Cabin Fever

Dear Eliza,

The night is on fire, lucid and yellow against my window. I must inherit some blame here, for this would not be possible without my impressive collection of beeswax candles, but innocence runs muddy in both directions. You gifted me that first set, and you know how I am with gifts. “Like a squirrel with winter on his mind” – isn’t that what you said to me during that Christmas in Lewis?

It’s alright, Eliza. It’s been too long for apt feelings. The drapes are catching flame, so I need to make this quick.

I will not pretend that we had a civil relationship. If anything, it could be categorized by properties found outside of civilization. I think of the blue jays that nested in the forest behind the cabin we shared on the Montreal border. Two thin-beaked buzzards, constantly jabbering over this stick, that stick, who’s got dinner, who’s warming the eggs. Pecking, screeching, pulling feathers- so many feathers that I found a bundle of them in the tree roots after summer ended. They were long and blue with black edges, perfectly shaped for writing quills. I left them all in the dirt, and the mushrooms consumed them in due time.

Forget civility for a moment, though- it was an exciting companionship, wasn’t it? You, the baroness of a logging dynasty, and I, the kin of two folk-loving paupers. It’s a genre of romance my parents might have sung about, full of loose iron string and the twangy heartbeat of New England. I loved that music, but when I associate it with you, and those nights listening to Dylan strum his little piccadilly, our hands crossed over in the dirt… well, it can drive a man mad, don’t you think?

I have it on, that Freewheelin’ album, as I write this letter. The heat has leapt to the wall now, making the plastic disc on the stereo warp and change shape. Bob’s voice is distorted, as if a lump of coal has been jammed atop his rasping tongue. Despite the damage, I can still hear some of the words- it goes “See for me that her hair’s hanging down. That’s the way I remember her best.” It hurts, I think, because he says it better and more beautifully than I can ever believe to tell it.

See, even with the pecking, the scratching, the squawking, the crying- taking all the quarrels into account, I still liked being a part of your little nest. It was the only nest I ever had. There were beautiful stars, and many big-breasted creatures that roamed below, and it was nice to fly through the air with you, breathless and in charge of the world.

My mind sinks back to the place we met, between the Mystic Fantasia and Otherworldly sections of Cooper’s Bargain-Bin Books. Twelve paperbacks were nuzzled against your breast. I only had three, and when I saw you, I forced myself to pick up a few more. I grabbed Asimov and Wells and Clarke, and when you noticed me, you asked me the big question. “Do you think any of them get it right?”

“Get what right?” I said.

“The rest of it. What happens when the lights go out.”

I shrugged. “Well, I’ve got to read them first,” I said, and you smiled in a way that made two decades of my life feel fictional.

Years later, after learning of the money and the land that had been thrown in your pocket, I asked why you were shopping at the Bargain-Bin in the first place. It was snowing outside, and laying under the window, you wore a navy cardigan unbuttoned at the midriff. The cold light prickled your skin in a line to your jaw. With a short turn of your head, my lips only inches from your own, you told me.

“The paper’s thinner,” you said, “and it has a smell that new books can’t get right.”

“A smell?” I asked.

“Yes. In the spine, I think. It smells better when the story’s been told already.” You lifted and turned to my ear, your words loud and hot as if coming out from a steam tunnel. “I like used things,” you whispered.

I had forgotten all about those words- love has a way of redacting those horrible and senseless moments, I suppose- but it bubbles up now, like a hex, sweet and ablaze against my forearm. My eyes begin to water from the smoke, and I release a whooping cough, startling the edges of this letter.

Oh my, Eliza, what great timing! The cause of my discomfort is your bookshelf, against the far wall, where you left those paperbacks a thousand Mondays ago. I’m watching the fire consume them, the force not understanding their story but tasting their ink, their dust, their glue that reeled you into my life. It consumes with such gluttony that the fire is white, curling my hair from five feet away. And the smell? Less pleasant than I expected. Red ash, acrid and hungry, punctuated by the crack of your footsteps down the hallway.

It is definition, my love, that I thought existed with you. A written name, different than the one I was born with. Those days in the grass, reading the bones behind your skin, counting swans on the surface. The way you’d say ‘Evan’, so delicate and soft, like you were breaking glass with every letter. That’s what you gave me- the feeling of being preserved in time. As if our fate was that of sap and insects.

And yet… a used thing? When it was mentioned, I figured I was the exception. I believed that the traits of the material, of the everyday, could not be applied to the verse of emotion that we occupied. I fell victim to hope, and hope came back with a switchblade.

The teacup was white, laced with blue vines and chipped at the lip. It sits on my desk now, the fire turning it glossy, evaporating the Earl Grey at its center, but when I found it, it held more. Notes in gold ink and pressed flowers and little souvenir pennies from the zoo. A ticket to Casablanca. A drawing of you on the backside of a gum wrapper. An entire life, the days unknown, packaged neatly in the belly of some thrift store porcelain.

You can admit it, Eliza. I won’t ever know, so just say it out loud, as you read this. You wanted me to find that cup. There are many nooks in this old cabin, all of them dustier and darker than the one you chose underneath the cedar bedframe. I barely had to search for it- I was picking up laundry, on my knees, and it came rolling out behind a flannel you had tossed away. As I grabbed it, I heard the chink of a shard snapping off, and my first thought was of you, of how upset you’d be with my clumsiness. That was before I took a peek inside.

Fall is always spongy and difficult. The air thickens up, but the ground doesn’t have time to follow, and there becomes an imbalance, where the land mourns a summer that the sky’s already forgotten. We held hands through the woods, the trees purple and orange and copper. When I stopped, we stood beneath the tree that held the old blue jays nest. My heart thumped and the sound made me think the birds were back, flapping above us, preparing for another year. But it was empty, and there was only me and you, knowing where all of this was going.

I asked, and you answered. He was a friend of your parents. You hadn’t expected to like him, and when you loved him, it felt impossible.

“How long?” I said.

“Four months.” Your hair collided with the wind. I thought of Dylan and his wife, epitomized in that album cover, bent over his arm, walking towards the camera. “Two since it became different.”

“You won’t leave him?”

I watched you, in the silence. I tried to pry into those thoughts that used to be my own. Your skin was taut, pulled at the corners as if tears were imminent. They never came.

“No,” you said.

“I can change,” I told you.

You reached out for my hand. I let you have three fingertips.

“This is it, Evan. The lights have gone out.”

I reaped cold and hard air from between us, trying to separate it between my teeth. It could not be done. My bottom lip trembled with a nervous ache.

“I’d like to keep in touch.”

“Listen,” you told me. “We can fake it, for a while. Christmas cards and the like. Many couples try to. But it all leads down the same path.”

You let go of me. The wind sagged and sighed. I blinked, and suddenly you were someone new.

“Strangers.”

Strangers. Oh, Eliza. It is funny how words can grow around us, even if they don’t fit at first. I battered against it the best I could. I maxed out your voicemail and sent letters with blubbering postscript in the margins. I imagined the hands of your new lover. Wondered if they were rough at the webs and corners, or if they were thin and soft like mine. I shook at night and took up God for two months. When I was sure you were gone, I threw him away again.

Then came one recent winter day, long and far down our driveway, where I slipped and cracked my knee on the black ice. Tendrils of sharp hell spidered through me, farther and farther until my whole right side screamed the tune of the sun. I took to crawling, and then, with the help of a fortunately placed branch, limped back to our cabin. It was forty-five minutes before I was back in the heat, my lips and cheeks and eyes all one contagious color, my makeshift crutch dripping near the radiator.

I moved to the kitchen and fished the landline off the wall. It buzzed as I lifted my finger to the rotary. I read each number once, then read them again. I ignored your digits, bouncing around in my mind, but I didn’t last long. I grabbed at them, rolling the first seven into the phone. And then, two pulls before the end, I stopped. Static growled heavy in my ear, and my leg throbbed, and together they were their own band, urging me towards a different ending. One that was percussive and blasphemous and shameful. My fingers betrayed me as I reset the count and called someone else.

Three days later, after my fractured meniscus had been cast and my morphine thinned out, I thought about you. I sat on our faded couch, in the hanging light of that oak canopy in the window, and I wondered why I turned that phone away. I thought about it until night bridged the cabin, until the gin shed itself of its bitterness, and at the end I had no good answers.

A few hours ago, before I started writing this letter, I figured this is what you expected all along. You saw me, Evan Goldman, and you decided to spin me a tale. Some retold anecdote that could be left with the rest of the pile. A load of bullshit, the biggest one I’ve ever been fed, so full of smoke and ether that I couldn’t even tell what was being read to me. Eliza, I’ll never forgive you for that.

And yet, that’s not why I write to you today.

One time during a seasonal intermission at the cabin we got rain. It came hard, as if making up for a year without it, and we sat on the patio watching the runoff draw patterns in the dirt. I strummed the guitar, and you huffed on a harmonica from the kitchen drawer, and with the raindrops there was a nice little beat for us to run on. But you stopped abruptly, and when I looked over, your eyes had caught something in the tree line. I squinted to find it.

“I watched a storm like this,” you whispered, “when I was younger.”

My thumb slid over the strings. I listened.

“It was at my father’s house. One of his more quiet ones in the country. He inherited some farmland and a man named Eric tended to it when we were away. But sometimes my father wanted a place with no noise and when he did, he brought us there.”

You exhaled and it whispered against the harp. “There was this July where we got boiled. We played cards in our underwear and during the hottest hour we’d dip our heads into the horse trough. Sally- this pinto that came with the place- would whinny as she saw us three taking turns in her drinking water. At dusk I would comb her in the corral, and my father would walk in circles just outside the barn door, his three-piece suit lynched around his neck. He never spoke when he was like that.”

“You do that, too." I said. "The circles.”

You nodded, but I don’t think you heard me. “We were supposed to leave in August, but on the first day of the month, my father wanted to stay. I don’t know why. Maybe he had a feeling it was all coming apart. The clouds rolled in shortly, and then the wind, and then the rain. It felt like the heat had all just been a warning.”

The rain, at your notice, seemed to become sharper, the gray landscape thicker and more expansive.

“Sally got out,” you said. “Eric had shown us how to lock the gates, but our hands were not strong enough to really get the latch, and so we were lazy with it. She kicked at the thunder and suddenly she was free. My kid brothers and I huddled at the window, watching her roam the pleated land at a canter, the only moving thing, so brown and wet and amazing in her fear.”

I turned back and you were white as dandelion scruff. The harmonica sat in the lap of your sundress.

“Do you ever wonder if God chooses why we go?” you asked.

“No,” I said. “I only wonder when.”

“I did, after he struck down that pinto.” You said. “The crack and flash were the same. We watched the sky spark gold and then die again, her outline pasted on the horizon.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That’s not the horrible part,” you said. “The horrible part is I don’t really remember the lightning. I just remember wondering where my father was during all of it. We could hear his typewriter in the other room. He never knew the horse went down at all.”

You paused, then turned to me.

“I guess that’s who I’m looking for, out there. To see if she’s still running.”

We started playing again, until the sun was back out and we could take a walk through the dripping trees. But that conversation refused to leave me, and it is plays even harder now, as hot, wicked flames lick the trimmings of the bedroom door. I break that old stick in the corner, the one I used for a crutch, and throw the two snapped pieces into the mouth of it. I see the teacup, and the charred bookshelf, and our torn-up box spring through the doorway, all melting together as one. It makes me smile.

I believe you, Eliza, when you say you like used things. But I don’t think you know how to keep them. You believe that they’ll adapt to their utility; that they can be dropped just as quickly as they’re picked up. You believe that the stains, or tears, or pencil inscriptions that you leave upon them are nothing but quirks- your little way of saying thanks.

I’m writing to tell you those memories are not “quirks”. They are deep hollowed canyons, ones that turn the foot of the healthy mare and make him question why he’ll never run again. They’re lung-popping, eye-blistering swathes of black carbon, blinding the world and all its reality. They are combustion, and ashes, and pain.

I can’t let these used things go on sitting here in this cabin. I think you can understand that. They deserve the red, explosive comfort of a long awaited nothing. And I’m here to make it happen. Burning is exponential, you know. The second floor of the cabin is completely charred now. The inferno is walking down the steps.

I’ve spent a lot of time dissecting you, my dear Eliza, but the truth is, I’ve learned a lot about myself here. I’ve learned that the cold can be a very great motivator, and that fire can be an even better one. I’ve learned that blue jays are monogamous, and despite their aggression, they mate for life. I’ve learned that, when you’re standing in a blazing building, the first thing you tend to ignore is the nerves beneath your skin. They sizzle and scream and then, as if by magic, they cease to exist.

It will be a warm night out here, near the Derby Line. Fireflies will be released, knitted by our time together. And then, in the morning, some ranger ten days to retirement will stomp his boots upon these cinders, smelling the lost and the found, wondering where it all fell apart.

But I don’t want you to be left wondering like your father. That’s why I’m sending you this letter.

I want you to know why the horse went down.