Homesick for Another World(18)
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My boyfriend came home the next morning with a black eye.
“I can’t talk to you,” he said to me, rubbing the skull in his small, rough hands. I sat on the bed and watched him. His brow was furrowed like an old man’s. “I can’t even look at you,” he said. “They’re saying you’re a scourge. A bad scourge.”
“They?” I asked. “Do you know what a scourge is?”
He cocked his head. I watched his wheels grind. “Um,” he said.
“You love me, remember?” I said.
“‘Scourge’ means you’re going to ruin everything,” he answered after a long pause.
“What happened to your eye?” I asked him, reaching a hand out. He blocked my arm with a swift karate chop. It didn’t hurt. But I could see his heart beating through his shirt, sweat leaking down his arm.
“It’s not good for me to talk to you,” he said. He went into the bathroom. I heard the door slam, the shower run, and, after a moment, the nervous tapping of the razor against the tile. I sat on the bed for a while. The sun flickered harmlessly through the swaying palms.
I got my suitcase and lugged it up the two flights to the roof. I’d been there only once before, one night soon after I’d moved in, when I couldn’t sleep. My boyfriend had come up and found me sitting on the ledge. We had talked for a while and kissed. “If you get torches and wave them up to the sky, it’s like a signal to the aliens,” he had said. He’d gotten up and twirled his arms around like propellers. “It’s the light that calls them.” He’d looked deep into my eyes. “I love you,” he’d said. “More than anyone else on Earth. More than my own mother. More than God.”
“Okay,” I’d told him. “Thanks.”
Up on the roof I unzipped my suitcase, pulled out the shotgun. It was easy enough to slide the round into the magazine tube, as they called it, pull the action back. That’s what the instructions said to do. But there were no birds around. I tried firing off a round, hoping it would startle the Egyptian crows, hoping something, anything, would leap up in front of me, but my hand shook. I got scared. I couldn’t do it. So I sat for a while and stared down at all the concrete, the palms flapping to and fro between the electric wires, then lugged the suitcase back down to our apartment.
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After that he’d disappear a lot, call me from some windy alleyway, talk fast, explaining his regret, ask me to marry him, then call back to tell me to go to hell, that I was trash, that I wasn’t worth his time on Earth. Eventually he’d knock on the door with huge scabs all over his arms and face, body thrumming with methamphetamine, head bent like a naughty child’s, asking to be forgiven. He always hid his shame and self-loathing under an expression of shame and self-loathing, swinging his fist back and forth, “Shucks,” always acting, even then. I don’t think he ever experienced any real joy or humor. Deep down he probably thought I was crazy not to love him. And maybe I was. Maybe he was the man of my dreams.
A DARK AND WINDING ROAD
My parents kept a small cabin in the mountains. It was a simple thing, just four walls, and very dark inside. A heavy felt curtain blotted out whatever light made it through the canopy of huge pines and down into the cabin’s only window. There was a queen-size bed in there, an armchair, and a wood-burning stove. It wasn’t an old cabin. I think my parents built it in the seventies from a kit. In a few spots the wood beams were branded with the word HOME-RITE. But the spirit of the place made me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a storm coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened. I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it—I’ve never been very clear on that distinction. I retreated to the cabin that weekend in early spring after a fight with my wife. She was pregnant at the time, and I suppose she felt entitled to treat me terribly. So I went up there to spite her, yes, and in hopes that she would come to appreciate me in my absence, but also to have one last weekend to myself before the baby was born and my life as I’d known it was forever ruined.
The drive to the cabin is easy to imagine. It was a drive like any drive to any cabin. It was up a dark and winding road. The last half mile or so was badly paved. With snow on the ground, I would have had to park in a clearing and walk the rest on foot. But the snow had melted by the time I got there. This was April. It was still cold, but everything had thawed. Everything was beautiful and dark and powerful the way nature is. I brought all my favorite things to eat and ate them almost immediately upon arrival: cornichons, smoked trout, rye crackers, sheep feta, cured olives, dried cherries, coconut-covered dates, Toblerone. I also brought up a nice bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc, a wedding gift I’d hidden and saved for three years. But I found no corkscrew, so I resorted to the remnants of a bottle of cheap Scotch, which I was surprised and relieved to discover on a shelf in the closet next to a dried-out roll of fly tape. Later, after dozing in the armchair for quite a while, I went outside in search of firewood and kindling. Night had fallen by then and I had no flashlight, hadn’t even thought to bring one, so I sort of grappled around for sticks in the glare from my headlights. My efforts amounted to a very brief but effective little fire.