David Vann - Dirt

My god, he said. It was right here all along.

What are you doing? his mother asked, but he ignored her. She was only the catalyst. She had locked herself in here to draw his attention to this, to give him this meditation. That was the purpose of all of it, of all their fighting and struggle. But she wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t understand her role. She’d try to distract him.

Thank you, he said. I honor this gift.

What are you talking about?

It’s okay that you don’t know, he said. You’re still locked in samsara. You’re a younger soul.

I’m locked in the shed, because you locked me in here.

Galen lifted another shovelful, the shovel become lighter, the action smoother. He lifted and flung again, watched for pattern in the dirt as it was lofted through time and space.

Galen.

He was being lofted. He understood that now. He was the dirt. He was watching himself being flung.

What are you doing with the shovel?

Shh, he said. This is important. I can’t have you as a distraction. I’m getting close here.

Hey! she yelled.

But he ignored her, plunged the shovel deep into the earth, powered now by a force that was beyond muscle and bone. He was becoming the action itself. He was the dirt, and the shovel, and the movement, but more than that. He was a million miles removed. These hands were not his hands. This breath was not his breath. This mother was not his mother. This Galen was not Galen. He had to let it all go, let the movement happen without attachment.

His mother’s fingers at the gap between wood and earth, white fingers pushing away the dirt that was building, and more dirt lofted through air, through time, onto those fingers, buried and emerging again, a beautiful dance, a movement known forever and meant to be.

The earth deepening, building against the old wood, and her fingers moved to the side, at the edge of the mound, found a larger gap, the entire back of one hand showing, and more dirt lofted onto it, buried now, and another shovelful, and his mother was screaming, a sound become muffled, a sound transformed, a sound that was cradled between earth and air and rocked and buried and buried again.

This meditation became the longest of Galen’s life, the most sustained, the most beautiful. The shovel into the earth, the swing, the dirt suspended in air and then falling, filling the gap between wood and untilled ground, the gap between human and earth, between past and present, self and truth. The old planks above becoming all that was transitory, pitted and weathering, meeting all that was permanent below, and the new dirt bridging the gap, dissolving distinctions.

His mother a constant sound, an accompaniment, an honoring of the movement. Her fingers in the gap, enforcing distinctions, trying to divide the world, then buried again, a constant progression through opposites. The clearing of the gap and then the filling, the vanishing.

Galen could feel his hands tearing, the hot blisters forming and then breaking and leaking and the raw pain in flashes but then it would fade again, and he remained far away, watched all of it, watched his breath. The heat become a dense layer around him, radiating from his skull especially, and he threw off his shirt, lost no more than a stroke or two and was back in the swing of the shovel, the movement. His skin bare to the sun now, and he could feel each individual ray like a dart through space and time, arrived from the origin of the world, the light not only of our sun but of all suns, finding his back now and piercing his skin, the heat and light-headedness and piercing a gift, not a distraction. They only increased his focus.

He wanted something to drink, but that would wait. That was only samsara, distraction, and what he was riding here was his final meditation. He would ride this one all the way out, all the way past this incarnation, past unnumbered incarnations, past all that would hold him back, if only he could hold on.

But that was pride. He needed to not think of the meditation as accomplishment. He needed to stop evaluating. He needed to remain focused on the dirt, each grain. The surface, whiter on top where it had been bleached by sun, darker beneath, the odd, broken shapes, rough faces. Each grain and clod and rock as the shovelful hung in the air, to see the position of each in relation to every other, to see the grid, the pattern, and then watch the collapse.

His soul had done this through many centuries already, watched entire lifetimes form and fade, watched other mothers come and go. How many lifetimes? It was more likely he went back millennia, not just centuries. He might have been there when the caves were painted almost twenty thousand years ago, might have painted many of the horses and bulls himself. The cave cool and damp, somewhere in France, the cave dark, a place others were afraid to go, and each day he visited with his torch, brought charcoal from the campfire for his art. And there was a young woman in the camp who noticed this, who looked up from berry-picking when he passed, and who eventually followed him into the cave.

Damn it, he said. This was supposed to be a meditation, not a porn show.

What? his mother said.

I’m not talking to you.

You’re calling this a porn show? You’re burying your mother and calling it a porn show?

Galen slammed the wall with the shovel. Shut the fuck up! he yelled. I’m not talking to you. You have no idea. You don’t know a single fucking thing that’s going through my head.

You said porn show.

Galen slammed the shovel against the wood over and over. The air around him on fire, and he was dizzy and drenched and seeing sunspots. His hands torn up. His shoulders so weak he dropped the shovel and stumbled around to the shade of the fig.

He sat in the cast-iron chair and slumped forward onto the table. He was breathing hard. The air had no oxygen in it.

You’ve called me crazy, she said, but let’s think about this. It sounded like she was close against the back wall, only a few feet from him. Her voice was rough, hoarse from the yelling. You’ve locked your mother in a shed, and you’re trying to kill her.

I’m not trying to kill you.

You’re mounding up dirt all along the wall, some weird kind of burial, and you don’t listen when she screams. And then you start talking about porn.

Who is she?

What?

You said I don’t listen when she screams.

She is me.

Exactly. And who’s crazy?

We could find you help.

I thought you wanted to send me to prison.

They have prisons that are also mental health facilities.

I can’t listen to you, Galen said. I can’t listen to you ever again. He walked away with his hands over his ears and went into the house, looked through the kitchen drawers for earplugs. She had some wax earplugs somewhere. All the old silver, real silver, an insanity right here in the kitchen. Everything about their lives was insanity. And what he was doing was cutting through that. He was the antidote. He would return to his meditation and not be distracted by her.

Every small thing from the last century had been saved in these drawers. Ancient rubber bands, metal thumbtacks, a wooden ruler, buttons and scraps of twine, nothing ever thrown away, everything saved just in case. Galen removed a drawer, releasing the catch at the back, and took it out to the lawn, dumped a small pile of things brown or metallic, things that hadn’t seen the sun in many decades.

Then he went for another drawer, and another, and he dumped them all. He took the drawers not only from the kitchen but also from the pantry, hallway, and dining room. He left everything heavy, all dishes and silverware, but took every drawer full of random little shit and dumped it. No sign of earplugs, but this project had become something else anyway, a purging, a burning back into sanity, a burning away of the old and useless.