INFERNO

  The mountains of my home state—the same state whose legislators believe protecting straight people from transgender people is more important than raising teachers’ salaries—are on fire. The mountains where I live now certainly could be; we haven’t had any rain to speak of in over a month. I keep picturing the U.S. Drought Monitor website in my head, wondering how long it will be until our part of the state will go from yellow to red. It’s the 18th of November and pulsing swarms of gnats still appear in midafternoon. The maple trees downtown still look like they’re on fire. Forest floors are so brittle that the depiction, in words, of the sound of anything that moves in the woods now would require an exclamation mark. I passed a grove of oak trees today on my bike and the leaves hissed. On a nearby ridge, somebody discharged a shotgun, then discharged it again. A truck from the Sheriff’s office rolled behind two men in orange jumpsuits picking up refuse with trash grabber sticks. I wondered how long my consciousness would continue to unspool if I swerved in front of a school bus, whose chains clanked together ominously as it passed, as if it might be some kind of Dickensian ghost vehicle. I wondered about the signs I passed: a rusted square hanging from a pole in front of a barn that said “PET”; a flag advertising “fast Internet”; a banner protesting the proposed gas line that announced I had entered what might someday be known as “the evacuation zone.” I thought about my students, many of whom would be spending Thanksgiving with family members responsible for electing the new president, for whom they could not bring themselves to vote, for reasons they dared not share with their parents. I wanted to tell the woman who comes to clean our house that I didn’t vote for the President-Elect and that I hope she’s not afraid, but my Spanish is worse than her English, so I left the house before she was scheduled to arrive, and sent her a text message to let her know the front door was open. On The Diane Rehm Show, Diane asked John Grisham whether his extraordinary wealth qualified him as one of the 1% of the 1%; John Grisham said he didn’t know what that meant, and furthermore, could we just not talk about money or politics? Because, John Grisham said, he was so sick of talking about politics. My neighbor texted me to let me know that the pig he’s buying will soon be ready for slaughter, and that my wife and I had been invited to their house for dinner and to watch Survivor, a show we don’t normally watch, but we agreed, under the circumstances, to give it a shot. At the end of my bike ride, I glided into the cemetery I always pass on my way home, but had never actually visited, and was surprised to learn that none of the names—Savage, Mast, Shaver, Hunter—meant anything to me. I called my father to check up on the fires, which were now threatening to burn the historic Trail of Tears, which the Cherokee had walked nearly 180 years before, at the bayonet points of U.S. soldiers. The air, he said, was smoky. The forecast for rain was slim. The fires, according to some, could burn throughout the winter—and beyond.

  FAT KID

  Sometimes I think about this kid I once knew, this boy who was fat. Like really fat. Obese, I guess, is the word. Not morbidly obese, I don’t think, but I can’t say for sure. I’m not a doctor. I can’t observe the particulars of a body—human or otherwise—and tell you whether or not it may or may not be teetering on the verge of extinction. I do, however, have eyes. I like to think—and in fact I feel pretty confident in saying—that I know overweight when I see it. So, like I said . . . this kid, he was fat. In fact, I’d say that he belonged to a specific category: the kind that elicits pity. The kind you look at and say, what chance does a kid that fat have? It’s terrible to think, I know, and worse to say. And it’s not like I have a lot of room to talk. I could stand to lose a few. But still. This kid? His fatness? Whole other story. Wherever he went, the fact of that fatness was, if you’ll pardon the expression, the elephant in the room. I’m not saying he was like those thousand pounders whose corpses have to be airlifted out of their bedrooms, just that this kid’s fatness was something you would’ve had no chance of not noticing. You could tell yourself that you weren’t going to judge, but I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut you couldn’t help wondering how someone, specifically a child, could get that big. Was it the fault of his parents? His pediatrician? Was he somehow genetically predisposed? Was his problem—supposing you wanted to distinguish it as such—glandular in nature? What and how much did he snitch when nobody was looking? Did he get in trouble for raiding the pantry or refrigerator? Did he sneak out to the nearest convenience mart, where a raspy-voiced woman with bloated eyebags and a diamond ring on her finger rang him up and called him “Hun” when she asked for the total, and if so did this make the fat kid feel good, if only because it seemed to him then that in the cashier’s eyes he was a regular person like anybody else, living in a world where all people were potential “Huns,” and did he then give her a handful of quarters and say, “Keep the change,” and ferry the snack cakes to his room where he stuffed each one whole into his mouth, not eating as fast as he possibly could, but with a steady consistency that still might have been accurately described as “wolfing,” little beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead and air whistling through his nose as he chewed, not even really enjoying it except for the fact that he knew he shouldn’t do it, but fuck it, who was he to deprive himself of this one joy in life, not that he didn’t only have one joy, but this was one only he knew about, a secret joy, the way his teeth cracked the brittle icing and then squished into the yellow cake and the gooey filling and maybe he had a chocolate milk to wash down each massive bite, who knows? Maybe all he needed to do was get through the eating and emerge on the other side. But maybe I’m getting it all wrong. Maybe the only thing to say about any of this is that it’s wrong to see a kid and think first and foremost the word “fat,” wrong to imagine that said kid was somebody who lacked the necessary willpower to be not fat, the kind of person who couldn’t control his desires. Aren’t we all guilty of indulgence? Don’t we all practice our own singularly ludicrous acts of self-sabotage? And might the only difference between our sins and his be that the consequences of his provide more physical evidence? What if, for instance, every time we got angry, our bodies started, ever so slightly, to balloon? What if we evolved somehow so that we grew what scientists would later dub, on the cover of Time magazine, “the fat gland,” and that every time you lost your temper, every time the Dream Team lost to the Sacramento Kings in NBA2K14 or if your spouse washed something that shouldn’t have been washed and dried or if your kid took too long finding a jacket to wear because he’s pathologically slow in the mornings and the bus will be here any minute, what if every time you got mad this little gland secreted something, like fat, maybe, or cellulose, or whatever, and what if bodies started metabolizing—or not—anger or sadness or lust? In other words, what if you could get fat in ways other than eating too much and not exercising enough or having the wrong kind of metabolism? What I’m saying is, what if it had to do with something other than metabolism or genetic dispositions or food? Might you change your tune? Could you then eavesdrop upon our fat young friend as he confesses knowing how to make a “mean” spaghetti sauce without wondering what the everloving fuck he was doing making spaghetti sauce, regardless of said sauce’s intensity or flavor profile, or what hole he’d been living in that would have prevented him from having heard that he, as a person of extraordinary girth, should be avoiding carbs and instead be subsisting mostly on a diet of nuts and fruits and vegetables and grains? Then again, do you have any room to talk about willpower? Do you know a thing or two about deprivation? Do you assume it would be no big deal to survive, say, on a diet of apples, just as a man I know named Junior once did, a guy who recently arrived to de-branch the trees in my yard, a guy who was certainly not, by any measuring stick, slim, but who, having learned that a person can eat as many apples as he or she wants and still lose an extraordinary amount of weight, embarked upon such a diet, and so for days and weeks ate nothing but apples, one after the other, just and only apples the entire livelong day, and that by doing so he shed—“burned it up,” is how he tells it—an extraordinary amount of body fat, and is now lighter on his feet than he’s been in years? Could you imagine a world where people like Junior took stock of their lives, and of what they might stand to lose, and then lost it? Is it too much to think we could teach ourselves to look at a person without inserting “fat” or “thin” or “black” or “white” or “straight” or “spiny” or “sticky” or “bedraggled” or “clean”? Might we learn to relinquish our hold on our qualifiers? Might someday we see a kid of a certain size and circumvent the adjective altogether, going straight—as we ought—to “person”? I’m tempted to say—sad as it sounds—that the premise sounds preposterous. But then I think of Junior, a once groundbound body who regained, through sheer will, his mobility, and who now scampers nimbly up tree trunks with a chainsaw in tow, and once he gets high enough he begins what he climbed up to do, which is to say he chooses which limbs need to go, lops off the excess, making trees lighter, opening them up so that more sun can shine through to the yard down below, so that the grass there can grow once again richly green.

  HERON

  I’m thinking about the dead girl, the one my son had known not because she was a friend—the dead girl had very few friends as it turns out, a fact that might very well have been a contributing factor to her death—but because she had attended his middle school. I’ve been thinking of her off and on for the last hour, and now, nearing the end of a twenty-mile bike ride, I’m remembering how, the day before, the people of my town had known the girl was missing, and that while life is rarely kind to children who have disappeared, many of us were still holding out hope that she might be found. And she was. Only she wasn’t alive. Which meant that this girl, the one who, for days, had been known to us as The Missing Girl or That Girl Who’d Gone Missing, had become, in an instant, That Girl Who Was Killed or The Girl Whose Throat Had Been Slit and Whose Body Had Been Left On The Side Of The Road. However named or referenced, she was, at the very least, a human being—a pudgy redhead with a slight underbite and, if her Facebook account can be trusted to accurately represent her wardrobe, an affinity for camouflage hoodies; a girl whose time on earth ended after a brief thirteen years. The police had gathered information that led them to believe that two first-year engineering students, both of whom were enrolled at the university for which our town is known, had met at a local fast food restaurant to plan the murder, which they then executed. A year before, a news station had chosen one of these students—the same young man who would befriend the thirteen-year-old girl on a sketchy social media app that helped him trick the girl into believing that he was her boyfriend, and as such could be trusted to love and care for her—as “Athlete of the Week,” and in an interview with the station the would-be killer had discussed his accomplishments as a star of track and field. During the segment, the young man, who had set a number of state records, said that he believed he could do anything he set his mind to. It was that particular phrase—anything he set his mind to— that I’ve since been unable to forget, and it’s one I now replay in my head as I zip though puddles, dodging melted slush, wondering if, in the days following last week’s blizzard, the dead girl had made a snowman, or if she’d sledded, or if she’d licked the ice crystals from her gloves, or if she’d pulled out her cell phone in order to prove to another person her age that she did indeed have an eighteen-yearold boyfriend, and that she planned to someday run away with him and start a family of her own. I wonder now if anyone had believed her, or if, when she’d shown them the boy’s wholesome-looking face, they’d rolled their eyes and thought here we go again with the obviously made-up shit this obnoxious girl so relentlessly peddles. I wonder what those people think now. I think about yesterday, the worst and last day of the girl’s life, which, as it happened, had been a very good day for me. I had spent the morning packing boxes for my family’s subsequent move across town, to a smaller but more solidly built and more expensive home, one that had been recently and completely remodeled, and whose features include granite countertops, wood floors, a brick patio, a fenced-in backyard, and an outdoor fireplace. And as I was packing and envisioning what it would be like to live in a house where you could stand near a window in winter and not feel the cold seeping through the poorly insulated fenestration, my wife appeared at my office door and wanted to know if, since our son was walking the dog, I wanted to go upstairs with her. I said something like, “But he won’t be gone that long” and she said, “Well, we don’t need that much time,” and because my wife is almost always right, and because it had been a while since we’d gone upstairs together, I followed her. Afterwards, I said, “That was a good idea” and she said, “It was, wasn’t it,” and then, in the throes of afterglow, my body pulsed with gratitude. That evening, I prepared dinner—meatballs, tomatoes, and garlic over polenta, garnished with roasted broccolini—using a recipe and ingredients that had been shipped to us via the United Parcel Service, and it was very good. Our son went to sleep early because he was tired from having played three games of indoor soccer and soon after he went to bed my wife texted me from upstairs in our home to say she too was turning in. I didn’t remind myself about the missing girl, didn’t think that I should appreciate every last moment with those I loved, didn’t go upstairs to say goodnight to either my wife or son face to face or to hug and kiss them as I usually do, mostly because I was downstairs in our guest bedroom gripping a controller, directing my avatar—a biracial young woman in tiger-striped pants and a black hoodie, whose face I’d paid a virtual stylist 500 virtual dollars to paint a tropical pink stripe across, for no other reason than I thought it might seem startling when I joined other players online during heists—across town in a stolen vehicle, to shoot at gang members who were cursing at me in Spanish. If I died, as I sometimes did, I always came back to life, to lay waste to thugs and afterwards retrieve piles of cash that flew from their bodies and pulsed radioactively on the concrete, as did packets of drugs, which I then delivered to an African-American man named Gerald, a tubby, bearded guy who wore a necklace over his T-shirt and who lived in an apartment complex in a part of town where, if you randomly fired your weapon, the surrounding neighbors would pull out their guns and unleash a barrage of bullets in your direction. Gerald took the package and said, “Don’t you tell nobody about me now, you hear?”—which is what he always said, even though I never had told anyone, ever, and then MISSION PASSED appeared on the screen, and I watched the dollar amount—mine—rapidly rise. Finally, I texted my wife “ok” and then “night night” and she texted back “nighter,” which is short for “nighter nighter chicken fighter,” which is a phrase she or my son made up, and which they think is funny to say, and so I kept on playing my game until the hour grew late enough for me to worry about the total amount of sleep I’d likely be getting, after which I crept through the darkness to bed, where I slept until morning. Upon waking, I turned on my phone and discovered that the missing girl was now dead. And once I had finished reading about her suspected killers, and how they made several trips to a local Walmart, to purchase a shovel and cleaning products, I went into the next room, to check on my own child, who, I realized, had been unconscious for twelve hours. I had no reason to believe he would die peacefully in his sleep at age thirteen, but even so, the sight of his breast rising and falling was a relief, and the first thing I said once he woke was, “Do you know that girl who went missing?” and he said, “Yeah,” and I said, “They found her,” and he said, “They did?” and I said, “Yes. She’s dead. Somebody slit her throat and dumped her body on the side of the road,” and my son said, “That’s awful.” And I said nothing, because I wanted the information to sink in, wanted to provide my son with the opportunity to acknowledge that the world in which he lives is a home where terrible things happen that we cannot comprehend. It is this same incomprehensibility—the unfair and ghastly throat-slitting of a young girl—that I’m thinking of now as I pedal my bike. Rain is misting my face and slowly melting mounds of snow, which is seeping into the ground, creating muck and dirt, and shiny areas on the road that I worry will cause my wheels to slide out from under me, and I am cold and tired and splattered with grime after riding over miles and miles of countryside. I wonder why the missing girl had to die and how were her parents preventing themselves from storming the jail to inflict their own brand of renegade vengeance and what drives a person to kill, to methodically and with such care and patience plan the demise of a fellow human being, in this case to select one of our community’s most vulnerable children and to create with the aid of modern technology a scenario in which this child would willingly barricade her door with a dresser and climb out her bedroom window and into the arms of a person who, unbeknownst to her, planned to slice open her body and let her life drain out. And it’s here—in the middle of my predictably feeble quest for answers, for figuring out the why and how the girl had to die—that a heron appears, out of nowhere: a sudden cipher overhead. I recognize the familiar angular wings, the S of its neck, the vaguely pterodactyl-like form. It’s beautiful to watch—the graceful flight of an ungainly bird—and for a moment I imagine what it must be like above the world, knifing through air, gliding forward without kindness or empathy. But then the bird disappears behind a stand of trees, and I am back in my own earthbound body, pedaling furiously this last too long stretch of road to get home.

 

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