My classes, as of now, were covered by others, Mr. Rubins told me. I deserved a break. I could go on home. But I should gather my things first, of course. Didn’t want to forget that. Remove every trace, Mr. Rubins requested. Which is, you know, what I tried to do. But later you discover that it’s not so easy. Traces remain. Not just one’s dumb things, but the people we have spoken to, who hold traces of us inside them. Do we remove them, too? Where does it stop?
Some cats were asleep in the road on my way home. Everyone seemed tired. People sat on the sidewalks as if they couldn’t wait to collapse in private. Not a lot of people. But here and there. Enough to notice. I steered the car carefully. I was not tired. Not even close. I sensed I would be awake for a long time.
At home I did some math regarding my finances. I’d have my salary for two more months. I had savings for another three. My pension, such as it was, would pay for a bag of apples every few months for one small child. How much longer would we all live, me and Gin and the kids? It was hard to say. A person had trouble coming up with an airtight plan, or even a deluded plan, when basic data of this sort was so hard to uncover. You could fuss with these little life-expectancy calculators on the Internet, but they didn’t always kick out real numbers when it came to kids. Little kids especially, cute or not, healthy or not, creeps or sweethearts. Sometimes the sites shut you out if you punched in, say, a very low number in the menu bar for age—as if you wanted to know something illicit. Life expectancy of a nine-year-old. I mean, why not just say? There’s math behind everything. It’s not a death threat to wonder how long a creature will live. Who has time for shyness?
The upshot was, of course, not enough money. Nowhere close. Maybe that was always the upshot. Maybe that’s the definition of upshot. I loaded up the job lists and clicked into the sweet heart of them. I needed to work alone, in a lonely place, where no one would walk or stand. I needed a job inside myself, a way to get paid for sitting in a dark room, money for steering clear of others. I could clean things and fix things, and I could talk to people who didn’t talk back. I had a made-up language, with words that mostly sounded like breath gone wrong, the last breaths of an old man, and I could recite that for someone if they paid me. I could use my body against the world, where things were wrong and needed to be changed. Digging and hauling and lifting and pushing. I could climb and I could descend and I could travel on the horizontal, unless someone was hunting me. I could make shapes where there were none and maybe they’d be called houses. I could speak to children, if anyone would allow it. I could not sing and I could not cook for a crowd and I could not laugh on command. I did not, so far as I knew, have a bad back. I knew something about the invisible world—the worms we call molecules—but all of that could change—facts could grow up—and then I’d just be a storyteller, lying about what goes on around us, hoping people believed that untruth reveals a kind of beauty, and not just because it’s a medicine against what is real. Maybe it was once true, and maybe it will be true again.
Gin came home and we drank a great deal, because that was the dance style in those days. That was how we fought the night. We roasted the shit out of a chicken and cracked into it like it was a great mythological beast. There was a wine and we put our faces in it, forgetting to breathe. Gin went to the icebox, where she found a frozen old log of something she’d made, bearded in freezer burn, and with my help we sawed into it, making thick yellow discs. Gin kept saying I should trust her, and when these toasted beauties came out of the oven, after ages and ages, they were soft and hot and sweet, and if they burned my mouth they also almost made me cry with pleasure. We attacked a platter of them and left none for the kids. Screw the kids, we were yelling, smashing our glasses against the wall.
The night wasn’t going to go on forever, because no one had figured that out yet. Everyone in the world wished for such a thing, begged for it all the time, but it was as if each of us thought that someone else would do the hard work to bring it about, an endless night now and then, an option, invoked even at extreme personal cost, for no morning. I wanted to sit with Gin forever and die in our chairs. Me dying before she did. But just by a second. Me and then her and then I would have to think a bit about the list from there, who would die and when. There was so much more involved.
“They took my kids away,” I told Gin. I hated to ruin her night, but she needed to know.
“What? What do you mean?”
“They took them from me. I’m fired.”
It probably wasn’t possible for Gin to get softer, but she did. You could have seen it on film, and maybe then you’d see proof that she wasn’t even really a person. What a small, dull word for what Gin was. How obscene. She softened and she almost transformed into a kind of medicine, not just a creature but a whole atmosphere, designed to soothe and neutralize this sad angry thing that had flown into its airspace. Gin had been tapped for a role and I could see her getting into character. Ms. Sympathy. She might have had the decency to leave the room during this transformation. Of course I might have had the decency not to exist in the first place. How rude to come on the scene like I did. How thoughtless.
“We knew this might happen, Jay,” Gin said. She held my hands.
“You did, maybe.”
“Oh sweetie.”
“I know.”
“Oh no. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Oh it’s not your fault. I deserve it.”
“You don’t.”
“Well, you’re being nice. You’re being paid to say that.”
Gin got her wild and beautiful look. She grinned and I almost couldn’t bear to look at her.
“Ha!” she said. “Not enough. Where’s my money, if that’s so? Why aren’t I rich by now?”
What I did a few days later was to take a special twenty-dollar bill that I’d been given and that I’d saved forever, I don’t know why. A mother might have given it to me long ago, I can’t remember. I didn’t earn it, I know that. It was a gift. A person handed it to me and I had never at that point seen so much money in my life. I just always kept it in my shaving kit, and it had stayed crisp somehow. It was still new money and I probably thought that it had magic, which embarrasses me to admit because mostly I can’t stand that kind of talk. I put it in an envelope for Gin and left it on her dresser. Once I used to collect gin bottles, just for their labels, and I’d steam them off and then scissor out her name, Gin and Gin and Gin. I pasted one of these to the envelope so she’d know it was for her. I wanted to write a note and I thought a lot about what I might say. I wrote it all out in my mind. But there was no easy way to get it out of me. I didn’t know how to extract it. It was all in there, in me, but I couldn’t prove it.
“From me,” I wrote, “for you. Because you are very nice.”
After Gin died, the children went to live with their aunt in Maroyo County, north of here by not so long. This all sounds pretty vague, but trust me, it wasn’t. It really happened and it felt real and there was nothing remotely vague about any of it. Gin’s was the fast cancer, which, I hate to say it, is far cheaper, I mean dollar-wise, and possibly on the emotional side, though I am no expert in that sort of tabulation. How do we count the various ways and styles of nothing we feel?
We used our money for her last days. She begged me not to. Once she even said that I was supposed to drive her out into a field and leave her there. It was one of our favorite places, not that I rank things like that: nice places, fun places, places I like. We used to go there before the kids, and then with the kids, and then alone sometimes, when the kids had their own life. Maybe the kids will go there one day without me. Maybe there will be days when no one goes there, when no one is left. One day it won’t even be a field. Lava will flow slowly over it.