A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  And then there was himself, or the improved version of himself he’d chosen in his stead. Months after this little exercise, Nick’s better self came out of his reflection in the computer screen. It had an erection. It looked furious. And then it hanged itself in the closet. Nick returned to his drawing and sketched the body dangling in the shadows, surrounded by T-shirts.

  But before that happened, the issue was one of depicting his father, and he was happy to be called away from the task, even if it meant descending the stairs to the old man’s workshop.

  Nick came sloping down the last few steps, skirting piles of sawdust and crinkling his nose at the pong of sweat in the air. His father stood there, dressed in a wife beater and tight jeans, a semi-expectant smile on his face and a slew of crushed beer cans strewn across the work desk behind him.

  “Son,” his dad said, “every boy needs to know how to swing a hammer if he ever wants to amount to something worth anything. It’s one of those things fathers teach sons so they can become useful men who command high incomes.”

  Nick began to tremble.

  “This here hook is for your father’s extension cords. I’ve already glued it on, but we’re going to use finishing nails to make sure it stays there. You’ll need this hammer.”

  His dad scooped his hammer out of his tool belt and casually tossed it across the room. Startled, Nick closed his eyes and swiped at the air in front of him. A tiny breath escaped his lungs as the hammer flew directly into his face, bloodying his nose and knocking him into a central mound of sawdust.

  “Shit, son,” his dad croaked, beer foaming out of his nostrils. “Have you not been watching your baseball? That should’ve been an easy snag.”

  Whenever this memory rears up in Nick’s mind — as it does very often — he calms himself by studying a battered pamphlet his mom gave him when he was only six. “This is from someone special,” she said. “He wants you to think about it. He wants you to think hard.” Nick keeps it folded into a tight little square in his back pocket. Before the invasion, when he’d be changing out of his pants to go to bed, he’d remove the pamphlet, study the words and images, then set it on his nightstand, so he wouldn’t forget to transfer it into whatever pants he wore the following day. Things were simpler now, because he wore the same pants every day. The only time the pamphlet wasn’t in his pocket or in his hands was when he stashed it in his shoe while washing his clothes in the river.

  Now, flustered again by the memory of his dad casually tossing a hammer into his face, Nick fishes the pamphlet out of his pocket and unfolds the segments. He rubs his thumbs over the oak tree on the cover, the cross-hatching on the trunk and the shaded leaves in their thousands. On the inside page, there’s an image of the same tree, but this time a man sits high up in its branches. Reclined against the trunk with his feet dangling over either side of the branch, he’s reading an indistinguishable book. The artist included a slight furrow in the man’s brow, so Nick knows that the contents of the book are more important than his precarious position high up in a tree. Below this drawing are the words: “Be one with wood.”

  Nick always smiles at the facing page. The oak still climbs high in the sky and the man still occupies its branches. But this time he’s standing face to face with the trunk and slapping a tennis ball against it, and the artist included a series of swooshing lines coming off the round top of the racket, so that Nick really feels the force of the man’s swing. Below this image, more words have been scrawled in cursive: “But even as one, you must be yourself.”

  “Nick.” Christina snorts back snot. “I’m cold now, Nick. I want to go home.”

  He buries his fingers in his hair and closes his eyes to think things over yet again. On the one hand, the pamphlet makes perfect sense coming from his father. After all, isn’t it fundamentally a message about harvesting trees to make oneself at home? Isn’t it possible that once, when Nick was young, his father had a gentler and more sympathetic approach to training his son? That maybe he became more obnoxious only as Nick grew older and further away? It’s certainly possible. And the thought makes Nick’s eyes well with guilty tears. He shouldn’t be so hard on his dad, so condescending and impatient. They’re different people, that’s all. It doesn’t mean that they can’t get along. It doesn’t mean they can’t love each other.

  But there’s something not quite right about that interpretation. Even as Nick’s emotions are swept away, his intellect is holding back, protesting quietly. The fact is, this pamphlet seems more like something Greg would’ve given him. The message isn’t about cutting down trees to fulfill some carpenter’s fancy. If it were, the man would be playing tennis against the broadside of a log house. He’d be reclined in an Adirondack chair. No, the message here is about integrating oneself with nature, about maintaining your healthy interests on the outskirts of civilization. And that’s pure Greg, isn’t it?

  “Nick? Please can we go? Because I’m so cold now.”

  Nick looks up at Christina, frowns, then looks down again. If Greg were his real father, things would’ve turned out so much better.

  “Nick!”

  Plastic hammer between her teeth, Christina is pulling herself up the muddy slope of the riverbank. She’s still naked. Nick withers at the sight of her bare chest with cherry-sized breasts.

  “Stop right there.” Grimacing, he turns away, plucks a towel from the pile of their things, and throws it at her. “Dry off first. Then put on your shirt and shorts before we go back. Nobody wants to see you naked, okay? Not ever.”

  Back at the camp, the raccoon is charred and gamey, but it’s delicious just the same. The four of them sit around the dying fire. They eat with their hands. No one complains that most of the animal is burnt. It’s the first time they’ve had so much meat to themselves. Nick barely notices his father’s smacking lips, barely notices the soot smeared on Christina’s cheeks. But he does take note of his mother’s happy, diminutive nibbling, and this makes him enjoy his meal all the more. No one talks while they eat. And all four of them are essentially doing the same thing: tearing, chewing, swallowing. The way Nick sees it, dinner has always been the best time to be around Christina and his dad. It was rare before the invasion but even rarer now that they can all occupy the same place without bickering and shouting. In a very practical and effective way, their old house was like a set of expertly framed compartments, with a great many combinations available for harmonious isolation. The closest thing out here, it seems, is a mouthful of burnt raccoon.

  After dinner, his mom stretches and yawns. “Did you see Greg today?”

  “Nope.” His dad is still poking around the embers, probably looking for more meat. “But I saw Reggie. He said Greg got shot by the soldiers the other day. He was weeding the garden and they picked him off. I sympathize in a way. Myself, I worry about leaks in our roof.”

  Christina

  In the morning, her father scratches himself. He throws his arms in the air, spreads his fingers, and appears to reach for something, maybe a ladder, so they can climb up to the way things were before. But he yawns loudly, farts, and drops his hands to his sides. There’s no ladder this morning either. She rolls over in her pine fronds and shivers. Soon, it will be winter and the rain and snow will come. She hasn’t said this out loud, because she knows her father has already thought of it. Otherwise, she would tell him. Christina doesn’t like to keep secrets.

  But she’s already keeping one right now. She closes her eyes to lock it in and thinks about how she got hold of it. How her stumps itch in the pine needles because the wool socks she likes to cover them with are threadbare and full of holes. And how now the itching keeps her up every night. Just like last night, when she heard Nick and her mom crying under their tarp. She could tell they were trying to be quiet, but she heard them anyway. They cried for a while, and then they gathered their things, and then they left. Christina waited up longer, but they didn’t come bac
k. After a bit, she grew more tired than itchy and fell asleep again.

  How can she break this news to her father?

  What if it destroys him?

  When she opens her eyes, her dad is crouched beside her, staring at her stumps with his head cocked. His red and black plaid shirt is unbuttoned and his chest hairs curl like tiny springs. His cheeks are so gaunt. He looks like a too-big skeleton with her dad’s skin yanked taut across the bones. Without his hat on, his head looks small and red and somehow combustible. He licks his lips and then presses them tightly together until they turn white. Maybe he already knows about Nick and her mother.

  Christina yawns to break his trance without startling him. He doesn’t smile when he looks in her face, and a flutter of anxiety moves over her chest. “Good morning, Daddy.”

  He cups her cheeks and his hand feels rough, just like they did before everything changed.

  “You’re the best daddy ever,” she says, pinching the prickly flesh of his chin.

  He smiles, but not warmly. “We should get going. It’s just me and you for now.”

  Her dad’s voice betrays his grief. He probably wants to conceal it, so that she doesn’t worry, except he’s too stricken to be convincing. But Christina is happy they’re gone. All her life, she’s felt their resentment. She’s felt their irritation and disgust. Her brother’s thoughts make lines on his face, and the lines are deep and fierce and always pointing at Christina. Her mother’s face is less distinct, harder to read, especially compared to her brother’s, and for a long time in her life Christina considered that a positive thing. But then she realized her mother’s smooth and thoughtless face expresses how little she thinks of Christina at all. And that hurts more than anything her brother’s face can do.

  But she knows her father feels differently. On his face, she sees millions of tiny expressions, shades of joy scoured away by humiliation. She sees something that on someone else’s face might look like rage, but on her father’s face, it’s more like violent self-defence. She sees longing, embarrassment, pride, love, and years of frustration that etched leathery lines in his neck. The message is clear. Her dad loves Nick, and loves her mother too, no matter how mean or indifferent they are to Christina.

  She decides to play along so she doesn’t hurt his feelings. “Where did they go?”

  “Just for a walk. We should get ready and catch up. I’ll give you a piggyback, okay?”

  “Have you seen my hammer?”

  “It’s in my tool belt. Let’s go.”

  They spend the morning wandering the damp and foggy woods, her father stumbling disastrously and Christina clinging to his back. His shoulder blades seem like wings that don’t fly and she traces them gently with her fingers and thumbs.

  “Your stumps,” he says and the flesh around the back of his ears tightens in anger. “Your stumps keep getting stuck in the pouches of my tool belt.”

  Stung, she pulls herself higher up on his shoulders. It hurts because her dad never reminds Christina that she has no legs. Even when her wheelchair fell apart, he didn’t complain about having to carry her everywhere, not the way Nick does. Before the better selves and the men with guns, and especially when she’d had a really tough day at school, she’d ask her father how come she was born like this. He’d stroke her hair and say: “What? You mean beautiful?”

  She knows that her father is two types of people rolled into one. Most of the world gets to see the abrasive, rough-hewn man who flicks cigarette butts out the window of his truck and drinks a whole lot of beer. Nobody really likes that guy. But Christina is privy to his softer side. She knows the gentle version who bounced her on his knee when she was a little girl, the man who tells her it’s okay to cry and no one is better than anyone else. She knows the man who found her in his workshop stacking wooden blocks into the shape of a house.

  “You’re going to need to nail that business together,” he told her.

  “But the hammer is too heavy. I already tried.”

  “That’s true, honey. The hammer is damn heavy, isn’t it?”

  He kissed her on the cheek, his clothes stale with cigarette smoke. Then, while whistling “Happy Birthday,” he strode out of the room. She heard his truck start up and pull out of the driveway. She understood that she should wait. Fifteen minutes later, the truck rumbled back into earshot. The front door of the house opened and closed, and Christina bit back a smile as his work boots thumped down the stairs.

  “Try this,” he said, holding a brown plastic hammer in the air. “Much lighter and still up for the job.”

  The temperature climbs as the morning lifts, taking with it the fog. Christina knows they’ve been walking around in circles, but she doesn’t say anything. She feels bad because she’s keeping lots of secrets all of a sudden. But the situation is unusual and maybe some secrets make sense to keep. Maybe that’s why her father is behaving so differently. Probably he has secrets of his own.

  It’s late afternoon when they step back into their camp, and Christina’s stomach is twitching with hunger. Her father sighs, sags, and swears. She doesn’t like cursing, because the sounds of the words are so harsh and furious, but she understands why he’s frustrated. She doesn’t scold him.

  “You did your best, Daddy. Maybe we should rest a while and try again?”

  Her dad snorts and shakes his head. “Stay here for a minute, okay? I just need to check on something.” He hoists Christina off his back and lowers her onto a log by the fire pit. Sweat streams down his face and neck. He sniffles and dabs his nose with his wrist. “Are you comfortable?”

  She isn’t. She’s feeling her legs, wherever they are, growing tired, thrashing in water maybe, out for a swim in a world that surely exists, but to which she’s never been. The water is warm but the legs are exhausted from travelling. They want her to bring the rest of the body to help out. The sensation isn’t always painful, but there’s something profoundly sad about it. How did her legs end up there all alone? Maybe her better self went there to find out, because it didn’t stick around here very long. It basically emerged from a glint in the metal of her wheelchair and rolled right out of town. If Christina doesn’t get there soon, will her better self steal her legs? Or are there two sets of legs now, so they can both be happy?

  She feels bad thinking about this when her father is so clearly confounded. She should be here for him. “You’ll find them this time, Daddy. I’ll wait right here.”

  He doesn’t answer her. He doesn’t even look. He just turns and wanders into the forest, his feet loudly crunching the understorey. But he doesn’t go far. Maybe twenty yards. Then he crouches in the bushes, so Christina can’t see him. She can hear him, though. Sobbing quietly. His ragged breathing. Best to leave him alone for a few minutes. Best to give him his privacy.

  If they die here together, starved like prisoners, she hopes he’ll come with her to find her legs. She hopes he can swim. But even if he can’t, she’s sure he’ll learn once the water touches his toes. The knowledge will come to his body, like in a dream. She imagines the two of them swimming side by side in an endless sea, an epic of water below them, billions of colourful fish joining their adventure. There would be an island eventually. They would wade ashore and pick fruit from the trees.

  Christina is consumed by these thoughts and visions. At first, she doesn’t notice her dad standing over her, bare-chested with his hammer in his right hand. A teardrop lands on her arm and she absently brushes at it. Only when he sobs does she look up at him, at his darkened face, the tormented lines around his mouth and the panic in his eyes. She has never seen him like this, but she recognizes him anyway.

  He raises the hammer over his head.

  “Daddy?”

  Tears cling to his chin and he mutters an apology.

  “It’s okay, Daddy,” she says. “I can find my legs alone.”

  Justine

  T
he body on the roof is vile, completely unrecognizable. Briefly, crouched in the firs at the edge of the Bluffs, Justine entertains the idea that Ron killed Greg and tied him to the roof, stripped him naked, and left him to rot in the sun. And she knows Nick is thinking the same thing. Collapsed to his knees with his face buried in his hands. Strands of hair flowing over his knuckles. And swearing under his breath. Nick knows. But the idea doesn’t quite sit with Justine. Because despite all his tiresome machismo, Ron is a weak man, non-violent in his cowardice. He would never act on his jealousy. Only harbour it. Store it up for nightmares and boozed-up sob stories with his buddies.

  But what difference does it make? If Ron killed him. If the soldiers killed him. Either way, Greg is gone now. And here’s the weird thing: he’s gone, and that might be his body bloating on a roof, but Justine remains calm. She feels Greg all around her. He’s decomposing before her eyes. He’s deconstructing. And the air is full of him now, thick with his molecules, enriched by his body as it comes undone.

  She squeezes Nick’s shoulder. “Think of it as a good thing. If you read the pamphlet, you’ll understand. Keep reading the pamphlet.”

  She remembers the first time she saw him, when he rang the doorbell in the middle of the afternoon, a stack of those pamphlets under his arm. She’d been so happy to see him. That’s the only way to say it. Happy. He gave her a crooked smile, playful, and raked his hand through his curls. He began explaining himself, saying that he and his family had just moved into the neighbourhood, that they wanted to start a citizens’ group, that they had some good ideas from the city — but they weren’t city slickers, no way. Justine invited him in for coffee. She forgot she was only wearing her housecoat, a faded, tatty pink. She forgot about the long days alone at home, idle eternities spent longing for a fuller life, millions of hours splayed on the couch, reconstructing high school basketball games in the fog of her imagination. And she forgot about the long silences on the phone with her mother, just twisting the cord around her finger while she waited for the sound of Ron’s truck in the driveway.