Sourland

This is what the surviving spouse deserves. A demon missing half his face.

She wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a demon missing half his face. The teeth! — if only the teeth would not touch her.

Kolk drank, and Sophie drank. Kolk began to speak in a confiding manner. Sophie was curious, and moved. Sophie was eager to hear of Kolk’s life, that had been hidden from her. With an air of aggrieved irony Kolk spoke of the “accident” — the “explosion” — except there are “no accidents” in the universe. He spoke of the “logic” of history. Or was it the “illogic” of history — what has happened once, cannot happen again in quite that way. Yet, it cannot happen again in any way that is very different. Kolk spoke of the “great vision” of the 1960s and of the “betrayal of the vision” — the “revolution” — by its most fervent believers. He spoke of having sacrificed a “personal life” for — what? — so many years after the wreckage, it wasn’t clear what.

Sophie said, “But I had a personal life. And that, too, is gone.”

Kolk was leaning on his elbows, on the table. His forearms were dense with muscle, covered in wiry black hairs like an animal’s pelt. Yet his beard was a bristly steel-color, and the short tough quills on his scalp had no color at all. The young Jeremiah was trapped inside the older man, only his eyes were untouched, baffled and wary.

Kolk was confiding in Sophie, he’d never been arrested. He’d left the state of Wisconsin within hours of the explosion and he’d never returned. He’d broken off contact with his friends — not “friends” but “comrades” — yet not “comrades” either — really. For years he’d moved about the country working with his hands. Learning skills with his hands: carpentry, plastering, roofing. He drove trucks, he learned to operate bulldozers. He used chain saws. He’d lived in Alaska, and in Alberta; he’d worked in New Orleans, and Galveston; he’d never returned to his family’s farm but he’d returned to the Midwest, to northern Minnesota, which was very like his home, yet isolated. And no one knew where he was. Only Sophie knew where he was, and who he was. In the Sourland Preserve he helped maintain the trails, kept roads open in winter. He was a forest ranger on the lookout for fires, in times of drought. He helped search for lost hikers. He brought back the injured, he knew CPR. He could go days — weeks — at a stretch in this place of utter solitude without encountering anyone or speaking with anyone. More than once he’d found bodies on the trails, in high ground where hikers weren’t likely to go in the winter. After the start of the spring thaw, he found them. Men — all had been young men, in their twenties or thirties — who’d gone out deliberately into the wilderness, into the snow, to lose themselves, to lie down and sleep in the numbing cold. He’d found them, lying motionless on the ground, so utterly still, peaceful as statuary, their faces strangely beautiful — for no decomposition had yet set in.

Sophie shuddered. “But — that’s terrible. Finding someone like that — must be very upsetting.”

Kolk shrugged. “Why? Whatever was rotten in them is gone — ‘cauterized.’ That’s the point of killing yourself.”

Sophie was thinking: Matt had liked — loved — hiking in the wilderness, before she’d known him. Then abruptly he’d ceased. That part of his life had ended. Rarely would he talk about it, he hadn’t been one to reminisce. The walks they’d taken together — the “hikes” — hadn’t been very arduous, challenging. After law school, Matt had gone into corporate law. He’d been a brilliant and ambitious student at Yale and he’d gone into a corporate law firm immediately after law school, in Summit, New Jersey. Initially he’d been successful — always he’d been moderately successful — always competent, reliable. Always he’d been well paid. But he’d been disappointed with the nature of his work and with his associates — never would he have called them “friends,” still less “comrades” — and by degrees he’d lost all passion for his work. Servicing the rich, aiding the rich in their obsession to increase their wealth while giving away as little as possible to others. Sophie had no wish to confide in Kolk that her husband had never been happy in his work — possibly, in his life. By his late thirties he was becoming a middle-aged man, his body had gone slack, fleshy. He’d lost his youth though he had always loved Sophie — it was his wish, that they not have children. They’d lived a life of bourgeois comfort of the sort Kolk would find contemptible, Sophie thought.

Strangely Kolk was looking at her now. Almost, a kind of merriment shone in his soot-colored eyes. In a voice that might have been teasing, or accusing, he said: “You’re a widow, are you! So, you must have money.”

Or maybe he’d said — “You’re a widow. So, you must be lonely.”

Money, lonely. It was logic, these fitted together.

Sophie said yes, Matt had left her money — and their house of course — but she worked, also — she’d worked for years at a university press that specialized in academic/scientific books — though she was now on a leave of absence.

Warmed by whiskey, Sophie told Kolk that she’d just finished copyediting a manuscript for the press by an anthropologist/linguist on the subject of twins. Most fascinating was a decades-long study of twins through their lives, twins who’d cultivated “private languages,” twin-survivors after the death of a twin, iconic and symbolic meanings of twins, that varied greatly from culture to culture. Kolk listened in silence, drinking. Sophie heard herself say that grief too was a “private language” — when your twin has left you.

Has anyone written about the “private language” of grief, Sophie wondered.

It was then that Kolk said in a halting voice that he’d lost his father — that is, his father had lost him. His father had disowned him, after Madison. More recently, his father had died — not that it mattered to Kolk, belatedly.

He’d lost his brother, that had been more painful. He’d been nineteen at the time. But a consolation to think that if his Vietnam War-hero-brother had lived, his brother, too, would have disowned him.

“Why?” Sophie asked..

“Because he was a war hero. I was the enemy.”

“I mean — why is it a ‘consolation’? I don’t understand.”

“Because he’d have ‘lost’ me — eventually. When, doesn’t matter.”

Kolk fell silent then, for some minutes. Beneath the table the bulldog snored wetly. The candles were burning down, luminous wax dripped onto the table like lava. Sophie saw that Kolk’s mouth moved as if he were arguing with someone. At last he said: “Friends I had here in Sourland, or thought I had — by degrees I lost them, too.”

“And why?” Sophie asked. Her veins coursed with something warm, reckless. “Why did you ‘lose’ them?”

Kolk shrugged. Who knew!

Sophie thought You need a woman in your life. To give your life direction, meaning.

You need a woman in your life to give you — your life.

In his slow halting voice Kolk was saying that he’d been waiting for — wanting — someone here in Sourland with him. He’d had some involvements with women, that had not worked out. This past winter especially — he’d been the most alone he had ever been, in his life. And when he’d thought of someone he wanted — when he lay awake plagued by such thoughts — it was she — Sophie — who came to him.

Sophie, whose face he saw.

But which face? Sophie wondered. Kolk had not seen her face in twenty-five years.

“You look the same. You haven’t changed. You…”

Sophie stared at Kolk’s fingers, gripping the jam-glass. She could not bring herself to look up at him, at his eyes. Was he drunk? Did it require drunkenness, for Kolk to speak in such a way? Was what he said true? — how could it be true? Sophie could think of no reply that would not be facile, coy, clumsy — her heart had begun to beat absurdly, rapidly.

Wanted. Was it good to be wanted by a man, or not so good?

Kolk confessed, he hadn’t been sure if he remembered her name. But he’d remembered Matt Quinn’s name.

Kolk was easing closer to Sophie. Hairs on the nape of her neck — hairs on her arms, beneath her linen shirt and sweater — began to stir, in apprehension. Unless it was sexual anticipation, excitement. For it had to be a good thing, to be wanted. Kolk said that when he’d “lost his way” — his “faith” — he’d “wanted to die” — he’d “come close to dying.” He’d hiked out into the wilderness — in Alaska, in Alberta, here in Minnesota — thinking how sweet, how beautiful just to lie down in the snow and sleep, shut his eyes. It would not be a painful