Three Ten Pictures

I wrote this mostly in Montana.

——-

Look to the horizon.

It’s Spring, mid-evening.  A ribbon of faint sunlight stretches across the horizon.  It’s nine o’clock, and still dusk, and the view is some Pentacostal ecstasy.  Your soul ruptures, and all your questions dissolve: the Infinite, the Endles, Heaven, Hell, Ying, Yang... here it is—The Answer!—in all its glory, and no one gives it so simply, not like God Himself in Montana.

Night envelops the day, and you roll down the window, and you breathe it in, and your blood comes alive, and your nostrils flare, and you’re here and you’re alive and it’s all yours and it’s not going away.

–

The morning comes, and you’re awake, and it’s silent, and you walk outside, and it’s silent. You feel the wind on your hands and your ankles and your lips, and it’s blistering cold.

They stare at you because you’re new, and they wave at you as they drive by. They can afford to be nice, because the turn of the earth is so far away. They sit back and watch it swirl, Day and Night, Right and Wrong, Peace and War, like it’s not their fight.

–

“Get up here as fast as you can,” they said, “and we’ll try and keep her alive for another week.”

She was old, and frail, and ornery, and she was hemorrhaging. Not hemorrhoid hemorrhaging, but volcanic colonic hemorrhaging, a pint at a time. She passed out from lack of blood, and she was pale as a vampire, and she was dying, and they found her on the kitchen floor bleeding out.

“It’s a tumor or something,” they said, “and it’s probably metastasized, and it’s all over her body, and we don’t know where the bleeding’s coming from, and we don’t know how to stop it. These blood packets are all that’s keeping her alive, and we’re giving her two at a time, and it’s like pouring water into a leaky bucket get here right quick she might be dead already stupid.”

So we got up and got here.

I’ll take any excuse I can to drive north, but not this. I’m twenty-eight and I’ve buried half my family already.  I wonder sometimes if everyone I know will just die at once–like next week or something–and I’ll spend my entire adult life in twilight while the rest of you play with your kids.  Life is a closing iris, slow and unstoppable, and I learned too young there’s nothing you can do about it.

–

She’s fine. Better than the last time I saw her. They cut her hair, painted her nails, even did some makeup. She’s sweet. She wants her cat. She wants chocolate.

Suddenly they’re telling us she can get a colonoscopy, maybe surgery. The bleeding stopped.  The platelets in the blood packets did their job.  The doctors hadn’t accounted for this. It had never occurred to them that blood would stop the bleeding, which I think I learned in fifth grade.  She’s not fine, but she’s not dying yet, either. She needs tests. They want us to take her to a hospital in Sidney tomorrow.

Death took a holiday. It’s almost–this is really terrible—disappointing for us. What are we doing here again?

–

I went running.

It’s flat as a sheet of paper here. The plains go on and on—grey, dead-ish grass on wavy hills, and the wind shrieks like a banshee.

There’s too much oxygen here. My lungs don’t know what to do with it.

–

We went to Sidney. It snowed–a dusting. The world looks like a big Frosted Mini-Wheat.

Tests. A temper tantrum. The woman’s wanted to die for forty years. It’s all she ever talks about. She’s death-obsessed. She’s so German. This is my family.

We bought her a small wooden cardinal from the hospital gift shop. While we drove home, she cradled it like a baby and spoke to it. She couldn’t wait to give her cardinal a home. To me, this is was not dementia talking–it was aged femininity. Or loneliness.

Yeah, I’m wrong. It was loneliness.

We offered to take her back home to California, but she refused. She’s dead set on dying in Montana.

–

Two days is all we had. We waved hello, hugged goodbye, and left.

–

Snow dusted the pancaked earth as we drove south. I nearly plowed the Chevy Malibu into a small herd of antelope. I braked, and they sped off, and they ran alongside the car as I accelerated, and as one of them ran I looked in its black pearly eye and saw nothing.

–

She’s okay. They’re waiting on a colonoscopy or something. She went home two days after we left. She’s at home with her cat and her cardinal and her cable television.

The thing is, the next time she’s on her deathbed, I don’t know if we’ll be able to drop everything and go to Montana again. This is more than annoyance, and I have a lot more respect for Montana than I do its doctors.

So I’m back, no longer in some remote ‘burg where you’re grateful to see another pair of headlights on the road.  It’s crowded, and we have malls and Best Buy and Arby’s, and it’s twenty minutes’ drive to a Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, or Iranian grocery store.  Well, there ya go.  The day ends promplty at 8:30.

I’m tired.  Good night.