Dirt

by David Vann

  Galen felt the unreality of her, felt it for the first time as something immediate and undeniable. She raised her glass again to her lips, but even that movement was jointed. The world put together with some kind of ratcheting action, each piece pulled into place under tension, all of it threatening to snap.

  Galen wanted to leave. He wanted to get away from this table. This table felt extremely dangerous. He understood now that what held his family together was violence. But he was locked here, glued in place, unable to move. He could only watch, and the only movement was his mother’s glass, and his grandmother’s glass and palm moving in its slow circles, and the wavering of the light.

  Chapter 11

  Galen read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, his most precious book, the one he studied when his attachment to the world became too much.

  Your children are not your children.

  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

  They come through you but not from you,

  And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

  Galen knew this to be true. He was greater than his mother, meant for more. She needed to understand that she had no claim over him. Or the illusion of her needed to understand that, or he needed to understand that the illusion of her had no hold over him, or something. It was all confusing. In any case, he needed to break her attachment to him, because she was holding him back. And his aunt needed to understand that she was free from her parents, that her life was her own. If only everyone could understand Gibran, there could be so much less suffering.

  It was difficult to be in a family of younger souls. Galen was an old soul, nearing transcendence, learning his last and most difficult lessons, his final disengagements from family, but the rest of them were just beginning. They didn’t know, even, that they were on the road. They didn’t know the road existed, and it was tiring to try to wake them up and pull them along. It was a kind of service Galen was having to perform, a selflessness that was also one of the final lessons. At the moment, though, he didn’t feel up to the task.

  He rested The Prophet on his chest and looked around the small room in lamplight. The slanted ceiling, exposed wood, the vertical planks of the walls, painted dark brown. He wondered whether he might be a prophet, too. Perhaps that was his role.

  Jesus had been a prophet. An ordinary man, a carpenter, but an old soul who was willing to help others see.

  Galen loved this room, a place to remember who he was. It was easy to forget during the rest of the year as samsara worked away at him. But the room felt too small right now. Galen felt on the edge of learning something. He felt his soul expanding.

  So he got out of bed, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and boots, since it would be cold outside, the mountains always cold at night. He tried to sneak down the stairs, but they were loud and creaking, and he didn’t know which way to turn. If he went to the left, he’d have to pass his aunt and Jennifer to get out the front door. If he went right, he’d have to pass his mother and grandmother sitting at the kitchen table. He didn’t want to go either way. He wanted a third door, but that’s exactly what life never provided, and perhaps it was a good thing. This is how we were confronted, how we were forced to learn our lessons.

  Galen went left, because he couldn’t bear to be in that kitchen again with his mother and grandmother.

  Jennifer and Helen on the hide-a-bed, leaning back awkwardly. There was a big gap between the mattress and back, so it was never possible to prop against pillows. They’d be getting kinks in their necks.

  Let me guess, Helen said. You’re being called by Father Granite to sing the pebbles into bigger rocks?

  Galen ignored her and stepped outside. Down the steps quickly and into the dirt road, the pine needles. Clear, cold air, the smell of wood smoke, everything traced in moonlight.

  “You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.” Gibran was right. Galen needed only to learn how to look, how to feel. The pattern of moonlight through the trees. Everything around him a presence and a sign. The bodhisattva in all things. The Buddha in each rock and tree. Each pine needle better than a church.

  Galen stopped and felt his connection to the ground, took off his boots and socks, concentrated on becoming lighter. Let the energy of the earth come up through his soles. He stepped forward again but tried to let it happen unplanned, tried to move authentically, tried to walk softly but not think about walking softly. Authentic Movement was something he was just learning about. There was a New Age bookstore near his grandparents’ house, where he had spent most of his years after high school, but they’d told him not to come back, called him a stalker when all he’d been doing was aligning his aura with a young woman who worked there. She was a younger soul, lovely but afraid, unable to see. He had been trying to help her. The alignment worked best when he stood close behind her and put his arms out, but she didn’t like that. The whole thing made him angry still, something he was trying to let go of. They were letting him order books by mail now, and the one on Authentic Movement was his most recent, letting the body find its own way, letting it speak back, learning from it, releasing attachment to self and past and anger, welcoming the connections to earth and air.

  Galen’s neck was slumped, and he could feel his lips heavy, like a frog’s. For some reason, that always happened when he tried to concentrate, and it was distracting. Why was he even aware of his own lips? He wanted to be focusing on his movement.

  He held his arms out, palms up, opened himself to the universe. Tried to let the movement happen, but somehow that just slowed him down and made his hips feel locked. So he tried a different stride, tried to walk the way he had over coals, more purposeful, longer strides. Only one workshop, one evening, and he had missed most of the talk because he’d agreed to tend the fire as a way to reduce how much he had to pay. Always having to beg his mother for money. A large bonfire, and it burned his face as the others talked about fear and using your fear as a counselor. He heard bits of it. Then he raked the coals into a bed fifteen feet long and three feet wide, the hot red embers and his face stinging.

  Everyone gathered on the lawn in a ring around the coals, the grass cool and damp but the coals glowing. Galen felt afraid, but he was buoyed by the chanting around him, everyone with their arms out and palms up. Then they crossed the coals, one by one. Many of them jerked, a little hop after a few steps, burned. But some just crunched their way across.

  When it was Galen’s turn finally, at the end, he felt the most beautiful faith, a sudden rush of knowing that the universe would take care of him, a feeling that his fear had become something else more powerful, more pure, and he walked across with only a curiosity. He could feel the coals crushing under his feet, could feel their heat, even. He could feel each piece of wood, how fragile it was, how the fire was a kind of net that had pulled the substance from the wood, and he didn’t burn. He walked across and was on the lawn again and felt he had received a great gift.

  He helped clean up afterward, and he watched the woman who ran the workshop tend to her feet. He hadn’t seen her jerk or hop as she crossed, but the bottoms of both her feet were outrageously burned, long puffed areas of red skin like on a hot dog. She applied a white cream, then wrapped in bandages and stepped into large slippers. She popped a Vicodin.

  What? she asked, and he didn’t know what to say. She was making probably $20,000 in an evening, so that was perhaps the motivation, and he felt cheated.

  Walking now on the pine needles, though, he tried to remember what he had felt as he’d crossed the coals, because something about that had been real. Something had happened, and there was no reason he couldn’t enter that space again.

  He tried to feel himself strung like a hammock between earth and moon. Wavering and catching the ethereal breeze, the wind from the shadow world. His body almost a tuning fork. His bare feet heavier on the road than he would have liked, so he tried to release them, tried to let them not ca
rry any weight. He could feel sharp pricks from stones and needles, and he tried to ignore that, too. Ceremonial steps, a smooth movement, and he realized he was being pulled toward the wide, shallow water near the bridge, the open pool. He was being drawn there, and he didn’t yet know why, but he was following that.

  The road a corridor, laced in moonlight and shadow. A journey. He kept his eyes half lidded, tried to see without looking. Felt the energy gathering. His crown chakra wide open.

  He chanted. Heya hey hey, ya eh oh ee, ya eh oh ee, heya heya hey hey hey hey how. A song he had learned once in a sweat lodge, a beautiful song, meant to do something. A ghost dance or sun dance or something like that. Heya nico-wei, heya nico-wei, heya nico-wei hung-ee hei hei hei hei how.

  He hopped a little as he sang, arms raised up, but then went back to a slower stride. That felt more real, more ceremonial.

  And then suddenly he was in the open, in the full moon, the dirt road white and luminous and the wide pool of water shining before him. The moon straight ahead, beckoning. He felt pulled toward it, felt acknowledged by the moon, recognized. The song had become a moon dance, and the moon had listened.

  The moon was offering him a gift, this water. This was why he had been drawn here. The surface of the water always in motion, the light never still, but evolving in pattern. This is what Siddhartha had seen. In the passing of the water was the passing of self, of attachment, and in the shapes on the surface one could find the face of all things. Every longing, every pain, all of it would form for a moment, a trick of the light, and then dissolve. It was when we looked at water that we dreamed, and remembered the tug of previous incarnations, and what we longed for was our true form beyond this body, beyond this incarnation, beyond this world of illusions.

  Galen understood now what he was meant to do tonight. The moonlight a path across the water, the proof, finally, of what he was. He walked toward it, or was walked toward it by the universe. The stream of beautiful sounds, the bubbling and coursing, a voice reassuring, the light soft, and he had lost his feet. They had become one with the light and would cross the surface in the same way that the light lay upon the water.

  Galen ecstatic, his entire soul rushing with love. His foot at the surface, cold, the breath of the water, and that was all right, it was happening, but then his foot plunged through and he tilted, trying to keep his palms up, trying to save this, trying not to lose faith. The next step could hold, so he threw his other foot out there, but it plunged, also, and his ankle twisted on rock below and he was falling forward, hit the water face-first in an icy shock, all his air gone. He breathed water and pushed against rock and sand to get up, thrashing with his arms. He was coughing, stumbled and fell again, his ankle twisted and too difficult to stand on, so he propped on his butt and arms and pulled himself backward toward shore. He crawled out of the water and just lay in the dirt. What the fuck, he said. When is it going to happen?

  Chapter 12

  Galen limped down the road, soaked and shivering and dirty, his wet jeans and sweatshirt heavy, and when he arrived at the cabin he wondered how he’d get in. He wasn’t going in the front door. There was no way he was giving his aunt that satisfaction.

  He wouldn’t be able to take a bath, either. It was too late. So his only hope was the stove.

  Galen stepped quietly onto the deck, ducked low under the main kitchen window and went around the side, peeked into the smaller window above the sink. He could see his mother and grandmother still sitting at the small yellow table, drinking yellow wine. A second bottle, almost empty. Everything distorted in the old glass of the window, bent, the upper part of a bottle magnified, lower part shrunken. His grandmother’s head too small. Everything yellow, it seemed, even the white-painted walls cast yellow in the light.

  It might be a while. They rarely drank, but when they did, it was back to the past. The cases of empty bottles from his grandfather, left outside the pantry door. Galen didn’t have a single memory of him that was without wine, without that smell of Riesling, the only wine he’d drink, a piece of the old country. Galen didn’t know where in Germany his grandfather was from, didn’t know what it looked like, had no idea what his grandfather’s childhood had been. All lost. An illusion anyway, but still, one Galen wanted to know, if only so that his grandfather could make more sense. His grandfather born into this world with a thick finger circling in the air, coming after Galen’s belly, a buzzing sound, his grandfather saying bzz, bzz, bzz, and Galen terrified of that finger. The earliest memory, and of course flooded with the smell of that wine. His grandfather exhaling wine, his teeth dark, the thick hairs in his nostrils dark, trying to play, trying to show something like affection, but he was only terrifying, every part of him, his finger plunging far too hard into Galen’s belly, a roughness to everything he did. Galen didn’t have a single memory of his grandfather that didn’t include fear.

  Galen had only one memory, though, of actual violence. His grandfather pulling his grandmother around by her hair on the kitchen floor. Galen had laughed at first, when he ran into the kitchen and found them. It looked like a kind of game, something done for fun, except that the sounds didn’t match that. His mother whisked him away quickly, out of the house, and every other memory that might have been of violence was only of sound and leaving.

  Helen was right that men were the problem. Galen’s grandfather the source of everything wrong in this family. But she couldn’t say Galen was the same. That wasn’t fair.

  Galen was becoming far too caught up in the illusions. He needed to remember that none of this was real. His grandfather was only a touchstone, a marker, like the old stove or the big rock. Despair, getting depressed about his family, was only a kind of procrastination on the road. It was a refusal to keep moving, a distraction, a lack of courage to face lessons. It could feel real, but it wasn’t real. You could spend an entire life trapped there, as his aunt had done, but that was an easy mistake, a weakness, a waste of an incarnation.

  The wall behind the stove had a bit of warmth, even on the outside, so Galen stood flat against it, his cheek on the wood. His wet clothing so heavy and thick his body could warm the inside layer, perhaps, like a wetsuit. He was shaking, though. He just didn’t have any reserves. No fat. He was not good with cold. He was meant to get in and quickly out of this incarnation. Just learn his final lessons and go. His body was not meant to last. Eating and pissing and shitting just a distraction, one he was tired of, his old soul frustrated at having to play the game again.

  Galen hugged the cabin wall, tried to imagine his arms wrapping all the way around the entire structure. He waited and waited, desperately cold, and finally the light switched off, the window went dark. His lower jaw like a sewing machine. He waited another few minutes and then walked around back, let himself carefully in the door.

  The kitchen air warmer but not as hot as he had hoped, the fire in the stove long since died. He sloughed off his wet clothing into the corner behind the door, then felt his way along the table in the dark, over to the drawers under the sink. Found the matches, lit one and set it on the stove for a light. He would start a new fire. He lifted one of the round burners with the chrome handle, and then the match went out and he was in darkness again. But he could feel hot air from the opening in the stove, and he set the burner carefully to the side, then felt with his hands. The cast iron warm on the surface, hotter still inside, so he bent over, the open hole of hot air at his chest, and hugged the stove. This would be enough. He wouldn’t need a new fire. He felt the breath of the stove warm his chest and his belly, pressed his arms against its dry warm skin until he had stopped shivering and creaked up the stairs to his bed and slid under a pile of blankets. He loved the weight of the blankets, four layers thick, something he had only here at the cabin. He curled into a fetal position, his head ducked under the covers, and felt safe in his nest.

  Chapter 13

  Galen awoke to the smell of bacon. Deep and beautiful smell, and he felt his hunger, the hollownes
s inside him. Bacon. There would be pancakes, also, and scrambled eggs. When he smelled the toast, it would be time. His mother trilling in the kitchen, her happy voice. Chatting with his grandmother, and he heard his aunt’s voice, even. A time of peace. A new day.

  Galen snuggled in the warmth of his blankets, even though the air had warmed from the stove. He waited until he could smell toast, and then he pulled the blankets aside and reached in his duffel for shorts and a shirt. He had no other pants, unfortunately. Only the jeans that were wet.

  Galen, his mother called. She sang it, rising up on the first syllable, falling on the last. Ga-len. A happy time. And he felt willing to go along with it. He came down the stairs and found them all at the table, squeezed into his place and watched his plate fill with two pancakes, eggs, strips of bacon, and toast. A mug of hot chocolate.

  Wow, he said.

  Brekkie is served, his mother said. Brekkie the way the Schumachers do it.

  Galen leaned over his plate and smelled his bacon, deep inhales and closed his eyes. His first meal in what felt like ages. He ate with his bare hands, didn’t want to distance himself with a fork. Kept his face down close, nuzzled the hot pancakes and warm sticky syrup. Tasted the bacon, the smoke and salt and fat and meat, unbelievably good. He was humming, his insides coming alive.

  The eggs moist, not overcooked, black pepper and garlic and onion. He twirled his tongue in his pile of eggs and then sucked them up, pushed the toast into his mouth. The combinations. Toast and eggs. Bacon and maple syrup.