Well

by Matthew McIntosh

  “What?”

  “Frank! Get him a towel! For Christ’s sakes!”

  “I’m leaving,” he said. And he left.

  Something strange was happening and I began to panic. My muscles contracted, my body stiffened, my arms stuck to my sides. “I can’t move,” I said. “I can’t move!” I coughed into the carpet, rocking back and forth on my side. Things felt like they were tearing. I couldn’t move and I kept yelling that I couldn’t and Emily’s mother kept yelling at me that I was fine.

  “You can move!” she said.

  “I can’t!” I said.

  “Yes, you can!”

  “I can’t!” And I couldn’t.

  Of course, after a few seconds, I could. She gave me a bag of frozen peas to put on my face. I kept saying that I didn’t know what had gotten into Frank. I stressed that I had just been sitting there peacefully, minding my own business. I wondered what my own dad was doing. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I wondered if Emily had heard all the commotion. Her mother helped me to her car, I put an arm over her thin shoulder for balance, and she drove toward home.

  Now the world was veiled in blue and it was blurry. The lights in the houses seemed to pulsate rapidly. I could hear them moving, a very high-pitched whir, and I wondered if the crack in the jaw Frank had given me had somehow scrambled my frequencies. Some of these lights emitted a very faint but constant beeping sound that I could hear from the passenger seat.

  “Can you hear that?” I said.

  “I should probably talk to your mother,” Emily’s mother said.

  I didn’t think this sounded like a good idea.

  “She’s asleep,” I said. “I’ll tell her about it tomorrow. We probably won’t sue.”

  We didn’t have peas, so I took a bag of corn from our freezer and iced my jaw on the bed. My angelfish floated quietly in her corner of the tank. The feeder fish swam around and bumped into one another. The bruise on my chin had turned into an almost breathtakingly beautiful swirl of blue and pink and gray, but it was killing me. I closed my eyes and had a dream.

  The dream was based on an actual event that took place when I was six years old and my parents and I were having a picnic one evening on Dash Point Beach, a small state park on the Puget Sound. While we were there, a boy tried to swim out to a buoy. He didn’t make it. He drowned. We heard his mother standing far away on the edge of the water—the tide was out—she was crying out, My baby! My baby! over and over again. Her voice was sorrow and it filled the sky. We packed our things and left, drove home.

  This is what happened, as well as I can remember it. But in the dream I had that night, I wasn’t six, I was almost eighteen, and sitting alone on the beach except for the woman, the boy’s mother, who was on her knees in the distance, at the waterline, crying out desperately, and two dark figures, who had come to stand on each side of her. They were stooped and whispering in her ears.

  Then from far out, a mile maybe, under a red, sunless sky, the drowning boy’s hands shot up above the water. I saw this from my place on the beach. I stood and attempted to shout toward the woman and the two figures with her. I jumped up and down and waved my arms. I tried to let them know that he was still out there, that he needed help, but no noise came from my mouth, and the louder I tried to shout, the more silent I seemed to become—or, the more silent I seemed to feel. I picked up a rock from the sand and threw it. Then I was an arm’s distance away from him, hovering over the water. The boy was writhing around in it, gasping for breath. He pulled his shoulders up and pressed his hands down against the surface, trying to lift his body over the waves. The woman was shouting, My baby! and I could tell that in the midst of everything that was happening, in the midst of his trauma, in the midst of everything, the boy was hearing it. I could tell he was hearing it because the more the woman shouted, the more frantically he tried to stay above the surface. Then there was another sound, a loud and violent creaking, and the sky was coming off its hinges—that’s the only way to describe it—swinging back and forth, about to give way. The woman had now collapsed on the sand and the two dark figures looked out over the Sound at me, at the boy—the boy’s shoulders sank—I was pulled away—and then the sky crashed down over everything.

  Noise from the street woke me up. Glass breaking and a series of thuds. I lay still for a second and then I got up and ran to the window. A man jumped into a big white car in the middle of the street and quickly drove away. I stuck my head out and tried to see the license plate, but he was driving too fast. He went around the corner and was gone.

  I grabbed my notepad, put on my jacket and went downstairs. The television was on with the volume turned up loud. My mother was passed out on the couch. Her mouth was open and she was snoring. She looked uncomfortable. I put my hand up to my jaw. It ached.

  My little brother put his head over the railing and looked down onto the living room.

  “What is it?” he said.

  I looked up. “Nothing bad happened,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

  “I heard something.”

  “It was just the wind. Go get in bed.”

  “Is Mom all right?”

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  I turned the volume down and went outside and walked out to the car. I looked at my house and at the houses down the block. Most of them were dark at this time of night. I looked at the sky, at the grass. I looked everywhere except in the direction of my mother’s car. I didn’t want to look at it until the last possible moment, but pretty soon my hands were against it, and I was forced to.

  There were shards of glass and red plastic on the ground. Both rear lights had been knocked out. I wrote this in my notepad: Both rear lghts out. Have been shattered. I went around to the front, running my hand over the top. Top DAMAGED, I wrote. Looks as if someone took heavy object and swung with grt. force. Paint and frame damage. Headlights out. Windshld and other mnr. structure damage.

  After I’d made my assessment, I walked back into the house, then straight into the garage and I picked up the first blunt instrument I could find, a shovel. I walked back through the house, past my mother and out the door, and I remember biting down hard on my teeth and squeezing up my face, closing my eyes tight, until they felt like they would pop. I made a high-pitched sound in the back of my throat, a sound that resembled a blender turned on and left on. I walked outside to the car, to the passenger door, and I swung the shovel as hard as I could. A terrible metallic sound fled down the street, through the rows of houses, and when I looked, the door was dented so totally I’d never get it open again.

  I went inside and put a blanket over my mother and took her glass and put it in the dishwasher. I turned off the television and all the lights downstairs. I listened to her sleep for awhile. Then I went up into my room and on a piece of notebook paper I wrote a letter to the school in Nebraska, asking if they offered classes in fisheries. I told them I sincerely hoped that they did and that I would be waiting eagerly, on the edge of my seat, for their reply.

  A few weeks later I graduated. I spent the summer mowing lawns around the neighborhood. My dad called one night and apologized for not making it to my ceremony. I hadn’t gone myself, but I didn’t tell him that. He said he was proud that I’d been accepted into the school in Nebraska and that he’d be honored to drive me. Since I hadn’t yet figured out how I was going to get there, I told him I could cancel my plans and go with him instead, under the condition that he’d make sure my mother and my brother were taken care of and given regular meals.

  One of the original five goldfish in my tank died around this time. There’d been no warning signs. They’d all seemed to be living normal and satisfactory lives. But one day I came home from mowing lawns and he wasn’t in the mirror. I found him dried out and bug-eyed on the carpet below the tank—for some reason he’d jumped ship. I put him in a plastic film container and my brother and I held a service in the backyard. I said a few words and then we buried him about six inches beneath the beauty
bark.

  After a week of steady icing, my bruise went away, but I continued cold compresses for a few more days in case of long-term damage beneath the surface. I kept my mother’s car parked on the side of the house and rarely drove it. Still, I washed it every Tuesday. I made sure the house was always clean and in good shape in case—although I never believed for a second it might happen—Emily might stop by one of these nights.

  But she didn’t and pretty soon it was time to go. The morning of our departure, I walked my brother to Winchell’s and bought him breakfast. I told him everything I’d learned about the world, which wasn’t much. People might let you down, I said, but don’t let it worry you. You’re not crazy, I told him. You’re not even close to crazy.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and told him he was the man of the house now, which meant he was going to have to take care of the old lady. He accepted this task with as much solemnity and tact as could be expected from an eight-year-old. He nodded his little head and took smaller bites from his doughnut.

  My dad showed up at the house in the afternoon, and he and my brother loaded the car. I wandered around the living room picking up various things from various tables and inspecting them, and then I sat down across from my mother.

  “I guess this is it” I said. I stood and stretched my arms above my head, then sat down again. “I don’t have to go.”

  She stared at the television but she didn’t seem to be watching it.

  “You should open the blinds more,” I said. I wanted to stay. Something told me that if I left now, everything would fall apart. Outside I could hear my dad and my brother laughing and loading the car, but in the living room it was so quiet I could hear my toes moving around in my shoes.

  Then my mother did something uncustomary. She made a gesture that I would think about a lot from then on. I think about it a lot. She closed her lips tight and tilted her head. She ran her hand to the top of her head and took a handful of hair between her fingers and squeezed hard. She looked at me then, and there was something very sorrowful, very heartbroken and searching in her expression. That is to say, she was asking me—she wasn’t saying anything—but she was asking me how things could have turned out the way they had, how what should have been such a pleasant life could have taken so many unfortunate turns, and it’s occurring to me now—I almost shouldn’t say it—that it will be difficult for me to ever love anyone more than I loved her right then.

  But I didn’t have an answer for her.

  I stopped going to class after the second day. Fisheries 101, I found, was not the true source of all knowledge. The professor was interested in discussing ecosystems, water resources and pollution, river management, molecular genetics, marine environment, stock-separation techniques, and so forth. He was not interested, as far as I could tell, in answering the essential questions: why fish swim in schools, for example, or how they swim or breathe at all.

  This was terribly disappointing. I stayed in bed the entire third day and didn’t leave the basement. My cold sore was getting progressively worse, no matter how much Neosporin I put on it, and I suspected that some of my fellow students had been mocking my Band-Aid behind my back. These things put off my interest in the school’s fisheries department, certainly, but above all—and this was important—there was no water in Nebraska.

  I started spending my time in the student center drinking Cokes and playing pinball and video games, watching people bowl on the three-lane alley. One night I fell in with a group of cowboys who had come from an even smaller Nebraska town to take jobs in the school cafeteria, which was located in the same building. They needed an extra man for bowling and one of them asked me if I wanted to play. I said I did. I sat at the scorer’s table and every time my partner would even glance a pin, I would congratulate him on a masterful throw and try to give him high fives. And I’m not saying there was anything special about these guys. They weren’t even cool for cowboys. None of them had ever, as far as I could tell, been within ten feet of a girl, let alone touched a tit on a kiss goodnight as I had, and mentioned, a few times, to my partner. But human contact seemed necessary in maintaining one’s sanity and, simply put, there was nowhere else for me to go. I was a terrible bowler and we lost. Afterward they all got in a car and left me in the parking lot to walk home in the dark.

  An hour later I was sitting at my kitchen table drinking a pop. People were yelling and laughing in the street outside. I went out, walked up the steps, over to the front porch and sat down. I put my head on my arms. I felt, I might have said, bound by sorrow. I missed my mother and my brother and my old man. Everything I’d said to him ran through my head and sunk me. I missed Emily. I went back down inside and took the Fish Bar flyer out from under the bed and my notepad and decided to call her. I would ask her to come to Nebraska and live with me. I would beg her to come. I would apologize for the terrible things I’d done. I would tell her I was in love with her. I would tell her my heart was breaking. I would get on my knees and tell her I was falling apart. I would say I couldn’t live without her and she would tell me—I hoped she would tell me—that she’d been waiting for a long time to hear me say it like that, that she would be on the first plane in the morning.

  She answered after the first ring. The television was going in the background. A crowd was laughing about something.

  “Please don’t hang up,” I said.

  “Not this again,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything.”

  “I’m getting my dad,” she said.

  “I’m not gonna do anything!”

  “Please just leave me alone.”

  “Your dad punched me in the face,” I said. I don’t know why I mentioned this, other than she wasn’t reacting to my call in the way I’d expected.

  “I’m hanging up,” she said.

  “Let me ask you a question!”

  “I’m hanging up. Goodbye.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “That’s a joke, right?”

  “You need help,” she said, and then she hung up.

  “I do need help,” I said. “I know it.”

  I put on my shoes and splashed my face with water. I put a fresh Band-Aid on my cold sore. Then I walked out into the darkness and got lost in it. I wandered toward the fields outside of town and then I wandered through them, down a series of narrow winding roads, not knowing where I was going, but thinking for some reason that what I needed to do was walk, or maybe that I needed to start walking.

  I whistled, but just listening hurt my heart. I kept walking, and in rural towns, those roads can turn around on you and you can find yourself completely devoid of direction, and if you have never been good with direction in the first place, you can find yourself in a lot of trouble, which, after the third hour of wandering, I was ready to admit.

  Because I had no idea where I was—I wasn’t anywhere, really. The sidewalks had ended miles before and I’d kept telling myself that every marker I passed, a rock or a particular tree or a field where someone had dumped a big pile of cement, I kept telling myself that I recognized these things, that I remembered seeing them as my dad and I had come into town, so it was baffling, almost hurtful, that they hadn’t led me anywhere.

  Clouds had come and covered the stars; they had, it seemed, removed the sky. I’d walked out into the darkness and I was lost in it. I was alone in Nebraska. I wasn’t studying fish. I wasn’t going to class. I had no one who knew me by name. There was no one, even back home, who would have been happy to see me, say I walked into their house to say hello. My girlfriend, or the girl I wanted to be my girlfriend, had torn my heart in two. I missed my family terribly. I missed everyone. I wished we could all be together again.

  The road forked and I stopped. The wind blew and the hills rolled away from the fences on either side. Two rows of radio towers stood off in the distance on the horizon, red lights blinking in separate rhythms. The Milky Way stretched behind them like a thin, tired cloud, like the rim o
f a great big bowl. It was an enormous universe. The wind was picking up. I was tired. My feet hurt. My shirt was wet. My jaw ached. I stared at the towers, at the lights. I watched them blink. And then I had a vision.

  In the vision, I’m looking down on myself as if from a camera suspended above my head. It starts with a shot of the inside of my ear and then it slowly pulls back and I see my cheek and the side of my face and my closed eyes and my hair and my neck and soon I can see most of my body, I see myself, curled up on the side of a road with my head resting on my hands like someone either dead or asleep. My jeans are rolled up past my knees and my legs are bare. And as the camera pulls back further, higher, I see a car—a mid-eighties sedan, I think—idling quietly on the road beside me with its headlights on. Then the vision was over and I was left alone with the lights on the towers, blinking.

  I didn’t see any other option than to lie down. I curled up on my side in a patch of cool grass next to the road and put my head on my hands. I stayed there, eyes closed, listening, and waited.

  Soon I heard a car approach and stop next to me. The doors opened. I felt two people come and stand next to me, one on each side. One of them bent down and said something in my ear that I didn’t understand, and then softly, gently, removed my arms and my nose. The other pulled off my ears, then unzipped my pants and pulled off my dick. They bent down on either side of me and spoke into my ears, or what had been my ears—the holes that were there. They each said something that I didn’t understand with voices I didn’t understand, and my eyes filled and I started crying, because I knew something, or my heart knew something—or the answer to something, and when you know the answer, it hurts terribly.

  They got back in the car, and then another door opened and someone else got out. He walked over to me. He crouched down next to me. He put his hands on my head. I kept crying and didn’t think to stop. He spoke words over me, and then he moved his hands down to my feet and pulled my legs off.

  I could feel my skin harden and emit a mucus membrane that covered up every hole—where my nostrils had been, the holes that were my ears, every opening but my mouth. My lungs tightened in my chest and shriveled up. I started gagging, my throat constricted, and I coughed my lungs up out of my mouth. I flopped in the grass, slowly at first, not breathing, and then with every second, more and more furiously, more violently and painfully, the sky and what was in it a blurry mess above my head, and I knew, I absolutely knew, that unless someone came and got me to water soon—within seconds—I would die.