The Executor (30 page)

You’re well past the urge to vomit but slipping your arms under her armpits does give you a bad moment. You wrestle her toward the log, smelling the deadness on her, feeling her clay through your gloves. On second thought you might not be totally done with vomiting yet. You get her head inside and then push her by her legs, bit by bit, her knees bending rustily, so slowly it’s going, so slow until at last you get her in up to her waist and that’s enough, enough already,
enough,
piling bark and twigs and pinecones and rocks and snow over the rest of her and pray that some scavenger gets to her soon, run.

Run, hobbled, sinking, wanting nothing but to get away from her. Ice in your socks and down your sleeves to your armpits cold and shocking but still you run, run, claw your way up the embankment and fall in the car seizing with terror and cold, calm down. You’re fine. Calm down. You’re hot, is what you are. Your fingers disobey you as you try to unzip your jacket, which is covered in dirt that might be from the ground or might be from someplace on her, you smell like her deadness. She is clinging to you, you must take off your jacket. Get it off. Get it off. Calm down. Your T-shirt is soaked. You can hardly see the road. The windshield is fogged. You cannot see. Calm down. Calm down. Look at the clock. Look. It’s seven in the morning. You’ve a whole lot left to do. Calm down. Calm down. Calm down and start the car. Start the car. Go on, start the car. Do it. Do it now, do it right now. Start the car. Drive. Go. Move.

Move.

NINETY MILES SHORT of the Canadian border, a sign for a diner appears. Semis crowd the lot. Despite making what you assume to be a grubby impression, you don’t draw more than casual glances upon entry. Looking around at the clientele, you can see why: it’s all mountain men and long-haul truckers. Other than waitstaff, there is a single woman—fairly robust, as far as women go—eating alone at the counter, her tensed shoulders indicating an awareness that around here, she is not much more than Something to Look At. You’re the only one in the place without facial hair. Has anyone else here read the complete works of Plato? With confidence, you claim that title for yourself.

The menu is in English and French. You order, then open the fishing magazine on the table in front of you, reading up on the Seven Secrets to Steelhead Success as you sip your coffee. You eat eggs and bacon and toast, and drink yet more coffee, finally rising to move your bowels in a filthy, frigid stall. On the way out of the bathroom you drop her cell phone in the trash, taking the battery with you.

 

 

A LANDSCAPE FLAT, windless, and lunar. The sun low on the horizon. The road badly paved, icy, running northwest-southeast; as far as you can tell, it’s not even on the map. To the south, a frozen meadow; beyond it, the undulant treeline.

The snow covering the meadow has turned to ice, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he slides. On the other hand so do you, your feet skittering Chaplinesquely. Dig your heels in. What good are these boots? You need crampons. Oversight. Keep going. You pull. The station wagon starts to shrink in the distance. How far have you gone? Not far enough. The hard part is almost over. You should be fine. You will be fine. Go on. Move. Put your back into it. Swish swish go your pants, a steady 4/4. You’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day. You’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away. Who would work on a railroad just to pass the time away? What kind of hobby is railroad work? It’s not like needlepoint or tennis, something you pick up out of boredom. Countless people died laying the first Transcontinental Railroad, many of them imported Chinese laborers, done in by brutal winters or accidental explosions. It’s no laughing matter. All those old songs make no sense. Why should you care if Jimmy crack corn? Why should anyone? Keep going. You once audited a course about folk songs and their relation to the unconscious. It’s taught by some imbecile. You should have gone to law school. The trees are close now. Keep pulling. The slits in the tape widen; pull any harder and they risk splitting open. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s nonsense, too, isn’t it? Just like the notion that cheaters never prosper. If this isn’t prosperity, you don’t know what is. Hahahahaha. Twenty-four hours ago he wasn’t this heavy. Your fingers are blistered. The tendons in the back of your hands are ready to snap. Nobody can endure what you’re enduring. You are the overman. You think of Nietzsche and his injunction to remake the world in one’s own image. You think of his moustache. He would have fit right in back at that diner, hahaha. Keep going. Swish swish. Davyyyyyyy, Davy Crockett. King of the wild frontier.

Once you reach the trees you keep walking backward until the light changes and changes again and you look up and see that you have come to a clearing. Above you the treetops rise like a crown, like the walls of a bottomless pit. You have seen this place before. You have seen it in your dreams, seen it painted on a piece of glass. It is unconcealed to you, now, aletheia. Look around and wonder.

Where is the deer?

Where is the hunter?

Which one are you?

You set him on fire.

Smoke rises through the trees.

Your relief is instantaneous. The pilgrimage is done, the offering elevated, and you would strip naked and run through the snow singing hymns.

But it’s never as simple as that, is it?

Because he burns for a few minutes and then, in an instant, he goes out.

The aroma is of grossly overdone pork, and you hold your breath as you douse him once again in lighter fluid. To speed the process you add handfuls of dry branches and leaves. You drop a match and away he goes.

This time he burns a little longer before going out.

The third try uses up the rest of the can and goes for fifteen minutes. You consider abandoning him there and then you hear a sound of approaching.

No point in running. You take down the shovel and grip it, waiting. Whoever it is, he or she has erred in deciding to walk in the woods this afternoon. Silence. Silence. And you move in a semicircle around the source of the noise, bringing into view, one hundred feet away, a lone, malnourished wolf.

He grins shaggily at you.

Hello, he says.

You take the crumpled duvet and back away. In the distance you see him slink out of the underbrush and crawl toward the smoking pile, sniffing interestedly at the remains.

 

 

AND IN THE SILENCE that follows? You are alone in the darkness and snow. And in that silence? When all that remains is nine hours of road and white noise? You do what you have successfully avoided doing until now: you think. Your thoughts have been held back long enough; they’re not waiting any longer. They’re impatient and want to come in, they’ll take the door off the hinges. Think about his staved skull. Think about her death song. Think about what you automatically did—the way you knew what to do. Who are you? It is you who have metamorphosed, you who have burst from the chrysalis. And if that is the case—if today a process reached its apex—then it must be true that that process began some time ago.

 

 

HALFWAY HOME you stop at a fast-food restaurant. Your clothes reek of smoke, with a base note of burnt hair. People stare. You rush through your sandwich, then put her cell phone battery in the trash along with your untouched fries.

 

 

NEAR THE STATE LINE you pull into a rest stop. A concrete arcade shelters four vending machines. You go around back, where the ground is littered with wrappers and cans, and throw the shovel as far as you can into the black.

AT ELEVEN-THIRTY P.M. you pull into the parking lot of a mall in Candia, New Hampshire, a suburb of Manchester. You drive around until you find what you’re looking for: a loading dock with several Dumpsters. A sign forbids unauthorized persons from dumping trash. Violators will be prosecuted. You lift the lid on one of the Dumpsters and pour in the contents of all nineteen bags of books, wadding up the empty bags and putting them, along with the duvets, in the adjacent Dumpster.

 

 

AT ONE-FIFTEEN A.M. you arrive in Roxbury, parking in an alleyway about a mile from her home. Normally you’d be nervous—this is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Boston—but tonight you feel dreamily impervious. You take out the duffel with clean clothes and everything else that belongs to you, which at this point fits into the backpack. You swab the interior of the car with baby wipes. It takes a while, but it’s better than thinking. You restore the second row of seats and lock the keys inside the car.

 

 

A QUARTER-MILE AWAY you find a gas station with an exterior bathroom. You change out of your smoke-scented clothing, stuffing it into the duffel. You take the duffel and the backpack and walk out with them, wandering up a residential street where people have set their trash out for collection. Drop the duffel in a can at the end of the block. Go another few streets and do the same to the backpack. Pat yourself down. All you have on you are your house keys, your wallet, and the high-tech gloves. Take them off. Take off the latex gloves underneath. Throw these away, one at a time, while walking north, toward the river, toward the bridge. There are no cabs. The T has stopped running. Walk three and a half miles to Cambridge. It’s four-thirty A.M. Step up your front porch. The neighborhood is quiet. Windows are dark. You’ve been awake for almost forty-eight hours, not counting your nap. Go inside. Shut the door. Welcome home.

I
woke the next morning with something akin to a hangover, which is understandable, given that both alcohol and caffeine cause dehydration, and the enormous quantity of the latter I’d ingested had made it difficult for me to fall asleep, even after the most exhausting two days of my life. What sleep I had gotten had been patchy and ruined by nightmares. In some of these I was doing the same things I had just done: driving in the darkness, or walking through thigh-deep snow. For the most part, though, the dreams didn’t describe any particularly upsetting activity. Nor did they possess any definite narrative shape. They consisted, rather, of static images, or brief sequences in which no other living thing appeared—soundless, fractured dreams, at once ordinary and menacing. I stood in a classroom filled with dozens of unoccupied desks. A foul wind stirred. Stacks of paper whirled around me, and I could not see, and when my vision cleared I stood at my high-school locker, looking at the photos taped to the inside of the door. I had the distinct sensation of being late for class, but before I went anywhere I wanted to see these photos. I couldn’t: they were too blurry. I kept squinting harder and leaning closer, all the while knowing that I was wasting time, making myself even later, and I began to flail about and I was then transformed; I was an infant, squirming against the cold linoleum, naked, silently shrieking, beet-red, my toothless mouth a wet open hole, and I woke myself with my own very much audible cries, arched, panting, the sheets pulled off at the corners and my pillow skinned, mind sodden with dread—a feeling that persisted much longer than such feelings tend to, every surface filmed with unreality. To reground myself, I tried getting up and walking around, forcing myself to focus on the solidity of the floor beneath my bare feet, but I got dizzy, ending up huddled under a blanket at the foot of the bed, rocking myself as I counted down to daylight.

My first look at the library was sobering: long smears of blood were still visible around the mantel. Bare shelves told of the missing books. Several of the photos hung askew, and one had been cracked clean up the middle. To my eye the carpet presented the biggest challenge, given that I no longer had a car. I took down the cracked photo (Alma and her sister on the beach), my unease redoubling by the second. Had I really been this sloppy? While away, I’d told myself that if someone should happen to enter the library, he would see—at worst—the remains of a raucous party. If I’d been so blind as to miss what was right in front of my face, what other, less noticeable, problems had I ignored? How many details neglected? The air stank of death, and I wanted to go back to bed. That was, I thought, the only answer: to sleep, to keep on sleeping until I woke up and found myself in another land, a hundred years hence. There was simply too much to worry about, disaster hovering over me in perpetuity, and all at once I saw, with a kind of prophecy, what I would soon come to appreciate firsthand: that life as I knew it was over, and that as long as I was conscious, I would have no peace.