In bed that night, I looked over at Jake. He was so stable, babyish. He looked smaller. Stress and tension hide during sleep. He never grinds his teeth. His eyelids don’t flutter. He usually sleeps so soundly. He looks like a different person when he sleeps.
During the day, when Jake’s awake, there’s always an underlying intensity, an energy that simmers. He has these little movements, twitches and ticks.
But isn’t being alone closer to the truest version of ourselves, when we’re not linked to another, not diluted by their presence and judgments? We form relationships with others, friends, family. That’s fine. Those relationships don’t bind the way love does. We can still have lovers, short-term. But only when alone can we focus on ourselves, know ourselves. How can we know ourselves without this solitude? And not just when we sleep.
It’s probably not going to work out with Jake. I’m probably going to end it. What’s unrealistic, I think, is the number of people who attempt an enduring, committed relationship, who believe it will work long-term. Jake isn’t a bad guy. He’s perfectly fine. Even considering the data that shows the majority of marriages don’t last, people still think marriage is the normal human state. Most people want to get married. Is there anything else that people do in such huge numbers, with such a terrible success rate?
Jake once told me that he keeps a photograph of himself at his desk in his lab. He says it’s the only photograph he keeps there. It’s of him when he was five. He had curly blond hair and chubby cheeks. How did he ever have chubby cheeks? He told me he likes the photo because it’s him, yet physically, he’s completely different now from the child he sees in the photo. He doesn’t just mean he looks different but that every cell captured in the image has died, been shed and replaced by new cells. In the present, he is literally a different person. Where’s the consistency? How is he still aware of being that younger age if he’s physically completely different? He would say something about all those proteins.
Our physical structures, like a relationship, change and repeat, tire and wilt, age and deplete. We get sick and better, or sick and worse. We don’t know when, or how, or why. We just carry on.
Is it better to be paired up or alone?
Three nights ago, with Jake fully comatose, I waited for the light to start peeking through the blinds. On the nights I can’t sleep, like that one, like so many recently, I wish I could just turn my mind off like a lamp. I wish I had a shutdown command like my computer. I hadn’t looked at the clock in a while. I lay there, thinking, wishing I was asleep like everyone else.
“Almost there,” says Jake. “We’re five minutes away.”
I sit up and stretch my arms over my head. I yawn. “Felt like a quick trip,” I say. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Thanks for coming,” he says. Then, inexplicably, “And you also know things are real when they can be lost.”
—The body was found in the closet.
—Really?
—Yeah. A small closet. Big enough to hang shirts and jackets, some boots, not much else. The body was all scrunched up in there. The door was closed.
—It makes me sad. And angry.
—Why not reach out to someone, right? Talk to someone. He had coworkers. It wasn’t like he was working in a place without other people. There were people around all the time.
—I know. It didn’t have to happen this way.
—Of course not.
—Do we know much about his background?
—Not a lot. He was smart, well-read. He knew things. He’d had an earlier career, some sort of academic work, PhD level, I think. That didn’t last, and he ended up here.
—He wasn’t married?
—No, he wasn’t married. No wife. No kids. No one. It’s rare these days to see someone living like that, entirely alone.
It’s a long, slow drive up the farm’s potholed driveway. Trees line both sides. We bump along for about a minute. The gravel and dirt grind under the tires.
The house at the end of the driveway is made of stone. From here, it doesn’t look huge. There’s a wooden, railed deck on one side. We park to the right of the house. There are no other vehicles in sight. Don’t his parents have a car? I can see a light coming from what Jake says is the kitchen. The rest of the house is dark.
There must be a woodstove inside, because the first thing I smell as soon as I step out of the car is smoke. This would have been a pretty place at one time, I imagine, but now it’s a bit run-down. They could use some fresh paint on the windowsills and trim. Much of the porch is rotting. The porch swing is ripped and rusted.
“I don’t want to go in yet,” says Jake. I’ve already taken a few steps toward the house. I stop and turn back. “All that sitting in the car. Let’s take a walk around first.”
“It’s a bit dark, isn’t it? We can’t really see much, can we?”
“At least to get some air, then,” he says. “The stars aren’t out tonight, but on a clear night in summer they’re unbelievable. Three times as bright as in the city. I used to love that. And the clouds. I remember coming out on humid afternoons and the clouds were so massive and soft-looking. I liked how gently they moved across the sky, how different they were from one another. It’s silly, I guess, just watching clouds. I wish we could see them now.”
“It’s not silly,” I say. “Not at all. It’s nice that you noticed those things. Most people wouldn’t.”
“I used to always notice stuff like that. The trees, too. I don’t think I do as much anymore. I don’t know when that changed. Anyway, you know that it’s damn cold when the snow crunches like this. This isn’t that wet snowball-making snow,” Jake says, walking ahead. I wish he wore gloves; his hands are all red. The interlocking stone path we take from the lane to the barn is uneven and crumbling. I appreciate the fresh air, but it’s frigid, not fresh or crisp. My legs are numb. I thought he’d want to go right inside and greet his folks. That’s what I was expecting. I’m not wearing warm pants. No long underwear. Jake’s giving me what he calls “the abridged tour.”
A blustery night is a weird time to be surveying the property. I can tell he really wants me to see it. He points out the apple orchard, and where the veggie gardens are in summer. We come up to an old barn.
“The sheep are in there,” he says. “Dad probably gave them some grain an hour ago.”
He leads me to a wide door that opens from the top half. We walk in. The light is dim, but I can make out silhouettes. Most of the sheep are lying down. A few are chewing. I can hear it. The sheep look spiritless, immobilized by the cold, their breath floating up around them. They look at us, vacantly. The barn has thin plywood walls and cedar pillars. The roof is some type of sheet metal, aluminum maybe. In several places, the walls are cracked or contain holes. It seems a dreary place to pass your time.
The barn isn’t what I’d pictured. Of course I don’t say anything to Jake. It seems dreary. And it smells.
“That’s their cud,” says Jake. “They’re always doing that. Chewing.”
“What’s cud?”
“It’s semidigested food that they regurgitate and chew like gum. Beyond the odd bolus sighting, not much excitement in the barn at this time of night.”
Jake doesn’t say anything as he leads me out of the barn. There’s something much more disturbing than the cud and the constant chewing out here. There are the two carcasses up against the wall. Two woolly carcasses.
Limp and lifeless, both have been stacked up outside against the side of the barn. It’s not what I’m expecting to see. There’s no blood or gore, no flies, no scent, nothing to suggest these were ever living creatures, no signs of decay. They could just as easily be made of synthetic rather than organic material.
I want to stare at them, but I also want to get farther away. I’ve never seen dead lambs before, other than on my plate with garlic and rosemary. It seems to me, maybe for the first time, that there are varying degrees of dead. Like there are varying degrees of everything: of being alive, of being in love, of being committed, of being sure. These lambs aren’t sleepwalking through life. They aren’t discouraged or sick. They aren’t thinking about giving up. These tailless lambs are dead, extremely dead, ten-out-of-ten dead.
“What will happen to the lambs?” I call to Jake, who’s walking ahead, away from the barn. He’s hungry now, I can tell, and wants to hurry up, get inside. The wind is picking up.
“What?” he yells over his shoulder. “You mean the dead ones?”
“Yeah.”
Jake doesn’t reply. He just keeps walking.
I’m not sure what else to say. Why didn’t he say anything about the dead lambs? I’m the one who saw them. I’d rather ignore them, but now that I’ve seen them, I can’t.
“Will anything happen to them?” I ask.
“I don’t know. What do you mean? They’re already dead.”
“Do they stay there, or get buried or anything?”
“Probably burn them at some point. In the bonfire. When it gets warmer, in the spring.” Jake continues walking ahead of me. “They’re frozen for now anyway.” They didn’t look all that different from lambs that are alive and healthy, at least in my mind. But they’re dead. There’s something so similar to living, healthy lambs, but also so different.
I jog to catch up, trying not to slip and fall. We’re far enough away from the barn now that when I turn back, the shape of the two lambs looks like a single inanimate form, a solid mass—a bag of grain resting against the wall.
“Come on,” he calls, “I’ll show you the old pen where they used to keep pigs. They don’t have pigs anymore; they were too much work.”
I follow him along the path until he stops. The pen looks abandoned, untouched for a few years. That’s my feeling. The pigs are gone, but the enclosure is still there.
“So what happened to the pigs?”
“The last two were quite old and weren’t moving around much anymore,” he says. “They had to be put down.”
“And they never got any new ones or baby pigs? Piglets. Is that how it usually works?”
“Sometimes. But I guess they never replaced them. They’re a lot of work and expensive to keep.”
I should probably know better, but I’m curious. “Why did they have to put the pigs down?”
“That’s what happens on a farm. It’s not always pleasant.”
“Yeah, but were they sick?”
He turns back and looks at me. “Forget it. I don’t think you’d like the truth.”
“Just tell me. I need to know.”
“Sometimes it’s hard, out here on a farm like this. It’s work. My parents hadn’t been inside the pen to check on the pigs for a few days. They just tossed their food into the pen. The pigs were lying in the same corner day after day, and after a while, Dad decided he’d better have a good look at them. When he went inside, the pigs didn’t look well. He could tell they were in some discomfort.
“He decided he better try to move them. Dad almost fell over backward when he lifted up the first pig. But he did it. He lifted and turned it. He found its belly was swarming with maggots. Thousands of them. It looked like its entire underside was covered in moving rice. The other one was even worse than the first. Both pigs were literally being eaten alive. From the inside out. And you’d never really know if you just looked at them from afar. From a distance, they seemed content, relaxed. Up close, it was a different story. I told you: life isn’t always pleasant.”
“Holy shit.”