The Other (28 page)

Raven in my cave,

Mosquitoes whining at dusk—

This is what I have.

The next day, it snowed. We sat in the cave entrance wearing our sleeping bags like robes and watched the flakes float and wander. Snow began to settle on the forest floor wherever the canopy didn’t stop it. The shapes it made against the dirt were like a map of what was overhead. Arcs formed, articulating the lay of limbs. You could see the sweep of foliage in the undulating patterns. I’m obviously drawn to moments such as this, and don’t forget them, but, for better or worse, I’m equally drawn to words, so I said, sitting in the cave entrance with John William and watching snow fall,

Raven in my cave,

Mosquitoes whining at dusk—

This is what I have.

“I agree.”

“You want to play chess?”

“No.”

“I brought dope.”

“I’ve become a bad tripper. Dope gives me nightmares.”

I shuffled through my pack and found the National Book Award winner for fiction in ’84, Ellen Gilchrist’s
Victory over Japan: A Book of Stories.
“They dropped poetry,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

John William stretched a hand out as if to gauge the snow, or just to feel it melt against his fingers. He said, “This is bad.”

“What?”

“I’m going crazy up here.”

“Leave, then.”

“Leaving’s crazier.”

“That loses me, Barry.”

He didn’t answer.

I handed him
Victory over Japan,
because I didn’t know what else to do, but he said he didn’t want it and set it on the cave floor. I said, “I think you should bag it. What’s the point?”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, chuckling, then laughing, then laughing harder, as if whatever he was thinking seemed funnier all the time. He had to sigh and say, “Oh,” a few times to make his laughing stop, and then he said, “How could there be no poems this year? That’s insane.”

“I can always bring poems.”

“I mean, with all the crap in the world, and they cut poems?”

I said, “Name your poet.”

“Galway Kinnell.”

“Go out when I go out. Hike out with me.”

“
The Book of Nightmares.
Isn’t that a great title?”

I said, “Please.”

He gave me the finger. “You’re their emissary,” he said. “You’re the oldest trick in their book—a traitor.”

“Which ‘their’?”

“The Archons.”

“This is what I mean,” I said. “You need to bag it.”

“Bring poems by women,” said John William. “I want to know what women think. I want to understand women.”

“Meet one.”

“I do. You remember my dakini? The one from my dream?”

“Try to hear what I’m saying. Listen to me for once.”

“She’s blessed me with fear,” he said. “Fear’s my way out.”

I
HAD TWO SONS
by the winter of ’84. I was teaching Orwell in Modern English Literature—it was a good year for retrospectives—and I was adviser to the Chess Club. Jamie and I were installing a woodstove. I’d learned a few things about bicycle maintenance. We were short of money. Sometimes, on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, I sat in our bedroom with a yellow legal pad and worked longhand on short stories. Sometimes, instead, I raced strangers around Green Lake. One Sunday, in February, at dusk, I saw a runner far ahead of me moving at a rapid clip, fast enough that I’d lose sight of him in bends, so fast I grew disheartened in the straightaways about gaining enough ground to make him aware of my existence. It was getting dark. The wind was blowing from off the lake. Some overwintering ducks, in silhouette, fluttered in the reeds. I felt obstructed. It was not so much that he was pulling away as that I was receding. I thought he was wearing a sleeveless white singlet, warm-ups, and a headband, but he kept disappearing and reappearing, and anyway, in the gloom it was hard to tell much about him. My hope was that I would wear him down, but this didn’t happen. He ran the lake twice, and so did I, but I was always too far behind to feel like I was racing. We were running in darkness now. I tried to make a push near the bathhouse, but this was a delusion I believed in only briefly. Even so, I pushed myself until I lost control of my footing on a patch of ice and broke my left ankle. The next day, I taught sitting in a swivel chair, my cast on a coffee table borrowed from among the stage props in the school theater, and my crutches in my lap, so that I could use them when needed as a long-distance pointer. In American Studies, we were reading Thoreau, and one of my students, a girl who went on to Yale and now works for the State Department, was loudly amused by the image of Henry David tossing out his rock paperweight when he discovered he had to dust it. She said, “What a granola-head,” and “Why are we reading this?” An argument ensued about abundance, leisure, work, nature, and what a second girl kept calling “the American way.” When I asked her what she meant by “the American way,” she said, “Basically, the destruction of everything—the world, your happiness, your soul, everything. The complete package. Evil and war. That’s who we are, Mr. Countryman.”

J
OHN
W
ILLIAM DIED.
I’m not going to indulge anyone’s interest in forensic details. If you’re fascinated by charnel-house specifics, the vocabulary of coroners, or the undertaker’s daily bread, forgive my reticence. I’ll say plainly that I found him on May 4, 1984, after having overdone it on my not-quite-recovered ankle. I shouldn’t have made the journey, but after eleven weeks, I was worried. And rightly so, because he was facedown across his fire pit, with his midsection charred and his arms in front of him as if reaching for something. He’d burned in his own fire, why or how I’ll never know, though I could speculate that, weakened by hunger, he’d stumbled, maybe, and that—maybe, or maybe not—this stumbling was suicide. Does it go without saying that writing this is hard for me? Regret for what you did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, after someone dies—I have that and expect I’ll always have it. I should have spoken up, if not before I broke my ankle, certainly after, because I’d known—sitting on the couch at home, correcting essays, with my casted foot on the coffee table—that John William’s situation was dire. Yet I couldn’t turn him in. There was a part of me, at twenty-eight, with a wife, two kids, a house, a dog, and a job, that agreed with him, and so I couldn’t make the call. I started to, a couple of times, but then I convinced myself that dying up there was preferable to granting Jehovah another victory, and set the phone down. Jamie didn’t agree. She wanted to call Olympic Park and tell someone about the maniac in the woods who was up there, right now, starving to death, but I asked her not to do that, and, to her regret, she listened to me.

Alone in the mountains, I was spooked by my friend’s corpse and had to sit for a long time at a considerable remove, not looking, looking, then looking away again, and, amid all this, wondering why I wasn’t crying. There were five ravens in the trees. I’m not going to say what work they’d done, only that they were eyeing me with inscrutable patience. After a while, I moved closer to the remains and stood there with my left arm across my gut and my right elbow resting on it so I could keep my palm against my mouth and my thumb and forefinger pinching shut my nostrils. I could see how he’d been sitting by his fire, reading, and had stood up and fainted—maybe—because beside his legs was a canteen, and out in front of his hands, in the dirt, was
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.
Even this didn’t make me cry, the thought of John William, at the hour of his death, reading Tu Fu or some other Chinese poet who’d been dead for a thousand years. To the contrary, it was something I was glad about.

After about an hour, I accepted things as they were. What choice did I have? When I thought of walking away from what was left of him, it felt wrong, so I stayed, climbed the ladder, and got a shovel. I took apart his ring of fire stones and threw the smaller ones at the ravens, but they didn’t fly off, only moved to other branches. Determined not to disturb John William’s remains, I shoveled out all the partly burned wood I could get at without touching him, spread the ashes I could reach, and groomed the forest floor nearby. I put his canteen, book, and shovel in the cave and came back with a cedar mat, which I laid out close to his left side and wriggled and tucked under him the best I could. But now I had to sit at a remove again, for another ten or fifteen minutes. I got my gloves out of my pack, and a bandanna, and I tied the bandanna across my nose and put the gloves on, but still I sat at my small distance, with my back against the cliff, my elbows on my knees, and my swollen ankle hurting, and said his name a few times. Inured by this, or a little inured, I got up, reluctantly, and did what I thought I should do, which was to shove John William’s remains onto the mat and roll them up, and while I was doing this I finally cried a little. Shoving him like that, no matter how respectfully I tried to do it, injured my sense of funereal propriety, and the feel of his weight against my gloved hands, the way he seemed to push back, his mass, the glimpse I had of his beard, of an ear, of the whorl of hair at the crown of his head—these are the images and sensations I remember. I had to shut my eyes and rudely assert myself, unceremoniously, the way you might with a roadkill deer, to get him where I thought he should go. After that it was a little like rolling up heavy carpet, except that making that first turn, rotating his weight until he was shrouded and gone, was like the moment when my mother’s coffin began to descend. The literal disappearance is, for me, the worst part of a funeral.

He fit. I cinched him up with his handmade cedar cords and made a bound bundle. It was like tying down a sleeping bag in the era before stuff sacks. Then I had to sit some more, at a distance again, and look away from John William’s cylindrical sarcophagus and let expire from my hands the feeling of pulling knots tight against the pressure of his corpse. The ravens were gone now. I wanted to walk out and be on the road with the radio playing and the dash lights glowing before night fell, but, again, it was necessary to accept things as they were. I made myself look at the lozenge I’d constructed, and then I made myself sit close to it and felt frightened of the supernatural, of the possible but impossible resurrection of the dead, and of the woods themselves. So it was a long time before I put a hand on the rolled mat, and then my other hand, and bent my head to it with the bandanna over my nose, through which the smell of cedar now muted some of the other smells, and with this step-by-step approach I was eventually able to lean the side of my face against my friend’s bark coffin and rest like that, if rest is the word for what I was doing. I can’t tell you exactly what I was doing, but, once again, it seemed right.

After a while, I trussed the bundle even more rigorously by running a line under my knots and seizing up all the cords, so that pulling it could only make everything tighter, and, raising dust and making noise, I dragged my friend away from the last ashes. There might have been a more reverent approach, but I couldn’t think of one and had to accept the self-loathing that went, for me, with the rudeness of my undertaking. Skidding one’s friend across the earth as if portaging a canoe over ice was not how it was supposed to be done—this is what I told myself while doing exactly that, while just managing when better was called for. But I was alone, a solo pallbearer, the only mourner. And now I had the question of what to do next and had to guess what his preference might have been in this matter, for burial or for burning on a pyre? I sat some more. I took off my left boot and rubbed my ankle. It occurred to me that I’d rolled him up too fast, that I should have cleaned his body or anointed it with water from the pool, or pressed his eyelids over his eyeballs, or combed his hair, or that I should have done all those things, but it seemed too late for any of it now, so on top of everything else—including anger—I felt regret about my handling of my friend’s last rites.