Nick Arvin - The Reconstructionist

‘I suspect that on some level in my poor brain I was giving it all to you. I never felt I was good at anything except work. She was my only other success, and I’d screwed that up. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to do, and it became doing nothing, and it became a gift. I was giving her an out. And giving myself one, waiting for you two to take it from my hands. But you know what got into me and twisted? The way you dragged it out. How long have you been fucking her? A year and a half? Longer? You couldn’t just run away with her? Bled me all that time. I thought I had decided to wait it out. But I broke, I guess.’

Ellis shook himself. Leaning forward, not looking at Boggs, he said, ‘I can’t have all of this on myself. You have your own volition.’

Boggs laughed. ‘Sure. Volition. Awareness of my own volition has been eating me alive. Terrible stuff. On the other hand, let me tell you about an accident: one day I get out of a depo sooner than expected, go to the airport, put myself on standby for an early flight, catch a tailwind and land on the ground almost five hours early. I get in the car and start driving back to the house. And along the way I happen to see, at the edge of the Home Depot parking lot, a familiar-looking RV. Did you really think, by the way, that that thing was inconspicuous? Why not go around fucking my wife in a lime-green school bus? So I stopped and watched the RV, and when it started up, I followed. It went to your place, you got out and you went inside. Jaunty, I thought, very jaunty. I hadn’t seen you walk like that before. And then – then all the options sucked. Usually I know what I want to do, but with this thing, trying to decide what to do felt like trying to reach my hand down my throat to grab my liver. I gave up. I figured I’d let you guys figure it out. You seemed to have ideas. Why should I step into it?’

‘Is this what you talked to her about, at the golf course?’ Ellis asked. ‘That I didn’t tell her to get a divorce?’

‘No,’ Boggs said. ‘I talked to her about your brother.’

‘Half-brother,’ Ellis said mechanically.

‘Right.’ Boggs said. ‘And driving around. I don’t know. I guess I figured we have to do something with our time. We might as well look at these places. When you’re in a darkness and you see a few points of light out there, of course you tend to go toward them. And if you’ve lost something, you go back to the last places you can remember having it. Maybe it was a mistake, though. Too much.’

‘If you’re depressed, we can -’

‘Stop that. I’m not depressed. Do I seem depressed? I’m just tired of thinking.’ He glowered at the highway. ‘Wounded pigs screaming. Something about the screaming pigs. People screamed in other accidents, but I started to think about the pigs. What does a screaming pig sound like? I imagine it sounds almost human, only a little different, in some unidentifiable way, to make you think, What in the name of God? And fog does weird things to sound. The cops wouldn’t have been able to see through the fog, they would have tracked the sound of the screams, stumbling around to find screaming wounded pigs, and occasionally you hear your partner blasting away, and a scream somewhere stops. Not to mention the fires, the smells of burned vehicles and ham, the body of a man lying still to be discovered after being dragged under a semi. What are you to think? What’s even the right question to ask? Is it: Who’s to blame? Who can be sued? Probably not. “It changes life forever,” they say. So, it’s like an inflection point, where the curve of a life changes direction.’ Boggs joined his hands in an inverted V. ‘The change of direction is important, but life is what happens before and after. That’s the implication. But what if that’s wrong? What if what’s actually essential is the point of change, the instant when everything is altered: the accident, the collision, the rollover? What if that’s life? Where everything changes. And if the accident is the essential point, then by travelling and gathering them together in my mind, I could see something new. Right? That was one thought I had. I guess it was stupid.’

They sat in silence. They ate doughnuts. Ellis tremored. The sky was cloudless and depthless and difficult to look at. Over time the wind gathered, and the windmills whirred and made whomp-whomp sounds. Sometimes one windmill or another boomed with a noise of aching steel. He worried hopelessly about abandoning the body by the lake. He felt an obligation to it, felt that he should have done something differently, although he could not think what exactly. Much of the past now felt this way. He had abandoned Heather and James Dell, too. Below moved the traffic, always moving. Red car. Black semi-tractor and shining refrigerated trailer. Green car. Silver SUV. Purple pickup. Green car. He recalled that when he had been growing up, it had been next to impossible to find a new car in green; now they were everywhere.

‘I saw the two of you embracing,’ Boggs said. ‘I knew she was only trying to console you. I knew you were probably only thinking about the man you had hit. But it only made it worse, to see you need her so much. And that was it. Nothing had changed in the facts of my life, but I saw them clearly. I couldn’t go back to Heather, to you, to work.’

Silence again and Ellis sat huge with guilt, as if too obese to move himself, and time passed and perhaps he slept – was it possible to sleep with eyes open? The scene remained before him, but its meaning changed with the purity of dream. All of it lay under a great bell jar. All of it peered at him and waited. All of it was held in a fog with the noises of the end of world. All of it fell slowly away.

Suddenly Boggs looked up, startled. And Ellis followed him down the slope of the hill.

As they reached the edge of the road, wind galed off the passing semis, the sun strobed between the blades of a windmill, and Boggs began talking about putting up little windmills along the interstates to catch the wind thrown off by passing traffic. He said he wasn’t sure if the energy captured this way would be negated by an additional wind resistance experienced by the passing vehicles. He raised a hand to shield the sun and talked about the worst gas station bathroom that he had ever seen. He said something about water, most of his words lost in the traffic noise. Then he turned and stepped into the road. Ellis, surprised, hesitated, and the air pulsed with the passage of the SUV that struck Boggs and carried him away.

Boggs flipped over the hood, bounced off the windshield and roof, and turned heels over head, limbs outstretched, as the SUV passed below. He came down on his shoulder with his head bent strangely while the SUV continued ahead a hundred feet before the brakes locked the tyres and they began to cry and the SUV spun in the roadway. A semi travelling behind it had time and space to slow and stop. Traffic began to back up. Ellis stared, waiting for something more to happen – it seemed something more must happen. Time passed, and he thought, I should understand this now. Someone was shouting. Nothing happened except that people shouted and traffic accumulated in a long idling column behind the stopped semi. He went slowly toward Boggs, already sure that Boggs was dead.

THE ROOM – SMALL, oddly shaped, poorly lit – lay at the end of a cul-de-sac hallway, at the place where an older hospital building had been mated to a newer addition, the room itself a structural afterthought formed by opening some space off the side of a storage closet. It had several corners, one narrow window, and provided barely sufficient floor space for a few pieces of equipment, two chairs and a single bed. On the ceiling a fluorescent light box flickered. ‘They brought me back to life and then what? Then they put me into a tomb,’ complained James Dell, his voice a croak. He sipped from a plastic cup and water overspilled his lips and flowed onto his green hospital gown, where he batted at it. Pale and brightly scarred, he lay in collapse, a pair of eyeglasses with thick black frames owling his eyes.