A fear like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Some people always know, ahead of all the others, what to be watching out for. One day, sooner or later, those people wouldn’t be wrong.
And where would he be? he wondered. Would he be complete? Would he have done whatever it took, no matter what, to make himself whole?
4
Stay Down and Take It
James is home early saying that goddamnit we really seriously need to pack. Hup hup, time to go. It’s the weather, again, and it bores me so. We live where the water loves to visit. Just a little bit of rain off the coast, that’s all, and it will try to flood into our home. It loves to soak our rug and rise up the walls, and once it loved to seep into our electronics, inside the TV cabinet, and destroy our precious entertainment center, which keeps us, or me anyway, from raiding the medicine cabinet at night for other pleasures. Otherwise, well, we have brilliant sunsets and the kind of grass that is absurdly tall, taller than you or me. I don’t know how it doesn’t just fall over. You’d think it had a long slender bone in it, in each blade. Some original, beautiful creature that needed no limbs or head, because it had no enemies. Who knows.
James bustles around the house, grabbing what he can. He says to pack light and to pack smart. I like this military side of him. I almost feel charmed. The evacuation is mandatory this time, something nasty and mean and serious is barreling down on us, and I almost wish we had a pretty siren in our little community for occasions like this one. A siren adds a feeling of gravity—to an evacuation, to a catastrophe. Just a feeling that something important is happening, which one so often does not get to feel. James says that he’ll grab our “go” bag, which I didn’t even know we had. Does it have pears in it, and medical marijuana, and Percocets, and frozen Snickers bars? Something tells me it’s more of a batteries and rope and candles and matches kind of bag. James is huffy and swollen and red as he loads the car. This is a little bit much for him. Still, it’s nice to see him excited, in charge, alive. It’s been hard to watch a man his age slowly lose his purpose, as he’s been doing, shuffling around the kitchen trying to perfect his long-simmering sauces, which only get poured out on the back lawn when he’s done, since how much gravy-drenched flesh can the two of us reasonably consume?
There is just one road out of here, and everyone we know is on it, moaning silently, I imagine, gently rending their summer linens at this unwelcome disruption. It gets tiring waving at them all—stressed-out wrinkled accidents of the human form, with white hair, or no hair, or nubby yellow sun visors. Grimacing, hunched over their steering wheels, as if they are being chased by men with guns. We know these people by their cars, which are long and dark and quiet, just like ours. We could all just call each other, share information and prop up each other’s nervous systems with voice-based medication, but people are saving their cell phone batteries. We’ve been through this drill before. Who knows where we’ll all be tonight. James also prefers me not to talk on the phone when he’s driving. He does his best to tolerate it, bless him, but he tenses up so terribly that I fear he will break open and spill everywhere, even while he insists, sometimes angrily, that he really doesn’t mind. Really really really, with spit fluffing out of his mouth and a look of pure murder in his eyes. I feel that he is daring me to make a call, but when I consider the risk, I sort of daren’t. After all, I am also a passenger in the vehicle that he is driving, and I must consider my own safety as well.
“This is the hardest part,” says James. “Just getting out of here.”
Well put, and doesn’t that just apply to any old situation: a meeting, a party, a relationship, a life? Always that sticky problem of the exit and how to squeeze through it.
When I don’t respond, James says, “Do you agree?” It’s what he often wants and needs. Assent. I tend to pay out as much as I can, with my mouth and otherwise, but always one must monitor the personal cost, careful not to add to the deficit, which can swell up and trigger a low-grade rage. Not my prettiest style. I never knew that I would be called on so relentlessly to agree with someone. Mother never said. Ask not, I guess, and I sort of haven’t.
I touch his leg. “Oh I do. I was just thinking, in fact, how right you are. This is the difficult part. This right here.” I would so love to point at the two of us, the fact of us, here in this car, on this road, on this day with a storm coming, in this particular life, just to say that this is the difficult part. Because, well. But the precise gesture eludes me. Hands can only signify so much. Usually they should just rest in one’s lap, sneaking beneath the garment now and then for a wee scratch at the tuft. This is possibly why one is supposed to use one’s words. I think. Plus, James is focusing all of his energy on the road ahead, which is really just an endless line of cars pointing west, away from the storm, away from home. We will be here a while. We might as well table any immediate feelings.
“This is about the only time I hate this island,” James says. “When it keeps us prisoner.”
“Yup,” I say. “Me too.”
It’s not really an island that we live on, or it wasn’t until some developers got clever. Because people love an island. I guess we love an island. I’m told they used explosives. They bombed a little spit of land that connected two bigger blobs of coastal blah, then built a baby road over the obliterated spit, the road we are now stuck on. So, poof, our little town became an island, and the houses suddenly cost more. The wind was arguably sharper and cooler after that, the light more intense, more knowing and intimate. More light-like. According to the marketing, anyway. Oh it was instantly spectacular, and all it took was some dynamite stuffed into the gaping pores of an old, rotted peninsula. Blowing your way to beauty might have been a nice slogan. One’s whole attitude to life was said to deepen, thoughts and feelings growing ever more rarefied and special. Island life. Too bad we can’t all die here, too, just to sustain our purity, but the island has a rule. You can die here, sure, and many of us have, spectacularly and otherwise, usually otherwise, but you must be buried across the sound, where the regular dumb folk reside and perish, and where the ground will open up for any old dead person, no questions asked. Even a living one, maybe, although who can say? Of course cremation is, as the saying goes, a workaround. A fine one. You can come home again—in a jar—and some of us have, but the victory seems small. I look at certain old friends, rendered to dust in their tureens, placed on various island mantels, and it is hard to feel just what it is they’ve won.
“What’s strange,” I say, as we idle in traffic, “is that the sun is out. It’s such a fine day. So weirdly beautiful.”
James cranes his neck to look out the window, trying maybe to be fair, and he has that expression, as if he’s evaluated all of the evidence but still, he’s very sorry to say, he just cannot bring himself to agree. It would violate his delicate moral compass to cede any ground here. “I’m not sure that’s so strange,” he says, as if there’s a superior adjective he’s reluctant to share. “Quiet before the you know, and all. Plus I see some…” And he points into nowhere, where there is maybe nothing, and I’m sure I don’t even need to look.