The Wilding Read Online Free PDF

tried to stop his fall with his arm but it had gone numb and he crashed to the ground unguarded and opened up a gash in his forehead.
    This happens in late spring—a few months after the meeting with the Planning Commission—when Justin moves through the electronic double doors and into the emergency room at St. Charles Memorial. The air smells of disinfectant and tapioca and old fruit. When the doors whir closed behind him, the noise of traffic falls away, replaced by hushed voices and gurney wheels and heart monitors and Muzak pouring softly from the sound system. In the waiting area, people lie sprawled out in chairs with dazed looks on their faces as if they have been dropped from a great height.
    At the reception desk, the nurse takes a long time in acknowledging Justin, finally raising her eyes from her clipboard when he clears his throat. “You hurt?” she says. “Or you here to see somebody who’s hurt?”
    “Do I look hurt?”
    She gives him a bitchy half smile and says, “Name?”
    “You want mine or his?”
    “ His name.”
    Outside, somewhere far off, a siren wails. He tells her his name and she taps a few keys at a computer terminal and directs him down a long buttermilk-colored hall lined with stainless steel tables on wheels. He hurries there and the noise of the siren follows him, growing louder, rippling through the town, through the concrete and the metal and the glass like a quick breeze over water, to settle on him with shocking volume. He passes a doctor with a brown mustache. The doctor moves at a quick trot toward the emergency room and whistles along with the ambulance, as if summoning it.
    When he visited the hospital for his wife, he felt fear. When he visits for his father, he feels hate. He hates this place that keeps trying to take people from him. He wants to splash black paint all over the too-white walls. He wants to rip out the throat of an orderly who pushes a gurney one way, then the next, as he tries to get past him.
    And then, just like that, the siren stops, as Justin arrives at room 343.
    He pokes his head in the door, and just as he is about to withdraw it and continue on, the man on the bed raises his hand in greeting. “Dad?” Justin says, hesitating in the doorway. “I didn’t recognize you.”
    His father does not look like his father. He looks like a pear that has begun to darken and collapse. Upon Justin’s entrance he picks up the remote control and turns off the TV and then immediately turns it on again. It hangs from the ceiling corner and shows on its screen a weatherman standing on a Florida beach with twenty-foot waves crashing behind him.
    At a wedding, Justin once heard Bobby Fremont tease his father, saying he looked like a beast trapped in a double-breasted suit. And this seems especially true now—hairy and brown-skinned and so large every corner of him hangs off the bed—the vision of him offset by all that antiseptic whiteness. Once, when Justin and his father stood side by side, his mother pointed out that they were the same height. It was true, but Justin never believed her. It has something to do with his father’s build—so much broader than his own—but even more to do with his personality, which even now seems barbed to a gleaming point.
    Above his bed hangs a black-and-white photograph of a dead juniper tree. Its trunk appears twisted, each bare branch straining up toward the sky.
    “Where’s Mom?” Justin asks.
    “I told them to call you. I didn’t want to worry her.”
    It is hard for Justin to look at him. His eyes are ringed by heavy shadows. His nose has a pinched look to it. His lip trembles a little when he speaks, as if he needs to cry but won’t allow it. He turns his head from Justin and looks out the window where the sun is setting. Justin watches his face change from red to pale in the fading light, as if, having colored with embarrassment, he has composed himself.
    A few minutes later a doctor enters the room. He has a