Torpor
When they slept, she had gotten into the habit of resting both her hands on his arm. Now that his arm was gone, what was she to do?
Before, they had had a good arrangement, or had come to have one once she had sorted through matters. She had begun with splints, using them first for just one hand and then for both. They kept her from waking up in the middle of the night with stabbing pains. But still, even with the splints, her hands would eventually start to throb, and that was enough to awaken her. More than enough. She tried drugs, but they did nothing but make her groggy. What you need, a friend told her, is better drugs. The doctor she approached for a prescription told her instead that it was simple: she just had to keep her hands elevated. So, she had tried to keep her arms bent at the elbow and the elbow planted on the bed, to sleep with her hands waving in the air on the stalks of her forearms. Either they fell down as soon as she fell asleep, or she awoke with her arms locked and sore. She stacked pillows next to her and splayed her hands onto them, but it didn’t elevate them enough. Nothing worked, nothing at all. But then one night, his back had been turned to her and he was sleeping with his arm hemmed to his side, and she had simply reached out and placed her hands on his arm, and he, sleeping, had let her. She slept the sleep of the dead all the way through to morning.
It had gone like that for many nights in a row: she lying awake, restless, until he rolled over and pressed his arm along his side and then she could wriggle her way toward him and lay her hands on his arm. Then sleep. She had grown not only to like it, but to need it, and the few times he had been gone at night and not in the bed, she had not been able to sleep at all. Those nights, the stabbing pains had been worse than ever.
For better or for worse, she had promised. She knew that was what she had promised, but how was she to have known that worse meant there would one day suddenly be less of him? It had been like that: one day he was whole and complete, and the next day his arm was three-quarters gone. When he first came home, the stump wrapped in gauze, she had of course understood that she couldn’t touch it, that it would hurt him to do so. She had respected that, kept her distance. But then the wound had annealed, the scar tissue had thickened and then hardened, and the stump became just that: a stump. By that time, it felt as if she hadn’t slept for a year. It hadn’t of course been that long, but that was what it felt like, and that was what she meant when she’d said it to him. But, touchy, he’d misunderstood. The tragedy here, he’d claimed, is not whether you can sleep. This, he said, shaking the stump in her face, is the tragedy. Stump, he claimed, trumps stabbing hand pain.
But did it? Were they really playing at some game that had trumps? A game in which only the person with the missing arm, the three-quarters-missing arm, was allowed to feel pain? She hadn’t thought so. And indeed, with a little time, a little patience, as his own pain lessened and he learned not to try to pick up, say, a glass with his missing hand, he went from feeling offended to saying—quite sensibly, he believed—But I still have a good part of my arm left. Use that.
But no, it wasn’t the same. When he turned now, as he always did, to sleep on his side, and she scooted closer across the sheet and rested her hands on him, she could, true, fit both hands on what remained of the arm. But one hand always slipped off the stump to fall lower, against his ribs. And if she scooted higher in the bed so that that hand wouldn’t slip off, it was the other hand that did so, spilling off the shoulder and down against his neck. Either made it too low. Admittedly that meant she was throbbing in just one hand instead of two, but she still couldn’t sleep. Can’t he just wear his prosthetic through the night? she found herself sometimes wondering at two or three or four in the morning. But this, she knew, would be asking too much. If he wore his prosthetic during the night, the doctor had told him, had told them, he wouldn’t be able to wear it through the whole day without having aches and strain and even, potentially, shooting pains of his own. No, despite their relationship, she just could not ask—and even if she did ask, she felt, he would almost certainly say no.
So, for months she was sleepless. She placed one hand on her husband and then held the other there in the air, over the place where the arm used to be. She held it up as long as she could, or placed it on a pillow balanced on her husband, if he was asleep enough that she could get away with it. But it was not the same. The best she could manage was a kind of grumpy torpor. And it was not, she became more and more convinced, enough.
And so, late at night, listening to her husband breathing beside her, one arm already tingling, sleep refusing to come, she found herself imagining what it would be like to be in bed with a man who had not one arm, but two.
From this, everything else followed, inexorably. It was a simple thing to take a lover. Not because she was sex starved, or to find passion, or for anything of that sort—for indeed, so she told me as she again pulled the sheet high enough to cover her breasts, she loved her husband passionately and desired him and always would.
No, she did it for afterwards. For the moment when, both of them spent, her lover would roll away.
As he perhaps dozed a little, she would stealthily slip on her splints and then, carefully, place both her hands on him. And then, finally, if all was just right, if he stayed there on his side, if he didn’t move, if he didn’t mind having her there pressing on him, then she, at last, would once again be able to sleep.
Past Reno
I.
Bernt began to suspect the trip would turn strange when, on the outskirts of Reno, he entered a convenience store that had one of its six aisles completely dedicated to jerky. At the top were smoked meat products he recognized, name brands he’d seen commercials for. In the middle was stuff that seemed local, with single-color printing, but still vacuum packed and carefully labeled. Along the bottom row, though, were chunks of dried and smoked meat in dirty plastic bags held shut with twist ties, no labels on them at all. He wasn’t even certain what kind of meat they contained. He prodded one of the bags with the toe of his sneaker and then stared at it for a while. When he realized the clerk was staring at him, he shook his head and went out.
I should have known then, he thought hours later. At that point he should have turned around and driven the half mile back into Reno and gone no farther. But, he told himself, it was just one convenience store. And it wasn’t, he tried to convince himself, really even that strange. It just meant people in Reno liked jerky. So instead, he shook his head and kept driving.
It was the first time he’d left California in a decade. His father had died, and he’d been informed of it too late to attend the funeral, but he was driving to Utah anyway, planning to be there for the settling of the estate, whatever was left of it. He was on his own. His girlfriend had intended to come along and then, at the last moment, had come down sick. What she had neither of them was quite sure, but she couldn’t stand without getting dizzy. To get to the bathroom to vomit she had to crawl. The illness had lasted three or four hours and then, just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. But she had refused to get in the car after that. What if it came back? If it had been bad while she was stationary, she reasoned, how much worse would it be if she was driving? He had to admit she had a point.
“Do you even need to be there?” she had asked him. “Won’t they send you your share wherever you are?”
Technically, yes, that was true, but he didn’t trust his extended family. If he didn’t go, they’d find a way to keep him from what he deserved.
She shook her head tiredly. “And what exactly do you deserve?” she asked. Which was, he had to admit, a good question. “And didn’t your father tell you never to come back?”
He nodded. His father had. “But he doesn’t have any say,” he said. “He’s dead now.”
But in any case, she had not come with him. And maybe, he thought now as he drove, his girlfriend’s illness—miles before Reno—was the first indication the trip would turn strange. But how could he have known? And now, well pas
t Reno, already having gone so far, how could he bring himself to turn around?
Back at the beginning, just past Reno, he drove, watching Highway 80 flirt with the Truckee River, draw close to it, and then pull away again. Then he hit the scattering of houses called Fernley, and the river vanished too. For miles there was almost nothing there, just a ranch or two and bare dry ground. He watched a sagging barbed wire fence skitter along the roadside, then, when that was gone, counted time by watching the metal markers that popped up every tenth of a mile. After a while those disappeared too, leaving only the faded green mile markers, numbers etched in white on them. He watched them come, his mind drifting in between them, and watched them go.
He thought of his father as he had been when he was young, a man who wouldn’t leave the house without ironing creases in his jeans. His boots he made certain were brought to a high polish before he left, even if he was just going to the back acres, even if he knew they’d be dirty or dusty the moment he stepped off the porch. That was how he was. Bernt hated it. Hated him.
He remembered his father lashing a pig’s hind legs together and running the rope over the pulley wheel screwed under the hayloft floor and winding the rope onto the handcrank. His father had made him take hold of the crank and said, “You pull the bastard up and hold it, and don’t pay no mind to how it struggles. I’ll get the throat slit and then that’ll be the worst of it done. Your job’s nothing. You just keep on hold to it until the fucker bleeds out.” Bernt had just nodded. His father said pull and Bernt had started cranking. There went the pig up, squealing and spinning and flailing. His father stood there beside it, motionless, knife out with his thumb just edged over the guard and touching the side of the blade, waiting. And then, with one quick flick of his arm, he opened its throat from ear to ear. The pig still struggled, the blood gouting from the wound and thickening the dust. Bernt couldn’t understand how his father didn’t get blood on his boots or his pants, but he just didn’t.
It was always that way, every time he killed something. Never a drop of blood on him. Uncanny almost, it seemed to Bernt, and he had spent more than one sleepless night as a teenager wondering how that could be, why blood would shy from his father. The only possibilities he could come up with seemed so outlandish that he preferred to believe it was just luck.
That was the kind of man his father had been. Now, dead, what was he?
He shuddered. He watched the mile markers again—or tried to, but they simply weren’t there anymore. For a moment he thought he might have left the highway somehow, by accident. But no, he couldn’t see how he could have, and whatever road he was on had every appearance of a highway. Then he flicked past a sheared-off metal stub on the roadside and wondered if that wasn’t what had once been a marker, if someone had been systematically cutting them down. Bored kids, probably, with nothing to do.
He gauged the sun in the sky. It seemed just as high as it had been an hour before, not yet starting its descent. He checked the gas gauge: between a half and a quarter tank. He kept driving, wondering if he had enough gas to get to the next station. Sure he did. How far could it possibly be?
He opened the glovebox to take out the map and have a look, but the map wasn’t there. Maybe he had had it out and it had slipped under the seat, but if it had, it was deep enough under that he couldn’t find it, at least not while driving. No, he told himself, there would be a gas station soon. There had to be. He couldn’t be that far off of Elko. It was less than three hundred miles from Reno to Elko, and he’d filled up in Reno. And Winnemucca was somewhere in between the two. Had he passed that already without realizing it?
He had enough gas, he knew he had enough. He shouldn’t let his mind play tricks on him.
His father had told him that if he was going to leave, he should never come back.
Fine, Bernt had said. Wasn’t planning to come back anyway.
And then he had left.
Or wait, not that exactly. It had been so many years ago now that it was easier to think that was how it had ended, but it hadn’t been quite so simple. He hadn’t said, Fine. He hadn’t said, Wasn’t planning to come back anyway. What he had said, “Why the hell would I want to come back?”
His father had smiled. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Come along,” he said, and he made for the door, waving to Bernt to follow him.
Perhaps an hour later—maybe more, maybe less, it was hard for him to judge time driving alone—he called his girlfriend to tell her she had been right, he shouldn’t have come after all. He was hoping that maybe she would talk him into turning around, inheritance be damned.
But she didn’t answer. Or no, not that exactly: the call didn’t go through. It seemed as if it was going through—he dialed the number, he heard it ring a few times, then the call disconnected. His phone had no reception.
Well, what’s strange about that? a part of him wondered. He was out in the middle of nowhere—of course service was bound to be bad. He’d have to wait until he was near a town and then he’d try her again.
All that sounded right, rational, correct. And yet another part of him couldn’t help but worry that something was wrong.
The radio too faded in and out, the same station one moment seeming quite strong, the next little more than static, then quite strong again. Not strange, a part of him again insisted. Must be the mountains, he told himself, the signal bouncing around in them. He told himself this even though it seemed to happen just as regularly when he was in open country as when he was skirting a mountain or when one had just hove into view.
There were moments too when there was nothing but static. When he turned the knob slowly but found nothing. When he could press the search button and his tuner would go through the whole band from beginning to end without finding anything to settle on, and would start over again, and then again, and again, and again. It might go on for five minutes or even ten, then suddenly it would stop on a frequency that, to him, still seemed to be nothing but static, but it stayed there. After a while, he became convinced there must be something beneath the static, a strange whispering that surely would slowly resolve itself into voices. Though it never did, only stayed static.
He checked his gas gauge. It read between a quarter and a half tank. Hadn’t it read that before? He tapped on it with his finger, softly at first and then harder and harder, but the reading didn’t change.
When he came to Winnemucca, he would stop for gas, just in case the gauge was broken. He probably didn’t need gas to make it to Elko, but he would stop anyway. He tapped the gauge again. Had he already passed Winnemucca? He felt like he should have, but surely he would have noticed?
He watched his father check the crease of his trouser leg. He watched him stop on the porch and raise first one boot and then the other to the rail, quickly buffing them with the yellow-orange cloth draped there before he stepped off and went down the path leading out to the road.
Bernt followed.
“This here is all mine,” his father was saying, gesturing around him. “This, all of this, belongs to me.”
But of course Bernt knew this. His father had been saying shit like this ever since Bernt was a child. It was not news to him. When his father turned to see how Bernt was taking it and saw his son’s face, his lips curled into a sneer.
“What in hell do you know about it?” he asked Bernt.
“What?” asked Bernt, surprised. “I know you own the land. I already knew that.”
“Land,” said his father, and spat. “Shit, that’s the least of it,” he said. “I own anything that comes here, plant or animal or man, including you. If you leave, it’s because I let you. And if I let you, you sure as shit ain’t coming back unless I say.”
Almost before Bernt knew it, his father’s hand flashed out and took his wrist in a tight, crushing grip. Bernt tried to pull away, but his father was all sinew. His father nodded once, his mouth a straight, inexpressive line, then he cut off the path, toward the storm cellar, dragging Bern
t along with him.
No, he should have reached a town by now. Something was wrong. The sun was still high. It shouldn’t still have been high. It didn’t make sense. The gas gauge was either broken or for some reason he wasn’t running out of gas. He tried again to call his girlfriend and this time, even though his phone didn’t have any bars, the call went through. He heard it ring twice and then she picked up. She said “Hello,” her voice oddly low and almost unrecognizable—probably because she was sick, he told himself later. He said, “Darling, it’s me,” and then the call disconnected. He couldn’t get it to reconnect when he called again.
His father took Bernt across the yard, pulling hard enough on his arm that it was difficult for Bernt to keep his balance. Once Bernt stumbled and nearly fell, and his father just kept pulling him forward, and he had to struggle to stay upright. He got the impression from his father that it didn’t matter to him if Bernt stayed upright or not.
They went past the barn and around to the back of it, to where the storm cellar was, a single wooden door set flat into the ground and kept closed with a padlock. Bernt had always known it was there, but he had never been inside. His father let go of his arm and thrust a key out at him. “Go on,” he said to Bernt. “Go and look.”
II.
Just when he started to panic, he came to a town. He didn’t catch the town’s name—perhaps the sign for it had been vandalized, like the mile markers. He came over a rise and around a bend and suddenly saw the exit sign and the scattering of buildings below, windows shimmering in the sun. He had to brake and slide over a lane quickly, and even then he hit the rattle strip and came just shy of striking the warning cones before the concrete divider. But then he was on the ramp and going down, under the bridge and into town.
A Collapse of Horses Page 15