For a while, he could only sob and gasp for breath. Eventually, the part of him that stood apart, detached, said that he was useless like this. He could accomplish nothing as long as the pain controlled him. He would have to get back to thinking of himself as a character in one of his stories and not as Thomas Huston, not as the man whose family had been butchered, the man whose life no longer existed, a mere body shot full of poison now, a corpse deprived of death. He knew this and was even able to marvel at this apparent division in his psyche, this dissociative split that allowed him to experience his pain while also regarding it from a distance.
He was both a fiction and the truth. The stronger of the two was truth, however, and the truth sickened him and hollowed him out. He felt hollowed out by hunger too and knew he would have to eat soon, even though the thought of food was nauseating. Water, on the other hand, was not a problem. The area was as wet as Alaskan taiga, soaked by hundreds of small ponds and swamps and streams. Before leaving the last stream, Huston had cupped its waters to his mouth. He remembered doing that. The water was so cold that it burned his throat and made him dizzy. Even so, he had gulped one mouthful after another, had filled his stomach with it. But he would have to find food of some kind soon. And now that his body temperature had been compromised, he would have to find a better place to gather his strength and make his plans.
He thought about trying to work his way to Oniontown and the O’Patchens, but Oniontown was at least twenty miles away, and Ed O’Patchen would be likely to shoot him on sight. Huston still had his wallet, his debit and credit cards and probably a little cash, but all of that belonged to another life, a life eradicated, an eviscerated life.
He could not go on living, he knew that much. But he had one thing to do before he could stop. He thought of the men and women he worked with and the students he taught, and he did not believe he could trust any of them to help him. They claimed to love and admire him, but that was yesterday or the day before, that was part of an expired dream.
Was there no one he could trust?
There was Nathan, yes, but no, Huston would not involve him in this. Let him have his own life. He had struggles of his own.
So there was only Annabel. Only Annabel who would understand. Only Annabel who would know. She might not want to help him, but maybe she would. She owed him that much. He had helped her when she’d needed it, and not lightly but with sadness in both their hearts, and he believed she would help him too. It was all sad business now. No business but the saddest. He had to try Annabel.
He did not know how to contact her except at work, and she did not work except on weekends, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. How many days until Thursday?
Some things remained quite clear to him. Other things he saw as if viewed in the pieces of a shattered mirror. This jacket, for example, seemed to have no beginning. Where had it come from?
What day is it? he wondered again. He went back in his mind to late Saturday night, worked hard to find his way back to it and harder still to stop short of the house. He did not want to go back inside the house in his memory. He was outside of it now, a man wandering the streets with a knife in his hand. A heavy, ugly knife, something to cut through the darkness and then the fog, something to give him weight. He remembered the way the knife had sliced through the water, how it fell straight down, stabbed through the water with hardly a splash, disappeared into the murk.
No, wait, he told himself. That was the next day, wasn’t it? Didn’t I have the knife when I found the cave? Yes. Yes! Sunday night I found the cave. How did I get there? I don’t know. I walked, I guess. I walked all day. Then I found the cave and I broke off some branches and I crawled inside. I had the knife. What about the jacket? I don’t know, but I had the knife. I wanted to use it on myself, I remember that. I wanted to open up my wrists and fill the cave with blood. And I almost did it, didn’t I? Or did I dream that? No, I almost did it. I put the blade against my wrist. I wanted to do it. God how I wanted to do it.
Then the next morning… Monday. It was Monday; today is Monday. I went back to the road. I was going to flag down a car, get a ride back home. I wanted to go home. I wanted everything back. But nobody would have picked me up if they saw that knife. So I dropped it in the water. I watched it going down. I hated it but I hated to let it go. Why was it so hard to let that damned thing go?
That was Monday, wasn’t it? Or was that Sunday?
Then what did you do? he asked himself. Then you remembered. How could you go home? There was nothing there, nobody there, everything gone. So you started walking again. You walked to the bog. You walked down the stream. You came to the road and the drainage ditch, and you couldn’t go any farther so you climbed into the culvert. And then you did what?
You found the jacket. You were wearing it. You found it when you saw that you were wearing it.
Then you slept all night.
No, he remembered, first my feet were blue. I held them, and they felt like packages of frozen meat. So I rubbed them awhile, and then I didn’t care anymore and I fell asleep. I woke up and it was dark. It was dark everywhere, and I was shivering. I thought I was underwater, and I tried to swim to the top but I banged my head on the pipe, and I went to sleep again. I passed out; some more time passed.