It speaks to you about power and freedom.
Power, freedom, and self-sufficiency.
The act refuses to allow you to contemplate anything but its own existence: the angle of the bar, the tension of the chain, your forefinger on the throttle.
No water.
No ocean anywhere.
The opulent vibration sweeping through your hands and into your arms and across your cortex.
The first tree stirring so diffidently you almost miss the motion.
Lifting off your bar, cracking into momentum, slamming down in a dull thump and dust billow.
Andi standing behind you the whole time.
Andi standing behind you the whole time holding your shirt tails in case she needs to pull you away from disaster.
She erupting into a series of celebratory shouts of which you become aware only after you have shut off your saw and your ears stop humming and your chest stops humming and your brain rises out of the sonic haze.
You flip up your visor, pivot, and, vigilant about the saw’s trajectory, bow at the waist, packed with satisfaction and accomplishment.
Deer stray from the woods at twilight to graze in your garden.
Their coats blend with the leafage so well they appear to be shadows drifting through ashy light.
For a week or two, clapping your hands is sufficient to scatter them. Then clapping your hands and stomping. Then clapping your hands and stomping and shouting.
In the end, however, you clap and stomp and shout while walking towards them.
Menacingly.
You walk toward them menacingly and yet they show no fear.
You approach so near that when you reach out your hand you actually touch one.
Yards away they seem fragile and delicately boned.
Palming this doe, though, you feel unmediated animal strength, the shudder of muscles down her half-barrel flank as she huffs and bolts.
Her shock shocks you.
Then the only thing remaining of her is a certain fullness to the air.
An after-scent of hide and dried leaves.
That night they return while you sleep and rip off carrot tops, leaving wilted clumps splayed uneaten on the ground.
They finish most of the lettuce and the pea vines and stamp down potato plants.
A pointillist constellation of sharp forked hoofprints every which way.
You drive into town next day and buy eight eight-foot posts and a roll of mesh.
It takes you all afternoon to sink them, most of the evening to hammer up the fencing.
Flashlight in hand, you crawl among the rows, what is left of the rows, removing the damaged vegetables, patting down the soil.
Near midnight, you set up the sprinkler and let it run.
Just out of range of your beam, you hear deer picking their meticulous way through the undergrowth.
Lingering.
The first ten minutes in Kathmandu airport or how smoke from your father’s cigarettes flooded the Land Rover as you drove over thousands of crabs.
Crabs or the backbones of frogs.
It was a long time ago.
The windows rolled up.
Even after the rains.
Even on nice afternoons.
Even on nice afternoons he would roll up the windows and open the air vent, which only had the effect of circulating the cigarette smoke through the cabin more efficiently.
One elbow pressed against the closed window.
One hand on the steering wheel.
Cigarette dangling from his lips like a movie star from the forties.
You cannot remember him being happier than during those particular moments.
The cells in his lungs already beginning to go awry on a molecular level, presumably.
Minute genetic damage already beginning to accumulate.
Like dawn gathering bluely across the Finnish countryside in December.
That subtle.
That haunting.
Andi wanders from room to room in the summer house, white light fogging the air, exposing her large dangling breasts to sunshine and oxygen.
It stops raining.
It stops raining and the sky adopts a glassy blue, day after day.
Millions of silver salt crystals breaking down into black silver.
Leaves clitter on bushes like paper.
Duststorms pursue cars on the gravel roads. Patinas collect on top of your refrigerator and stove. Dust stings your eyes, stings the back of your throat. It makes your sinuses drain without warning.
You do not know any chemistry, either.
But still.
Sunsets become breathtaking north-to-south expanses of oranges, yellows, pinks.
You start letting your hair grow.
It seems like a good idea.
It seems like a good idea and soon it covers your ears and feathers your lower neck.
Scratch-resistant coating, emulsion, base.
The stuff of black-and-white film, the thickness of your fingernail.
Andi finds a steady line of customers: gawky brides, beefy grooms, gleeful chefs.
You begin bumping into people in Moscow much like yourself: programmers, artists, academics from somewhere else.
Several invite you to dinner.
You invite a few to your house.
You discover that they, too, want to be the last people to arrive in this state.
They want to be the ones to lock the gate behind them.
You limb the felled trees and chain saw them into seventeen-inch logs, buy a maul and wedge, split the largest pieces, stack them in the barn.
Virginia Dentatia slips into a coma.
Far inside her web site, you embed a video feed so viewers can witness a close-up of her wasting face, translucent pale-green oxygen mask over nose and mouth.
Close-up: Andi’s toes wriggling on the edge of the shiny wooden coffee table, each digit with a mind of its own.
Pan back to include her tanned calves.
Her shiny whitish kneecaps.
Her muscular thighs disappearing beneath her shiny black silk robe.
Pan back farther to include you sitting on the carpet, her across from you on the couch.
You are eating breakfast.
Both of you are eating breakfast and recounting your dreams from the night before.
Andi has taken to keeping a journal of the best ones.
She is writing as you speak.
A beach, you say between bites. A silver-white beach of the over-zealous imagination.
And on the beach?
A resort. A resort which exudes plushness. All the paths are lined with fake Easter Island heads. All the waiters are black and extremely polite. I’m sorry, of course, but they are — both black and polite.
You take another spoonful of banana slices, vanilla yogurt, and granola.
You and I are sitting on a veranda, sipping Piña Coladas. Below us, on the white beach, good-looking people with good-looking bodies are sunning on a good-looking day. Every once in a while a swim-suited man with a thirty-eight-inch waist and twenty-one-inch inseam moseys among the sunners, carrying a small red plastic pail and shovel.
For playing in the sand?
It would seem so. But the man isn’t the same man. There are many of him. They are all carrying the same red plastic pails.
What are they doing?
Heading in the same direction, minding their own business. Businesses. They’re all on the same mission, ambulating from the lefthand corner of your view to the right.
What happens?
That’s it, unfortunately. I remember the dream dissolving just like that: on a certain note of ambiguity, a whiff of uneasiness pervading the otherwise pleasant scene.
That’s good, Andi says, jotting. That’s very good. But I can top it.
You sip your organic kiwi-and-strawberry juice, wipe your mouth, lean back on your palms.
It’s the peace of the countryside, she begins. It’s open windows and a chaste breeze. I’m reclining in the bathtub, our bathtub, I’m fairly sure, when I understand, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, what Death’s name is.