goes down in the middle of an immense battle. He lies paralyzed on his back on the cold earth, with chaos all around. Nothing above the soldier but sky, lofty sky. He can’t move; he can only look up. The hero lies wondering how he could have missed the central truth of existence until that moment: the whole world and all the hearts of men are as nothing, lined up underneath the infinite blue.
“I’m so sorry, Ray. I forgot about this part. We can skip ahead.”
The eyes howl up at her again. But maybe it’s not the fiction that baffles him. Maybe he just can’t figure out why his wife keeps crying.
Dinner turns again into a protracted campaign, another land war in Asia. She tucks him in front of the TV. Then she goes out, for a second dinner. Hers. Alan meets her at the door of his workshop. His hair is powdered with wood shavings. His eyes, too, howl a little. She looks away. He takes her in his arms, and it’s horribly like coming home. Her fiancé-to-be. Can you have a fiancé, when the divorce has been held up by what her husband’s profession likes to call an act of God?
“How was your day?” And yes, he expects her to answer. But tonight, eating take-out General Tso amid the dismembered violins and violas and cellos, the neckless bodies, the bare white top plates hanging in rows on wires, the split maple backs, the smell of spruce and willow blocks, the chunks of pure ebony for fingerboards, the bits of boxwood and recovered mahogany for the fittings, it’s just a question of breathing in, one lungful after the other.
She clicks her disposable chopsticks. “I wish we’d met when we were younger. You should have seen me then.”
“Aw, no. Older wood is much better. Trees from high up on the northern faces of mountains.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“It’s a shame I’m so old. I could get good at this.” He waves at the plates of shaved, carved bodies hanging from the rafters. “I’m just now beginning to understand how wood works.”
Two hours later, she comes home. Ray must hear the car pulling up the drive, the garage door opening, her key in the back door. But when she enters the room, his eyes are closed and his jagged mouth hangs slack. On the TV, people are laughing like banshees at each other’s jokes. She shuts off the set and comes around the bed to turn the stained covers back over his stiff frame. His one good claw snags her wrist. The eyes scream open, that look of hell and murder. She jumps and cries out. Then she’s calm and reassuring him.
Always the gentlest man in the world. Sat through her escapades with the patience of a saint. Cried a little when she announced the end, and said he only wanted what was best for her. That she could stay and do what she wanted. That if she were in trouble, she would always have him. She’s in trouble now. And yes. Him. Hers. Always.
“Ray! Gosh. I thought you were sleeping.” He slews out something murky enough to be chanted Sanskrit. “What’s that?” She leans in for an agonizing game of charades with no pantomime. Two syllables, both smeared. “Again, Ray.”
As it did in life before death, his patience exceeds hers. The muscles on his unfrozen side thrash. All kinds of specters graze her skin and run their fingers through her hair. “RayRay. I’m sorry. I can’t tell what you’re saying.”
More sounds trickle out of his half-moving lips. She leans back in and hears. At first she hears: Right. The real request seems so unlikely she doesn’t get it for a moment. Write. She hunts down pen and paper, despite all reason. She puts the pen into his marginal hand and watches the fingers move like the needle on a seismograph. It takes him minutes to make a few awful scratches.
She stares at the tangle of tremors and sees nothing. Nonsense, but she can’t say that to whatever man is still trapped in the rubble. Then a word emerges, and sense crashes into her. She starts sobbing, tugging at his stiff arm, telling him what he already knows. “You’re right. You’re right!” Six letters, starts with an R. Bud’s comforting comeback. Releaf.
TWENTY SPRINGS is no time at all. The hottest year ever measured comes and goes. Then another. Then ten more, almost every one of them among the hottest in recorded