Dirt

by David Vann

The pleasure the same as despair, a deep and awful need, and his imagination terrible.

Pain itself an interesting meditation. On the surface, always frightening, and you wanted to run. Very hard not to move, very difficult, at least at first, to do nothing. Pain induced panic. But beneath the surface, the pain was a heavier thing, dull and uncomplicated. It could become a reliable focal point, a thing present and unshifting, better even than breath.

He swallowed, and exactly what he had feared would happen did. The track all the way down to his stomach, and he felt the weight of his stomach, the caustic need, all of his awareness pulled downward, the top of his head no longer open.

I’m always the awful one. I’m the one who needs to be beaten after you’ve been beaten. But never Suzie-Q. Never little Suzie-Q. Suzie-Q helps us pretend that we’re good.

this was the beauty of etheric surgery. It could find the right places, the sources, and replenish those sources. It wasn’t fooled by the surface of things.

Hid several issues of Hustler in his clothing, and also packed Siddhartha, The Prophet, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Can a broken mind remember when it was well?

Galen climbed down and walked into the center of the clearing. He found a stick and dug a small hole, nestled the deviled egg inside, and covered it with earth. Grow, he said. Grow more deviled eggs.

Oh, he said. Oh this is cold. But he eased forward, slipping his belly and chest in, and went under. His arms waving frantically underwater, the lance dropped. Trying to warm up, kicking his thighs in place, treading with his arms, banging his knees and feet and elbows on the stones as he thrashed. Nowhere to go in this small pool, but he had to warm up, had to move. He opened his eyes and they stung in the cold. He could feel the exact shape of his eyeballs, hard little lumps freezing in their sockets.

A different world underwater. Galen’s hands giant, his skin a tight sack holding his vital mush, his precious bit of warmth. He was a planet moving in a cold, weightless vacuum. Airless, impersonal, with a different relation to light. A thin membrane all that was keeping him alive.

I saw the creek today in a way you’ve never seen it, Helen. You have no idea what the creek is.

He was shaking, though. He just didn’t have any reserves. No fat. He was not good with cold. He was meant to get in and quickly out of this incarnation. Just learn his final lessons and go. His body was not meant to last. Eating and pissing and shitting just a distraction, one he was tired of, his old soul frustrated at having to play the game again.

If only there were some way he could throw up his family and not have them inside him anymore.

If he could throw and get the blade to stick into a tree, the sudden halting might reveal something. He might catch the eddy just behind the shaft as it washed over. The abruptness might allow vision.

but it was already memory, already gone. He just wasn’t fast enough. He needed to be able to pause in a moment like that and travel around in it, float for a while, and that never happened.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull didn’t like to fight over scraps with the other seagulls. They were all obsessed with food, but he was free of that. He was testing the limits of gravity and physics, experimenting in his flight, trying to get the world to slip, trying to catch the unreality of it, just like Galen.

We all want you to die, Jennifer said in a voice that sounded loving and caring, which made it all the more frightening. She reached out and touched her grandmother’s hand. We’re all waiting for you to die.

She was talking to him as if he were a child or a small dog, her eyebrows way up and head tilted. This is how we show love in this family. Welcome to the family. Then she punched him in the neck.

Too slow, too limited by breath, too limited by this clunky body, by chicken fat and dumplings. Galen stopped and bent over, purged, tried to free himself, tried to lose this mortal shell.

It really is that bad. It’s like being no one. You think you’re someone now, but it’s only because you can put your memories together. You put them together and you think that makes something. But take away the memories, or even scramble them out of order, and there’s nothing left.

They fell down through mountains into the lower foothills, gray pines a pale green, daubed into the forest as if they’d been watercolored. Nearing Sam’s restaurant, which had every video game imaginable, including ones you couldn’t find anywhere else. An antiaircraft one that used actual movies of planes. If you lined up correctly when you fired, the film would cut to footage of a fireball, the plane exploding. Can we stop at Sam’s? he asked. No response.

He had a sense of his mother’s goodness, and he didn’t like to think of his mother’s goodness.

His mother and grandmother walked away into that awful place. Prison and hospital combined. A place of a thousand voices, none of them talking to each other.

She’s a bitch, Jennifer said. Who cares what happens to her. Yeah, Helen said. Maybe you’re right. What if Jennifer says that about you someday? Huh, Helen said. I wouldn’t do that, Mom. You might. It’s true. You might. And that’s fine.

It would have been a better plan to walk around naked and never invent anything. That way, you’d have to head for a creek or a lake or at least some trees. You’d never just stand around in a thousand-mile oven.

Galen liked this idea, but he stopped, because he didn’t really like to see his mother hurt. That was always the problem. She deserved to be treated worse, but he could never do it.

He was becoming the action itself. He was the dirt, and the shovel, and the movement, but more than that. He was a million miles removed. These hands were not his hands. This breath was not his breath. This mother was not his mother. This Galen was not Galen.

Every small thing from the last century had been saved in these drawers. Ancient rubber bands, metal thumbtacks, a wooden ruler, buttons and scraps of twine, nothing ever thrown away, everything saved just in case.

These photos were too brief, only moments. They couldn’t describe what a day felt like, how all the hours of even one day moved along. And this was all a distraction anyway, the deepest form of samsara, the belief in belonging, the belief in being tied to a family and a place and time. The final attachment, the one that was the foundation for the illusion of self.

The opening at the tip like an eye, watching him, knowing everything about him, all his secrets, everywhere his thoughts had gone.

When we grew old enough for sex, that was our second birth, and that birth was a deformation, a reshaping from the clay of the first birth, and who we became then was something we had to run from for the rest of our lives.

lay down in the dirt and rolled in it, used his good hand to cover himself completely with dirt, rubbed it into his skin, into his hair, gave himself a coating against the sun. He would not wear clothing again. That was his decision. He would wear only dirt, because dirt was his meditation, and he needed to not ever forget about dirt.

Galen didn’t know why he had first stopped eating. He didn’t understand how it had begun. A decision whether or not to drink orange juice. It may have begun there. But who could say the beginning of anything, because it all had started earlier, in previous lives. Not eating was a way of punching through this existence.

We could never see it, but we journeyed through it every moment of every day. The trick was to wake up in the middle of the dream and yet still dream, and then we could battle.

Neosporin was a belief in the future.

Fear of the dark was full belief in the world, full enslavement, and it meant there had been no progression.

The problem with memory was that it told us whatever we wanted to hear. It had no shape of its own.

Without the mother, the container of the world no longer held.

The meaning of dirt was this, perhaps. The shovel removing time. The eons it took to form the dirt from rock. The water and air that had to work through millions or even billions of years to free it, and then its travel and settling and waiting, layer upon layer. His life now such a brief flash. Any attachment was absurdity. This was what the dirt taught. If he could remain focused on geologic time, human time could never reach him.

The shovel willing, always willing. And the dirt itself. Waiting for so long, yet no resistance to being moved. All order upset, the arrangement of grains, but no resistance and therefore no suffering.

Cutting through layers, this labor like cutting through the illusion of self to find there was no core, only the layers.