wrote,
Before the shift that night she left dinner with her parents and biked south in darkness past her apartment building, along into her usual path. The afternoon storms had broken the heat and departed without trace. The air was drying, late-summer cool. On the side streets near campus were weakly haloed car headlights and shadowed figures waiting to be briefly illuminated.
She wrote for almost three hours without stopping, finally deep into something true, without any sense of present time and place. Then she turned off her computer. Some minutes later she found herself outside, at the woodpile. She split six pieces of elm and lay them in the handled canvas. She smelled the wood and a sugary scent that she followed around the back of the cottage. On one of the maples a bucket had been knocked off a tap that had begun to drip sap. There were bear tracks all around. She stepped away, seeing everything.
Back inside, she sat by the fire, stared out at the lake. The animals were waking from their dens. Seeing the prints had brought forth the smallest things. The faintest yellow in the grey of the dormant beech buds. The weather seemed no different but it was already spring in the ancient systems.
All moved forward from here. It was time to go home.
Her thoughts returned to the half-written story. She was still standing outside the church and she couldn’t go further without confronting what she couldn’t. Fear had stopped her, but also an incapability. How to think of him? He was faceless, without even a name to hold the substance of him in place. She wanted him known, not named, not by her. Any name might skew her senseof him one way or another. And so instead she designated him with only a letter, and for reasons she didn’t speculate upon, the letter that seemed right was R. A letter rolled on some tongues, though she didn’t roll it now. A letter that sounds like
are
. Her attacker, a plural state of being.
A verb in English, she thought, at which point her intuition that he didn’t speak English was useful to her. The man had language, but not hers. The detail opened up more of the globe than it closed in her conception of him. And it isolated him within the city, which made sense, she decided. And thinking of him without English, in fact, meant she could attribute to him any life she wanted.
She expected he would come to her like this, that one day she’d call up her narrative, and begin writing, and there he’d be, fully present and named.
3
I t had been six steady weeks on the new job and it paid the best of any work he’d ever had. Rodrigo worked for a man about his age named Kevin, who bid on contracts from insurance adjusters and then phoned Luis, who called him, and they had to be on-site within an hour because of sitting water that would ruin everything left to ruin if it wasn’t pumped out and the carpets and walls stripped away. The work was hard and dirty, and sometimes Rodrigo came across burned-up things he wished he hadn’t seen. Last night it had been a child’s doll lying in a hard black pool of its melted head and back. One time it had been a dog that the firemen hadn’t found. The heat had curled its legs in front of it stiffly, as if it had died in an instant, running, though it had not died that way.
He didn’t say much at work. Kevin got them going and then spent a long time on the phone. He brought all the tools and wanted them put back as soon as they were used. Rodrigo and Luis were not to talk to anyone but Kevin or Matt, the other crew member, who took more turns than Luis with the worst of the work.
Most fires were at night. The hours they worked were backwards to the lives of other people. He showered before bed andslept until mid-afternoon. His one daily event was the walk to the internet lounge where he’d check for news from his cousin Uriel in Cartagena but there was never news. Uriel had written only once, after Rodrigo’s first message to him, to say that there
Before the shift that night she left dinner with her parents and biked south in darkness past her apartment building, along into her usual path. The afternoon storms had broken the heat and departed without trace. The air was drying, late-summer cool. On the side streets near campus were weakly haloed car headlights and shadowed figures waiting to be briefly illuminated.
She wrote for almost three hours without stopping, finally deep into something true, without any sense of present time and place. Then she turned off her computer. Some minutes later she found herself outside, at the woodpile. She split six pieces of elm and lay them in the handled canvas. She smelled the wood and a sugary scent that she followed around the back of the cottage. On one of the maples a bucket had been knocked off a tap that had begun to drip sap. There were bear tracks all around. She stepped away, seeing everything.
Back inside, she sat by the fire, stared out at the lake. The animals were waking from their dens. Seeing the prints had brought forth the smallest things. The faintest yellow in the grey of the dormant beech buds. The weather seemed no different but it was already spring in the ancient systems.
All moved forward from here. It was time to go home.
Her thoughts returned to the half-written story. She was still standing outside the church and she couldn’t go further without confronting what she couldn’t. Fear had stopped her, but also an incapability. How to think of him? He was faceless, without even a name to hold the substance of him in place. She wanted him known, not named, not by her. Any name might skew her senseof him one way or another. And so instead she designated him with only a letter, and for reasons she didn’t speculate upon, the letter that seemed right was R. A letter rolled on some tongues, though she didn’t roll it now. A letter that sounds like
are
. Her attacker, a plural state of being.
A verb in English, she thought, at which point her intuition that he didn’t speak English was useful to her. The man had language, but not hers. The detail opened up more of the globe than it closed in her conception of him. And it isolated him within the city, which made sense, she decided. And thinking of him without English, in fact, meant she could attribute to him any life she wanted.
She expected he would come to her like this, that one day she’d call up her narrative, and begin writing, and there he’d be, fully present and named.
3
I t had been six steady weeks on the new job and it paid the best of any work he’d ever had. Rodrigo worked for a man about his age named Kevin, who bid on contracts from insurance adjusters and then phoned Luis, who called him, and they had to be on-site within an hour because of sitting water that would ruin everything left to ruin if it wasn’t pumped out and the carpets and walls stripped away. The work was hard and dirty, and sometimes Rodrigo came across burned-up things he wished he hadn’t seen. Last night it had been a child’s doll lying in a hard black pool of its melted head and back. One time it had been a dog that the firemen hadn’t found. The heat had curled its legs in front of it stiffly, as if it had died in an instant, running, though it had not died that way.
He didn’t say much at work. Kevin got them going and then spent a long time on the phone. He brought all the tools and wanted them put back as soon as they were used. Rodrigo and Luis were not to talk to anyone but Kevin or Matt, the other crew member, who took more turns than Luis with the worst of the work.
Most fires were at night. The hours they worked were backwards to the lives of other people. He showered before bed andslept until mid-afternoon. His one daily event was the walk to the internet lounge where he’d check for news from his cousin Uriel in Cartagena but there was never news. Uriel had written only once, after Rodrigo’s first message to him, to say that there
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