Dirt

Chapter 27

Black rock. Volcanic. Rock that had boiled, shot through with air. Broken now, severed and sheared and sharp as glass. Pores and hollows. The walnut trees growing from the rock, roots worked into vents and cauldrons, snaking along fissures. Soft flesh of wood encased.

From the surface, no way of telling how far they reached. The roots and trunks white against the black.

Miles between every tree, the orchard grown. And Galen carrying a small sack of water, a sack made of flesh, and he had to let a few drops fall on the roots of each tree. Rare that he saw a tree at all. Mostly wandering, looking for the next, and the land growing as he walked, cracking and stretching, opening great chasms that filled with melt and hardened and he continued on.

His feet torn, unshod, and clicking on the rock. His joints clicking also, each movement of knee or hip or ankle, even the movement of his eyes. The sack thick with fat held very little water, and it had to be held carefully. He must not drop it. If he dropped it, all would be lost. And so he stared at the rock, careful in placing each step and click.

Galen knew that years were passing, that he had no hope of reaching every tree in time. He might not reach even the next tree. The water disappearing as he walked, becoming only a sheen on the walls of fat.

The surface of the planet was bending. But the other problem was the melt. The melt delayed him, because he couldn’t help gazing. A deep red, rock transformed, all patterns round and edged with black, a slow boil and upwelling, and then the fade as the rock cooled and lost its color.

He continued walking even as he woke, held on to the dream, tried to extend and understand. Walking toward the next tree. Strange dream. He tried not to think, tried not to let his waking mind take over, tried to fall back again into the larger mind. But the small mind refused. Galen had to pee, and the small mind was very focused on that.

Fine, he said, and he rose and peed in his mother’s toilet and nothing felt real. Standing here in his mother’s bathroom, covered in dirt. Sleeping in his mother’s bed. His mother out there still. None of this could make any sense, and he didn’t want to participate in it anymore. He wanted to fall back asleep and dream.

So Galen lay down and refused to wake. He felt exhausted still, enormously tired, and was able to fall back out of mind until he woke again this time without dreams and his mouth dry and stomach demanding food.

He rose and peed again and bent down to drink out of the sink faucet, gulp after gulp, so dry. His mother’s toothbrush, purple and white, something from another life, a life already difficult to remember or even believe. Who we are now, he said.

He walked downstairs to the kitchen, legs sore and tight, his joints clicking just like in the dream, bone ends catching as they worked. His hips no longer arranged correctly.

The problem again of what to eat. A constant reminder that incarnation was enslavement. He wanted to just be done with eating, wanted to rip his stomach out and move on to other things. But it would not be ignored. Demanding and desperate, and until he gave it what it wanted, he would have no peace.

What would your highness like? he asked. The pantry a jumble of colors, but the most colorful of all a large can of fruit cocktail. The bright red cherries, yellows and whites and greens, the grapes. All in syrup too sweet.

The can heavy. He held it up to the opener as it circled. Fruit cocktail sandwiches, he said.

Galen heaped the fruit into a hammock of bread and had a bite, the bread gone doughy from the wet. He ate a cherry on its own, could taste the dye. Other than the cherries, all the other fruit had become the same, all one taste. It was simply “fruit,” not peach or pear or grape or whatever else. And this was the same for people’s lives, going to work at the same jobs, living in the same houses, those houses over the high fence. But not Galen’s life. Galen’s life was not like theirs. He was wearing dirt, and that was the big difference. You knew a man by how he dressed.

Galen was watering trees today. He would need to carry his sack of flesh with its small bit of water and bring a few drops to each tree across a landscape of black rock and melt. Except that the orchard was dirt, not rock, and there were not miles between each trunk, opening and increasing. How the dream world fit into the waking world was never clear.

Galen gave up on the bread, forked the fruit in great mouthfuls and chewed quickly. He knew that what he was afraid to think of was his mother. Food always a substitute, never itself. He tied his shoes and stepped out into the oven.

Afternoon already, a kiln for baking bricks, dry and stinging his lungs. Each day seemed hotter than any other, but they were all the same inferno. The shed bleached in glare, heat waves in the orchard, actual heat waves like melted glass a few feet from the ground, distorting the shapes of the trunks and weeds and furrows. The orchard looked like it might be only ten feet deep, something you could cross in one long step. Or it could be miles deep. Distance impossible to tell.

He didn’t want to go near the shed. Its rough belt of wood, a partial furrow on the orchard wall, his mother somewhere inside. That his life had funneled down to this wasn’t fair.

He stepped out of the shade into the full blast of the sun. The stream of light at impossible speed and pulsing as it hit, tearing away all. Any shelter was temporary. In the end, the sun would take everything.

Galen nearly blind as he walked. This body with the landscape shifting around it but the light constant. He could not stay out here long.

Everything shrank in the glare. The roof of the shed maybe a foot or two lower, the boards thinner by half an inch. The fig tree more squat to the ground, not as tall as before. The furrows shallow. Galen didn’t know what that meant, that everything grew as the light faded and shrank again in the day. This was true of presence, also, that shadow and night seemed inhabited and the bright day did not. All life was emptied at midday, and yet Galen had to roam around in it for countless hours, always roaming a desert.

The path from lawn into orchard always along the left side, this sunrise wall, east facing. Here was where his mother had hammered the planks loose. Here was where he had stood in the shape of a cross. And here now was where he found the checkbook, pushed out in the gap between human and solid earth, armored by rock, where he had not been able to dig a furrow.

He picked it up and flipped through the pages, squinting. She had signed every check, and a dozen of them had amounts. The last one $430,000. All this money.

He looked away at the walnut trees, whited. Looked again at the checkbook, held it in both hands, turned it over and found a note. Please, son. I love you.

And yet she’d been willing to throw him away. She had called him an animal and wanted him to spend the rest of his days in a cage like an animal.

Please, son. I love you. He didn’t know what to think of this, because here was the problem: he believed her. He knew that he owed her everything, that every son owes his mother everything. And he knew that she loved him, and that he loved her. But he also knew that she had been willing to throw him away. And it was not possible to get these things to fit together.

Mom? he called.

He could not stand here long. The sun would not allow it. Mom, he repeated.

But there was no answer. He walked up close, put his ear at a gap between boards and tried to hear movement, a dry voice, anything.

The landings of grasshoppers, a yellow sound, without depth. The distant, unstoppable hum of the air conditioners. A car passing on the road, much muffled by the hedges. But nothing else. Only the sound of his own blood and breath.

He walked to the next wall, with the bay door and its old rusty lock. Mom? he tried again, but no answer. So he went to the third wall, the side with the toolshed, where he would bake through the afternoon, and he stood there squinting at old wood. I can’t make any sense of you, he said.

She had been excited, breathless and excited at the thought of him being dragged away to prison. She had said she was afraid of him, but why? He had done nothing. She had called him an abuser and a rapist, her own son who had done nothing. What he’d shared with Jennifer was not a crime.

You, he said. You have done this. You have forced me into this.

She was not responding. He wanted to talk with her. He wanted to find out why.

It’s not fair, he said, that I get one parent and she’s crazy. That’s not fair. And here I am talking to a wall, just as crazy as you. Thanks, Mom.

There would be no peace, ever. He could see that. His mind would always be chained to thinking about her. Guilt and anger and shame and everything else that made a life smaller. She had destroyed everything. He had wanted to focus on his meditation. That was all. He had wanted to be left alone.

He couldn’t just stand here. He went to the lock, held it in his hand, yanked at it to see whether it might open. He had no idea where the key might be. Rusty old lock, much bigger than needed, thick steel.

Galen looked in the toolshed for the key. Along the small shelves and ledges built into the walls, added to over the years. His grandfather a kind of pack rat. And the problem was not in finding a key. The problem was that there were too many keys, dozens of them, on chains and lying individually in the dust. So he collected them all and brought them back to the bay door, set them carefully in the bottom of a furrow.

Rusty, dirty keys and a rusty, dirty lock. Even if he found the right key, he might not know, because it wouldn’t go in easily. The lock so hot in this sun it was burning his hands, but he tried key after key, finally went for cotton gloves from the toolshed, then tried more keys.

I haven’t decided anything, he told her. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just seeing if I have the key.

Then he thought of WD-40. That would help tremendously. He walked past all the crap scattered in the dirt, everything he had thrown out of the toolshed, and didn’t see a blue and yellow can. He stepped inside the toolshed and let his vision adjust, knelt and searched along the lower wall under a slanting roof and found half-used cans of paint, grease and engine oil, and finally the WD-40.

Galen sprayed the keyhole in the lock, leaned away from the smell, sprayed the pile of keys in the dirt. He needed a rag or something to clean them, but he had only the cotton gloves. So before he tried each key, he wiped it, both sides, on the glove of his left hand, on the palm, the fingers still curled in pain, that hand turning into a club.

A few of the keys were the right size and went partway in, but not one of them went all the way in.

How is this possible? he asked. A million keys and one lock. How could I not have the key here? Where’s the key, Mom?

Not one of them fit. He walked around to the lawn, to the pile of crinkled photos and crap from the drawers. He took the glove off his right hand and sifted for keys, found dozens more. It didn’t make any sense that there were so many keys, as if his family had owned all the world. What did they all unlock? What was left? All the illusions everywhere in this life, and we were left holding a pile of keys to nothing. This is perfect, Galen said. This is exactly how things are.

He carried them all back to the lock, and he knew none would fit but he tried them anyway, one at a time, in what felt like a ritual, nothing less than sacred. I honor this, he said. If a key fits, you’ll go free.

Light-headed from the WD-40 vaporizing. Light-headed from the sun, from living in this incinerator. A grasshopper landed on the lock and he let it stay there and watch. A husk of a body, something that could be threshed like wheat. Good bread of grasshopper, something Galen might try.

When the last key failed, he let the lock fall back against wood and the grasshopper launched. Galen on his knees in the dirt, burning. He didn’t know what to do next.

His mother was dying on the other side of this door. There was no point in hiding that. He hadn’t made any decision. He had never made a decision to let her die, but she was dying anyway. It was her own fault, something she had done to herself, but he was responsible too. She had made him responsible. Damn you, he said.

Our actions controlled beyond what we could know. Galen could never have seen any of this, and yet this is what he had been given.

He felt like he would die, too, if he remained kneeling here in the dirt and sun, so he rose, his legs stiff, and walked around to the fig tree and the spigot and opened the water wide, drank gulp after gulp. He could try to get some water to her, put the hose through a gap in the wall and let it run. He might have to do that. Or let her out. But he didn’t see how he could let her out. She had left him with no options. Thanks a lot, he said.

Galen walked into the wilderness on the other side of the lawn, into what was supposed to be his grandmother’s garden. Thistle and dry yellow grass to his shoulders, his feet falling out of sight, rattlesnake and lizard. He didn’t care what happened. Live oak, its leaves knit up in spiny points, scratching all along his bare skin, through his shield of dirt. A thicket of them, and he pushed his way through, liked the awareness that came with all the cuts. A forest for flaying. The leaves only half alive, half green, the trunks thin and numerous and hidden in shadow. His head still exposed to the sun as he pushed between them, short trees without real shade.

This wilderness extended, stretched on and on, thistle and grass and live oak. His thighs and stomach caught by the thistles, his feet pierced by thorn and branch and rock. He held his arms out when he could, to catch more thistle and oak. A shallow dry sea he was wading through, merciless sea, his eyes stinging, the taste of salt, and he the only man to wade here.