Helen and Jennifer marched past out the front door. He heard the car doors slam and the engine rev up and they drove away.

Well, he said. I think I’ve had enough family time for today. He rose carefully, his head a big ball of throb.

Help me up, his mother said.

Help yourself up, he said, and went out the front door. Smell of dust in the air, so they must have taken off fast. He walked around the cabin on the blind side, away from the kitchen, and up into the trees. The dirt loose, his feet sinking. Something had mounded all the dirt everywhere, ants or moles or whatever else, and it was more sand than dirt, bits of granite forming a kind of dirt-froth. Nothing solid anywhere. He stepped over rotted trunks and limbs crumbling away in what looked almost like coals, a deep orange. Insects everywhere, the place infested.

He found a stand of smaller pines providing enough cover, braced against the largest of them, leaned over, pushed his finger back hard into his throat, and let all the piggy grease and egg drool and pancake and syrup come out, purged himself, made himself clean again. If only there were some way he could throw up his family and not have them inside him anymore.

Chapter 14

The chicken and dumplings. His mother and grandmother began cooking, putting the world back together again. How many times? he wondered. How many times had they put the world back together? And why? Why not let it fall apart and stay apart, why not let the truth happen? It would be easier. They could all relax. Everyone could just say they hated each other and be done with it. But somehow that was not possible, and so his mother and grandmother chopped up two chickens at the sink.

Galen went down occasionally to watch, peeking around the corner from the stairs, and neither of them acknowledged his presence. He’d become a kind of ghost.

His mother chopping yellow onions at the sink, his grandmother sitting at the table peeling yellow potatoes. They were drinking wine again, a study in yellow again, even some of their clothing yellow. His grandmother’s sweater, the edges of his mother’s apron.

The crunch of the knife through onion, the slap of the peeler on a potato. No other sounds, and this was part of what made the world unbearable, the magnification of small sounds in a vacuum. This was one of the signs. Only a world that had been staged could be so flimsy and so annoying.

They were the same person, maybe, his mother and grandmother, a split image he needed to resolve and bring into focus. They had been created at the same time, in Galen’s first memories when he was three or four, and they had a similar role. They had drifted further apart in recent years as his grandmother lost her mind. She had been left marooned on some positive sense of him, whereas his relationship with his mother had grown steadily worse. Were they the same, though, underneath all that?

If you’re not doing anything, you can go chop some wood, his mother said. She was standing at the sink chopping carrots now, and didn’t turn to look at him. He wasn’t sure how she even knew he was here.

Okay, Galen said. His head hurt, but he liked the idea of getting away from the kitchen and his mother, and he liked chopping wood.

He went out the front door, walked around the deck to the toolshed. About the size of an outhouse, and older, even, than the cabin. No light inside, and he had to let his eyes adjust. Shovels, picks, several axes, as if this were a mining camp. All the tools old, the wood handles dark and polished from use. The fishing gear was in here, too, old wicker baskets and ancient poles. He didn’t know how to use any of it. In all the times they’d come to the cabin while his grandfather was still alive, his grandfather had stayed in Carmichael and worked. Never retired. Had a stroke, finally, went to the rest home, and died. He’d been a civil engineer, designing highways and even that bridge in Sacramento that his grandmother was always mentioning, but what did that mean?

Galen pulled out the smallest axe and grabbed a wedge from the floor. Cold heavy steel, the edges of it dented and smashed from years of blows. Then he pushed the door shut with his foot and went to the chopping block behind the cabin. He dropped the wedge in the dirt and swung the axe over his head into the block. He loved the feel of that swing, of the weight on the outer arc, his right hand slipping down on the smooth handle.

Yeah, he said.

The wood was stacked along the back wall of the cabin, with an overhang from the roof to keep it dry. Gray-looking because it’d been here so many years. Their visits were never very long. Galen grabbed a log and worried about spiders. He didn’t have any gloves. He upended the wood on the chopping block and took a large swing with the axe. The blade glanced off the edge of the log and buried into the ground a few inches from his left foot.

Whoa, Galen said. He stepped back, the handle standing up, and looked behind him, as if someone might have seen. He had this dizzy feeling like tottering at the edge of a cliff, the air pulling him downward. Holy crap, he said. He looked at his old Converse sneakers, dirty canvas, so thin, and just couldn’t believe how close he’d come to losing his foot. He had this awful feeling he could still lose it. He shook his arms, shaking off the heebie-jeebies, then picked up the axe again.

Anything could happen at any time. That was the truth of the world. You could just lose your foot one day, and after that you’d be a guy missing a foot. You could never know what was coming next, and that was true for even the smallest things. You couldn’t know what thought you’d have next, or what someone would say in conversation, or what you might feel an hour from now, and this effect was always amplified by his mother. His conversations with her could go from zero to crazy in a few seconds. He didn’t know why that was true only with her. She could be calling him pumpkin one minute and threatening to throw him out on the street the next. And when he felt angry at her, it came from some terrible source, something you’d never know about, never suspect, and then suddenly he was drowning in it.

Galen wanted peace with his mother. He wanted peace. But as soon as he came near her, he wanted to kill her.

He was more careful to keep his feet wide, stood farther away and focused on the top of the log as he swung. A satisfying chock this time as the blade hit. He used the wedge in the gap and swung again, split the wood in one stroke. Brighter flesh inside, the wood yellow instead of gray.

Okay, he said. And he worked into a rhythm, log after log, focusing carefully on the target, enjoying that swing, the high weightlessness of it, the feel of the muscles in his arms and back, the sweat on his skin, the sound of the blows muffled in the trees.

Earthly labor. That was perhaps the fastest path, because you could forget yourself, forget everyone, and feel only the swing. The key to getting through the world was to find a way to forget that it existed. A shadow in a shadowland, biding time.

Galen flung the axe up the hill. Just an impulse. End over end through the air, whumping into the earth. He hiked up to it and flung it again, the blade and handle flipping through branches and bouncing in the dirt, spraying small grains of granite. Puffs of dust like smoke. The axe-flinger. He didn’t know what it meant, but it felt good. It felt right. He threw the axe as hard as he could, hurled it with both hands. He was like Thor, splitting the air itself. Tearing through appearances, ripping the fabric of the illusion.

Galen glanced quickly behind to see the wake left in the air, any swirl or disturbance at the edges of where he had passed, but his eyes were not trained to see. Troughs and rips and back eddies, and all of it hidden from the naked eye. But the axe might cut through quickly enough. If he focused just behind it as it flew, he might see something.