Searching For His Voice
The evening is cold and black. The type of darkness that could swallow a man whole. A black river howls an angry hymn called the sting of a thousand knives. John is bundled in a coat, work pants with tights underneath, and work boots with spiked covers pulled over the top. He’s wearing work gloves with his fingers pressed tightly against his palms. His jagged fingernails piercing the skin as the salt crawls into the open wound like an impregnated invader, birthing bundles of pain that spread through his hand. But he can’t stop, because when his fingers enter the holes of his thinly insulated work gloves, the numbing begins, then the throbbing. Then he needs to take them out and press them against the open wound once again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
A balaclava is draped over his face, and he thinks about the radio station telling its listeners that exposed skin in an evening like tonight was susceptible to frostbite in a matter of minutes.
“Better stay in bed, folks. Wrap yourselves in a nice warm blanket, and watch a movie. Do not go out there tonight.”He said, before segueing into the Stones, She’s So Cold.
Do not go out there tonight.
Boy, you’d have to be nuts.
Yes, yes you would.
There’s danger in the way he’s feeling. He knows that. There’s guilt as well. The shadow of his father follows him through the freight yard as his heavy steps crack the ice and snow like shards of glass. He’s disappointed in him because he knows the decision he’s going to make, even though it has not yet been made.
“What are you going to do for money, huh?”
“I don’t know.”
“I stuck my neck out to get you this job. You’re making me look bad. Are you even a man?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you know?”
“That I don’t want to be here for Chrissakes.” He yells into the darkness. “That’s what I know! That I want to be home with my kid! I know that too!”
But the shadow isn’t even his father. It’s an incarnation of his father, sure. It’s his mind traveling back through time and like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, picking out the worst of his old man, and making a villainous, sociopathic, and relentless mental torturer, that lives only in the moments where he wants to veer off the family path, and create one of his own.
John is 23 years old, and as the tears from the wind freeze just above his cheekbones, he thinks about the age-old adage, “life is short.” And at that moment, he thinks that’s the biggest crock of shit he’s ever heard.
Life is long. Life is a long, sweltering fever dream, unless you can get a grip on it. Those who believe life is short are the lucky ones. They’re the ones wrapped in a big thick wool blanket, like the radio man says, watching sitcoms with their lovers, as the baseboard heat is cranked to ten. They’ll watch a show or movie they enjoy, then maybe they’ll go upstairs and make love to their partner, and fall asleep in an embrace of warm naked skin.
Sure, that life is fast.
This, on the other hand, is a marathon race through quicksand.
His mind quickly shifts to a book he read about a soldier in the Vietnam war. This man gets drafted and loses his shit. So, he decides to travel to an isolated cabin a short canoe ride away from Canada. He looks out and sees how close it is, how close he is to a new life. A life far away from the war. But it isn’t that easy. It never is.
So as he sits in a boat with the 80-year-old proprietor of the old cabins, he cries. He cries because it’s right there. It’s close enough to touch, but too far to ever reach. And that scares the hell out of him. The brutality of not being able to make a decision that you know is right in your heart, for fear of ridicule, disappointment, and cowardice.
He knows that his fate is much different. It even feels silly to compare the two, but he isn’t really comparing his life to the veteran in the Vietnam book. He’s comparing the thought process behind fear. And the similarities feel much the same.
Because he’s in his own boat, staring at his house instead of the mountains of another country. He’s walking inside quietly up the stairs, trying to keep the floorboards from creaking, but always making it worse. He’s in his bedroom, where his son sleeps in a bassinet beside his wife. John’s staring at his son’s soft face. He’s reaching out to touch it, but then there are the voices.
They start off low and singular, but they build like a symphonic crescendo. There’s his father, then his mother, his brother, and even his university friends. There’s his wife. His In-laws. Everyone joins in.
His mother says, I knew you’d quit. I always knew you were a quitter.
His father says, this is your blood. It’s in your blood. How can you leave behind what’s in your blood? Your grandpa would be rolling in his grave.
His wife says, I’m scared, John. What will we do for money? There’s nothing here. You moved me out to a wasteland with only a couple of good paying jobs. What are we going to do?
His father-in-law says to his wife, you shouldn’t have married him. He isn’t a man. He isn’t a provider.
Jeremy from college says come on, pal. You’re not a worker, man. You drink. You party. You don’t work. You don’t provide.
They build and build, and he searches for his own voice, but it’s lost in the noise. His voice is too soft and delicate and it’s being trampled. It’s being beaten and thrown into the black abyss of a northern January night.
He’s searching to find it. Searching for his balls. Searching for a voice loud enough to drown out the noise and the pain.
His hands are numb. He’s left them in the finger holes for too long. When he clears his mind for a moment, his hands throb.
He continues down the freight yard. His voice still nowhere to be found.
He’s numb.