I'm Thinking of Ending Things(18)

I sit up and stretch my arms over my head. I yawn. “Felt like a quick trip,” I say. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“Thanks for coming,” he says. Then, inexplicably, “And you also know things are real when they can be lost.”





—The body was found in the closet.

—Really?

—Yeah. A small closet. Big enough to hang shirts and jackets, some boots, not much else. The body was all scrunched up in there. The door was closed.

—It makes me sad. And angry.

—Why not reach out to someone, right? Talk to someone. He had coworkers. It wasn’t like he was working in a place without other people. There were people around all the time.

—I know. It didn’t have to happen this way.

—Of course not.

—Do we know much about his background?

—Not a lot. He was smart, well-read. He knew things. He’d had an earlier career, some sort of academic work, PhD level, I think. That didn’t last, and he ended up here.

—He wasn’t married?

—No, he wasn’t married. No wife. No kids. No one. It’s rare these days to see someone living like that, entirely alone.





It’s a long, slow drive up the farm’s potholed driveway. Trees line both sides. We bump along for about a minute. The gravel and dirt grind under the tires.

The house at the end of the driveway is made of stone. From here, it doesn’t look huge. There’s a wooden, railed deck on one side. We park to the right of the house. There are no other vehicles in sight. Don’t his parents have a car? I can see a light coming from what Jake says is the kitchen. The rest of the house is dark.

There must be a woodstove inside, because the first thing I smell as soon as I step out of the car is smoke. This would have been a pretty place at one time, I imagine, but now it’s a bit run-down. They could use some fresh paint on the windowsills and trim. Much of the porch is rotting. The porch swing is ripped and rusted.

“I don’t want to go in yet,” says Jake. I’ve already taken a few steps toward the house. I stop and turn back. “All that sitting in the car. Let’s take a walk around first.”

“It’s a bit dark, isn’t it? We can’t really see much, can we?”

“At least to get some air, then,” he says. “The stars aren’t out tonight, but on a clear night in summer they’re unbelievable. Three times as bright as in the city. I used to love that. And the clouds. I remember coming out on humid afternoons and the clouds were so massive and soft-looking. I liked how gently they moved across the sky, how different they were from one another. It’s silly, I guess, just watching clouds. I wish we could see them now.”

“It’s not silly,” I say. “Not at all. It’s nice that you noticed those things. Most people wouldn’t.”

“I used to always notice stuff like that. The trees, too. I don’t think I do as much anymore. I don’t know when that changed. Anyway, you know that it’s damn cold when the snow crunches like this. This isn’t that wet snowball-making snow,” Jake says, walking ahead. I wish he wore gloves; his hands are all red. The interlocking stone path we take from the lane to the barn is uneven and crumbling. I appreciate the fresh air, but it’s frigid, not fresh or crisp. My legs are numb. I thought he’d want to go right inside and greet his folks. That’s what I was expecting. I’m not wearing warm pants. No long underwear. Jake’s giving me what he calls “the abridged tour.”

A blustery night is a weird time to be surveying the property. I can tell he really wants me to see it. He points out the apple orchard, and where the veggie gardens are in summer. We come up to an old barn.

“The sheep are in there,” he says. “Dad probably gave them some grain an hour ago.”

He leads me to a wide door that opens from the top half. We walk in. The light is dim, but I can make out silhouettes. Most of the sheep are lying down. A few are chewing. I can hear it. The sheep look spiritless, immobilized by the cold, their breath floating up around them. They look at us, vacantly. The barn has thin plywood walls and cedar pillars. The roof is some type of sheet metal, aluminum maybe. In several places, the walls are cracked or contain holes. It seems a dreary place to pass your time.

The barn isn’t what I’d pictured. Of course I don’t say anything to Jake. It seems dreary. And it smells.

“That’s their cud,” says Jake. “They’re always doing that. Chewing.”

“What’s cud?”

“It’s semidigested food that they regurgitate and chew like gum. Beyond the odd bolus sighting, not much excitement in the barn at this time of night.”

Jake doesn’t say anything as he leads me out of the barn. There’s something much more disturbing than the cud and the constant chewing out here. There are the two carcasses up against the wall. Two woolly carcasses.

Limp and lifeless, both have been stacked up outside against the side of the barn. It’s not what I’m expecting to see. There’s no blood or gore, no flies, no scent, nothing to suggest these were ever living creatures, no signs of decay. They could just as easily be made of synthetic rather than organic material.

I want to stare at them, but I also want to get farther away. I’ve never seen dead lambs before, other than on my plate with garlic and rosemary. It seems to me, maybe for the first time, that there are varying degrees of dead. Like there are varying degrees of everything: of being alive, of being in love, of being committed, of being sure. These lambs aren’t sleepwalking through life. They aren’t discouraged or sick. They aren’t thinking about giving up. These tailless lambs are dead, extremely dead, ten-out-of-ten dead.