Dirt Read Online Free PDF Page A

open, staring up into the midday sun. He was roasting in his sweater, and his bare legs and face would burn. He would stay out here the rest of the day. The wooden edges so hard across his back and neck he didn’t know how he’d last even the next five minutes, but he was determined. It would be a meditation, and who knew what might lie on the other side.
    All I’ve sacrificed for you for more than twenty years, his mother said in a low voice. Get up before Helen and Jennifer see you.
    Galen could hear his aunt and cousin talking at the shed, coming this way. Why does it matter if they see? he asked. I’m just curious. I don’t see why it would matter.
    Just get up now.
    No, he said. I’m staying here like this all day.
    The sun so bright Galen couldn’t see his mother, couldn’t judge what might come next. But she only walked away.
    He tried to relax into the hard wood, tried to let his flesh and bones find a soft way of fitting to the wood. The edges cutting into his butt were making his legs numb, and the edge across his back made breathing more difficult, but the one at his neck was the most urgent. He tried to exhale, stare at the sun, forget this existence, find something else.
    You already look like jerky, his aunt said.
    His thighs are white, Jennifer said.
    True, his aunt said. And I guess they should match his face and neck.
    Galen dizzy and blind, his eyes filled with flashes and spots, but he could hear the work on every side, a pointless task. The racks didn’t need to be cleaned or oiled or maintained in any way, unless a screen was broken. But none of them knew how to repair a screen. If one was broken, they’d simply put that rack aside, in the pile directly behind the tractor, and not use it. So what was happening today was that they were taking all of the racks out of the shed and then putting them away again.
    We’re just going through the motions, Galen said.
    What’s that? his aunt asked.
    Our whole lives, Galen said, just reenactments of a past that didn’t really exist.
    The past existed, his mother said. You just weren’t there. You think anything that’s not about you isn’t real.
    What about my father? Galen asked. Can you prove he’s real? Can you narrow it down to the two or three men who are most likely, at least?
    No answer to that. Never an answer to that. Only the sounds of their shoes in the dirt, the sounds of racks being picked up now, returned to the shed.
    I have some other questions too, Galen said. I’m not finished.
    But no one was listening to him, it seemed, and his back was so destroyed by now it hurt too much to speak. So he closed his eyes, saw bright pink with white tracers and solar flares, a world endlessly varied and explosive. His body spinning in the light. Face and thighs cooking, a stinging sensation. But he would stay here, he would see this out.
    Pain itself an interesting meditation. On the surface, always frightening, and you wanted to run. Very hard not to move, very difficult, at least at first, to do nothing. Pain induced panic. But beneath the surface, the pain was a heavier thing, dull and uncomplicated. It could become a reliable focal point, a thing present and unshifting, better even than breath. And the great thing about these racks was that they distributed the pain throughout his body. He was afraid his neck and back might actually be damaged, and that was a part of pain, too, the fear of maiming, of losing permanently some part of the body. Even an insect didn’t want that. No one wanted to lose a leg or an arm or the use of their back, and so as we approached this moment, we approached a kind of universal, and if we could look through that, and detach ourselves, we might see the void beyond the universals, some region of truth.
    Stop thinking, Galen told himself. The thinking was a cheat, robbing him of the direct experience. And it’s also bullshit, he said aloud. It’s all