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The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.
We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings. The only things we share with the city are the ambulances, being close enough to Hartford for them to come fetch us when we’re near dead or rattling away on steel gurneys without next of kin. We live on the edges but die in the heart of the state. We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.
If you aim for Gladness and miss, you’ll find us. For we are called East Gladness. Gladness itself being no more, renamed to Millsap nearly a century ago after Tony Millsap, the boy who returned from the Great War with no limbs and became a hero—proof you could lose almost all of yourself in this country and still gain a whole town. A handful of us wanted to be East Millsap to soak the shine and fill the stores, but the rest were too proud to name ourselves after a kid whose wheelchair never glided over our sidewalks.
He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.
There was no shame, the boy thought, in losing yourself to something as natural as gravity—where one doesn’t jump but is pulled, blameless, toward the sea. If nothing else, this would hurt his mother least.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like his name—only that he had been willing to toss it in the river. He had never wanted to throw his name out, just the breath attached to it. The name, after all, was the only thing his mother gave him that he was able to keep without destroying.
“Anytime I feel my soul going dim,” she panted, “I just step on some rolls and it’s like a magic spell.”
From far away, across the river passing in your car, you would’ve seen two people dancing in a rainstorm in a cone of light on a Connecticut night at the end of the first decade of the century, and forgotten that the country was at war.
“You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”
“When did he die, your husband?” “When does anybody die?” she shrugged. “When God says Well done.”
“You believe in God, boy?” He took a long drag and considered this. “He’s probably around sometimes.” “Clearly not as much as the devil,” she cackled, her missing front tooth winking behind the smoke.
The mind in dementia, Hai learned, can be like one of those Etch A Sketch things he had as a kid: a little shake and it vanishes to a grey and otherworldly blankness.
“You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.”
“I just have to read a whole bunch first. Three or four years of reading, then maybe I’ll be ready to write. It’s like a pregnancy.” “Sounds more like constipation. In my country, most writers got silent pills.” “Silent pills?” “Bullets.”
It was the kind of day where anything felt possible. As if the charity of the world had tipped, finally, to one side of the rusted scale. The kind of day where you can fill in your scars with Magic Marker and tell yourself you’re normal—and it might be true.
How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.
Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.
He wanted to tell her that the body was just this stupid little shovel we use to dig through the hours only to end up surrounded by more empty space than we know what to do with.
“No Catholicism, no Judaism for him. But he did convert to Alcoholism.” She bit her lip and shrugged.
Some of our leaders are even lizards in disguise. I mean, how else do you explain Dick Cheney?
he was only alive inside pieces of mistakes that gravity had collected into a life raft called the present.
“Flat white at the register!” another worker shouted, setting a drink on the counter. “What the hell did you just call me?” Maureen said.
Sony picked up a sickly green slice of something between two fingers, reading the label. “What’s a hare-loom tomato?” BJ peered over his shoulder. “It’s when rich people think fucked-up-looking things are more special than normal stuff.”
A medical device that went no faster than eight miles an hour, the model was called the SpitFire 2, the fire part spelled out with flaming letters. It was like calling a catheter the Eternal Spring, Hai thought.
It will only occur to Hai, years later, when his grandmother is long dead, how easy it was for them to laugh, that it was almost a superpower, to crack up with faces so open they seemed on the verge of falling apart,
“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light?” Water dripped from her nose. “People don’t know what’s enough, Labas. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”
“Look, touch me. Go ahead. Grab on.” He held out his arm and Sony squeezed it, cautious. “Harder. See? That’s the only real thing about me, that I’m sitting here next to you at this bus stop. That’s it. Everything else, what I do, what I’ve done, the goals and promises, they’re all, like, ghosts. For most people, their ghost is inside them, waiting to float out when they die. But my ghost is in pieces.”
He passed houses filled with warm light and imagined the people inside, his head growing blurry with the thought of them huddled in their tiny parlors full of furniture and voices breaking through the raiment light of TV commercials, the news, its endless reel of abjection, their bodies kept, for now, from the intolerance of daylight and its procession of work and misgivings.
He lay there awhile listening to the river, its low rush along the banks, the periodic gurgle as the waves swirled around an inlet. It must’ve sounded like this for thousands of years, the only constant thing, no matter how much people polluted it. No matter how much waste was dumped into its depths from the chemical factories in Springfield or Manchester, how many bodies it swallowed and spat out, clean as teeth, this sound of its flow toward the sea remained unchanged.
Is it possible for a hole to be cut open and for you to step inside it—not to be destroyed, but simply gone? Where on earth was elsewhere possible? Is that what the pills do, in the end? Is that what was happening to Grazina? The brain’s derangement of itself to other reckonings? Is it possible to be a hog in a field left behind by Noah’s ark, whistling “Silent Night,” and not be the loneliest thing in the universe?
These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they
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But where was she going? She was going to a place where freedom is promised yet made possible only by a contained egalitarian space fashioned with walls and locks, where measured nourishment is delivered each day through long corridors by staff born from a never-ending elsewhere who forgo watching their own children grow up in order to watch strangers grow old, all this to keep you alive so they can suck up money from your bank account while you’re warm, immobilized by tranquilizers, and satiated and numb, a body ripe for harvest even beyond ripening. She was heading to America after all. The
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In a few weeks the roads will be filled with bike spokes you can hear from your room at night, so clearly that you have to put down your book and look out the window to see what propels a person so fast through so much summer, the gasoline sweetness of young skunks and lilac blossoms wafting through the window as a deep urge to make something, anything, mounts in your chest and you decide, once and for all, to plot your escape from whatever tiny name on the map has tried and failed to claim you.
Everything’s a room, he realized, too late. The cars on the interstate nothing but rooms with wheels. The endless prescription bottles. And the body, too, a room, and so is the heart.
And that’s when he heard it—not the river’s rush, but the hogs. Dragged by their hooves into the emperor’s butchery, they were screaming from a galaxy far, far away, inside him. And they sounded just like people. Soft, simple people, who live only once.
