“So what do you see when you look at me?” I leered and waited, took a large gulp of beer.
“Atrophy.” He wiggled a pinky at me and chuckled to himself.
“You bastard.”
“Didn’t you used to write little poems?” He was smiling now too, like a kid with a stick.
“You’re basing your future on our sloppy pub-night pillow talk, both of us one wink away from passed out on the floor. It’s pathetic.”
“Hey, at least I still have a hope in hell of achieving enlightenment.”
“They have you on the same circuit,” I said, smirking into my beer. “Is a PhD so different? Don’t you think I know they have a hamster wheel at that university built especially for you? You get on that campus and your little legs are going faster than mine, my friend.”
“Yah, that may be. But didn’t I tell you?” He pulled a thread of tobacco from his lip. “I’m planning on being a monk.”
“No, you didn’t tell me that.” I laughed hard enough that I slopped beer down one pant leg. “You’d make a shitty monk.”
“I’m going to live in a state of perfection.” He tilted his can back and finished the beer, adding it carefully to a wobbly tower of cans next to his chair. “Nirvana.”
“I thought you’d already achieved that.” I smirked at him.
Thom laughed and made a weak attempt to disguise a belch.
“So where do you go to be a monk around here?”
“There’s a place near Mission.”
We talked well into the early morning, until the edges of the clouds turned pink and we were slumped over our chairs trying to grasp at a conversation slipping sideways toward total incoherence. We were talking about politics and great books and greater wars as though we knew anything about those subjects. Thom kept backing me into corners, pointing his finger in my face until I finally surrendered and stumbled up, knocking over my folding chair, and told him to fuck off. I don’t think either of us knew what it was over, but we both knew we’d reached that point in the morning where we hated each other. I found Angie and Veronica inside on the couch under a pile of blankets, talking.
“Are you crying?” Angie said. An arm came up from under an afghan.
“They’re just leaking,” I said, waving her away. There were tears on my cheeks, but it was impossible to tell what from, the booze or the anger. Angie crawled out from beneath the blankets and peered out the window at Thom. “You guys have been drinking all night.”
Veronica stood beside her. “Is he still out there?” She went about puttering in the kitchen and muttering to herself about the sorry mess in her backyard and the neighbourhood waking up to bear witness.
I leaned against the wall as I stumbled down the hallway to the bedroom. “If you wake her up I’ll kill you,” Angie called after me.
Sophie lay in the middle of the bed, chin tilted to the ceiling, mouth open, abandoned to sleep. There was something immensely pleasurable about staring at my sleeping daughter when I was drunk. “You’re so beautiful,” I said as the exquisite little breaths escaped from her mouth.
“Get out of here,” Angie hissed. Her hand came out of the dark and pulled me down the hall.
“When are you guys going to learn you’re not twenty anymore?” Veronica said from the kitchen. “Tea, Ange? What do you need, Wes? Some coffee?”
“He’s a stubborn bastard,” I said, wiping the back of my hand over my weepy eyes. It was certainly the booze.
“So he told you?” Veronica dipped the tea bag in and out of the hot water, steam drifting up around her face.
“Told me what?”
“That he dropped out of his PhD program,” she said. “Hasn’t left the house all week.”
TRAFFIC IS PILED UP along the highway. Sophie is crying, has been crying on and off in howling fits for the past two hours. The wildfire has closed part of the road, with escorts taking convoys of cars down the mountain. No one has moved for twenty minutes. Angie’s been halfway over the front seat, ass in the air, for most of the ride, and we silently agreed to stop talking to each other after the first half hour of arguing. Maybe she’s hot. Maybe she’s bored. Maybe she wants us to stop yelling. Kids hang limply out car windows. People walk along the edge of the highway, stretching their legs, taking their dogs for a piss, lifting their hands to shield their eyes as they stare down the long line of stationary cars. I’ve been sitting here fiddling with the air conditioning and thinking of alternate endings.
“Just leave it on one setting,” Angie says. “Cold is cold.”
I’ve been thinking of more possibilities in which the plane lands safely. And the hawk no longer seems to be serving its purpose. Instead of a weightless exhilaration, what I feel when I think of the hawk is dread, the kind of terror that ricochets through your insides when your foot slips off a steel rail, when you make that critical mistake. The feeling is enough to eject me from the car and out into the highway’s swelter.
“I’m going to take a leak,” I say, slamming the door behind me before I can hear Angie’s reply. I walk quickly down the line of cars, heat hammering me from above, bouncing off the windshields and fenders so I have to squint, my sunglasses sitting useless on the car’s dash, where I threw them after whipping them off to massage the ache gathering between my eyes. I leave the road and cut off into the brush along the side of the highway, wading through waist-high grass and jumping over a drainage ditch before hitting the trees. Pricks of sweat erupt across my forehead. What are your intentions? It’s a question I thought I had the answer to. I wipe at my wet face. In the forest, I weave through the trees, my breath coming heavy after only a minute. I can feel something in my body, an ugly growth, an extra layer around the middle of something that might be insubstantial now, but is growing.
Once I’m hidden from the road I relieve myself, sending the stream over the side of a tree stump. In here the air is only hot, alive with the noise of insects and forest detritus crackling under my feet. Only now do I smell the fire. I picture the pilot climbing out of the wreck, walking through the burned-out forest back into town, how everything would smell better, taste better. He probably wouldn’t notice the heat. The whole world would look different. What would he do first? Eat a hot dog. Wade out waist-deep into the lake. Would he go back to exactly the way things were? Did he have someone to love? Would he keep flying? Would he keep waiting for summer fires? I wonder if in thirty-three years I will still be that man standing on the highway, squinting at the traffic, badly needing to take a leak but holding it. Suddenly falling off the deep end seems attractive to me. If Thom can fall off the grid, lose his mind without consequence and sit around the house all day reading, then why can’t I? I could go back to university, accomplish what Thom threw away. I’ve seen it happen: bursting into flames. Falling from great heights in a blazing ball of fire. Maybe Thom has it all figured out. When life gets too straight and narrow, throw a wrench into the mix. See what happens. What happens is everyone tiptoes around you, grabs you an extra beer from the fridge, says poor Thom, takes your picture, makes it part of a project.
Through the trees, tail lights brighten along the highway and car engines start at the head of the line. I jog down the middle of the road between the rows of cars, singles or families back in their seats staring straight ahead, hoping to move even if only by a few feet. By the time I reach the car, sweat is trickling down my back. The doors are open and I can hear the wailing before I even get close to the car. Angie is pink-faced in the back seat rocking the screaming child.