• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 281 0

cracks or shifts that made me think of huge upheavals. I closed my eyes and listened. The silence was complete. I’d never felt a stillness such as this, never such enveloping nothing. But such nothing that was, that spun around me, or she did, Jessie, warm to the touch. I don’t know how long I stood there, every muscle in my body listening. Could I forget my name in this silence? I took my hand off the wall and put it to my face. I was sweating heavily and licked the moist stink off my fingers. I opened my eyes. I was still here, in the outside world. Then something made me turn my head and I had to tell myself in my astonishment what it was, a fly, buzzing near. I had to say the word to myself, fly. It had found me and come near, in all this streaming space, buzzing, and I swatted vaguely at the sound and then started back toward the dead end. I moved slowly and stayed near the wall, in intermittent shade. After a time I began to think I should have reached the car by now. I was tired, hungry, water was gone. I wondered whether this gap, this pass had a north and south fork and was it possible I had strayed into the wrong fork? I could not convince myself that it was not possible. The sky seemed to taper toward a point where the cliff walls met and I thought of turning back. I took the water bottle out of my pocket and tried to squeeze a drop or two into my mouth. Every few steps I told myself to turn back but kept going forward, increasing the pace. I wasn’t sure that this was the same crushed granite path I’d come in on. I tried to recall color and texture, even the sound my shoes made on the coarse grains. Just when I knew I was lost I saw the trail widen slightly and then there was the car, a dusty shitpile of metal and glass, and I opened the door and fell into the seat. I put the key in the hole and hit the AC button and the fan button and a couple of other buttons. Then I sat back a moment and took a number of deep deliberate breaths. It was time to tell Elster we were going home.

That night I could not sleep. I fell into reveries one after another. The woman in the other room, on the other side of the wall, sometimes Jessie, other times not clearly and simply her, and then Jessie and I in her room, in her bed, weaving through each other, turning and arching sort of sealike, wavelike, some impossible nightlong moment of transparent sex. Her eyes are closed, face unfrozen, she is Jessie at the same time that she is too expressive to be her. She seems to be drifting outside herself even when I bring her into me. I’m there and aroused but barely see myself as I stand at the open door watching us both.

I looked at him. The face was gradually sinking into the dense framework of the head. He was in the passenger seat and I said the words quietly.

“Seat belts.”

He seemed to listen belatedly, knowing I’d spoken but failing to gather a meaning. He was beginning to resemble an x-ray, all eye sockets and teeth.

“Seat belts,” I said again.

I buckled up and waited, watching him. We were taking the rented car, mine. I’d hosed down the car. I’d packed the bags and put them in the trunk. I’d made a dozen phone calls. He nodded this time and began to reach toward the strap over his right shoulder.

We were leaving her behind. This was hard to think about. We’d agreed at the beginning that one of us had to be here, always. Now an empty house into fall and through winter and no chance he’d ever return. I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over to help him strap in. Then I drove into town to fill up the tank and soon we were out again moving through fault zones and between stands of swirled rock, the history that runs past the window, mountains forming, seas receding, Elster’s history, time and wind, a shark’s tooth marked on desert stone.

It was right to take him out of there. He’d be shivered down to a hundred pounds if we were to stay. I would take him to Galina, that was her name, the mother, and entrust the man to her compassion. Look at him, frail and beaten. Look at him, inconsolably human. They were together in this,