Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

And what he once was grateful for, a job, a wife, kids, a house, he comes to regard as a burden, a weight that pulls his chin slowly to his chest, and because he was grateful once, he feels foolish now, cheated somehow by himself.

In a community closed in by weather and geography, where the men work at jobs and the women work at home and raise children and there’s never enough money, the men and the women tend to feel angry toward one another much of the time, especially in the evenings when the work is done and the children are sleeping and nothing seems improved over yesterday.

Bob’s face is like an intelligent dog’s, unable to hide or effectively disguise his emotions, and it’s forced him into being fairly honest. He’s learned to disguise his thoughts, of course, his strategies, plans and fantasies, but not his feelings. He doesn’t know this, however, because whenever he looks at himself in a mirror, he seems to have no feelings whatsoever. He wonders what he really looks like. Photographs can’t tell him—he looks into a camera lens the same way he looks into a mirror, as if he were an actor portraying a corpse. If he truly were an actor and could portray a living man, then perhaps he would know what he looks like.

a new, worse thing happened to her spirit, for she stood now on the further side of resignation, where people, especially women, laugh and cry too much and too often, where nothing matters and a second later everything matters. She was emptied out, and although we could love her, we could not trust her.

settled in the midst of the clutter but organizing and diminishing it, lies a large, dark blue pistol. Sarah, her legs still crossed, stares at the gun as if it were a small, dead, slightly repulsive animal. Eddie looks at it proudly, as if he has just killed it, and Bob looks at it with confusion, as if he has been asked to skin it.

His desires, then, reveal the world to him. His fears and anxieties, his aversions, obscure it.

Men do that to women, use them to remake themselves, just as women do it to men. Men and women seek the love of the Other so that the old, cracked and shabby self can be left behind, like a sloughed-off snakeskin, and a new self brought forward, clean, shining, glistening wetly with promise and talents the old self never owned. When you seek to acquire the love of someone who resembles you, in gender, temperament, culture or physical type, you do so for love of those aspects of yourself, gender, temperament, culture, etc.; but when you seek the love of someone different from you, you do it to be rid of yourself.

with Avery as with no one else, Bob can tell the truth and in that way can make the visible and the invisible man one.

It’s a terrible thing, to know someone else’s secrets, but it’s the only way you can know someone. It’s hard to say beforehand which is more to be avoided, knowing another person’s secrets or knowing no one at all.

They’re nobody and everybody, the kind of people every man has to deal with to get through his day, just four more insensitive men, self-centered and arrogant and carrying wallets stuffed with credit cards and traveler’s checks that they use to buy themselves their own kind of pleasure, a few hours at a time.