Out There: a novel (8 page)

It all looked so serious. High school track. He remembered his own intensity—much more consequential than anything having to do with academics—about the time he’d need to beat to secure a place in the 200 at the state meet. Now the number was gone from his mind, though he thought it had been less than 25 seconds.

The first group of four sprinters took off with the whistle, making good time halfway around the loop. The determination of their strides reached him at the top row of the stadium. A second whistle sounded, sending off a second group of four, and then a third and a fourth in quick succession. The runners rested a minute or so, hands on their hips and chests, heaving for oxygen. He could feel it. And before they were ready, the coach’s whistle, forcing them on to another 200 meters, and another and another. By the sixth run, it had hurt worse than anything else he could imagine at that time.

Jefferson’s last race had been just before graduation at the UNM stadium, an oval that, though regulation size, seemed made of an entirely different substance than any high school track he’d ever been around. He’d run a decent time, though not his best, and not good enough to place. At the time he’d thought the disappointment had killed something inside him. He’d skipped the end-of-year awards dinner, feeling that going would only make his failure to place at the state meet more noticeable. Before that last race he’d always finished ahead of Tommy Rutledge—god, he hadn’t thought of that kid in five years—the other runner from Santa Fe High, who’d ended up first that day, and with a scholarship to Baylor to boot. Jefferson hadn’t wanted to talk about it at the time, and he’d told anyone who asked that he didn’t care and that he hadn’t trained that hard anyway. But his stomach clenched now as he watched the young runners down below.

He’d always thought going back to the old places would be a comfort—he had thought of those places so many times when lying on his bunk in Iraq—but he was finding that to have been a false assumption. He didn’t feel better or more himself sitting here at his old high school stadium, staring down at his old track coach. He didn’t feel like walking down there and saying hello and meeting the young runners who’d taken his place. An emptiness louder than the previous emptiness was taking up all the space inside him, a brooding, malignant presence. It was an inarticulate sickness, and it would kill him if he didn’t find a cure.

In a funk he left the high school and rode the trails that followed the big arroyo out to the south part of town, behind the Chavez Center with its indoor pool and basketball courts and ice skating rink—all that running and sweating and stroking of ice and water—behind the weathered, half-empty mall, out to where the houses had no trees in their small yards. It was another beautiful day in the high desert, and all around him life was abuzz, but Jefferson could think of nothing in the world he wanted to do as he gazed at the snow-tipped mountains way off in the distance.

Eventually
there came the day—it was a Thursday—when Jefferson fished out the slip of newspaper from his pocket and called the pseudo-doctor and explained his situation.

Could he come over right now? She didn’t have any appointments for the rest of the day.

Dr. Monika owned a compound on the East Side, infamous for the man who’d designed and built it, a political activist and painter from Santa Fe’s roaring 1960s. Tucked back down an overgrown dirt lane, Jefferson guessed the place must have been under the care of a professional gardener.

She met him at the door in an orange caftan and rubber flip-flops. “Welcome—Jefferson, is it?” she said, and led him through the thick-walled serenity.

He imagined her story—almost sixty, weekly massages, no real job ever, a lifetime of summers at the beach, at least one stint at an Indian ashram. Very beautiful, in fact so beautiful that it was weird for him to think how old she must be. The women he knew worked too hard to be this youthful at sixty. He felt bad momentarily for having had that thought—he meant no offense to all the beautiful hardworking women of the world—but it was true.

They passed through a long whitewashed hall hung with paintings and woodcuts he felt sure were important, ending up in a sunken sunroom, its many windows looking out onto a square of green lawn and a fountain. Who was this woman?

“Wowee,” Dr. Monika said after he’d told her the whole story—at least, as much as he could dredge up in forty-five minutes. “So, let me get this right. You’ve made it home—you survived the war, but you witnessed unbelievable loss while you were over there—and everyone, your family and friends, are ecstatic to have you home, but you don’t feel right, you don’t feel yourself, you want to feel better. Is that it?”

“Well.”

“I mean, that’s what it seems to me,” she said.

“I’m not sure.”

“I know, I know, you hesitate to apply terms to yourself. You don’t want to be a victim. You don’t want it all to get the best of you, poor kid. You poor, poor kid.”

“I’m not sure what I have has a label—I mean
 . . .” But he didn’t know what else to say.

“Are you jumpy?”

“Jumpy?”

“Yeah. Jumpy. You know—
Ho!
” Dr. Monika yelled in his face, and he did in fact jump. Her breath needed a squirt of toothpaste.

This conversation was veering off into mucky marshland. It reminded him of what he imagined Louisiana bayou to be like.

“Could we talk a bit about Gabriel García Márquez?” Surely Dr. Monika, being the high-cultured sort of woman who had a fountain in her back courtyard and who wore a caftan at midday, would have something to say about GGM.

“Sure. So what about him? Great, great writer.” Her eyes were seriously blue when she said this.

“Yeah. He’s really my savior.” He couldn’t look at her when he said this—it was too serious an admission. He couldn’t take it if she wasn’t taking him seriously.

“Yes. Well. I can certainly relate to the power of great literature. I went through a Henry James phase when I was in grad school—read all of his novels one summer. Just beautiful.” She seemed to be off in a neverland, probably the green lawn of some Ivy League college somewhere.

“I’m not really talking about beauty so much as—”

“Well, sure you are. You’re just calling it something else.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. He saved my life, Dr. Monika.”

“Who?” Her eyebrows strained toward one another.

“GGM.”

“Who?”

He refused to answer this question. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.

“Oh, are you still talking about Gabriel García Márquez?”

Now he was sure it had been a stupid idea. This woman wasn’t even a good listener. She had a lot of money, and she probably knew a lot about art and culture, maybe even books, but she had nothing to offer him.

But the woman was persistent, and luckily she didn’t seem to be able to read Jefferson’s mind, or he might have offended her. She just kept on talking and peering inquisitively into his eyes. “Look, Jefferson. Why don’t you tell me a little more about what you’re talking about—I’m curious.”

He thought about his options, going back down to Albuquerque and trying again with the young doctor from the VA, or trying to find another psychoanalyst somewhere else, or just talking about it all with Nigel or with strangers down on the plaza. He thought about not talking about any of it ever again, and he wondered what sort of internal damage that might cause. And then he looked around him again—the beautiful older woman who claimed to be curious, sitting before him on a white couch.

“Have you read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
,
Dr. Monika?”

“Oh, yes, of course. I think so. In college. That was a long time ago.”

“Have you ever had a book you felt you had to carry with you everywhere, all the time, Dr. Monika? I mean, do you think it’s normal to do that? To feel fragile and shaky at the very idea of losing that book?”

He paused to look at her. She was still listening.

“Because that’s what I’m going through. That’s my life. I feel sometimes things are stable all around me. I feel I’m home. I’m alive. There’s no one asking me to get in a Humvee and go put myself in danger. I haven’t touched a gun for over a month, and yet my hands shake. And when my hands stop shaking, I realize my brain’s jittery. Jumping from one image, one phrase, one bit of memory to the next. It’s never quiet in my head. I’m not myself, Dr. Monika. At least, I’m not the myself I used to be. The only thing that seems to make me feel okay is this one book.”

“
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“And isn’t that a healthy response to all you’ve been through? I mean, it’s not like you’re doing drugs. It’s not like you’re racing a hundred and twenty miles per hour on the highway, trying to kill yourself. It seems to me that reading is the very sort of thing that might help you. I wouldn’t worry about it at all.”

The pseudo-doctor had such a nice voice, and Jefferson had no real criticism of the things she was saying to him, but nonetheless he suddenly felt he could not talk about any of this anymore. He felt he did not want to try so hard.

She went on. “I was just thinking it might be helpful for you to read a few more things—I was thinking what other novels I might suggest—who knows? You might find that with each novel you read, you feel better and a little bit more like yourself. You know . . . I know! I’ve got a great list of classics filed away somewhere. I’m just gonna go get it for you—I’ll make a copy. I think this may be just what you need. And you know, it can be entirely free. The public library is a great resource. I’ll be right back, okay? It’ll only take a minute—”

And with that, Dr. Monika dashed back down the long hallway and disappeared around a corner. He heard a door open.

But it wasn’t what he needed. He knew that. The idea of her eager fingers sorting through files, trying to find this list of classics, formed a heavy lump in his stomach. What was worse than suffering alone was witnessing complete strangers trying to heal you in a day with a piece of paper. Did she really think a list of novels could help him answer the question
Why?

He clutched at
One Hundred Years
under his shirt and considered a new approach. What he needed was to show Dr. Monika that it was not the general habit of reading but rather the particular practice of reciting and chanting and singing García Márquez’s words that he needed. He thought that by identifying just the right lines and sharing his practice with her, she would understand. She might stop trying to come up with another solution for him.

He struggled, trying to think of just the right line. If only Gabriel were there, he’d know which one would do the trick.

Jefferson’s first idea was the line about people being so extreme, they would wage war over things they could not touch with their own hands. He thought what a great line it was and how, no matter what war you might think of, it was true. But it was so simple. Perhaps too simple for such a thick novel. So he stored it away in a mental bin and moved on. What was a line, perhaps a longer excerpt, that showed more of GGM’s complex side? He thought about one of the many lines dealing with relationships between young boys and their much older aunties. There were some really interesting ones in that category, but the thought of Auntie Linda had always prevented him from fully appreciating them; they suggested ideas he found difficult to keep abstract. And so he moved on, back in the direction of Gabriel’s ideas about war.

Dr. Monika was headed back down the hall toward him with the list of suggested reading. Ugh. She placed the multi-page packet on the coffee table in front of him. “You want some tea? Coffee? Bottled water? I’m going to get something for myself.”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure? I’ve got some really great Thai coconut iced teas.”

It wasn’t that he was against caffeine or sugar or chocolate or anything. He just found it all distracting. And what he needed in the moment was to settle on the perfect line. He was considering the one that always got him in the gut, the one that really cut a little too close for comfort, causing the face of his sergeant, RT, to take the form of a pulsing anagram eight inches from his nose. It might offend Dr. Monika for its specificity, and though it was longish, Jefferson felt fairly confident he had the gist of it in his mind. It began:

The sergeant ordered a house-to-house search, and this time the soldiers even took the people’s tools. They grabbed a doctor and tied him to a bush and then they shot him.

Jefferson paused. The next bit was about the old priest. Terrible.

The old priest tried to show off by levitating, but the military authorities were not impressed and split his head open with the butt of a rifle.

There was one more bit about a woman who had been bitten by a mad dog who was then killed with a rifle butt as well. Jefferson shuddered as he thought of it.  He couldn’t repeat that part.

Dr. Monika had returned back down the hall, to the kitchen for her beverage, he guessed, and he felt a little shaky. Too shaky, in fact, to chant that line in its entirety to a well-meaning almost-stranger with crystal-blue eyes. It was bad enough to recall it in his own mind. He had to think of a different one.