I need water, she said, her voice a rough breath. He could hear now how dry it was. But he needed to focus on this new meditation, the hammering.
Each nail individual, metal worked by machine but not perfect, not without variation in how the tip had been sheared or the head formed. Lines cut on the shaft, also, and in this light, there was no shadow. Light as a presence, without source or direction or heat, a cold illumination that was general, and it was only in this light that you could see the true shape of a thing, the fullness of a nail. The robust presence of a nail. It might as well have been sixty feet high. Peering at it up close, it became enormous. A shape-shifter.
Galen held the nail with thumb and pinkie. His blood no longer dripping, clotted now, beginning to scab, and it looked a dark iron red in this light. The skin that had been bunched and torn seemed no longer a part of him. It would dry and fade and fall away. What was exposed now would be covered, and soon it would seem almost that this had never happened.
Chapter 24
It was tempting to think of those first shafts of light as fingers as they reached into the leaves of walnuts. But this was a second rising. That was important to remember. The first, the light, the illumination, was a gift. The second, the actual presence, was something else. The second rising was samsara. When we grew old enough for sex, that was our second birth, and that birth was a deformation, a reshaping from the clay of the first birth, and who we became then was something we had to run from for the rest of our lives.
Galen pressed back against the shed wall, stood with his arms out and his eyes closed and waited for the moment he would be blasted by the sun. Nailed to the cross. We were all sacrificed, every day, and no one could do it for us. That was the truth.
Water, his mother said.
Shh, he said. I’m focusing.
I’m going to die. If you don’t let me out, if I don’t have water, I’ll die.
Shh, he said.
Your mother is going to die. Your own mother.
Galen tried to focus only on the sun. He could feel its presence higher on the shed wall, could feel the radiation of that sudden heat. In moments, it would tick downward and set him on fire.
You were named after a doctor, Galen. An ancient Greek physician. You were supposed to help people. You were supposed to be different.
He thought of the earplugs. They were over on the lawn, or he could look for new ones. But he didn’t think he’d make it back in time for that first sun. It was rising quickly, but we should call it lowering, the rays of light levered down onto us, a giant seesaw balanced at the edge of the globe. He could feel the wood burning above him. So he held on, tried to just ignore her.
Galen.
His shoulders getting sore from holding his arms out. He didn’t feel he could hold them up much longer. Come on, he said. Come on. He wanted to feel his sacrifice. He wanted to feel the shape of the cross as the sun hit.
I won’t report you.
Shh, he said. He felt it, finally, in his hair, across his forehead, the heat, the burn, but not as hot as he had imagined. The power he had imagined was not there. He would not be set on fire, only warmed a bit, disappointing as always. The sun a cataclysm, billions of atomic bombs going off every moment, but it was too far away, just like everything else. Everything he wanted to reach was always just outside of his grasp. The world a small emptiness, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Galen let his arms fall, his shoulders burning hotter than the sun, stupidly. The sun moving down over his face and neck and onto his bare chest.
I won’t report you to the police. I won’t say anything. And you don’t have to move out. We’ll just go back to the way things were.
Yeah right, Galen said. The minute you’re out, the cops will pull up, and they’ll chase me down and put me in chains or whatever it is you said.
I’ll sign something. We can write something.
My fingerprints are on the lock, just like you said. And you’ll show them you haven’t had any water. You’ll say I made you sign. You’ve made it all impossible.
The sun moving down his chest, and the air already warmer. Not the sudden fire he wanted but instead a gradual cooking in an oven. He was going to be baked, and there was nothing glorious or interesting about that.
We can figure out a way, his mother said. We just have to work together.
The work I have to do is nailing these boards, he said. So you can’t pull your little stunt again. And I have to do it before the day gets too hot.
Galen, she said, but he walked away into the orchard, lay down in the dirt and rolled in it, used his good hand to cover himself completely with dirt, rubbed it into his skin, into his hair, gave himself a coating against the sun. He would not wear clothing again. That was his decision. He would wear only dirt, because dirt was his meditation, and he needed to not ever forget about dirt.
Good smell of dirt, and of weeds. He crawled along the ground, careful not to put any weight on his damaged fingers, using his palm instead, and smelled, and there was one smell stronger than all others, pungent, not a sweet smell, and he found it, finally, along the edge of an irrigated row near a walnut trunk, a place of more water and shade. A pale green that was bluish, almost, and a velvety sheen to the leaves. A plant he had never noticed before, and he didn’t know its name. It seemed so unlikely here, made possible only by the irrigation. A plant almost flat, its leaves reaching out along the ground like the legs of a starfish. A roamer, come from another world. The orchard suddenly new, a place he had never seen before.
This was the key, finding the new world within the old. The bitter stinky plant a perfect reminder. Somehow he had never noticed this powerful smell, never seen this unlikely, lush and velvety plant in the midst of all the dry weeds. And this was exactly what he needed to find in the dry husks of all the illusions of self. Something more pungent than self, something more unlikely and from farther away.
Galen lay beside the plant because he knew the irrigation system would turn on soon, and he wanted to be here when the water released. He wanted to feel this plant reaching for the water. Brother plant, he said. Almost time to drink. And he realized he was so incredibly thirsty himself. And starving. But that could be ignored. That was only the body.
He was very tired, so he closed his eyes. The smell of this plant a strong medicine, overpowering, and he stretched and traveled in that smell, elongated like the furrows, and he dreamed nothing he would remember, was lost in blackness and forgetting and the void we all return to, surfaced and was lost and surfaced again and finally he heard the water.
The air hot now. The water trickling in the furrows. He knew he should feel panic, should check to see his mother hadn’t escaped, but he didn’t feel any panic at all. He leaned closer to the irrigation tubing and put his lips to it, sucked in cool water. Amazing, water. Feeling it on his lips, in his mouth, was a kind of peace. A relaxing of the body, a relaxing of need, of desperation. This was what his mother needed. Something so simple, so basic, and how long could we go without it? Galen didn’t know, but it couldn’t be long. We needed air more desperately. We couldn’t do without that for more than two or three minutes, but water was next. Water was not a luxury.