by David Vann
Jim’s dick feels so satiny and soft, but the light touch is only at first. He squeezes then, really as hard as he can, and likes the ache of that, and then he’s pumping beyond what’s comfortable, because it’s so difficult to come now. It used to be easy. He used to try not to come. But now he has to yank as fast as he can, so fast his shoulder freezes up and the end of his dick burns, and when he comes there’s so little to show, dried up from doing it too often. Purple and swollen all around the head of his penis, bruised, painful, and the skin below that torn a bit, just very small tears no more than a couple millimeters, but they sting. Jim is out of breath, gasping from the effort, not from pleasure. He feels so little pleasure now, only need.
He wonders whether he was loud enough for anyone to hear. He uses a tissue to clean the tiny bit of come, stuffs his Hustler back down into the duffel bag, and tries again to rest or even sleep. How amazing it would be to just sleep. His heart hammering still, his arm and shoulder and dick all pulsing, his head spiraling in pain. Smell of video porn booths, that smell that comes from jacking off several times without a shower between, something the semen does to rot and transform. When do the good moments come, the ones worth living for? When are they supposed to be? He needs to talk with Rhoda, needs a plan for how to get through this evening, because right now it feels impossible.
So he takes a shower. At least that’s productive. Muddy clothing crusted and flaking on the tile floor, and he steps naked into water too hot and steaming, feels his skin burn, watches it turn red, keeps having to step out of the stream and then goes back, wants immolation but not dry. Hot water one of the purest pleasures, but just a few degrees hotter and everything changes.
He can’t endure. He has to turn the temp down, and it feels good to go all the way to cold, because his skin is superheated now, residual cooking, but then he’s coughing, weak from no sleep, and he turns off the water, grabs a towel that is too old and rough, has to pat himself dry carefully. It hurts too much to rub.
He leans his head out the door and yells, “Hey can I borrow pants and a shirt?”
Why bother getting dressed at all? The daily actions, the routines, he hates the whole circus. How many meals has he eaten? A thousand every year, at least, so forty thousand times chewing through what mostly was unwanted, only necessary, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pasta, canned soup, some dry piece of meat, and how many times taking a shit? Maybe fifteen thousand times? A hundred thousand pisses? Taking clothes on or off at least thirty thousand times.
And how many swallows, how many breaths? Mostly we are machines, working pieces of meat.
A soft knock and Mary’s voice, wavering: “I have a pair of Gary’s jeans here, Jim, and one of his shirts.” So he opens the door, standing there in his towel, and she doesn’t look at him, just holds her hand out, head turned away, and he takes the clothing, closes the door again.
Soft old clothing, worn jeans and flannel shirt, too big for him. Smell of detergent.
He walks out like a shrunken old man no longer fitting his previous self. Something diminished and barefoot.
“We have to get you some socks,” Mary says. “And slippers.”
“I need to call Rhoda,” Jim says. He’s in the hallway at the edge of the living room. Mary has disappeared for the socks, but Gary and David and Tracy are all watching him.
“That’s not a good idea,” Gary finally says.
“I need a plan,” Jim says. “How to get through the evening.”
He doesn’t like that David and Tracy are hearing this, but there’s nothing else he can do.
“Everything’s fine,” Gary says. “We’re just going to have some dinner here. And maybe we can play pinochle after.”
“The plan’s not like that.”
“Well what kind of plan then?”
Jim feels the enormity, the impossibility. Why does he ever think there can be a plan?
“Can we play pinochle now?” David asks.
“Okay,” Jim says. He will try not to scare his children.
The dinner table is already set, so they use a folding card table, brown, just like the one Jim has up in Fairbanks. Same brown folding chairs, plastic over metal. He will kill himself at his card table. If it happens when he’s back up in Alaska, that’s where he always sits. No other furniture. So he’ll be in a chair just like this, at a table identical, the .44 magnum resting on it, loaded, and he’ll be talking with Rhoda on the phone. He’ll call her and she’ll probably be at work, or with her new boyfriend, or otherwise busy, and she won’t be able to hear him well. He’ll say, “I love you but I won’t live without you.” Or maybe “can’t” instead of “won’t,” because really is it any choice? And she won’t hear and he’ll have to repeat it, all things made small in the end, the utter lack of dignity on our way out, and then he’ll pull the trigger and much of his head and blood will be instantly on the ceiling and walls but he won’t have to see it, won’t have to see or feel or know anything else ever again. All suffering gone in an instant, and so why has he delayed?
Gary deals him cards in threes, and this seems right. Nothing clear in life. You’d never be dealt a single card, always two other ways you might go. He arranges them by suit, has more diamonds than anything else, only one heart, his life with money and no love, and this is both a weak hand and a strong hand, no help to his partner but he might take the lead. Is anything neutral? Can cards just be cards? What will it be like on the other end of the phone? What will the gunshot sound like, and will there be dripping afterward, pieces of him raining from the ceiling? Will she ever answer a phone to that ear again? And will his death become more important than the death of her parents, or will that murder and suicide remain primary?
“Your bid,” Gary says.
But Jim hasn’t heard anything. “Where is it at?” he asks.
“Twenty-seven to you.”
“Twenty-seven then.”
David is his partner across the table, eager, watching him. He must have already bid once, which means he has at least a helping hand.
“It’s to you,” Gary says, but Jim has missed the bids again, has no idea what anyone has said. Mary standing there holding her cards in one hand, not sitting because she’s still prepping the food.
“I’ll bid,” Jim says. “Whatever the next number is.” Not one of them has ever done this in their entire family history of pinochle, but it seems to work fine, and Jim ends up with the bid. “Diamonds,” he says, and he notices that Tracy is sitting close beside him, watching his hand. He puts an arm around her. “Do you think we’ll make it?” he asks her.
She smiles and bounces on her seat in response, but no words, which is fine with Jim. He’d like everyone to stop using words.
David passes four cards. The missing ten is there for the run, and even the two aces he needed, but Jim does not feel excited. He lays down the run and aces to pleased bobbing and expression from everyone, which gives him a moment to hide. He can play pinochle without thinking, passing losers to David, picking up his cards again, and playing out the lead ace as he has always done in how many thousands of hands, then his singleton ace of hearts, then the queen of diamonds to flush the higher trump, all ordered, and why have they played this for so many years? Were they really not able to come up with anything else to fill the time? Is everyone in fact on the edge of suicide all their lives, having to get through the day with card games and TV and meals and so many routines, all meant to avoid any moment of coming face-to-face with a self that is not there?
8
Dinner another vacant exercise. Venison, from the most recent kill, five months ago in the fall. Jim was there. Gary firing on the run, in the trees just above the reservoir. Huge scars left from his boots, soft dark earth and pine needles, and that little .243 up to his shoulder, the stock taped together, puny but accurate. Gary hit the deer with three out of four shots, peppered him. The buck tumbling and exposing more dark earth in a long slide.
That day was overcast,
cool, later in the season, late October. All of them wearing brown jackets, disappearing against earth and trees. Jim will miss hunting. From whatever void or whatever happens after, he’ll miss that return each fall, and Gary will be thinking about him. No void can be empty enough to take away all that we longed for or loved.
“What do you think happens after?” Jim asks. Surprised to hear his voice out loud, and wondering about the suitability of this question in front of his children. Not the model father lately.
“What’s that?” Gary asks. He’s at the other end of the table, looking subdued, head low, wearing a clean flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up his thick forearms, a lumberjack.
“The afterlife, or not. What do you think it is?”
“Well,” Mary says. “God has prepared a place for us, and Jesus will welcome us.”
“But what happens?” Jim asks. “Step by step.”
“We don’t have to worry,” Mary says. “All is taken care of for us.”
“Like a resort where someone grabs your bag right from the taxi.”
Mary looks uncomfortable. “Something like that. Yes.”
“Who grabs the bag, and how did they get stuck in that role? If there’s all this great service, someone has to provide it. Do they draw from the elf heaven?”
“Oh Jim.” Mary smiles as if he’s just being silly.
But there’s no point in talking about heaven anyway. Suicides don’t go there. Jim considers pointing this out, but he decides to hold back, because of his children. He can be appropriate still. He hasn’t completely lost it.
In the past, suicide was considered a crime. Maybe it still is. Very funny, really, since the criminal can never be prosecuted. But family used to be responsible, at least for debts in debtor prisons, and maybe also for suicide. His son would have to pay the IRS, or go to prison if he couldn’t manage to earn 365K at thirteen years old, and maybe he’d be hanged for the crime of suicide, an eye for an eye. At the moment, all law seems entirely fucked. Could be just his state of mind, but he can’t think of a single law he believes in. Most of them come from the church. And why the sudden interest in law?
“What’s the drinking age in heaven?” Jim asks. “You’ve got Europeans there, who are used to sixteen, and Americans used to twenty-one, so how does that get sorted out? Heavenly elixir must be powerful stuff, so you couldn’t let just anyone drink it.”
“Let’s enjoy the food,” Gary says. “It’s a nice casserole, Mary.”
“Thank you,” Mary says.
In fact the casserole is incredibly salty, a pan of chicken and cheese goop with tortilla chips thrown in.
“I wonder about the architecture too,” Jim says. “Some people say there’s heaven and hell, but others add a purgatory, and I’ve even heard of a kind of waiting room for heaven, which would make four places. It’s a crowd-control problem, like parking at a Giants’ game, and where are these places, and how do you get from one to another? And what can you call you? If there’s no body, how do you know what’s you and what’s not?”
“We have our souls,” Mary says. “Each one special and not the same as any other, and the soul can never die.”
“And it’s okay that we can’t feel the soul now, and don’t know what it is? That will all be cleared up immediately afterward?”
Mary smiles, condescending, really as if Jim is eight. “Your soul is your goodness. You can feel that. You just have to let yourself.”
“But what about the souls that go to hell? Are they also made out of goodness? And I don’t even believe. What happens then, when you don’t believe but you’ve been given plenty of instruction and had every opportunity and therefore are supposed to believe? What happens if the nutcases are right and there is an afterlife? I’m fucked if that’s the case. Sorry about the language.”
“Don’t call Mary a nutcase, please,” Gary says.
“It’s okay,” Mary says. “All you have to do is accept Jesus’s love, accept that he died for your sins, to save you. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to think about anything else.”
“Is he okay with suicide?”
“What?”
“What are Jesus’s views on suicide? Does he still love us then and save us? And what if we take others with us? Aren’t there some limitations to Jesus’s love? Or does he consider his own death a kind of suicide? I guess that could make him sympathetic. He did have plenty of warning signs and willed it to happen anyway, so yeah, I guess Jesus was a suicide like those guys who walk up to cops pointing a gun, but with a grander plan for the purpose of that suicide.”
“Wow,” David says. “I didn’t know Jesus committed suicide.”
“He didn’t,” Gary says.
“He did, in a way,” Jim says. “And he wanted an attention grabber. No pistol to the head or pills or car exhaust in the garage or yanking the wheel on Highway One. He went for a long, drawn-out torture, a slow suicide that would be remembered.”
Mary stands up. “You have to leave,” she says. “You have to leave right now.” And then she walks quickly to the hallway, toward the bedrooms.
“It looked like she was crying,” Jim says. “Like she had tears.”
Gary is already up and following her. “Yeah,” he says. “Nice one.”
Jim looks at David and Tracy and shrugs. “Let this be a lesson, I guess. Remember how weak the religious are. They’re denying so much about the world they can’t handle any contact with it. And I’m not going to apologize. Fuck her and her faith.”
Tracy’s face is crumpling, so he leans to the side and puts his arm around her. “It’s okay,” he says. She starts to cry, and he tries to console her, but he feels tired. He doesn’t have the energy for this. And what is the crying about, anyway? Kids are such a pain in the ass.
David is upset, too, even though he’s older. He’s staring at Tracy across the table and getting some sort of crying contagion from watching her face.
“If we could stuff a hundred people in here, everyone would be crying soon,” Jim says. “Why can’t we have our own emotions? Let Mary cry alone. There’s no need to join her. She probably cries whenever a piece of macaroni falls off one of her crap decorations.”
“Why are you being mean?” David asks, and then he’s crying too.
“Fuck me,” Jim says. “I’ll just go wait outside. Try to eat a few more bites so you don’t show up at home hungry. I don’t want to get in trouble there too.”
He rises and leaves them to it, and everything in the room seems brown. The dinner table, the card table, the casserole, the doilies, the rug, various pieces of wood. All the wild color gone somehow, only brown left.
Outside, he’s happy that the air is cool and the sky clear. He can see stars and the moon so bright. Even without a spotting scope, you can see there are huge craters and seas. He’d like to visit, but that seems unlikely. So limited what we get to experience. NASA should sign up suicides as volunteers. Jim would gladly get in a capsule that’s not coming back. He could reach as far as Jupiter or even Pluto, be of some use to others and transcend a normal life. Why does that never happen? Why don’t we send out capsules that won’t return? Why are we so chickenshit and limited? What do we think we’re preserving? Do we really believe one life is valuable? If we think about our experience for even one second, we know it’s not. Heart attacks, car accidents, natural disasters, gun deaths, war: we’re flicked away like ants in every moment. Clearly we have no value.
To pass through the rings of Saturn, to see them up close, that’s what he wants, and to step on some other planet, with no spacesuit, just his jeans and a T-shirt. The video running and radio on so he can say what it’s like, what it’s really like, how the air feels, the temperature. He’ll go barefoot and say what that feels like too. And it doesn’t matter if he only lasts two or three minutes or even a few seconds in some burning place, because everyone else on Earth and all who are born after will know something more, everyone made richer through the sacrifice
of nothing. Some will cry for him, some will have stupid ideas that he’s a hero or an idiot, as if it matters what he is, and the religious will go off in twenty new directions of imbecility, new talk of how Jesus is fire resistant or doesn’t need oxygen to breathe or Jim is the devil, vanished on Jupiter to reappear in all our bedroom closets that very night, but all will be made richer, and Jim will know more intimately what heaven and hell are like, because both must be airless places, and sound might not be the same, unable to travel, and though we believe hell is both on fire and freezing, who has ever said what the temperature of heaven is? Tropical for those who like the heat, but breezy and low seventies for those who prefer a mountain summer? Jim will be the first to report back, and others can follow. Some should go beyond radio range, starting out as children, because why not? Why shouldn’t we see farther things?
What Jim would like is some use for his despair. Why can’t his fucked-up state now be perfect for something?
But all he can think of is walking thousands of miles or traveling to space, one of them useless and the other impossible. He should pull a Mother Teresa, but the problem with the lives of the good is that everything moves so slowly, and he just can’t bear it. Going out with a bang is much easier to imagine.
9
They’re back in the truck again, one pointless trip after another, just a short way over the hill to Elizabeth’s house, which Jim paid for, by the way. All the money he’s spent in his life, all the waste, houses and building the commercial fishing boat that lasted only one season to be sold at a tremendous loss. Staggering to think of it all together. The problem was no reliable plan, just fits and starts all moving too quickly, the future always waiting with a surprise. You’ve bought a new red Mercedes convertible, but right before it’s finally delivered by ship all the way to Ketchikan, your wife finds out about your affair with Gloria, so you drive it around Ketchikan’s eight miles of road for one afternoon, then it goes back on the ship and you pay thousands in restocking, congrats. Or you buy a new Uniflite cabin cruiser, brand-new shiny gelcoat and upholstery and new-boat smell and engine so perfect in its just-oiled haze and gleaming paint, then you forget to put in the drain plugs and it sinks the first day. You look at it submerged in maybe twenty feet of saltwater below the docks and you know everything about the boat will be fucked forever because of this. Mysterious electrical shorts hidden behind bulkheads, an engine that never hits full power because of residual rust in the cylinders, pumps turning on when no switch has been flicked, lights going out just as you need to come into the harbor at night, a VHF radio and other electronics that will need replacement on day two. You are master of your destiny. Kids you will have but not live with anymore and your son who will say no to a year in Alaska so you get to be the vacation father only, congrats. A second marriage you will fuck up the same way as the first marriage, by being unfaithful, because why not pay alimony to two ex-wives, and the kicker is that when you want to get back together with her she finds a poor fuck named Rich. And the tax dodges. That worked out magnificently. The IRS was fooled just long enough for all the penalties and interest to become something monstrous. And who knows what else. The expensive new house in Alaska, forgetting that, oh yeah, houses are supposed to have people in them, but this house is out of sight of any neighbor and you have no family up there and no wife or even girlfriend, and who are your friends? You have some down here in California, whom you aren’t planning to visit this trip, oddly—Tom Kalfsbeck and John Lampson, why aren’t you visiting them—but no friend in Fairbanks. Nice one on that. Good thing you made the house two stories with three bedrooms.