by Josh Emmons
My death won’t be the major act. That’s done already. The major act began a month ago and led more or less directly to my injuries. I would be in perfect health if it weren’t for that. Some would argue that I died symbolically a long time ago, but that’s not true.
There’s nothing left in my kitchen but canned beets and tuna. This is okay because I hardly move and don’t need much food. The beets alone could last me a week. I’ve spent most of today lying on the couch. Generally it’s quiet, but sometimes the neighbors’ dog barks at deer and rabbits like a town crier who thinks every passing traveler is an enemy spy. From birth the dog has been paranoid and violent, and many times I took an axe outside when it wandered into my backyard. I considered all the animals I’d save by killing it, though in the end I let it be.
I think of this note as an SOS to the future, except that I don’t expect to be rescued. I don’t think you’ll read it and come back to make everything right. But maybe you will. Maybe when you read this time travel will be easy, and you’ll have already prevented the world wars and famines of the past, and you’ll be on the lookout for smaller former problems to solve. I doubt it, though. I doubt there will ever be a cure for what happened to me.
Before last month I was a normal person. Nobody looking at my life from the outside would have thought twice about it. They might have been struck by its tragic elements, but only for a minute. They wouldn’t have wanted to linger over them. They would just have said that I was unfortunate to lose my wife and daughter in a boating accident, and then they would have moved on. If I were them that’s what I’d have done.
But I’m not them, and at the time of the accident—ten years ago on December 1—I was teaching at Winship Elementary School. The county sheriff called to give me the news. After hanging up I sat down in the school office. It was a busy place and no one noticed me for a long time. I didn’t believe it. My wife and I had had problems the way couples do, and my daughter had been in some ways a moody teenager, but in general I’d felt happy and blessed. I’d thought my friends were wrong to say, “The day you wake up and don’t feel any pain is the day you know you’re dead.” So I sat in the school office and figured there had been a mistake. I stared hard at the telephone expecting it to ring at any minute. The sheriff would apologize and say there’d been some confusion over whose boat had been found wrecked on the beach, and that it turned out not to be my wife and daughter at all who were presumed dead.
The phone rang many times that afternoon, but it was always parents and other people. Then when it was finally the sheriff again wanting to talk to me, he didn’t say anything about a mistake. He only told me that they still hadn’t recovered the bodies, but that he would call if and when they did.
That evening I contacted my wife’s family, coworkers, and friends, and then my daughter’s friends and teachers. Everyone was devastated. They wept and when they stopped they offered condolences. They said it was impossible. My wife and daughter were wonderful women. They couldn’t imagine what I was going through.
I couldn’t imagine it, either. It was like I’d suddenly been relocated to a foreign country where everything was unintelligible. People talked and it sounded like gibberish. I knew they were trying to make the transition easy for me. They were trying to teach me how to survive in this new country, but I had no intention of staying. I didn’t want to survive there; I didn’t want to understand the language. Win-ship gave me a mourning leave of absence, so I sat at home waiting for my wife and daughter to return. I took up wood carving and watched television. I left the front door ajar. I made small cedar statuettes of them, knowing they couldn’t be gone permanently. I knew that if I waited patiently, they would eventually push open the door and explain where they’d been. I rehearsed how I would take them both in my arms and shush their explanations. “It’s okay,” I practiced whispering, “it’s all right.”
But they didn’t come and their bodies were never found. After several months I ran low on money and sold my house. I asked Win-ship if I could work part-time. They put me on their substitute teacher roster. I also got a job at Lou’s Drugs manning the soda fountain. I appeared to be getting on with my life and learning the language of survival.
The reality was that with other people I used the new language of acceptance and resignation, whereas with myself I used the old one of contentment and happiness. With myself I spoke as though nothing had changed. There was no grief, no fear, no solitude, no death in that language. Those words didn’t exist.
Using the money I made from selling my house I bought a small cabin on Neeland Hill in Eureka, where I’ve lived ever since. The nearest house is a quarter mile away and belongs to a family of four—a man, a woman, and their two grown sons. They own the angry dog. I built a one-room addition to my cabin to use as a woodworking studio. In it I taught myself to sculpt life-sized statues using burl, the large, workable outgrowths of redwoods, oaks, and Douglas firs.
To date I have made a hundred and thirty, which I keep in the cabin and outside. They are all of my wife and daughter.
When I went back to work and moved to Neeland Hill, my friends thought I had come out of my solitary phase and was ready to share my pain with them. They said I should expect to feel sorrow for up to a year or longer. It was okay to cry and wonder what was the point of carrying on. My friends brought comfort food and sat with me in my cabin, where I cried and wondered at the point of carrying on. They sympathized and left satisfied. When they came back they made small talk by asking what I had been up to in my studio. I showed them. My efforts then were crude compared with my later work, but they clearly showed my wife and daughter as they’d been before the accident. They were done with love and care. My friends had little to say about them at first.
As the months passed and I made more burl likenesses of my family in various poses, they began complimenting me. They openly admired my technique—I spent a great deal of time and energy on burnishing the statues, so that the wood was perfectly smooth, glasslike, its shades of dark brown rich and lustrous—and said it was wonderful the way I was processing my pain by doing something creative. They were also impressed that I’d chosen burl sculpture, because it is considered a low-class art form by most Humboldt County residents. Here I was using a tourist gimmick to memorialize two beautiful people. I was showing, with the deftness of my cuts and the proportionality I achieved, so that one friend correctly noted the influence of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on my approach, that it had greater possibilities than were generally recognized.
After a year, when I’d completed about twenty statues, my friends stopped praising me and suggested I try another subject. They said I’d find it fun and interesting to challenge myself with something different. It would also be therapeutic. They recommended I take classes where I’d meet others interested in art, and where there would be live human models to sculpt. They said variety was important, and some even offered to sit for me themselves. Grieving was one thing, and obsessing was another.
They didn’t understand my plan to expand the space around me in which to use the old language. With the statues of my wife and daughter I could be happy again and shut out the voices of the new language that I found alien and disturbing. I could re-create the country I’d been exiled from. To this end I made statues of my family eating, running, sleeping, crouching, yawning, walking, writing, juggling, planting. I had them holding hands and hugging. I had them watching television. I had them telling their stories and listening to mine.
There was only one activity I didn’t have them doing. I was afraid of that thing for many years and so put it off, even though I wanted to sculpt it more than all the others combined.
My friends were upset when I didn’t take their advice. Our relations grew strained. They said I should go to therapy and I told them there was nothing wrong with me and that they had taken an unhealthy interest in my affairs. They accused me of being stubborn and self-destructive. One called me morbid and then apologized,
saying he didn’t mean it although I knew he did. They staged an intervention where they all came together and told me that I was in trouble and needed help. I thanked them for caring but said it would be better if we stopped being friends. I no longer had anything to say to them. Most gave up then and agreed to the break, though some continued to call and send me letters that I ignored until they too stopped.
My mother—the only person I’ve kept in contact with—told me I was wrong to cut people off in this way. She said I’d made Ahab’s mistake of blaming God for my life’s tragedy. It’s not right, she said. Think about Job and the trials he suffered, and how he felt as persecuted as you do without rejecting his creator. She said my turning away from the world of men was as much a crime against myself as it was against the people I turned away from. This was typical of the new language, and I explained to her that I would have nothing more to do with it. My mother meant well but was mistaken.
Over the last ten years I’ve lived modestly. My combined salary from substitute teaching and working at Lou’s has been enough to pay bills and keep me in woodworking supplies. Even before I became injured I didn’t eat much. I split my own firewood. For clothes I went to the Salvation Army and found nice, inexpensive items. You can spend very little in America if you try.
I am fifty-four now and had planned to retire at sixty. With my pension and savings account, and with Social Security beginning in my sixties, I worked it out several years ago and saw that I would be okay. I have almost finished paying off my mortgage and car loan. Even with a healthy allowance for burl slabs and for tools, my money would hold if I lived long enough to need it.
I wrote before that the major act began in December, but that’s not true. It really started in September, when, because the ten-year anniversary of my wife and daughter’s accident was approaching, I thought it was time to make the statue I’d been avoiding: a model of them swimming. My idea for the statue was of them fully clothed, side by side, in a synchronous brush stroke, with their faces turned up for air. I envisioned them shooting across the surface of the water.
I bought a large burl slab from a man who lives down the road from me and gets excellent specimens from his job at Burl World Supply Store. I also replaced the blades on two of my carving knives and the grade sheet on my electric sander. In every way I readied my workplace and myself.
It was a quiet morning when I sat at my studio desk to draw a preliminary sketch of the statue. Light filtering past the trees came in through the window and I thought it was a promising sign. I felt warm and strong. My old fears about making the statue seemed foolish. I expected to finish the sketch in an hour or two.
But when I started drawing, my vision grew blurry, as if I’d put on someone else’s prescription glasses. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, but the paper in front of me stayed fuzzy and indistinct. I kept working and soon faint geometric shapes appeared floating in the air. It didn’t matter where I looked, there they were. I thought that my excitement had mixed badly with the caffeine from my morning coffee and that they would soon go away.
Instead, the shapes grew sharper the longer I drew, and I developed a headache of such fierce power that I had to quit and lie down in my bedroom with a cold compress on my forehead. Faint light hurt my eyes; quiet breezes sounded like air raids. I figured I was coming down with an illness and took it easy for the rest of the day.
The next morning I felt better and went back to the sketch. I made a good beginning and improved on my original idea, but by noon the geometric shapes returned, followed by another headache. I was scheduled to work at Lou’s that afternoon but called in sick. Then I lay in my room again with the shades drawn, wanting to detach my head.
Over the next few days this pattern continued. I’d start working and pretty soon my vision would worsen and I’d see floating geometric shapes that led to headaches of incredible pressure and volume. On some afternoons I threw up; on others I couldn’t do anything but lie still and try not to move my arms and legs.
On the seventh day I went to a neurologist, who gave me a series of tests and interviewed me about my diet and lifestyle. He wrote down what I said and nodded. My headaches were classic migraines, he explained, the primary symptom being the visual distortion that preceded the pain. He called it the aura period. My case was unusual because migraines happened more to women than men, showed up before the age of twenty, and subsided as one grew older. Also unusually, I got them in the morning, did not suffer fatigue, and had had no exposure to bright light, loud noises, powerful odors, or changes in weather. I didn’t drink alcohol or eat strong cheeses.
Something to consider, the doctor said, was research suggesting that migraines came from abnormalities in one’s neurotransmitters. If you got too much or too little dopamine, serotonin, or norepinephrine, you were at risk. There were two treatment options. You could either prevent the migraine by eliminating what triggered it, or you could cut it short by taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and lying in a quiet, dark room.
I’d already tried the quiet dark room, so I decided on prevention. This meant figuring out what triggered the migraine, which I knew to be my work on the statue. There was no rational way the two were related, but all the evidence pointed to it. So as an experiment, on the following morning instead of sculpting I mowed the lawn and ran errands in town. None of my symptoms returned. The next day I weeded the garden, wrote a letter to my mother, and failed at three games of solitaire. I felt good, if bored. At night I slept peacefully, and in the morning I went to work at Lou’s, where I put in overtime. I ate dinner at an Italian restaurant called Mazotti’s and stopped at the Ritz for a lemon cola. Again that night I slept as though comatose.
When I woke up I decided that my headaches were a spell of bad luck that had ended. It was a coincidence that they had shown up when I was sculpting, nothing more. I felt alive and eager to go back to work on the swimming statue. But I didn’t rush to it. I had a slow breakfast and listened to the news. I took a long shower. Then, late in the morning, I got out the sketch I’d managed to complete during my week of migraines. I knew exactly how to execute it and guessed I could be done in a month.
I started early the next morning. The burl I’d bought was an oblong Douglas fir slab without many knots or too much moisture. I drew grid lines and shaved off a few edges. I could see the finished sculpture in my head. My wife and daughter were swimming. Side by side they were kicking with their legs and pushing the water away with their arms. They were breathing powerfully. I shaved off more edges and thought about where I would put the completed statue in my bedroom in order to watch them swim forever.
Almost immediately the blurriness and geometric shapes returned. By one o’clock I was back in bed with my worst headache yet. I was disappointed, but I was also determined not to let my pain stop me. From that point forward I worked on the statue in small morning increments before giving in to a torture that stretched into the night. I made progress. I took my name off the substitute teaching roster and told Lou that I had to stay home for a couple of months. My mother was concerned and called every day, afraid that I had a brain tumor. She insisted that I get a CAT scan and MRI. I nailed blankets over my bedroom windows to better shut out the light, and removed the clocks that made noise. I learned to soften even my heartbeat and breathe in time to the shooting pains in my skull.
On December 1, ten years to the day after the accident, I finished the statue. My headache erupted as I set down the electric sander and took an appreciative step back. I felt triumph and pain in equal measure, as though I’d run a marathon. My wife and daughter as they should have been, the correction of a horrible mistake. I thought that I’d been foolish not to make this statue long before.
At that moment came the major act: at that moment, without warning, I found myself floating in the Pacific Ocean, about a hundred feet from shore, in the middle of light gales. One second I was standing in my woodworking studio, the next I was in water so cold it felt like liquid elect
ricity. My headache was gone and I knew I was dead. Given my recent pains, I figured I’d died from an aneurysm. There had been many warning signs in the weeks leading up to it, and I wasn’t surprised. There was even a timeliness to the event: I’d just finished the most vital statue of my wife and daughter on the anniversary of their death. I’d perfected the old country and there was nothing left for me to sculpt.
I waited, and after a few minutes I noticed that I was dog-paddling in the water. This was strange. If I were already dead, I reasoned, I shouldn’t have been afraid of drowning. I tried unsuccessfully to still my hands and feet but couldn’t. Water came into my mouth and I spat it out.
This was hard to understand and I struggled with the contradiction until it occurred to me that I was about to see my wife and daughter. Obviously I’d been sent to the ocean because that’s where they lived, and they would come up from below to greet me. They would help me past my fear of drowning and take me down with them, and we would live together in a watery afterlife.
But then, as suddenly as I’d left, I was back in my studio. My clothes and body were damp, and I was very cold. There was a draft in the room. I sneezed and dried myself with one of the rags I kept to wipe away sawdust. Although I knew myself to be dead, I felt very alive. The water had invigorated me, and I felt none of the calm and tranquility I expected of death.
Then I saw that the statue of my wife and daughter swimming was no longer a statue. It had reverted to the raw burl slab I’d bought from the man down the road. From every angle it was as rough and unformed as it had been. There wasn’t a sanded or sculpted inch on it. I checked the blades on my carving knives and the grade sheet on my electric sander, and they were new. If I were dead, I’d been sent back three months in time.