By Jonathan Gaboury.
Everybody out there was saying, You have to reckon with it, with hands waving up to the power lines. It was assumed to mean everything, and everybody wanted you to reckon with everything. Many gave it a good shot, wrestling with it or trying to wrangle it, but these actions seemed to be avoiding the initial call. I wanted to try, it was time for a reckoning, but I wasn’t a cowboy and I couldn’t wrangle the stars. I made a few half-hearted attempts before. With dad, with war, with work. I wasn’t exactly ready, and they led me nowhere. You burn out from a false reckoning. When the war was raging, I tried to silently cut down on what I did daily. I limited myself. First it was no imported tea, then no more TV, then suddenly no words beginning with W. I wanted to be altered in a real way. To bring the fact of the war home, in silence and abstinence. But then I wasn’t able to think of water because of the W, and I stopped drinking it. My mouth dried up and my head killed me. I was missing a key component in my understanding of what war was. It hurt my head and it killed me, so I gave up. Then one day, I looked around and tried to reckon with it. That day, it wasn’t everything, because we all knew you couldn’t reckon with everything, and everybody was becoming okay with reckoning with only a few, or a couple, or some, or one, the various ones that made up everything. That day, it was a single flower at the edge of the garden. The garden had other, many more, flowers; it was a garden, after all. I had the hose in my hand, and my path to the garden split the yard in two. To my left was a triangle with the shed, to my right a triangle with the garden. I twisted the nozzle and selected the setting that sent a light umbrella of water down. I did this minor duty of mine. But canting over a cluster of stones at the corner of the garden was that one flower, and I sensed the moral imperative behind the call to reckon with it. It was about measuring up to the rest, they said, from a fixed point to everything beyond it. You measured the distance from an anchor to an orbit, so in this case me, myself, and the single flower in orbit around the flowers of the garden. What seemed like one thing was actually three things. I looked at it again and reckoned with it: I said to it, Hello, then I said to myself, I’m saying hello, but of course a reckoning could never be the small talk that hello was. I said, I’m getting to it, impatiently. I was committed to understanding a flower that wasn’t only a flower; from what I understood, you don’t really reckon with single instances, but with orbits, systems, relationships. Even my computer had an operating system, and I never tried to reckon with it. I brought up the DOS prompt from time to time, which felt like the summoning that a reckoning could be, but I wasn’t versed in the commands, so the system was a wall, not a garden. It wasn’t everything and it couldn’t even be one of everything. I got mad at my computer, too, swearing in ways that would outcast me from the impulse of reckonings. My language busted up, and I mashed the faces of the keys. I said, I’m sorry, to my computer, but an apology was no reckoning. The letter H had come loose. I sensed an opportunity: maybe I could commune with it, the it of the H, since one letter was one. No luck, it turned out I was too embroiled in trying to fit the letter back into the scheme of other letters. There was a hole in the keyboard and it was hard to line up with the latch on the back of the letter. Nothing caught, I tried. I was close to swearing again. There was no way the word shit was the sign of a reckoning. I gave up and almost banished the letter H from my life this time. I wouldn’t let that happen again, so in the garden I fell on my knees. The power lines hummed above us; I wondered if I should call the city about that. But then I felt I heard the flower ask me a question without a question mark. My soil, it said. It asked. We were reciprocating. I said, Loam, dangerously fast, without a clear picture in my head of what that was, but then this time I didn’t apologize, I knew I was wrong. Perhaps that was the reckoning, it occurred to me. I failed and I couldn’t offer it to the flower at the edge of the garden. I didn’t know and I didn’t know other things and I had no idea. I was building a relationship from anchor to orbit, founded on humility, as they suggested, spinning away from my knowledge. As time ticked on, it began to seem one-sided. We were now on the brink of silence, the flower and I. Growing frustrated, I revoked the word shit from my vocabulary, just in case, since I sensed the relationship was still all me, and that stymied me. It got in my gut, so I buried the swearing, went as far as I could go from shit. In my head, I tried to summon the right system that the flower was part of, but I knew I couldn’t be a person who said photosynthesis to a flower, even with the aim of a reckoning in mind. I admit that my head was empty of what it meant. I didn’t have kids, so I had no-one to explain the basics to. I bet Sam knew. Tyler was eight now, and he demanded more and more of your explanations. Without them, she told me, he was dangling on a precipice. There was a dark tone to how she said it. With every explanation, she hoped that that would do it for now. It’s when light becomes sugar, I imagined Sam telling Tyler, but then my own database of knowing expired. It was a hole, not a wall this time. I’d gone too far away from myself thinking of photosynthesis. The reckoning was crumbling. I needed my own words, so I fished around for my old curse. It floated to the top, of course it did. It moved like waves inside me. I was powerless before it. The power lines above powered toasters and old freezers. Down on my knees, I sensed that I was a machine in front of a flower. I had felt this way once before, with my sister, not with a flower. She let me stay in her cabin for a season, but I blacked out and got naked a lot. Sam had said, Go up there. Take time off. The last time I got naked in that foreign house I crumpled into a ball at the feet of my sister, who had come up to check on me. This is a confrontation, she told me. Later, I sat under a blanket at the kitchen table listening to the hollow sounds of the countryside. I had tried to find the right words to say something to Sam, but I blanked. No excuses floated up. If ever there were a time to account for oneself, that was it. The blanket pricked my naked body, the material was hell. But I was surprised at how forgettable and hollow it felt, like I wasn’t under it at all. My sister had helped me immensely and I knew what I owed her. The beats of my heart evened out with that thought. I put down the hose, then stood up straight. I watched as the head attachment loosened by what had to be less than a quarter-inch. It spun off, which meant it wasn’t on very tight. I saw an ultimate gush come out of the hose, where it formed a pool on top of the grass. Lying there, the dead hose cut me off from the precinct of the flower. The garden was out of reach. The system was against me. I was on the brink of a comeuppance, it seemed, not a reckoning. My bond with the life of the flower was denied by the lash of an object. My reckoning was doomed from the start, I realized. I had to accept there was a fatalist inside me whenever I worried about losing control. I was beginning to understand this about myself, in increments: the mix of restlessness, cursing, and fatalism. There was, in fact, a strain of thought that said the reckoning first and foremost began at home, or within. It was a project meant for you alone on behalf of the orbit of everything. It didn’t require you to build a channel to the flower, nor the garden. So I gazed away from the flower just like that, forgetting even its color, and my scope kept widening to the henbit and farther to the sinkhole at the back of the yard. In their view, you started from where you were, anchor to anchor. But I was incapable of moving beyond the simple version of this view, where you sat in dialogue with yourself. For example, me, myself: I was someone who either rented a home, or owned my home; I was someone who was patient with others, or impatient; I was someone who believed in free will, or couldn’t quite; I was someone who was compelled to work a lot of hours, or not as many; I was someone who ticked, or left unticked, boxes on rashness, kindness, money, pain. In the end, the implications of each box mattered, bore down on the quality of reckoning. My foes, my friends, my family, each of us would reckon within ourselves, but then one of us always wound up doing something baffling. Like dad ditching his house and wanting to die alone of sickness in the woods. He gathered us around and relayed this thinking and orated his plan and said it would be magical and we all gazed and smiled at one another in a circle. But not just dad as an example. I was out seeing a friend play live music once. At one point he lifted the guitar away from his body to get close to the electricity of the amp. I didn’t understand the technique or the relationship he was forming. He rocked to and fro and swirled the guitar around. I had a glimmer that this was distortion, or dissonance, or was it feedback, or reverb. My database of knowing was exhausted. I had a small packet of two earplugs in my pocket, and they were very real to me in that neon room. I risked hearing loss to figure out how these swirls of the guitar were also sounds in the air. I left dizzy, disappointed. The experience defied the idea of an inner reckoning, even if he had gone through one on his own; in that room with other people it didn’t matter. It was either-or, and the end result was noise. I didn’t like the idea of dissipation in public, which is why I subscribed only to the reckoning itself without adhering to the reckoning within. The orbit had to be more central than even the anchor was, that was the trick, and I wasn’t able to see it as a place of dilution, like a plain where the wind went nowhere. It wouldn’t be clear to me what a reckoning would be for then. It had to go somewhere. That day, I tried to reckon with it, with everything. It was with a flower on the outer edge, unevenly spaced from the others, towards the granite head of the elephant that faced the corner of the shed on the opposite side of the yard. The statue was my mother’s, and because I had moved around a lot, Sam ended up with it. I have thought about that head every single week of my life. It wasn’t banal or blended into the world around me. It always stuck out. It ripped into my vision. I suppose it belonged to the orbit, as part of the flow, but I was too focused on communion with the flower. I blocked it out on purpose to say hello and then shit to the flower. I thought I couldn’t spare a thought for the head in the garden. I was wrong. The elephant’s head was right there with me, but I was pushing it into the background, where it had never been. It was clear I didn’t have a handle on what everything was, much less what one element was. Little things would trip me up. I could talk to my neighbor over the fence and he would say gun and I would feel the world split open. It ripped into my vision. There must have been a time when a word like the word gun didn’t mean anything. Perhaps that time was thirty years after the invention of the gun. Then there were merely some guns. But today I am too aware of the crack on the surface. It makes a reckoning seem impossible because you have to believe there is an even nature to everything outside of you, like an audience in seats. I was starting to feel naked under the blanket again. I shifted focus and took in the garden as a matrix of objects: the stone rim, the loam soil, the flowers, the one pink flower, the power lines above, the headless hose below, and the elephant, all held in tension by one another’s presence. In front of my big audience, I began to intuit that there was no single representative to appeal to. There was no sister standing over me. She was literally at work, putting out a fire, she said, and I was at Sam’s house watering her garden. I did my minor duty. That day, I tried to reckon with it, and then I stopped cold. I said, No way. I said, Goodbye. I wouldn’t force it. That this felt so easy to do was a sign of weakness, for sure, but everything was still out there whether I spoke to it or not. There would be room for clemency, I hoped. Better a reckoning in the future than a false reckoning now. With a flourish, I coiled the hose around my arm and returned it to the source. I walked back toward my sister’s house. The three back steps were hemmed in by the branches of shrubs on either side. They playfully scraped my legs, but then we were free from one another. I closed the door on the reckoning.
Inside, my mission was simple. I would steal the one remaining corn dog in the freezer from under Tyler’s nose. The corn dog was his favorite food. He had gone through a circus phase, Sam told me, but this stuck around. I was going to eat this carnival food as payment from Sam for what I was here to do. The catch was that it would punish Tyler, leaving him bereft of corn dogs. He wouldn’t understand, so I had to be stealthy. Otherwise, it would be one explanation too many, a bridge too far. I wondered if I thought that the flower could smooth my anxieties about Tyler, that if I connected with the flower I would also connect with Tyler, that a real reckoning would bleed into the world of my life. I did believe that was part of the promise of a reckoning. I was here for the garden and I was here for Tyler. I owed Sam big time, for how she looked after me at the cabin, and I agreed to water the garden and sit down with Tyler. The corn dog was something extra, it didn’t fit into the scheme of debt and duty. It was a solitary beacon in a cold place. I could hear it humming at me through the buzz of the freezer. When I entered Sam’s house, my mind turned as if along an edge, and I suddenly desired the corn dog. I couldn’t account for this craving. I had seemingly revised my own palette, scratched out my typical lunch of poached egg and toast. It was clear I was improvising, and I worried that this choice might silently undo the good work of my duties in Sam’s house. But with the elephant as my witness, I watered the garden. And with the corn dog as my witness, I would sit down with Tyler and we would talk about computers and the fine line between what is good and what is bad. A memory of the shrubs tickled my legs, and when I looked down I saw blood. Both calves had the kind of cut that wasn’t a line because it wasn’t very deep, but that looked like a series of disconnected dots. Each dot was a small bubble of blood and they were rising, yet I suspected that my skin could suck the blood back in before the dots had a chance to drip down. I felt harmonious with my own blood. I felt free of gravity. I felt triumphant. I felt itchy. I tried not to give in. I recollected my duty. The pressure was now the pressure of a duty, not a reckoning, and that was easier on me, despite all the blood. I liked Tyler as a kid and didn’t exactly come to know the flower very well. That was the difference. We already had a relationship. In the system, I was an uncle. My own sister had modest expectations of me in that role. We had a history of fighting with each other. We didn’t see eye to eye. We specialized in silence and solitude. She was someone who didn’t see the crack in the surface of things. She called me and said, I can’t bring myself to look. There was a strange download on her computer hiding in plain sight. A day later she said, I looked a little. Sam permitted herself to click about three-fourths along the runtime bar with the video still paused. The frozen image had little to do with a beheading: a metallic table, a tree clearly leaning in the wind, it was all nothing. Sam took a moment to try to recreate Tyler’s desires. She flipped through the faces of Tyler’s friends in her mind, but denied all scapegoats. It had to originate with Tyler himself, she told me. She was proud of herself for understanding that he had this capacity inside him, but the acceptance left her cold and tipsy. She was hemmed in by how innocent it was. The kid was eight. I said to her, I’ll sit down with him, Sam. She must have felt all her memories of me in a hot instant, but said yes anyways. That day, I watered the garden outside and then there I was in her kitchen, finally released from the pressure of a reckoning. Tyler was upstairs, getting scooped up by the internet. He had an appetite for everything, we thought, he was drawn to the very orbit of orbits. That day, I had a glimmer of what to do to fulfill my duty and pay back my debt. I wasn’t sure he was old enough, or the right age, for a reckoning of his own, but I would find him upstairs and say to him, Let’s watch the video. In deference to the wisdom of the age, we would measure the distance from anchor to orbit, Tyler to metallic table. I called to mind the corn dog in the depths of the freezer. It would be my reward for having so humbly failed again and again over time. The box promised thirty seconds in the microwave, that that was all it would take, and that day I would try to take it at its word.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Gaboury lives in Tulsa. His writing has appeared in This Land and Solrad.
