by Alan Rossi
He thought that he’d wasted so many years wanting things to be different than they were, wanting himself, others, to be different than they were, and it was only Jack who he’d never felt this way about. But everything else, he thought, he was constantly wanting to be different. He closed his eyes and blinked several times in order to get sweat that was running down his forehead to stop pooling near his eyes. If he blinked fast, he could get the sweat to move around his eyes. The burning sensation from the salt slowly subsided, and he was again listening to the quiet rain. For a moment, the physical world – rainfall, woods, tree trunks, the slip of dark sky he could see, the rising crescent moon, damp mud and fungus-y earth smell, mist moving between the trees, the spiderweb vibrating in the rain – manifested itself as a stronger reality than his mind, and he tried to let himself go out into it, and he felt something in him pulling outward.
He told himself he needed to stop thinking and start doing something. He needed to get out of this car now, and with his right arm, he pulled at his left arm a little, felt a streak of hot-cold pain, and stopped due to the pain and felt cowardly. Then, he focused on his right leg, which he could move some, and he reached down, which was up, with his right hand and felt around his right thigh, then under his thigh, felt only a small amount of pulsing in his lower back, and then with his right arm pulled on the thigh. It didn’t come loose, but he felt it move to the right. It was too dark to see up into the floor of the car, but he reached again, and grabbed his right leg behind the knee, pulled and wiggled it at the same time, and it wiggled, loosening, and he realized he needed to slide it. He slid it toward the center console, toward the passenger door, moving it along the seat and whatever was pinning it in place, and as he slid it, it suddenly lurched free and fell toward him. He waited a moment, then moved the leg, and he could. He could move it. He was doing it, he thought. He was getting out. Now, feeling that he had this under control, he knew what to do, he reached across his chest to his left arm, and tried to jiggle it like he’d jiggled the leg and when he tried that again the same stabbing sensation screamed through him, and he stopped and said, Okay, not that, not doing that. The stabbing pain slowly dissipated and he breathed, deep breaths. He thought, in what he knew was a self-pitying way, that if he just hadn’t been driving on this road then this wouldn’t have occurred – he wouldn’t be trapped in the car, April wouldn’t be on the road somewhere, Jack wouldn’t be alone with the babysitter waiting for them. Images arose in his mind like a sort of indie movie cliché, complete with opening credits – his name playing himself, April’s name playing herself – over the slow-motion capture of a simulated accident, and yet this was no simulation, this was not a movie, not a drama. He felt the force of the cliché’s actuality, that if he’d just said no to the tenure party like he’d wanted to say no to it and not let that other part of him that wanted recognition win out, if he’d just said that he wouldn’t have another beer and not let that part of him that told him to get drunk tonight, whatever, win out, if he hadn’t listened to April saying that this was something his colleagues wanted to do for him and he should be both accepting of and grateful for their respect and kindness and then let the sincere part of him also have its say, as though he suddenly saw that he wasn’t going for selfish reasons but because it was actually kind of him, a kindness and respect shown to his colleagues, if he and April hadn’t been arguing on the way home about the fact that Nicholas had been talking to Nora Evans in the kitchen, an argument he hadn’t wanted to have, but which he definitely wanted to win, then none of this would’ve happened. If he could just have been one person at any one moment, he thought, then none of this would’ve occurred.
He took several deep breaths and tried to roll his head. He tugged a little at the seatbelt and it slipped up his chest some, which allowed him to maneuver his right arm so that he could slip it out from under the belt, but the belt stayed in place, now wrapped around the outside of his left arm, holding him in the seat. He tried to get the belt around the outside of his left shoulder but couldn’t. Shit, he heard himself say, even more confined than before. He pulled his arm across his abdomen, tight against himself, without moving his upper body at all, afraid that it might hurt his left arm if he did, and was able to slip the arm under the belt, so that it was back into the original position, free of the belt, but still the rest of him stuck. He then noticed that his freed right leg hung uncomfortably toward his chest. The leg pulled on his lower back and made something ache there, so he pushed the leg back down, wedging it under part of the collapsed dash. He made sure he could easily free the leg again, and he could, and then put it back in under the dash, which relieved some pressure on his lower back. He noticed himself breathing hard, like he’d just climbed several flights of stairs in quick succession. Not wanting to move his left arm, not wanting to do this at all, he thought again of the ride home, and suddenly understood with a kind of paralyzed horror that barely allowed him to fully form the thought and wouldn’t, for a moment, let him go beyond the thought, that the argument he had with April might be the last communication he had with her. Momentarily unable to move, to think, to do anything, until his mind began again moving toward what he didn’t want it to move toward, which was their argument, and more specifically what led to their argument in the car, he felt a deep shame and regret. The impression of the car ride home – like a kind of emotional signal from a distant star, not definable and clear until he was able to decode it – arose in his consciousness, and in that impression he recognized their worst selves: April at her worst, him at his worst. He felt nauseated and for a moment his mouth began to water as it did before vomiting and he told himself to breathe, breathe, and after a moment, the feeling subsided. In the car driving home, he recalled, April had said she’d noticed him talking with Nora Evans for quite a while in the kitchen tonight. She’d said it off-handedly, an affect he hated, like she didn’t really care. But he felt it – her jealousy, a kind of held-in energy that she was ready to direct, negatively, at him, like a weapon. As soon as she said it, he’d interrupted her by saying that he’d been trapped there in the kitchen, he hadn’t wanted to be talking to her, and anyway, Nora Evans was the one who was talking to him, asking him questions, he wasn’t talking to her, and also she was mainly asking about the two of you, he’d added. As he was saying this, though, he was also aware that when Nora Evans had begun talking to him, he’d liked it, he’d wanted it to happen, he’d been happy this pretty woman wanted to speak with him, yet he didn’t say this to April. He’d told April that whatever she thought had occurred with Nora Evans probably hadn’t come close to occurring in the way she was thinking it had. He remembered saying to April in the car that Nora Evans had actually asked about April and Jack, saying that she so much liked the idea of all of us, you know, whatever she called it, living on a sustainable farm and attempting to go off the grid. There’s nothing to be jealous about because Nora Evans was asking about you, he had said. And Jack. She wanted to know how you two both liked living in the woods. She said it like that, living in the woods. I mean, she was asking about you two, about our life. She said things like how she admired that we were making no small attempt to do our part, to live beyond the confines of late capitalist ideology, and that she admired it very much, our lives, and the way we were raising Jack to have these alternative values, and she’d said that she too had these values, that maybe they weren’t even alternative anymore, what intelligent person didn’t have them, we all wanted to save the planet and not hurt animals, but who actually lived it, and from her perspective, she said, no one really lived it fully but that we made a decent attempt at least. Nicholas remembered himself saying things like this, though they sounded better in his head now, and he couldn’t be sure what was real or not, though he did clearly recall not wanting to engage in an argument with April, but also at the same time wanting April to try to argue with him so he could show her how wrong she was. He recalled that he had been a little drunk, that he hadn’t wanted to g
et drunk, or to drink at all, but he had, he had gotten drunk, and now, upside down in the car, he realized that part of the reason his head was aching and his mouth was dry and he had to pee was because he was hungover and the little stream of water running by his face was tempting him, his own blood running copper through the water. He stuck his tongue out to try to reach the water but it was just beyond him. He tried to nudge his head forward against the ceiling of the car and though he moved, the water seemed no closer. He glanced at her empty seat.
He told himself to think of something else, of good times with April, with Jack, of how Jack was the present moment around which he and April moved and were pulled into. They’d discussed this maybe when Jack was a year old, the way in that first year he pulled them to immediacy and away from their own private lives with ease. He was a quiet baby, a good sleeper mostly, a good eater, though when he got constipated he had made strange faces that had scared both Nicholas and April, then made them laugh, faces like he was going to explode either himself or the room, like this little baby was actually some kind of magician gnome, but then, after some time of strange, wrinkled, occasionally evil-looking faces, they’d hear the poop, and then smell it, which caused Jack to smile tiredly, like he’d been making some enormous effort, which he had been, he had, and they then were brought into action. After already being in the action of laughing, they were now in the action of diaper change. They noticed that their days, which they had once categorized as good, okay, great, bad, boring, no longer could be contained in such a way. There was less time to judge, for one, but what they both felt was that any judgment couldn’t contain Jack. Jack crying all night, which was rare, was not bad. How could it be? It was only exactly what it was. It was exhausting, frustrating, but the designation of ‘bad night’ didn’t even have a chance to exist. In the morning, it was just another day. Jack playing quietly by himself for the first time was exactly what it was: Jack playing. His deep screams when he wanted food were just that: a screaming baby. And their own exhaustion was just that: tiredness. Of course they got annoyed, frustrated, but it seemed to happen after the fact, later, upon analysis, and only ever at each other. In the evening, when Jack was asleep for the night, they argued about when he should be taking naps, when he shouldn’t, when he should be going to bed, getting up, when he should be starting more solids, what types of solids, should he eat baby food, or the same food they ate just cut very small, they argued about how it was frustrating that one of them let him sit in a wet diaper too long, that’s why he had a rash now, or one of them thought baths every other day were okay, or that they should be using organic disposable diapers less and washable cloth diapers more, though Nicholas couldn’t now say which side he’d fallen on in any of these arguments, just that he had. Stupidly, they both had. They’d quietly argue, blame, judge, accuse, retreat, apologize, attack again, claim tiredness, claim confusion as excuses, apologize again, wait, get quiet, tell each other that this was where they were, they had to keep something for themselves, and it couldn’t just be their exhaustion and frustration. Then, when Jack was with them again, it was as though their frustration had been some kind of game – unreal – and they were there for him. It was sad, Nicholas thought now, that they saved their annoyance for each other, though after a couple years, as the boy became more capable and independent, this frustration dissipated and they found space to be themselves again, to be there for each other, too, and not just for Jack. They’d almost forgotten what that was like, and Nicholas was glad to return to some version of it, him and April together, with Jack, yes, but together alone, too, once again getting to be just what they were. Nicholas thought that those first two years with Jack had taught him something indispensable. In any given moment with Jack, there was only what there was to do: feed the baby, put him down, be tired, burp him, change his diaper, clean his spit-up, talk to him, laugh with him, walk him around the yard, sing to him, be spit-up on, be peed on, be interrupted while doing work, listen to his cries, unrelenting and sometimes causing him to vomit, all perfectly as it was. There was no chance, April said, when with Jack to make analysis of how life was going and wish for something better or wish things were different if not better – there was no better, no worse, and even the one medical scare that year, they only did what they could do, which was take him to the doctor, give him the medicine, be concerned, be wary, hold him in a gentler manner, speak more softly. It was later that they thought and argued and complicated it all, but in the moment there was only what they were doing. How to make all life like that? Nicholas thought. To just do what one had to do.
Beneath this thought Nicholas felt the other thought about the argument with April and felt his mind wanting to go there, to think of the argument, but he didn’t allow himself to do it. He tried to stay with Jack, and April too, and not find too much meaning in this one argument, though he felt the pull, wanting to analyze, wanting to see why it occurred, why it happened, why the fight came into existence, but he made himself think of when Jack played as a toddler. His little tongue stuck out in the corner of his mouth, at play with great seriousness, and it was the same when he got older and began reading little books and drawing and doing chores around the cabin. Everything he did was what he was doing right there, and though Nicholas and April had wanted to move to the mountain for the quiet and isolation, for the opportunity to find again the moment that they were constantly rushing from, it was their child who revealed what this actually meant, that even in rushing there could be presence, that even in difficult moments, there was immediacy, and Nicholas thought now in an effort to not think about his and April’s argument, that what Jack revealed to him was that he’d mistaken being present for every moment being good. What he feared most for Jack was that he’d lose this, the ease of not living in any world except the one right in front of him. Nicholas thought of how he’d worked so hard to try to be able to do that again, to live without any obstructions, and it only rarely worked, or he only rarely felt the depths of where that might lead, but on the mountain he’d been moving toward it. There were small moments, glimpses, when sawing a table was sawing a table, not sawing a table and thinking about work, and worrying about an article he needed to write, and worrying about what April said earlier, or what to say to a male student he knew was gay, and who kept coming to his office hours with throw-away questions in order to flirt with him. He just sawed the table. There were moments when he just walked on the mountain path, just planted the garden, just played with Jack, just changed him, just fed him, just read him a book – this thing he’d wanted and was trying to access was only accessed through this other being, who he’d been afraid he could not be a good father to. Jack made things for both him and April simple again, even in the chaotic, exhausting moments of parenting, it was still simple, the focus of their life was simple, obvious, clear, what one needed to do was clear: be there for Jack, and even this formulation, he thought now, itself was lacking, didn’t actually come into existence in the moment, it was only afterwards in analysis of the situation that it came into being, which made it an imperative, which it did not feel like. He, like April, didn’t think, Be there for Jack. It just occurred, arose of its own accord, like a seed that had always been inside him manifesting itself as a tree, without any will. But with the exception of Jack, he rarely brought this same kind of awareness and attention to the rest of his life. Even now in the car, he thought, he wasn’t living in the moment because he didn’t want to be: because the moment meant pain, diffuse throughout his body, and it meant mental pain, the recollection of this last conversation with April, which he didn’t want to think about, but which he could feel under his thoughts about Jack like a virus infecting his memories of his little boy, Jackie. Jackie, he’d say, gimme a big big nug-hug. Jackie, he’d say, what are the words on page four of I Am a Bunny? Jackie, he’d say, what do the bees who don’t collect honey do, just to hear the ridiculous answer, which had something to do with being traitor bees who showed bears where the honey was l
ocated. With Jack everything was not easy, but easeful, whereas in the rest of his life there was some discord, some divide between how he wished things would be and how they were. As he was thinking this, he suddenly had the competing thought that maybe things with Jack weren’t perfect or easeful, but were only that way in retrospect, and that he was idealizing his time with Jack, was doing it, right now, constructing a fantasy past, a delusion. The idea that Jack was some force of immediacy that brought him and April into the present moment and wiped away their delusions was maybe itself a delusion, in the same way that thinking about Jack now was avoiding this moment of pain and suffering that he didn’t want to suffer through, deluding himself.