Gar

            I used a urinal, zipped up, washed and dried my hands. Gar used a urinal, with two empty ones between us, zipped up, stood and looked vacant.

             I said, “Noisy out there.” 

             “Yeah. Yeah it sure is.”

             “What did you do while I talked to the insurance people?” 

             “I looked in the shops, Jeremy.” Then he said, “I bought a gun.” 

             “A gun? What do you want with a gun?” 

             “Well, if somebody jumped me, I could shoot him. Maybe I’d shoot somebody even if nobody jumps me.”

             I didn’t like this conversation. “Who would you shoot, Gar?” 

             “I don’t know, Jeremy. Somebody. I could shoot my wife. I could shoot my daughters, you know. Lot of people do that now. Came down to needing somebody to shoot bad enough, I could shoot you, Jeremy.”

             “Not the funniest thing I ever heard, Gar.”

             “No. I know. It isn’t funny, is it?”

             “Well, let me see this gun you bought.”

             He reached under his suit coat and pulled it from his pocket. I was relieved. The talk still wasn’t funny, but he held a red and black plastic revolver, a toy.

             “Looks like a toy, doesn’t it?” he asked. He pointed the little plastic pistol toward my chest. Pale, flat blue eyes, he looked into my eyes.

             “Isn’t it?”

             “No. It isn’t a toy. It’s plastic, but they lined the barrel and the cylinder with steel. Clever thing, the way it’s built. It won’t last very long, but some guns don’t need to last a long time.”

            I stepped toward him, and he stepped back and turned the little pistol more intentionally toward me. I stopped. I didn’t know how much reality I was dealing with and how much fantasy. With Gar, sometimes I’m not sure what’s real and what isn’t.

             “Is it loaded?”

             “It’s loaded. I bought bullets. It uses 22 shorts. Low power bullets, because the steel liners are thin, to keep it looking like a toy, but I’m pretty sure 22 shorts would kill a person close up.”

             I turned and walked to the sink, washed my hands again and dried them on paper towels a long time. “Something I heard once; I don’t know if it’s true. American men take a leak and then wash their hands. French men wash their hands and then take a leak.”

            Gar laughed. 

             I said, “I’m so provincial, I’ll probably never know the answer to that or a lot of other international questions. Regional differences get blurred by international business, politics, and communications, but I’m as provincial as ever. Years ago, my brother called me provincial, and I felt insulted, but I eventually realized that isn’t an insult. I am provincial. I’ve been in three states in my whole life. I have no desire to go to Europe or the Orient or even to Niagra Falls, or to town if I can help it.”

             I watched Gar’s image in the long mirror above the sinks. He pointed the pistol at me, then let it droop until it pointed at the floor. Then he put it in his pocket and buttoned his suit coat. He walked over to the sink and washed and dried his hands.

            I said, “Me, I’m hungry. What do you think about lunch?”

             “Lunch? Sure. Let’s get some lunch. I’m hungry.”

            I held the door open, and he went out first. In that moment of closeness, when he walked by me, I could have grabbed him and wrestled for the gun, but I didn’t. For one thing, I knew from our backyard football games that Gar is stronger than he looks. Intellectual college professor with the beginning of a paunch, but he still carries power. More important, if I wrestled Gar for the gun and got it, that’s what I ‘d have, the gun and nothing else. Guns are available all over the place. He could buy another one as fast as I could talk about it.

             We ate lunch at the Chinese restaurant on 2nd Street. They have a lunch special, something close to authentic Chinese food. I’ve never been to China, so how would I know? but I worked in a Chinese restaurant, chef’s assistant and washing dishes when I was in high school. I ate with the cooks, so I got some sense of what is authentic and what they’ve adapted for American consumption.

            The waitress took our dishes away, and we drank tea until the pot was empty.

            Gar said, “I’m buying, but you’re leaving the tip.” I put two dollars on the table. Gar paid at the cash register, and we walked out into hot afternoon sunshine, six blocks to Gar’s car.

             We drove toward the outskirts of town. Gar said, “Lorraine wanted to get a car with air-conditioning when we bought this one. I said we couldn’t afford it. We could have afforded it. I just didn’t want her to have final say on every damned decision. Now, I wish we had it. I made the decision, and I declared my manhood, and now I’m too damned hot.” He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his suit coat.

            I said, “Let me look at that pistol you bought, Gar.”

             “You still think it’s a toy, don’t you?” He pulled it from his pocket and handed it to me. It wasn’t a toy. I opened the cylinder and ejected six 22 short cartridges.

            I said, “You shouldn’t carry this thing loaded.”

             “Why not?”

             “For one thing, it’s illegal. For another, this is not a well-made pistol. The hammer rests right on the cartridge. There’s no safety position. If you hit the hammer, it might go off.”

             Gar threw his head back and laughed. “Have it in my trousers, and it goes off and blows my pecker off. That would be funny. That’s what happened to Nick. He got his pecker shot off and couldn’t fuck anymore. At least he got his shot off by the enemy, didn’t do it himself through carelessness, even if his daddy did blow the top of his head off when the going got rough.”

             “Is that what’s happening with you, Gar? The going’s getting rough? It looks to me like you’re having a really good life. You have a good job, a really good family...”

             “I could have shot you back there in the restroom, Jeremy. All I had to do was pull the trigger. I tried it before I loaded it. I pull the trigger, and the hammer comes back and then falls. I don’t have to cock it first. Do you think a .22 short would kill a person?”

             “If you hit a vital spot, it would kill a person deader than hell. What I want to know is, are you serious about shooting somebody?”

             “What I want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?” He looked over at me. “You aren’t a blue-eyed boy, are you? who used to ride a water smooth silver stallion and break one two three four clay pigeons, just like that.”

             We drove from four lane, with a divider in the middle, to two lane, no divider. A truck rocketed toward us in the other lane and hung over the center line. Gar held his position close to the center lane.

            I pushed my feet hard against the floorboards. The truck roared by, inches from us. Gar flipped the bird out the window, though the truck driver couldn’t see it. “Fuck you, you stupid bastard, think I’ll chicken out.” He said, “What do you think?”

            “It doesn’t seem at all like you to talk about shooting people. But it doesn’t seem at all like you to go and buy a gun, either, and you did that.”

             “Toy gun. Just a joke. Can’t you take a joke?”

             “But it isn’t a toy gun. It’s a real gun, with real, deadly ammunition.”

             “A real gun? Well, I guess it isn’t a joke, then. Was it a joke when they took the morphine out of the first-aid kits and left a note saying the co-op owed? I guess that wasn’t a joke either. Maybe all of it is real serious. Robert didn’t shoot Pablo, did he? but it didn’t do him any good, either way. He died. Germans all around him, closing in. The story ends before it happens, but you know he’s going to take a lot of Germans with him to oblivion. Haven’t you ever thought about shooting someone?”

            Gar drove the dark blue car sixty miles an hour up the highway through farmland, then gained elevation rapidly as we drove into the foothills. I held the pistol, with the cylinder open, in my right hand and six small bullets in my left hand. We left four or five more miles of highway behind us before Gar said, “Well?”

             “Yes. I have thought about killing someone. When I found out Phil was fucking Jean, I thought about killing them both. When she left me for him, I daydreamed about lining him up in a telescopic sight and killing him with a high-powered rifle. But I didn’t do it.

            “Now they’re living their lives in joy or agony, whatever they have, and I’m a free man, happier than I ever was when I was married to Jean. I’m not locked up in some prison cell or executed for murder.”

             “Me neither. I didn’t do anything.” Another half-mile of highway, bordered now by long strips of alfalfa fields beside the river running down the canyon, fell away behind us before he said, “Yet.”

            He looked across the front seat of the car at me and laughed. “Come on. People kill each other all the time. Husbands kill wives. Wives kill husbands. Parents kill their children. Children kill their parents. Some guy gets pissed off, and he kills people he doesn’t even know. People hear about that stuff, and they know they can do that too. I know you’ve heard that song Johnny Cash sings, ‘I shot a man in Texas, just to watch him die.’ Haven’t you ever thought about shooting someone just for the hell of it?”

            “Yes, I have. I’d be a good serial killer, because I could do it as part of a careful plan, and I wouldn’t get caught until I’d established a world record. But I’ll never kill anyone intentionally, and I hope never accidentally. Thinking about it isn’t doing it.”  

             “What’s the difference?” 

             “Everything. The difference between life and death. Empathetic identification with other people, with life. A moral structure to my life, to my actions that allows me to see the difference between thinking about everything given to my mind by a violent culture and taking action based on thoughts.”

            “Right.” He let about a half-mile of alfalfa fields giving way to forests fall behind us before he said, “Wrong. What are you, a jerk, believe all this shit they feed us? From when we can understand words, they teach us all this shit about what’s right to do, but look around. Governments kill, wholesale. Our government kills, war, covert actions, its own citizens if it gains anything or if they think it gains anything. They talk peace and make war. Doublespeak. They say don’t kill, then they put everybody in uniforms and say, ‘Go kill all these people you’ve never seen before, who mean nothing to you. If you don’t, we’ll put you in prison or kill you.’”            “The world’s crazy. Do we make anything better by going crazy, too? Knowing governments are crazy and immoral doesn’t mean it makes sense to be crazy ourselves.” 

             Gar said, “As Tonto said when he and The Lone Ranger were surrounded by Indians moving in to kill them, ‘What do you mean, we, white man?’ As the Lone Ranger said, ‘Give me back my gun.’” 

             “I think I ought to hang onto it.” 

             “Why? Who are you? Who appointed you my caretaker?” 

             “Nobody. I’m just here with you. I don’t particularly want the job. I don’t know how to do the work, but maybe I don’t have any choice.”

            “Give me back the gun. It’s my gun. I paid for it. I have a receipt for it.” 

             “Kind of a dangerous situation if you’re walking around with a deadly weapon, the way you’ve been talking.”

             “What’s talk? Talking about it isn’t doing it. You said that yourself. One thing I promise, I won’t shoot you.” 

             He shifted down. We climbed the steep, winding stretch of highway close above the river. “Probably won’t.” he said. 

             I handed him the pistol. He said, “You still have the bullets, but I bought a box, and there’s fifty in a box. How’s your math? That leaves 44. 44 is a good caliber. Makes a hell of a roar. You ever hear a 44 go off up close?” His window was open. He threw the pistol. It sailed across the other lane, out over rocks, and fell toward the river. The car rolling ahead 45 miles an hour cut off my view of the pistol. Probably, it splashed into the river.

            We rode in silence for a while. Then Gar said, “Damned toy. Stupid to kill people with 22 shorts. I don’t know why I wasted my money. What I need is a 44. I looked at one before I bought the 22, but I thought, start small and work my way up.

            “I might buy a 38. My father shot himself with a 38 revolver. He shot himself in his bedroom with a 38 revolver when everyone was home. It was very messy. He was 38 years old. That was 1976, twice 38. He shot himself in the head, through the head, when he was in his bedroom, in case you’re thinking of making a joke out of that part about he shot himself in the bedroom. Don’t make jokes about it. Jokes about that kind of thing are very unfunny, asshole.”

            He drove the car up the center of the highway. An oncoming car slowed, hit the shoulder, honked the horn. Gar flipped the bird out the window at them and drove up the mountain.

            “Hey Gar, do you have any idea how strange what you’re doing is? I said nothing at all, funny or otherwise, about your father shooting himself. You carry on both sides of the conversation and get mad about my half. Both parts are your invention. I didn’t say anything at all.” 

             He laughed loudly, then looked across the car at me. He said, “You’re a lot more outspoken since I threw the gun in the river.” 

             “Wouldn’t anybody be? Wouldn’t you be?” 

             “Yeah, I suppose I would. How come you were so chickenshit when I had the gun? Did you think I would really shoot you? Jeez, as long as we’ve been friends, is that how much you trust me? Is it me, or is it all of humanity? Have you lost your faith in all of humanity, and it reflects in your reaction to me, or is it just that you’ve lost your faith in me?”

            “You’re going to have to work at deserving faith, if you want me to maintain faith. This is tiring.”

            “Boring?”

             “No, not boring. Tiring. Exhausting.”

            “I still have weapons, you know. This car is a weapon. I could drive this car into a tree at sixty miles an hour and kill us both. Or mess you up so bad, you’d wish you were dead.”

            “Or mess yourself up really bad and not die. Be crippled the rest of your life.”

            “Should I do it? You want to see what happens?” He swerved the car toward the edge of the road but yanked the wheel back so the car rocked wildly and then recovered straight up the highway again.

            “I really don’t care, Gar. Go ahead, if it makes you happy.” 

             “You don’t have any choice. Permission doesn’t mean anything to me.” He watched the highway and sped up to seventy. The car leaned heavily through curves. “Sometimes somebody mentions something to a friend because there’s nobody else to mention it to.” 

             “Out of a need to talk it through? to sound out ideas?” 

             “I don’t think so. As an amateur psychologist, you leave a hell of a lot to be desired.”            “Why don’t you write a script for me? You write it all out, and I’ll read it and act it out to the best of my ability, and you’ll have what you need.” 

             “Pretty good. Pretty good reaction. You’re giving a more honest reaction, with a fair bit of anger, since I threw the gun into the river. I suppose that’s natural enough. Nothing like a bullet for a censor.”

            “I’m getting to where I don’t care.”

             He turned off the highway onto the dirt road and drove a half-mile to my cabin, pulled up in front, and shut off the engine. 

             I said, “Come in, and I’ll make some tea.”

             “I had about a quart of tea at the restaurant.” He got out of the car, walked to the edge of the parking area, and pissed. He walked back and stood by the driver’s door of his car.

            I said, “Come in anyway and sit down a while.”

             “I’m going to a professional counselor once a week, for plenty of money. Why should I submit to amateur counseling from you?”

             “When did conversations between us become counseling?”

             “When I told you I might want to shoot someone. Now the only thing you can think about is how to straighten me out so I don’t shoot anyone.”

             “How do you know what goes on in my mind?”

             “I know. You’re a big, soft heart, out to save the world. You can’t change the world, not even your own life. You couldn’t save your marriage. You couldn’t even get visiting rights with your kids. You can’t stop wars. You can’t feed hungry people. But here’s somebody you’ve influenced, going off the deep end and going to kill people. If you straighten me out, you save the lives of the people I might kill. Maybe you save my life. All that life saving gives your life meaning. Fuck you, sonny. Get your meaning yourself. Don’t lean on me for your cheap thrills.”

            He got into his car, slammed the door hard, spun his wheels turning around, and drove too fast down the dirt road toward the highway. I listened to the roar of his engine and wondered if it might be good if he wrecked the car and killed himself. Sound faded into distance.

             I knew his psychiatrist’s name. I looked up her phone number and called her. I said I was very concerned about Gar. She said, “I don’t discuss patients, even as far as identifying them as patients.”

            I said, “I think we have a very dangerous situation. He’s talking about killing people.”

            She said, “I don’t discuss patients. You’ll have to figure out how to handle this yourself.” She hung up.

            Midnight, the phone rang. I grabbed it in the dark. Gar said, “Jesus Christ, blood all over. I didn’t realize there’d be so damned much blood. I didn’t even think about the blood. Should be able to shoot somebody without it being so damned bloody, don’t you think?”

            I stared into the dark inside my cabin. He laughed so loud, I had to move the phone away from my ear. “You dumb shit,” he said. “You don’t know what to believe, do you? The funnest part of going nuts is if I can drive somebody else nuts in the process. They can take us together up to the hospital. That’s going to be fun, being in there side by side, old buddies. I’ll talk about shooting people, and you’ll give me moralistic bullshit about how we all need to love our fellow man. They’ll keep us both locked up, me because I’m so God damned dangerous and you because you’re so God damned stupid.”

            He hung up. I got out of bed, walked naked outside, sat down on a rotting pine log in moonlight, and looked up at the sky, washed pale yellow with light from the waning moon.

            I moved to this isolated cabin to avoid most contact with a troubled world, so I could have a time of calmness to try to figure out what next step would make sense for me. I didn’t even get a good start figuring out anything, and here I am, beginning to feel cold in the moonlight, and the world follows me into my refuge. After a while, I went back inside, got in bed, and slept.

            Six o’clock in the morning, the sun rises above tall pine trees growing from the ridge and shines onto and into my cabin. The phone rings. Lorraine says, “He hit me. He broke most of the dishes and everything he could in the kitchen. He says he won’t talk to anybody but you. I don’t know where he is. He went out the front door and up the hill. It took me an hour to get Angelina and Penny calmed down.”

            I got there as soon as I could. Lorraine gave me coffee and breakfast. We took it out on the deck and sat in sunshine, the quiet of forest around us. Clean, calm water of the lake lay below the house. Penny and Angelina stayed close to Lorraine. We waited. Lorraine said, “He’ll see your car and come down and talk to you.”

            After an hour, I said, “I can’t sit here and wait. I’ll walk up the hill and see if I can find him.”

            Lorraine touched my arm when I stood up. “Please stay within sight of the house. I’m afraid of him now. I don’t know what he’ll do.”

            At the top of the first ridge, Gar sat on a stump from logging thirty years ago. I walked toward him, then turned and looked back. I couldn’t see the house. I turned and looked at Gar again. He held a large, nickel-plated revolver aimed at me. He said, “What I left out when we talked about guns coming up in the car, I already had this one up here in a wooden box wrapped in a plastic sack, shoved under a log.”

            He sat in mountain sunshine. I stood on top of the ridge in pine and fir forest. A flicker called from some close tree. A steller’s jay raised a fuss farther away. Three birds flew up the mountain. I didn’t know what kind of birds they were. I just saw them in my peripheral vision. Front and center, I kept my eyes on Gar.

            “What kind of a pistol is it, Gar?”

            “44. It appealed to me because all the old gunslingers carried 44s. Didn’t they? Didn’t they carry 44s?”

            I shrugged. “45s, 44s, 38s, I think. Some of the women might have carried 32s. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Some people say guns everywhere on the frontier never happened. It’s a Hollywood myth. Mostly, people didn’t have guns. There weren’t that many around until after the civil war, and then outlaws mostly had them.”

            Gar kept his pistol leveled toward me. He said, “Outlaw guns, and only outlaws have guns.”

            I tried to look at Gar and not the pistol, but sticking out in front of him like that, I couldn’t help seeing the damned thing, the weapon, the instrument he held. Ugly. Or not. Just metal and wood. Or plastic. I asked Gar, “The grips on that, wood or plastic?”

            “Wood.” He turned the pistol and looked at the grips. “Shit. You insult me. You think I’d pay over three hundred for a pistol and accept plastic? How long have you known me?”

            “About five years. Didn’t mean to rile you. Just making conversation. Probably means more to talk about sunshine. I do love this warm sunshine.”

            He brought the pistol around and aimed along the barrel at me, cocked the pistol. He said, “Hear that blue jay? It talks nonsense, because it doesn’t know any words. I might shoot that bird, just to watch the feathers fly. Good rhyme there, ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, might shoot that blue jay and watch the feathers fly.’ You don’t have to talk nonsense, because you know words. I remember that. Once in a while, the five years we knew each other, you talked sense, so I know you can do it. Shut up until you can say something that makes sense.”

            Warm sunshine. I feel groggy. I thought and worried last night when I should have slept.

            I said, “I have to sit down. I’m going to walk over and sit on that old piece of log.”

            “So, walk over. For that matter, keep walking. Walk out of here and go home. Keep your life. Mind your own business.”

            I walked over and sat down on the log end. “I don’t think I can.”

            “Our hero. Sacrifice your life, and you still can’t stop what’s happening here. You can’t get close enough to me to do anything about the pistol, because if you get closer to me than twenty feet, I’ll shoot you. Once I take that first step and shoot somebody, it’ll be easier to shoot other people. Moral breakdown never reverses itself. Even you should know that, ignorant asshole that you are. The hardest step is shooting the first person. After that, it gets easy. You’re letting everything you know about the history of the people slip out of your leaking brain. There isn’t any use trying to teach anything to assholes who are ignorant to the core. You should see the papers I get.”

            “Every paper I did for your classes, I got an A on it. You remember that?”

            “One of the more intelligent ignorant assholes, that much is clear. I don’t deny that. You intelligent people are all so uneducated. Jesus Christ, I couldn’t have imagined so much ignorance if I’d tried to make up some kind of fiction. I wouldn’t invent this much ignorance, because nobody would believe it. I don’t believe it, and I see it every day.”

            I can’t wear out. I already ruled out trying to jump Gar. If I jumped him and didn’t get his gun, I’ve blown it for everyone, because I’ve got him riled up. He’s sitting there looking for a reaction from me, something to give him something dangerous to shoot at.

            He asks me, “What the hell are you doing?”

            “Lying down. Trying to find a comfortable place here in the dirt and pine duff.”

            “Why?”

            “I’m going to sleep. I didn’t sleep much last night after you called. I’m pretty tired.”

            “I can shoot you in your sleep.”

            “I know.”

            “That might not be as much fun. If you’re standing up when I shoot you, the bullet knocks you down. Some drama there, physical stuff, bullet hits you, slams you flat on the ground, bam, maybe dust rises. If you’re already lying down, you can’t fall. All that happens is you die, and I might not even be able to see that. I mean, maybe I can’t tell, just looking, when you die.”

            “Not just I die, but you kill me. Gar kills Jeremy. It’s your action. I don’t choose to die. I definitely don’t want to die. So it’s in your hands. Meanwhile, I’m going to catch some sleep.”

            “Don’t go to sleep.”

            “Can’t help it.”

            “Don’t go to sleep. I need to talk to you.”

            “That’s what Lorraine said. She said you said you’d talk to me, but now it looks like all you want to do is shoot me. That’s tiring and boring. I’m tired and sleepy, and I’m going to go to sleep.”

            Quiet in warm sunshine of the mountain morning.

            “Jeremy.”

            “Try to be quiet. I really need to catch a nap.”

            “Jeremy, did Lorraine tell you when I blew up, we were talking about me going into a mental hospital?”

            “Yes. She did.”

            “I’d go. I guess I would. I’ve been there before. Maybe it isn’t so bad, but they gave me shock treatments. I don’t want that.” I turned my face away from him. I heard him walk toward me until he stood over me. He yelled. “That’s so fucking stupid. Did it do me any good? Nothing. None. No good but very God damned painful. Assholes think they can make you walk the line if they torture you enough. Drive you sane cause you’re so afraid of the pain, you make damn sure not to vary from straight and true. Insane when you realize you can’t stay on that line, so they’re going to do it to you again and again, and you have absolutely no power in what they do.” The last sentence, he tapered back to conversational volume. Then he said, “Take this, now.” I sat up and took the pistol. I stood up. I opened the cylinder, dropped the cartridges out, and put them in my pocket. I didn’t want the heavy, awkward pistol but I wasn’t going to give it back to Gar. I tried carrying it under my belt, but it was too heavy. I took it out and carried it in my hand.

“If they’ll guarantee no shock treatments, I’ll go.”

            We walked back to the house.

            Lorraine phoned and told the people at the hospital we would be there late the next day. She took Penny and Angie to Julia’s. I stayed with Gar. Gar sank into resignation, rose to rebellion, sank into acquiescence. He said, “I have to go. Nobody can predict what I’m going to do. I can’t even predict what I’m going to do. Ask me a month ago would I go out and buy guns and start threatening to kill people I love, I’d laugh you under the ground.”

            I thought Gar fell asleep lying on the couch. I drifted toward dozing. Gar stood up, grabbed a butcher knife he’d hidden in the couch and jumped toward me, swinging the big knife out in front of him, “Asshole, jerk, bastard, fucking my wife, killing my kids, lying, cheating, betray me. Stupid, uneducated, ignorant.”

            I couldn’t move fast enough to stop him, but he turned and threw the knife, shattered the kitchen window over the sink, and the knife fell in the grass outside. Gar laughed, “Jesus Christ, Jeremy, don’t you have any faith whatsoever? Would I hurt you? You’re my best friend. You’d better take some of these pills Lorraine got for me. They mellow me down and make everything calm. You’d really like them. They’re prescription.”

            Lorraine and I took turns staying close to Gar through the night. We pulled out before daylight, headed north 500 miles to the hospital he’d been in before, where he agreed to go.

            Long trip. So what’s the matter with me? isn’t there another way to handle this? I think that’s what the psychiatrist meant. Handle it among the people. Everybody take responsibility for the people around you. Insane-making is when everybody backs away and says, “Not me. I don’t take care of crazy people. Not my profession. I got to make my own way in the world, let alone...”

            Gar comes up from lying down across the back seat. He’s dug down in the food and stuff we brought and got a glass bottle of juice, swings it toward my head. In the mirror above the windshield, I see him rise and swing, Lorraine’s supposed to be watching him, drifted into sleep. Gar yells, “Have some juice,” stops just short barely short, a wonder the juice doesn’t come on through the glass, the width of a hair from my right ear. Frozen action, holds the bottle almost to my ear and suddenly stopped, and I don’t even wreck the car or anything bloody when my heart refuses to do anything five beats, and then I breathe, and my heart, thud, resumes.

            “You thought I’d do it. You thought your head was splattered all over the inside of the car. Shit, you stupid bastard. Would I kill somebody driving the car I’m riding in? You think I’m crazy? Lorraine, this medicine you’re giving me, it’s dog shit. It doesn’t do anything. Is this all they could manage? Is this a prescription? What kind of a prescription? They keep dogs in back of the store. When they need pills, they go out there and scoop up dog shit and punch it into little pills and coat it up like this. Guys like me eat this dog shit and feel better. Or we eat the dog shit, and our wives feel better, and our asshole friends, drivers feel better, safe, never do know it’s just dog shit.”

            I parked the car in front of the long brick building. Gar said, “Come in with me, Jeremy. I need you with me.” I started to get out of the car. He said, “Sit down. Get back in the car. Use your head. Think about what’s happening here, for Christ’s sake. Do I want you to witness this? You think you serve some kind of function here, feel necessary? You didn’t do anything. I would have decided to come here on my own. Sit down and keep your mouth shut.” He started to walk away with Lorraine, turned back, said, “Some friend. Won’t even come in with me, rid of me soon, talks me into going, but scared to be there when it happens. You’re scared they’ll point at you, say, ‘You did it. You’re the one. Betrayer. Judas.’”

            I got out of the car, and Gar said, “Shut up and wait here. This is a time of shame, don’t you understand that? You think I need you to harvest my shame? You some kind of vulture, feed off other people’s hard times? You’ve done enough, betray me, turn me over to these killers, that’s enough.”

            Lorraine tries to get Gar to go with her. Gar starts to walk away from the car, turns back toward me, says, “You need to see a psychiatrist. You’d better check yourself into a mental institution, want to know the truth, Jeremy. Anybody gets jerked this way and that way by what a crazy man says, listening to the wrong voices entirely, wouldn’t you say, my dear sweet friend?” He turns and walks toward the front door of the big, pale brick building.

            He stops and turns toward me and shouts, “People get out of these places. They do, you know. You’re a long way from safe. I’ll be coming to see you. I could even fake being sane, you know. Some people do it, and you know I’m smarter.” He turns and walks away again. Lorraine trots to keep up with him. His big, loose sweater billows out behind him like a cape full of wind.

            In front of the mental institution, I take the keys from the ignition, put them in my pocket, lock the doors of the car, and fall asleep.

            Lorraine raps on the metal above the car door. “Jeremy, unlock the door. Jeremy, let me in,” and I do. I try to wake up. “Jeremy, I’m going to drive. Get out and go around. Jeremy. Give me the keys.” I give her the keys, walk around the car, wait until she leans across and unlocks the passenger door, and I get in.

            “Lorraine, did they guarantee no shock treatments?”

            “They won’t guarantee anything. They said that would be letting us run the treatment, and they aren’t going to do that. Now you know. You want to go back and get him?”

            I buckle my seat belt and shut the door. I say, “That wouldn’t work either.” Half a block, I‘m asleep again.

            I wake when she parks the car. She says, “I’m getting a room. Either of us drives another mile, we’ll die in a car wreck when we run off the road, asleep.”

            Small room, two beds. Lorraine says, “This was all they had.”

            I don’t react. I’m tired. I’m in bed asleep when Lorraine finishes her shower and climbs in the other bed.

            By the clock on the night stand, it’s four in the morning when Lorraine climbs into bed with me. I’m slow to figure out where I am and to wake up. She’s shaking and crying and soft and warm. “Jeremy, I need you to hold me. I’m so scared and lonely, I’m going crazy. Please hold me.”

            I try to refuse, but I’m lonely and afraid, too. We hold each other in the single bed. She lies against me and hugs me tight against her. She is soft, warm, and naked. I push her onto her back, move above her and then into her, caress her with my hands, all of me. We move together a long time in an anonymous hotel room only a few miles toward home from the mental institution, until she cries out and surges against me in orgasm. I immediately come in her, and we both fall deeply into sleep until she pushes against me. “Jeremy, I need to breathe. Off.”

            I roll onto my back. I’m warm and relaxed, but it keeps running around in my head, Who’s crazy? This is crazy. This is really nuts. Do I have any control over my life, over what I do?

            I say, “Gar is my best friend.”

            “He’s my husband, I think you could say that makes him my best friend.”

            We’re quiet. Then she says, “There’s different kinds of crazy. If you can get along with the world, you can be any kind of crazy you want to be.”

            We lie against each other, arms and legs entwined, and sleep. 9:30, she gets out of bed, and that wakes me. She says, “Come on. We have to hit the road. I told Julia I’d be back tonight, and I want to try for that. Angie and Penny need me.”

            We speed south over concrete and asphalt. We eat from the basket Lorraine put together before we started north. Miles fall away beneath humming tires. I drive Gar and Lorraine’s car into Julia’s driveway and shut off the motor. We go into Julia’s house, gather Angie and Penny and take them home and get them settled in their beds. It’s midnight. My car is still parked outside. In my mind, I keep seeing Gar turn toward me and yell at me, “People get out of these places. I’ll be coming to see you.” and walk away into cold wind.

            Lorraine and Gar’s daughters sleep soundly. Lorraine and I leave their room and walk back into the living room. Lorraine stops in the middle of the high-ceilinged room and looks at me. We stand there, lost in fog of tiredness. Lorraine steps forward and hugs me. I hold her against me. She says, “You can’t go home this late. Stay with me and go home tomorrow.”

            If I walk out and climb into my car, I will be too tired to drive. I will crash into a tree and die or be horribly injured. My thoughts die before I can form them into words.

            I hold Lorraine against me. She says, “In the morning, I have to start repairing the damage. I have to figure out where to go from here. Everything is impossible. I can’t face this.” Her tears soak through my shirt and warm my chest. I hold her against me. Tears run down my face and into her hair. The night lies quietly against the house, across the lake, through forest on the mountain. Above the darkness of night on the spinning earth, stars shine brightly across the universe. The moon rises above pine trees on the high ridge.