by Habash, Gabe
There’s a loud sound like electronic bending and the radio goes back to the old voices. “There’s some orange barrels tipped over the line, by … uh … where the fuck am I anyway … Fessenden … little past the grade school there … going east.” I’ve moved to my bed, farther away from the radio on the floor, but I don’t know when this happened.
I’ve started locking myself in my room before dark, storing up snacks from the cafeteria and working up a sweat. I take out the Barron’s intending to do the vocab exercises but instead I draw diagrams of whales and then some wolves on the blank pages.
The snow keeps coming down until the power blinks before going out completely, and then the building goes silent. I sit on my bed, waiting for the PA system to tell me what’s going on, but after I think fifteen minutes of nothing but the wind outside, it’s clear there’s no one else in the building to get on the PA, that I’m stuck by myself in the dark with the thing in the bathroom. The school has fully cleared out, who knows how close the nearest help is? Under my door, I can see the flicker of the backup lights.
I take out the plastic bag of roasted zucchini and squash, now obviously cold, and pour a butterscotch pudding cup down my throat. I lick the inside of the container. This is my midnight snack.
I have to pee but I don’t dare open the door, so I open the window and climb up on the ledge and let loose into the blizzard.
I have no access to a scale here and I feel like I’m gaining too much weight.
In the dark, I find my laxatives box under the pamphlets and this leads to me shitting out the window.
I put on my wool hat and three sweatpants and three sweatshirts and my brown coat. One-legged jump-roping, the rope scraping the ceiling, and push-ups and sit-ups and one-leg scrambles, and then I try doing some running in place but I don’t push my knee too hard. No water’s in the room so I collect some snow in the empty vegetable bag and consume that.
I measure time by how many bathrooms I do and so far it’s four.
This isn’t so bad. Nothing can get me in here. I can’t even see myself. I once read that humans stuck in total darkness for three days can become completely blind, due to eye atrophy. In my room, drenching my layers, I drown out the noises outside my door with the medicine ball, I throw it down over and over and over. What does North Dakota mean to me? In seventh grade, I was 13–8. In eighth grade, I was 10–10. In ninth grade, I was 11–14, no postseason. In tenth grade, I was 16–13, sectional qualifier. In eleventh grade, I was 23–11, district qualifier. In twelfth grade, I was 24–8, state qualifier. At Oregsburg, in my freshman season, I was 21–13, eighth place in regional, not good enough for an invite to the Division IV championship. In my sophomore season, I was 23–11, fourth place in the regional, not good enough for an invite to the Division IV championship. In my junior season, I was 25–10, fourth place in the regional, not good enough for an invite to the Division IV championship. It wasn’t until college when I jammed enough histories into my skull that I began to feel them rattle inside, clinking like glass and importance, the palsy of history. They matter more and more and I wrestle harder and harder. I wish I had ropes to do pummels. I keep going, I’m trying to outlast the snow. More sit-ups. More bag water. I eat two graham crackers.
Here’s a math question: During the course of a life, do most people in the world experience more happiness or more suffering?
I’m very sticky now. Appetite! Slime, slime! I rub it on myself. I outpace any suffering with my appetite, I lick my arms and bang my head against the wall three hundred times, I can’t get enough. I’m ready to be let out now.
You lock yourselves in the room where you sleep with the person you love. This is the most intimate thing you can do with this person. I’ve locked myself in two different rooms with Mary Beth and at the time I couldn’t believe my luck.
I’m trying to remember when it was I first heard about tubal ligation. Top five extra organs, kidneys, spleen, gonads, colon, appendix, piling up in a big old dumpster. Back in health class, black-haired Ms. Garrett, who just totally excreted the loneliness smell, had part of her jaw removed for her mouth cancer and she kept telling us she was cancer free, cancer free! She taught us that poor people get pregnant more easily and would sneak in racist shit like how most diseases came from China. It must feel so good to get the bad part of your body cut out.
An experiment for the human being with a vibrant breed of loneliness is to self-insert the middle finger of the writing hand into the anus.
I have considered masturbation but I’ve convinced myself that whatever it is I’m holding on to in there is worth holding on to.
I open the window and wipe off the snow and see that the weather’s stopped and that there’s some decent daylight in between the frost fog. The snow is at least four feet deep. I get into bed and go back to sleep and wait for them to come get me.
Attention.
The PA system crackles and through the fuzz, I hear a man clearing his throat. “Hello. We are here. We are here to help you out. We will fix the lights in a moment. Please stay where you are.”
I open my door. I have put the gorilla mask on. The hallway is lit by small bulbs stuck in the four corners of the floor so that it’s bright at the ends and darker as you near the middle. Distant electric fizzes. The place is trying to come back alive. I head forward into the darkness. “Please give me two more minutes. We are coming.” The backup lights in the bathroom strobe with no pattern. When I turn the handle, no water comes out of the sink. I try flushing a toilet. Nothing. I walk down the line of stalls, every single door open. The lights tick and flicker. I turn the other corner, making my circle, and stop at the row of shower cells. There are eight. The curtains of the first seven are open. The eighth has been drawn shut, and it is moving.
“We are here.”
Two campus security men are in the hall and I run past them. “Hey, are you O.K.?” My knee is fine now, I realize, I can take the stairs at full practice speed. This is no problem. Outside, there are people starting to shovel the snow.
Without a direction in mind, I jog around areas with the least snow, move from overhang to overhang, all the dark groins of the college.
Linus is in Nebraska and I’m glad he’s gone. Boy am I glad I don’t have plantar fasciitis! I hope something bad happens to him. He doesn’t understand anything, he’s just a kid. He doesn’t understand me anymore, and I don’t understand myself in relation to him. When he comes back, I have to keep his mouth away from my prestige.
Around the corner of Opal Hall, I spot a rattly snowplow burring past some pine trees, shooting snow off the highway, clearing a direct path of habitation east. Toward Konstantin College.
Ice. I don’t need anybody. I don’t need anybody. I can pass around here undetected, I can do whatever I want. I’m the one in control. Ice. Cold.
I stomp behind the plow that’s pushing aside the snow with its face. Snow gets through my socks. The clouds from my breath go away. The temperature rises so quickly that I can feel it.
When I get about eight miles outside of Oregsburg, there’s much less snow. You can see dirt everywhere, as if it hasn’t snowed on the highway in a week, as if the clouds didn’t move west to east but squatted on Oregsburg, did their work, and then disappeared.
I start running. I have a plan.
All this time to myself. I have time to take stock of the big picture. What do I think about? Does it count as considering mortality if, passing a scraggled bunch of roadside trees, I imagine death as a black stump you continually bump up against? If I cross over to thoughts of God, a wild man who is sitting up in the clouds playing with his crayons? And what does it mean if they fall out of my head ten seconds after I have them, gone for good, how much validity can they possibly have?
Most of life is adulthood, mostly husbands who are prosecutors coming home with liquor buzzes and hard-ons from doing justice, ready to hide it inside their wives who are mostly in missionary, staring at ceilings, life is mostl
y wet stone buildings, collars, rain, snow.
A single car drives by, heading back toward Oregsburg. Inside, they might’ve heard for an instant my voice singing through the lips-hole of my mask, “Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies, farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain.”
There is a story I read in the suicide pamphlet about a woman from Jamestown who had such bad headaches that she drove the hour and a half to Bismarck in order to take the elevator to the nineteenth floor of the capitol building, the tallest building in the area, and jump out of an open window. Did she check below beforehand to see what she’d besmatter? But what I kept getting hung up on was how much time she had to think about it. She had the whole car ride and elevator ride up to think about it.
I pass a pile of rusted iron girders at the edge of some tall grass leading to woods. A mother possum emerges huffing from the pile and trudges toward me, her pregnancy dragging on the ground. She begins hissing and chases me off.
Under some distant fog, you can see the small cluster of Konstantin buildings. But on this side, there are little farmhouses dropped in scattered locations, divided by enormous brown fields. Skiffington is more spread out than Aiken.
The temperature is over fifty. It must be late afternoon. I stalk around the houses. This is what happens when my discipline doesn’t know where to go. Taking off the mask, I go up to a house that looks like it contains nice people. I knock. A middle-old lady comes to the door. Wives who smell like their husbands and children.
“Well, you’re a long drink of water!”
“Hi, ma’am, I’m visiting from Yankton and seem to have gotten turned around. I was hoping you could direct me to my cousin’s house. The Carvers?”
She eyes my sweatpants. “Yankton! Long way from home, aren’t you, cowboy?” I think right now she is recording a lasting mental image of my bulge. “You certainly do look like a Carver, however.” Her look moves to my face for the first time. “I see the resemblance, even with that fight-swelling there.”
“Yes, ma’am. We all look alike.”
“Two farms down, Mr. Carver. Red roof, surprised you didn’t remember that! Tell them I say hi, and you should be wearing warmer clothes than that. It’s going to storm.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
I put the mask back on, go down a main Skiffington thoroughfare until I come to a side road on the left, where way at the end of it, I see a red roof. If the Carvers happened to be looking out of their windows, they would have plenty of time to see me coming up their front drive, marching between their silos and barn. But I get all the way up to the house, have time to walk around it. What do you even do on a farm? I cannot shake images of dinner triangles, rose-colored sunsets, old man Carver braining the hogs. A big window on the side is open and from inside, I hear a woman’s voice on the radio. I approach the window, stick my head in. It’s the kitchen. Something smells like smoke. “Nearby residents are seeing a record snowfall, leading to widespread power outages and road blockage, while close-by areas are puzzlingly clear. More after this.” The inside of the house is brighter and warmer than the outside. While observing the Carvers’ clean and inviting house, I get the sour sense of being very far from my home, which itself is not a real place as it should be with furniture and cared-for floors, it’s only a dense feeling inside my whatever, a feeling of familiarity.
Someone’s coming, so I duck down and make my way crouchwise to the front door, shoving the mask down my pants. The doorbell is cheerful.
The person that comes to the door is the mother. This is how I know: she has the distinct look of a woman who has given birth, which is lifelong and both tired and satisfied.
“Jesus, son. What happened to your face?”
“Good evening or afternoon, Mrs. Carver. My name is Stephen Florida. I attend the nearby college Oregsburg. A few weeks ago—”
“I know who you are. Why don’t you come inside.”
“That’s really all right. I was actually hoping—”
But she’s leading me by the shoulders toward the kitchen where I just stuck my head. She sits me in a wicker chair with a strong weave that crackles comfortingly when I put myself down on it.
“Can I make you some eggs? I’m sure you’re like Joey and don’t eat anything. He’ll eat eggs sometimes, though.”
“No, thank you, ma’am. Really I just—”
“What can I get you for the problems you’re having with your face? We have iodine and bandages in the bathroom there, if you’d like.”
“No, thank you, could I—”
“You need to eat. When’s the last time you ate?”
“Recently.”
“I’ll make you some eggs.”
So Mrs. Carver makes me eggs while I sit and wait in her kitchen, at the table where Joseph Carver eats. I compliment her on her red sweater. She puts the eggs in front of me. They’re scrambled. “That’s only two. Under two hundred calories total. No salt, no butter. Olive oil. You eat that.”
So I chew with my back teeth. The digestive feel is one of tossing an egg in a large hole, and there is more upset than pleasure in choking down Mrs. Carver’s eggs. But I’m not trying to upset anyone so I get them down for her benefit. She stands by the window where my head was, watching to make sure it all goes in. Her slacks are midway up her stomach, a menopausal bump pushes out the zipper area. She takes out a cigarette and lights it.
“We were all sorry about the match,” she says. “I was very sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Joey was very sorry.” She looks right at me. “What was it he said? He kept saying it. Oh right. ‘If we wrestled one hundred times he would’ve won fifty.’” She angles her breath out the window and taps the cigarette. “You came over from Oregsburg?”
“Yes.”
“It’s bad over there?”
“Pretty bad.”
“Mm,” she says, then looks out the window, in the direction of the college.
“Is Mr. Carver home?”
“Mr. Carver is no longer in our lives.” If the first instinct is to think he’s dead, it’s certainly replaced by the thought that he’s run away and deserted them, and I believe this because of the way she says it.
“Well, thank you for the eggs, ma’am.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Is Joseph home?”
“No, sorry, he’s not.”
“Where is he?”
She sucks the cigarette hard, the ash end crawls toward her mouth. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“Is he on the property? I could go find him. If I could just have a word. Won’t take long.”
“I’m afraid he’s not here.”
I stare at Mrs. Carver’s old wrinkled face, the source of these lies, I pick her eggs out of my teeth and understand that no amount of talking will get her to change her lies.
From the upstairs, a floorboard creaks.
I knock the chair over, Mrs. Carver running behind me, yelling, “Stop, stop! Please!” But I’ve already found their stairs, I’m up them two at a time. At the top, there are three doors. One is closed. All I want is to wrestle him again, my knee is better now and I’m ready to throw in again, I’m going to get him in a crossface cradle in his own bedroom, I’m owed another shot since my knee cut things short before, it’s the fair thing. I throw open the door and it is a very small room with a bed and at the window there is a wheelchair and a girl with a blanket over her knees and she turns her head and looks at me, her face and head disfigured, she looks happy to see me, her arms crooked and her hands in twisted fists, her mouth wide open and drooling.
“Get out. Right now,” says Mrs. Carver from right behind me.
On the driveway, it begins to rain. I put the mask on. There is a fable about rain in December. When it happens, it is a sign of error and depravity in the people it falls on, and the harder and more prolonged it falls, the worse the human offense, which is why the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah could nev
er stay dry. The rain spatters the pavement, soaking the dirt, and it begins to fall harder.
And maybe I would’ve just gone home and things probably would’ve been just a little different if I hadn’t heard the goat. But I did, I heard the goat.
The Carvers’ barn has a whole bunch of animals around it. The pigs and the cows don’t mind the rain, but the chickens step around under the roof in the shadows, they are too stupid to clean themselves. But what I am interested in is the billy goat. I confess I never used to try anything like this but then a ways back my brain snapped in half. His big bell rattles around on his neck as he chases the fillies around, and they pretend like they don’t like his attention and bombast. He lets out the goat noise. He’s very good about letting everyone know he’s there. He trots out into the rain and over to the fence to get closer to me. He puts his front hooves on the fence and looks at me by turning his head to the side. He has a long curled beard.
I hurdle the fence, my feet sucking into the pen’s mud. He tries to get away from me but I have his back leg, his nice coarse fur, dingleberries on the lower long furs, great unhappy noises as he tries to free himself, but I have him. They’ve disbudded his horns and they are only modest nubs. I grab his other leg, saying, “Here, billy,” and yank him close. I’m going to cradle this fucker. The goat kicks my face, knocks the mask off. I dive into the mud. Skiffington mud has a mustardy tang. He shakes his leg out and runs away, his bell clanging, making a shrill ruckus that warns the others to stay away from me. But then I see what he’s really doing: he’s not running away, he’s only making a wide loop of the pen to build up a head of steam, and he’s making the turn and galloping back toward me, kicking up mud everywhere, his bell flailing, lowering his head, and I stand up to welcome him. I catch his hard skull in my stomach and he knocks me back into the fence, which snaps easily. I land on my back and he keeps going, veering crazily around in the adjacent pasture, waggling his head around and bucking. On my back in the rain, I hear a woman crying, a sound coming from Mrs. Carver, who is standing ten feet away, dripping wet in her fine red sweater, a sad and sorry sight indeed, telling me she’s called the police.
