The fashioning of the rod was spectacular work. It let him dip into and out of his thoughts all day, like a ladle in a stream. At times, he applied himself to the wood, first to finding it then to shaping it, and at times he daydreamed on what he would write or reflect on what he’d read. Daydreaming was fine and pleasant as long as it didn’t sink into dwelling. Dwelling might lead to dwelling on Rachel, and then the panic might set in.
The rod saved him from so much thought. He had to focus shaping it. He hammered little guides into it for the wire. He attached the reel and played with a weight on the hook. He made plans, set only in his mind, for fishing in the morning. Morning seemed liked the time when fish were hungrier, but this was just a hunch. He’d never fished in the morning. He’d never fished at all.
That night, he reread a passage from Portnoy’s Complaint and then another one about being marked from head to toe with repressions, about being able to make a roadmap from them. Then he was alone in the dark, and he did what he’d been doing almost every night when alone and bored. He jerked off onto his stomach, wiped himself with the sheets, and slept to forget.
*
In the morning, he woke up in the dark and took a bag of books and his makeshift rod down to the lake. By this point, he knew the route well enough to need only the frailest of daylight to make his way.
He dropped the wire and anchor. He set the rod between rocks and set to flipping pages. Among the books was an old magazine, one he’d browsed a week after breaking up with Rachel. It had been a period of life in which poems shimmered, as if here only for a short time as they were guests from another, truer dimension. He was still, despite the light air and sky, partly in that period.
There was “An Apology” by Robert Wood Lynn. Adam didn’t have to read it now to know what it said. The speaker was speaking to someone who wasn’t there. The speaker saw wild horses on a beach, and this symbolized joy or beauty. Adam had wanted to share the poem with Rachel. The poem had been Adam’s wild horses. He’d come up to the mountains and the town in part to hide from wild horses, or find ones unrelated to Rachel.
The fault in this plan, its major flaw, was that while all this was new to him and unknown to her, he’d brought along himself—mind, body, and heart—and none of him had learned what to do with wild horses if he couldn’t share them with her.
*
He was surprised when the fishing reel started going out. He grabbed the rod and lifted and for the first time felt the roughness of the unpolished wood. The reel stopped for a moment, and he tugged gently, picturing the small fish on the other end, knowing that this rod wasn’t made for sturgeon or even a hearty trout.
Whatever fish it was, he never saw, because when he tugged for a fourth time the little guides he’d placed tore off the rod, and the leverage was lost, and the reel broke off the rod, and Adam, defeated and full of premature humiliation let out a grunt more to express his anger than to find a saving burst of strength as the reel and spool flew from his grip and he collapsed onto a ground that was wetter than he remembered and stuck to his ass like mud.
*
That evening, he started a new shopping list with the simple item, “fishing rod.” He ate tinned sardines and a serving of beans. Afterward, in the dusk, he set up the telescope in what he was beginning to consider his front lawn.
Through the eye was a new sky, brighter and busier. Since moving to the cabin, he’d begun to study the sky for truly the first time. The city lights had made this type of sky a distant dream. Now, he planned to get a map or book of astronomy to learn about the stars and find constellations. Until then, he would appreciate the objects without reference, as points of light on a canvas.
He had come to notice that there were more colors than white in the sky. Some twinkles were white, others gold and yellow, and a few had a touch of red or blue or silver or even green. For some nights, he’d come out and tried to find a pink one he’d seen on his fourth night. Without a telescope, they had all folded into a great, luminous arrangement.
The telescope’s magnification introduced a sense of depth. The bodies were sharper. Adam felt, for a moment, a small sense of wonder, followed by a larger sense of relief at this wonder. It was a relief to know he could still experience genuine wonder, small as it was. And he felt a greater relief at the fact that he could see himself spending real time studying the cosmos now, distracted from his solitude. Along with the electric lantern, the telescope erased so much of nighttime’s gloom.
He turned it down and out through the forest around him, to the mountain across the lake. There was a shrub, and he could see its individual leaves now. It was all upside down, and the diminishing dusk was quickly making it all shadows.
No matter. He turned back to the sky, to the bodies of light that had risen to the take the place of the night, that were growing brighter as all around him grew darker. He tried, and mostly succeeded at, witnessing some marvels.