Bloomland by John Englehardt

Author:John Englehardt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Bloomland
ISBN: 9781950539123
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2019-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

EVERYTHING LOST COMES BACK AGAIN

EDDIE

ALONE IN MY LIVING ROOM, you are putting on a sweatshirt you will never wear again. It is teal, chewed up around the neck, with a cartoon sailboat sewn across the chest. You already dug out your baggy, decade-old running pants from the suitcases piled against my couch. It has been an hour since the university announced there is an active shooter on campus, and you can’t get hold of Casey. You’ve called, texted, emailed. Your only option is to run two miles home and hope she answers the door in her pajamas.

So you sprint down College Avenue, where people stare at you from the window booths of Waffle House, from under raccoon- themed Christmas Lights, wearing cowboy boots and statement necklaces, thronged in the frigid air without coats. You do not care how desperate you look, sprinting through the half-halted ceremony of a Friday night, past Shotz, Don’s Eat Place, Tailspin Tavern. How the sweat on your beard is turning to ice and the thinning hair on your head is slicked up in a sort of middle-aged mohawk. Soon you reach the part of town that’s all law offices, steepled churches with gigantic rec centers, wide vistas of asphalt parking lots. It’s so quiet you can hear your staccato breathing. Streetlights spin your shadow around on the pavement like the hand of a clock.

By the time you reach the base of Mount Palmer, you’ve convinced yourself Casey is dead. Such an assumption allows you to withdraw from the present and inhabit the future, where she will have been dead a long time. You have already endured your own obsessive nostalgias and hormonal cascades. You have waited in line at the campus Wal-Mart pharmacy for your beta blockers. You have dented the blank face of my freezer with your fists. You have wandered into the pitch black of an ice storm. Enduring all this will feel like getting soaked by death and never drying off completely, but in time you will learn how to cope. You will wake up in the morning and drink coffee in our small kitchen. You will organize poetry explications in a neat stack, put a wool hat on your bald head and go to class, where you will tell your college freshman that the point of literature is to imagine a future beyond the reality that is rendering before them. Then, while they complete an in-class writing exercise, you will look beyond the rows of bleached hair and photorealistic camo jackets and entertain a maladaptive daydream—what life would have been several months after Casey was killed, the two of you navigating the new reality of her pregnancy. “Don’t you ever get sad you’ll never experience childbirth?” you write in your notebook, since you are brainstorming for a dialogue exercise. After so many years, you still participate in any assignment you give your students.

Eventually, the day will end. You will walk back to our house— because, in this future, we will be

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