drinking a glass of wine or two, sometimes big glasses—sometimes three glasses—before coming back in to go to bed, where sometimes Karen would still be sitting up, propped against a pillow, reading and drinking, though other times already asleep, and the inside of the house as silent as if it were already abandoned: as if they had already lived the full reach of their lives and passed on into dust and then history and then nothingness. Jerry had grown up on the Texas Gulf coast, within reach of full sight and scent of the ocean, and had wanted to move away from it, to higher ground, all his life; often, as a child, he’d had dreams of rising tides and floodwaters.
“I guess I’m the exact opposite,” he said. “A steady trudger, that’s what I am.”
“I know that about you,” said Jim, smiling and reaching over and clapping a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “That’s why I called.” He smiled again, as if to say, There are no secrets in the world, no masks above masks, no masks below masks, and asked, “How’s Karen?”
***
They kept stopping to eat. Jerry wasn’t hungry, but Jim, in his nervousness about finding out whether the first surgery had been successful, was ravenous. They
stopped first at a Burger King, and then a McDonald’s, and then, most disastrously, a Taco Bell; after each meal, Jim would have to stop a few miles down the road and spit up again, as his body rebelled against these repeated attempts at gaining nourishment, and Jerry said nothing but wondered why in the hell Jim kept going back and doing the same thing, again and again, trapped so distressingly between nausea and hunger.
***
They arrived early, but Dr. Le Page was already in and waiting for Jim. After a brief examination, he told him that the news was not good: the first surgery had not been successful, and a second, alternative surgery would be required. They would have to stay overnight.
The retina is designed to cling to the back of the eyeball like the thinnest piece of Saran Wrap, fastened to the eye with nothing more than a few cells’ width of adhesion. A poet looking at a retina held in her gloved hand during an operation described it as “a strong and durable and beautiful outpost of the brain, as it awaits to be reattached to a gorgeous wall that looks like the inside of an abalone shell, with all its shimmering, radiant iridescence.”
Jim’s doctor explained it less poetically, comparing it to a sheet of wallpaper that he hoped to hang back in place upon the curved back of the eyeball, hoping that it would not slide off or pull loose again, that it would rest in its proper place long enough for the living cells to grow back between the thin wrap of the retina and the blood-slicked arc of the inner eye.
In the first operation he had sewn a tiny buckle into the back of Jim’s eye and had then laced the retina to that buckle. He’d shown Jim the buckle before sewing it on; it had been about the size of a small stainless steel staple. The nylon thread used for the sewing was about the diameter of a single long strand of a woman’s hair.
