Living Light
This essay was published in Confrontation
Before God cut His name into Ben, we never missed a house party. Like the kind Brain “What’s-His-Face” would throw during winter break in the West Hills of Portland, Oregon. We would get drunk, Ben and I, early and hard, so that a sudden current, something like sheet lightning, would shock up our blood and make us crazy, sending our knees into furniture, table legs, our elbows swinging across vases and picture frames.
The house belonged to Brian’s parents who were either doctors or lawyers or both. There were three-dozen boys and girls, most of whom Ben and I had graduated from high school with that past June, drinking malt liquor and five-dollar wine.
Rain was coming down through the snow outside. We sauntered into the kitchen, found a bottle of Potter’s gin. The current began to shake, lightning began to move.
Later, we heard somebody say to somebody else, “But my real problem with Heidegger is…” and Ben stepped over to fix the problem. He knocked into a giant candle, spilling a lake of wax onto the hardwood floor. Laughing, I swerved around the kitchen counter and tackled him into the nearest wall, leaving a human-sized hole. And in the epilogue of that action, in the stuttering of lights and shouting and glass, the night ended how most of those winter nights did: we were barred from the party, kicked out on the front lawn, left to the street.
The booze had run its way through our muscles, leaving us exhausted, empty, saggy. Sloppy punches turned to blocky, lazy grappling. We were shivering, soaked, with bloodied lips. We didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. In two days it would be Christmas. We could try to go back inside, make our apologies and jokes, maybe find a couple of girls, but Ben was standing there, weaving in front of me, with two crooked eyes.
“What do you want, cocksucker?”
“Let’s go home,” he answered, his voice graveled with gin. The sound of rain gone to snow gone to ice tinkling about.
“You don’t want to go back in?”
Ben staggered a little towards the house and then turned back abruptly. “Nah. They don’t want us, man.”
I looked up and down the dark and snowy streets of that neighborhood, miles from anywhere. We had no car and no way of finding one. Ben walked over, put an arm around my shoulder and patted me on the chest. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll be okay. We’ll be all right. I promise.”
We walked as long as we could. Our collars were ripped and flapped in the weather, and the bruises on my elbows ached to the bone. Snow was piling up, ankle deep now, and I wanted to quit, lie down, and fall asleep in a drift the way I heard some Eskimos did when they got too old to be of use to anyone. The stoplights had begun flashing yellow. Ben, hobbling ahead, pressed his face against the window of a minivan abandoned sideways on the road. “Keys in the ignition,” he shouted. “Doors unlocked!” He couldn’t believe our luck. We promised each other to return it by morning. Who knows if we did.
*
Sometimes I like to think that Ben and I grew up together the way trees grow together: twined at the root, gnarled in dirt, breaking for sky, crowding for light, our needles sharp and green. Instead of soil, we smoked blunts. Instead of wind, we played varsity football and crashed into a lot of drywall at parties. I would get him jobs with me on my construction crews during the summers. And then, after graduating somehow from our respective universities, we traveled across Australia together. Both of us nearly drowned in the roiling surf near Melbourne, and a spider in Adelaide bit my leg and the poison turned one side of my thigh a blood brown. We spent the next day sitting in back of a small white bus watching trees give way to flats of hard yellow earth. I held my journal and my pen, staring out the window, wiggling with the rough motion of the north road, and told Ben that I was dying.
“Not a chance, dude. Look at the size of that bite. You’d be already gone if it was going to happen.”
“You think?”
“Trust me.”
He reached down and pulled a bottle of port from his pack. He handed me the port. My leg ached. The trees disappeared. The swelling darkened. The port bloomed. Night had the desert.
*
After Australia, I moved to Maryland for graduate school. Ben stayed in Portland and took work as a forestry engineer. Time passed.
Ben didn’t write letters and I hated the phone.
*
The summer Ben gave his life to the Lord Jesus Christ was the summer I returned to Oregon from Maryland, set to move again to Chicago with my brother in the fall. I had just completed my second year of coursework, and I was faltering to understand what I was doing now in my parents’ finished basement at the age of twenty-six. The problem (as indefinable as it appeared to me) was a matter of definition and the lack thereof. I wasn’t anybody. I was nowhere.
“What’s wrong with you?” my brother asked one night after dinner.
“Lord knows,” I said.
He lit a cigarette. He lit mine, too.
“You think it’s like one of your literary devices? Like when, you know, the protagonist is not who he thinks he is and knows it?”
I flicked my thumb across the end of my cigarette, watched the cherry brighten. “My life reduced to shitty prose, is that what you’re saying?” I asked.
“You know Mom says you drink too much.”
“You know she says the same about you.”
“Yeah, but it’s made you fat.”
“That an argument?”
“You should lose some weight.”
“I’ll stick it on the list.”
“You called Ben?”
I took a drag and shook my head.
“You talked to anybody?”
“Not really.”
“But he knows you’re here, right?”
“If he does, I haven’t heard.”
“You can’t call him?”
I shrugged and tossed my cigarette into the garden.
“I’ll do it, if you want.”
“That’s sweet, but no thanks.”
“Well, put it on the list, all right?”
“Deal,” I said.
*
My father had framed my mildly illustrious high school history—news clippings, photographs, 1st Team All-City Honors—along the walls of my old bedroom, which didn’t help matters, and in the mornings I showered and stood naked in the same mirror I had brushed in front of as a child. I would hold the loaf of flesh around my waist and make wet noises with my lips. At night, I piled food and drink in front of the TV: cheeseburger, bag of fries, and a plastic pint of bourbon. I got drunk and pretended I lived in the shows, dating Jennifer Aniston, hanging with Kramer—I stopped reading Faulkner entirely. Passed out, I dreamed of trains and scorched earth and vaginas that were trying to swallow me.
*
In late June, Ben called the house. My father answered. I could hear him speaking to Ben about the church, that coming Sunday, about scripture and the potluck afterwards, a feasting for the spirit and body, etcetera, etcetera.
“Son,” my father said finally, “the phone.”
“Look who’s home,” the phone said.
It’s hard to say what we said beyond the pauses, stutters, and starts. Ben asked if I was all right and I asked Ben if he was all right and we talked about the last two years in about two minutes and he asked if I needed work for the summer and I said that I did and he told me that he’d pick me up in the morning around five. He told me to wear something thick. Brush pants, if I had them, and that I should bring a sleeping bag. We’d be spending the night.
“What are brush pants?” I asked.
He laughed. “Forget it, professor, I’ll get you some.”
*
We drove in silence, the road drumming beneath the heavy engine of the pickup.
I looked past the white weather streaks on the window to the evergreens growing thicker and taller now that we’d pushed past the city, their crowns darkening into the gray morning sky. The Columbia River clipped between the trees like reels of old film, the texture of the water shimmering and shadowed.
Five weeks before, heading west in an old Honda with rusted out wheel wells, I drove into Iowa City, following the river to the university. Lights had come on in the homes, the restaurants, glowing on the streets in dull glassy welcome. I rolled down the windows. The trees bloomed apple flowers, a smell of rich earth filled my dirty car. I coughed and shivered and lit another cigarette. The tips of my fingers were yellow. I smiled, rolling my lips back to feel my teeth. Pure moss.
From the heights of my hotel room, I opened thick curtains and looked out on the American Mecca of postwar literature. Nearly every one of my favorite writers from the last sixty years had, at one point or another, clocked time in Iowa City. Using my knuckles, I rapped a few of their names into the window. Johnson, Stafford, O’Connor. Vonnegut, Cheever, Francine Prose. And I could feel that what separated me from them was not this glass, nor the bloom of apple flowers, nor the sour saltwater of my heart, but something closer to an inability and faltering of being: potholes in the paths of my mind and an all-time dark my voice had failed to light.
Ben elbowed my shoulder.
“Hey,” he shouted over the roar, “you awake?”
“I was,” I said.
“Another fifteen minutes or so, all right, and we’ll get breakfast up at this diner in Prescott.”
“Fine.”
Ben crooked one of his eyes at me. “Your old man said you were different, but I don’t see it, really.” He reached over and patted my paunch. “My baby’s still there.”
“A kicker,” I said.
He laughed.
I studied his face. “But what about you, man?”
“What about it?” he answered.
“You know,” I said.
He shrugged. “What can I say? I got Christ.”
“You got Christ?”
“Yep,” wiping his nose against the sleeve of his shoulder.
“How’s that feel?”
He grinned, looking at the road. “Real,” he said.
*
The property, owned by Ben’s maternal grandfather, covered the down slope of two steeps in the foothills of the Oregon coastal range—a woody V-neck with a skinny creek running its cleft. At the time, the tree growth stood at ten years. This meant that the Doug firs were ready to have their bases, about the first six-feet, shaved. With these branches gone, the firs would grow straighter, faster, make for better timber. Essentially, our job would be to increase the value of the property, tree by tree.
Ben and I spent the first two weeks cutting trail, dividing the verticals into sections, cutting ways in and carving ways back out. The difficulty with 10-years, particularly in that part of the country, is that the undergrowth becomes impassably infested with thick nests of blackberries—an invasive weed brought to the Pacific Northwest from Eurasia (the Himalayan, for instance, from Armenia). Before a stand of trees can get tall enough to block out the light and suffocate the foliage beneath, blackberries billow deep and dark as thunderclouds, vicious and barbed, jutting out and back into every square inch of earth. In some places, these tangled thickets can reach eighteen or twenty feet in height, overtaking even the trees.
We were outfitted in helmets, handsaws, and machetes. With the early fire warnings for that summer in full effect, Ben’s grandfather reneged on our use of his chainsaws at the end of the first week. Ben stomped around camp later that evening, frustrated and disappointed by what he perceived as unnecessary caution and a general pain in his ass. He hated handsaws. “What a waste of time.”
Me? I knew the old man and the dry season had saved me a limb.
On our fourth day of work, we had taken a preliminary run across the property with the chainsaws, and, contrary to Ben’s sense of efficiency, I sided with the trees in that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with those machines. Too much gasoline and exhaust coming from an exposed 2-cycle engine burning hot as a small sun, and I had to wear goggles to protect my eyes and metal slabs to protect my privates. And with all the heat and smoke and sweat, I couldn’t see and I couldn’t move as the big ripping steel bucked me against the bark.
Besides, after two years spent either reading or writing or teaching or drinking, my muscles had gone to soggy pulp.
*
“I want you to cut across the creek and then head vertical up that side,” Ben said.
It was 6:30 in the morning, beginning of the second week, and my clothes, already soaked with sweat, felt like thirty layers of paint.
“That’s pretty far,” I said.
“I’ll give you the week.”
“It’s pretty far.”
Ben looked at me. “Granddad says you got a yeast infection.”
“Because I don’t want to use the chainsaws? I thought that was his idea.”
“No, because you’re fat and soft like a woman.”
I looked down at my belly going over my belt, nodded, and then headed into the thicket.
The line across the creek and up the west side of the property—a horizontal to vertical cross—took me a week of 12-hour days to make, half of that just to reach the creek. I chopped down birch trees to flatten out the blackberries, then inched along, sometimes crawled, over the trunks of these trees—my machete duct-taped to my wrist, my arm swinging the blade, burrowing a hole, “a get through,” my body sealed in thorns and bits of branches and dead leaves. In spots, the ground dipped down and trenched away so there was nothing beneath me but thin poles of birch and swirls of blackberry vines. At the end of the week, my arms, my face, my neck, were slashed and scabbed. The thorns, too, turned out to be poisonous. My hands swelled with the viscosity of wax.
*
In the evenings, Ben and I would go down to the Columbia and wash. The water of the river was salty and brown, and an abandoned nuclear power plant rose up behind us like some busted phallus.
Ben thought different. The power plant didn’t look like a phallus at all, rather an old turkey gun. “You know, the kind the pilgrims carried.”
“What are you talking about, dude? It looks just like a giant penis.”
“Turkey gun.”
“Monstrous cock.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. The New Testament lay open on his lap, its rice thin pages stuck to his fingers.
We would fall asleep on the beach, drying our bodies on the dirty sand, and then head back up to camp to grill chicken for dinner.
We woke at four every morning and I would sit in the truck, eating a protein bar and drinking coffee, listening to Yo-Yo Ma. I imagined an audience of thousands in a gorge, star-struck, startled, as Yo-Yo performed Bach’s Cello Suites, a machete for a bow, without ever slicing a string.
I would watch Ben rise and light the propane lamp beside his cot, picking up his scripture. The lamp glowing from inside our tent reminded me of the field trips he and I took in grade school to the Museum of Science and Industry. How we would break from the rest of the class and sneak into the room with the plastic modeled bodies, the organs and vessels that beeped out lights and color and were alive like Christmas trees. We would tug on the skeleton’s hand and touch the pregnant woman, her insides pulsing with the heartbeat of her electronic baby.
Sometimes I turned down the cello strings to hear Ben praying. He never asked for anything, just the name of the Lord, over and over.
*
I dropped weight. My arms hardened into a marble of skin and muscle, knotty with veins. And when I came home to Portland on Fridays, I didn’t bother to shower, but would go straight to The Ship, order a beer, open a pack of Camels, and wait for my brother to come down and meet me. I liked the way I looked. My brush pants covered in tree pitch, my gnarled boots, the cuts on my arms and over my eyes, five days of growth on my face, my heavy hands, the strong smell of me. I felt earthed, grounded, barked. My brother would laugh and say I looked perfect, like I had walked out of a dream of myself, dressed up as my own ideal—my grizzly. We played darts and I would get a little drunk and then drive, following my brother’s car, the few blocks to our parents’ house.
*
The first time Ben smoked dope it was sprinkled with mushrooms and cocaine. The high school drug dealer had this gas mask (modified with a bowl piped from its corrugated mouth) that he got from his older brother, a Marine in the first Gulf War. Stoned, the dealer started to tell us about his brother. “It’s like everybody in this world thinks they got some purchase on what shit’s supposed to mean. But they don’t. Then you take my brother, you take that motherfucker, and there’s somebody, I mean somebody who knows the depths of the deepest.”
I watched Ben’s lips turn blue. His hands turned blue. He hooked the mask over his face again, inhaled deeply and then burst out laughing, the bowl erupting sparks and ash all over the drug dealer’s bedroom floor. We were fourteen. The dealer was sixteen, decades older than us.
I pulled the mask off Ben’s face and he rolled into my arms, laughing and laughing. “The depths, the depths, the depths!” Then he vomited. Who knows how we made it out of there. But I remember my dad making us pancakes the next morning because it was Saturday.
Blackberries.
I remember there were blackberries.
*
“Jesus is God,” Ben would whisper to himself as he barbecued our chicken in the evenings, white smoke pumping from the portable grill. The sky was also white, the sun just now gone behind the hills, a corner of moon above the trees. “The world is death. But thank God my spirit is newly regenerated. Praise Jesus Christ, my spirit is regenerated.”
*
Sometimes I prayed, too, a little calling crouched there in the woods. But the difference was that I couldn’t help but ask—pray that I would be given, that I would receive. The name of God, for me, wasn’t enough. Praise wasn’t enough. I wanted and I needed and I would crumple under the trees and beg that I would become more than me.
*
After six weeks, I stopped bleeding and the poison of the thorns was no more than a mild ache in my joints. My body still poured buckets of sweat, but I wasn’t breathing so heavy anymore, and I saw how the fog rose out of the morning, leaving the trees like smoke or ghosts, the smell of cedar and pine.
Ben worked one side of the V. I worked the other—from trunk to trunk, hacking through chained curtains of elderberry and salmonberry and Himalayan to saw through the first six-feet of tree branches by hand. The days pooled off into sunlight. And in the endless spiraling of pine needles and forest dust, I counted the names of women in the cities I had once lived in and would go on to find again. I don’t know how, but I felt the whole of my life spread out onto strings, vertical and horizontal strings, from throat to heart to lung.
*
Ben brought out a dog to live with us on the property, a golden Labrador that had belonged to a “Brother” who moved to California with his wife and children to join the “Full-Timers” at the Church in Anaheim. The dog had poor digestion from all the berries she ate and was afraid of the dark, which meant she slept under Ben’s cot at night, filling our tent with her farts and tongue smacking and her squirrel-chase dreaming. During the day, she traversed the distance between us, snuffing at our boots, barreling through the canopy after woodchucks she had no chance of catching.
*
The heat grew intense. Summer rotted through. I felt Chicago fast closing, how the road east would soon lead me back through the Columbia Gorge and the high deserts of Oregon, up into Washington, and over onto the flats of Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and so on.
At the end of August, when Ben retired to read scripture by lamplight, I took my camping chair out to the middle of our clearing and sat in the darkness, watching the stars between the shifting of night clouds. Earth was closer to Mars than it had ever been in recorded history. The red in the sky glowed a smidgen brighter. Stars flickered with the satellites. Birch trees moved in the wind. Blowing clear, the moon ignited barracks of leaves and trunks and thorns, thundering in its pale silence over the creek. My skin felt rusted, filaments of pain running in my wrists, my palms, my veins.
In another five weeks, rain would turn the crowns of this breasted valley the darkest green. Gray would swallow the skylight of the world, and all the trails that Ben and I had carved would turn to mud slicks and slides. The thorns, like mended bones, would be back thicker than ever. And if anyone happened upon this place in late spring, the paths of our work would be only shadows in fresh sheets of brush, ghost trails all but hidden in the Himalayan. Even this clearing would be recovered by the weeds and clean shoots of birch erected out of the earth.
My fists, cupped to the shape of my saw grip and machete, throbbed in my lap. Leaning back, the tendons in my neck tugged on my jaw. And I sat there in the chair, agape, taking in the shattered quartz of constellations.
What I saw wasn’t Maryland or Oregon or Chicago—my past, present, or future tenses. It wasn’t Ben or prayer or poison. It was those stars framed in the passing clouds, the needle points of light in a black cheesecloth of gas, and how some of that light was living light and other light was dead.