AFTER GETTING OUT, he tried to make a new life.
He moved to Upstate New York and started a resurrection project, something that would bring him back to life. It wasn’t going to be easy because he was dead inside.
Life had fled from him like a beaten dog. It came back the same way.
He moved into an apartment above a little coffeeshop, and he woke to the smell of baking. There was someone in the bed beside him. A woman, younger than him but not by much. Maybe she just looked younger because life had been kinder to her. She smelled like blood. They’d stained the sheets. When she turned toward him he was surprised to see his dead sister for a second, but then her face reconstituted itself and became a stranger’s.
“Marnie,” she said. “You don’t remember my name.”
“Glen,” he said.
“I remember yours.” She wore a black tanktop that didn’t fit her, her breasts slipping out on either side. Her hips made a small mountain under the covers.
When he reached for her: “No,” she said. “Gotta go.”
And then she was bustling up out of bed, rinsing off in the shower, putting on jeans and high heel shoes and clattering down the stairs like a horse or two. Damn. He tried to remember where he’d met her. Couldn’t. Remembered his sister instead. Then stopped doing that.
*
The resurrection project involved materials he salvaged from the dump. Boards, pieces of metal.
He built a scale model of a life he’d once lived: wife, two kids, two-car garage. It was intricate and faithful. He’d learned metalworking inside, but modeling was a skill he hadn’t realized he possessed.
His scale model kids were five and seven, perfect. They didn’t talk back to him. They didn’t refuse to come visit him.
It took months.
In the meantime he got drunk, slept with women who were willing to sleep with him, and worked, late shifts at the airport loading luggage into the bellies of metal planes. 737s, 747s. He earned begrudging respect by putting his head down and working, and then he earned suspicion because he wouldn’t talk to anyone and worked too hard.
In the best moments he forgot where he was. He became a machine, moving things from one place to another.
*
Late shifts did not mean late mornings. He couldn’t sleep past six, six-thirty tops. Sometimes the smell of baking woke him, sometimes the birds.
*
He smashed the scale model of his former life with a hammer. Then he lifted the model and brought it down on the floor. He heard himself screaming but couldn’t stop himself, not even after the neighbors started wall-banging.
The cops came and warned him.
He sat on the floor looking at the pieces of his project.
Then he started again.
*
His sister would not come back. Neither would the three strangers he’d killed in the crash. He’s been so drunk he couldn’t see anything.
He got blackout drunk still but had no car so was only a danger to himself.
He woke up one fall morning half in a river. If it had been colder he would have died from hyperthermia. As it was he shivered and wandered back through the town he barely knew.
*
The next scale model was bigger.
He bought modeling clay and a wooden armature and he put back together his son and daughter and ex-wife, all of whom refused to see him anymore.
His ex-wife had a restraining order out on him.
His kids would do the same if he tried to get in touch with them.
He made ¾ models of each one of them, and he sat them in the ratty secondhand furniture in his apartment. His son’s nose was too small. His daughter’s head had a dent in it. His ex-wife barely looked like a person at all.
He wondered how long he could go on like this.
*
He woke in someone else’s apartment. There was a brick wall. A railroad apartment.
The woman was small and very pretty and looked like she did a lot of yoga.
She smiled at him as if he’d said something kind and he felt confused and wanted to cry. Then he did. He was three towns away; the Uber ride cost him thirty bucks.
*
At work sometimes he thought about climbing in to the luggage compartments and going wherever the planes took him. Spokane or Milwaukee or Austin. Someplace not here.
*
Finally it snowed.
The first snow he’d seen since he’d gotten out.
It was beautiful.
He brought the ¾ scale models down from his apartment and carried them, one at a time, out to the woods.
He found a copse where the snow hadn’t fallen yet and set them up in a circle. Then he sat down with them and shivered in the cold.
Inside he’d had no choice but to tunnel inside himself. Now he was trying to come out a little at a time.
He left the scale models there, and he went into the coffeeshop below his apartment.
He ordered coffee and a lemon cake and sat at a table watching people. How strange they all were.
— JAMEY GALLAGHER
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