A Collapse of Horses Read online

  That might have gone on for a long time—even forever, or the equivalent. But then in my walks I stumbled upon, or perhaps was led to, something. It was a paddock. I saw horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead. They couldn’t be dead, could they? I looked to see if I could tell if they were breathing and found I could not. I could not say honestly if they were dead or alive, and I still cannot say. I noticed a man on the far side of the paddock filling their trough with water, facing away from them, and wondered if he had seen the horses behind him, and if not, when he turned, whether he would be as unsettled as I. Would he approach them and determine they were dead, or would his approach startle them to life? Or had he seen them dead already and had his mind been unable to take it in?

  For a moment I waited. But at the time, in the moment, there seemed something more terrible to me about the idea of knowing for certain that the horses were dead than there was about not knowing whether they were dead or alive. And so I hastily left, not realizing that to escape a moment of potential discomfort, I was leaving them forever in my head as not quite dead but, in another sense, nearly alive. That to leave as I had was to assume the place of the man beside the trough without ever being able to turn and learn the truth.

  In the days that followed, that image haunted me. I turned it over, scrutinized it, peered at every facet of it, trying to see if there was something I had missed, if there was a clue that would sway me toward believing the horses were alive or believing they were dead. If there was a clue to reveal to me that the man beside the trough knew more than I had believed. To no avail. The problem remained insolubly balanced. If I go back, I couldn’t help asking myself, will anything have changed? Would the horses still, even now, be lying there? If they were, would they have begun to decay in a way that would prove them dead? Or would they be exactly as I had last seen them, including the man still filling the trough? What a terrifying thought.

  Since I’d stumbled upon the paddock, I didn’t know exactly where it was. Every walk I went on, even every step I took away from the house, I risked stumbling onto it again. I began walking slower, stopping frequently, scrutinizing my surroundings and shying away from any area that might remotely harbor a paddock. But after a while, I deemed even that insufficiently safe, and I found myself hardly able to leave the house.

  And yet with the house always changing, I couldn’t remain there either. There was, I gradually realized, a simple choice: either I would have to steel myself and return and confront the horses, or I would have to confront the house.

  Either horse or house, either house or horse—but what sort of choice was that really? The words were hardly different, pronounced more or less the same, with only one letter having accidentally been dialed up too high or too low in the alphabet. No, I came to feel, by going out to avoid the house and finding the horses I had, in a matter of speaking, simply found the house again. It was, it must be, that the prone horses were there for me, to teach a lesson to me, that they were meant to tell me something about their near namesake, the house.

  The devastation of that scene, the collapse of the horses, gnawed on me. It was telling me something. Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.

  At first, part of me resisted the idea. No, I told myself, it was too extreme a step. Lives were at stake. The lives of my wife and at least three children. The risks were too great.

  But what was I to do? In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses, and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? I kept imagining myself there at the trough, paralyzed, unable to turn and look, and it came to seem to me my perpetual condition. In my worst moments, it seemed the state not only of me, but of the whole world, with all of us on the verge of turning around and finding the dead behind us. And from there, I slipped back to the house—which, like the horses, seemed in a sort of suspended state. I knew it was changing, that something strange was happening. I was sure of that at least, but I didn’t know how or what the changes meant, and I couldn’t make anyone else see them. When it came to the house, I tried to convince myself, I could see what others could not, but the rest of the world was like the man filling the horse trough, unable to see the fallen horses.

  Thinking this naturally led me away from the idea of the house and back instead to the horses. What I should have done, I told myself, was to have thrown a rock. I should have stooped and scraped the dirt until my fingers closed around a stone, then shied it at one of the horses, waiting either for the meaty thud of dead flesh or the shudder and annoyed whicker of a struck living horse. Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment. No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced.

  And so I turned away from the house and went back to look for the paddock, steeling myself for whatever I would find. I was ready, rock in hand. I would find out the truth about the horses, and I would accept it, no matter what it was.

  Or at least I would have. But no matter how hard I looked, no matter how long I walked, I could not find the paddock. I walked for miles, days even. I took every road, known and unknown, but it simply wasn’t there.

  Was something wrong with me? I wondered. Had the paddock existed at all? Was it simply something my mind had invented to cope with the problem of the house?

  House, horse—horse, house: almost the same word. For all intents and purposes, in this case, it was the same word. I would still throw a rock, so to speak, I told myself, but I would throw that so-called rock not at a horse, but at a house.

  But still I hesitated, thinking, planning. Night after night I sat imagining coils of smoke writhing around me followed by rising flames. In my head, I watched myself waiting patiently, calmly, until the flames had reached just the right height, then I began to call out to my family, awakening them, urging them to leave the house. In my head we unfurled sheets through windows and shimmied nimbly to safety. We reached safety every time. I saw our escape so many times in my head, rendered in just the same way, that I realized it would take the smallest effort on my part to jostle it out of the realm of imagination and into the real world. Then the house would be gone and could do me no more damage, and my family and I would be safe.

  I had had enough unpleasant interactions with those who desired to give me treatment since my accident, however, that I knew to take steps to protect myself. I would have to make the fire look like an accident. For this purpose, I took up smoking.

  I planned carefully. I smoked for a few weeks, just long enough to accustom my wife and children to the idea. They didn’t care for it, but they did not try to stop me. Since my accident, they had been shy of me and rarely tried to stop me from doing anything.

  Seemingly as a concession to my wife, I agreed not to smoke in the bedroom. I promised to smoke only outside the house. With the proviso that, if it was too cold to smoke outside, I might do so downstairs, near an open window.

  During the third or perhaps fourth week after I took up smoking, with my wife and children asleep, it was indeed too cold—or at least I judged that I could argue it to have been such if confronted after the fact. So I cracked open the window near the couch and prepared the images in my mind. I would, I told myself, allow my arm to droop, the tip of my cigarette to nudge against the fabric of the couch. And then I would allow first the couch and then the drapes to begin to smoke and catch fire. I would wait until the moment when, in my fantasies, I had envisioned myself standing and calling for my wife and children, then I would do just that and all would be as I had envisioned. Soon my family and I would be safe, and the house would be destroyed.

  Once that was done, I thought, perhaps I would find the paddock again as well, with the horses standing this time and clearly alive.

  And yet, the fabric of the couch did not catch fire, instead only smoldering and stinking, and soon I pressed the cigarette in too deeply and it died. I found and lit another; when the result was the same
, I gave up on both the couch and the cigarette.

  I turned instead to matches and used them to ignite the drapes. As it turned out, these burned much better, going up all at once and lighting my hair and clothing along with them.

  By the time I’d flailed about enough to extinguish my body, the whole room was aflame. Still, I continued with my plan. I tried to call to my wife and children, but when I took a breath to do so, my lungs filled with smoke and, choking, I collapsed.

  I do not know how I lived through the fire. Perhaps my wife dragged me out and then went back for the children and perished only then. When I awoke, I was here, unsure of how I had arrived. My face and body were badly burned, and the pain was excruciating. I asked about my family, but the nurse dodged the question, shushed me, and only told me I should sleep. This was how I knew my family was dead, that they had been lost in the fire and the nurse didn’t know how to tell me. My only consolation was that the house, the source of all our problems, had burned to the ground.

  For a time I was kept alone, drugged. How long, I cannot say. Perhaps days, perhaps weeks. Long enough in any case for my burns to slough and heal, for the skin grafts that I must surely have needed to take effect, for my hair to grow fully back. The doctors must have worked very hard on me, for I must admit that except to the most meticulous eye, I look exactly as I did before the fire.

  So, you see, I have the truth straight in my mind, and it will not be easy to change. There is little point in you coming to me with these stories, little point in pretending once again that my house remains standing and was never touched by flame. Little point coming here pretending to be my wife, claiming there was no fire, that you found me lying on the floor in the middle of our living room with my eyes staring fixedly into the air, seemingly unharmed.

  No, I have accepted that I am the victim of a tragedy, one of my own design. I know my family is gone, and though I do not yet understand why you would want to convince me that you are my wife, what you hope to gain, eventually I will. You will let something slip, and the game will be over. At worst, you are deliberately trying to deceive me so as to gain something from me. But what? At best, someone has decided this might lessen the blow, that if I can be made to believe my family is not dead, or even just mostly dead and not quite alive, I might be convinced not to surrender to despair.

  Trust me: whether you wish me good or ill, I do hope you succeed. I would like to be convinced, I truly would. I would love to open my eyes and suddenly see my family surrounding me, safe and sound. I would even tolerate the fact that the house is still standing, that unfinished business remains between it and me, that somewhere horses still lie collapsed and waiting to be either alive or dead, that we all in some sense remain like the man at the trough with our backs turned. I understand what I might have to gain from it, but you, I still do not understand.

  But do your worst: disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me. If you can make that happen, I think we both agree, then anything is possible.

  Three Indignities

  1.

  During the surgery they peeled the ear off his head, severing the nerves so they could get at the tumor that had spread its fingers across his jaw and up one side of his neck. Then the ear was forced back down, sewn into place. The nerve had to be sacrificed, the doctor told him when, disoriented and nauseous, he awoke. What was there, if anything, to do about it now?

  “Sacrificing the nerve” apparently meant that the link between ear and body was mostly gone. There was still something there—he could tell by the way the dead ear pressed against his skull when he tried to sleep on his side—but whatever was there no longer made sense. He could feel around it, piece it together with his fingers, but in a very real way the ear was no longer a part of him.

  The severed nerve throbbed, pulsed. At times, inside his skull, he almost could feel the ear there again, but it was no longer an ear. He could feel it trying to tap in to the nerve. And then it did momentarily tap in, and he felt it unfurl like a fan and then, suddenly, clench like a fist. It was no longer his ear, no longer an ear, but its own creature, a separate animal—sewn firmly to one side of his head but not part of him, no, not at all.

  2.

  There had been premonitions. Back before he had had the surgery, they had herded him into a room that contained a large medical hoop, plastic and metal, and had inserted him into it—not all of him, just his head and neck. A male nurse, a Croat or a Serb—unless he was an Albanian—had bluntly informed him they would have to inject him with contrast, and there was a chance, albeit minuscule, that this would kill him. Please sign here.

  He signed. He waited patiently while the nurse attempted to insert an intravenous needle into one arm, failed, tried again, failed, then called another nurse in to inflict the needle painfully but successfully into the other arm. He lay there as the bench he was on slid jerkily into the hoop, an apparatus within the ring spinning around, whirring. Then the whirring stopped. That’s all? he thought, relieved.

  But that was not all. As it turned out, that was only the test run.

  When he was slid again deep into the hoop, and the so-called contrast was injected, he felt a surge of intense, unbearable panic. It didn’t last long, only a few seconds, but by the time it was done, he was, he felt, no longer the same person. Or, for that matter, even a person at all.

  3.

  Months later, just as he was beginning to get over it, just as he had reached the point where the panic was all but forgotten and his ear, though still numb, had begun again to feel as though it belonged to him, something else went wrong.

  It took him some time to notice it, but after that things moved very rapidly. In a matter of minutes he found himself lying on a table. He was wearing a paper gown with a hole cut to allow the extrusion of his penis, a mercilessly attractive nurse having pushed a hypodermic’s worth of Novocain through his urethral opening, after which she clamped his penis off midhead.

  And then, with a polite smile, she left him alone.

  For five minutes, maybe ten, it was just him alone in the room, trying not to look down at his clamped-off and bloodless penis, which was numb in some parts and stinging in others. Five or ten minutes, or maybe twenty. But however long it was, it felt longer.

  It went on so long that he was relieved when the doctor finally arrived. But only briefly. When he saw the telescoping apparatus the doctor was armed with and learned that he intended to force this up his urethra and squirrel his way around until he had forced it into his bladder, he was filled with something akin to panic.

  “This is going to hurt a little,” the doctor said. The attractive nurse was somehow beside him again. She smiled and took hold of his wrist. It was only once she also took hold of the other wrist that he realized she was not trying to comfort him, but was holding him down.

  “Maybe even a lot,” the doctor admitted, unclamping his penis and grasping it firmly.

  The doctor was not, as it turned out, lying. A lot was exactly how much it hurt, or maybe more than a lot. When it was done, the question he had to ask himself as he lay there shivering was what, if anything, was there left of him worth saving?

  As far as that question goes, he, or whatever now stands in for him, still doesn’t know the answer.

  Cult

  I.

  It had been terrible from the start. He knew it was a disaster, knew from the very beginning, maybe even from the very first instant, that they were not, no matter what she claimed, meant for each other, that he should get away from her as fast as he could, if not faster. And yet, somehow, he couldn’t. He’d always experienced a certain amount of inertia, but it was something other than that. What exactly it was, though, he wasn’t sure.

  After a few weeks, he knew not only that they weren’t meant to be together, but that he didn’t even like her, but by then she had already moved in. The months that followed—the whole relationship, if he was being honest with himse
lf—had been like being brainwashed, if you could be brainwashed while still knowing with a painful clarity what was happening to you. It was as if he was watching someone else move from humiliation to humiliation but was powerless to do anything to stop it. But the problem was that this someone else was not someone else: it was him.

  No, they never should have been together in the first place. He knew that even then, but he couldn’t do anything to stop it. If she hadn’t stabbed him, they’d probably be together still. Even the stabbing had been just barely enough to propel him out of the relationship. Even lying there on the floor, clutching his side, waiting for her to call the ambulance, he had already begun to forgive her, to consider how her stabbing him had been, in a way, if you really thought about it, his fault. And she hadn’t been trying to really hurt him—if she’d been trying to really hurt him, she would have used the butcher knife. No, she had just used a little knife, not even as long as a steak knife, a knife he didn’t even know the name of. How was she to blame if the knife had been sharper than she expected?

  Of course, she had said none of this to him—he had thought it all out for himself, had even said some of it to her before he passed out the first time. No, it took his friends days, if not weeks, to begin to convince him that even if she hadn’t said it, she’d made him the kind of person who would say it for her. She had gotten into his head and rewired it, changed it. So much so that when he became conscious again and found she wasn’t there, he hadn’t told himself She’s deserted me or She’s fled because she’s afraid she’ll be arrested for stabbing me. No, instead he’d thought, She must have gone for help. It took passing out twice more before he could bring himself to crawl across the floor, pull the phone off the coffee table, and dial 911. Not because, he told himself even as he dialed it, he thought that she hadn’t done it, but only because if both she and he called, an ambulance would be more likely to come.