Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  Jefferson paused. The next bit was about the old priest. Terrible.

  The old priest tried to show off by levitating, but the military authorities were not impressed and split his head open with the butt of a rifle.

  There was one more bit about a woman who had been bitten by a mad dog who was then killed with a rifle butt as well. Jefferson shuddered as he thought of it. He couldn’t repeat that part.

  Dr. Monika had returned back down the hall, to the kitchen for her beverage, he guessed, and he felt a little shaky. Too shaky, in fact, to chant that line in its entirety to a well-meaning almost-stranger with crystal-blue eyes. It was bad enough to recall it in his own mind. He had to think of a different one.

  Maybe he should go for simple. Two of his all-time favorites—lines that he’d recited and sung hundreds of times in the dining hall for all to hear—were very, very simple. It would be difficult to choose between them. God, he wished GGM were there to help him out.

  The first was more hopeful than the second, but its rhythm wasn’t quite as easy. The second rolled off his tongue; he had found he could almost fall asleep while chanting the second one. In both cases Jefferson had adapted the original lines so they would feel like his own. He thought of the two lines now, weighing the pros and cons.

  War . . . it’s such a waste! Why can’t it just be a bad dream?

  And:

  I don’t know why we are fighting.

  But something was missing in each of these for this present circumstance with the pseudo-doctor. As great as each one was, Jefferson feared none was quite personal enough to capture her attention. He needed a line that showed more of what he’d been experiencing since he’d returned home. He needed a line to grip Dr. Monika with the precise flavor of sickness that had overtaken him. A riff on García Márquez’s words that would simplify all the issues Jefferson was having a very hard time talking about. Jefferson thought of one now that came pretty close:

  A deep chill has come over me.

  It tortures me.

  Even in the heat of the day

  it will not let me sleep.

  It stalks me.

  Yes. If he had to start with one line, this would be the one. Jefferson knew there was no guarantee Dr. Monika would connect with the words—and he did not expect her to curl up on the floor and sob as he had the first time he’d chanted them—but he would share them with her anyway.

  “Okay, I’m back.” She held a glass of clear, bubbly beverage surrounding perfectly formed ice cubes. Just like in the movies. And again the question came to his mind: Who was this woman, and what was he doing in her house?

  “Listen—I was thinking—why don’t we pick a few books from the list and read them together? You know, like our own little book club?”

  God, she was so well-meaning. Truly good.

  “Whaddya think, Jefferson Long Soldier?” Beautiful too. A beautiful old rich white woman.

  He didn’t want to be rude. He didn’t want to burn any bridges.

  “Jefferson?”

  It seemed best to leave the questions for a moment and just go ahead with the line he’d chosen, the most appropriate line he could think of in the moment to help her understand the current distractions of his mind, the dark places he’d traveled, the nightmares. Dr. Monika’s very beautiful skin glistened all the more in that instant, compelling him onward in the direction he knew was best.

  “Wait a sec,” he managed, as he stood up from the white couch, adjusted his sweats, and considered his options. “Just a sec,” he said, as he thought whether the pine coffee table strewn with magazines or the somewhat ancient-looking leather drum the size of a small kitchen table would be better for his purpose. It was important, he’d always thought, to add a little height to his presentation if at all possible. He was normally so shy. It helped to be taller.

  She had taken her seat on the white couch, crossing her legs under her caftan and sipping her bubbly beverage, when Jefferson made his decision and stepped up onto the somewhat ancient-looking leather drum.

  “Oh my god—what in the world?”

  “Just a sec, Dr. Monika. I want you to hear something.” And with that he launched into his take on Gabriel García Márquez’s line about an inner coldness having shattered his bones, the one he’d just settled on moments earlier in his mind. He’d done this one so many times in Iraq that the words began to slip off his tongue into the crisp blue light of the room like an ancient fable. As was usually the case, he closed his eyes and opened his mouth and after having filled himself with air down to the bottom of his belly he bellowed,

  I am so cold.

  A deep chill has come over me.

  A deep, deep chill.

  He sang in his unique chant, the way he imagined all those old monks chanting in all those dark passageways. The way he imagined his great-grandfathers chanting from within the embrace of rocky enclaves and flat in the middle of the wide-open plains. He tilted his head back and sang,

  It waits for me,

  It tortures me.

  He swayed on top of the drum with bent knees, singing on,

  It waits for me and tortures me.

  I say, it waits for me and tortures me.

  It tortures me.

  And so, even in the heat of the sun I cannot rest.

  Even in the heat of the sun I cannot rest.

  I tell you, I cannot rest.

  He raised his hands above his head, and as he imagined old-time Baptist preachers from under the white tents of old-time revivals, Jefferson screamed out his hope for comprehension and connection.

  I said, I cannot rest!

  I said, I cannot rest!

  I said,

  I CANNOT REST!

  Out of breath and seeing now through the slits of his eyes that Dr. Monika was gazing up at him with a strained expression, he finished the lines in what he thought of as a humble whisper.

  For several months, even in the heat of the sun, I am so cold I cannot rest.

  The chill stalks me,

  It stalks me,

  It stalks—me.

  His performance of the lines, his articulation of the words and the precise way in which he’d drawn out and repeated certain syllables, was, if Jefferson had to say so himself, a perfect representation of his emotional state. He could not speak for all those other soldiers, but he had no choice about whether or not to speak for himself. And he was proud to have made it to the end without crying—sometimes that happened, and it was okay, but he was glad for this first time with Dr. Monika that he had kept it professional and sort of, if he thought about it, academic. This was the best way for her to experience the words—without his overwhelmed emotions getting in the way.

  He stepped down from the drum, which fortunately had proved strong, and he looked at her, waiting. He had a lot of experience with this sort of thing and knew that he could not expect a positive response. Still, he always hoped.

  There were tears in her eyes.

  “Wow–wee,” she said, clasping her hands together under her chin. It must have been the only word that came to her mind.

  They reached a point not long afterward in which any more talking about any of it became awkward, and so Jefferson left, with plans to visit the pseudo-doctor again three days later. He didn’t expect much, but then again, there was something to be said for having a stranger willing to listen. Though Dr. Wesleyan in Albuquerque had meant well, and though she had been a bona fide MD with framed certificates on her office wall, there was something altogether more helpful about this older lady who’d advertised on the back page of the weekly paper. He had no name for the feeling he was having as he rode back down her dirt drive and back through the tangle of eastside estates, but his hands did not shake as they steered the bike back home. After that Jefferson kept going back to see her two or three times a week, and though he continued to bring the novel with him, after a month of the storytelling he removed it from the Ace bandage and began to carry it in a backpack.


  What the skill was, precisely, and where she had learned it, Jefferson never determined, but Dr. Monika, who had no medical degree, who had nothing behind her but a lifetime of beautiful living, began to help him feel better. She was a good listener. “You just tell me whatever it is you need to get off your chest, Jefferson. Just start talking.”

  And talk Jefferson did. He began with generalities, as if slogging through a quagmire. It was intense. I couldn’t ever catch my breath. I knew it was gonna be bad, but I had no idea. There were several weeks of this undefined muck spilling out of him, always ending with Jefferson in a ball on the white couch, weeping, Dr. Monika sitting next to him, patting his back. And then Jefferson felt he’d run through all that material and there was new stuff, specific stuff, an entire list of stories ready to be aired. It began when Dr. Monika asked the question, “So when exactly did you start chanting from One Hundred Years of Solitude?”

  He paused to remember.

  It had been the evening of his forty-seventh day, after Ramon from Las Cruces had been shot in the throat next to him. The line he’d chosen on that day had been a long one, one of Jefferson’s abiding favorites because it ended with a hopeful notion. Jefferson believed that this notion—that there could exist a machine to help a person forget his nightmares—was reason enough to love Gabriel García Márquez. Even if the man had written no other noteworthy sentence, this one idea would have been enough. Ah . . . A machine to take away one’s bad memories.

  After that, using the list he’d kept of all those losses, he’d told her a story each time he visited. About the loss of a close companion or a guy he’d just met. And how, in each instance, he pulled his book out from under the Ace bandage and chanted the line from One Hundred Years of Solitude that seemed most appropriate.

  The list was long. Jefferson did not plan to get through the whole thing when he started sharing stories with her, but in the end he told Dr. Monika everything he could remember about each of those losses he had witnessed at close range.

  Without fail, after Jefferson had talked for thirty or forty-five minutes, Dr. Monika would ask him what he planned for the rest of his day in a tone so neutral that it made it simple for him to admit just how simple his life really was. He was riding his bike home, or he was stopping at the store to help Esco unload an order, or he was going to think about checking in on Josephina C De Baca, finally going to do something about his feelings about that girl. Dr. Monika shared her plans as well—sometimes yoga in the backyard, sometimes a hike up Atalaya, sometimes early dinner plans with an old friend.

  On his rides up to Dr. Monika’s on the eastside and back home again, those several times a week for all those months, despite the changing seasons, despite his easing breath, despite his growing trust in the pseudo-doctor and the movement of the novel from the Ace bandage to his backpack, Jefferson did not stop loving Gabriel García Márquez. Most of his daydreams were of the writer, and when he was not dreaming, he was speaking to the old man in his mind and occasionally, in great bursts of verbal enthusiasm, yelling out actual questions to which he awaited actual replies.

  Oh my god, how did you know what it would be like to return home from war?

  What should I do now?

  Sometimes it was not a question.

  God, I wish I could talk to you, Old Man.

  Sometimes it was a plea.

  I really need to see you, GGM. If I came to see you, would you open the door?

  14

  García Márquez’s descriptions of Úrsula Iguarán’s husband—José Arcadio Buendía, the eccentric patriarch of the Buendía clan—his experiments and his unwitting neglect of his family, had immediately reminded Jefferson of what he knew of his late grandfather. Jefferson had never met the wild Lakota musician with whom Esco had fallen in love and raised a family, but he’d heard plenty of stories. The two men were similar beasts. Ursula’s husband began as a family man and ended up a solitary lunatic after years of failed experimentation and ranting. He spent the last years of his life tied to the trunk of a chestnut tree in the courtyard, and he died a lonely death.

  Likewise, Jefferson’s grandfather had died alone, a musician chasing a dream. A banjo player with a lithe voice, he had traveled the Southwest with a little country band, forever hoping for a break. Nothing, not even his wife and their young daughters, filled his heart like writing songs and plucking the banjo’s strings on stage. Jefferson figured that music had been for his grandfather what laboratory work had been for Arcadio Buendía, an addiction.

  And then he had died in a boating accident outside Austin while touring the Lone Star State. Esco was forty-four years old, with a ten-year-old grandson, Nigel, and a second grandson, Jefferson, just two weeks from being born. She had never told anyone (to whom would she have shown her soft side?), but her husband’s death, coming like that out of nowhere, had turned her numb. They had gotten into a habit of talking on the phone about being grandparents again together, of helping their younger daughter raise her child, just as they’d helped Linda. They had reminisced about the days when their girls were little, of taking them to concerts at Paolo Soleri, of picnicking up in the mountains. He’d been nostalgic. I’ll be home for the birth, he said. Get her to name him Jefferson Long Soldier, after me, he’d said.

  And then he’d hit his head wrong on the rocklike surface of the lake as he tried to jump the wake with his water skis, a typically freakish accident. He’d died without ever regaining consciousness. “He was always doing stupid things,” Esco said every time she told Jefferson the story. “He was full of life and scared of nothing. Just like your mother,” she usually added, shaking her head.

  Just like José Arcadio Buendía, Jefferson thought as he read the lines in the novel.

  15

  He took his time, allowing each story to pull at him as it would. When possible he shared a detail he’d known about the person who had died, something she’d said just before the explosion, the expression in his eyes when he made a truce with the pain, a smile that reminded Jefferson of a friend from elementary school or of a season of the year. Some stories tugged at internal body parts—his esophagus, his inner ear, the ocular nerve attaching his eye to his brain—and others threatened to annihilate his various extremities—the thumbnail of his left hand, the callus on his right heel, the tip of his nose. Because each loss played uniquely upon his mind, Jefferson housed each one in a different place. Although he had a list, some stories were still hard to find.

  The boy who’d told him about his grandmother’s pierogies made him cry for Esco’s hands as she wrapped tamales. For the young woman whose left ear was blown off prior to her mortal bleeding, he cried for her first favorite song, for all the time she must have spent on her bed as a middle-schooler listening to songs via headphones, for her first iPod and earbuds that, he imagined, her mother had given her as a high school graduation present. For the older guy whose helicopter went down less than an hour after he handed Jefferson a fistful of good-luck bubble gum, Jefferson cried for his own good and fortunate life and for the man’s sweet tongue and his teeth and his lips. Some of the stories were more difficult to tell than others—the old man with his goats, the family in their Toyota, the seventeen-year-old and the hound. He told each one, and he cried his unique set of tears to the alert one-person audience on the white couch before him.

  In all, there were forty-one stories in twenty weeks.

  16

  He was a high school dropout, approximately two hundred pounds overweight, a fact that caused his eyes to almost disappear into an expanse of perspiring skin. Almost exactly a decade older than Jefferson, he was an unlikely optimist who appreciated the hard questions brought on by life. Later, as Jefferson was accounting for all the small miracles that had helped him heal, he realized that it was his cousin’s subdued hopefulness that had lifted him out of harm’s way at a critical moment. Nigel’s mindset—that life was made up of puzzles, not problems—was part of the life-saving recipe.

&nbs
p; During Jefferson’s first several weeks home, Nigel had laid low, telling his cousin to take it easy, to listen to music, to give it time. He listened to Jefferson complain about Esco’s incessant gentle knocking on his bedroom door, her constant offer of fake chicken soup, as if it could heal him. Nigel told Jefferson that he understood that Jefferson’s problem had nothing to do with soup or fake chicken, or, for that matter, any food item their grandmother might prepare.

  This went on for weeks, all through that summer of 2009, and then the aspens turned yellow up in the mountains and the light took on that nostalgic low slant. Winter was coming, as it always did, and aside from his having told Dr. Monika a bunch of stories, Jefferson thought, nothing much seemed to have happened.

  Then came the morning Jefferson finally decided to contact Ray Soto, his friend from Iraq who also loved García Márquez, to see if he wanted to get together now that they were both survivors back in Santa Fe, and discovered that Ray had hanged himself in his apartment off San Mateo, a whole year earlier.

  Jefferson slouched in the metal chair, drinking his fourth Dr Pepper of the day, alternating mindless slurps with fistfuls of Cool Ranch Doritos, as his cousin changed the spark plugs on the Kawasaki. It was a breezeless, mosquito-less October evening, the kind of evening white people call Indian summer, whatever that means, and yet Jefferson could not erase the image of Ray hanging from his ceiling fan less than a mile from where Jefferson now sat. It was as loud as a mortar explosion in his head, as unexpected as hiccups and as difficult to forget. He felt he might be sick.

  Nigel was smearing away the corrosion and grease from the bike’s engine with a dirty rag, paying attention in an inattentive manner. Jefferson fully assumed that his cousin was not listening. This was okay. What Jefferson felt he most needed on that evening was to be solitary without being alone, to talk without his words having any consequences, and somehow miraculously to arrive at a decision about which fork in the road to take. There seemed to be two options: sign up for another tour of duty or get on with things as best he could back in Santa Fe. An explosion sounded in the near distance—a car backfiring on Cerrillos, or a handgun over on Hopewell Street—shaking Jefferson’s skin against his bones. Could he do it? Go back out there again?