She stopped whacking. Galen, she said. She sounded out of breath. I can’t do this. You need to open the door. Her voice muffled, and he didn’t know exactly where she was, somewhere there in the darkness and he was blinded here in the light.

I’d be happy to.

Well do it now then.

I have to know I’m not going to prison.

You’re going to prison.

Galen opened the white plastic packet of saltines, went to the wall, and slipped crackers in through the gaps in the planks. Here’s your food, he said. This is all the food you’re getting for the next day, so be careful with it.

This will be perfect. When I tell them I was dying of thirst in the heat and you fed me saltines.

The thing is, you’re not telling the story yet. You’re not standing in court. You’re still living the story. And that’s your food for the next day.

He slipped a dozen crackers through the planks and heard her come up close. She slammed the wall where he was standing and then pushed crackers out the bottom gap between ground and wall. It was a small gap, no more than an inch high, but Galen noticed it suddenly. The entire shed built on posts buried into the ground, and the planks came down almost to the ground but weren’t buried. She could dig her way out pretty quickly anywhere along the wall.

Fuck, he said.

What’s that?

Nothing. He walked all the way around to the toolshed, grabbed one of the smaller rounded shovels, and wondered where to start. It would be best if he could just follow her. If she started digging, he’d throw dirt back in that area. But that meant he’d have to stay awake. Even an hour or two of sleep and she could get out. Which meant he should start now and mound up enough dirt everywhere along the edge.

If he started shoveling, though, she’d know. And she hadn’t started digging yet. Maybe it would never occur to her. He couldn’t believe he was having these thoughts.

We have to stop this, Mom, he said. We have to figure something out. This is too awful. This is not me.

This is you. This is who you’ve been all along. All your New Age crap, how you’re an old soul. But you’re a murderer. That’s who you are.

Galen walked along the edge of the shed, walked the entire perimeter, gray wood reaching just short of the earth. The ground hard, untilled in close, and she had no tools, no shovel, so he doubted, really, that she could get very far, but it was hard to know. He’d become a jailor.

He found the largest gaps at the sliding door in front, so that was where he broke ground. The earth heavier than he had imagined. A shovelful a considerable thing. He had imagined before that the crust was so thin he could fall through and tumble to the other side of the planet, but now he wasn’t so sure. The world an illusion, but what seemed paper-thin one moment could solidify the next. It was all changing constantly. The fact that Galen was shoveling may have increased the thickness of the earth right here. The illusion testing him, responding to his consciousness. As we walked around, the world making and remaking itself.

The point was the struggle. The earth thickened here so that he would labor. The shovel felt heavy so that he could feel he was doing something. The world provided resistance, and as we struggled through, we learned our final lessons.

The sound of the shovel entering the earth. That was a complex and beautiful sound, deceptively fast and not all of one piece at all. And the light thud and sifting of stones and clods and fine grains falling away as he lifted the shovel, that was a reminder that we were all made of this. Everything we knew was fragment. Streams held together to appear as solids. The fundamental nature of all things. And the thrill was in the fling, when he flung the shovelful against the old wood, against the gap, and he heard it hit in a thousand ways all masquerading as one sound, as one action.

Galen knew now that what was happening here was important. His mother locked in this shed was a gift. This was his final lesson. It was here that he would feel and know the impermanence of all things. Not just think it or suspect it but know it. This was his river. Galen had always looked to water, thinking his meditation would be the same as Siddhartha’s, the water in which he would see all things forming and dissipating, but Galen’s rightful meditation had been here all along, a meditation on dirt. He had grown up alongside it, had known it all his life but never recognized it. He lifted another shovelful and flung, the million tiny grains spraying outward into pattern and collapse, and he felt an incalculable joy, a thrill that ran right through him.

My god, he said. It was right here all along.

What are you doing? his mother asked, but he ignored her. She was only the catalyst. She had locked herself in here to draw his attention to this, to give him this meditation. That was the purpose of all of it, of all their fighting and struggle. But she wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t understand her role. She’d try to distract him.

Thank you, he said. I honor this gift.

What are you talking about?

It’s okay that you don’t know, he said. You’re still locked in samsara. You’re a younger soul.

I’m locked in the shed, because you locked me in here.

Galen lifted another shovelful, the shovel become lighter, the action smoother. He lifted and flung again, watched for pattern in the dirt as it was lofted through time and space.

Galen.

He was being lofted. He understood that now. He was the dirt. He was watching himself being flung.

What are you doing with the shovel?

Shh, he said. This is important. I can’t have you as a distraction. I’m getting close here.

Hey! she yelled.

But he ignored her, plunged the shovel deep into the earth, powered now by a force that was beyond muscle and bone. He was becoming the action itself. He was the dirt, and the shovel, and the movement, but more than that. He was a million miles removed. These hands were not his hands. This breath was not his breath. This mother was not his mother. This Galen was not Galen. He had to let it all go, let the movement happen without attachment.

His mother’s fingers at the gap between wood and earth, white fingers pushing away the dirt that was building, and more dirt lofted through air, through time, onto those fingers, buried and emerging again, a beautiful dance, a movement known forever and meant to be.

The earth deepening, building against the old wood, and her fingers moved to the side, at the edge of the mound, found a larger gap, the entire back of one hand showing, and more dirt lofted onto it, buried now, and another shovelful, and his mother was screaming, a sound become muffled, a sound transformed, a sound that was cradled between earth and air and rocked and buried and buried again.

Chapter 21

This meditation became the longest of Galen’s life, the most sustained, the most beautiful. The shovel into the earth, the swing, the dirt suspended in air and then falling, filling the gap between wood and untilled ground, the gap between human and earth, between past and present, self and truth. The old planks above becoming all that was transitory, pitted and weathering, meeting all that was permanent below, and the new dirt bridging the gap, dissolving distinctions.

His mother a constant sound, an accompaniment, an honoring of the movement. Her fingers in the gap, enforcing distinctions, trying to divide the world, then buried again, a constant progression through opposites. The clearing of the gap and then the filling, the vanishing.

Galen could feel his hands tearing, the hot blisters forming and then breaking and leaking and the raw pain in flashes but then it would fade again, and he remained far away, watched all of it, watched his breath. The heat become a dense layer around him, radiating from his skull especially, and he threw off his shirt, lost no more than a stroke or two and was back in the swing of the shovel, the movement. His skin bare to the sun now, and he could feel each individual ray like a dart through space and time, arrived from the origin of the world, the light not only of our sun but of all suns, finding his back now and piercing his skin, the heat and light-headedness and piercing a gift, not a distraction. They only increased his focus.