how to dig

by leah erickson

    They never met in offices. He always thought that psychotherapy was for the weak.  He would meet them in a video store, a pharmacy. A coffee shop. Normal places. They would come to him. Each affair was pure beauty. Each had its own rhythm, its own blossoming. There would be no words, just a look, a finger laid lightly on his arm. And he, awed and humbled, had only to follow as she would lead him wordlessly to her house. Or apartment. Or student housing. Draw the blind, pull the curtain. Their souls would crash together like lightning. Then, what followed would be so ineffably tender. Like every love song ever written. Until it was over, and he’d leave, stumbling through the street in a daze, her imprint still electric and warm on his body. But soon even that would be gone, leaving just a dull sweet ache.

     A clinical psychologist, a school counselor. A sex therapist. The guys David drank with all made their dirty jokes about the women he saw. Asked him what all these psychologists, these educated women, saw in a ditch digger like him. So what do you talk about? You talk about Freud? That Freud was a dirty old man, right? Does a woman shrink like to get dirty? We missing out, what? He learned to keep his mouth shut.  He knew these women were out of his reach. But for a little while, they were together, and there was nothing wrong with that.

     Of course, he loved them all. There was one, Marianne, a neurophysiologist. She studied brain evolution. Her hair was long and black and Indian straight. It smelled of sandalwood. He’d bury his face in it as she spoke of memory and molecular construction. He would think nothing but, this is good. It never occurred to him to question his good fortune. He took it as it came.

      He married the last and greatest of these loves. She was in forensics. She represented crazy people in courtrooms, though she told him not to call them crazy. They lived in a large new house in a brand new development. The streets were wide and wound gently, like an unfurling ribbon. Those big houses went on for miles.

     Things were OK there, for a while. Until he woke up in a cold sweat one night. He looked out of their angled skylight, speckled with stars and thought, “It was the loving that I liked better. Not being loved!” Then he knew he’d made a terrible mistake.

     He walked on eggshells in this new house. He gestured like a mime. His wife took long baths that lasted for hours, until the walls dripped, the paint peeled and flaked off the ceiling. The tension sent him out into the street after dinner. He saw the professional people that were his neighbors, talking at the end of their driveways. He nodded foolishly, they waved. David was a tall wiry guy, with darting eyes and wild sprouts of black hair. He had a cough that sounded like ball bearings rattling in his lungs. He knew how he looked to them. He’d walk down to the corner store for cheap beer. The Korean woman at the counter knew him. Called him, “Tunnel Man. “Tunnel Man, you got dirt in your creases. Why your wife don’t clean your fingernails? Dirty!” And she’d roll her eyes up at him, wag a finger with a pointed red nail. She had his number, all right.

     David met his wife while he was on the job. He was tunneling under Elm Street. Submerging a four-foot pipe with hydraulic jacks to run a water line. She was a forensic psychologist on her way to a court date. She slowed down to look at him. But he, shoveling and daydreaming, didn’t notice her until she yelled to him “I like your vest.”

     He was wearing his usual hardhat and orange safety vest. He took off the hat and looked up out of the hole.  She wore a fitted blazer with a short, full skirt. The skirt was patterned with cowgirls and horseshoes. It just about knocked him out, those cowgirls. A person who would wear that knew the possibilities of the world. Looking her straight in the kneecap, he said, “I know a place that serves a great breakfast taco.”

     “What time do you get off?” she asked.

     That night he lay in her queen bed with peach sheets. He stroked her face, kissed her

fluttering eyelashes. She smiled, happy and grateful. He touched each of her dear little toes, as though they were rosary beads. She pushed him down and leaned over him, covering his dirty face with puffy little kisses.

     He felt something inside, clear and bright and expansive, a white light.  He said to her, “I feel like I’ve been a man on a quest. And now I’ve found what I was looking for. I want to marry you. I…I want to marry you in India, where the wedding last three days, and they walk around a fire.” He was joking, but not.

    She blinked, leaned on one elbow. She had short hair, in the Dutch-boy style. Wore glasses even when they were making love. She’d written a book, given lectures. Her focus shined on him like warm sunlight. She was different than all of them. Her intellect had a softness, like an aura. Electric blue.

     She said, “We assign cause and effect where there is only chaos in our lives. It is only natural to assign a narrative to complete randomosity.”

     “Narrative, huh?”

     “A story. A fairy tale.”

     “You think I’m random?”

     “I’m talking about your amygdala.”

     “Say what?”

     “Animal brain.”

     “WOOF WOOF!” He rolled his eyes wildly and charged her like a bulldog. They married two weeks later, not in India, but at the beach.  A beach town where the shops sold airbrushed T-shirts and bongs and galleon jewelry. They ate fried chicken from buckets afterwards and threw the bones to the seagulls, who took them and flew away. Carnivorous gulls in a blue-blue sky, that’s what he would remember.

     They sat at the table in their kitchen, drinking their morning coffee. They had been married for five months. The kitchen had been renovated. He thought it looked like a space ship, all shiny steel surfaces and sleek pendant lamps. He thought of alien autopsies.

     “So what are your plans today, David?”

     “I’m connecting a storm drain pipe under Lexington Street. And you?”

     “I’ll be at the prison. Evaluating a new patient.”

     She spoke to him, but she was looking out the window. Sad and winsome, as though she wished herself out there instead of where she was.

     He wanted to reel her back in. “Don’t forget your ink blots!” he said, trying to make her laugh. He liked to tell people, My girl is a big believer in Rorschach.

      “I have them. Um, did you call the insurance people about that bill yet?”

      “I’ll do that today.”

     “The contractor will be coming about doing the master bath.  The Davisons come over Friday. I’ve got some Cornish hens. You know what they signed up for, and recommend to us? Ballroom dancing lessons…all the couples from the neighborhood committee do it…ha ha.. yeah….” she’s spoke so quietly, it was though the words were not even meant to be heard.

     Abruptly, she let out a sob, then caught it quickly back into her throat.

     ”David, I was thinking we could go a trip.”

     “Oh yeah?”

     “I think it’d be good for us.”

     Her words were casual, but anxiety thrummed through her words. He worried that she meant it’d be good for starting a baby. He felt a little dizzy.

     “Did you look at the pamphlets I gave you?”

     “Yes, Celia. I don’t know that I want to go back to college. I enjoy doing what I do.”

     “Digging ditches? Forever?”

     “I feel free at my job. I like to daydream. I don’t want to wear a tie and work at a…I don’t know…mutual fund company.” He tried to make her smile. “All I know is how to dig. I’m just a townie who likes cheap beer and pool.  I’m not one of those highbrow types. I don’t even like art! Going to an art gallery makes me want to pound the walls like a gorilla!”

    She laughed, he laughed, but it was awkward. Like they were laughing at a punch line they didn’t understand.

     David began to wonder if things would have been different if they’d had a real wedding, with rings and speeches and a little girl to drop the rose petals. Maybe then the marriage would feel more real. He was thirty-four years old, and nothing about his life felt real to him so far.

     Gray October sky. Orange pumpkins, purple mums. You see a lot more when you walk to work, David thought, walking hunched in on himself.

     Animal brain, she said. Right. I am an animal. And running.

     Running not from his wife, exactly, but  from that house. Those smothering pillows. Those doilied and useless little end tables. The dinner parties and empty talk.

     His workmate, Adrian, was from Mexico and spoke no English. They’d worked together for years, and things were easy between them. Adrian had an inner peace that David envied. He drank cans of coconut milk on his breaks, and snacked on slices of jicama, a type of Mexican turnip. Adrian communicated through smiles and shrugs. Nothing seemed to bother him.

     It was a relief to climb down into the trench. David liked the feel of his spade. It was heavy black soil he was digging, not a lot of rocks. Things could be worse than this, he thought, a man digging a hole. Things, at one time, were much worse. There was the army, for instance. He was nineteen when he cleaned up bodies in Iraq, in the first Gulf War. And he was twenty-nine when his reserve unit cleaned up at Ground Zero after 9/11.

     His wife said that the retinas are the only exposed part of the central nervous system. And the things he saw through his retinas…he had intrusive thoughts of demolished buildings, whole scorched landscapes, dead cities. And other things that he was unable to give words to. His wife singed her hair once on a candle. She didn’t understand why the smell made him leave the dinner table.

     His spade hit something metal. Right in front of him, in the wall of dirt. He cleaned it off a little. Corrugated metal. He dug it out some more. It seemed to be a huge tube of steel, running parallel to the trench.

     There was a large rusty spot, and the tip of his spade went right through it. He found his flashlight and shined it into the hole he’d made.  It was a room. A room full of books.  The smell whooshes out, a combination of old books and damp pipe. It was a comforting boyhood smell. It reminded him of happier times, when he could have been anything.

      David knew that Adrian was on his lunch break. Knew without looking, because after he ate, he sang. For a small man, he had a deep, mournful voice that seemed to contain the whole world. He was facing west, with his helmet in his hand, singing

                                

                                    Tus ojos el abismo

                                Donde muere mi razon…

   The rust came away in flakes as he worked the hole open a little more, just enough for his torso to squeeze through.

     He was inside with his flashlight. It appeared to be a bomb shelter, but not like any he’d seen in pictures before. It seemed flimsy, improvised, made from a giant section of pipe. He could see that it had a door, as though it had been dug into a bank, and then buried over.

    This shelter was built for one. There was a single cot, with an army sleeping bag on top. There was the shelf of books. Some of the titles were, The Failed States Index. The New World Order. The Changing Face of War.

     There was a roll down map of the world. The map had drawings on it. Dotted lines and arrows swooped over the countries. And in the corner was drawn a cartoon. A little man, dwarf-like, Disney style, wearing a tattered army uniform, asleep and oblivious inside of a bubble, with bombers swooping overhead.

     There was a desk of dark swollen wood. And on the desk was a large model ship with a sail. A pack of Lucky Strikes.  A compass. And next to that, a switchblade, sticking out of the wooden desktop like someone slammed it there.

     Carved into the desk was the infinity sign, over and over.

     Something about this arrangement of objects made him feel still, and very, very calm. David felt as though he was in the prow of a ship, alone on a long journey. And it was a very, very long moment before he could crawl back out of that rusted hole into day.

     Adrian had finished his song, but still stood looking into the low autumn sun. It was like a moment of silence for the dead.  Something compelled David to spread a tarp over the hole. He wanted to keep it his, for just a little while more.

     He got home before his wife. He made dinner and poured wine. When she came in the door she was quiet and distracted, but thanked him for the meal.

     “Who did you work with today, Celia?”

     Her eyes brightened. “I was speaking with a guy named Manny. He’s in trouble for impersonating a mailman. And a private detective. And a stock broker. It’s amazing.”

     “Why would he do that?”

     “Well, he doesn’t mean any harm. He is just desperate to know how other people live. He says he doesn’t know how to live unless he’s impersonating someone.”

      People often asked David if it bothered him that his wife worked with crazies and psychopaths. It did not. It seemed to him that she was born to help these people, to see reasons and connections others couldn’t. She was most beautiful to him when totally absorbed and focused on the kaleidoscope mind of a mental patient.  It gave him an idea.

     “Hey, do you think you can analyze me?”

     “Why?”

     “I don’t know. Just because. Can we get out your inkblots?”

     “Dave, it’s not some kind of parlor game. Besides, I’ve got housework.”

     “This place is too clean. Please don’t clean the house anymore. Come on.  You’ve never psychoanalyzed me.”

     “No!”

     “You don’t respect me enough to analyze me, do you?”

      “Don’t push me, David. Don’t push me. My god, sometimes I don’t even know who you are or what I’m doing here. I’ve lost the thread of what I’m doing. I need to get away.”

     “Then let’s go on a trip damnit!”

     “What’s the use? All that trouble, planning the trip, spending the money. Time and effort. I’m just constructing a narrative for us. A happy ending. A cognitive bias. What’s the use?”

      David took a deep breath, then put his arms around her. He moved his hands over her back and shoulders, as though he was molding her. As though he could make her more solid, more real. But she was slipping away, evaporating into static and mist.

     As he washed the dishes that night, he saw the bomb shelter in his mind’s eye. He remembered the way he felt there, safe in the earth. Who built it, he wonders? Because he felt linked to that person. They shared a secret.  Tunnel people. Whose real life is under the dirt.  He was at the kitchen sink, his hands in warm water. But he was under the ground, too.  With just his books, a map, a knife. A compass. A man could make sense of the world with these things. Couldn’t he?

     “How about a walk?” he asked. They often walked after dinner.  She went for her coat.

     “I had a dream last night,” she said, her voice wavering.  It was cold. The night sky felt hollow, echoey. “I had a dream that you left me. And I got a mail route. I knocked on the doors but no one would take my letters. And then tanks rolled down the streets of our blocks.  And the warplanes came. I knew I was doomed.”

“ I won’t leave you.” He doesn’t know what else to say, he isn’t good with words. They pass by the convenience store. He sees the Korean woman behind the counter, dreaming, her head propped on her fist.  You have dirt in your creases.

     He had never regarded his wife as a lonely person before. Now walking beside him in the dark, she seemed small, vulnerable, lacking a center. Perhaps he made her this way. David felt sorry that the marriage wasn’t right. He didn’t know what to do, what he could buy her, what he could say. There was only one thing he could offer her, if she would go there with him.

     “Hey. I found something at my worksite today. I want to show it to you. It’s just a few blocks more.”

     Soon they were there. The trench, the giant plastic tubes lined up. It looked so eerie at night.  Like a movie set.  Like aliens of the future set up an archaeological dig, then abandoned it.

     He found a flashlight in the hull of one of the diggers, and guided her down the short ladder into the tunnel. Pulled aside the tarp. David shined the light in to show her the books. He knew she would at least crawl in for the books. He picked her up and helped her into the hole.

    For a while they said nothing. He gave the flashlight to her, and she explored as he lay on the cot. She looked at the books, the cigarettes, the knife. She pulled a desk drawer open. There was a ball of twine and a pistol She looked at him, delighted, grinning like a child.

     We can be happy here, he thought. She came and lay beside him on the cot. They watched their shadows on the wall, huge and quivering.

     “When I was a little boy, “ he told her, “my house exploded.”

     “What? I never knew that.”

     “A gas leak,” He was massaging her shoulders, molding her into life. “It’s funny the things that stand out. I remember all the bats flying in the dark sky, over the telephone lines. And the fire trucks. My family was OK, but we lost all of our stuff. People donated clothes to us. I remember I had to wear a pair of girl’s jeans. I hated it, but that’s all there was. Do you think it all means anything? As far as who I am now?”

     But his wife said, “Hush. I just like to imagine the lights, and sirens, and bats.”

     I like this.  He was drawing her into a story. He went on. “My parents split up not long after. Then we lived with my mother in a cheap apartment. And people always looked on us as tragic. The exploding house family. We collected empty cans for money.”

     “Oh. Well, what happened to that boy?”

     He was constructing a narrative. “When he was a young man he joined the army reserves.  He never fought a battle. But he saw terrible sites.  Evil things. Things that he wanted to forget. He left the service with bad lungs and a heavy heart. Only his real true love could save him. He would slay a dragon for her. He would dig to the ends of the earth.”

     “Did he find his true love?” She was like a little girl, leaning against him in the dark.

     “They are tunneling, trying to find each other. Trying and trying. Like they do in the movies.”

     “Is the man you?”

     “I am a man on a quest.”

     “Amygdala.”

    “Animal brain.”

     “Woof.”

     And so it goes. Their shadows were telling the stories. We could stay here forever, he thought. Time itself seemed frozen for just a moment, but also passing by quickly: he could already see this as a future recollection. But then there was a noise from outside. Suddenly a light was glaring on them, and they looked up, startled, clinging together like two people who know they’ve been caught.

     

Leah Erickson has had worked published most recently at Indigenous Fiction, Pennsylvania English, The Saint Ann's Review, and Unlikelystories.org. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and young daughter.

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