I look alarmingly ugly. My eyes are pouched black. My skin is cancer yellow. My upper lip peels back to reveal long, thin teeth. Mine is the sort of face that belongs to someone who bites the heads off chickens in a carnival pit, not the sort that belongs to a man who cradles in his hands a tiny red-winged blackbird. The vision of me, coupled with the vision of what I once dreamed I would be—handsome, wealthy, athletic, envied by men, and cherished by women—assaults me, the ridiculousness of it and also the terror, the realization that I have crept to the edge of a void and am on the verge of falling in, barely balanced.
And then my eyes refocus, concentrating on a farther distance, where through the window I see a man rising from a couch and approaching. He is tall and square shouldered. His hair is the color of dried blood on a bandage. He looks at me with derision.
I drop the bird and raise my hand, not quite waving, the gesture more like holding up something dark to the light. He does not move except to narrow his eyes. There’s a stone pagoda at the edge of the garden, and when I take several steps back my heel catches against it. I stumble and then lose my balance entirely, sprawling hard on the lawn. The gray expanse of the sky fills my vision. Moisture from the grass seeps into my jeans and dampens my underwear.
In the window the man continues to watch me. He has a little red mustache, and he fingers it. Then he disappears from sight, moving toward the front door.
As I stagger off the lawn and hurry along the sidewalk, my eyes zero in on the porch, waiting for the man to appear there, and I catch sight of the address: 13743.
And then I am off and running. A siren announces itself nearby. The air seems to vibrate with its noise. It is a police cruiser, I’m certain, though how I can tell the difference between it and an ambulance, I don’t know. Either way, someone is in trouble.
The body was blackened by its lengthy exposure to radio frequency fields. Cooked. Like a marshmallow left too long over flame. This is why the deputies shut off the transmitters when they climbed the tower.
Z-21 interviewed Jack Millhouse, a professor of radiation biology at Oregon State. He had a beard, and he stroked it thoughtfully. He said that climbing the tower would expose a person to radio frequencies so powerful they would cook the skin. “I’d ask around at the ER,” he said. “See if somebody has come in with radiation burns.”
Then they interviewed a woman in a yellow, overlarge T-shirt and purple stretch pants. She lived nearby and had seen the commotion from her kitchen window. She thought a man was preparing to jump, she said. So she came running in the hopes of praying him down. She had a blank, smeary face, like a smashed piece of putty. “It’s just awful,” she said, her lips disappearing as she tightened her mouth. “It seems like something that should have happened somewhere else, but it’s right here.”
I know I am not the only one who has been cut off by a swerving car in traffic or yelled at by a teacher in a classroom or laughed at by a woman in a bar. I am not the only one who has wished someone dead and imagined how it might happen, delighting in the goriest details.
Here is how it might happen:
I am in a kitchen with stainless steel appliances and granite counters and a mosaic backsplash that looks like it’s made from crushed diamonds. I stand over a man with a Gerber hunting knife in my hand. There is blood dripping off the blade, and there is blood coming out of the man. Gouts of it. It matches the color of his hair. A forked vein rises on his forehead to reveal the panicked beating of his heart. Saliva webs the corner of his mouth. He holds his hands out, waving me away, and I cut through them. He wears a silk shirt. A gold chain flashes at his neck. A watch gleams at his wrist, the same sleek midnight coloring as the Mercedes parked in his garage. He has everything, everything, everything.
A dog barks from the hallway. The man screams in a high, thin, repulsive voice. All of this sounds far away, like a conversation heard through blips of static.
I am aware of my muscles and their purpose as never before, using them to place the knife, aiming it finally at the man’s chest, where it will make the most difference.
At first the blade won’t budge, caught on a rib, and then it slips past the bone and into the soft red interior, deeper and then deeper still, entering him to the hilt. The response is cathartic: a shriek, a gasp, a stiffening of the limbs followed by a terrible shivering that eventually gives way to a great, calming release.
There is blood everywhere—on the knife, on the floor, gurgling from the newly rendered wound that looks so much like a mouth—and the man’s eyes are open and empty, and his sharp pink tongue lolls out the side of his mouth. I am amazed at the thrill I feel.
When I surprised him, only a few minutes ago, he was on the phone. I spot it now, on the shale floor, with a halo of blood around it. I pick it up and bring it to my ear and hope for the familiar, calming murmur of the dial tone.
Instead I hear a voice. “Hello?” it says.
Are you listening? Will you stay on the line just a little longer? Telling the story is complicated. Finding my way to the end and knowing my way back to the beginning without losing my way.
To understand a story like this you would have to know what it’s like to speak into a headset all day, reading from a script you don’t believe in, conversing with bodiless voices that snarl with hatred, voices that want to claw out your eyes and scissor off your tongue. Do you know what that does to a person? Listening to people scream at me and hang up on me, day after day, with no relief except for the occasional coffee break when I talk with C6 about the television show I watched last night?
I forgot to tell you how Pete Johnston sort of leaned and sort of collapsed against the fridge and a magnet fell to the linoleum with a clack after I slashed the knife in a silvery arc across his face and then his outstretched hand and then into that soft basin behind the collarbone. Something inside me, some internal switch, had been triggered, filling me with an unthinking adrenaline that made me feel capable of kicking a telephone pole to splinters. Again I stabbed the body, in the thigh, the belly, my muscles pulsing with a red electricity.
I am going to offer you a great deal. Low interest rate, no introductory fee. But first you need to know what it felt like to pull the body from the trunk of my car and hoist it to my shoulder. I climbed the tower—one rung, then another—going slowly. From here—thirty, then forty, then fifty feet off the ground—I could see the chains of light on Route 97 and Highway 100, each bright link belonging to a machine that carried inside it a man who could lose control in an instant, distracted by the radio or startled by a deer or overwhelmed by tiredness, careening off the asphalt and into the surrounding woods. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you.
Imagine for a second that you know what it’s like to be me. Your thighs tremble. You are weary, dizzy. Your fillings tingle, and a funny baked taste fills your mouth. The edges of your eyes go white and then crazy with streaks of color. But you continue climbing, with the wind tugging at your body, with the blackness of the night and the black shapes of birds all around you, the birds swirling through the air like ashes thrown from a fire. And let’s not forget the sound—the sound of the tower—how it sounds almost like words. The hissing of radio frequencies, the voices of so many others coming together into one voice that courses through you in dark conversation.
Listen.
The Mud Man
Thomas is in his garden when it happens. Weeds choke his daffodils, and he hacks at them with his garden claw, breaking up the soil, yanking out clumps to toss in a pail. He isn’t concentrating. He is thinking about something else, the problem of a split refund. At this time of year, when everyone crowds his office at once and throws onto his desk rubber-banded 1099s and wrinkly bunches of receipts, he is always thinking about something else—about reductions to the gift tax rate, the new exclusions for estates and trusts, the valuation of qualified real property, and on and on, his mind clogged with numbers and forms, his fingers dirty with ink and crosshatched with paper cuts.
“If only I didn’t need sleep,” he often says to his wife. “If only there were more hours in a day. If only there were two of me.”
The garden claw comes down on his hand, two of the tines piercing his glove. It takes Thomas a moment to process the injury. He does not curse—he is not the cursing type—but tears off the glove to account for the damage. The webbing between his thumb and index finger is gashed. And the nail of his middle finger has peeled over, hanging by a red thread. A nub of bone peeks out. The pain arrives a moment later, an electric heat. He can feel his heart beating in his hand. A drop of blood gathers at the tip of his finger, swells fatly, and then falls into the cup of a daffodil.
He likes daffodils more than tulips. You can’t count on tulips. You dig so many holes with your spade and arrange the bulbs in a tidy design so that staggered throughout the garden the flowers will appear, blooming in different stages, different colors, Darwin tulips and fringed tulips and parrot tulips and triumph tulips. But things never work out as you expect them to. The squirrels sniff out the bulbs and burrow through the loose soil to chew them like blighted apples. And when spring finally comes, maybe you have a tulip here, a tulip there, scattered survivors soon gnawed down to a serrated edge by a rabbit.
Daffodils are more reliable. Squirrels hate their bulbs, and rabbits their leaves and flowers, for the bitter taste. So daffodils are what he plants, and once their bloom ends, the irises and the daylilies take over, the peonies and columbines and hollyhocks, the hostas, the whole garden color-coordinated, tidily weeded, mapped out perfectly, like the rest of his life.
Next to the toilet sits a magazine rack arranged alphabetically. He folds his socks into neat little balls that run in white, brown, and black stripes through his drawer. Every Saturday he washes his car, a beige Ford Escort, kneeling to pick the bugs from the grille, to scrape any rust specks off the hubcaps. He organizes his grocery list according to aisle. He alternates his mowing patterns—north/south, east/west, diagonal—to ensure the grass doesn’t streak with wheel wear.
So the messiness of his hand bothers him more than the pain. He peels off his fingernail and flicks it aside, and it drops into the soil like a seed.
His is a life without music. He finds it distracting, irritating. Even on long car trips he keeps the radio silent, the only noise the hum of the engine, the fizz of the air conditioning. So it is as he drives to the hospital, his hand wrapped in a towel, his mouth tightened into a line as he chews at the insides of his lips and calculates the hours lost to this injury, not just an afternoon in the garden but the weeks ahead in the office, punching numbers, flipping through files.
Later, when he returns home, his hand is gloved in bandages under which his skin is glopped over with Neosporin and stitched up with black string that looks like the coarse sort of hair that might grow on a fly, like the ones that fill the bloody daffodil, buzzing and drinking and making the flower bob and surge with their boiling presence, when once more he stands in his garden, collecting his tools, his gloves, his kneeling cushion.
It is then that he spots, in the very same place he discarded his fingernail, the swollen belly of dirt. Along its edges several flowers lean sideways, displaced. It is cracked along its crown and from the center of it pokes a cluster of green, muddy shoots that look like nothing so much as a handful of fingers, reaching upward. He nudges it with his shoe and mutters, “What the?” but before he can crouch down and observe it more closely, his wife, Rebecca, opens the kitchen window to tell him to please come inside, his Tuesday-night casserole is ready and Owen needs a diaper change and his work phone keeps ringing.
By the next morning, what appears to be a crooked tree, almost an arm—a sinewy tangle of bark and vines and leaves—grows from the garden. Throughout the day it grows larger, and larger still, thickening, branching out, taking on the eventual appearance of a man curled in the fetal position. This is what Thomas observes after work when he rattles the lawn mower out of the garage and into the backyard.
The wind is blowing, and at first Thomas believes it is responsible not only for the trembling of the grass he stands on, but the shivering of the bush. A bush. That is what Thomas—squinting his eyes, cocking his head—processes the hunched shape as, some invasive species of bush. And then he realizes it has its own animation, slowly untangling itself, shuddering to life. In a series of arrested spurts, it straightens from a hunch to the upright position of a man roughly the same height and build as Thomas, round-shouldered, with some thickness about the waist.
He stands in the middle of a shallow crater. His joints issue a series of blistery pops like pitch pockets bursting from a log thrown on a fire. Clods of dirt fall off him and spatter the garden, freckling the daffodils and hostas. He has all the calm of a tree, the breeze rushing around him, bending the loose vines and leaves hanging off him like hair, carrying a smell like worms washed across a sidewalk after a hard rain. The mud man seems to be staring at Thomas, though it is hard to tell, as his eyes are hollows with black scribbles in them, like the insides of a rotten walnut.
When the mud man steps forward, Thomas steps back, so that for a moment they are mirror images of each other. The mud man raises his arm, extending his rooty fingers, and at first Thomas thinks he means to shake hands. But the mud man is instead reaching for the mower. He rips back the cord, and the engine coughs to life. Immediately he sets off across the lawn, making a dark green path all the way to the fence line, where he flips the mower neatly around and continues back toward Thomas, who can only stand there, blinking, scratching vaguely at the itch beneath his bandaging.
His mind is never off the clock, always accounting. He knows how many tiles there are on the floor of his master bath: 15. He keeps a notepad and a pen in his Ford and every time he fills up he calculates his gas mileage: 21, city; 32, highway. He can guess with great accuracy the number of bowel movements he will have in a day based on the dinner he ate the night prior: meat loaf, 1; fish fry, 2; Mexican, 3.5. Before the NCAA tourney, he spends weeks studying stats, injuries, coaching strategies, while composing his bracket. The tidy calculations exhilarate him and inform nearly everything he does, as is the case now, when he glances at his watch and realizes that with the forty minutes saved from mowing the lawn and sweeping its clippings off the sidewalk, he will have time to finish the Anderson Jewelry portfolio before dinner.
The mud man trims the hedges. The mud man lays down fresh mulch. The mud man empties the garbage. At first Thomas tries to keep him out of the house, but the garage needs sweeping and the fireplace is still thick with winter’s ashes, so he relents. “I guess it’s fine. I could use the help. I’m so busy, I hardly have time to breathe.”
The mud man polishes the mildew from the grout in the basement shower stall. The mud man cleans the gutters, pulls out dank fistfuls of leaves, crushes hornets’ nests and tosses them aside as if they were balls of dirty paper. The mud man tries to wash the dishes, but gives up after the water darkens and thickens into a kind of gravy.
At first his wife worries. “What will the neighbors think?” she asks. “That I can’t take care of our own home? That I’m sitting here all day doing nothing?”
But then, when the mud man brings her a Diet Coke with a slice of lemon, when he picks up Owen’s toys, when he irons the wrinkled oxfords that have piled up in the laundry room, when he fixes the satellite so that a jagged line doesn’t run down the middle of the television, she begins to grow fond of him, the way he remembers the little things that Thomas doesn’t have time for. “I don’t know how we got by without you,” she says.
Coming home from work and seeing so many tasks completed makes Thomas feel renewed in the world. He smiles and claps the mud man on the shoulder and then goes to the bathroom to scrub the mucky residue off his palm.
Owen is two years old, and Thomas doesn’t spend a lot of time with him. Occasionally he tries to play with the boy, piecing together a puzzle or pushing a toy tractor through the sandbox, but they both end up frustrat
ed, because Owen doesn’t do things correctly. He fails to put the edges of the puzzle together first. He throws sand into the air and dirties the patio. And Thomas can’t help but constantly correct him, saying, “No, no, no,” until finally the boy collapses into a red-faced fit.
Thomas knows he should feel guilty about this, but sometimes he forgets Owen even exists. One time he returned home from work and stepped into the kitchen as the garage door rumbled closed and nearly tripped over the boy as he played with his magnets on the refrigerator. “What are you doing here?” he asked, and meant it in more ways than one.
Owen has a large head and short legs. His knuckles are dimpled. His brown eyes match his hair. The boy seems to enjoy the mud man as if he were a pet, something to be chased and pestered. He races between his legs. He plucks leaves off him and tosses them into the air like green confetti. At the end of the day he grabs the mud man by the hand and asks him to help pick out his jammies. The mud man never complains. Thomas even observes him helping the boy up and patting him on the head after a nasty tumble off his tricycle.
This evening, Owen is playing on the living room floor with a plastic dragon the size of a cat. When he pushes a red scale on its back, it stomps forward and opens its jaws and looses a roar. But the batteries are low, so its steps are sluggish and its roar more like the squawk of a strangled bird.
Thomas comes out of his office to get a glass of milk and sees the boy whimpering over the toy. He says, “You wait one minute,” and goes to the cupboard where they keep the batteries and a small plastic toolbox and squats down on the carpet next to the boy. “I help,” Owen says, and Thomas says, “No. You watch and learn.” But his bandaged hand can’t grip the dragon properly, and his good hand is cramped from clutching a pen all day and he keeps fumbling the screwdriver, which is too big for the small screw on the dragon’s belly, where the batteries are housed. After he bungles the job for the third time, he stares at his hands, simply stares at them, as if he were at the controls of a machine that had broken down. At that moment the mud man walks into the house after fertilizing the lawn.
Suicide Woods Page 7