The One-Eyed Man

by Ron Currie

  “There’s a darkness on me, K.,” Claire says. “I realize that sounds silly, but I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like I’ve been wearing a black sash for the last four years.”

  “I understand,” I say.

  “Do you?”

  “I think so,” I say.

  “I’m not sure how much more I can take,” Claire says.

  “What can I do?” I ask.

  She is silent.

  “Do you need to talk to someone?” I ask.

  “This will not yield to therapy, K.,” Claire says. “I am sick to my soul, here.”

  “Tell me what to do,” I say, “and I will do it.”

  “The guy was a smear on the concrete,” Claire says. “All that was left when they hauled the pallet off him was a stain. A stain, K.”

  “That’s terrible,” I say.

  “People went right on shopping. Barely missed a beat,” she says. “At first I was appalled. But now I think maybe that’s the only reasonable reaction to something like this. Just keep on taking advantage of those exceptional wholesale values. Grab an extra twenty-pound bag of wing dings, just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “The next pallet has your name on it.”

  Larry’s plane appears overhead once again. At the same time, a cloud glides across the sun. The squirrels, clucking and squawking, scrabble up and over the fence into the neighboring yard. A chill rams through me, head to sole, despite the heat. I know what’s coming next, though neither of us has ever once mentioned or even alluded to it before now.

  “We, K.—you and me—are responsible for two hundred and forty-eight deaths,” Claire says. “Three people will spend the rest of their lives in a vegetative state because of us. Another thirteen are maimed, some of them so badly that they hardly resemble human beings anymore.”

  I could, of course, argue the fine points. I could rightly argue that responsibility for all that death and dismemberment belongs to a much wider swath of humanity than is present on our back porch at the moment. Our abductors, for example. Or Sheriff Frank, who allowed an apocalyptic malignancy to fester under his watch. Every last member of Cold Dead Fingers, wholly complicit even if they lacked understanding of how they were being used, or for what purpose. The FBI, with their Operation Overlord response. Trumbull, of course, who conjured all that destruction, planned it for years, tended death like a farmer in his field, patient and deliberate, happy to wait for the bumper crop. And then, further expanding the sphere of responsibility beyond those on the ground: politicians and talking heads, entertainers masquerading as newsmen, charlatans and outrage profiteers everywhere. All of them, and others, bought shares in the carnage of that day.

  I could cite these guilty parties, spread the blame thin as parchment. But that would completely miss the point.

  “Yes,” I say to Claire. “We are responsible.”

  The rogue cloud slides away, and the sun flares so bright against the grass that I squint involuntarily. Claire shakes a fresh cigarette out of her pack.

  “The question,” I say, “is can you live with it?”

  “Can you?”

  “I have yet to find a circumstance that I can’t ultimately live with,” I say. “I imagine if it were going to happen, it would have by now.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Claire says quietly.

  “I hope you can find a way to not resent me for that,” I say.

  Claire blows jets of smoke from her nostrils. “It’s not resentment,” she says. “It’s envy. With a dash of awe.”

  “I’m not sure awe is indicated, either.”

  “It’s also why I’m leaving,” Claire says.

  As we’ve established, time is relative. This is true in both a strict physical sense, and also, as anyone can tell you, in the way that we perceive the passage of time, particularly during traumatic or dangerous events. The texting driver looks up to see he’s crossed the center line and is about to collide head-on with a pickup truck; though the vehicles are only fifty feet apart and traveling at a combined speed of 140 miles per hour, it seems, to the driver’s mind, to take at least seven or eight seconds for the impact to occur, a span during which he has all too much opportunity for regret, terror, even self-recrimination. Or: a woman is cutting zucchini at her kitchen counter. She is a practiced knife wielder, having worked in professional kitchens her entire adult life, and experience has made her careless. As the knife rises and falls in rapid staccato, the tip of her left thumb slides underneath it; she notices this too late to avert the accident, as the blade is already coming down again, but she has plenty of opportunity for her eyes to go wide with horror, for her mind to anticipate the slice, the blood, the pink nub of flesh that will remain on the countertop when she rushes to the bathroom, right hand clutching left wrist, to find the first aid kit.

  This same phenomenon is often mimicked in film, when lazy or untalented directors use slow motion as shorthand for the sense, in the moments preceding disaster, that time has stretched out like a strand of bubble gum.

  And this is this phenomenon that enables me, in the second or two after Claire voices her intention to leave, to ruminate about car crashes, severed digits, and rote filmmaking.

  That goddamn plane again, cheerfully showing off overhead: barrel roll into a steep, sun-glinting climb.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I tell Claire.

  “Say you understand,” Claire says.

  “But I don’t.”

  “Say it anyway.”

  “I’d be lying.”

  “So lie to me.”

  “This could very quickly make me crazy,” I say.

  “Then you’ll know how I feel.”

  “What, exactly, is making you crazy?” I ask.

  “Every day that I wake up next to you,” Claire says, “I smell burned blood. It’s like a pork roast left in the oven too long. I get in the shower with the smell in my nostrils. I smell it in my coffee cup. I smell it in the van, in the break room at work. It drifts up as I fold the shirts and jeans. And let me tell you, I can’t go anywhere near the meat counter.”

  “So maybe a new job is the thing,” I say.

  She gives me a scolding look, though she must know I’m not joking in the least. “Have you ever wondered,” she asks, “why I eat a tuna sandwich for lunch every single day?”

  I shake my head.

  “Because it doesn’t matter what I eat. Everything tastes the way everything smells.”

  I say nothing.

  Claire stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray and gets to her feet. I follow her into the kitchen, down the hallway, and up the staircase to our bedroom, where her two-piece luggage set—one wheeled upright, one wheeled duffel—is packed to bursting on the floor in front of the dresser.

  “I can take the van, or the Fiesta,” she says. “Which would you prefer?”

  “You usually drive the van,” I say.

  “Which has never made sense,” she says. “You’re six-three and pack yourself into that tiny car every day, and I’m five-two and almost need to sit on a phone book to see over the van’s dash.”

  “So this is more about your preference, then,” I say.

  She gazes at me. “It’s about what’s logical, K.,” she says.

  “But what if I say I want to keep the Fiesta?”

  “I’d say that seems more like bitterness than preference.”

  “Regardless.”

  Claire grabs the handles of her luggage. “Please don’t make this harder than it has to be,” she says, wheeling the bags around me and out into the hallway.

  “Let me help you with those, at least,” I say.

  She stops at the landing, glances back over her shoulder, and steps aside to let me hoist the larger of the two bags. We clomp down the stairs and out the front door into the driveway. Larry still stands in the middle of the cul-de-sac, peering skyward.

  I pop the hatchback on the Fiesta, push aside a snow brush and half a jug
of windshield wiper fluid, and swing Claire’s duffel into the cargo space.

  “Where will you go?” I ask her.

  “Peggy’s, for starters,” she says. “After that, I don’t yet know.”

  I hoist the upright roller and place it on top of the duffel. “You really think this will make you feel better?”

  Claire jams her hands in the pockets of her jeans and looks off over the rooftops toward the western horizon. “I have no idea, K.,” she says. “I just know if I stay here with you I’m not going to make it.”

  “Well if you’re certain of that,” I say.

  “I am,” she says.

  We’re quiet for a moment, listening to the drone of Larry’s plane.

  “This is so strange,” I say. “Fifteen minutes ago I was thinking about what we might do for dinner.”

  “It’s all so strange,” Claire says. She holds her hand out. “From the first breath to the last. Can I get those keys?”

  The skin beneath her bottom lip bunches. Her eyes implore me to hurry.

  I hand the key ring over. Claire gets in the Fiesta, backs out of the driveway, and takes off at a much higher rate of speed than the neighborhood association–mandated twenty miles per hour.

  “She going on a trip?” Larry calls across the cul-de-sac.

  “Mind your own business, Larry,” I say, and go back inside.

  • • •

  It is quite late, and I am required, by both contract and custom, to drive across the river by dawn’s early light, park in the municipal lot, sit down at my particleboard desk under the soft fluorescents, and dedicate a certain percentage of my day to this, a different percentage to that, until all of the day is used up.

  Instead of retiring to bed, though, I am sitting in my lounge chair rereading the Einstein biography given to me by my physicist friend. And I am taking in things about Einstein that I did not, in my excitement over relativity, notice or remember from the first time I read the book.

  For instance: Einstein had two wives, Mileva and Elsa, both of whom he outlived.

  There is evidence that he was not particularly kind to either of them, or really anyone in his family.

  Consider, for example, the strong possibility that Einstein forced Mileva to surrender their first child, a baby girl, for adoption.

  Or that later, when their marriage had curdled, Einstein wrote Mileva a list of conditions upon which he would agree to stay with her, including a stern insistence that she not ask for or expect intimacy of any kind.

  Or that Einstein’s elder son, Hans, said, in reference to his father’s renowned dedication to his work, “Probably the only project he ever gave up on was me.”

  Even I am shocked by the cruelty. I sit here stunned, as if ambushed by a custard pie to the face. And like someone who has been ambushed with a custard pie to the face, I feel my shock give way to a rapidly rising swell of anger.

  I set the Einstein biography aside, rise from my chair, and go about the house, room to room, smashing things like a poltergeist.

  Dishware, plant pots, Mason jars, picture frames, electronic devices both high-and low-tech—everything is reduced to bits. The less-sturdy furniture I rend with my hands. For the hardier items—bed frame, dressers, china cabinet—I employ the ax we keep in the basement for splitting firewood. When everything in a given room is broken, I take the ax to the walls, cleaving plaster, gypsum board, wood paneling. I swing and sweat and curse. I put the ax aside for a moment and break a floor lamp over my knee, which in seconds develops a contusion like a waterskin. I hoist the ax again and limp into the bedroom and catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror: wild-eyed, impotent, confused beyond language. Not caring for what I see, I smash my forehead into the mirror. The glass spiderwebs but remains intact. I step back and look at the kaleidoscope I’ve created, a dozen bent and misshapen versions of me, each with a fresh rose of blood unfurling above his eyes. I stare at myselves, shoulders rising and falling as I breathe. Then I hoist the ax, spin twice on my heels, and swing the poll as hard as I can into the mirror, which disintegrates as the ax head lodges deep in the wall behind it.

  I stop to catch my breath and call Claire. While the phone rings I realize if she has driven without pause she should just be crossing the state line between the Virginias. The phone rings and rings, and eventually I get the familiar recording of Claire’s voice, offering the option to leave a message and telling me she may or may not care if I do so.

  The possibilities: One, she is driving and did not notice her phone ring. Two, she noticed her phone ring but chose not to answer. Three, she crashed into a ditch on the side of some country highway and is sitting there bloodied and unconscious, while the Fiesta’s hazards strobe an inky Appalachian night.

  I dial Peggy’s number. She picks up before the second ring, as though she’s been expecting a call.

  “Where are you?” she asks without greeting or preamble.

  “I’m home, in Toledo,” I tell her.

  “K.,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say. “Obviously Claire hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “Not yet,” Peggy says. I hear her drag on a Winston, exhale magnificently.

  “Do you know if she’s alright?”

  “I haven’t heard from her since she left,” Peggy says. “But I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Why is she doing this? What has she told you?”

  “Probably nothing she hasn’t already told you,” Peggy says.

  “Send her home, Peggy,” I say. “When she gets there, tell her to come home. She’ll listen to you.”

  “Honey, you didn’t listen to me,” Peggy says. “So what makes you think she would?”

  I drop the phone on the floor and stomp it, over and over, ignoring the pain in my injured knee until what used to be a state-of-the-art pocket computer is in a condition that could best be described as minced.

  Then I hoist the ax again.

  If I had the skills and the equipment I would break everything down into quarks, and not in the detached systematic manner of a laboratory, but with the violence of a nuclear weapon or particle collider. A cliché of masculinity, I know. Build and destroy. The two imperatives printed on my Y chromosome. But I am only as God made me, so I rage and rage, though I’m smart enough, this time, to keep my anger from spilling into the yard and inviting the attention and censure of our neighborhood watch program.

  When the doorbell rings I have little idea what time it is and no way to find out, having broken all the clocks in the house.

  I open the front door and find Larry standing there, dressed in the same paint-flecked cargo shorts and orange polo he wore earlier. He gazes at me plainly, as though he either doesn’t notice the ax in my hand, or doesn’t find it alarming in the least. A mosquito hovers between us, glowing like a faerie in the light from the bulb overhead.

  “Looks like you’re having a time in there,” Larry says.

  “You’ve been watching me?” I ask.

  “Last twenty minutes or so,” he says.

  The mosquito drifts and drifts.

  “You may want to step back a minute,” I say.

  “Why?”

  I grip the ax and thrust it straight up at the porch light. Both the bulb and the fixture explode, baptizing us in glass shards and argon.

  “Come on in, Larry,” I say, turning to go back inside.

  There’s no furniture left intact, so we stand in the remains of the kitchen. Milk and cranberry juice mingle in a puddle on the tile. The refrigerator door rests on a jumble of kindling that was, until recently, the dining table. The air smells like sweat and miso and citrus. I set the ax on its head and lean the handle against the wall.

  “I’d offer you something to drink,” I say. “But.”

  “Why’d she leave?” Larry asks, brushing bits of glass from his hair.

  “I can’t really talk about that,” I say.

  “Because it’s none of my business?”

  “Because I’m no
t supposed to mention the past,” I say. “You aren’t the only one who has dealings with the government.”

  Larry looks around, taking in the devastation. “Everyone knows who you are,” he says. “They just don’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because they’re polite cul-de-sac people.”

  I nudge a ceramic olive oil cruet, somehow spared in my rampage, off the countertop. It hits the floor but does not break. “Then tell me, Larry,” I say, “do you think I’m responsible for what happened in Texas?”

  “I was, like, eleven when it went down,” Larry says. “I barely remember.”

  I lift the ax with one hand and drop the head on the cruet. It cracks into several large pieces and disgorges its contents in thick, creeping rivulets. “Even still,” I say.

  Larry thinks for a moment. “We all court our own fate,” he says finally.

  “By which you mean?”

  “Well look. If I see someone planting a roadside bomb, I’m going to blow him away. But I’m not responsible for his death. He is.”

  “Go on,” I say.

  “I didn’t put him in a ditch with a hot-wired artillery shell in his hand. He made that choice.”

  “That’s valid. Simplistic, but valid.”

  “How is it simplistic?”

  “There are a lot of theoretical influences on our theoretical bomber. Poverty. Lack of education. Religious dogma. The lingering effects of colonialism.”

  Larry stares at me. “You people always make things more complicated than they are. It’s like some weird mental illness.”

  “Which people?” I ask.

  “Liberals,” he says.

  “I’m not a liberal.”

  “Let me simplify it for you,” Larry says. “Man trying to kill you. Kill man first, if you can. The end.”

  “But that’s his exact perspective, too.”

  “And around and around we go.”

  “Nice that you’ve got it all figured out,” I say.

  “Listen,” Larry says, “with regard to your particular question: FBI tactical teams implicitly accept the possibility of dying that comes with the job. Right-wing loons implicitly accept that poking the bear comes with better-than-even odds the bear will poke back.”