Communion

Arctic Circle

The young men and women of the high reaches of ice devised a party for themselves. In a very cold freeze, a group of ten or twelve gathered in one boy’s father’s barn. In amongst the smells and shuffling of the livestock, the girls dared to unwrap the bundles they’d become. As they watched them do it, the boys tried very hard to breathe, then they themselves quickly remembered to follow suit. Without those many layers, all of them were like pupae, naked in a new skin. They pretended it was summer, very far away, that one of them might, at any moment, break into a sweat. The boys fanned the girls; the girls blew cool breezes into the boys’ ears. One girl, at the height of all this merriment, fumbled through her discarded parka. She found the dimpled orange globe she had buried there. When she ripped the skin, tore it off in one long, curling piece, the smell—that of a faraway, foreign summer where things are light and sweet and very warm—filled the barn. The rose-fleshed girls and the scrawny boys watched, rapt, as she took the sweet sections, one by one, into her cold mouth.

Masks

This was the game: they took turns by the black-ice creek. One boy unwrapped his carefully muffled head and turned his back to the others. He proceeded to hold his now naked head out against the blue-cold elements. His mouth curled into a long, thin grimace. The tips of his ears turned red, threatened purple. When he could stand it no longer, he brought his hands to either temple and then worked the skin inward and down. In the freezing cold, the skin had lost its elasticity. His forehead held the wrinkles. He had aged by decades. He then turned and presented this new old face to the circle of his friends, all of them presumably unblemished and still young beneath their bundles. The warm ones pointed and convulsed, delighted, and the one who’d made his face turn dead could then scramble for his coverings, blood slowly returning to warm and rejuvenate his cheeks, his ears, the very tip of his nose. Then another boy turned his back and the game started again. One boy after another. Face after face. In the relentless, impossible cold, near the very top of the world. This, a simple sacrament of defiance and resurrection.

†

Vows

He was a very handsome man. In this way and in others, he was a man of extremes. It was something she knew about him.

When they went to visit his mother, the old woman made them split pea soup with fatty ham hocks and she treated them like two children. There was the smell of wood smoke. Store-bought pastries for dessert. Then the long ride home along the bucolic state roads.

—I just want to know why you said what you said. He did not take his eyes from the road.

—I haven’t said a word for ninety minutes straight, she said.

—You know what I mean. What you said about the light coming in the window in the morning.

—My god that was Wednesday.

—It was Friday.

—Wednesday and Friday are the same thing, nearly. She turned her head away from him and caught a whiff of her own hair: salon shampoo, traces of wood smoke. The sky was gray. The trees had leaves but not many.

—It’s a free country, he said. You can say what you want. But when you’re with another person, in that context—

—Everything is pregnant with meaning.

—Something, yes. It’s pregnant with something. I wouldn’t have picked that metaphor.

—I think it’s not a metaphor anymore. It’s just a cliché.

—You’re not going to tell me why you said it, are you?

—I’m almost positive I don’t know.

And that was it for a long time.

He was tired. It was almost nighttime. They found a service station at a crossroads and stopped. He rubbed his eyes and she pushed open the heavy door.

—I have to pee, she said.

—You’re driving the rest of the way, he said. I can’t keep my eyes open.

He took her silence as acceptance. Then she broke it.

—I said what I said because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

—And that’s what you managed?

—I couldn’t think of anything else, she said, and then she went to pee.

With no ceremony, he climbed out of the car to pump the gas. In the far corner of the lot, almost behind the station, three wiry young men drank beer from silver cans and leaned on a muddy pick-up with oversized tires. One of them crushed a can and tossed it into the bed. She walked in their direction, toward the women’s restroom. As he pumped the gas, he noticed the dress she was wearing for the first time. This dress was wasted on a visit to his mother. A pale yellow thing, almost but not quite white. It clung close to her trim torso and then billowed into sheer whimsy around her long legs. The weather was a fraction too cold for this dress and she was not wearing her coat. She hugged herself to keep warm. Until he heard the low whistle and the accompanying muffled guffaws, he had not even seen her in this dress. The figure she cut. After she disappeared into the restroom, he found he had been holding his breath. He exhaled and returned to the duty at hand, inserting the nozzle into the tank and trying to push the moment out of his mind. A stream of pink leaked across the sky, near the horizon. The adjacent field was bare and stubbly, plucked clean of whatever it once produced. He was wide awake.

—I thought you wanted me to drive.

—I’m not tired anymore. The fresh air woke me up. I can go the rest of the way.

He twisted the gas cap until it clicked several times and took two heavy strides toward the driver’s seat.

It wasn’t that he heard what they said. He did not have to hear it. Young men—men of any age—achieve a tenor and a tone in the general proximity of other men. This is older than tribal. Therefore he did not need to hear the words to know in an instant that they were directed at him, as were the raucous, astringent peals of laughter that followed.

He was a man of extremes. Capable of profound silences, silences in which he disappeared completely. But a vein of intense feeling—a full volume intensity—ran through it. Or just underneath it. In circumstances such as these, he could dredge up a wholly different version of himself. He paused, stood straight, and raised both fists—middle fingers erect—in the direction of the truck. He held the gesture for several seconds, lest it be mistaken for something other than what it was.

And then he got in the car and drove away.

The last act of this particular gray sky was to break into an astonishing range of reds and yellows and oranges just along the horizon line. She found that she had—almost without meaning to—placed her slim pinkie finger on the cool, flat passenger’s side window. The unselfconscious gesture of a child. Though it was, of course, impossible, she wanted to somehow touch these bright colors that had burst from nowhere and nothing.

—You’ll make a smudge, he said, without looking over. Months or even weeks before, she might have teased him for being so predictable, so stuffy, and then she would have squeezed his knee or even ran her hand up his thigh, to see if she could get him to react. But now she simply allowed her finger to curl into her palm, which she dropped into her lap. With the stubby digit of his thumb, he depressed the button on the steering wheel that brought the stereo to life. Brahms. The music was too loud for her, she could not think, but he turned it up. She closed her eyes and put her head on the rest but it was too hard for even pretending to rest, and, with her eyes shut, the music became that much louder. She decided that the day had turned finally and irrevocably bad.

At first it was a persistent sense of manic, unbridled energy hulking too close behind them. He did not even bother a glance at the rearview. He kept calm. He took his foot off the accelerator, allowed the car to lose a fraction of its momentum, and then again put his thumb to work, this time setting the cruise control. They had just entered a long stretch of straight, flat road, and the enticement seemed to work. The truck accelerated, crossed the double yellow line, and growled up to pass them. He tapped the brake to disengage the cruise and the car faded back. A signal of deference. But instead of passing, the truck edged ahead just enough so that the bed was in line with his window. He tried to fight the urge to look over, but he looked. Three young men crouched there. All three of them wore broad grins on their faces. His gesture at the filling station was an invitation they accepted with what could only be described as profound joy. He turned away from them and kept his eyes forward. They will throw something at the car, he thought. He resigned himself to it. Beer cans, probably. He hoped the cans would be empty. The dents and dings would require a week or more in the body shop. This could no longer be helped. He began to construct a feasible reaction for her sake, something that conveyed surprise and indignation. In his periphery, he felt her lean forward and look past him to see what was happening.

She made a noise—a small, startled noise—and she trailed off.

Despite himself, he looked again. One of the young men had raised up, almost to his full height, as the other two helped anchor him. His black hair whipped and he squinted from the force of the wind. He had loosened his fly, and reached into his pants. What he pulled out was ropy and thick. Impossibly long. Equine.

—Jesus, he said. He pressed the accelerator and pulled forward but the truck soon matched the smooth, quiet precision of the car’s German engine with its own loud American thrust.

—Slow down, she said. Let them pass.

—They’re not trying to pass. It’s a prank.

—No, she said, there’s another car.

The sun had set and there was now just the blue pall before the full-fledged night. She was right. In the distance, a set of headlights advanced toward them. He eased his foot further into the accelerator but the pick-up surged forward with him.

—Slow down, she said.

He knew nothing good could come of this, that there was no graceful extrication. He knew that he must slow down and that, in the end, he would. Still, he allowed himself a few more seconds of rash, reckless, and unrelenting speed. She put her hand to the dash, closed her eyes. A deep thud sounded from the rear flank of the car and she let out a loud gasp. Two more deep thuds. They were throwing full beer cans. He let himself believe they were now perhaps, in fact, afraid and—he could not help it—he felt himself grinning.

—Stop it, she shouted. Stop.

The oncoming headlights were close enough now to see that they were attached to something larger than just a car or even a pick-up truck. Something big, industrial. He brought the car into a pronounced deceleration. Her seatbelt caught her slight lunge forward and pressed her back into her seat. The pick-up zoomed ahead in that instant and made an S-shaped swerve into the proper lane.

He braced for one last salvo, lobbed directly into the windshield, but it never came. Instead the pick-up motored on. Moments later, the oncoming vehicle—a passel of logs stacked high in its long bed—rumbled past. The car was now nearly stopped on the empty road. It gave a small shudder in the wake of the passing logs. A moment later, in the irrevocable stillness, it moved forward into what had become a vast but simple darkness.

Manna

The boil of his brain and an afternoon constitutional, up the long hill. His heart a flibberty-gibbet in his chest. A flapping bird. The ocular symptoms: a flutter in the middle of his visual field. Most days it is all he can do to trudge down the hill and back