by John Welter
“Do you know what I hate about death?” Janice said, taking a sip of wine and reaching for my cigarette.
“That it exists?” I said.
“That, too,” she said. “But let’s say death is going to exist and you can’t stop it. Nothing, so far, will prevent it. What I hate then is that death doesn’t care how or when it destroys. A baby might die thirty seconds after birth from a malformed heart. It might die at seventeen from being drunk and falling off a hotel balcony during a prom. Or you could live to be eighty and choke to death on soup. It’s not like death is some noble, mystical force that we should learn to deal with. Death is just this capricious, random killer,” she said, frowning and looking at me for agreement.
“Now you’ve libeled death,” I said. “I think libel means when you deliberately attempt to injure someone’s reputation and livelihood.”
“Death doesn’t have a livelihood,” Janice said.
“You’re right. Death doesn’t get paid. So that can’t be libel. It’s probably just slander. That’s not as bad as libel. We’re fine.”
“I’m glad we’re fine,” she said, patting my leg and sniggering. “But do you believe in resurrection, now that I think of it?”
“Oh, Janice. Don’t get me started on religion. I’ll just get pissed off and slander everybody in the Bible, and then on Judgment Day, I’ll have to have two lawyers with me. I’ll get Jewish lawyers. Supposedly they’re smartest. And when it’s time to go before God and be accountable for everything I did in life, my lawyers will say, ‘Your honor, our client doesn’t remember all that. Also, we request a delay in judgment, allowing our client time to sneak to the back of all of humanity and hope you forget he’s here.’”
She stared at me with astonishment, and laughed. She said, “Kurty. Some people just commit sins. I think you invent them, really. I’m gonna have to watch out for you, my God.”
“Okay. I’ll be quiet.”
“No you won’t. You never are. That’s one thing I like about you. There’s almost nothing quiet or resigned about you.”
“You either,” I said. “That’s why you can tolerate me.”
“But I don’t understand,” she said, staring in my eyes. “You’re so,” and she was quiet, wondering which word I was.
“I don’t know which word I am, either. Don’t think of it. You’ll hurt our feelings.”
But she kept thinking of it, finally saying, “You’re so skeptical, and mocking about religion, as if it has all these obvious, stupid flaws that you won’t tolerate. And despite that, and the fact that I know you don’t go to church, you still pray. You pray about me, and I’m glad. But I don’t understand. How can you be so skeptical but still you pray?”
I was quiet, wondering about that. “Yeah. It’s very weird,” I said.
“But I know,” she said. “I used to go to church, since I was a girl and until I was maybe eighteen. I went to college and met atheists.”
I said, “See? College is bad for you. I think we should outlaw education. It would protect our ignorance from corruption.”
“I’m not an atheist,” she said.
“I remember the first time I met an atheist. It was at some party in Johnson County, Kansas, and I was drinking a beer and talking about some kind of philosophic crap you talk about when you’re in college. And this guy said he was an atheist. I said, ‘Really? That’s not much of a religion.’”
“Will you stop it?” she said, laughing and trying not to. “Quit interrupting me. I’m trying to explain something to you, dammit.”
“Okay.”
Janice looked puzzled. “Now I forget which thought I last forgot,” she said.
“It was about atheists in college,” I said.
“That’s right. But that’s not what I’m getting at. I gradually stopped going to church, too. But not because I’d lost faith in anything. It was just that church was so strange. They created an entire atmosphere of, for me, complete, inscrutable weirdness. It was as if each instant of life, whether you were eating breakfast or playing outside or looking at your dog or anything, was either movement toward sin, or away from it. I just thought it was crazy, that every instant of life had to be religious, and if you weren’t memorizing the Bible or spending every scant second directing your thoughts toward Jesus, you were some repugnant, lost person. Actually, I began to wonder, just a little, if Christianity itself wasn’t pathological, and not me. So I backed out of that. But I still believed in God. It was like, God was there, somewhere; I always assumed he was in outer space, beyond our telescopes, but somehow, religion got in the way of God. It became this sort of spiritual bureaucracy, I guess is the best way to put it and sound irreverent, this church, dogma, pathological bureaucracy saying all that mattered came from the Bible, and anything not focused on that was evil. I couldn’t take it. So I excused myself from organized religion. And what I realized I’d done was keep believing in God, because I wanted to, but I wanted him to be a better God than the one at church, you know? I didn’t want some god who was supposed to be omniscient but who didn’t even know Adam and Eve were going to eat that apple. Which means he either isn’t omniscient—and that makes Christians look stupid for saying he is—or even worse than that, he isn’t love, and I get so mad when people say he is. How can you call it love when you let Adam and Eve eat an apple that supposedly starts a chain reaction of biological sin throughout the entire history of humanity? That’s not love. That’s an epidemic. And I don’t like it, dammit, and you’re not going to get me to go into a building where they have an organ and a choir and people dressed up beautifully to sing songs about someone who started an epidemic.”
She looked suddenly bewildered, like she hadn’t known she was going to say all that, and she shook her head and smiled at me, saying, “Now do you think I’m terrible? Please don’t think I’m terrible.”
“I think you’re great,” I said. “I think you’re even more heretical and skeptical than / am. Although I won’t call that a public honor. But now we’ll never get in fights about which church we won’t go to. We both won’t go to the same one.”
What she told me as she set up the tent, which I watched because she knew how to do it and I didn’t, is she wanted to do something in life that really mattered, before she died, and maybe nothing mattered.
“That is, maybe you don’t go to heaven or you aren’t reincarnated and you just, like bacteria or a plant, fall away and see no more,” she said.
“Like bugs,” I said.
“What scares me is that most people, and I’ve done this too, just go through rituals and routines every day, like you have a job because you need money, and you have a husband or a wife because you need companionship and sex, but all you’re really doing is acting out these rituals and routines because you were taught to do that.”
“I wasn’t taught how to set up a tent,” I said. “That’s why I’m standing here.”
“And sometimes I just get really godawful scared, and I don’t know why I’m telling you this now, it just came to me, like I can trust you with this,” she said.
“If you can’t, shoot me. We brought the gun.”
“But sometimes I’ll feel this sudden panic in me, like an anxiety attack, but it’s not really an anxiety attack, or maybe it is.”
“I’ve had anxiety attacks. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what to call them. They hit you anyway.”
“And I’ll just feel deeply, deeply scared, like why the fuck am I alive? Why am I being here right now, hearing sounds and seeing things and being this woman named Janice? As if I’m supposed to know, like there really is an explanation and I’m supposed to find it, because do you know what’ll happen? One day I’ll just die, like we all do, and if there’s nothing out there, if you just vanish and all your emotions that ever mattered are permanently ended, I better do something that matters now, if this is all we have.”
She stopped tying a rope on the tent to look at me kind of sadly, and I walked over to
her and we held each other. I said, “Maybe we’ll vanish slower this way. And let’s don’t talk about death for a while, okay? I know we’re both going to die, but if we keep talking about it, we should set up our tent at a funeral home. Which reminds me: why do they always set up tents at funerals? It always makes me think you’re supposed to have a buffet and maybe play croquet on the lawn. Cemeteries are too nice just for graves. You should be able to go there for a burial and to play baseball.”
22
Do you think we should shoot something to death for dinner?” I said, holding Janice’s Beretta straight out with my left hand and squinting down the sight into the trees just beyond the tent Janice had set up on some weeds and flowers not far from the cliffs.
“We have food,” Janice said as she tinkered with our fire and looked at all the various hunks of semirotten wood we’d gathered to keep a big fire burning all night and scare away bears and tourists.
“I know. But this country was settled by people who went out and shot something to death for dinner. Being in the wilderness reminds me of that.”
“Well, you don’t look like a pioneer. Pioneers didn’t wear Cleveland Indians baseball caps and carry Berettas.”
“I’d be one of the elite pioneers. We dress better, and have neater guns.”
“Kurt, don’t shoot anything.”
“I’m an American. We’re supposed to shoot things. It’s part of the true pioneer spirit. We didn’t come over here for religious freedom. That’s bullshit. We came over here to steal land and shoot things. Sounds like Germans, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t. It was the English and the Spanish, mostly. Best goddamn thieves of the seventeenth century.”
“Put the gun away, Kurt. If anything attacks us tonight, you can shoot it. I think we better fix these steaks now, before any more bacteria has a chance to grow on them and give us food poisoning.”
“It is like the pioneers,” I said cheerfully. “Our dinner might make us sick.”
“That’s right. We could have fevers and severe intestinal cramps together. What a special night, just the two of us, groaning and crying.”
“If another woman ever asks to have cramps with me, I’ll tell her no. I only do that with you.”
“I swear to God,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “You’re the strangest man I ever knew. You don’t even remind me of anybody. I’m glad I met you in time to steal you from the women who abandoned you. Kurt, put the gun down and come over here and kiss me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
. . .
Even in the summer it got cool in the mountains at night, and we wore jackets and sat on big rocks I found and put next to the fire. The dark was so thick and heavy around us it almost seemed like a force, or a presence, instead of just the absence of light. The closest town, wherever it was, was obviously hidden on the other side of some mountain and was so small that no lights radiated up into the night sky, and it was like civilization didn’t even exist, or was concealed in the pure dark. Our fire was a big one and a hot one, with a dozen or more limbs, all of them fat, crisscrossed over each other and producing brilliant, soothing flames. It also created a wobbly kind of sphere of light that encircled us and seemed like our protected domain. Janice drank some red wine, and I had some brown Coke, and we looked out of our sphere of light up at the unimaginable glittering of stars that looked permanently strewn across the dark, like God got a handful of stars and threw them, and they stayed there always, scattered for our wonderment. Which made for good poetry, until scientists told us the stars were made of hydrogen. No one wrote poems about hydrogen. Janice told me since I thought of it, I should. The century was changing things. When lovers looked up at the burning hydrogen at night, it wasn’t as romantic. And carnal love had changed, too, Janice said. It was almost completely synonymous with viral infections, now. So at night, if you were in a bad mood, or an ironic one, you didn’t look up at the twinkling stars with your lover. You looked up at seething globs of hydrogen with your vector. I said, “Vector? What’s vector?” She said a vector was an organism that transmits disease, like AIDS. Oh. That. You mean in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to vectors? It’s too sad. Don’t say that. I won’t anymore. Not much poetry was going to come out of hydrogen and vectors.
Into the dark we stared, beyond the cliff and beyond the next mountain, where everything competed to be darker and more absent.
“It’s void and without form,” Janice said.
“It’s void where prohibited,” I said.
“If you look straight up at the stars, where there’s supposed to be some hope and wonder, it just makes you feel small and sort of pointless.”
“Sounds like we should be writing a pamphlet to help people despair.”
“If there are hundreds of millions of stars in the universe, which scientists say there are,” she said.
“They’re just guessing. Those fuckers can’t count.”
“And you couldn’t even get to a single star without being killed by it. Why do people say stars are proof of God, as if He made things you either can’t get to because they’re too far away, or they’d kill you if you got near them? Is that divine?” she asked.
“No. It’s just inscrutable. You can’t scrute it.”
Then she drank some of my Coke, the way she did sometimes to be intimate with me and to take communion with me, because it was kind of religious that I’d decided never to have alcohol again or slip even once into the easy euphoria of dry sherry or Bass Ale. The psychiatrist said if I did, I’d want it even more and more, and this time, maybe, if I wanted it to, it would devotedly kill me.
And so like two priests, Janice and I sipped my Coke, a kind of personal religion with just us in it. And as we spoke abruptly and spontaneously, sharing the things that secretly passed through us then, she just said, “It was an important accident that I met you. I could’ve gone to any of several universities, but I wound up in St. Beaujolais. I could have left North Carolina for various jobs long ago, but I stayed here. And I also could have gone with some of my friends to this country-western bar in Raleigh the night I decided instead to go to Annie’s party where, by accident, I met you.”
“It makes me sound like a useful mistake,” I said.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You are useful, though.”
In the dark, thick, jumble of trees beyond us and everywhere came the hooting of owls, chatting to each other or whatever they did, talking about some rodent they were thinking about eating. Certain pieces of wood in the fire popped and had little explosions, making bigger the wide trail of glowing embers wiggling up into the dark, where we watched them vanish, like the night eating fire. We always put one more limb on the fire, and another one, to keep the sphere of light big around us, and the warmth.
A snapping sound came from the woods, like a solid limb breaking, and we both jerked around to see if something was coming at us, but there was just darkness. We stared at each other, trying to see how afraid we were, or if it was funny, and I picked up the gun.
“It might be a bear,” I said, and we were both silent, listening hard. But there was a breeze making noise, and some owls way off, so we couldn’t hear the padding, giant footsteps of something out there that we hoped was going away.
“Kurt?”
“What.”
“Remember when I told you earlier not to shoot anything?”
“Yes.”
“It’s different, now. If it seems reasonable, shoot something.”
“Okay.”
There had been only that one snapping, and no more noises like it, and I wished the breeze would shut up so we could hear. Janice put her arm around mine and drank some more wine, staring into the big darkness as she drank.
“Camping is supposed to be fun,” she said. “It’s not fun thinking something might kill you.”
“We won’t die. It was probably just a skunk,” I said, then thought of everything it could be. “It was probably just
a skunk, or a weasel, or a raccoon, or a possum, or a wild boar with tusks the size of hunting knives.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Or a bear, or a bobcat, or maybe Big Foot.”
“Or maybe it’s Elvis,” she said.
“Elvis? I never did like his music very much. I’ll shoot the fucker. He’ll be dead this time.”
“You wouldn’t really shoot Elvis, would you?”
“If he comes out of the woods singing ‘Viva Las Vegas,’ I will.”
We squinted into the woods some more, and Janice put two more limbs on the fire, making everything a little brighter, except for the darkness around us. She looked at me holding the gun and said, “I just thought of something. Do you know how to use that gun?”
“Not really.”
“That’s what I thought. You better give it to me. I went to a shooting range in Raleigh. I know how to aim it and actually hit something.”
“But, Janice. I want to shoot Elvis.”
“You haven’t been trained to shoot Elvis. I have. Give me the gun, Kurt.”
So I gave her the gun and she put it down near her foot. It didn’t seem like whatever was going to kill us had any real interest in us anyway, and it looked as if the night was going to resume being just the night, leaving us alone. Janice got out her miniature Sony TV, and it was impossible not to giggle at each other for having a TV with us.
“This is fun, going to this much trouble to get away from civilization and then watching TV in the wilderness,” Janice said.
“I know. It’s silly beyond redemption. I like it.”
She fiddled with the antenna for a while until some show came in.
“‘Gunsmoke’! This is great!” Janice said, and we sat together on the ground watching James Arness shoot people with his polite reluctance.
“We have a gun, too,” she said girlishly, holding up her Beretta and comparing it with Matt Dillon’s revolver. “This one has a lot more velocity,” she said. “Plus it’s prettier.”