Galen didn’t know what any of it meant, but he knew dirt was his teacher. At every moment, unexpected, dirt was showing him something. Better than going to a university. He might never go, even with all the money. He might just stay right here, in this old house and orchard, and learn everything.

But it was hard to believe in a future, hard to care.

He was in so much pain he finally had to turn the temperature down. His whole body pulsing in the burn. He fumbled at the shampoo with one hand, tried to work it into his hair but there was so much dirt. The top of his head caked, so he put his head in the stream of water and just ran one hand over it for a long time. This felt right, standing with his head bowed and rubbing a hand over it, an expression of despair. He moaned a little to go with it, and that felt right. Waiting for his mother to die. Transcendence seemed far away. The big problem was that we could never see far enough ahead. How could we transcend if we kept getting ambushed?

Great smears of mud across his thighs as he scrubbed with soap. The black becoming lighter brown and then washed away. Small stones gathered at the drain, and bits of leaf and grass and thorn.

Bending down for his shins and calves, scrubbing until the last of the dirt was gone, a kind of loss. It had felt right to be covered in dirt. He was naked now.

He turned off the water. His hand did not look good. Sore and a bit puffy and red at the edges, infected. He dried carefully with a towel and looked for Neosporin. Neosporin was a belief in the future. He found it in a cabinet and applied liberally, then wrapped his hand in clean gauze, padded into his room and pulled on a clean T-shirt and shorts, clean socks and his dirty old Converse high-tops. Then he went to her room.

Everything on the floor. The bed dark with dirt. He felt tired. He didn’t want to deal with this. And the shed was more important anyway. He had to remove the boards he’d nailed around in a kind of belt. That would draw attention.

Half waking, Galen said. We are half waking, going through the motions. I hammered all those nails, and now I need to take them out.

Down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he gulped at water, always so thirsty, and he ate two pieces of bread and then drank more water.

Outside, it was late afternoon now. Time passing. That was what he wanted. He wanted the day to end, but time was so slow.

Shadow hanging off the east wall, stretching into the furrows. He put his ear to the wall, listened, tried to hear any sign of her, even the lightest breathing, but she had vanished. He didn’t know how long it took to die from no water. He didn’t want to go in too early and find her alive. Because if he found her alive, he would call an ambulance. It would be impossible not to do that. So he needed to wait.

He walked around to the toolshed, feeling too clean, too unconnected. He was no longer a part of this place. He looked around for a hammer and then realized a crowbar might be faster. His grandfather had three of them leaning in a corner. Old metal, unpainted, wiped in oil, rough at the edges. Galen picked up the slimmest, shortest one, and even that was heavy. Tool users. It was possible to have an entirely different view of humans. No souls, no transcendence, no past lives, only animals that had learned better tricks. Everything pointless.

Galen used his opposable thumbs, gripped the crowbar and slotted its thin face between board and wall. Levered and popped the end of that board free, worked along until it fell to the earth, undone. Moved along to the next board, worked the hungry thin teeth of the crowbar.

The sun on the back of his neck. His body a slick, the T-shirt draping close. He felt dizzy, and that was fine. He tried to lose himself in the work and not think. The furrow along the wall annoying because it kept him from stepping as close as he would have liked. He had to lean in, and his back was cramping up.

Removing the boards was so much faster than nailing them. Galen was on the second side in no time, along the wall with the bay door, his back to the trees. The old lock still hanging there. He didn’t know what he would do about that. He still didn’t have the key, and it seemed too big to break with a crowbar.

For now he would focus only on removing the boards. One task at a time. They fell off like scabs, rough and uneven, discarded wood, lying in the dirt with their nails sticking up. Galen had the idea of dismantling the entire shed. He could remove one plank at a time and drag them all into the orchard. The shed dispersed, planks lying along every furrow. The tractor and the walnut drying screens in their stacks would be exposed to the sun and moon. He liked that idea. Just undo everything and wait in the orchard until the wood decayed and became earth again and there would be no sign that the shed had ever existed. He would be old by then, and his final project would be to undo the house. He would take it apart board by board, just as he had done to the shed, and in the end, only the piano would remain, and maybe that cool wooden floor, exposed now to the sun.

If only Galen could live long enough to watch boards decay into dust. To stand here in the orchard and watch the high wall and housing developments crumble, and watch the land return to desert, with no water and no sign of civilization, and then watch the rains come and plants grow and wind and storms and water increase until he stood in a jungle with palm fronds and ferns and vines and the air filled with water. Galen wanted that. He wanted no part of human society. He wanted to join geologic time. But first he had to get through this one day, and even that seemed as long as the transformation of desert to jungle.

Galen took a break from the crowbar, grabbed a board in his good hand, and dragged it toward the pile along the hedge. Leaving a thin track in the dirt, the only sign remaining, and he could rake that out. The pile reduced to almost nothing, a few scraps, but it would grow again now. Galen took his time walking back for the next board. He didn’t really believe anyone would visit. A year from now, Jennifer would need her first check for college. But before that, no one. Removing the boards was another form of going through the motions, another performance for no audience.

He picked up another, dragged it, and listened to the hollow sound that came through the wood. Something faint in addition to the dragging, something transmitted through the length of the board, always more to hear and see. We could never be awake enough. He flopped the board onto the pile, then bent over with his hands on his knees and felt lost, the inside of him a vacuum. He had to breathe, just focus on his breath, and then he stood up again and walked back for another board.

He dragged the boards one at a time, and the sun was lower. It was very slow, but it was lower. He picked up the crowbar again and pried along the eastern wall in shadow. Concealed from the sun. Hidden from all except perhaps his mother. He wondered whether she could still see and hear him, outlined through the slats against the sky. Easiest along the west wall, where he would leave a shadow, much more difficult to find along this wall. A peaceful way to go, not having water. A light-headedness and quiet that would fade eventually into nothing, a meditation on light and sound and air.

Chapter 29

Galen worked on the furrow in darkness, no moon. Felt his way along the walls with the shovel. The air shallow, an ebb time. Sound magnified.

He was using the flat-faced shovel, jamming its squared end down along the boards into the loose dirt he had piled, then pulling toward him. The dirt heavy and invisible and loud. The scuff of the face as he dragged each load a few feet, spreading the soil. Making a bed for a new garden, planting his footsteps.