by Atticus Lish
The Navy recruiter was a hulk of a man with bulging biceps and full sleeve tattoos hunched over a laptop, hunting and pecking the keys. His room looked like a telemarketing operation—folding chairs and tables, landline telephones, pencil stubs, scraps of paper littering a desk.
Corey told him he intended to be a Navy SEAL.
The man looked up. “That’s extremely hard. No one can guarantee you that.”
He gave him a pencil stub and some pieces of scrap paper and had Corey take a timed, multiple-choice test to determine his mental and moral fitness for the Navy.
* * *
—
Corey went into his mother’s bedroom on Christmas morning, took her reading glasses off the nightstand and looked through them. They made the venetian blinds sharply precise. He set them on the bedspread. He began going through the room, taking each thing of hers and putting it with the glasses—silver jewelry, elephant ornaments, woven purse, driver’s license with the sad picture of her face—taken after she had been diagnosed. Discovering her phallic glass pipe, he hastened to throw it out. He kept cancelled credit cards, South Asian ornaments, clothbound notebooks she had used for shopping and to-do lists, written in what had used to be a beautiful hand.
He hadn’t realized how beautiful her handwriting had been. A note said: “Application, three references, timing belt, inspection sticker, greens, onions, butter, poem.” On the overleaf, she had drawn an abstract design of a flower and the words “I Can See It.”
He found several messages she’d written expressing her hopes for him and bemoaning her struggle with herself—willing herself to struggle past her tendency to self-defeat. Then he found a letter she’d written after getting diagnosed. Like the others, it was addressed to no one. He didn’t finish it. He folded it shut. Her writings got shakier over time. The entries grew shorter and shorter.
Most of what she’d done was beginnings without endings.
But he kept finding more beginnings. She’d written him a partial letter. The handwriting changed halfway and he realized she’d dictated it to Joan. It dated from his trouble with the law: “My dear son…I’ve got my eye on you…” it finished. He read it carefully. She’d wanted him to not throw his life away. He put the letter in his room.
He took her mandala down and folded it.
The next day, Sunday, he went into her closet and took out her clothes, aware of their weight, smell, variety. The things at the back of the closet were different from the things at the front. She had more clothes than he’d ever seen her wear. In the middle of the day, he drove to Goodwill and gave them her clothes and drove away before they could open the bags in front of him.
The house seemed somehow messier when he got back. Everywhere he looked were medical documents, the endless forms and flyers, doctors’ bills, laboratory invoices, insurance company mailers, notices from the state for disability, credit card statements, tax bills, ALS: What It’s All About. He tore it all up—it made a sea of paper in the center of the floor—and stuffed it by the armload in the garbage.
He got his wrench and attacked the wheelchair, took apart the leg rests, broke it down and took it to the car. He unwired the Boss license plate and kept it. The oxygen and suction machines went next. He drove to a medical supply in Randolph with the trunk tied down with clothesline and unloaded everything on the sidewalk.
At home again, he vacuumed. Night was falling. He ate chicken fingers, drank a Mountain Dew and turned the lights on.
He was up all night again. Her books and papers, writings about art, society and the self, he preserved. Over and over, he found writings in which she reflected honestly on who she was, grappling with herself, exhorting herself to fight on and do something she could be proud of before it was too late. It had been the theme of her life for decades, long before she had gotten sick.
He saw The Flower Ornament Scripture in her milk crate. He hadn’t opened it in years. He turned the pages—sutra after sutra—Sanskrit on the left, English on the right—Chief in Goodness, Purifying Practice, Super-knowledge, Ascent to Suyama Paradise, Eulogies, Awakening by Light.
On her laptop, he found an abortive essay she had been working on the winter leading up to her diagnosis: run-on word-jammed pages fragmented into stop-and-start ideas, author’s notes: “Need to study French painters!” “Go back to the Greeks!” The last line was “I’ve gotten some bad news. Can I use this?” He went back to the beginning and read it. It didn’t sound like her. It was by turns highly technical—bristling with dates and specialized knowledge about Mycenaean friezes—nudes came flowingly to life in 480 B.C.—and polemical, strident, funny, interrupted by comic interludes and aggressive flights of fancy. It was disorganized too, a wild rough draft with long riffs on small points she built into bigger and bigger mountains—a Nietzschean expansion. There were passages that had come out ringingly well. Most of it was finding her way—and then she’d found it: flares of fire. Bigger, smarter, meaner, surer—more daring—than the mother he’d ever known in person. The start of a new person, but an unfinished one.
He preserved her writings in a waterproof plastic tub marked “The Real Gloria.”
* * *
—
In the new year, he moved out of his mother’s house to a room in town, a few blocks from Molly’s bars. Parking was free. There was an outside staircase to his floor. Women lived on the second floor, men on the third. The rooming house was the size of a barn. He kept the old hatchback downstairs in the snow. Two guys lived on his floor, a landscaper who was always working and a pot smoker who never worked, who woke up in the afternoon and played guitar all night. They shared the kitchen and bath. Corey had brought nothing with him but his sleeping bag and his boots, a few books, a towel laid out to dry on the radiator with a toothbrush and a bar of soap. Everything else was in a storage unit behind a Master lock at Quincy Adams.
In the winter mornings, he left the house before dawn when it was all guys in pickups on the roads, listening to sports radio, windows up, heaters on, eating sandwiches at stoplights, waiting for diesel trucks to roll through. In Weymouth, a giant man named Bench, the boss’s right-hand man, was always there before him—in mackinaw and rubber boots, picking his way around the stone in the half dark. The daily delivery came in and they cut stone all day, filling the drain with milky slurry, or went out on installations.
In the evenings after work, Corey went to Northeast Health and Fitness and trained according to the guidelines from the Naval Special Warfare website.
* * *
—
One night, instead of going to the gym, he ran from the city center all the way down to his mother’s house, hopped the seawall and ran along the ocean.
Soon, he was going over the seawall, regularly, in construction boots, running in water, getting wet on purpose, doing calisthenics in the sand. The SEALs had a deck they called The Grinder; he had a grinder of his own—a spot where he did sit-ups on asphalt deliberately to lacerate his back. He sprinted, picked up lightning-scorched logs, so heavy his skeleton’s integrity was in peril. Worried about tearing apart his shoulder, he cast the timber off and it thudded to the ground. It would have crushed his foot if he hadn’t pulled his leg away. One night, wearing a sack of wet sand on his back, he toiled down the beach, running on his hands like a bear.
He was pushing against an internal limit, the selfish pain-fear boundary in his head, trying to move it. It was the heaviest log to move. Every day he pushed against it, and every night someone came along when he was sleeping and moved it back. His goal was to move it all the way to the horizon.
On the fifth of February, he drove alone to Wollaston beach and parked. On the ocean horizon, the clouds formed a stack of horizontal lines. The stratospheric winds were curling the top row of clouds, blowing them apart and driving them across the sky like suds in a pan. He was shivering in his clothes. He stripped, ran out an
d threw himself in the heart-stopping water.
33
Total War on Sea, Air, Land
It was snowing. The end of March. The recruiter was surprised to see him, it had been so long. Corey brought a copy of his birth certificate and GED, which he had passed. It was cold and white and quiet all around them. They spent the day filling out forms.
* * *
—
He called the prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor couldn’t take his call. He was put through to someone else.
“Detective Bellavia. Can I help you?”
“This is Corey Goltz. I came to your office months ago and I haven’t heard anything. Is there anything going on?”
“If there’s anything to tell you, you’ll be notified.”
“I took a polygraph. Nobody notified me of anything.”
“You passed.”
“I passed?”
“Yes. You sound surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. Does that mean I’m in the clear?”
“I wouldn’t say you’re in the clear.”
“But how come, if I’m telling the truth?”
“You can be charged with a crime even if you’re telling the truth. If you come up to me and say ‘I stole a candy bar,’ that’s a confession and you can be charged with that confession. Happens every day.”
“Okay…”
“Makes sense, right?”
“But what is it about what I’ve told you that you’re going to want to charge me with?”
“We don’t have to tell you that. That’s up to the prosecutor’s discretion anyway. But I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Would it be that I was in the car with Tom?”
The detective said nothing.
“Is it that I knew Molly? Or that I knew Adrian?”
“I’m sure you can figure it out for yourself.”
“Does this mean you’re going to charge me?”
“I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.”
“All right. Well, at least now that we know I’m not lying, do you want to hear about my father?”
“If you want to tell me.”
Corey spoke at length.
“It’s not like I have proof of anything. This is just my impression of the man.”
“That’s quite an earful.”
“There’s just so much about him that nobody knows. I could tell you more.”
“I don’t really have time now.”
“When you hear what I’m saying about him, does it show you that maybe somebody else is guilty besides me?”
“Obviously, if you’re the one telling me, I have to take it with a grain of salt.”
“But I am telling the truth. As best I know.”
“You mind me asking what you’re doing with yourself?”
“I just enlisted in the Navy.”
“No kidding. I’ll have to tell the boss. He’s a Marine Corps guy, so he’ll enjoy the part about the Navy. He asks me how come I wasn’t a Marine. I call him one of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. He calls me a Ground Replacement Unit.”
“What does that mean?”
“A grunt. It just means he loves me.”
“Were you in the Army?”
“For better or worse.”
“I really wish I could talk to you a lot longer. I’ve got a lot of questions.”
“Talk to your recruiter. But don’t believe a word he says.”
* * *
—
Corey had placed the call from his bachelor’s room. The musician was sleeping. The smell of pot hung around the house. He sat on the floor of his room and stared out the white window at the snow.
According to the Naval Special Warfare website, he’d have to be doing 1,000 push-ups, 1,000 sit-ups, 200 pull-ups, and be running at least 50 miles a week to be ready for selection. He’d want to be lifting double his bodyweight, if he could, like an ant. He’d want to surround his shins with muscle to prevent stress fractures, because, at selection, they would run literally hundreds of miles, in sand, in boots, in life preservers, which were wet and heavy, and steel helmets, carrying boats on their heads.
Other injuries he could expect: tendon tear, cartilage tear, anterior cruciate ligament, inflammation of the knee, tendonitis, splitting the Achilles tendon sheath, sprained ankle, torn rotator cuff, chafing, staph infection, cellulitis, falling from a height, broken leg or spine, hallucination from exhaustion, falling asleep while running, hypothermia, lung edema, death.
No one who has gone to selection has ever found it easy. Training deaths occur. Some men commit suicide after failing. Some try again. It’s more pain than most will take. He’d be competing against the toughest, strongest, fastest men from every state across the country. If he made it through selection and joined the Teams, he could expect to deploy. Special operations are at the forefront of the United States’ current military strategy.
If, on the other hand, he failed, he’d spend his enlistment doing what? Menial work on a destroyer?
But if he did nothing, he would stay right here.
* * *
—
He imagined facing an enemy in a match without rules. He imagined facing them, exhausted, when he could no longer defend. He felt himself succumbing, the air being choked out of him, exhaustion consuming him. He could see what would happen if his enemy, possessed by fury, were allowed to strike him after he was spent, the horror of that—of dying like Molly in open combat without a referee.
If any enemy, no matter how powerful, had threatened his mother, Corey hoped he would have found it in himself to defend her. He could not feel fear where Gloria was concerned. But he did. He could imagine all too well those he was afraid to face. Could he overcome his fear of every monster on the planet?
Simply by running on a quiet road, he knew, if he exerted himself to the fullest, the sensation of drowning on dry land would soon grow so intolerable he would do anything to make it stop. All his resolutions were nothing next to the need for oxygen. If he couldn’t overcome his desire to breathe when he was running unmolested, how could he stand up to a vigorous adversary without quitting?
One says “I’d summon the strength to kill for you.” But could he summon the strength to fight anyone for her? Could he summon the strength to hold his breath for her? Could he summon the strength to die for her—not by a bullet but by inches?
And all this was far easier, it seemed, than the task of always treating her with patience.
Could he summon the strength to be a saint for her? Would he take her ALS from her? Would he trade places with her in that wheelchair?
The very thought was too much to consider. Corey knew he wouldn’t do this for her. Her disease had terrified him. Which forced him to ask: Of what quality was his love?
The quality of his love was lacking.
To truly love someone, you must be willing to do anything for her. To do anything, you must be able to face any fear, any pain. Killing was easy, fighting was hard, sainthood was harder, ALS was the hardest of all, it was impossible—and yet his mother had faced it.
* * *
—
That evening he called Joan again for the first time in a long time and asked her how she was. He told her he was worried that Leonard was going to get away with everything.
Joan said, “The cops’ll probably let him get away with it. Look at what they did for Whitey.”
“If they would only talk to him, they’d see.”
“That’ll never happen.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because they’re all men. They don’t care.”
“You don’t really mean that, do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“But some men do care, Joan. Not everybody’s bad.”
&nbs
p; “Well, they should care, Corey. And I do think that men should protect women. And I do think that men who beat up on women aren’t men. They should get paraded down the street in dresses like little fucking girls.”
“Hey, I agree.”
“And I think that if a man rapes a woman, he should get something stuck in him.”
“No argument.”
“A needle. In his dick.”
Corey winced. Then the conversation took another turn he had not foreseen.
“You’d never hurt a woman, would you, Corey?”
“No. Of course not.”
“It’s funny, because I remember you telling me about your friend from MIT in your mother’s kitchen on the day I turned you down. And then this happens to a girl you knew. And it takes you, what, six months?, to come clean to me that the guy who did it was your friend? So I gotta wonder what you’re hiding.”
“Joan, you’re getting carried away.”
“Maybe your father made you into a pervert. Maybe you can’t accept it if a woman tells you no.”
“Would you ease up on me? You’re supposed to be my aunt. If any of that was true, would I be thinking day and night about taking the law into my own hands and doing something vengeful to Leonard?”
Joan agreed to change the subject. She began telling Corey how she had moved to a new house in Dorchester, which was beautiful and huge. She lived there with her boyfriend, a construction worker. Irish dude. Very young—Corey’s age—she was robbing the cradle blind. Young but wicked mature. A plumber. He had no teeth, she said. He’d done time. “You would love him.”
Corey said that was great. He said he’d like to meet him.
He revealed his military plans to Joan.
