Chapter 7
The end of summer was always hot, but this year it went on and on, until the heat became almost sickening.
By mid-August, the needles of the conifers were burnt, with patches of copper deadness mottling the limp green shag.
By September, the creeks were dry. Always, a vague haze smeared the horizon, brownish smoke scum trickling up from California, or down from Canada, or from the Coast Mountains, or the Cascades.
The fires never stopped. It was that summer when I noticed people talking about the earth in the past tense.
They began referring to Nature as a thing long gone, and whatever world was in store as a sad compromise at best, a shadow of a shadow of the grandeur that our parents and grandparents had once taken for granted as reality.
I had farmer friends who were calling it quits. For twenty years, they’d been working their land outside Ashland using only trapped rainwater, taking almost nothing from the watershed, and still they couldn’t get by. The sky wouldn’t give anymore. Their tiny footprint would now shrink to nothing.
“Where will you go?” I asked one friend.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Where is anybody going to go?”
I read old books and watched old movies, and found the lack of despair around the planet anachronistic. To live in those olden times, when the dread of global doom wasn’t woven into everyday existence, was almost unimaginable.
I had moments when I wondered why I was writing a book at all.
It made no logical sense to write a book that would be born into a dead world.
There was no way my book would change anything or usher in a new age of ecological renewal and rebirth.
If the book had any effect at all, it would be in the most subtle, negligible way.
A book was not like a hammer driving a nail.
It was more like a wave in an ocean. Collectively, the waves might reshape a shoreline, but individually, they were practically nothing.
And yet, I never considered pausing. I focused instead on Merle and Candy, and their humble gardening, and pressed onward every day with my doomed enterprise.
It wasn’t any different than usual in that way.
Every book is a doomed enterprise. It’s an impossible prayer going out into a world that doesn’t listen and doesn’t care.
In fact, it was exactly the doomed impossibleness of the enterprise that made it so compelling.
A book had no use value. It barely even existed.
It was just a batch of vaporous thoughts emanating into the public mind as a faint demurral, a vanishing, ephemeral ghost of all the time spent writing it.
It might stir a little whirlpool in the atmosphere of meaning, maybe ruffle a leaf, nothing else.
As always around this time, I was hitting a tricky patch in the writing.
After months of spinning out provisional words and clauses, telling myself I’d improve everything at some later date, I’d reached that date.
This was the stage of the process where things slowed down.
It was the time when I had to acknowledge that everything I’d written thus far sounded wrong and it would be necessary to peel everything back and basically start anew.
I had to slash entire sections, bleed entire bodies of text.
I had to break open every sentence and find the real sentence that lurked inside.
It was always demoralizing how this part of the writing went, and it could go on for a very long time.
In writing a book, you had to give up everything on a daily basis.
I wasn’t sorry when Sarah left town for a few days because it meant I’d have more headspace for the book.
She was going on a retreat to Mount Hood with a mindfulness group of hers, which meant meditating together, practicing breathing techniques, and spending as much time in the saunas and hot springs as possible.
It was an annual gathering, a good group, and she’d been looking forward to the trip all year.
She was excited, even though it meant we’d miss a couple of our precious nights.
“I’m gonna miss you,” I texted.
“You’ll miss my ass,” she texted back.
“I’ll miss the other stuff, too,” I texted. “The stuff connected to your ass.”
“Uh-huh, but mostly my ass.”
The day she left, I woke early and brewed coffee and got to work.
I sat down hoping for a major breakthrough but had trouble getting started.
The coffee wasn’t hitting very hard for some reason, and the day’s headlines kept distracting me.
“Hottest Year on Earth Recorded.” “Heavy Rains Wreak Havoc.” “Wildfires Rage.” “Why Would Anyone Live in Phoenix?”
I moved onto the back deck and set up my computer and notebooks in the shade, but still couldn’t force myself to concentrate.
It was already so hot, and the oak leaves were rustling so loudly in the lethargic breeze.
I skimmed through my pages again and checked the news a few more times.
“Plastic Waste Spiraling out of Control Across Africa.” “Many People Are Feeling Ecological Grief.”
At last, I got a little traction. That’s the thing with a daily practice: you’re there when the attention focuses.
You never know exactly when it’ll happen, so you have to be there, just in case.
This time, I was suddenly seeing redundancies that I could clip and finding entire new paragraphs between jammed sentences.
A long-held tight spot was giving way to something smooth and soft and possibly poetic.
I was still working inside the pocket, forging some decent, fresh clauses about softwood versus hardwood trees, when Phil called and broke my spell.
I didn’t pick up the phone, not wanting to waste my time, but I listened to the message a minute later to make sure it wasn’t an emergency.
He said he wanted to talk to me. Did I have a few minutes?
I thumbed him a text explaining my situation, how I was living underground this week, laboring on the book.
Maybe we could talk in a day or two? He texted back and said he wanted to see me today, in person, if possible.
He said he had something important to discuss.
He’d been known to call with random factoids he assumed I’d find completely mind-blowing, so I texted him again saying I was too busy, maybe Wednesday?
I was a little annoyed that I had to keep batting him away in the middle of my prime hours, not that I was in any position to scold him.
I watched the pulse of his typing on the other end.
The bubble grew and shrank, grew and shrank.
As I watched the ellipsis burble on the phone’s screen, it occurred to me how odd it was that Phil would be so demanding.
It was so unlike him, I thought. What did he want?
And then, the next thought boxed me on the ears: he knew.
My fingers and toes suddenly went cold. What else could it be?
What other reason could possibly drive Phil to this uncharacteristic pushiness?
He’d discovered some clue in the house. He’d found something in Sarah’s pocket, maybe, or a stray text.
We’d been so careful, but really, how long could this deception go on?
The bubble on my phone faded and didn’t come back.
My insides curdled with fear and shame. Apparently, Phil couldn’t think of what else to say in text form, but I knew now what his message meant.
My first impulse was to call Sarah, but she was already off the grid.
I was alone to field Phil’s anguish for another six days.
Now I really couldn’t work. I sat and tried to pick at a sentence, but it was no use.
The trail was cold. What was I supposed to do now?
It was amazing how little I’d managed to think about this part of our story—the actual consequences, the horrible reveal.
As long as Phil hadn’t known about the affair, it had seemed almost imaginary.
I’d been able to tell myself that it was practically normal.
Millions of people had affairs, all over the world.
It was the way of human beings. All of which was true enough, in its way, but far from the whole truth.
What I hadn’t been thinking about was Phil as a living, feeling person.
I’d been ignoring the very specific pain that this betrayal would cause him.
I’d assumed, on some level, that Sarah would deal with it.
But now, with only a text, Phil had thrown a nauseating light on the whole ugly scene, and without Sarah, I wasn’t sure what the next move should be.
If Phil kept calling me, I’d have to talk to him at some point.
Which meant I’d have to lie to him and tell him he was wrong, his fears unfounded.
I’d have to lie baldly, in other words, and I’d probably get called out on it at a later date.
And if he pushed harder, and showed me actual evidence, what would I do then?
I’d still deny everything. I’d try to convince him it was all a misunderstanding, that he was reading it wrong.
And if he pushed even harder? Eventually, I knew, I’d probably give in.
I’d end up telling him something true just to end the logjam.
I’d tell him how we’d never meant to hurt him and how we both loved and respected him and how we were all caught up in an unexpected, star-crossed, uncontrollable romance.
I’d end up informing him that his wife and I had fallen in love.