The Hermit's Story (12 page)

They float.

Occasionally the sailor in the stern shifts her focus, notices that the passenger in front is speaking to her, or is trying to speak to her. She can't be sure, but the expression on her face makes it appear that he is asking something of her—that he wants something from her, something she doesn't have anymore—and even though she can no longer hear him, she can see that he keeps asking, and it makes her hate him. There's nowhere to put the hate, however, on such a wide, flat sea, and so she just holds on to it, and the boat grows more leaden.

He tries to be more perfect, or less imperfect. Despite the fading tenure of their years together, he buys her flowers each day that he is in town. In cold weather, if she is to go out somewhere in her car, he makes a point of warming the vehicle up for her and backing it sufficiently far out of the garage so that the fumes from the idling engine do not build up in the garage, but not so far that she has to walk out into the snow. But one morning, when she's running late, it turns out that he has positioned the car so that its door brushes against the garage wall when opened, thereby limiting somewhat the space available for her to slip in behind the driver's seat; and because she has an armload, that morning—a purse, a shoulder bag, and a cup of coffee—she exhales her familiar sound of exasperation, shakes her head, and mutters, once again,
How hard would it be, really, to do something right the first time?

She's a beautiful woman, even now into her mid-forties—in some respects more beautiful than ever, and it's true that people have always all but fallen over themselves doing for her—often she needs not even to make a request, but simply look or suggest or, sometimes, point, in order to urge the doer along. But Jerry, more than anyone, knows she has also a beautiful heart, that it, that great heart, resides like a mask behind a mask beneath a mask, and that only he can see far enough back there—past the false or surface beauty, and then behind the false or surface anger, buried just behind that skin's beauty, all the way to the contemplative tenderness he knows is still alive far within her.

Jerry is a stonemason—a creative enough occupation but one in which, always, limitations and stress loads are understood—the rock, or span of bricks, able to do only certain things, in the end, and able to achieve only certain effects and certain goals, within reason. There are no miracles in his job, only the daily cumulative force of showing up each day and putting in one's careful and cautious hours as precisely and diligently as possible, with the shape of the work manifesting itself not in any one hour's or one day's labors but over the course of the project's entirety.

And it's not always out-and-out war; there's reason for hope. Karen's an artist, and possesses an artist's volition, sure, but just as frequent as the pustulous outbursts of frenzied rage and fear (he thinks) at the proximity of his ponderous, outsized heart are the long stretches of silence and invisibility; as if neither time nor matter exists, as if the days and nights are not rushing past, being funneled down a drain; as if there is no urgency; and as if Karen believes Jerry is content to receive, forever, those faint lashings and faint withholdings.

Still, the calm water, horrible as it is, never lasts.

Occasionally they stir, and fight like crows or magpies, squabbling over the last of that water, Jerry believing she still has some left in the vessel which she is not sharing and Karen knowing that she does not.

“You make me
puke,
” the one sailor cries to the other one on some of the days when her numbness fades and she returns to war. “You
repulse
me.”

And always, he retreats and sits on the other end of the boat, bow or stern, and watches the horizon, as he has for so many years now, still hoping for a shore, and still—amazingly—believing that there is another shore out there.

***

When Jerry asked her if she minded if he drove Jim back over to Spokane, at first Karen didn't understand what Jerry was saying. She had to ask him to repeat himself twice more and couldn't figure out what Jim had to do with it: why someone whom Jerry didn't know that well would have to request help from another person who, if not a stranger, was neither a committed friend. She didn't understand the depth of the need, the seriousness of Jim's situation.

She watched Jerry slip out of the boat and into the warm sheen of flat water. Something caught her attention at the corner of her vision—she frowned, squinted, turned her head to look at it—and when she returned her gaze to the ocean before her, the calm sea, he was gone, leaving not even a ripple.

***

When Jerry picked Jim up at his cabin before first light, it was foggy and the roads were covered with a glaze of ice that glinted in their headlights. They had to drive slowly, and in the last wedge of darkness before dawn, deer tiptoed back and forth across the road in front of them, returning to the daytime sanctuary of the woods after having ventured earlier in the night down to the river's frozen edge for a drink of water from the current's fast-flowing center. The deer trotted back across the glassine road on tiny black hoofs, slipping occasionally, their eyes glowing red in the headlights.

The retina is the last screen through which any incoming light passes, before flooding into the brain, where the light proceeds to tell its stories and be processed, stored, and filed as memory and knowledge; because the eyes are so important to a sense of orientation, any disruptions to them can send the body into a state of extreme confusion. Not knowing why, the body often responds with an agonizing form of nausea, not unlike the throes of seasickness, trying to purge anything and everything it might have taken in, on the off chance that that's what's causing the problem.

Jim was seized by this nausea from time to time and would ask Jerry to pull over to the side of the road so that he could retch. Sometimes Jim would have nothing left in his stomach to hurl, and would succeed in vomiting only a thin trickle of shining drool; other times he would be able to make it a short distance into the woods, stumbling down the twists and turns of frozen deer trails, before expelling, in coughs and gags, the detritus of his stomach.

Jim's face was still swollen and bruised from the previous surgery—the injured eye, the left one, was still almost completely shut—and he wasn't much company, though he tried to be stoic about it, riding upright with his head held in his hands, swaying with the road's rough passages, and making random conversation in the lulls between pain and nausea.

He told Jerry that he'd had all sorts of medical repairs done to him just before he got out of the service, to take advantage of the full health care offered by the navy. He'd had knee surgery to pick out all the little fragments of cartilage that had been floating around behind his kneecaps, and had had both ACLs tightened and tuned while the surgeons were working in there. He'd had six crowns put in by the dentist—Jim's teeth flashed and gleamed like a minefield when he smiled, so much gold and silver that it seemed his mouth, and his smile, would be heavy from carrying so much weight. He had a tendon reconstructed in his elbow, too, and a bulging disk removed from his backbone, and had never felt so good. He'd had radical orthokeratology performed so that his vision had been twenty-twenty, and the doctor had noticed the beginning of cataracts, so he'd repaired that problem, too, implanting translucent plastic disks in the place where the cataracts had once been. The cosmetic effects of this surgery were strangely troubling to Jerry, for sometimes when the light hit Jim's eyes at just the right angle it reflected off those plastic disks set behind the cornea, causing Jim's eyes to shine not unlike those of the deer that passed before their headlights.

“In many respects, I'm like an entirely new man,” Jim said. He laughed. “Older and better. Who would've believed it? Except for this darned eye.”

Jim had grown up in the sand hills of Nebraska, dreaming of the ocean. “I'd always been restless and daring,” he told Jerry. “When I was in high school my friend and I stole a plane from the county airport, even though we didn't know how to fly, and we crashed it. That's how I first hurt my back. I went back the next year, got my pilot's license, rented one legal, but then crashed it, too—flew it through a power line.” He lifted his arm to show Jerry the scars. “Had to have a steel plate put in my arm. It sets off the metal detector in airports.” He tapped his teeth. “Sometimes my teeth pick up radio waves, too. Late at night, driving in flat country, I can pick up those big high-powered Christian stations.” He laughed. “Talk about hearing voices in your head! Drives me fucking crazy, sometimes. Driving out toward Nebraska once, going back to visit family, I couldn't make the broadcast stop, so I had to turn around and drive back up into the mountains, and wait there for daylight, for the station to go off the air. It's funny sometimes how much you take peace and quiet for granted: how nothing can be sweeter than just a little space and time where you're not hurting or in anguish about anything.”

Jerry nodded. In the last couple of years he had taken to going out by himself to a little cabin he'd built away from the main house and reading by candlelight for an hour or two, and drinking a glass of wine or two, sometimes big glasses—sometimes three glasses—before coming back in to go to bed, where sometimes Karen would still be sitting up, propped against a pillow, reading and drinking, though other times already asleep, and the inside of the house as silent as if it were already abandoned: as if they had already lived the full reach of their lives and passed on into dust and then history and then nothingness. Jerry had grown up on the Texas Gulf coast, within reach of full sight and scent of the ocean, and had wanted to move away from it, to higher ground, all his life; often, as a child, he'd had dreams of rising tides and floodwaters.

“I guess I'm the exact opposite,” he said. “A steady trudger, that's what I am.”

“I know that about you,” said Jim, smiling and reaching over and clapping a hand on Jerry's shoulder. “That's why I called.” He smiled again, as if to say,
There are no secrets in the world, no masks above masks, no masks below masks,
and asked, “How's Karen?”

***

They kept stopping to eat. Jerry wasn't hungry, but Jim, in his nervousness about finding out whether the first surgery had been successful, was ravenous. They stopped first at a Burger King, and then a McDonald's, and then, most disastrously, a Taco Bell; after each meal, Jim would have to stop a few miles down the road and spit up again, as his body rebelled against these repeated attempts at gaining nourishment, and Jerry said nothing but wondered why in the hell Jim kept going back and doing the same thing, again and again, trapped so distressingly between nausea and hunger.

***

They arrived early, but Dr. Le Page was already in and waiting for Jim. After a brief examination, he told him that the news was not good: the first surgery had not been successful, and a second, alternative surgery would be required. They would have to stay overnight.

The retina is designed to cling to the back of the eyeball like the thinnest piece of Saran Wrap, fastened to the eye with nothing more than a few cells' width of adhesion. A poet looking at a retina held in her gloved hand during an operation described it as “a strong and durable and beautiful outpost of the brain, as it awaits to be reattached to a gorgeous wall that looks like the inside of an abalone shell, with all its shimmering, radiant iridescence.”

Jim's doctor explained it less poetically, comparing it to a sheet of wallpaper that he hoped to hang back in place upon the curved back of the eyeball, hoping that it would not slide off or pull loose again, that it would rest in its proper place long enough for the living cells to grow back between the thin wrap of the retina and the blood-slicked arc of the inner eye.

In the first operation he had sewn a tiny buckle into the back of Jim's eye and had then laced the retina to that buckle. He'd shown Jim the buckle before sewing it on; it had been about the size of a small stainless steel staple. The nylon thread used for the sewing was about the diameter of a single long strand of a woman's hair.

This type of operation was successful about 95 percent of the time, and its surprising failure had caused Jim to consider for the first time that which he had previously been purposefully avoiding—the realization that he might never get back his sight in that eye.

The second, alternative operation—called the bubble procedure—was successful only about 75 percent of the time; if it failed and a third treatment was needed, and then a fourth or a fifth, the percentages continued to decline dramatically.

After Jim got the bad news, they sat for a long time in the waiting room. Jim apologized to Jerry for the two of them having now to stay overnight.

“Hell, don't worry about that,” Jerry said. “I'm just sorry you didn't get the answer you wanted. I hate that they have to go in there and work on it again.”

“After this operation, I have to keep my head pointed down at the ground for a week,” Jim said. The retina had only partially attached the last time, so Dr. Le Page would have to go back in there and cut it loose and burn away all the old scar tissue with lasers, then hang the weary retina back in its proper place. At that point, the doctor would pump a bubble of nitrogen gas right behind the retina, packing the eye socket tight to prevent the retina from slipping loose again, until the connective tissues of life could reclaim it, reattaching and binding it to the back of the eye. That was the reason that Jim would have to keep his head tipped down for several days—to keep the bubble, tucked back in there like a Ping-Pong ball, from sliding to one side or another, wherein the retina, the wallpaper, might slide off.

Near-perfect calm and stillness would be required for the next six to seven days, to keep the bubble balancing there, like an egg perched not even in the cup of a spoon, but on the inverted arc of the spoon overturned—inflated tight-but-not-too-tight against the precarious curve of his eye.