to fuck you up? For ventilation’s sake Wakelin left both the door and the one small window of his hot shack wide open, took off his shoes and socks, and shuffled down the carpet of grass to the river in its narrow channel.
Divided or not, he was not, it seemed, ready to give up on this story, and not because things were going so well. All he had for tomorrow was a pretext for reentering the Troyer Building. To learn what her father had to sell him. Mind you, given the general tenor of his welcome around here, this could be considered a significant achievement for one day. Tomorrow morning he’d be waiting out front when she opened for business, her father would still be upstairs shaving, and this time she would talk to him.
Not likely.
So why was he still here?
For a chance, like a believer, to touch the hem of her garment?
Wakelin looked to the water, sliding with a constant force. So swift, so black. Universal magnet for despair. He sat down. Not one for rash acts or anything like that, but a single move could undo that favourite little idea about himself forever.
Something not kosher between the father and the daughter. Not to this day, maybe, but once. He could feel it. Something.
Was this what was keeping him here? The story behind the story?
The shore opposite was talus at the foot of a height of black rock with the disshevelled appearance of igneous toothpaste squeezed a hundred feet out of the earth and fallen back on itself with a great weight. The cliff was barely in shadow, but the shadow was headed this way, across that spill of rock. Wakelin lay down on the grass where he sat, an arm over his eyes. He was hardly sleeping these days. Compensated by being half asleep most of the day and dozing at any time. There on the grass he fell asleep and dreamed that he was back in the city, in the summer night. At that small hour when the commotion stumbles to rest, when the roar of human commerce subsides to a broken peace, when at any moment you are liable to be jolted upright by a muffler-less acceleration, by a window slammed shut against a drunk bellowing in the street, by cats yowling and hissing in the grey backyards of the morning.
In the city Wakelin slept with a pillow over his ear, a feather buffer, but for some reason the pillow made the fear worse, and most nights he woke afraid, sometimes with a cry or a shout, sometimes crouched by the bed, toes gripping the fibre mat, no idea why, no particular memory of a particular dream, just the fear. This had been going on so long and was so familiar and at the same time so fresh a condition that Wakelin had all but forgotten it had been no different when Jane was alive, that it had not started with losing her. With Jane, when he bolted up in terror, he had trained himself to pass straight into the follow-through, pillow in hand, a comforter pulled from the hall closet as he passed, and he was on the futon in the living room, already working at getting back to sleep, rocking his hips in a steady rhythm, something he could not do in the same bed with Jane, who felt every shift, heard every sound. If so much as the pattern of Wakelin’s breathing changed, she was wide awake. What’s wrong? she would whisper, and she would be talking to him.
Nothing, Love. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.
What was wrong? He blamed the city, he still blamed the city, but he knew the city was not it. Not really. Sometimes when Wakelin slept it was as if the sweet flow of his dreaming were a supersaturated solution the faintest ping could crystallize to terror. As he slept, his mind would pass out through the pillow pressed against his ear, and it would range across the ambient field until when the moment was ripe it would pluck one sound and swell it to a chime. Ping! Time for your fear, Tim! This was how it happened on the riverbank behind the Birches. In the distance somewhere, all but beyond auditory range, probably, the slam of a screen door exploded like a gunshot inside his head, and it was a detonation of sorrow, a bullet of fear and longing. He sat up on the grass in the shadow of the black cliff, and the blue sky above him was perhaps not cold but it looked cold. He got to his feet shivering, the arm lately over his eyes now numb and useless, brushing himself off with the other, and walked stiffly back to his mock shack, which had retained the heat of the day with the same shabby tenacity it had retained the cigarette smoke of its occupants and the spores of the mould in the carpet and the cheap curtains, and he curled up on the warm bed with a gentle rocking of his hips, and he was grateful for that warmth now.
Caroline Troyer was sitting behind Crooked Hand’s counter. She was reading. Something was bothering her, and as she went on reading she half-thought it must be the man who had just been in looking for property (so he said), how his half-turn to the past and the habits of blindness and deception cultivated by that in him had muddied and compromised his nature, but then she realized that it was not him, at least not only him, but her own immediate state of intending to do something she wasn’t doing. Of knowing there was something but not knowing what it was. Like knowing something is there before you turn your head. Before you recognize it, it’s there as a husk, as the ghost of itself, waiting to be known. And then the sun had reached the cellophaned window, and the office did not get hotter, not yet, but the patch of bright amber light on the linoleum at the corner of her eye caused her, even as she continued to read, to think of heat, and that was how she remembered that she’d been meaning to plug in the fan, which she had unplugged when she went upstairs for lunch, right after the man had come in, and that’s what it was she wasn’t doing.
Now it seemed to her there must be a way to act that would not, like this, like him, be confused, half hidden to yourself, half backward-turned, your timing always that little bit late. And she decided to see if it would be possible to know the right time to get up and go over and plug in the fan. She knew she could just do it. Decide to do it, then get down off her stool and walk over and do it. But it seemed to her that that would only be acting according to an idea of what she should do. Acting to fit an idea of acting. And she wondered if there could be some other way to do it. So she sat up straight and she waited, and before she knew it she was springing up to go and do it. But instead she sat down again, because it seemed to her that doing it that way, without thinking, was even more mechanical than doing it according to some idea. So she waited. Again she sprang up to do it, and again she sat down and waited.
And then it happened. She saw when to get up and go and plug in the fan, and in the exact same action of seeing it she got down off the stool and walked over and she plugged in the fan. And this was another kind of action altogether, a third kind, completely different from the other two. It was a harmony, a grace of movement, and she wondered if a person’s whole life could be this way. And how this would be different from the other ways. How it might change how she was able to know. Whether she could live in order to act out of seeing and not according to an old reflex or the last idea. And she knew that it would be easy to think you were doing it when you were not, believing in it as an idea but not doing it. Or doing it in love with the person you wanted to be. But the thing was, she knew that she knew this, and she knew that she didn’t have to stop there, because she understood that knowing this was also part of what she could see, and all she had to do was to try to find out how far this thing was possible to be done.
In this way, moment by moment, not gradually but all at once, at each moment, she would empty herself, if she could, she would empty herself of the slave.
Ross Troyer leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for his daughter Caroline, who climbed up and pulled hard at the door but not hard enough for the door to engage. It was an old truck.
He raked his fingers through his hair, observing in the rearview the effect of doing so upon the lie of it.
“Door’s not shut,” he said.
She tried it again.
“Who got in?” he murmured, his old joke. His eyes had left the rearview. She was clicking into her seat belt.
His hand went lightly to the handle of the knife in the sheath at his left side, as it often did. Then his hand went to the ignition. “Better wind down that window.”
She wound down the window.
He eased the truck along the narrow alley, and when he reached the street he nosed out cautiously beyond the parked cars. They left the main street by the north bridge. Passed the Birches Motel (where Wakelin lay in his hot shack