11/27/2010

 (20 years ago)

THE SURVIVALIST

 When the Soviet Union broke up, I got a divorce.  There didn’t seem to be any point in continuing the charade any longer and our marriage was over, had never really started at all.
 I should explain–my husband was what the media called a survivalist, although he preferred to call himself “One of the few intelligent men left in the country”.  I kept my mouth shut most of the time, but it got harder, let me tell you.

 We really got into it all right.  Did I tell you that we didn’t originally start off in Oregon?  He moved us up here after a lot of research.  Said the fallout patterns were very favorable in the Northwest.  I wanted to go to Seattle, but Oh no, that was way too close to the Submarine Base at Bangor.  We had to settle in Portland.
 To tell the truth, Portland was something of a compromise.  He wanted to buy a place in Eastern Oregon.  “There is nothing out there”, he said.  So did I, as often as I could get away with.  I also pointed out that self-sufficiency was nice, but money was even better.  That was always the trump card in that game.

 So he bought property in the desert for himself and a house in Southeast Portland for me.  I didn’t really mind the bars on the windows so much; they gave me a sense of security while he was out in the desert.  He built a high block wall around the property and topped it with broken glass.  I told him that someday a kid would cut himself trying to get a ball or something, but I lost that argument.  In the mornings the sun would catch in the brown and green glass in a way that I’m almost nostalgic about.  I would make the coffee in the mornings and look at the sun making green fire on the wall, and I would imagine that I was a prisoner.  The blank block walls cut off the outside world.  I’d watch airplanes go overhead and wish that I was on one of them, going anywhere, somewhere that had a view of life.  Somewhere beyond the walls.

 At first, I went with him to the place in the desert.  He called it “The Compound”.  There were three buildings facing each other around a small square.  I didn’t dare laugh when he installed a flagpole and ran up the Stars and Stripes.  There was a high wall around the compound too, but the property was bigger and most of the wall was out of sight.
 The Compound sat at the mouth of a dry canyon.  He drilled a well and built tanks.  The main house was built of cinder blocks.  He filled the holes in each block with one-inch rebar and concrete.  The windows would not have admitted even the most anexoretic crook even if they could have been opened.  You couldn’t really see out of them unless you stood on a chair, and the thick Lucite distorted the desert into a hideous vision of heat waves and dust.  The garage and storehouse matched the house, and all of the buildings were the color of the land around.  When I walked away from it and turned around, it was as if the desert had reclaimed everything.
 He made me carry a gun when I walked in the desert.  I didn’t know anything about guns when we first met, and I think it always secretly bugged him that I shot better than he did.  Or maybe it was that I shot better and didn’t care.  I just wanted to participate in things with him.  How was I to know that eventually all there was to participate in was my husband’s fantasy?  The paths that life leads you down when you just follow along can be bizarre.

 He had lots of guns.  I lost track of them somewhere along the line.  He always said it was better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.  There were guns in the car, in the Jeep, in the house, in the garage and the storehouse, and god knows where else.  I made him stop bringing a gun to bed right after the wedding, though.  I told him he could sleep with me or with his Colt or Browning or whatever, but not with both of us.  So he put the pistol on the floor, under the bed.  The three of us slept together for as long as it lasted.  When he woke up from nightmares, he’d reach for the gun, not me.

  We never had any kids.  To be honest, there wasn’t all that much sex after the first couple of years.  Things changed after the compound started taking shape.  If I’m to be totally honest, I took steps to avoid having children.  I came to think it best that we not reproduce ourselves.  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, but then I think of him and am glad we had none.  I know I made the right decision.

 After so many years, I stopped going out to the desert with him.  I came to like the empty feeling of the house in Portland.  My husband was such an angry man that his anger hung about him like smog over LA.  It was like there was a cartoon bubble over head, except instead of words, there was just a brutal scribble of rage.  I never knew what would trigger the release of his rage; the price of apples in the market, or the new tax laws, or something his boss said to him.  Or something I said.  I learned that there was a very limited range of safe subjects that we could talk about, only the subjects sometimes changed, and the safe topics became minefields.  When he was gone, the psychic atmosphere of the house cleared like Oregon after the rainy season.  I’d open the shades and drapes that had to be closed when he was home and let in as much sun as could get over the walls.  I’d play music and read romances and talk to people on the phone–all the things I couldn’t do when he was home.

 I stopped talking to people about my husband.  They wouldn’t have understood.  I didn’t want to lie, so I just got less specific about him.  I taught school for years and my colleagues joked about my mythical husband.  I thought it was safer than the unvarnished truth.  My sister used to tell me that I should get out, that I should have him committed.  We stopped having anything else to talk about and so we stopped talking.  Last December made it seven years since I last saw her.  I guess I don’t have to tell you that my husband didn’t much like sis, and he wasn’t sorry to see us drift apart.  He didn’t want people to meddle in our private affairs, you see.

 How much people will put up with has ceased to amaze me.  The grass may be greener on the other side of the wall, but if the walls are so high that you can’t even see the grass, what good is it?  The horizons of my world closed down to the

walls around my house and cut me off from the light of life.  And I did nothing about it for more years than I care to admit.  One can know what the problem is, and know what the solution to the problem is, and still be unable to do anything about it.  It’s so easy to drift along and let the years go by unmarked and unremarked.

 Last December, we were watching TV.  He was talking at the news anchor like I wasn’t the only one who could hear him.  I had stopped caring about the outside world that so worked him up that I could usually sit through the newscast and not remember a single thing that was said.  But this night was different.  I looked up from my grade book at my husband’s gasp, thinking that he had finally succumbed to apoplexy to find Gorbachev on TV, resigning.  The Soviet Union ceased to exist.  My husband for once was speechless.  He could only stare open-mouthed at the tube as the anchors talked over their plastic discussion of the event.
 The end of the Cold War, they were saying.  They said it over and over, until it went through my head like a mantra.  I stared at my husband as if I’d never seen him before, and realized that maybe I hadn’t ever seen him at all.  The words, “End of the Cold War” kept going through my mind, and I couldn’t stop staring at him.  When the commercial came on, my husband turned to me to speak and saw me staring.  The look on my face stopped the words in his mouth and all he could say was “Huh?”

 Something in my head snapped.  I heard it very clearly.  My mouth opened and I listened to myself say, “I’m leaving you.  I am going to file for divorce and you are going to give me this house.  You will not contest the divorce.  The end of the cold war is here.”
 He said “ Huh?” And I got up and went to the bedroom and packed his bag.
 “You can go to the desert, to The Compound.  You’ll be all right there.  You’ll be safe,” I told him.  He looked at me.  He looked in my eyes, searching their gray depths for something he didn’t find.  And he left.

 We are divorced now by decree of law, but the divorce began a long time ago.  The walls that he built around our home were only the visible manifestations of the walls that were built around our souls.  We humans are creatures of the light, and open spaces, and the walls we build separate us from our happiness, from the light we need to live in.  In the shadows of the walls our souls shrivel and dry out.  But that’s all behind me now.  Now I can choose to live in the light.
 

The first thing I’m going to do in my new life is pull down the walls and let in the light. 

 And then I’m going to call my sister.
K. A.M.
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