A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

In the backyard, I open George’s garden cabinet and take out the trowel and split-fork weeder and get down on my hands and knees. It’s like a goddamned premature spring awakening. The yard is heavily planted, everything is thriving. I dig in the dirt. I think about my class this afternoon. I’ve told no one about being fired — who would I tell? What the hell kind of job could I get now? I’m digging, hurling clumps of weedy earth over my shoulder, and imagining the faces of my students, idiots who sit there waiting for me to spoon-feed it to them, waiting for me to inform them that there is such a thing as history and that it matters.

I crawl on my hands and knees, obsessively plucking errant growth, weed stumps, clover, various things that seed, blow, spread. I am diddling in the dirt looking like every other asshole who mucks in the backyard as though we can rekindle our ancient energy by sinking our hands into the soil.

The pet minder appears at the edge of the yard. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Should you be bent over like that? Isn’t it too much pressure on your head?”

“No one mentioned not bending.”

“Might be too much,” the minder says. “My aunt had a stroke and they told her no forward bending.”

I lift my head. “No longer bent,” I say.

“Perhaps take a rest,” he says. “I got Tessie a pizzle stick. And I gave the cat a catnip mouse — she loves them.”

“I never thought of giving the pets toys,” I mumble.

“They get bored and need something new — same as us,” he says, walking down the drive. “Call me if you need me. I’m fish-sitting not far from here.”

Tessie smells the overturned dirt. She lies on her back in the center of the yard and rolls on my pile of fresh-plucked weeds.

A minute after the minder is gone, I accidentally flip a massive clot of rich black dirt into my eye, blinding myself. I paw at my face, trying to clear it. I use my shirt, get up too fast, and step on the trowel, throwing myself off balance. I crash into the barbecue and rebound — mentally writing the headline: Idiot Kills Self in Garden Accident. It’s Tessie who guides me to the stair, with me holding on to her collar, saying, “Cookie, cookie, let’s go find a cookie.” In the downstairs half-bath I let myself have it. “Shit face,” I say, looking at myself in the mirror, thinking it is really possible that I didn’t flip dirt into my eye but shit of some sort: Tessie shit, kitty shit, raccoon or deer shit — whatever it is has a funky smell, like fancy cheese, cheese so rare and ripe that they keep it in its own cave and bring it out only for royal holidays. I have one eye open and am looking at myself in the mirror, giving myself a talking to, remembering another time when I looked in the mirror, I literally dissolved — the stroke.

“Don’t stare,” I say to myself. “You have that dumb look like you don’t even know what I’m talking about, like it’s all a big surprise. How could it be? Just because you’re hearing this out loud for the first time doesn’t mean it’s new information. I’ve been talking to you for weeks, really more like years, or the entirety of your whole goddamned life, you fucking idiot.”

“Why are you talking to me this way?” I ask.

“Because you don’t hear it any other way, you want it to be all touchy-feely. You fucked up, your sister-in-law is dead, your brother is in an insane asylum, and you want me to make you feel good about yourself? Wake the fuck up — you are a disaster. You’re even more dangerous than your brother; the fact that he’s in there and you’re out here, on the loose, proves it.”

My head slams into the wall. Slam. As though somehow it is just happening, as though someone else is doing it. Slam. Slam.

“Why did Jane call me when she wanted to know where the light bulbs were, why was I like the other half, the functional half of my brother?”

“Are you blaming her?”

“No,” I say.

And now my head is not in the sink anymore, not slamming into the wall, it’s in the toilet, and there is pressure at the back of my neck; at first I think it’s a hand pushing me down, but then I realize my head is stuck under the rim of the seat.

“Are you going to throw up? Are you sick of yourself now?”

I don’t answer.

The toilet flushes, soaking me, drowning me. I am waterboarding myself.

Coughing, sputtering, I pull my head out of the toilet. I vomit. I am on the floor of the bathroom, wet, sour — silent.

“Pouting?”

I don’t answer.

“Not talking to me? Should I stop?”

“Say whatever you want, give me what you’ve got, bring it on. Clearly you’ve been sitting on it for a long time.”

“Okay. Number one — how could you spend so many years writing a book on Nixon? It’s boring, it’s beyond boring, and it’s pathetic. I wouldn’t even care if you fucking failed, it’s the fact that you’ve done nothing that’s sent me over the edge.”

“Is my book really that bad?”

“It’s shit. You are shit. Your personality is necrotic, dying; it eats away at everything. Look at me, would I lie to you? I’m like a ghost from within trying to knock some sense into you.”

“What do you want from me?” I ask, fearing this is all hurtling towards some inevitable end.

“I want your life,” he says.

And there is nothing more to say.

The telephone is ringing.

“Hello,” I say.

“Is this you?”

“Yes,” I say.

“It’s me,” she says.

“Claire?”

“Who’s Claire?” she asks, her voice suddenly strict, as though insulted, as though I should have known.

I go deeper into my own darkness, “Jane?”

“How many are there?” she wants to know.

“How many of what?”

“Girls,” she says, “women, fuck buddies.”

“Who is this?” I ask, frightened.

“Why don’t you run down your list, and when you get to me I’ll call out, ‘Bingo.’”

“You have the wrong number.”

“Oh no,” she says. “I have the right number. I double-checked before I dialed.”

“Maybe it’s my brother you’re looking for,” I suggest.

“Does he have a heart-shaped mole over his left nipple?” she asks.

Deep silence. “Who is this?”

“Crap,” she says, sighing. “You don’t remember me. I fed you lunch and then some.” She pauses. “Look, I didn’t mean to catch you off guard. Can we roll back and try this again? Push the restart button.”

“Sure,” I say, still not knowing who I am talking to.

The line goes dead. I hang up. Immediately the phone rings again.

“Hi, it’s Cheryl calling. Is Harry there?”

“Speaking,” I say.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Good,” I say. “And you?”

“I’m sorry I never called you,” she says. “I mean before now, I mean after we had our moment and before now.”

“Oh,” I say, still unable to make sense of it, “that’s okay.”

“I want to be honest with you about the whole Internet thing.”

“Sure,” I say; the pieces are coming together.

“I thought I was okay, doing really well, so I stopped taking my medication and I was working in a friend’s catering company and then business got slow and I had all this extra time and I started surfing and then making these ‘dates’ like the one I had with you. It got out of control and I crashed,” she says. “Hard landing. I had to be hospitalized — briefly.”

We are silent. I take my shirt off and let it fall to the floor. Stripped down wet, stinking of vomit, I sit at the kitchen table.

“Actually,” she says, “I’m not being entirely honest. I stopped taking my medication and then I started self-medicating. I was completely out of control; our meeting was one of many. I put myself and my family at risk. My son, you may recall, he came home when we were in the middle of … Well, it wasn’t good.”