I think I’m grinding my teeth at night.
An Anacin wouldn’t hurt.
Today I simply won’t grind my teeth. I’ll walk around with my mouth open like a goldfish.
A cute goldfish, you say, taking a seat next to her, handing her the envelope from Grannam. Guess what.
Oh, no, she says, making the same traffic-cop gesture Jared did when she offered him a marzipan. You open it.
It’s addressed to you. It makes sense you should open it.
Sense schmense. Even unopened, it makes me feel like I’ve just eaten too much.
You want me to open it?
Open it. Don’t open it.
It’ll all be over soon, you know.
Tucking her hair behind an ear, she looks at you with hope alive in every feature.
How? she asks.
How what?
How will it be over soon?
You try to germinate an answer.
Okay, you say eventually. It may not be over soon. The truth is I don’t know whether it will be over soon or not. That’s just what people say at times like this in movies that touch the heart. It seems like a good thing to articulate.
It’s a check. It’s got to be another check.
I’m sure you’re right. To cover the plane tickets and travel expenses. It stands to reason.
She huddles in, presses her head under your chin.
My tooth is killing me, she murbles into your chest.
I’ll open it.
No, don’t. Did I make the point I can’t stand this anymore? I really can’t stand this anymore. You have to do something. Think about everything very carefully first, obviously, sleep on it, then do whatever needs to be done.
You sure?
Don’t act rashly, of course. Acting rashly never really accomplishes anything.
You stare across the living room, letting your eyes go in and out of focus, running down an advanced flow chart of decisions.
An Anacin wouldn’t hurt, you say after a while.
I’m on the edge here. Just to let you know. The stones are giving way.
A black bird whips by the kitchen window as if it has been shot out of a grenade launcher.
You continue working down the flow chart.
On the edge? you say.
Geronimo, she responds. Chief Joseph.
You rise without hesitation, walk into the kitchen, and do the first thing that comes to mind: you build two sandwiches.
You assemble double-deckers whose first decks are comprised of turkey, bacon, lettuce, and tomato, and whose second decks are comprised of peanut butter, mustard, pickle slices, and catsup.
Descartes’ book is called Dioptrics, and newborns who hear the funeral passages from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique begin to squirm and cry.
You do not hold back on the mayonnaise.
You slather it on thick as wet cement on a brick.
Then you wrap the sandwiches in tin foil and fill one plastic container from the cabinet below the counter with potato chips, another with pasta salad, another with chocolate-chip cookies, jog down into the basement, locate your blue-and-white cooler, jog upstairs with it, dump all the ice from all the ice trays from the freezer into it, and cache two beers for yourself on the bottom, a flask of Jack Daniels’ for Andi, then the sandwiches, the chips, the salad, the cookies, two forks, a knife, plastic cups, and a fistful of paper napkins.
Dioptrics means something interesting, no doubt.
You jog into the loft and choose a number of tapes from your collection, emphasizing upbeat selections from the sixties and seventies.
Lupe refers to the special magnifying glass used to inspect an image on a contact sheet in detail.
You jog out to your Honda, open the trunk, slide in the cooler and day packs, jog around front, chuff across the seat, sort through the tapes like a poker player checking his hand, select The Beatles’ Revolver, pop the cassette into the deck.
Chinagraph to the wax pencil used to mark said contact prints.
When you jog back into the house to collect Andi, you discover her sitting exactly where you left her.
Dioptrics. Lupe. Chinagraph.
She looks like she cannot get used to earth’s gravitational pull today, like she is slowly being squeezed down into the couch.
Panting, you check your watch.
You think about how cheaply you and Andi could live in Kathmandu.
Kathmandu or Pokhara.
Your endeavor has taken twenty-three minutes.
This infuses you with a sense of gratification and achievement.
Andi’s back is straight as a Yogi’s, her mouth open slightly, just like she said.
When you approach, her eyes slidder toward you but her head remains fixed.
Hah I ooing? she asks.
You’re doing great, you say. You sure you don’t want to have that looked at?
Are ooou ki-ing?
No, you say. I’m a duke. Let’s rock.
Silver flecks swirl across the hood of your Honda like disco-ball dazzle.
Approaching Jack Pederson’s place, you cannot make out anything except a dust cloud. Then you see Jack navigating his riding mower among lodgepoles in the middle of the storm. He wears a red bandana across the lower half of his face, movie-bandit-style.
When he recognizes you are from around here, he briefly raises and lowers his cowboy hat in greetings and returns to work.
Alongside his house stands what is left of the log cabin his father built: ten feet wide, fifteen long, its wooden-shingle roof collapsed in on itself, a blue spruce emerging from the gray wreckage.
1895 carved above the door frame.
In Deary, you ease along the curb in front of the White Pine Market on Main Street and hop out. Four minutes, and you are back with two Snaggy Scree bars. You hand one to Andi and start in on the other yourself.
In 1908 a realty company began selling lots here on what had been the Joe Blailock homestead east of Potato Hill, an old volcanic vent which pitches up like a timbered thousand-foot-tall Vietnamese peasant’s hat.
Today the town is barely bigger than it was then, four or five square blocks of tidy unadorned mobile homes and wooden houses with tin roofs, a gas station at either end, the White Horse Café, the Mercantile, Fuzzy’s Fine Food and Bar, a one-room library that is never open, a fire station that doubles as city hall, a run-down motel comprised of a long rusty white trailer subdivided into five or six rooms, a shop no bigger than a closet that buys antlers and bear gall bladders from hunters.
The thing that continues to surprise you is how this is the largest town from here on out.
It is the largest town until you are miles inside the Montana border.
Everything human shrinks after Deary, diffusing among trees and foothills, disappearing into a tangle of logging roads and wilderness.
In Manhattan, with its nine million people, you ride an elevator into the frontier.
Here, there is no elevator for thirty miles in any direction.
Fifty.
Shortly after you pick up speed again, other cars fall away.
Soon yours is the only one on the curvy two-lane highway.
Hilly bleached fields skimming past.
Farmhouses scrambling up at increasingly larger intervals and ducking down.
You rip by a pasture freckled with acorn-hided cattle, all sitting with their forelegs folded beneath them.
Three shiny black horses bobbing their rectangular heads over a barbed-wire fence as if watching traffic elapse.
In Manhattan, the sky is filled with people.
Here, pastures shapeshift into wide meadows behind which rise blunt forested hills.