The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📕

eyeball. Because Dr. Le Page forbade Jim to drive, Jim was calling to see if Jerry might be able to run him back over to Spokane for his first checkup to see if the retina had fully attached. Dr. Le Page had told Jim that there was 895 percent chance that everything would be all right and they’d be able to turn around and head right back home.

Jerry was surprised, and slightly flattered, that Jim had asked him for help. He told Jim he’d check with Karen but, although he didn’t tell Jim, he suspected Karen would fall out of her seat in her eagerness to get him out of the house.

If their story was not the most ancient in the world, it had to be running a close second: the end of love. The flat water where the shore is no longer visible, and where all wind leaves the sails, and the sun hangs overhead for days, without moving, in a bright burning haze, a searing ball of light, nothing more. A place where both will and navigation fail, as does the imagination, and where the two sailors, the two castaways, finally have no choice—none—but to turn upon each other: a place where each has finally become the other’s prisoner.

One sailor—suppose he is a man much like Jerry—rides in the bow, and in the doldrums’ heat feels as if he is burning at the stake. He turns in the seat of the little boat and tries to speak to the other sailor—she might be a woman much like Karen—but it is as if no sound comes from his mouth, or if it does; as if the words fall into some chasm before they ever reach her, across even that short distance.

Suppose that a hundred, or ten thousand lashes, however faint or light each one might be on its own, have mounted across the years: ten thousand little lashes or harshnesses or taking-for-granted ignorings, for every one small and dwindling kindness. Will you fold the newspaper more neatly when you’re done with it, can’t you do anything right? Why must you lift the lid of a pot on the stove to see what’s cooking when it should be evident to anyone with any intelligence by the damned odor alone that I’m cooking rice, and that it’s sitting there steaming, as it needs to do, and that now you’ve let all the steam out? And, goddammit, you bought the wrong kind of milk at the grocery store, I told you to get the one percent with the blue label at the top, not the fucking one and a half percent with the red label! Don’t you pay attention to anything, can’t you observe what’s in the refrigerator each day?

Panicked, the one sailor stares at his attacker, his critic. We’re stranded on open water, he wants to whisper, we’ve got to pull together—but mid-sea, she can no longer hear or even see him, and instead stares right through and past him. The man—yes, certainly, it is Jerry, and perhaps he is not the only one—continues to feel that he is burning at the stake; he is filled with despair that she is wasting the moment, wasting the last moments.

They float.

Occasionally the sailor in the stern shifts her focus, notices that the passenger in front is speaking to her, or is trying to speak to her. She can’t be sure, but the expression on her face makes it appear that he is asking something of her—that he wants something from her, something she doesn’t have anymore—and even though she can no longer hear him, she can see that he keeps asking, and it makes her hate him. There’s nowhere to put the hate, however, on such a wide, flat sea, and so she just holds on to it, and the boat grows more leaden.

He tries to be more perfect, or less imperfect. Despite the fading tenure of their years together, he buys her flowers each day that he is in town. In cold weather, if she is to go out somewhere in her car, he makes a point of warming the vehicle up for her and backing it sufficiently far out of the garage so that the fumes from the idling engine do not build up in the garage, but not so far that she has to walk out into the snow. But one morning, when she’s running late, it turns out that he has positioned the car so that its door brushes against the garage wall when opened, thereby limiting somewhat the space available for her to slip in behind the driver’s seat; and because she has an armload, that morning—a purse, a shoulder bag, and a cup of coffee—she exhales her familiar sound of exasperation, shakes her head, and mutters, once again, How hard would it be, really, to do something right the first time?

She’s a beautiful woman, even now into her mid-forties—in some respects more beautiful than ever, and it’s true that people have always all but fallen over themselves doing for her—often she needs not even to make a request, but simply look or suggest or, sometimes, point, in order to urge the doer along. But Jerry, more than anyone, knows she has also a beautiful heart, that it, that great heart, resides like a mask behind a mask beneath a mask, and that only he can see far enough back there—past the false or surface beauty, and then behind the false or surface anger, buried just behind that skin’s beauty, all the way to the contemplative tenderness he knows is still alive far within her.

Jerry is a stonemason—a creative enough occupation but one in which, always, limitations and stress loads are understood—the rock, or span of bricks, able to do only certain things, in the end, and able to achieve only certain effects and certain goals, within reason. There are no miracles in his job, only the daily cumulative force of showing up each day and putting in