Previously: There are some things people don’t need to hear … You aren’t going to die today … I always wanted to die after one last dinner with our family … When the last dish was dried and put away, I’d put my arms around his waist and look into those damn handsome eyes and ask him to pour me a glass of wine … When the glass was empty, I’d set it on the end table and that would be that.
Last Week:
Take it from the top:
fernweh (fern-way) n.
1. An ache for distant places
2. Being homesick for anywhere but home
I see light like this when I go visit Jeremiah Barger’s bedroom. I visit him often, trying to understand, to know him, maybe forgive him, and there is one night in particular I go back to again and again because I think it says so much, and because the light in his room is compelling, like a force of nature, which I guess it is. I watch him sit at his desk, lit by light that makes everything more than it already is, shirtless, gut hung halfway over his belt, beads of sweat sat on his shaved head, staring at the wall, angry because earlier, in the dining room, his mom wouldn’t let him borrow the car.
“Why, Mom?”
“Because I need it and I’m the one payin’ for it.”
“I’ll be back in ten fuckin’ minutes.”
“No!”
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
“I might need it and anyways I said no!”
“Ten fuckin’ minutes!”
“Damn it, are you deaf or retarded? I said no!”
He said he was thinking about getting one of his guns and shooting her between the eyes; she said, go ahead, he’d be doing her a favor. He stared at her until she left the dining room and went into the kitchen, then he turned and walked through the living room and swatted a lamp from a table on his way to the stairs.
Everything in his room was just so. His bed was centered right be- neath the window. The bed was made with both pillows tucked into a red comforter. A footlocker at the foot of the bed held a sawed off shotgun, an AK-47, two .357s, three hand grenades and a dozen boxes of ammunition. The shade on the lamp on his nightstand was tilted so that there was just enough light to read by at night. On the top shelf of his bookcase were boxes of rolled up maps of Guthrie, of Oklahoma, of the United States. There were books on the next two shelves. On the bottom two shelves were completed models of jets, ships, tanks, and helicopters. Opposite his bookshelf was his desk with nothing on it but a spiral notebook and a lamp. The desk is where he sat, and stared, and waited, and breathed, and seethed.
I wonder if, all else being equal, if his house had been situated just a little bit differently, if the sunset light wasn’t so extreme in his room, if things would have been different for him.
Thank you for reading. Next week will start like this:
You talked to my sister, your aunt Stephanie once, on the phone, when you were a baby.