David Gates - Jernigan

Then down to the basement and into the death chamber. Not with the idea of trying to kill myself. What I wanted, I think, was just to do something extreme. Something that would be hard afterwards to pretend I hadn’t done. I got the gun out of the toolbox, sat down on a haybale, put my left hand palm-down on the rough hay, stuck the muzzle into that little web of skin between your thumb and the rest of your hand and shot myself there more or less experimentally. To see what it would be like. Jesus Christ it hurt. Oh, not the worst I ever felt: nothing to compare with, say, bright pain in a tooth. This was like hitting yourself with a hammer, hard, and knowing you’ve done damage; but with a sort of raw stinging afterwards that just seemed to get worse and worse and worse. That’s Jernigan all over: first you swallow a bunch of drugstore anodynes and then you want to feel something and then you bitch and moan because it hurts.

1

“Good morning,” said Martha, setting something on the night table. Then she sat down on the bed. “Brought you your coffee,” she said. “And you got some mail.” She reached over to the night table and tapped a finger on two envelopes, one red, one white, next to a steaming mug.

So I was in her bedroom, not in the place I’d apparently been dreaming about. Which dissolved as I tried to recall it. “Bizarre,” I said.

“What’s bizarre?”

I shook my head. “Dream,” I said. “Time is it?”

“Ten?” she said. “I thought I should wake you up. It’s a beautiful day.” The two ideas seemed to have some connection in her mind. “You were out like a light when I came in last night. What did you do to your hand?”

There was a bandage on my hand.

Now I remembered.

“I don’t know,” I said. Well, that wouldn’t do. “Cut it on something,” I said. “You find the tree?” Now that she’d mentioned it, I was aware that my hand hurt.

“I saw it first thing,” she said, “when I got up to feed the bunnies. It’s beautiful.” That made two things that were beautiful. “I was hoping maybe we could get it up today.” Was the double entendre deliberate? I examined her face for signs of roguishness; didn’t look like it. Shame, I thought, in a way, looking at that bulge of thigh under denim. On the other hand, that was no way to extricate yourself, if what you wanted was to extricate yourself. Great: awake for what, thirty seconds, and here you are right back in the problem.

“I cut myself evening it off,” I said. “The end of it.”

I can see, reading this back, why she looked puzzled.

“With the saw,” I said. “The Christmas tree.” This sounded plausible. Plausible, that is, until the bandage came off and you had to explain a round scar. Well, maybe it wouldn’t end up being round exactly. Maybe you better go in the bathroom and find out what you did to yourself.

“Does it still hurt this morning?” she said.

I nodded. “Stupid,” I said.

“Think you should let somebody look at it?”

I shook my head. “I’ve had it with the emergency room for a while, thanks.”

That did it.

“Approximately when,” she said, “am I going to be allowed to stop eating shit?”

“Not giving you shit,” I said. “Simple observation.”

She lifted her hands, as if calling God to witness. “I cannot discuss this one more time,” she said. “You know, this is not 1952, Peter. It could just as easily have been Danny, and me sitting home on my ass while you were out working.”

“As you obviously think I should be doing.”

I had now been awake for maybe a minute and a half.

“Well, it was never my vision that you would just sit in the house day after day, no.”

“Right. It was your vision that I was going to be a poet. ‘The Compost Heap as the Letter C’.”

“I’m sure that’s something clever,” she said. “Peter, my only vision was that whatever you did you might get some enjoyment out of your life for a change. I should’ve — I mean, everything I knew was literally screaming that you were absolutely incapable of any sort of joy whatsoever.”

Should I say figuratively? Better not. “A trenchant analysis,” I said.

“Fuck you too.”

“Trenchanter and trenchanter,” I said. “Repartee City around here this morning.”

“I’m going out,” she said. “I hope you enjoy your coffee.”

“Oof,” I called after her. “Slam-dunk.” As if punningly, she slammed the door behind her. I picked up the coffee. Just looking at it you could tell she’d made it too weak. Hey, work at it a little, I thought, and you could really get to be a monster.

She flounced back in, slammed the door again and stared at me, her back against the door and her arms folded. Shoulders rising and falling.

“Your contempt for me,” she said, “is really boundless, isn’t it?”

“Why?” I said, the hand hurting like a son of a bitch. “Is that an idea that turns you on?”

That made her eyes open so wide you could see white above the iris. “You incredible bastard,” she said. Apparently she found the suggestion worth addressing. I’d just thrown it out there to be a prick.

“Get over here,” I said.

“For what?”

“So I don’t have to be raising my voice,” I said. “Unless you want the kids to savor every nuance of this.”

That got her over to the bed. She stood stubbornly.

“So what’s on your mind?” I said.

“You tell me,” she said. “I didn’t do anything but be nice to you.”

“It’s so unjust,” I said.

“You just know so much , Peter,” she said. “What a man . Treat ’em bad and they come back for more, right? You’re a true asshole.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” I said. “You’re not in the principal’s office.”

She sat down.

I stared at her breasts and let the silence just go and go.

After a while she said, “This is too weird for me.”

“Right,” I said. “You didn’t do anything but be nice. That husband of yours ever hit you?”

She began to sob. I watched it for a while, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing, then told her come here. She wouldn’t and I grabbed her; she tried to twist away and I wrestled her down, which got me hard. I should add, not that it makes the whole thing any less sick, that I get hard over nothing when I first wake up. Oh no, not life reasserting itself or anything; it’s just because I haven’t pissed. Pressure of bladder on whatever it is, prostate? Or some explanation equally — what’s the word? Opposite of mystical. I got the jeans and underpants down around her knees. Give her the old Norman Mailer.

“I’m really going to be sorry someday”—she inhaled, hissing through her teeth—“that I showed you so much.”

Afterwards, we lay there not saying anything. That hand really starting to worry me. Finally she said, in a small voice, “Do you remember when I used to have my names?”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. You had to wonder sometimes: yesterday, talking to Danny, I’d been all set to get out, well almost all set, and now this. Sick and brutal? No question. But still, a way of drawing closer. Unless what I was doing was simply drawing closer in order to increase the tension for another recoil; this time, perhaps, a recoil strong enough to achieve escape velocity. Thinking about that Star Trek where they head straight into the sun so its gravitational force will help them spring away on the rebound — the slingshot effect, they call it — and back into their own time period. See, they’d been flung back into the past by getting too close to a black star and its gravitational forces. Another thing I was doing was watching too much Star Trek .