It was her valedictory. Before I could stammer out a reply, one of her girlfriends touched her on a wrist and she was gone, and so was Chuck.

A year later, I happened upon her wedding announcement in the local paper one Sunday. My mother had died and I lived alone. I worked in the oil fields as a roughneck, a job that didn’t suit me at all, and saved most of my pay so I could get to college. It was spring and flowers were brightly in blossom after a hard winter. Molly wore a wedding dress and looked about the same in the black-and-white snapshot as she had when she jogged in her khaki outfit to the gym, always running late and then stopping at the door to leap high like Chuck when he slam-dunked a basketball.

As my own valedictory, I drove to the high school on a day of deep clouds and found my way to the wooden bench where I had spent so much time for four years. It was summer. The campus was hot and deserted, the grass gone brown.

I ran my rough hands over the bench’s rotting wooden slats. I could see the bright glare of the water tower. Chuck was long gone, of course, playing football at the state university in Fargo—still a success but no longer making anybody faint—and I remembered that he had once declared the Rosetta Stone to be a ski slope in the Rocky Mountains.

Oddly enough, those memories, unlike Chuck’s fame or my crush on Molly, haven’t faded with time. And I’ve come to understand that my life’s vocation, one sentence following another, is to climb into the clouds as if they are mountains and rappel down their slopes, deciphering their whorls and hieroglyphics as if I hold between my fingers a key to some indecipherable understanding.

It gives me hope in dark times.

Ava’s Demon

He comes home and beats me, like my father once did. “How many do you want?” He uses a thick leather belt, black like obsidian, one he keeps under the sink with the whiskey and the fix. He’s like Hemingway: a quart a day.

“As many as you think.” I find the will to submit. It’s come to that. My voices have deserted me; my ears ring.

He smiles afterward, takes me to the mattress, does the nasty, fixes me good, puts me asleep, the sleep of the dead. He paints. In the morning when I wake, he covers the easel with cloth. After breakfast he leaves, canvas still covered. With his paints and brushes and sketchpad and a dark hooded jacket, he’s gone all day. He returns at dusk, the wind sweeping the shore, the canvas shrouded.

“Why can’t I see? Wasn’t that the vow we made?”

“Keep off my back.” Mud’s caked on his shoes. “You’re always on my back.” He takes off his shoes. As I buff the leather, losing myself in the creases, odd creatures hover around me and he paces, comes close, leans over and grunts, then stalks to the wood-burning stove. He stares into the grate. “You’re getting lost,” he says. “There’s only the strap. Nothing else can do.”

***

“My name’s Pablo,” he said the first time we met. “Painting’s my game. Want to see my etchings?”

“Do you really have etchings?” He was a rugged man with grayish crusty hair, blue eyes that strayed to my cleavage, dark, radioactive skin that glowed.

“They’re very good,” he said, taking a slug from his flask. He moved close. I could see corrugations of thought under the brim of his sailor’s cap, tilted at a rakish angle. “Everyone says so.”

“Everyone?”

He grinned. “My former wives, at least. You can’t get more critical than that.”

His rage started in one of the wars. On the boat his comrades celebrated respite. “The waves,” he shouted. “The way they move. Make them stop!” He ran the upper deck, whipping his mates with his belt, sailor’s knife lashed to his leg. He broke a jaw, ruptured a spleen. They cracked him upside the skull, left a forehead indentation, put him in restraints, gagged him, tossed him in the brig. “Let me out!” he screamed. “I did it for your good; it’s not over. None of it’s over. Let me out!” They let him scream. Exhausted, he made promises. “Adrenal exhaustion,” he told me. “My whole endocrine system got fucked up. My lizard brain took over.” They threatened court-martial, discharged him. “Back-in-the-world deserves you,” they said. He grew a beard, lived in a garret in Fargo, of all places, alternated between orgies and solitude. “Like a priest,” he said. “I lived in the place where Bob Dylan once lived, though at the time he called himself Elston Gunn.”

One night he screamed out such bile that neighbors called the cops. When they arrived, he pulled off his belt. “Back off,” he said. “I’m no man to tangle.”

***

On the island in the Boundary Waters, I cook eggs. He likes them over easy. “Isn’t this better than that city hustle, all that crap? Aren’t we better here?” He likes his coffee hot, oily, black.

I stare across the water at the skyline of the broken city, an illusion made by clouds and landscape and the shit in my veins. It’s where I come to myself. Abuse on the farm before Mama left with me for good, but I’d been ruined by then—rude, graceless, high on anything, child-waitress and sometimes prossie at the café, where I learned everything I need to know about men. Back with Mama, running from my brutal father. “You don’t yet have wings,” she said, “and yet already want to fly.” She did what she could. It didn’t help. I couldn’t make it through. The only thing that made any sense was Poe: “Over the mountains of the moon/ Down the valley of the shadow/ Ride, boldly ride, the shade replied/ If you seek for Eldorado.” I had a child, poor thing. Named Serena, the most beautiful name in the world. She’s with Mama, who I hope does better by her than I did. It breaks me to think of her.

I tried, though, I like to think; I did try.

He gulps coffee like a drunk, cup after cup. “Listen. You’re mine; I’m yours. Repeat it.” He walks to the sink, pausing twice to stare at my legs, then bends over, rises, stretches, shakes his head. “Sometimes my hands do more.”

“What am I learning?” My head turns gauzy; voices haunt me like the hazy landscape. “What’s the point?”

“Pleasure,” he says. “Nothing’s like anything.” He pauses when the horn bleeps across the island. “Listen. You hear? The monster!”

The words are so stupid, I laugh. He glares, thinks twice, and laughs too.

His eyes wide like pennies, he reaches for a pair of shades. “Put on your dark glasses. This could be the end. Let’s go stand on the beach and watch for the cloud. You hear that siren?”

***

“Your etchings, they don’t make sense,” I said that first night.

He raised his chin and looked away, face dark like raw meat. “Not everyone knows how to see what’s there.” His face, sunburned, frowned its network of lines. On his forehead a large vein pulsed. He moved close, the force of his presence beating me dizzy. “What, you think I’m new? I’ve had four wives. Four—and they all loved me. That was way back in the day.”

He dreamed me into his life. He pulled a magic marker from his camouflage jacket and scrawled a wide scar across an etching. “All my paintings have predicted tonight,” he said and led me to the sofa, where he fixed me and did me. A week later I moved in, safe, hidden from all the eyes. He was going to be my Poe, my voice, the voice in our heads. “I’ll take you to the Boundary Waters. You can be my muse. I’ve got acres. No electricity, no phone,” he said, sailor’s cap awry, a dog-killing grin on his face. “Electricity supports the monsters. We’ll live like Robert and Elizabeth Browning, like John and Yoko, Kurt and Courtney, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.” I laughed and he grinned. “Just the two of us, by candlelight. We’ll have one another, in the custody of the cosmos.”

***

On Saturday, when he lets me leave the camp, we picnic. I bring chicken, deviled eggs, bread. He takes me where the waves lap ashore. We walk sandy pockets of trees colored like cinnamon; far away, on private land, a beach umbrella stretches people out, stick figures. They get up, spasticate to the shore, and lie at the water’s edge.

“It’s a robot convention,” I say.

He laughs so hard he can’t get back his breath. “What do you think you see?” he says. “There’s nobody out there. It’s just the Boundary Waters.”

He gives me my fix. “You know I stabbed one of my wives? With a Bic pen,” he adds. “She didn’t even need surgery.” He turns and opens his mouth several times like a fish, as though clearing his ears of static. “But that was then. This is now.”

My blood courses like plastic melt in a rubber hose. Patty melt, that’s what we used to call them at the café. Cheese like liquid, burger burned to a crisp, toast. He coos, pulls me into scrub oak and sand, does me good and nasty. Afterward, civil, he slings an arm around me. “To hell with the sexual slave. I want the child. Where’s the child?”

In stop-and-step gestures, I climb out of my dress and dance us home, twirling in leprechaun fashion. I can’t dance. I’m a klutz, fixed or stone cold sober, but it doesn’t matter to him or to me.

“Get the rattle.” He bites his lip, drawing blood. “God, that’s beautiful. Now shake it. Shake it.”

“How long?”

“Don’t question the cosmos!” He roughs me up a little. “Feel how things are.” I start coughing, can’t stop. “That’s what counts.” He cracks his neck. Shadows play on his face, alive in the light of the lantern. His eyes settle on the world inside his head. “Be who you are.” He stands with his canvas. “Outside, though. I need myself.”

No electricity, no running water; only the stove, the well, some kerosene, the lantern’s shifting light. A big steak knife. His canvas is life: He paces, glowers in the light, cracks his knuckles. Agitated, the lines of his face on fire, he crunches to my side. “What have you done? Can’t you see the stars, how they break? Tell me what you’ve done to the waves! Can’t you see?” He heaves a stone into the water. “How many?” he asks, rage twisting his face.

I cringe, wrapped in a sheet, in his crazy vision, and bow my head. It’s the way things are. His hands move in delicate brushlike gestures and he stumbles to the canvas. “Let me be. Can’t you ever let me be?”

Outside on a damp rock I notice the moon change the tide into a new world. The eyes of animals thick under the sea. I smooth wrinkles in the rocks, but they vanish, slippery-green. The water clings to my sheet like the green inside his whiskey. The moon stitches together stars with light as I stroke the rocks asleep.

***

Wind, scissors, paper. One breaks, one cuts, one covers.

“What do you want?” the wind asks.

“Let me be! Let me be! Let me be!”