Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“You know, did I ever tell you about the time I was sitting out on the porch with your dad? It was hot. Your mom was talking all the time about being ‘left behind.’ So your dad turned to me and said, ‘Doesn’t she realize that we’ve already been left behind? Look around — the landscape is empty.’ He laughed, but he looked blue.”

Now Jesse said, “That’s the tragedy of life, I guess — you can only be in one place at a time.”

Jen said, “This is the place I chose. I don’t mind.”

After a moment, Jesse said, “I don’t either, baby.” And they both knew that, these days, she was the reason he didn’t mind.

—

GUTHRIE LIKED Iowa City. He had a room in a house with two other guys and a girl on East Washington Street. He kept completely to himself. His job was at the mall in Coralville, “Ice Arena Representative.” His boss at the mall told him he was to “represent and present” the ice arena to mall customers, so that this “absolutely unique Iowa attraction” would not go to waste. Guthrie, who was a good skater, didn’t mind whooshing here and there. Other than “Do you rent skates?” the most common question he got was “What in the world is this?” He would smile and say, “This is a unique recreational opportunity, right here in Coralville. Would you like me to help you?” He would skate gracefully backward, shifting his hips from side to side, smiling his welcome, feeling like a character straight out of Lake Wobegone.

It was an easy job that paid a little something, and, a bonus, he didn’t have to feel his dad’s worried eyes boring into the back of his head, assessing his “state of mind.” Iowa City, everyone said, was suddenly ringed with pot farms — in some bars, they said, you could get high just sitting in your booth, sniffing the air. At the VA hospital, he chatted with several sympathetic counselors about his anxieties. He thought that he got the most out of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing sessions. The counselor was a woman about his mom’s age, Dr. Kingston, who had grown up on a farm in Illinois. She always wore sensible shoes, but almost at once she noticed that while he was talking he would stare at her shoes, so she made him look at her hand. Which memory kept coming back to him?

Guthrie closed his eyes.

Dr. Kingston said, “No, open your eyes.”

Guthrie opened his eyes.

She said, “Tell me the story.”

“We were guarding a checkpoint. I guess there were about six of us. The road was clear. So this kid comes down the road with a Coke can in his hand. I’m guessing he was maybe seven, but the kids there acted older, even though they were very small. He was a cute kid; he had sandals on — I noticed that. Maybe a blue shirt. Anyway, he threw the can into the air, and someone shot it; it was like a game for just a second. I guess we thought it might be a bomb; it wasn’t beyond them over there to use a kid to deliver a bomb in a Coke can.”

Dr. Kingston nodded.

Guthrie cleared his throat. He said, “Anyway, the Coke can broke up and flew into the air, and then someone shot the kid, right in the neck, I saw the blood spurt out on his shirt, into the air; the air was clear. He got this look on his face. We just let the body lie there. We were afraid of it. The longer it lay there, the more afraid of it we got. I kept expecting it to blow up any second. Maybe an hour later, some Iraqis picked it up. It didn’t blow up.” He shrugged.

“What is the most disturbing image you have? Tell me, but stare at my hand, let your gaze follow my hand.”

She put her hand about a foot in front of his face and moved it back and forth. Guthrie stared at her hand, and he could feel his eyeballs swiveling, back and forth, back and forth. After a moment, he said, “I think I shot him.”

The hand kept moving.

She said, “Did you shoot him?”

Guthrie thought for a very long moment, then said, “I don’t know.”

She was well trained. She didn’t react or stop moving her hand. She said, “Do you remember lifting your weapon or looking at the boy through the sight?”

Guthrie said, “I don’t know.”

“Tell me again.”

She kept moving her hand.

“I was afraid of the boy. I meant to hit the Coke can, but when the Coke can was shot, I didn’t have time to change my aim, the boy jerked forward so fast.”

“Keep talking.” His eyeballs went back and forth.

“I was afraid of the boy. I had my hand on my weapon, but I didn’t lift it. Someone else shot him. I looked around. I didn’t see anything except Private Heller. He was the one who hit the can.”

“Maybe the same bullet that hit the can killed the boy.”

“Maybe we all shot him. It was ten years ago. I have thought about it and dreamed about it so many times that a thousand boys have been killed, and I can’t remember what really happened.” He did not add his real thought, which was, What’s the difference? Or, Maybe I saved that boy from joining ISIS. Or being beheaded by ISIS.

Dr. Kingston prescribed him some Zoloft.

They got into a reassuring routine — twelve sessions. He met interesting women at the ice rink (he didn’t dare go into bars, except sometimes for the music and the weedy fragrance), but in fact, he forgot about sex completely. Zoloft was good for that.

Iowa City was a place where people could and did stall out forever. Seated along the bar in the Mill Restaurant was a line of customers that hadn’t changed in thirty years, being served by bartenders ten years older than Guthrie was. If you were from Oelwein or Spencer or Denby, you could wash ashore in Iowa City and be so sated with ease and pleasure that you would never move on, which was not the case in Ames. Ames took them in and popped them out. Iowa City took them in and kept them — that was the difference between pain and pleasure, Guthrie supposed. He had been living here two and a half years, and he did feel better than he had at the Usherton Motel 6, but he also felt that he was reaching a point of no return: another year and he would buy a house on American Legion Road and grow a beard to his waist. He was thirty-two now, a disappointment to everyone but himself and Dr. Kingston, who thought she had done a good job with him. He gave himself six months to come up with a plan. If, when he saw Felicity at Thanksgiving, he still hadn’t thought of anything, he would put himself in her hands.

—

THE CORN WAS knee-high on the Fourth of July. This was not a good thing. Jesse had never, even in 2012, seen corn that was only knee-high on the Fourth of July — hybrid seed didn’t waste time like that. The June weather had been dry, but not in-the-bottom-five-years-of-the-century dry. After the downpours of mid-May, some farmers had replanted seed with a shorter growing season and a lower yield. Jesse had thought of it, but hadn’t dared go back to the bank for more money to buy the “inputs,” and so he had ended up doing what his father had always done — hoping for the best. The problem was not the lack of moisture; it was the weeds. In spite of all the herbicide he had used, more than he had ever used before, the weeds were thriving, and not only the velvetleaf, but the foxtail, the thistles, everything. It was evident that they were sucking whatever moisture there was right out of the soil. Weeds always grew fast and produced seed almost instantly. Corn and beans and, for that matter, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers, were the slowpokes, rather like educated couples who produced a single precious child when they were in their thirties. If the weeds flourished, you had to get them out before their seed distributed itself (his dad, for example, had never allowed the kids to pick dandelions and blow the seedheads into the air; he had gone around the yard when they first came up and pulled them one by one).