The Death of All Things Seen Read Online Free PDF

father had sent him letters to this same PO box with the affectation of par avion , letters asking after his health, but more pointedly after Nate’s wife and newborn child, though their names were never mentioned under the presumption that all letters were opened by the United States government.
    Back in the pickup, Nate let the vents pour a dry heat over his hands. He ran his thumb along the crinkled give of the envelope. It was upon him, all that he had left behind.
    He recalled the first summer of his escape, the encroach of wildfire, the sky a sanguine blood orange, the thunderous stampede of wildlife in a pitiless retreat toward rivers in a natural divide of a fire line, and then the soot and ash, the torrents of rain that darkened the midsummer as though it had all been delivered unto him alone.
    He had endured those first months with a moral indecisiveness so it was hard to find the measure of who he was. He braced against the knifing advance of autumnal days he knew would come, and did. Inside his cabin, he had penned letters against the throw of shifting firelight, grappling not with the immediacy of what was happening, but seeking a grander assessment of life, writing with the instinctive understanding that what he set down would be read again and again, not for the hard and fast facts, but as an epistolary of a life lived.
    A shudder ran through him. Guilt dogged him. He struggled for the right metaphor. How best to describe it, this past? An old scar in the boggy tenderness of flesh never made quite right; his history an escape that would outlast the conflict in Vietnam, the pull-out from Saigon, the receding proxy of Cold War conflicts fought in far off jungles.
    Maybe that was why he had felt such swelling euphoria on first seeing the Twin Towers come down – not for the loss of life. He was philosophically against death, but he aligned with the literal act of aggression. War had come to American shores, so it wouldn’t be a case anymore of shipping young men overseas, for the fight would be fought on American soil. It turned out not to have been the case.
    *
    Nate didn’t open the letter right away. He was past the insistent pressure of youth. He would wait, though he felt a thumping in his chest as he went about his business. He exited the pickup under the bowl of a streetlight. The wind took the door. The hinges creaked and strained. He pushed the door shut with both hands. A dusting of snow blew around his face. Storm was in the air.
    In the warm store, he picked up his supplies: coffee, evaporated milk, an assortment of meats, three bags of flour, rice, beans, a kilo of sugar, an allotment of canned goods. He had emailed his order ahead. The goods were sitting in a crate with his name stapled to the slatted wood. It could have been the nineteenth century.
    He checked the contents against his list. The proprietor, Pierre Arouet, came out but neither of them spoke. The store bell trembled on a coil spring. There were highlights of the previous night’s game between the Oilers and Canadiens on a big screen TV in the background. Roars filled the silence. This was how wars were settled, in the contained rink of Canadian ice, the rapacious frack of the gas boom western province pitted against the militant Québécois Francophiles, and yet Canada held.
    He used a bathroom off to the side of the general store. He went in dribs and drabs. Blood in his urine clouded the bowl. He should see a doctor, but knew he wouldn’t.
    Above him, a spider held a corner in the web of its own spun universe.
    *
    On the way out of town, Nate looked again at the letter. He set it beside him like a passenger come a long way. He would address the matter at home.
    Ahead, snow fell in a soft, swirling veil that took on the opaque blue-grey of a bruise, the northern facing hills cast in deep cavernous shadow, the western sides a pale, butter yellow that had long since sent animals toward the instinctive drowse of hibernation.
    He