After the show, I spoke with one of the musicians.  I told him that I was sorry if I sounded cloying.  Tawdry.  I apologized, but I told him I needed to say it anyway.  I told him that I was tired of spending so much time thinking about how destructive we are, as a people.  Or as a species, however you want to look at it.   I take these quick glances at what the human tide is up to, what it’s careening up against now.  Check the news, work a shift in the emergency room.  Instead of seeing the glowing moon’s pull and tug in our ebbing and rising, flowing and waning, I see heavy cliffs crumbling slowly, rocks and sturdy shores moaning.  I see wars and murders and rapes and horrible coping mechanisms that lead people to do awful things to themselves and to each other.  I see  terrible illness and disease, and I see us ripping our precious Garden to shreds and tatters for what amounts to absolutely nothing.  We shatter the mountains and pick through the shards for shiny slivers and wet ore, and then we burn their black bones, violently sweeping their gnarled and rivered faces from the dirt of the quiet earth.  We rearrange the rivers, children at play.  We turn the air grey.  And all this for nothing.  Without any discernible way to stop it.  And I wonder if we are capable only of pain and destruction.

But as we listened to Balmorhea’s music, the musicians dancing through those orchards and picking apples and picking apples and picking apples, I kept thinking that this is the truth.  This is what is true and good about our nature.  This is how we were made, and what we were made for.  We are so beautifully, wonderfully made.  We are capable of such unimaginable beauty and creativity.  Genesis says that we were created “in God’s own image,” and we’re told that right after He finishes creating the heaven and the stars and the seas and the trees.  That’s the source and the proof of all that exploding life in you, all that surging, rushing beauty that defines you already.  I want you to know how much we love you.  And I want you to know how much beauty you have in your soul.  It is your true nature, your true design, your true ability.  To create beauty.

So I told him all that, and he seemed really surprised.  I told him I was so thankful that he had reminded me of how much beauty we have inside us, and that we’re capable of creation, not just destruction.

I hope you enjoyed the show.  Like I said, I think you had just gotten your ears, so I would love it if that music was one of the first things you ever heard.  And by the way, your middle name was almost Balmorhea.  I think you can see why.

River’s first camping trip was to the bluffs on Lake Travis, west of Austin, TX.  Your mom and I know this spot so well that we can find it and build camp in the dark.  Let the night itself blindfold us!  In fact, I think we’ve set up the tent more often in the dark than we have in the day.  When we were at Baylor, we went to Austin about once a month.  Sometimes we’d go for a concert, or sometimes just coffee and fresh air, and then we’d always camp at that spot on the bluffs at Lake Travis.  We’d listen to owls, let the birds wake us up, the sun wash our hair.  We used to jump off the cliffs, and take new friends to jump with us, about forty feet down.  I jumped every time until one day I just decided to stop.  Some Goodness must have reminded me that you were in my future, and that I’d rather not ruin my chances at hiking the John Muir Trail with you one day.

In the mornings we’d go to Mozart’s coffee, a beautiful little cabin on the water that roasts beans and bakes breads.  Your mom loves their bagels, and I love their cinnamon buns without icing.  They have sprawling, yawning decks and docks that stretch into the lake like fingers.  I can’t tell you how many hours we’ve spent on that deck drinking coffee.

Other traditions are to go to Waterloo Records, Whole Foods, and REI, where we spend a fair amount of time trying to feel out just how serious the other one is about setting up a yurt and living quietly in the mountains, drinking from clear streams and gardening food.  Something I suppose you’ll come to understand about us is that we’re mountain walkers, forest people, maybe even hippies at heart, and that we go to Whole Foods with the same glassy, gaping look in our eyes as a tween in the mall.  It is our wonderland.

This particular trip to the bluffs was your mom’s idea.  In all the swarming, smothering chaos of medical school, we had only made it to the bluffs a handful of times.  As soon as medical school ended, we made a mad dash for those bluffs with the owls and the morning birds.  I love your mom so much.  She knew exactly what I needed.

River’s first argument with mama was a few days after we found out that you had appeared.  I cooked some quinoa with a lot of veggies and seitan, one of our favorite meals.  Your mom wanted to eat it, but you kept telling her you weren’t so sure about it.  Mama looked down at her belly (at you) and said “Baby, we eat lots of veggies in this family.  They’re good for you!”  You said you didn’t care and that you would prefer some limes.  You know, mom didn’t put up much of a fight.  She loves you a lot.

River’s first names included – but were not limited to – Lee, Annalise Rae, Finn, Jonas, River, Jayden, Muir, Zoe, Corrigan, Eddie, Jack, Forrest, Levi, Sam, Samuel, and Jackson.

River’s first… well, exposition was on Tuesday morning, April 5, 2011.  We had an appointment to have an ultrasound done so we could make sure that you were growing and moving like you should.  But your mom wanted you to dance.  She read that drinking grapefruit juice incites dancing in babies, so she drank a whole jar of it that had just been hand-squeezed by her friend Sandy.  It worked.  The first thing I saw you do was chop both your arms up and down across the front of your body.  You waved, crawled, somersaulted, and danced.  Even the technician said you were quite an active little boy.  You also were not shy.  At all.  Either that or you were sick and tired of hearing us yammer monologues about how we “knew” you would be a girl with absolutely no evidence to back it up.  At twelve weeks and six days, earlier than I’ve ever heard of such a pronouncement being delivered, we found out you were a boy.  That you would be our son.

To try and summarize the waves and cascades of happiness and surprise and every other emotion that swept through me at that moment would be a feat of introspection that I fear I am not capable of.  All I can say is that I was absolutely bombarded, pummeled, swept up and deposited somewhere else, in some other place than I had been standing before.  The earth tilted.

I can fairly say that I was absolutely ecstatic when I thought we would be having a girl, and that I was equally ecstatic upon the realization that we would actually be having a boy.  But I was happy in an entirely new way.  The closest thing I have for comparison is my love for mountains, both the Rockies and the Appalachians.  The Rockies are enormous, rugged, and spectacular.  They are all rock and ice, canyon and carving river, pine forest and glacier meadow.  They demand a fierceness from you that the Appalachians do not.  They are like boulder words to a wild poet.  But the quiet green waves that ripple through the Appalachians and Blue Ridge offer a sonant peacefulness that is rhythmic in a way the Rockies are not, defined by seasonal washings of orange and red, grey and white, and then the most green of greens, the most yellow of yellows, the most blue of blues.

I love both, but they are different.  And when I found out you were a boy, I felt the earth tilt, leaning its eastern shoulder eastward, and I was in a different place.  I found myself out of the soft forests of the Blue Ridge and in some high alpine meadow, the towering eruptions of the Continental Divide and the rioting sea of Rocky Mountains stretching to every horizon I knew to look for.  I felt wild.  I felt long bearded and glacier eyed.  I felt strong shoulders and calloused hands.

I am ready for you.  I cannot wait to meet you.

River’s first dance was Thursday, April 28, 2011.  Your mom felt a little flutter in her belly, and as soon as she placed a hand over the spot to see if you were moving, she felt two tiny little kicks right under her fingers.  You only moved for a moment, and she didn’t feel anything again for about a week.  I missed the whole thing, but I loved hearing the rivering excitement in your mom’s voice when she told me about it.  I can’t even imagine the connection you two already have.

River’s first trip to the mountains was in the middle of April, 2011.  Your mom and I took a last-minute road trip to Breckenridge, Colorado.  April is the time of year in Colorado when no one who has a grain of honesty in their bones can tell you what the weather will be like.  We thought we might be hiking in fresh green meadows, or even snowshoeing on higher hills, but we were wildly wrong.  It snowed nearly the entire time we were there.

Unfortunately, I failed to anticipate what 10,000 feet of elevation gain could do to a pregnant woman.  Your mom’s morning sickness joined forces with what may have been a little touch of altitude sickness, and together they slammed her whole body into the couch for the first day or two we were there.  But your mom is a rugged Mountain Mama, and she began to climb out of the fog with amazing energy, grace, and beauty.  Before I even had time to crack the covers on a few books I’d brought with us, she was ready to start exploring.  And skiing.

Her eyes looked like the sun and the moon through wet forest trees in fresh morning, and she insisted we go skiing.  We got twenty inches of snow, all soft and gleaming powder, and there was no way she’d let us go home without getting on the mountain.

The day was as beautiful as a mountain day can get.  It snowed all night, leaving us an empty white mountain canvas in the morning.  The clouds had wandered east, and the sky was 10,000 feet closer than we see it in Texas.  I saw blues that you cannot see unless you’re that close, fingertips waving at the earth’s soft roof.  And your pregnant mama carved the sweetest mountain songs to you with her wild white cursive in the snow, skis chiseling verse after verse on the first blank paper runs of the day.

I can’t tell you how proud of her I was.  She was sick all day, but kept riding lifts and skiing back down.  I think she imagined that white slope glide settling into your bones.  Mountain air in your blood.  I think she imagined teaching you what the side of a mountain feels like, the angle and rumble of it, the sturdy heaviness and the pine forest skin.

And I like to think you loved it.

This is the way a lot of our conversations start.

“Like, I see them on the outside of my eyes…. Yesterday I heard some little tappies, like Layla was walking around.  But then I came in here and Layla was sleeping on the couch.  It’s like the house is learning to haunt us.”

I got out my computer.

She changed the subject.  “Okay so, what did you say sounded good?  You said something sounded good, but you didn’t finish your sentence.”

“And there is a good reason for that.  Because you got me all excited about having a sliding contest in the living room.”

For some reason that I can’t remember, we were both sitting against a wall in the narrow hallway between our guest bedroom and guest bathroom.

“Busy B’s.  I want some Busy B’s muffins.”

She looked happy.   “Well we should go, or there won’t be any of the good stuff left.”

“Okay, but I have to write this down first.”

“Wait, write what?”

“’I’ve been seeing little creatures lately…’”

“I’m not telling you anything ever again.  I’m never speaking to you again.  Hello, Layla.”

This is the way a lot of our conversations ended.

I hope it’s obvious how grateful I am for their help.

Writers are to me like mythical creatures, the heroes and heroines of folklore, living in homemade cabins perched on impossible hillsides.  Gardens clamor and jangle over every patch of open earth, rustic colors stain every hard surface.  They always seem to wear flannel and jeans, have no need for shoes, and sit on decks that look more like redwood canopies than anything else.  Cups of coffee steam quietly beside them.  They always have faces that conjure a kind of peacefulness that radiates.  Glimmering droplets of sunlight in their eyes whisper hints of some inbuilt ability to shatter the complicated world, melt it down to clay, and sculpt something simple, clean, beautiful.  They live in wonderlands and have superpowers.  They know how to build cabinets and end wars, when to plant garlic and how to ride canoes off waterfalls.  And they carve their own canoes.  With knives they make themselves.

I, however, am the opposite of a folk tale.  I live in an enormous city, so fat that its pannus folds weirdly into the even bigger rolls of a city forty miles from here.  I live in a little house, occasionally “robin’s egg blue” but otherwise turquoise, perched unobtrusively in a neighborhood that has apparently embraced the creeds of female empowerment so enthusiastically that the men have committed to not working, and instead sit in lawn chairs on sun-crisped lawns and drink mysterious beverages from brown paper bags.  I hail from a profession that involves an actual Oath, daily grooming, and the sacrifice of all one’s free time to the study of an elusive crater of knowledge that, once mastered, will probably get me sued.  My skin is mottled, my beard is frizzled, and the whole of me is starved for sunlight.

But I do garden, and my front lawn is laden with the Texas version of “the fruits of my labor.”  Crispy “green” leaves fold themselves up to avoid another beating from the Yellow Pulsing Orb, revealing a smattering of shriveled tomatoes, scorched blackberries, and shocked grapes.  Raspberries were a little happier, but gave out after one handful.  And there was one week where the strawberries seemed to pull themselves out of a sulky depression and lend some color and sweetness to the world before collapsing in on themselves, furrowing ruffled yellow leaves and begging to be left alone.  But the lantana exploded, as did the salvia and purple heart, teaming up to make my little spot of earth a remarkably beautiful place.  And my succulents!  They are the masterpieces of my garden, spilling out of themselves in patterns that are simultaneously incomprehensible and yet geometrically perfect, creating colors that simply don’t exist elsewhere.  Sometimes I spend my mornings next to them, watching them with invincible captivation.  I believe they can probably tell you the smell of my favorite coffee.  By the time I leave, the grass beneath my crossed legs has pressed its newest etching into my skin, and I admire its work as proof of our proximity.  Evidence that I went outside, that I felt the breeze and touched the earth.

I read stories of grizzled men who ride the tops of trees in storms, carve canoes and float rivers, stumble into valleys meant for heaven but given to us by grace, and summit peaks so high they have to climb through the clouds.  But more often than not, I read from my couch, and around me the whole earth rages and whirls.

All this wildness, and me in my house.

I am no folk tale.

But!

I am a man who craves wilderness.  I crave wildness, aliveness.  Chained to my suburb, I am bursting at the seams.  My eagerness in writing is overwhelming.  I am swarmed, pinned against rock by all the ocean’s weight, at the mercy of the tide.  Such is the strength of my compulsion to attach living words to those loudest moments of life, those quietest, most peaceful moments of days, when all the elements of earth and wind, leaf and stem, petal and stream seem to gain a voice and speak to every nerve inside me.  It is out of simple obedience to nature that I write.

I have launched myself in giddy fits into those same forests that my friends gather blooms from, exploring prose and poetry with the energy of a Blue Ridge thunderstorm and the sturdy discipline of lantana in summer blaze.  But some months ago, lost in the deep woods, resting by a whispering river, I found myself alone in my writing.  I wondered what else there was to discover.  I suppose I began to fear that I had been writing foolishly all these years; a man alone can’t judge madness in himself.

I asked for help.

And full of grace, both friends swept themselves up into towering clouds and offered a drenching rain of advice that has the only possible consequence of turning everything greener, thicker, stronger, and more healthy than before.  Though they don’t know each other, a solid majority of their suggestions sounded like a call and response chorus of repeated melodies.  Even their differences were harmonious, one voice drifting neatly alongside the other.  All of this proves the rather serious – and obvious – need for improvement in much of my writing, and I am truly thankful to have these elements pointed out.  That was, after all, the point of asking for help.

There was, however, one extraordinary difference of opinion that I have only recently been able to reconcile after reading an introduction to Thoreau’s Walden.

As best as I can boil it down, their disagreement concerns hyperbole.  Though my mind is saturated with little else but profound gratitude for her help, I have to confess that one friend never seemed able to get her fingers down into the dirt of why I write the way that I do.  She pleaded with me to just calm down a little, suggesting that I was sacrificing clarity for metaphor and overstuffed, supersaturated imagery.  Ouch?  Not really.  I actually agree with her observation.  I suppose this is one element of my writing that I was already aware of.  I know that my writing can get a bit gnarly and tangled, inevitably bringing to mind memories of the Olympic wilderness’ Hoh rainforest, where every available space for growing is snatched up and rooted, sprouted, overgrown, whether it is tree trunk or branch or collapsed, decaying log.  It is beautiful, but there’s no room left for breath.

But I have to tell you… that’s exactly where I want to take you.  I want you to come with me to that point of breathlessness, when your eyes are widest and your mind is wildest, when you are at the limit of your ability to experience.  What is suffocating for some is exhilarating for others.

My other friend seemed to understand this.  Embraced it, even.  Encouraged it.  She seemed to glimpse that swarming-tide compulsion… that I write this way because I have no choice.  I am at the mercy of something beyond my control.

I explain it this way:

I am like a stream.  I am slow and soft, babbling quietly, peacefully.  I flow through canyons and rummage through meadows, tiptoing around pebbles and rocks and the smallest tree branches.  I leave behind whimsical etchings, my name scripted in winding rivulets and streambeds.  I am so deep!  I am so shallow!  Everything at once.

I am always under trees, staring up at the skies and peaks through the bellies of leaves, collecting their glimmer and hints of their color, reflecting them wildly, in kaleidoscopes and fragments, in disorganized slivers of the world above me.  I am quiet and meek.  Followed from birth to death, I lead a calm life.

But there are moments that demand an eruption.  There are moments when I am hurled off cliffs, when semblances of peace are obliterated, cast into blinding wildness, unbridled ecstasy.  I leap from the mountainsides, become a fury of cascading, carving water, washing the faces of mountains.  I am exploded, shattered into senseless blizzards of prismatic rain.  I am in every sun ray, filling the valley with giddy soft mist, and I become every color known to the mind of men.  I am violet and blue, green and yellow, orange and red.  I bend light, I crush rocks.  I am heard for miles.

And then quietly, I gather myself together.  I come down off rocks and drip from the trees, water the flowers and come back to the stream.  And I wander once again.

End of metaphor.

When I tell you about those moments of unfurled, unleashed, wild aliveness, I have two choices.  I could tell you a story, quietly and slowly, with simple words and well-formed thought, of how it happened and where.  I could tell you with rhetorical precision that it was, in fact, the shimmering aspen leaves that sent me leaping off cliffs, dispersed and annihilated into a maelstrom of giddy waterfalling rain.  And you would not understand.

Or I could try and explode upon you the havoc of sensation and images and color that assaulted my every perception, clinging to the hope that you could feel it with me, have your skin washed with the colors of sunlight filtered through a thousand autumn leaves, your face explored by cool valley winds, your hands warmed by a humming, guitar-string fire.

It is in obedience to my nature that I write the way I do.  I am at the mercy of the tide.

More to the point, I am going to explode at you.

Immediately after receiving the review from my friend who suggested I trim my hyperbolic nature into petite and easy-to-explain shrubbery, I began wondering how to reconcile two rather looming combatants.  One was my own beating heart; my core purpose in writing.  The other was the advice of a friend whom I respect tremendously.

I was encouraged somewhat by the more positive response I received from my other friend, but it did not dispatch the concerns raised by the suggestion of the first.  I needed help.  I needed reinforcement, some heavyweight in my corner, rubbing my shoulders and telling me I could do this.  I needed the personalized endorsement of internationally adored and respected authors from one of the most important and creative periods of literature, prose, and poetry.  I needed Emerson.  I needed Thoreau.

Imagine my ecstasy when I came across the following two quotes in an introduction to Thoreau’s Walden.

In defense of hyperbole:  “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language… Wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things… The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, ‘with the flower of the mind.’” So says Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And Henry David Thoreau sings my life:  “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.”

Yes!  I leap from the mountainsides!  I bend light!  I crush rocks.

This is the anthem to my existence.  I am a man alive.  I am no folk tale, but I am a man alive.  I crave wildness and aliveness.  And I desire to speak “like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments.”  I want to bring you to breathlessness, to throw your eyes wild open, to bring your mind to shuddering captivation, and I am convinced now, more than I have ever been, that “I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.”

There is too much color, too much life, too much air and breath, too much leaf and sky, too much river and rock, too much grass and mountain, too much to succeed.  And there is too much to fail.

I am going to explode at you.

“How long you been out here, Brother?”  There was a pause, and all that noise tumbled finally, quietly into the lazy water.  There was a soft finish, the suggestion of peace.

Edward peered through the firelight, and glimpsed the man who had spoken.  The giddy orange heat leapt and churned the air like water beneath an oar, and the world beyond it danced, whirled, winked.  Caught in the blur, the man’s face was wild, a thousand shapes, committed to nothing.  There was the hint of a beard, rough as underbrush, clamoring over the rugged edges of his emberlit face.  Two eyes, deep as lakes and soft as ponds, blue and gentle and turning fierce at sunset, glowing orange and pink.  There was a warmth to everything.

Edward didn’t answer.  Moved his boots closer to the fire, his wet socks draped over muddy laces, drying from the heat.  He rocked backward and tucked his bare feet under him, legs crossed and knees to chest, careful to keep his right leg from lying in the dirt.  He felt the cool ground kissing his soles, all thick and brown and callused, and spread his toes to let the grass grow up between them.  Ran his fingers over the rawness of the wound, bandaged with the sleeve of his old white coat, now wrapped twice below the knee.

The fire was strong now, sturdy and singing, whispering, rambling in another world’s notes, and he loved the flicker and quiet of it.  He reached for his lantern and turned it down, turned it off.  At the touch of the metal, he remembered his first night in these woods, in this blueberry patch, finding these friends at the fire.  They were at the river, planting raspberries, starting blackberries, and heard the sound of dinner, the whistle of the tea kettle, and they ran through the dusk, flinging their lanterns in jagged arcs of wild orange cursive, spelling the words to unruly stories.  If they had sung, it would have sounded like an anthem.  Edward watched them run, watched them laugh, read their cursive that welcomed him home.

He’d had a patient back in Texas, an old fisherman with the kindest eyes, tethered, tied, doubletied to dialysis.  Tubes everywhere.  The room filled with his own blood, in machines and in flesh.  Edward stood at the bed, pushing buttons, scribbling notes, silencing calls.  The fisherman reached from the sheets, held his hand, clutched it from the fingers to the elbow, moved the crisp white sleeve out of the way to get at skin, and said fly to Montana!  There was a light in his eyes.  Water, too.  The sun shone wild on rainclouds.

Edward waited until his beard grew long enough to tuck between the second and third buttons of his shirt, and then he flew to Montana.  Do you have any bags to check, Dr. Abbey?  No.  Enjoy your trip.

Okay.

He spoke in whispers, like a creek that tiptoes by pebbles and twigs.

There was Montana.  Then there was Wyoming and Utah, and then Colorado.  Now there was this.  This fire and this river.  And these blueberries, everywhere.

He looked through the fire, still strong and speaking in faraway tongues, and found the face with a thousand shapes, eyes a match to his.

Voice like rubble, left from the spring’s snow melting, filling a hundred rivers.

“Long enough, I suppose.  Long enough, Brother.”

Phase Two requires a trip down Rosedale Avenue, which is the main thoroughfare through the hospital district.  Enigmatically, it is also the street with the most precisely timed array of sequential red lights that I have yet encountered in this city.  Consequently, I’m currently interested in finding out how many people die in their ambulances while in transit to the hospitals.  Unfortunately, I am untrained in effective research methods, and I’m not at all convinced that I have the wherewithal to present the results as anything more than a provocative gimcrack.  Also, my friend Napolotar told me that ambulances have a button that turns red lights green.

Sidebar:  Napolotar’s parents are sci-fi geeks from India, and developed his name by splicing a traditional cultural name with one of the “good” monsters from the credits of Star Wars Episode V.  Mysteriously, every recent attempt to find the name again in the credits has been an embarrassing wash.  That’s his parents.  So he compensates with beefy gold necklaces and entirely too much street slang for his massive brain.  Watching Napolotar in the lab at the university is like watching Einstein furtively tagging his theory of relativity on trash cans and scampering off guckling, stopping repeatedly to pull up his pants, which are belted at a premeditated mid-thigh height (depth?) and accommodated by specialized extra-long boxers.

Anyway, that’s Napolotar.  A Banksy-Einstein hybrid.

Phase Three is Interstate 30, which I’m on for approximately two miles before I exit into Phase Four, a brief denouement of residential hatchwork.  Phases One and Two are preoccupying.  Phases Three and Four are a breeze.  I explain it like this:

Phases One and Two: I hear NPR.  Phases Three and Four: I listen to NPR.

Today was a little different though, because I didn’t listen to NPR at all.  As soon as I dripped off the bridge and rippled into the highway current, my attention went and absconded with a car the color of jaundice, plowing backward at about forty miles an hour on the access road.  The driver had his right arm wrapped around the passenger seat, left hand on the wheel, and was staring back through the rear window, his whole body torsed around like a Gumby.  The whole scene was maniacal in a delicious sort of way.  Watching it, I felt exactly the same as when I see Napolotar get his gold chain stuck in his mouth when he bends over to put sterile nets over his shoes.

Almost ridiculous, almost hilarious, almost serious.  The kind of thing you stand and watch and cross your arms about, half your mouth in a smile, the other half a sarcastic frown, creating a pink stripe of bemused angles across the lower half of your head.  Your face wobbles and you try to figure out just what in the world is going on, knowing you’re never going to get a good answer.  But it’s the imagining that’s the fun part, and not the knowing.

So I imagined this guy, maybe thirty-five or forty, stuck in life with a bilious car and a dumb job.  Maybe he is a Consultant, and maybe he still doesn’t know what that means, though he enjoys handing out business cards to complete strangers, flush with pride and joy that his title deserves capitalized letters.  Maybe he’s got a good tan, not because he loves being outside, but because he’s heard that real men like going outside, so he goes and cuts the grass and sweats a little.  Maybe his wife is nice but a little protective, and even though he’s not a dreamer, he’s still got a little something in him that occasionally wakes up to remind him life isn’t boring.  So he’s been whispered at by this thing in him for a few weeks now, and he doesn’t care a whole lot about work anymore, and today his boss sat him down for a “talk.”  Now he’s zooming backwards down an empty access road as fast as his little car will take him, and he’s never been happier.  Yeah, he could turn around, pull a quick u-turn or something, but this is way weirder.  He’ll go home and tell his wife that they’re gonna eat shrimp tonight, and they haven’t eaten shrimp in years.  He’ll pee in his backyard before he goes to bed, just once, under cover of darkness, just because he’s never done it before, and because he knows full well that he’ll wake up tomorrow as normal as ever.  Bored, stifled, duty-bound to pee in urinals.  Just like everybody else.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted for that guy.  I imagined it all the way home, and so I don’t have a clue what NPR was talking about.  But we did eat shrimp tonight.

I suggest that your reason for living tomorrow should be to spend more than four minutes in the bathroom cleaning the dirt from beneath your fingernails, accumulated from a day spent planting berries and blooming things.

Yesterday, your reason for living was supposed to have been to break the same string twice on your guitar, distracted as you would have been by the frenzied stomping of your folk beat feet through front porch floorboards, and thus reasonably unaware of your catastrophic strumming.

Unfortunately, your guitar is lying on top of Clementine’s crate and beneath a pile of the week’s accouterments that includes (but is not limited to) a formal belt, socks to be worn with tasseled shoes, and the flannel plaid sheet you wore as a toga to Greek Night at your parents’ house. The pile has been largely undisturbed for nearly a week, and you do not know whether the guitar is in tune.

But! Do not panic.

You will have plenty of time to offset this forbearance of responsibility next week, when your reason for living will be to wash your beard with the rain from the first spring thunderstorm.

And if it doesn’t rain, then you are going to have to get your beard stuck in a tree or something.

As next week’s reason for living is a bit precariously dependent on weather and tree-climbing abilities that may have withered over the winter, you can spend your spare time preparing for an upcoming reason for living, date TBD. Research guerrilla gardening. Also, begin acquiring whatever supplies are necessary for high quality guerrilla gardening. Recruit a small band of hippies for their company and assistance.

You want to be completely awesome at this.

And Daniel.  Don’t mess this up.  Don’t do this one like you did the guitar strings.

You are almost who you want to be.

The wife of one of my patients said, “You’ve still got your house shoes on!”  I said, “NO!  These are my moccasins!”

Then I asked her husband if he did cocaine, because he is super young and had a miniature heart attack.  His wife said, “You better not be!  I’m bigger than you!”  And she was right.  Very right.

Ha ha!

I talked about beards for, like, five minutes today with a guy I know!

Then I got a video in my email of a guy who made his beard into a bird cage.  He won a championship because he opened a little door in his big beard-bird-cage and drank his coffee through it!

I met a guy who studies horticulture because he loves trees!  He knew everything about nature!

I introduced him to Edward Abbey!  Man!

Guerrilla gardening is the coolest!

My wife bought me a book on Banksy!

I had two daydreams about mountains in the middle of my departmental exam, and I still managed to finish on time!  It was probably the most enjoyable testing experience I’ve ever had!

Clementine gives me hugs!  She is my younger dog!

My wife is a hippy!

Dan:  “Okay, gonna go.”

Kate:  “For coffee?”

Dan:  “Yeah.”

Kate:  “Bye.  See you tonight.  What time are you coming home?  Do you love me?”

“Good morning, Mrs. Stoll.  Back agehhhh?”

Amber’s question smears with nearly imperceptible abruptness into Mrs. Stoll’s response, affording her the opportunity to leave the final syllable of her question to inarticulate ambiguity.  Despite this, she still managed to curl the blurred phonation in an upward stroke of pitch and tone, officially demarcating the phrase as a question.  Dutiful to the last.

With aforementioned rapidity bordering on the insensibility of interruption, and also with a considerable amount of premeditated glibness, Mrs. Stoll explains, “Well, I was just passing by.”

Her tone is perfect, her mannerisms casual.  She believes herself to have created an impermeable and definitive atmosphere of detached unimportance, intended to saturate the upcoming conversation with substantial forgivability and normality.  Her next line is crucial.  If delivered poorly, if she fails to lay a believable foundation, all is lost.  She understands her request is a curious one, but her desire is driven by the heat of internal combustion, the force of pistons churning.  She cannot fail.  She must not fail.

She speaks.  So, so slowly.  Aching bones slow.

“I guess I just must be one of those people who has to be one hundred and eighty percent satisfied.”

Kate, having leaned forward as far as she can go without appearing severely scoliotic, moves her buttocks from the rear of the chair to the front edge of it.  Uncomfortable but engaged, she picks up an automotive magazine and half-heartedly pretends to flip through it, never taking her eyes off the two conversationists.  She reeks of determination and a certain acuity of memory, her hands performing tasks upon the magazine that her mind is utterly unaware of, bent as it is upon recording every detail of the scene unraveling before her. It has not registered yet that no one just drops in to collision repair centers while “just passing by.”  But her powers of perception are at their peak, and she has not failed to notice Amber’s unspoken, frolicking exasperation, as though she is at once tremendously happy at having found herself face to face with Mrs. Stoll, and also very, very tired, the source of her exhaustion emanating from deep within her soul.  With the keen, sage-like understanding of mountaintop wise men, Kate registers the look now flooding and dissolving Amber’s face as one of absolute blankness.  Amber’s pupils have gone small, her cheeks have blanched, and her throat appears somewhat constricted, as though her tongue has slipped into her neck and the throat is trying to push it back into the mouth.  Her hands, until now busy with tasks made invisible by the high counter, appear to have become still, evidenced by the sallow hanging of her shoulders.  Profound understanding courses through Kate’s blood, triggering her heart to beat faster, and some rudimentary, primal reflex alerts her to the need to turn the page of the magazine in her hands.  These two know each other!  They know each other well!  Never could such a vivid and immobilizing response have been earned by so simple a word, so meek a phrase from a mere stranger.  The exchange took on an epic resonance, echoing into the past for what could be days, weeks.  Even months.  The weight of time bore down upon Kate as she learned this, wondering how many times the two before her had crossed words, dueling themselves into anonymous lore.

~Amber looks blankly back at Mrs. Stoll.~

The look is not unseen by Mrs. Stoll, who begins to wonder if she’s laid too thick a fog.  The poor girl appears to have gone away, bland as she’s gone in the face, thinks the mind of Mrs. Stoll.  She recovers herself, returning to the goal at hand.  Her only option is to proceed.  She speaks again.

“Okay.”  Groaning bones slow.  “I’m willing to leave my car with you today, as long as I can have a Chevy Malibu.”

What?  Kate looks wildly from Mrs. Stoll to Amber, and then back and forth too many times.  Amber’s peripheral vision catches sight of the rhythmic, frantic motion of Kate’s head, and looks toward the waiting area for clarification.  Too fast!  She must carry in her genes some inborn hunter’s sense of motion, catching sight of Kate’s whipsawing head like it was a rabbit darting through the underbrush.  Kate does not have time to hide her stare, locking wide, wet eyes with Amber, lingering there until the now well-established beat of alternating glances sends her head and gaze swinging heavily toward Mrs. Stoll, and back again.  Kate feels small in her corner.

The specificity of Mrs. Stoll’s question, and perhaps the oddness of it, combined with the thrill of being uncontrollably, unabashedly watched by a customer in the corner, drives Amber out of her blanching delirium and into the entrenched, nearly robotic maneuvering of a well-trained Customer Service Agent.  She sits up straight, draws her lips up and over her front teeth like a stage curtain before the opening act of a ballet, and offers to her present customer the vast expertise given to her by the industry’s finest training videos.  She fumbles only on the first two words.

“Um, okay.”  These are the fumbles.  “Do you need it for a rental car?”

Mrs. Stoll nods.  The brevity and muteness of her response betrays her eagerness.

Amber maintains her smile, and true to her astonishing array of skills, dials the number for Enterprise Rent-A-Car by memory.  She happily endures nearly twenty full seconds of unanswered ringing, relentlessly smiling at Mrs. Stoll but for occasional and brief redirections of the focus of her glee toward the telephone, to keep her customer at ease.  Finally, she speaks.

“Mrs. Stoll is here.  Yes.  Well, she’s here and is requesting a Chevy Malibu.  Is there one avail-  Um.  Right.  Is there one available?”

Mrs. Stoll, desperate to appear nonchalant and greedless, asserts herself once more.  “I don’t want to make an appointment.  If they have one, though, I’ll leave the car.”

It is at this point that Kate, our chief historian and narrator, exits the room in a spasm of storytelling, already having dialed the number of her husband.  The authenticity of her desire to recount the day’s events, thus defending them from the devastating anonymity so often wrought by the murderous hands of Time and Untold Stories, is to be commended, and commended heartily.  But alas, we will never know the end.  Was Mrs. Stoll turned away without her beloved Chevy Malibu, left alone to suffer paroxysms of unfulfilled desires and disintegrated hopes?  Or did she receive the car for the day, offering up her own as twisted collateral, like a deranged mother desperately suggests trading children with a neighbor whose young progeny offer a more rewarding parentage.  And how did Amber, our dutiful Customer Service Professional, deliver the news to Mrs. Stoll?  One can assume it was delicate and patient, but these are things deserving only of our speculation. Perhaps it is better that way.  Perhaps the reader can decide for himself.

The great insult, as he saw it, was the problem of coexistence with an enemy.  Here he was, subjected to the needling harassment of his hunger, yet bound to sit quietly and endure it.  He found himself miserably equating his sufferings to those of a modest protagonist who is inexplicably obligated to behave cordially toward a particularly epic kind of mortal enemy.  Wool thought he’d stumbled upon creative brilliance with this, and imagined himself subjected to a polite dinner party where he would force upon himself wineglass-wielding poise, bound by societal restraints to endure the consequences of proximity to his most hated acquaintance.  And then he imagined what it would be like to shake hands with such malignancy anthropomorphized.

The absurdity of tactful coexistence in this moment, of all moments, was too much.  He was hungry.  The experience was consuming, penetrating.  Like a poison was wandering his vasculature, drifting lazily from somewhere in his gut to his extremities.  Soon it would be in his fingers.  Then his toes.

And he was losing his poise.

Amie pretended not to notice as he writhed like something hatching on the couch.

Feeding off her postured inattention, he writhed harder.  Banged occasionally into the coffee table for effect, once a bit harder than planned, prompting him to add a muffled gurgle to the shuffling din of his suprafabric wriggling.

“Look, Wool, I know you’re busy doing something, and it looks serious, kind of, but I can’t find my keys.”  Somehow, she managed to emphasize every word in the last part of the sentence in such a way that she simultaneously: (A) proved beyond doubt that she knew exactly where her keys were, and (B) buried a suggestion that he ought to initiate himself into the search, despite its scripted frivolity.  She was determined to draw this out.

On the couch, still hatching, Wool punched through his shell, extended his arm to its full length, then brought it back down to grab the outside edge, steadying himself to reach through the new opening with his other hand.  He quickly tore away huge chunks of the encasement, surprisingly brittle in his hands – or was it sheer strength? – until he had enough room to poke his head through, gasping for air and wringing his neck like a dishrag.

Arms in midair, he scanned the room for Amie, finding her standing near the kitchen with her back turned.  She hadn’t seen it!  He cursed himself for completely mistiming the most dramatic part of his emergence.  Her ability to sync her distraction to his more ridiculous displays never failed to amaze him.  It was uncanny.

“Forget your keys!  Leave them behind!  I have my own!  We must go now!”  Everything with an exclamation point.  Somehow monotone.

The flurry of concentration he’d used to draw attention to himself on the couch had masked the sensation of the hunger now dripping slowly into his fingertips.  But now, the task behind him, his attention laid bare, he felt his starvation in full force.  They had to get out of the house.

Amie must have seen something change in his face, because in a bizarre, waterfalling motion that was at once graceful and lovely and smashed rocks to bits, she bowed, stood, spun once, and reached toward the tabletop behind her back, all without breaking eye contact but for a moment of necessity during her spin.  She waited.  Stared at him.  One of her eyes gleamed.  The eyebrow above the non-gleaming eye was wiggling, attempting to match its sister but succeeding only in creating a pseudo-serious, frolicking kind of facial expression, like a hippy in a competitive barefoot meadow-running contest.  Wool got the point.

“Wool.  You are never going to believe what I just found.”

He was not sure how to answer this, and was thankful for the preoccupation of adjusting to the realization that his arms were still raised in mid-hatch, and that something must be done to correct this.  Discreetly.  He began lowering his arms, slowly, hoping to not draw attention to the fact that he had just hatched himself on the couch, praying that what he was now doing looked half-normal.

She apparently didn’t care that he hadn’t answered.  Or assumed that he had.  “Guess where I found them.”

He guessed.  “On the table.”

“In the middle of the table.”

And slowly, ceremoniously, she held her keys out before her, her other hand posing fingertips in the mock glee of resolved exasperation.

“Wool, you know what this means, don’t you.”

Dumbly, “That we can-”

“Leave.  That we can leave.”  She would have the last line.

With a final shimmy, he rid himself of the last remnants of the imaginary orb, stood, bowed, and chauffeured her to the door, elbows linked.  Dinner would not be long.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Scott Campbell was surprisingly cold.  It was the end of September, but it was also Texas, and he didn’t remember it ever being cold here before January.  He remembered someone from work saying it was El Nino this year.  And something else about rain.  He didn’t know whether that meant cold, too, but he blamed it anyway.  El Nino was making him cold.

He spent a few moments enjoying the freedom of blaming something other than his own poor planning, but honesty soon prevailed.  He hadn’t been outside in four days, and he hadn’t checked the weather either.  He left the house without having any idea what it would be like out here.  Now two hours spent sitting cross-legged by the side of the road, motionless but for occasionally stretching his legs in front of him to keep them from tingling, he was weathering the consequences of his carelessness with some abandon.

But what did it matter anyway.  Tonight was an experiment, and if it failed, being cold for a few hours wouldn’t mean anything at all.  Sickly savoring the melodrama of the phrase, he thought that very little had meant anything to him in a long time.  And tonight’s chill was no different.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Amie called her dad, telling him they’d be a few minutes late to dinner, but not to worry.  She didn’t tell him about Wool’s couch antics, but blamed the delay on forgetting to bring Wool’s homemade salsa.  Which was entirely true; they’d made it about a quarter of the way to her parents’ house before realizing their mistake and turned around to get it.  Leaving the salsa at home, and thus choosing not to eat it, was not an option.  And it would never be an option.  It was good enough to put some extra mileage on their old blue station wagon, maybe rub some fresh chunks off their balding tires.

Wool, who was driving, knew that the salsa was an absolute necessity; if it was made, then it was necessary by the simple fact of its existence.  But he was growing concerned about the gnawing and progressive nature of his hunger.  He imagined the rugae of his stomach rubbing against one another, left with nothing better to do given the the total absence of food to preoccupy them.

He wondered if it was odd that he was using the word “rugae” in a normal sentence.  Medical school had ruined his vocabulary.  All the functional words had become replaced with the earth’s most esoteric jargon, utterly meaningless to nearly everyone he knew outside of school.  It wasn’t long ago that he’d inexplicably forgotten the word “wonderful” in the middle of a giddy description of what it was like to grow up by the Blue Ridge Mountains with twenty-two acres and a boy’s imagination.  He’d fumbled, knowing it started with either an m or a w, mouthing strange permutations of unheard-of pronunciations and haphazardly thrown-together syllables, flailing at the word like a blindfolded boy making desperate last-ditch efforts to pin the tail on the donkey in front of way too many of his friends.  He hadn’t actually remembered the word until much later, and waves of relief crashed against dissonant waves of embarrassment, and he was a tumultuous little sea for the ten or so minutes it took for him to calm the waters.

The decimation of his treasured vocabulary was one of about fifty reasons for quitting medical school he’d compiled into a list.  He’d started making the list with the hope that it would eventually become long enough to justify a well-reasoned departure, but he was still here, still studying, with only a vague understanding of why.  He wanted to be a gardener.  Or a carpenter.  Or a secessionist.

As much as Wool loved indulging his imaginations of what it would be like to be anything other than a medical student, it was always severely disruptive to his happiness and work ethic, and he’d learned to shut himself up if he thought a round of ruminations could end up with a destiny-making email to the dean.  Which was probably why he hadn’t quit yet.  Maybe he did just need to let his mind run rampant.

He was thankful to have his train of thought derailed momentarily by noticing a man in a white tee shirt sitting strangely still in the grass by the road as they drove by.  Sunset was a half-hour gone and Wool couldn’t see the man’s face, but he looked rather comfortable in spite of the chill.  As they passed, the man stood up and walked slowly across the street toward a row of duplexes and a mess of parallel-parked cars, enough for each unit to claim four or five.

A moment was all Wool needed.  By the time they passed that spot again, this time with the salsa in Amie’s lap, the man was gone, and Wool had forgotten entirely about him and his salivatory thoughts of desertion.  He was a public radio junkie and was in the middle of telling a story that began with one of his most commonly used phrases: “I was listening to NPR today and….”  And he loved his wife, for a thousand reasons, but currently because she’d heard the same story while driving to Kennedale and liked it; she told him so as she balanced steady conversation with timid hints that he needed to be a little less passionate when telling stories while driving.  Wool had a habit of forgetting rules when worked up as he was, often stopping at green lights and using his blinkers when the road curved.  When talking about NPR, Amie was usually the only thing standing between him and dismemberment.  He waved one arm in the air, occasionally checked his mirrors, and couldn’t wait for dinner.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Sammy was turning twenty-eight.  In about four minutes, to be perfectly accurate.  But he wasn’t thinking about that right now.  Instead, he was studying his birthday cake, round and perfectly white but for a blue rim and his name spelled out in the same color.  The letters were cramped on the right, with the y barely making it on the cake.  He guessed that whoever had drawn his name hadn’t planned well.  He didn’t know how one would plan that sort of thing, but he thought that if anyone did know, it would be a professional cake-maker, and he was a little annoyed that this cake-maker had failed him.  Maybe the m‘s were wider than originally expected; the second one was noticeably thinner than the first.

But mainly he was annoyed that he was now twenty-eight and everyone still called him Sammy.  Like he was eight.  Like it was still okay to ruffle his hair and forgive his shortcomings as a little-leaguer.  And he hated looking down at his cake and seeing the proof of it painted all clownish in bright blue bubble letters.  Cramped blue bubble letters.

He loved his friends, sure, but this was humiliating.  The whole evening had been humiliating.  It was a surprise party, for Pete’s sake, and there was something about hearing his eight-year-oldish name hollered in choral unison by fourteen grown and seasoned adults that made him feel small and idiotic.  And then the mob had broken into a rather eager rendition of the obligatory party tune that was passionate enough to surprise even some of the singers, who kept singing but looked alarmed at each other, raising wild eyebrows, as if to say, Why so loud?  At the end of the song, the friends with the warbliest voices began singing a variety of post-birthday-anthem refrains that didn’t match at all, and Gary started flicking the light switches on an off with such ferocity that he’d blown two bulbs and made one sizzle.

Sammy was jealous of Gary’s name, and had been for a few years now, because it actually sounded like an adult’s.  He usually managed to console himself by imagining how ridiculous it must have been to say Gary’s name when he was five.  Like he already had a beard and a corner office, or perhaps a successful career designing backpacking equipment.  Never mind the fact that Gary was by far the most immature of Sammy’s friends.  And thus the light switch incident.  But the cramped blue name on the cake was taunting him, and he was having trouble getting over it.

It was by the sputtering light of the last remaining bulb in Sammy’s living room that all fourteen of his friends were watching him cut the cake.  Gary, ridiculously, was putting bunny ears on Adam, who was trying – and understandably failing – to pose for a picture.

Sammy felt something wet on his hands.  Looked down, and was shocked to see that he was bleeding.  Must have sliced his finger with a careless draw of the knife, but he didn’t remember any moment that registered as painful.  The cut wasn’t deep, but he was bleeding like a hose.  His whole palm was dripping red.

Adam must have seen what had happened – or he’d given up on the picture – and came over to finish the cake.  Sammy slipped off for a moment to wash his hands and bandage the cut, which he now realized was barely more than a half-centimeter long and not even deep enough to pull skin back.  But still the whole sink turned red with the blood that poured out as he washed.  Sammy couldn’t believe this.  He put his hands on the edge of the sink, leaned over the counter and bowed his head, chin against sternum, a bit of hair falling forward and leaving bare one of the receding corners of his scalp.  Automatically, with a well-practiced flick of the wrist, he swept his hair back and resumed his posture.

He closed his eyes, and lingered there for a moment of complete stillness.  Even his mind was still.  It wasn’t until several moments later that he allowed himself to breathe, to wade timidly back into thought.  He felt a sorrow that failed utterly to match the diminutive size of the cut, still somehow trickling red droplets, beading up and piling over one another as they slid onto the counter.  He felt so fragile.  Wasn’t surprised at all that he could bleed this much without even feeling the cut.

This was his life.  Pale hands and no callouses.  Naked face.  Widow’s peak.  Hiking boots in the closet that hadn’t even tasted mountain dirt.  He’d bought them in a hopeful frenzy when Josh had mentioned a road trip to Mt. Elbert, but had only worn them twice – both times to avoid puddles and wet grass while walking a dog for his neighbor, who’d somehow managed to be away the only time it rained in Texas in July that year.

He wiped his hands again, the last bits of blood smeared vividly against the cream white of the dish towel.  Everything cream colored.  Everything so sterile, so matched, so crisp.  He had a glass table in the breakfast nook.  He curdled.  Hated that he called it a breakfast nook, like a floral-patterned mom from Savannah.  A Georgian mother could live in this apartment and be right at home   He didn’t even have a bike.  The most worn shoes in his closet were the ones with the tassels that slapped against the top of his feet when he walked.  They had slick bottoms, no grip whatsoever, and were jeering proof that he’d bought them as a silent admission to the store clerk, himself, the whole world that he spent all day and every day inside, on carpet, and would never need grip on his shoes, not for anything at all.  What the hell was wrong with his life?

He’d been raised for the mountains.  His dad had a beard and hands so shredded and hard they would’ve still had dirt lines after swimming in the river.  He was buried with dirty hands.  He’d actually left instructions in his will to be buried in his boots, and that the boots should not be cleaned.  Said he wanted to track a little dirt from the farm into heaven when he got there.  Show the Good Lord he’d tended his earth good and well, even though he’d warned us it would be hard.

He was raised to know when asparagus was ripe.  He’d told scoffing friends that potatoes had a leafy part, and told them what it looked like.  Planted clementine trees.

And now here he was, a grown man named Sammy with gripless shoes and a crease in his pants, and he couldn’t remember when to try and grow a tomato.

He had shaved every day for seven years.

Every single day.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Though Scott should have been cold, wearing only a tee shirt and jeans on a night like this, he wasn’t.  He was warmed by his own irritation.

He’d been angry for days.  Months, really.  Maybe years, but he could really only claim months with certainty.  And it had been terrible the last four days.  He hadn’t gone to work, hadn’t even left the house, and worn only one shirt the whole time.  Was still wearing it, actually.  He’d been so solemn, so still, so relentless in his brooding that he hadn’t done a thing to put a sweat into that shirt, and it still smelled like it had just come out of the dryer.

Tonight was the culmination of those four days.  He’d actually had the idea for this experiment just fifteen minutes after he’d started his brooding, and spent the rest of the time trying to talk himself out of it.  But somehow, in a warped way that didn’t surprise him at all given his current state of mind, he’d wound up becoming more and more convinced that his experiment absolutely needed to be conducted, for the good of his soul and the rest of mankind.

So he’d spent two hours on the side of the road, sitting cross-legged and alone, bearing the cold and trying to see if there were any good people left in the world.

He’d chosen this spot intentionally.  The street wasn’t busy enough for him to be mistaken for an ordinary pan-handler, and thus discarded with the same casual judgment that left the desperate to their poverty and the natural order intact.  But it had enough traffic to allow for plenty of opportunities to test his curiosity.  And it was a residential area, full of warm homes and full cabinets, recliners with cup holders, a thousand reasons why a man should not be sitting somber and alone on the side of the road at night.  A thousand reasons to prove his state unnatural.  And deserving of attention.

The plan was simple.  He wanted to know whether anyone noticed him.  Whether he mattered.  Whether they cared.  He wanted to know whether anyone would realize that he needed help, that he was in bad shape, that he might do something drastic if they didn’t ask him if he was alright.

And for two hours he’d watched two hundred and twelve cars pass.  Most of them – he estimated maybe sixty percent – had only a single occupant.  A few teenagers drove by, and most of those had about two or three more people in the car than they were probably legally allowed to hold.  Of the rest, many were families, usually with a set of small children engaging in a variety of activities in the back seat.  Some were giggling, playing games, bugging siblings.  Some were simply looking out the window.  And of all the people who passed, he made eye contact with only twenty-two.

And no one had stopped at all.  No one had asked him if he was okay.  If there was something he needed.

Not one.  Not a soul.

And every single time a car passed by without stopping, without anyone even glancing at him, his anger grew deeper and deeper.  He brooded with force.  With a purpose.  Only twice did he emerge from his private and sickly conniptions to wonder if he was being irrational, if he was expecting too much, if there was any chance he was placing far too much weight on the behavior of people who probably had evenings to enjoy, errands to run, friends to see, meals to eat.  But like a drunk begins a night right-minded before he gradually descends into helplessness within the choking fog of his own mind, so Scott Campbell lost his already weakened grip on proper thought and crawled like a scavenger on the murky bottoms of frenetic streams of thought.  One thought flowed into another, which flowed into another, and then there was a river, and then a flowing force behind the river, and then vast, open, wild sea.

He saw one child playing with her mother’s hair, and he thought of Heather, cursed the thought, succumbed to it.  All he could see were her hands at the hem of her shirt.  They hung there, nearly limp, banging into her legs when she walked, only fluttering into motion to adjust again the hem of her shirt, pulling it back down, pulling it back down, pulling it back down, always, always, always.  She always wore these tight black shirts to cover her fat, which was always growing and never shrinking, and she was always pulling the bottom of her shirt back down, pulling it back down, pulling it back down.  Her whole posture, her entire physical world seemed to be organized around the necessity of this limp little movement, continually repeated.  She’d mastered it, using delicate and deft movements that most people hardly ever saw.  But it was almost all he could look at.  The way she walked through a room, the way she waved, the way she recovered from having to wave, the way she sat in a chair and stood from it again, everything, everything, everything depended on allowing her these small little flutters.  Pulling it back down, pulling it back down.  Always, always, always.

He hated it.  It seemed like all she’d done since they’d been married was eat.  Now she was overflowing.  And instead of getting rid of the weight, she’d changed her wardrobe to compensate it.  And eaten more.  And begun to readjust the hem of her shirt.

He brought it up once.  Once and only once, and delicately, he’d thought.  But it was like using fireworks for kindling.  She’d exploded, erupted, turned fourteen different colors, shimmered to embers, burst into greens and purples and yellows again, and left for the finale, slamming the door so hard a window had broken, the shards tinkling against the floor like an absurdly innocent aftermath, as though Vesuvius made amends to the people of Pompeii by burping out a few pretty bubbles after its onslaught.  She’d left.  Just left.  Left for a week, staying with a friend, who got her all worked up in self-defense and self-righteousness.  She came back with a pomped-up attitude and he couldn’t talk to her anymore.  After she came home, he was the unloving, unsupportive waste that deserved the wrath of all her friends.  All of them nurses.  All of them nearly as huge as she was.  He’d had his problems before, but he’d never been such an ass as he became after she’d left.  He became cruel, angry, bitter.  Then he began leaving.  Left twice over the next year, each time for a couple of days.  Always came back, though.  Somewhere inside, he knew he was obligated to try to make it work.

Now, though, he didn’t care.  Now he was done.  All they did was scream.  He had learned to hate the sound of her key in the lock.  He’d hear the tinny rattle of the metal pins falling into place, and he’d get up and change rooms, stay in the back of the house.  If he didn’t, she’d whine something puny, he’d get fumed, and they’d spend the rest of the evening red-faced and winded.

He really didn’t care anymore.  He didn’t care about her, he didn’t care about himself.  His job was crap.  He didn’t care about his stuff.  He wouldn’t miss it.  He wouldn’t miss her.  He didn’t even know where she was.  She was gone again, probably at Misty’s, probably eating ice cream to console herself.

He was done.

He realized the muscles in his back were tense.  Like the mere thought of his life for the last six years gave him reason to take a fighting stance.

He tried to relax.  Tried to look friendly.  Tried to look approachable.  He didn’t want this experiment to fail.  He would go home again if someone would just stop and ask him how he was.  He’d wait for her to come back.  He’d try to make it work.  He wanted to know that there were good people.  People who paid attention.

If there were people like that… if there were people like that, then he’d have something to hope for.  He’d spent four days sorting through his waning belief that there was any goodness left, wondering if there was any reason to even try.  Why love if there wasn’t any love left?  But if he could find love, in any form, anywhere, even if he had to lay a trap for it, then he’d try again.  He’d go back home.

But he’d watched two hundred and twelve cars pass, maybe five or six hundred people.  Twenty-two had looked him in the eye.  And now a blue station wagon was coming, a guy driving, waving his hand in the air, a girl in the passenger seat, touching his arm.  He watched the wheels, listened for brakes.

Heard nothing.

Nothing.

No change.

They did not slow.  They kept driving.  The guy was drumming on the steering wheel.  The girl was laughing.

It had been two hours.

And as they passed, he stood to go.  He stood to leave.  He wouldn’t even pack.  He didn’t care.

He was gone.

There were no good people anymore.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Wool loved dinner with Amie’s parents, because it meant he could shuck the health food thing for an evening and gleefully bend to the supinating, reclining consequences of heavy country food.  He did not take lightly these rare opportunities to eat such ambrosial tonnage, often incapacitating himself for two or three hours, only regaining the ability to move his limbs once his gut had recovered from the shock.

It was a different world here, he thought, from where he grew up.  Not any better or worse.  Just different.  He’d been raised in the country, but everything was fresh.  Lots of veggies, steamed or raw, no salt or butter.  He knew when to pick corn, how to pull beets from the ground.  His mother knew how to can preserves.  And there was the annual week of mulberry pies, after they’d go down to the tree by the creek and pick enough to fill their buckets, saving as many as they could before the birds picked the branches clean, like a superterranean and much more beautiful version of ocean scavengers at a whale carcass.  Save the mulberries!  He loved that memory.

He mused at his upbringing, the roughly organic world he was born into, always building fences, digging holes for trees, shaping snow forts, or hiking mountains with his father, and all this juxtaposed against the relentless understanding that he was being raised for excellence.  Raised for superior achievement, purchased with the merit of a rigorous intellect.  His being named Willard Appleseed was perfect proof.  Willard always sounded to him like a socially-embedded Englishman who would wear suit vests with a pocket for a watch and chain.  He wouldn’t actually wear the watch and chain – he wasn’t quite so picturesque – but he’d have a pocket for one nonetheless.  Should the need arise.  And from his aversion to this vested caricature arose one small act of rebellion; despite his inclinations toward articulation, he would always pouch his lips and say “Wullard” when asked his name.  Like a Minnesotan.  “That’s not your name,” his parents would chime, casting levity-enhancing glances and mock grins at the introducee.  “What’s your name again?”  He’d say it again, and they’d let it go until the family arrived home, when attempts at correction were made.  “Will- Willard.  Your name is pronounced Willard.”

“Okay.  I know.”

But he was always Wullard to everyone whose blood didn’t match his own, and eventually this turned to Wull, or Wool, and he liked that better.  Wool Appleseed.  The doctor who wanted to be a gardener.

Laying in an extravagant post-consumption rumple on Amie’s parents’ couch, Wool wondered if his daydreaming was humble or just selfish.  Poetic or kind of stupid.  He was having trouble concentrating.  Food was sloshing around his head, and the rhythm of it was distracting.  It reminded him of a drum circle he’d seen downtown, laying underneath old trees with heavy branches wrapped in yellow lights, some drums so deep they didn’t seem struck so much as swelled.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said to the room, and hoped one of the walls was angled toward someone who would hear him.  And he crumpled a bit more and fell asleep.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Sammy woke up, and immediately regretted it.  The room smelled like Gary.  The immediacy of such realization concerned him, and he paused, giving himself a moment to sort it out, but allowing himself some room for mild irrationality, given that these were his first thoughts after waking.  He tried to justify it nonetheless.  It smelled like… a prank.  It smelled like fish, it smelled like bananas, it smelled moist, like hair gel on a dog.  After a bath in vinegar.  Left to air dry.  It smelled like Gary.  Honestly, Sammy had no idea why he was friends with Gary, but he’d been wondering that for something like nine or ten years now, ever since he started college.  He’d wondered it when Gary shot at an enormous truck (of the compensatory type) with a paintball gun from his dormitory window.  He’d wondered it when Gary had hung outside the window with a stupid grin on his face, gun in hand, until the driver of the truck had enough time to create a mental map to the room with the window from which the idiot protruded.  He’d wondered it when Gary was punched by the beef-necked guy who’d moseyed up to the room to exert terrible vengeance upon them all.  He found out, though, when Gary had defended the rest of the entourage, earning himself a second punch.

But the ironically honorable overtones of that day had faded a bit with time, and now Sammy just wondered how in the world he could wake up and immediately know Gary had done something middle schoolish in the room without even opening his eyes.  He knew Gary by smell.  That was insane.

He rolled over in bed, fully expecting to topple off and hit the floor, hoping it would knock some semblance of reality into him after the blur last night had turned into, but when he kept rolling without falling, he was forced to realize he’d spent the night on the floor.  The floor of his own apartment.  His whole left arm was numb, and he threw it over himself with his right, trying to get some blood back into it.  His head pounded, but he was beginning to think clearly.  He sat up, slowly, to keep the cranial hammers at bay, hoping they wouldn’t notice his change in position and beat him mercilessly back down into the makeshift pillow he’d apparently made out of someone’s jeans, and looked at the scene around him.  The one light left in the room was still struggling a bit, and there were several red plastic cups scattered across the floor.  A piece of cake was laying icing-down about four feet from where he sat, with a short smear-line heading toward the underside of the couch, but that was about the worst of it.  Some gracious friend had taken it upon himself or herself to retain the stability of mind necessary to clean the place up a bit, and Sammy appreciated that.  But at the same time, he thought that this was possibly the saddest thing he’d ever seen in his life.

Seriously?  He was twenty-eight years old, officially now, and the best he and his friends could do was throw the kind of party that under-age highschoolers throw when they happen upon a weekend with an unparented house.  He knew people who went camping, read books, and could have epic evenings among friends doing nothing but sitting on couches and talking with each other.  He’d once been invited to an evening like that, and found himself riveted both by the conversation itself and the fact that there were no plastic red cups in sight.  He was so inspired, in fact, that he’d gone home and invited three of his smartest friends over for coffee and done his very best to recreate the conditions necessary for good conversation, even going so far as to rearrange his living room furniture so it didn’t all point at the television, but instead at other pieces of seating across the room.  The evening was a miserable failure, with two of the friends awkwardly asking what in the world he’d done to the room and if he’d planned anything for them to do, or if they were just going to sit around all evening looking at each other.  The third asked for a beer, and Sammy pathetically acquiesced, both to the request for the beer and to the whole evening turning into the typical stupid senselessness it always was; he woke up the next morning on a sofa that was again facing the TV, and someone on ESPN was screaming at him amidst a crowd of stuffed animals and bobble-heads.  Gary wasn’t even there that night.

His left arm was tingling now, and Sammy knew that circulation was returning.  He clenched his fingers two or three times to move the process along, and then stood and walked to his bathroom.  He stacked the red cups that were in the sink and washed his face, brushed his teeth, drank some water.  Realizing how thirsty he was, he drank some more water, then peed for what seemed like two straight minutes.  Then he took off his shirt, preparing to take a shower.  Maybe it was the rather winnowing reflections he’d already passed through this morning, or maybe the bleeding from his silky, uncallused hand last night, but whatever the reason, he found himself stopping as he passed the mirror, and then turning to view himself fully from the front.  He normally avoided this pose, not quite hating the image in the mirror but generally preferring some degree of anonymity when nearing reflective surfaces.  But this morning, he stood in front of the mirror, naked from the waist up, staring at himself like he’d stare at a piece of art that he didn’t quite agree with or understand, but felt strangely compelled to try.  He moved closer, bringing his own details into sharper relief.

He wasn’t a thin man, by any means, but his only thickness came from a soft kind of filling that committed to no shape at all, his torso always changing from some degree of straightness to varying degrees of roundness before and after meals.  He wasn’t fat either, but he knew he could be quite easily, with a few more careless years adding to the stretch he’d already put on his genetically respectable frame.  His skin was nearly uniformly pale, the only shading contributed by his forearms, and even that was from a sparse spattering of freckles he’d acquired in his youth.  Not that he’d been counting, but he felt confident in assuming he hadn’t earned himself a single additional freckle since the age of fourteen or fifteen.  Sammy wasn’t quite one of the masses of the immobilized desk-dwellers, and so he could pick out the vague shapes of muscle underneath the milky softness, but he could claim no notable movement or change in size when stretching or curling his arms.  His hair was sparse, and he had no scars.  He looked blank, like an empty canvas.  Yet to be painted.  Hardly even sketched.  He stood there, formless, white, reflecting the room around him, failing to give off any color of his own, and hated himself.  He felt as still as a placid sea, without a claim to even the small stories of wind against waves.  He needed a storm.  He called upon the clouds to come and hurl gales and squalls at his sea, at his skin, to leave their mark, to leave their stories splayed out all across his chest, vivid enough that their heavy, rugged words could be read from a distance by a stranger on the street.  He realized he was breathing hard, that his muscles were tense, that he’d closed his eyes.  He clenched his teeth and nearly seethed, breathed out something between a sigh and a rasp, and looked again in the mirror.

Today would be different.

He stared himself in the eye.  Today would be different.  Today would be different.

Without a shower, he walked from the room, noticing for the first time the sound his feet made against the floor, enjoyed it massively.  He walked heavier than usual, taking care to strike his heels against the floor with a solid beat, avoiding the softfooted padding from weaker days, making careful refinements to the deep reverberations with every step.  He imagined himself walking like the old explorers must have walked, ever going west, coming upon mountains in the distance, crossing them with fervent relentlessness, the look of giddy, powerful discovery in their walk.  He walked like that.  He thumped down the hall, and hoped someone would wake up and ask what in the world he was doing.  He’d tell them.  Today would be different.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

“Wool, are you thirsty?  You want some water or anything?”  Amie stood at the back door, watching Wool crawl around in the dirt.

“Eh…” he thought about it.  “Nah.  No, but thanks!  I’m doing okay for now.”  Wool remembered what it was like to build fences with his dad when he was younger, always watching in awe as his father would refuse any offers of refreshment or rest, even after working out in the hot sun for hours.  He remembered thinking that his father was probably the strongest human being alive.  He’d heave a breath, then heroically stab the earth with the post diggers, irrationally always coming out with a full load, even when the bottom of the hole was proving itself solid rock, and then deposit it all triumphantly on the ground.  And all of this methodically.  Humbly.  Quietly.

He wondered if his mother thought his dad was crazy for refusing water like that.  Or if she thought, like him, that his father could lift tractors and throw hay bales a hundred yards.  And sitting there in his own backyard, his own yard’s dirt all over his shirt and jeans, Wool wondered if Amie thought he was being authentically tough or stupidly macho.  Whatever she thought, she went back in the house with a smile on her face.

Wool was doing his very favorite thing in the world.  Getting dirty.  Being a medical student afforded him rare opportunities to work like this, or even to go outside, but he never – never - failed to take each opportunity, when they did come, with sheer delight and something else that resembled gusto.  He’d put on his crappy jeans, a white tee shirt, and carry as many tools to the back yard as he could justifiably incorporate into the day’s work, and only reluctantly return to the house for meals.  His dad had worked like this, and Wool loved copying those memories, himself now the man of the land.  But he’d been raised on acreage in the Virginian countryside, making his father’s work quite different from the maintenance demanded by Wool’s quarter-acre lot in the suburbs.  Undaunted, Wool gleefully went way past maintenance and was doing his best to turn the property into nothing less than a bursting garden, colors streaming like upside down waterfalls out of every crack and pore on the bit of the face of the earth he was in charge of.  Oftentimes, his favorite part of the day was the short whisper of a moment before work he’d spend watering his plants, carefully pulling weeds, trimming the browned tips of his irises, culling the purple heart into deeper and deeper splendor.  Then he’d go back in the house, put on slacks or scrubs, and fake himself for the rest of the day.

His favorite were the weekends that he didn’t have to spend in call room caves in the county hospital.  He’d dig flower beds, plant new bushes, water things, clean things, compost things, anything as long as it meant he’d finish the day with dirt-caked forearms and a bit of a sunburn.  Today was going to be his crowning achievement thus far into his tenure over his little plot on Willing Avenue.  He was going to build a fence.

He had no illusions about the enormity of the task ahead of him, and was surprised at his own restraint in overly romanticizing the event.  It was only about thirty-six feet of fence and a five-foot gate, and it was all going to come from pre-assembled eight-foot cedar panels and six metal poles.  But he knew that there was about a foot and a half of solid rock waiting for him under about six inches of decent soil, creating plenty of requirement for a heavy rock bar and a pick axe.  The fact that his yard had a gradual incline to it turned Wool’s mind giddily toward the expectation that he’d have to dig trenches and build amendments to hang the panels properly.  And he liked to work after a good rain, which there had been the night before, because there was more mud available to cake his arms and jeans, and also for the simple benefit of more graceful glides of his shovel into the earth.  The fact that it made the soil heavier was also an encouragement; he craved soreness tomorrow to compensate for the astounding benignity of his scrubbed days in the clinics.  He needed proof that he’d actually moved his body.

When Amie had come and asked him if he needed anything to drink, Wool had been in the yard about four hours.  Judging by the mud and dirt that now smeared his shirt, both front and back, his jeans, and even his hair and beard, he could have been out for two days.  His boots were uniformly brown, the mud forming a mold of each with the reliability of a podiatrist’s plaster, and his left knee was cheerfully bleeding, visible through a new rip in his jeans of unknown origin.  He looked furry, with all the dirt and dust clinging to the hair of his arms, turning him darker, frazzled, wondrously filthy.  At least to his own mind.  He wore a red bandanna in a band around his head for no other reason than the fact that he didn’t get to wear it during the week.  Wool was happier in the dirt than in almost any other situation in his life.  Wool Appleseed.  The doctor who wants to be a gardener.

And as if God had not smiled upon him enough today, he blessed him again with another of Wool’s favorite pastimes: going to the Home Depot.  Wool, blessedly, had failed to plan perfectly for the day, and needed a few items to continue his work.  And to add to the sweetness of the moment, he’d get to go to the store dirty.  Like he’d actually been working.  This was the rarest of events for Wool, who was normally forced to walk the hallowed halls and aisles of home improvement departments as clean cut as the aspiring Young Professionals of Dallas.  He’d find himself shamed by the austerity of his appearance, observing the heavy boots and flannel shirts of the majority of the patrons of the Depot with unmitigated envy.  And if they had a tool belt, well then, that was just about all Wool needed to go home and write the much dreamed about destiny-making letter of desertion to his dean.

But today was different.  He’d go and bring the mud with him.  He’d smell badly, and he’d smile because of it.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Sammy took his heavy footsteps into his closet, chose the manliest shirt he owned (a yellow and blue-striped rugby shirt with a white collar), and clodded down the hall to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of orange juice (with pulp!) and drank it like a shot, tipping his head back and nearly swallowing the thing whole.  He threw his shoulders back and tried to look as triumphant and ferocious as possible.  He energetically tried to swipe his keys off their wall-hook with as authoritative a gesture as he could summon, but his unpracticed aim resulted only in swatting the keys across the room and into the front door, which looked like wood but was made of metal, and thus the incident resulted in a maniacal clattering and jangling that sent Sammy back into a sheepish sort of pose, momentarily abandoning the intensity of his posturing and gait.  For a moment, it looked as though the keys were heading straight for the dead bolt, lockable by key from the inside, and Sammy fantastically toyed with the possibility of having knocked his keys straight into the lock, a story that would surely make it into legend and earn him a few extra plastic red cups at the next party.  But when they missed the lock and clambered to the floor, he was reminded that he had actually simply missed his grab at the keys on the hook and also that he was actually trying to avoid the plastic red cups, which through the course of the morning had come to symbolize everything that Sammy hated about his life.

He stopped, picked up the keys, unlocked himself out of the house, and stepped outside.  He’d leave the house unlocked, and even wondered if he should leave the door wide open, adding drama to his escape and offering his trinkety crap to whatever criminal took compassion on him and robbed him blind.  Most of his friends were still draped across various pieces of furniture, and they could find their way home if they wanted.  He didn’t have to be there to offer pancakes.

It had rained, apparently, and he discovered this when the bare sole of his foot landed in a small puddle on the sidewalk.  He was barefoot, unintentionally, and gleefully embraced this new development as added hysteria to the story he hoped this day would turn into.  Let the winds come and blow this sea apart.

Having no idea what to do first, he decided to focus on firm realities, and hoped that through determination and changed fate, they would turn into wild impossibilities.  He needed light bulbs.  And suddenly there was an upside to Gary’s childish light-flicking frenzy; he had given Sammy an errand to run.  And in a strange way, a reason to live.

Sammy climbed into his car, checked his mirrors, and backed out of his parking space.  He was lost in thought.  What was going to happen today?  Would he meet a beautiful woman, intrigued by his barefoot appearance, thinking him a hippy, or a writer, or better yet an indie folk musician?  Would she think he played harmonicas and guitars and have a voice that sounded like field grass blowing and fall leaves rattling?  If she did, and if there was such a woman, would he play along?  Or would he go to a coffee shop today, and sit and read a Johnathan Safran Foer novel, half-engrossed in the story and half-engaged in a delirious round of people-watching?  Would he quit his job?  Would he buy a frisbee and befriend a stray dog?  He had no idea.  The pedal felt odd on his bare feet, like it was deeper, smaller, more malleable than before.

He came to the first stop light, and looked at the tires of the car in front of him, checking their tread, trying to gauge how close to the vehicle he could safely travel.  No tread on a rainy day meant stay back.  Full tread meant it was safe to pass.  Having made it through this train of thought and arrived at his conclusions, Sammy abruptly cringed and shuddered, in the same way that a man will shudder after relieving himself.  He felt the carefulness of his past drift away from him.  He would not look at tires like this again.  Sammy was changed.  No, Sam was changed.  Sam did not judge the tire tread on nearby cars at stoplights.  Sam did not wear shoes while shopping.  Sam went to coffee shops.  Sam did not wake up on TV couches under flickering light bulbs amidst a sea of plastic red cups.

He made up his mind that if he did meet a beautiful woman interested in his bare feet, he would introduce himself as Sam.  Sam the Interesting.  Sam the Traveled and Experienced.

Despite the beautiful blur of mind, he made several simple decisions in the background that led him to the parking lot of the Home Depot, and then across the parking lot and into the store.  Barefoot.  He would never go to Wal-Mart or Walgreens again.  He’d go to a home improvement store for the first time since he’d gone with his father in high school.  He’d look at tools, nurture an interest lumber, test door hinges.

The first thing he experienced when walking into the store was disappointment.  Everywhere, yuppies.  Everywhere were rich guys pretending to know what they were looking at, wearing khakis and loafers, adding too much gruff into their voices as they asked stupid questions to the orange-aproned employees, making jokes they imagined John Madden would make if he were shopping for a few bolts and washers.  Sam only knew this because they looked like he would have looked if he’d come here yesterday, asked the same kinds of questions he would have asked.  Everywhere there was Sammy.  Everywhere there were guys who had no idea how to be men, relying only on confrontational jokes and feigned knowledge of how to change the blade on a circle saw to give the impression that they’d have a beard if it weren’t for their oppressive, repressive bosses.

Sam went looking for light bulbs.  He thanked the immaculate heavens that the lighting department was right in front of the entrance doors, preventing him from asking his way toward the bulbs while hopelessly lost within the yard and garden section, but it was about four aisles wide and ran the depth of the store, making his job easier but not simple.  No matter.  He was barefoot, and he hadn’t done his hair or changed his pants.  While not dirty, he was appropriately ruffled and careless.  He began to wander.

And then something rather strange happened.  Sam was looking down the length of the aisle he was standing in, when a man walked by the end of it, perpendicular to the aisle, visible only for the moment or two it took him to pass by.  The man was filthy.  Covered in dirt.  The jeans were torn and muddy, and the shirt that had been white was now tie-dyed in tans and browns.  Even his arms were caked in the stuff.  He wore a red bandanna that made him look somewhat unapproachable, intensifying the way his beard sprayed out from underneath it.  Before he understood why, Sam walked quickly down the length of the aisle to see where the man had gone, but he must have turned down an aisle a few feet away, because he’d disappeared from sight.  Sam noticed a few chunks of mud on the ground that he suspected had been dislodged from the man’s boots, but they followed no path or pattern, and the man was lost.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Wool didn’t exactly feel self conscious about his atrocious appearance, actually enjoying it quite a bit, but he wondered if he ought to be.  He imagined a father down one of the aisles, offering him up to his particularly rebellious young son as an exhibition of what will happen if a boy doesn’t study and make good grades.  ‘See that poor man, Rodney?  See how dirty and tired he looks?  You’ll have to do manual labor for the rest of your life if you don’t go to college, like that man there, and believe you me, you don’t want that.’  Wool had to smile a bit at the irony of a medical student, filthy from yard work, inspiring a father to warn his boy about the perils of not attending school.  Did he really make that much of a difference?

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

Sam was having trouble making up his mind.  He couldn’t quite bear the thought of chasing another man around a Home Depot, particularly with his daydreaming of beautiful women veritably crawling toward him because of his bare feet and ragamuffin appearance, but he wanted to know more about the man with the red bandanna.  How old was he?  Was he worn down, or was he strong, healthy from a life in the sun and the dirt.  He looked fearless, unafraid of the elements, comfortably smeared in earth and earthtones.  In the end, Sam decided he’d seen all he needed to see.  He sat down in the aisle.  Literally sat cross-legged underneath the hanging light fixtures and fans for sale on aisle three, and he thought.  He thought that there was a man who lived a real life.  He’d clearly forgone the years of trivial schooling, learning facts and academic concepts that were rumored to make a man a king, but had done nothing for Sam but muffle his life, smothering it and smoothing it into bourgeois predictability and sterility.  Sam thought this man wisest above all others, demonstrating kinship with the earth, a deep understanding of where he’d come from and to whom his allegiance was owed.  The man in the red bandanna was tethered to the earth, and the soil, the rain, and the sun.  Sam was knotted and double-knotted to his desk and the chance to respond with a respectable-sounding job title when asked by strangers what he did for a living.  Sitting on aisle three, barefoot and stunned, Sam was experiencing a revolution.  His hand was already in his pocket, reaching for his phone.  He’d call his landlord and break the lease.  He’d sell everything.  He’d wear nothing but flannel and go barefoot until winter.  He’d find some land somewhere, and learn how to plant things that grow.  He’d end his friends and never drink out of a plastic red cup again.  He’d quit his job, maybe pour coffee for a living.  Maybe he’d ride his bike, or maybe he’d buy a tractor.  He’d read books.  He’d get dirty.  He’d get his hands in the soil, and rip his jeans.  Burn his gripless, tassled shoes.  Use his slacks for kindling.  He would be triumphant.  He would become again real.

Sam was a new man.

******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* *******

By the time Heather returned home, fully two weeks later, Scott was long gone.  Maybe he was in Missouri, or Alaska, or Maine.  No one knows.  He did go back home one more time, but only to change out of his rain-soaked shirt and leave a note, which said, “I tried.  But also I failed.  May God be the judge of me.  May he be the judge of all mankind, for there are no good men left.”

Heather read the note only once, and she didn’t even cry.