Galen wanted peace with his mother. He wanted peace. But as soon as he came near her, he wanted to kill her.
He was more careful to keep his feet wide, stood farther away and focused on the top of the log as he swung. A satisfying chock this time as the blade hit. He used the wedge in the gap and swung again, split the wood in one stroke. Brighter flesh inside, the wood yellow instead of gray.
Okay, he said. And he worked into a rhythm, log after log, focusing carefully on the target, enjoying that swing, the high weightlessness of it, the feel of the muscles in his arms and back, the sweat on his skin, the sound of the blows muffled in the trees.
Earthly labor. That was perhaps the fastest path, because you could forget yourself, forget everyone, and feel only the swing. The key to getting through the world was to find a way to forget that it existed. A shadow in a shadowland, biding time.
Galen flung the axe up the hill. Just an impulse. End over end through the air, whumping into the earth. He hiked up to it and flung it again, the blade and handle flipping through branches and bouncing in the dirt, spraying small grains of granite. Puffs of dust like smoke. The axe-flinger. He didn’t know what it meant, but it felt good. It felt right. He threw the axe as hard as he could, hurled it with both hands. He was like Thor, splitting the air itself. Tearing through appearances, ripping the fabric of the illusion.
Galen glanced quickly behind to see the wake left in the air, any swirl or disturbance at the edges of where he had passed, but his eyes were not trained to see. Troughs and rips and back eddies, and all of it hidden from the naked eye. But the axe might cut through quickly enough. If he focused just behind it as it flew, he might see something.
He threw again and everything was just too fast. Even the flipping of the handle rotating beyond the speed at which he could isolate an image. He needed to learn how to slow the world down in order to see it. His blood pounding now from running after the axe. The dust in his nostrils. His feet sinking in the tufted earth, bogging him down.
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.
So Galen held the axe behind him, hefted it a bit in the air to gauge its weight, its balance, stepped forward and flung at a trunk twenty feet away. But the axe went wide and bounced end over end in the dirt.
Galen walked instead of ran, getting tired. But he could hear the wind rising in the pines all around him, clouds moving over and the day become darker suddenly, and he felt he was at the edge of something. A tree farther ahead had lower dead branches covered in a bright lime green moss. Glowing arms in the overcast, muted light. They were emanating, luminous. They looked unreal.
Galen stood with the axe before this tree and tried to know the trunk, tried to lock it into place in the air and feel its pull, and when he flung, he felt the flipping end over end until the axe hit, handle first, glanced off into dirt and ferns.
Close, he said. I’m getting close here.
He retrieved the axe, walked back again to his position, and opened himself to a universe made almost entirely of empty space. Neutrons and protons, or whatever, swirling around, electrical and magnetic connections all that was holding us together, and no reason that couldn’t be cleaved in an instant, revealed. He threw the axe with all his might, end over end through emptiness, slowing and seeing, and the blade connected with trunk, abruptly halted, the handle frozen in place, the eddy of air washed over the handle, the seam in what had been cleaved, 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. His axe hanging from the trunk, the bright green arms above, all of it a perfect moment, and all of it passed and gone, as if it had never been.
Chapter 15
The mafia didn’t return until late afternoon. Galen’s mother and grandmother on a walk at Camp Sacramento, the stew pot in the oven, smell of chicken and onion in the air, and Galen settled upstairs with Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Anyone here? his aunt called out.
Yeah, he said. I’m reading. The others are on a walk.
No response after that. They settled in below and he stayed above, and that was good.
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. Jonathan had midair tumbles and frustrations, just like Galen’s crashing into the water. The amazing thing was that Galen came first, not the book. He was already doing all of these things before he read the book. And so the book was a kind of recognition.
What amazed Galen most was that although the entire book was a kind of metaphor — it was about seagulls, after all — Galen was living it in real life. He was living in a time that was preparing to recognize him. That was an important part about being a prophet. It was no good if you had the vision and no one could understand it. But books like this one were preparing people to understand Galen.
Galen rested the book on his chest and listened. He had his earphones in, listening to a nature tape of waves at the seashore. He listened to this whenever he read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and in the sound of the waves, he could hear the impermanence of things. The forming and crashing, remaking and dissolution of the world. The self put together in the same flimsy way. The key was to feel the ebb and tug as everything receded before it built again and lumbered forward. Because in that ebb, at the very end of it, at the end of the pull, was the nothingness that was truth. Samsara, suffering, was the inability to stay in that moment. Samsara was the forming of the next wave.
A hand on his crotch and he jolted upright, eyes open. Jennifer laughing. You looked so peaceful, she said. She took a step closer and yanked his headphones out of the tape recorder. Wave sounds in the bad speakers, sounding like static. That’s really beautiful, she said.
Galen pushed stop and the play lever clicked up.
You’re reading about seagulls, she said, and listening to waves. How is that being here now in the mountains?
Her hair was wet and she smelled like coconut. Her eyes bright and blue. She sat on the bed and he watched her breasts under her T-shirt.
I was meditating, he said.
Meditating on these, she said, and held her breasts. She crawled up over him, lifted her T-shirt, and put her breasts in his face.
Hot still from her bath, damp, but her nipples going hard in the cool air. She rocked back and forth, slapping his cheeks with her breasts, so soft, so unbelievably soft, and he grabbed a nipple in his mouth, wasn’t sure what to do, but he had his lips around it, careful not to use his teeth, and he sucked.
Mm, she said. A little weird, but it feels kind of good. I like the whiskers, too. Try just licking.
So he licked.
That’s kind of nice, too. Circle my nipple with your tongue. And she grabbed a breast and held it in his mouth.
Mm, she said.
He liked the little bumps around her nipple, but he pulled his face away. Quiet, he whispered. Your mom might hear.
She’s on a hike. We have the place to ourselves.
Wow.
Yeah, maybe you’ll get lucky this time.
I hope, Galen said. I hope. And he had a breast back in his mouth.