And it’s not always out-and-out war; there’s reason for hope. Karen’s an artist, and possesses an artist’s volition, sure, but just as frequent as the pustulous outbursts of frenzied rage and fear (he thinks) at the proximity of his ponderous, outsized heart are the long stretches of silence and invisibility; as if neither time nor matter exists, as if the days and nights are not rushing past, being funneled down a drain; as if there is no urgency; and as if Karen believes Jerry is content to receive, forever, those faint lashings and faint withholdings.
Still, the calm water, horrible as it is, never lasts.
Occasionally they stir, and fight like crows or magpies, squabbling over the last of that water, Jerry believing she still has some left in the vessel which she is not sharing and Karen knowing that she does not.
“You make me puke,” the one sailor cries to the other one on some of the days when her numbness fades and she returns to war. “You repulse me.”
And always, he retreats and sits on the other end of the boat, bow or stern, and watches the horizon, as he has for so many years now, still hoping for a shore, and still—amazingly—believing that there is another shore out there.
…
When Jerry asked her if she minded if he drove Jim back over to Spokane, at first Karen didn’t understand what Jerry was saying. She had to ask him to repeat himself twice more and couldn’t figure out what Jim had to do with it: why someone whom Jerry didn’t know that well would have to request help from another person who, if not a stranger, was neither a committed friend. She didn’t understand the depth of the need, the seriousness of Jim’s situation.
She watched Jerry slip out of the boat and into the warm sheen of flat water. Something caught her attention at the corner of her vision—she frowned, squinted, turned her head to look at it—and when she returned her gaze to the ocean before her, the calm sea, he was gone, leaving not even a ripple.
…
When Jerry picked Jim up at his cabin before first light, it was foggy and the roads were covered with a glaze of ice that glinted in their headlights. They had to drive slowly, and in the last wedge of darkness before dawn, deer tiptoed back and forth across the road in front of them, returning to the daytime sanctuary of the woods after having ventured earlier in the night down to the river’s frozen edge for a drink of water from the current’s fast-flowing center. The deer trotted back across the glassine road on tiny black hoofs, slipping occasionally, their eyes glowing red in the headlights.
The retina is the last screen through which any incoming light passes, before flooding into the brain, where the light proceeds to tell its stories and be processed, stored, and filed as memory and knowledge; because the eyes are so important to a sense of orientation, any disruptions to them can send the body into a state of extreme confusion. Not knowing why, the body often responds with an agonizing form of nausea, not unlike the throes of seasickness, trying to purge anything and everything it might have taken in, on the off chance that that’s what’s causing the problem.
Jim was seized by this nausea from time to time and would ask Jerry to pull over to the side of the road so that he could retch. Sometimes Jim would have nothing left in his stomach to hurl, and would succeed in vomiting only a thin trickle of shining drool; other times he would be able to make it a short distance into the woods, stumbling down the twists and turns of frozen deer trails, before expelling, in coughs and gags, the detritus of his stomach.
Jim’s face was still swollen and bruised from the previous surgery—the injured eye, the left one, was still almost completely shut—and he wasn’t much company, though he tried to be stoic about it, riding upright with his head held in his hands, swaying with the road’s rough passages, and making random conversation in the lulls between pain and nausea.
He told Jerry that he’d had all sorts of medical repairs done to him just before he got out of the service, to take advantage of the full health care offered by the navy. He’d had knee surgery to pick out all the little fragments of cartilage that had been floating around behind his kneecaps, and had had both ACLs tightened and tuned while the surgeons were working in there. He’d had six crowns put in by the dentist—Jim’s teeth flashed and gleamed like a minefield when he smiled, so much gold and silver that it seemed his mouth, and his smile, would be heavy from carrying so much weight. He had a tendon reconstructed in his elbow, too, and a bulging disk removed from his backbone, and had never felt so good. He’d had radical orthokeratology performed so that his vision had been twenty-twenty, and the doctor had noticed the beginning of cataracts, so he’d repaired that problem, too, implanting translucent plastic disks in the place where the cataracts had once been. The cosmetic effects of this surgery were strangely troubling to Jerry, for sometimes when the light hit Jim’s eyes at just the right angle it reflected off those plastic disks set behind the cornea, causing Jim’s eyes to shine not unlike those of the deer that passed before their headlights.
“In many respects, I’m like an entirely new man,” Jim said. He laughed. “Older and better. Who would’ve believed it? Except for this darned eye.”
Jim had grown up in the sand hills of Nebraska, dreaming of the ocean. “I’d always been restless and daring,” he told Jerry.
