In the Lake of the Woods. Tim O’Brien
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during the night John Wade woke up sweating. The first time, near midnight, he turned and coiled up against Kathy, brain-sick, a little feverish, his thoughts wired to the nighttime hum of lake and woods.
A while later he kicked back the sheets and said, “Kill Jesus.” It was a challenge—a dare.
He closed his eyes and waited for something terrible to happen, almost hoping, and when nothing happened he said it again, with authority, then listened for an answer. There was nothing.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Kill Jesus.”
Quietly then, John Wade swung out of bed. He moved down the hallway to the kitchen, ran water into an old iron teakettle, put it on the stove to boil. He was naked. His shoulders were sunburnt, his face waxy with sweat. For a few moments he stood very still, imagining himself kicking and gouging. He’d go for the eyes. Yes, he would. Tear out the bastard’s eyeballs—fists and fingernails—just punch and claw and hammer and bite. God, too. He hoped there was a god so he could kill him.
The thought was inspiring. He looked at the kitchen ceiling and confided in the void, offering up his humiliation and sorrow.
The teakettle made a light clicking noise.
“You too,” he said.
He shrugged and got out the tea bags and lay down on the kitchen floor to wait. He was not thinking now, just watching the numbers come in. He could see it happening exactly as it happened. Minneapolis was lost. The suburbs, the Iron Range. And the farm towns to the southwest—Pipestone, Marshall, Windom, Jackson, Luverne. A clean, tidy sweep. St. Paul had been lost early. Duluth was lost four to one. The unions were lost, and the German Catholics, and the rank-and-file nobodies. The numbers were implacable. There was no pity in the world. It was all arithmetic. A winner, obviously, until he became a loser. Which was how it happened: that quick. One minute you’re presidential timber and then they come at you with chain saws. It was textbook slippage. It was dishonor and disgrace. Certain secrets had been betrayed—ambush politics, Tony Carbo said—and so the polls went sour and in the press there was snide chatter about issues of character and integrity. Front-page photographs. Dead human beings in awkward poses. By late August the whole enterprise had come unraveled, empty wallets and hedged bets and thinning crowds, old friends with slippery new excuses, and on the first Tuesday after the second Monday in September he was defeated by a margin of something more than 105,000 votes.
John Wade saw it for what it was.
Nothing more to hope for.
Too ambitious, maybe. Climbing too high or too fast. But it was something he’d worked for. He’d been a believer. Discipline and tenacity. He had believed in those virtues, and in the fundamental justice of things, an everyday sort of fairness; that if you worked like a son of a bitch, if you stuck it out and didn’t quit, then sooner or later you’d get the payoff. Politics, it was all he’d ever wanted for himself. Three years as a legislative liaison, six years in the state senate, four tedious years as lieutenant governor. He’d played by the rules. He’d run a good solid campaign, working the caucuses, prying out the endorsements—all of it—eighteen-hour days, late nights, the whole insane swirl of motels and county fairs and ten-dollar-a-plate chicken dinners. He’d done it all.
The teakettle made a brisk whistling sound, but John Wade could not bring himself to move.
Ambush politics. Poison politics.
It wasn’t fair.
That was the final truth: just so unfair. Wade was not a religious man, but he now found himself talking to God, explaining how much he hated him. The election was only part of it. There were also those mirrors in his head. An electric buzz, the chemistry inside him, the hum of lake and woods. He felt the pinch of depravity.
When the water was at full boil, John Wade pushed himself up and went to the stove.
He used a towel to pick up the iron teakettle.
Stupidly, he was smiling, but the smile was meaningless. He would not remember it. He would remember only the steam and the heat and the tension in his fists and forearms.
“Kill Jesus,” he said, which encouraged him, and he carried the teakettle out to the living room and switched on a lamp and poured the boiling water over a big flowering geranium near the fireplace. “Jesus, Jesus,” he was saying. There was a hissing noise. The geranium seemed to vibrate for an instant, swaying sideways as if caught by a breeze. He watched the lower leaves blanch and curl downward at the edges. The room acquired a damp exotic stink.
Wade was humming under his breath. “Well now,” he said, and nodded pleasantly.
He heard himself chuckle.
“Oh, my,” he said.
He moved to the far end of the living room, steadied himself, and boiled a small spider plant. It wasn’t rage; it was necessity. He emptied the teakettle on a dwarf cactus and a philodendron and a caladium and several others he could not name. Then he returned to the kitchen. He refilled the teakettle, watched the water come to a boil, smiled and squared his shoulders and moved down the hallway to their bedroom.
A prickly heat pressed against his face. The teakettle made its clicking sound in the night.
Briefly then, he let himself glide away. A ribbon of time went by, which he would not remember, then later he found himself crouched at the side of the bed. He was rocking on his heels, watching Kathy sleep.
Odd, he thought. That numbness inside him. The way his hands had no meaningful connection to his wrists.
For some time he crouched there, admiring the tan at Kathy’s neck and shoulders, the wrinkles at her eyes. In the dim light she seemed to be smiling at something, or half smiling, a thumb curled alongside her nose. It occurred to him that he should wake her. Yes, a kiss, and then confess to the shame he felt: how defeat had bled into his bones and made him crazy with hurt. He should’ve done it. He should’ve told her about the mirrors in his head. He should’ve talked about the special burden of villainy, the ghosts at Thuan Yen, the strain on his dreams. And then later he should’ve slipped under the covers and taken her in his arms and explained how he loved her more than anything, a hard hungry lasting guileless love, and how everything else was trivial and dumb. Just politics, he should’ve said. He should’ve talked about coping and enduring, all the clichés, how it was not the end of the world, how they still had each other and their marriage and their lives to live.
In the days that followed, John Wade would remember all the things he should’ve done.
He touched her shoulder.
Amazing, he thought, what love could do.
In the dark he heard something twitch and flutter, like wings, and then a low, savage buzzing sound. He squeezed the teakettle’s handle. A strange heaviness had come into his arms and wrists. Again, for an indeterminate time, the night seemed to dissolve all around him, and he was somewhere outside himself, awash in despair, watching the mirrors in his head flicker with radical implausibilities. The teakettle and a wooden hoe and a vanishing village and PFC Weatherby and hot white steam.
He would remember smoothing back her hair.
He would remember pulling a blanket to her chin and then returning to the living room, where for a long while he lost track of his whereabouts. All around him was that furious buzzing noise. The unities of time and space had unraveled. There were manifold uncertainties, and in the days and weeks to come, memory would play devilish little tricks on him. The mirrors would warp up; there would be odd folds and creases; clarity would be at a premium.
At one point during the night he stood waist-deep in the lake.
At another point he found himself completely submerged, lungs like stone, an underwater rush in his ears.
And then later, in the starwild dark, he sat quietly at the edge of the dock. He was naked. He was all alone, watching the lake.
Later still, he woke up in bed. A soft pinkish light played against the curtains.
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