We Found How to Get Out and Get Lost (novel.)

Dave’s tenant, George, died in the basement apartment. Nobody seemed to be emotionally affected. ‘Take some food from the fridge if you want.’ Dave told me in his halting, unsure way. Taking food from a dead man felt weird to me, but I snuck down and peeked inside the chest refrigerator and decided to come back later to take a jar of peanut butter, canned vegetables, and chipotle dip. George asked me to stay for a bit of pot roast the last, and only, time I was at the ranch. He was a little drunk but easy going, not sloppy. ‘Sure, that sounds great!’ I was in the basement to use the shower before taking off for Dave’s fruit stand in Bonsall. Before I started the water, through the bathroom door he offered soap and aftershave; I declined. By the time I exited the shower he had gone into his room and shut the door. Earlier in the day, when we met, he had been cleaning out his bedroom because the two family goats, Trudy and the kid Ed, had made their way in through the screen door and shit and pissed on his bed. After I washed and shaved, I went into the open kitchen, the roast smelled great, but instead I turned and quietly walked out of the basement, into the garage where Dave’s stepson, a thirty-four year old red-bearded, soft-spoken man also named Dave had coaxed a Mojave Red into a big plastic water jug where the serpent stared fiercely but never rattled at me, even as I put my face nose to nose with hers; and slowly trudged my way up the steep hill to my truck. I had forgotten soap and have never worn aftershave, but I wished I had borrowed both from George. When they were going through his effects to try and find his information they uncovered his heroin kit. He was slumped, sitting on his bed, Dave’s middle son found him: he was cold. If there was a funeral I would have liked to go. He had that pale hardness in him from hard living, and guilt in the corner of his eyes and on his scabbed forearms which hung tiredly by his sides, as if they would pop off his shoulders and crumple onto the linoleum like dead fish. One thing is for certain: nobody deserves to die feeling alone. I should have shared a roast with George.

‘I hope he had his wits about him when he went.’ I emitted in the calm and subtle, unintentionally patronizing tone I had adopted for Dave. ‘My worst fear is dying when I’m piss drunk, worse, blackout. I want to be cognisant of the death experience. We’re born without being fully conscious of the birth. We’re brand new, only developed over nine-months inside our mothers. We don’t know.’ My brain struggled to work through these thoughts, to Dave; to this gaunt man who stared at me with his narrow blue eyes and nearly toothless mouth slightly agape, his tattered straw hat pushed back on his shoulder-length, silver hair. ‘All this living we’ve done, now, since being born. I have seen beautiful things. I’ve watched the snowfall through the window while I’m sitting next to a wood-stove. I’ve watched tadpoles in a shallow eddy in the Santa Margarita River. A snake snatched from a patch of ticklegrass in Mendocino hill-country by a hawk, and the blood, or venom, or bile fell with the snake after it bit the hawk, and another hawk came from below the ridge and hung in the updraft breaking the air with their mate shaking its frustrated wings in the draft behind. I’ve seen awful things. A cement factory lit fluorescent, ashen with gray skies hovering, and rain and dust shrouding its occupants. The betrayed and sad eyes of people I have hurt. A man on a ledge in Penobscot Bay, Maine who had drowned by becoming tangled in his lobster gear but come loose in the current and drifted to rest on a ledge in the ebbtide, his eyes bulged and uneven, his face wrung up like a damp rag and one white rubberboot half on, twisted in the seaweed. But all this. All these things are what I have seen and emotions I alone have felt. I expect death to be an entirely different event for everyone. Only the result is the same. Ultimately, we all share in the impact of death. I just want to experience it with clarity, not muffled or eliminated by being too drunk or distracted. Once, I fell out of a bar and hit the ground face first. Somehow the girl I was pursuing still took me to her place. On her big, granite front steps I fell backward and broke a couple ribs. I mean. I mean, I have a vague recollection of breaking my ribs, but otherwise this was all recounted by the girl when we woke up the next morning and I had pissed the bed. After I went to a laundromat, I came back with the sheets and clumsily knocked a frame off her wall as I stumbled in, breaking it on the floor. I don’t remember her name or what picture was in the frame. Then I left to go back to my girlfriend’s apartment and lie about why I was beat up and in pain. I don’t care about dying by falling down some steps but I do not want to be blackout drunk. I want to…’ ‘So that it’s a clean transition.’ Dave observed. ‘Yeah.’ Even though he meant the transition to Heaven and I meant the transition from alive to dead. ‘We’re born, we die. I don’t consciously remember my birth but I want to be conscious when I go.’ I reiterated, forcing out the words. I was finished. I had been half-turned to walk down the hill toward the river to resume cutting down a big eucalyptus tree. ‘That’s a really good observation.’ He mumbled earnestly, but I felt like a generalizing debutante trying to explain myself with ideas I didn’t really understand or believe. And did he hear me? Did I actually say all those things out-loud? I cracked a wry grin. ‘Anyway, I guess I will head down the way and get after the cutting.’ ‘Okay.’ He said in the quick, nervous way he says ‘Okay’, like a mouse if mice spoke like Dave and Dave spoke like mice. I grabbed my fishing spear, the saw, my boots, and water; and started down the hill to needlessly cut up a tree with a dull chainsaw and silently wondered what it would feel like to be bit, mid-air, on my index finger by a rattlesnake.