The feeling came again, just as confusing. I was in the cereal aisle and said aloud—in a quiet madman voice, unbidden by anything, completely beyond my control—what I’d said so many times before. I went home, then to bed. The bed seemed right, a little cloth cave. I slept completely under the covers, like I’d done when I was a child.
The next day I woke feeling fine. All I’d needed was to burrow in bed for a while, let Helena float through the night without me. I was clerking for a justice on the Montana Supreme Court, lots of property-rights cases. Clerking there wasn’t as big a deal as it sounds: the justice lived down the road from me in a two-story orange house with a hitching post in the yard. He and his wife had kept golden retrievers, and after she died he switched to goldendoodles. Sometimes I would see him in a plaid shirt and jeans, in line to buy cereal.
The feeling came after lunch, two days in a row now. I was holding a stack of manila envelopes, and something about their color or the stack’s surprising heft, something about the situation made the world almost end: the argyle design on the carpet, the height of the ceiling—the nowhereness of everything. What was I doing? Then I said the words again and knew I had to go home. The justice was fine with it. He was fine with everything.
But where was home? I lay in bed again, but the wrongness—the incompleteness—of the bed was apparent to me now. It was a new bed in a new room in a new home, not my real home. I went to Darcy’s house. Our house, actually, which I still technically owned in half until she paid me my part of the mortgage. We had been divorced for a year, since I started clerking.
“So you want to sleep here tonight?” she said.
“Alone in our old bed,” I said, and to be extra-clear, I added, “Just me.”
She and Greggory, her fiancé, let me. First we went to Blackfoot Brewery for beer and popcorn. I liked Greggory—he was in no way a character in the story of our divorce. I still liked Darcy, too, in a way. I planned to leave Montana at some point to work at a big firm on a coast. She had a nice life in Helena that she didn’t want to leave. We had lived apart for so much of our marriage that when we finally discussed a permanent location after I graduated law school, that was that.
We bought some growlers of beer to take home, which we drank with a dinner of grilled hamburgers. While we ate, a herd of deer wandered into the backyard, stupidly unafraid, as happens a lot in Helena, nothing magical about it. As they passed with their curious, stork-like gait, I was suddenly filled with a desire to go away, a tentacle of the feeling I’d been carrying since the clerk’s office after lunch, holding the envelopes.
I went to bed—our old bed, a wood-framed king. Earlier, we had changed the sheets to those Darcy and I had used, which we had found in a scrunch in the back of the closet. There was still summer light over the city. Outside and then in the house, Darcy and Greggory made their evening noises: cleaning after dinner, Jeopardy!, the metallic beep of aimlessly searching Netflix. They would be sleeping together on the couch’s hide-a-bed and had already taken everything they needed from the bedroom.
Night moved on. This desire, this sad pull, had ensnared me, but did the old bed feel right? The Helena house had been ours since before I began law school. Darcy had stayed here for work, and I would come back from University of Washington for summers and holidays off. Now what was the house to me? In the bedroom, there were photos taken at Greggory’s family’s cabin, up near Glacier, a pile of his pants in the corner by the door. I wasn’t jealous of him, but I did feel invaded by his things. I needed to be alone and away from his smell in the bed. All I wanted was that gush of wet energy I’d felt when I stepped out of the car after a nine-hour drive from Seattle, and that warm, easeful, almost rapture to shower in your own shower and dry yourself with your own towel and pass out in your home on your bed, an adventure come and passed. I could no longer feel that way in the Helena house. Had I ever experienced that sensation before, or was I just romanticizing the past? Anyway, the night spent imposing on Darcy and Greggory was a waste.
I went to my new house in the morning. I felt nothing stepping in. Everything inside was mine, or bequeathed to me in the divorce. I stood in the doorway and the words came. I needed to go home.
• •
In Sammamish, outside Seattle, I had lived in a three-bedroom house that sort of rotated through U of W law students. A thin redhead, almost a boy, answered the door when I knocked.
“I used to live here,” I told him. “Can I look around?”
“Law guy? Where you at now?”
I told him—Montana Supreme Court—and he was floored. In the grimy kitchen I told him it sounds better than it is. It’s not the California Supreme Court, or the real deal Supreme Court.
“Still,” he said. “Still, that’s a thing to be doing.”
His name was Bret, about to start his second year. He was much younger than I, but that was the case with all the law students when I was attending. I was just past thirty when I started law school—my various housemates in Sammamish had all been in their midtwenties.
He showed me around my old house, the basement with the pool table, the big study room and the little study room. I told him I wanted to see my old bedroom, which turned out to be his now, cheaply adorned with IKEA furniture, a squat, European bed.
“I like it,” I said. I didn’t really like it; I was just beginning the process of charming him.
“Of course you like it,” Bret said. “But that’s just your nostalgia talking. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
“Do you have class today?” I asked, and immediately felt somewhat stupid; it was summer. Of course there are summer classes, which I found out he wasn’t taking. His summer was for cramming. I offered to get him coffee.
“Why?” he asked. “Didn’t you just stop by to look at the house?”
“Give me the old tour,” I said, smiling. “It’s for my nostalgia.”
We ordered paninis and dark roasts at a coffee shop north of Pike’s Place. I paid because, nice as our conversation was going, I was inconveniencing him and would soon inconvenience him further. We sat by a window, against which rain would sometimes briefly splatter. I let him complain about school, his girlfriend Lauren, who was also a law student, and his housemates, both of whom were in and out over the summer—now out together on a trip to Colorado, near Boulder, where my sister happened to still live. Bret hadn’t been invited.
“But I have the house to myself now,” he said. “After a shower I can air dry in the kitchen and study naked in the little room. And when Lauren comes over, we can use the couch.”
There would be no better time to ask. “Bret,” I said. It was hard to keep going, because in the coffee shop I didn’t have that feeling, that pull to be elsewhere, alone, or any sensation really but embarrassment for what I was about to ask. “Bret,” I went on, “I’d like to stay at your house tonight, if I can.”
Bret shrugged. “Better than getting to Helena at four in the morning.”
“There’s more that I need,” I said, and I explained why I had come to the Sammamish house, the hard-to-understand feeling that had been coming and coming, the need to return to a place where I could shut my body off like a switch.
“So I’ll sleep on the couch?” Bret said. “Are you going to murder me?”
“Or you and Lauren can stay at the best hotel in Seattle, I’ll pay,” I said.
“So you’re going to rob me then,” he said. “Is this some sort of sex thing? Are you going to masturbate in my bed?”
“No.” I gave him my Amex. “Take this,” I said. “Use it for dinner, best restaurant in the city, then stay a night at the hotel. I don’t want your stuff.”
It was dark when I arrived at the Sammamish house. I had no interest in inhabiting all the rooms, shooting pool, of living an evening there like I’d done before. I showered then dried myself in the dingy smell of my old bedroom.
Bret’s bed was different from any bed I had ever slept on, the mattress a dense foam that moved and remained moved under my touch like sand. I pressed my hands on the foam, leaned all the way in, and waited to see if the indentations would fill—I was stalling. I closed the blackout curtains I’d installed when I lived there, turned off the lights. The room became a suspension of darkness. I knew where the bed was, it was just a matter of crawling in.
I stood there, still stalling. Once I had watched a clickbait video about a woman born and raised in an Amazonian tribe, who married an American somehow, lived a housewife life in New Jersey, then one day left her new family to live again where she was born, utterly happy. Was this what I wanted? A far-off place that I could drop my manila envelopes and run away to? My own hammock in a hut, open-air, no doors or windows, and the slow waltz of rain on the thatch roof? On the long drive I had begun that morning, from Helena to Seattle, through mountains and wildflower plains and dense pine forests, I thought that the reoccurring feeling was a lack of here-ness that I carried vaguely with me from place to place—and maybe I was right, but now, in Bret’s room, waiting to get in the bed, I thought it was also a lack of elsewhere. I had no place I could be or go. The world was a broad, shimmering salt flat, an endless white plate of nothing and nowhere. As soon as I lay down in Bret’s bed, the feeling came, the feeling I had hoped all day would be expunged by lying down in the bed. My failure was overwhelming, a towering wave. I pulled the covers over myself and said the words I’d said before, then I said them again. Sammamish was not home, and I was foolish to have thought otherwise.
• •
Boulder, my sister’s house. She wasn’t home when I arrived, but I knew where the key was: under a sunfaded plastic bucket next to the porch. I let myself in, as I had done hundreds of times when I lived with her briefly after her settlement. She had been injured in a one-car wreck caused by faulty wiring in the automatic steering, a problem that would later involve a recall and a nightly news scandal. She had been interviewed by MSNBC, CBS, Fox Business.
Amber was home soon—she’d been at the Boulder library, researching masks—and we hugged near the door. We were never the fighting sort of siblings. She would allow me to sleep here tonight, and for as long as I liked after.
“Aren’t you clerking?” she said. “Can you take off like that?”
“It’s just Montana,” I said. “I’m more of a research buddy than a clerk.”
We went in town to buy pot, the best kind. She paid. Amber’s money was endless, and she spent it only on her art and her pot and me—the Amex I used for Bret’s hotel and dinner expenses was paid monthly by Amber, no questions asked—in thanks for nursing her after the accident. Now she used a cane and had a wide, swinging hobble that could get her around Boulder pretty fast. She could drive again and had amassed many tickets. For a while after the wreck, she couldn’t walk—in truth, she could always walk, but the pain was too intense to actually do it. Instead, she preferred to lay in bed and moan until I’d get under the covers with her so we could watch TV all day, eating chips.
We got stoned in her studio, which used to be the living room with another larger TV and a couple couches. Before the accident, she had painted all the way upstairs in the triangular attic, where busloads of light dropped through the unopenable windows onto the pink insulation. She wore surgical masks against the paint fumes and floating pink fiberglass. Now, of course, stairs were big trouble for her—her bedroom, studio, everything had to be on the bottom floor.
“I love it, though,” she said.
“You should. You have so much more space to paint.”
“And,” she said, tracing with her fingers a rectangle where the TV used to be, “no more distractions.”
I sat for her. On a little canvas, she painted my face as if it were a mask, a scary, deformed thing when done, five hours of sitting. While she worked and I waited, the pot draining out of us, we talked about clerking, Darcy, our childhood house in Helena, long since sold after our parents were gone. Every word I said began to feel like a lie, as if, were she to find the right question, she would uncover the farce beneath. I felt oppressed by her good cheer, the relaxed way she sat in her own home, among her things. If she was still depressed about her situation, she hid it well.
I looked at the painting of my face, textured and dark as if the mask were made of burned oak. Through the wooden abstractions, it was obviously me.
“I see it as a happy mask,” she said, touching my arm. “A good luck sort of thing. Keep it.”
I wasn’t convinced. I stared at the mask painting, seeing what she saw in me, and then everything spilled out, the feeling, the need for elsewhere, and other things I had never fully realized and wasn’t expecting to say. I told her I never wanted to be a lawyer, I never wanted to clerk, that I chose that path because it’s what averagely smart kids did. I told her that going all the way back, through college and through childhood, there had been nothing that held my interest in a permanent and irrational way. I told her that I wanted hobbies, that I wanted to be a person who could go to the library to study masks. I told her I had loved Darcy too simply. She was someone I was happy to see emerge through a door, someone to drive around Montana with and then camp in the mountains near our car, but I never loved her in the abstract way I thought of as marriage—a person I could crumple into when my fears were enclosing, two glasses to pour into each other back and forth, our liquids mixing. The words were coming out without my thinking, from some ancient, limbic process, as if I were a snake-handling preacher. I felt high again, injected with adrenaline. Everything was crystalline and clear and in their ordered parts, and I began to hope, as I was babbling to the painting, I would finally come to understand the origins of this feeling that was now returning monstrously to me in my sister’s studio. But before I could, this newfound clarity started seeping away, my head an emptying mask, and I turned quiet, uncomprehending, and I said again what I’d said in the cereal aisle.
Putting the painting away to dry, Amber said, “I know what you mean.” Was this more patronizing? She sat on the floor and began her evening leg stretches. “I felt like that sometimes after the accident, but you get through it. You, like . . . find a way, if you want to get screenwritery about it.” She outstretched her legs, put her head on her knees, and wrapped her hands around her feet. She had never been this flexible before the accident. She said, “But then I have as much money as I ever need. I can just smoke pot and paint—and that’s all I ever came to Boulder to do in the first place. It’s like this. Remember when you were at U of M, and you didn’t really have to worry about much? Loans were for paying later. Our inheritance paid the rent. Money was just money. You could work on whatever little project you wanted without thinking about what was holding you back. Happiness is like that, when you can just live. That’s how you know you’re home.”
Her life advice was to get into an accident and sue yourself rich. Perhaps I had misremembered my sister’s capacity for empathy, or perhaps her settlement had sucked it from her. I thanked her anyway and went upstairs for the night.
I had the upstairs floor to myself, the bathroom, the miscellany room with art junk she had bought to incorporate into projects, and the room I used to sleep in, with the daybed and doily-like blankets. I cleaned upstairs for her—dust was everywhere, wetted into a grime in the corner of every room. In the bathroom behind the mirror were the bottles of pills I used to administer to her, mostly painkillers, expired or almost there, clearly untouched since I moved back to Helena.
I showered then went back to my old bedroom, to the pink daybed. I remembered now that I hated that bed, and then I remembered that soon after arriving in Boulder to help Amber heal, I had gone to bed each night hoping that the next morning would be the one she would release me from my duty, and I could live again in Helena with Darcy. How easy it is to pretend our past was better than our present.
Boulder had been wrong, another mistake. I took one of her old pain pills, then I sat on the bed with the lights off. The pill helped. I felt good sitting there, or at least contentedly stupid, and in my spinny daze, I decided what to do next. I listened for Amber to finish her night, then I emptied the rest of her pills into a pillowcase so I could feel good again later—she would never miss them—and I waited another hour of silence, ensuring she would be asleep when I left.
• •
Summer evening in Missoula. I parked at the Albertsons grocery store, where you could leave your car for weeks and not get ticketed or towed. The coed co-op where I lived from sophomore year to graduation was a ten-minute walk, first along the Clark Fork River, then through shambly student housing. Two pain pills were already in my system, dulling my brain so the feeling wouldn’t come.
There was a party at the co-op, a pre-pre-football celebration for the University of Montana summer students. Everyone in the yard was wearing jerseys. The crowded kitchen in the basement, all maroon and silver jerseys. I loved it, or thought I did: the beer-pong tables, the anonymous Solo cups, the two full fridges of beer and liquor. When the party was over, the routine was that all the alcohol would be moved back to the walk-in pantry behind the stairs where there was another fridge so full of food that we always needed to tie it shut. Then the food would be moved back to the kitchen fridges, the spoiled and smashed things thrown away. I was wending through the jersey’d students to look at the secret fridge, a little nostalgia, when a girl grabbed my arm.
“Where’s your jersey?” she asked.
“I forgot to wear it.”
“I think there’s an extra one up in Kelly’s room,” she said.
I followed her. Her shorts were mostly hidden by a huge maroon jersey, her boyfriend’s or an ex’s that she never returned, and when we ascended the narrow staircase to the third floor the shirt billowed so I could see everything from her ass to the nape of her neck. The pain pills were working. When I glimpsed this girl’s taught back, I forgot that I was here to sneak into my old room, my old bed, where I would attempt to relive the happy college nothingness Amber had offputtingly suggested—all I could think of was screwing the girl in her jersey.
We passed the bedroom I lived in, its door shut, and entered the big, three-person room at the end of the hall.
“What’s your major?” she said.
“I’m in grad school.” What was a famous grad program here? I wanted to impress her. “In film. I want to be the next Tarrantino.”
“I was going to say.”
I didn’t know what she meant: that I looked old, or like a film student, or a Tarrantino fan, or maybe all three, which I was considering when she handed me a jersey. Too big, another boyfriend thing.
“Just toss it back in here when you leave. On the top bed.”
We went back to the party downstairs where she left me to play cornhole in the backyard. I think the pain pills made me love her, so after a few minutes in the kitchen I followed. Darkness was beginning, the floodlights on. The girl and I made a team of sorts. Everyone drank beer from red cups. I loved the weight and feel of the beanbag in my hand, and I loved better the release and arc of the bag, still part of me as it spun in the floodlit air. We weren’t keeping score, and the teams changed to accommodate the coming and going of party-goers. Soon the girl was gone, and I was on a team with a heavyset, bearded guy in black jeans.
Now I didn’t care that she left. I was deeply comfortable with the gentle rhythm of game, the ease with which we unspokenly took our turns, our growing skill in launching the beanbags. The game had knocked us focused and stupid. Perhaps this was what Amber had meant when she talked about college. I hadn’t shared her apparent sense of freedom that came with my share of the inheritance and the sale of our childhood home—that money had been all stress until I dumped it into the down payment for the house with Darcy—but now I remembered that college, and the innate unseriousness with which I viewed it, had been untethering for me. College was an easy game Darcy and I could play while we did whatever else we wanted. We’d skip classes together, stay in my co-op room for a whole day, screwing and smoking pot. There were faraway concerts, all-night diners, long drives, the brown up-and-down expanses of Montana—one December we had ditched an exam to go north near the Canada border to lie bundled in a meadow under an ice-block sky, through which the aurora borealis throbbed in pillars of color. What else? I had joined the U of M kendo club for a month!—paid my yearlong dues, bought a bamboo practice sword and a mask, hundreds of dollars lost to a hobby I abandoned as easily as I’d taken up. I remembered the leather handle of the sword against my palms and the blank, intense look on my face in the mirror as I practiced head hits for the sensei.
The world cracked open for me. The cornhole, Darcy, kendo—I had been empty and stupid and could be again. Beanbags flew in the air, some from me, and the cup of beer warmed in my hand. I left the game, without fuss, just as the girl had. The feeling had been chased from me. I wouldn’t need to sneak into my co-op bed. Tonight I would arrive in Helena, sleep the night in my new Sleep City bed, and in the morning I would wake early to clerk.
The pills were evaporating out of me, leaving behind their joy. I went back inside, to the kitchen. I didn’t know how to contain this happiness. I wanted to deliver it to someone, but none of the kids in maroon and silver would care. I thought of the fridge again, not as some absurd totem to express my feelings to, but as a relic of the time I had been happy. I snuck behind the stairs and shifted open the pantry door. There it was, surrounded by cans of vegetables and boxes of rice, the handle tied by a leather strap to a weight-bearing beam in the bare wall. I remembered the post-party days when we’d list the food we’d need replaced and we’d pool our money and send a few housemates to Albertsons to restock. But then, of course, came another memory: a cart, a list, me alone in the rice aisle, looking at my hands, saying the words, those same words, all those years ago—had I forgotten this feeling had dogged me for so long?—me just looking through my hands past the wire of the cart to Albertsons beige tile floor and wanting to vaporize in the store without ever having existed. And then in the pantry, I said the words again.
I had to be alone. The partying undergrads repulsed me. I went upstairs, knocked on the door to my old room. No answer. Inside, it was plainly a girl’s room. On the bed, girls pants, unfolded blankets, a purple computer bag. I set everything aside, folded the blankets neatly and stacked them on a soft-looking chair. I took a pill, then another, and waited to turn docile and nonthinking. I remembered again lying below the northern lights, my body warm with Darcy in the sleeping bag, my face exposed, the elemental art swaying above the cold, and that even then all I could think of was being elsewhere, alone, blacked out.
The door opened with a blast of party noise—the girl who gave me the jersey, drunk. This was her room, of course. She must have seen me come up. Everything moved quickly after that. We kissed by her closet, then she undressed under the covers of her already-cleared bed. I knew I wouldn’t be having sex with her. She claimed to be willing, but she was drunk. I undressed for her under the lights, then turned them off, full dark, and got into bed with her.
Again and again I kissed her on the neck, then I asked to spoon. She would fall asleep soon if I took my time. I ran my hand up and down the curve of her hip and hardened slightly into the space where her legs became her ass. She grew impatient and asked what I wanted, and I told her I only wanted to talk as I felt her. First I talked about life in the co-op, the clean-up schedules, the community meals. Then I talked about Helena, and my old home with the hitching post by the mailbox. Her breathing slowed; she was already asleep. I was free to leave, or to keep speaking to her dreaming head. I went on, choosing my words in a controlled, careful way. I explained the feeling, and how I realized it had been attached to me since beyond when I could remember. I let myself think—it was time to get this right. I told her that I had fooled myself, that I had misunderstood my desire for home. Your house is your home, the threshold to pure safety, a place of pleasant nothing, but a house has many chambers, so take the sensation further, to safer and safer places: the bedroom, and then the bed. Bed, I had thought, was home, but I could have thought more completely, to the absurd end, and holding the girl, I finally did. The realization made me smile in the dark. I knew what I wanted. I held her breasts and told her I had been home, and I would be there again. I said there was only one home—the first home and the last home. Everything would be perfect, I told her, and then I said the words again, this time on my own volition, knowing exactly what I meant.
I want to go home.
• •
Climbing the tree was easy, the sequence of steps and grips was like recalling a once-forgotten language. As I maneuvered along the branch to my old window, surprised it could still bear my weight, the backyard lights next door came on. I stopped moving, the pillowcase of pills swinging to a silence. The justice let out two of his goldendoodles to pee. Every summer when I was a boy, the justice and his wife had paid me twenty dollars a week to walk their dogs. Then he gave me the clerking position. Everything in my life had been handed to me.
The window was unlocked, and I snaked my body inside. Stacks of boxes, a sewing table, porcelain figurines like little Hummels—after buying my house, they turned my room into a repository for knickknacks. Outside, coming from the living room, the chatter of a TV, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Had MSNBC existed when I was young?
My bed was gone, trashed after the house was sold. I lay on the carpet. Blue TV light entered from the gap below the door. What would these people find when they finally opened that door?
On the floor, nothing. One last attempt, but I expected nothing. I had hoped for nothing, in a way. I closed my eyes and briefly imagined my old bed, the baseball comforter, the dinosaur pillows, which I kept until I moved to Missoula. But I knew the bed wasn’t what I needed. What I needed was to remember more. I took a handful of pills, then another. The memories came of T-ball, dogs, family breakfasts, the old-timey trolley rides through Helena. But soon the pills took the memories away and everything became sensation—the rough carpet touching my arms, the flickering light below the door, and Rachel Maddow’s voice, teaching, motherly, and ah how I remembered now my head in my mother’s lap, my face in her soft belly, her speech muffled by her own body, and the feeling I had lying there as a child, indescribable then, of wanting to disappear into her, into that voice, and be suspended in motionless safety, of wanting to be everywhere, atomized, gone.
