No answer from his mother. What’s odd, he continued, is that they’re still working. They don’t stop for the photo. They just kind of look up for a moment. But they’re still bent over the racks. And the racks go on forever. That’s what your father’s life was like. Just work that stretched forever in all directions, work for work’s sake, and nothing else. No family.

I was there, so I’m the one who knows. We were a family, and we didn’t just work. Dad played the accordion, and Mom played the piano, and we’d sing songs together.

Grandma plays piano?

Yeah. Almost everything is something you don’t know.

Okay. So let’s say I want to believe in that family. I still have to get everything to fit. So why did he beat her?

Damn you. He didn’t beat her.

Galen ripped the photo from the album and crinkled it up.

Stop! Her voice broke, ragged and spent.

Save your voice, he said. The photo’s no loss. None of this happened, after all. He didn’t beat her, and there was no family, and there were no drying racks, no walnuts.

Galen could hear his mother sobbing now, but he didn’t care. He looked at the other photos and ripped them out, a page at a time.

Here you are with a new bicycle, he said, and he ripped out that page. Here you are with a dog. What was that dog’s name again?

Schatze, she said, and this made her sob harder.

Just a dog, he said, and not much of a dog. Those legs are about three inches high. What kind of dog is that again?

A dachshund.

Yeah, that’s right. What a mistake of a dog.

I loved Schatze.

What’s the name mean again?

Mein Schatz is my treasure or dear one or my love.

Galen ripped the page out. Well there are a lot of photos of my love, but not after today.

I hate you.

Yeah, I know. We’ve already covered that. Time to move on to something new.

I’m your mother.

Covered that point, too.

You have to let me out.

And again the familiar ground. I had hoped to get through these albums before going for the earplugs, but I may have to get them sooner.

You’re a monster.

Yeah yeah.

You’re not my son.

Uh-huh. He looked at another photo of Schatze, by the Christmas tree. His mother in a holiday dress that looked thick, like it was made of velvet, maybe. And the tree huge, out in the main room that was two stories high. Tinsel and hundreds of ornaments and a star on top. A blanket of felt underneath, and all the presents, piles of presents. Schatze with his paws up on her, straining to lick her face, and she had both arms around him, was laughing and trying to get her face away from his tongue. It almost looked like what she said. He could almost imagine the family she was claiming. And maybe they had good times. Maybe the good times stretched on and became most of the time. Maybe the beatings and favoritism and fakery were only occasional, the exceptions to how their lives were. But he would never know. His mother couldn’t be trusted, because she was trying too hard to protect and deny. His aunt couldn’t be trusted because she was trying too hard to destroy. And his grandmother couldn’t remember. These photos were too brief, only moments. They couldn’t describe what a day felt like, how all the hours of even one day moved along. And this was all a distraction anyway, the deepest form of samsara, the belief in belonging, the belief in being tied to a family and a place and time. The final attachment, the one that was the foundation for the illusion of self.

Chapter 22

The crinkled pages looked almost like flowers, large and shiny, the whites and darks of the petals, enormous white carnations dyed with ink. Two albums made a bed of flowers much larger than the piles from the junk drawers.

I’m a gardener, he said. I’m planting a family. And once all the flowers have bloomed, I’m going to pour gasoline on them and light a match. And that will be freedom, finally.

You’re a demon, she said.

You’re not even religious.

I know. But you’re a demon. You’re a force for evil. You’re not a person gone bad. You’re something that had this in him all along. This is your nature.

You can’t believe in evil if you don’t believe in god.

I can see the truth. I can see what you are.

There is no evil. There is only progression through opposites.

You haven’t even read Blake.

Who’s Blake?

Blake is the one you’re parroting with all this crap from Kahlil Gibran and others. If you’d gone to college, you’d know.

Galen walked over to the table, picked up one of the heavy cast-iron chairs, and flung it against the shed wall.

That fixed it, his mother said. You’re no longer an uneducated dumbass.

Galen went into the house, grabbed the rest of her photo albums, and then just stood there in her room. He had let her distract him. He had found his meditation, finally, and look how quickly he had left it and become caught up in something else. This was the problem. She had an unbelievable power to throw him off, like a magnet next to a compass. She could destroy everything just by opening her mouth.

He let the photo albums drop onto the floor. He had to find the earplugs.

They weren’t on her nightstand. He looked in her bathroom, in the mirror cabinet above the sink, and found a set of old ones, two dirty globs. He stuffed one into each ear, listening now to the inside of his own head, to his own blood and synapses, and that was where he needed to be. No more distraction. Without sound, she could no longer reach him.

He found gauze to wrap his raw hands, and he kicked things around in her closet looking for gloves, dumped the drawers of her dresser onto the floor, all her socks and underwear and bras and blouses and everything else, and still no gloves.

So he marched out to the shed, walked all the way around it to the small toolshed, and looked in there. No doubt she was saying things to him now, but he could hear nothing but the airspace in his own skull.

His eyes had to adjust after the bright sun, but he found a small shelf along one side, and here were the gloves. He picked a light cotton pair, dark with dirt and grease, and smashed them in his hands to kill any black widows. Then he slipped them on over the gauze. He was going to commit to the meditation now.

He walked out front to the shed door, stood at the orchard edge with the trees to his back and looked at the dirt he’d mounded along the wall. It was a furrow, he realized now. He was extending the orchard, connecting it to the shed, cultivating something.

The trees at his back a kind of audience. They seemed full of expectation. Grown heavy out of the soil and hanging now in the air, waiting.

Okay, he said. I’m doing it. And he walked to the corner, where he had only a few feet of wall left. He plunged the shovel and his hands stung. His arms and back sore as he lifted. He’d already cramped up.

The dirt seemed only dirt, nothing more. It looked and felt and smelled like dirt. The shovel heavy, and the fling too weighted, no fling at all, no suspension to it, only a brutal gravity.

Come on, he said. He knew that all meditations began this way, uninspired, thick as clay, without connection. A transition from the unalert world to the alert one, a journey through the full thickness of appearance. A kind of burial and trying to dig oneself out, and it always felt impossible. Every time, every single time, it felt as if the thickness would never end, as if the world would never shift again, never slip, never transform and become.

He was burning, his entire neck and back and arms cooked at the surface, but even that was no transformation. Even that was dead and heavy. It only hurt. And his breath was ragged. He was tired.

His back hurt so much he didn’t feel he could bend over any longer, but he kept going anyway, kept shoveling, took out the earplugs and tried to listen to the streams of dirt and rock falling off the sides of the shovel, sounding almost like water, and then the heavy whump as he dumped each load. The sharper sound of small rocks hitting wood when he aimed high. He was on the east wall now, partly in shade, working his way toward the lawn. The cool of the shade a beautiful thing.