Temptation

Lately my boyfriend and I have been staking out a sound. We walk out the yurt and trudge through the snow to the road that crosses the interstate. It is always loud by the interstate and the bracing cold and piled up snow have been no hindrance to the people who race up and down it each day, bent on their money making. I carry our baby in his starfish shaped wool, which covers him head to toe; the week before his first birthday we put this on our credit card, it being from Germany and expensive. We come to the airfield by the interstate, a swath of beaming white in the sun, with a little house on the crest that has a large American flag waving in this arctic wind, what makes our faces burn as we walk. Though the sun is nice. I feel it even through my eyelids, warming, circulating in my body. I have become so used to the cold, it does not bother me. As we only heat our place with wood, sometimes, if we do not wake in the night to feed the fire, it is 40 degrees when we wake up. I keep our baby nestled on my stomach, his little face peeping above the blankets. He doesn’t wake in the cold. Neither do my two older children, deeply sleeping in their beds, under their waffle printed duvets. Also purchased with the credit card. Early morning is for J— throwing down the hatchet to splinter wood and the crackle of the expert fire he makes, and my measuring out water for coffee and matcha from the copper pot we keep water in—bought when we sold our old car. Otherwise I have to fetch water from the shower. The other pipes are all frozen. The children are roused, biscuits are cooked on a pan. We don’t use our oven anymore, not since the mice infiltrated it. We replaced it once but when the mice infiltrated it a second time we gave up. Sometimes the biscuits burn on the tinfoil in the cast iron pan on the gas stove. My daughter never complains, or glances at me furtively and peels off the burnt layer. She looks in her little mirror and applies her lip gloss before school, happily, and sits on her bed to brush her long hair. She has always cared for herself so nicely and been so feminine. She has not had my life curve—of hurt and self-harm, and having to uncover my self-worth at the bottom of a well where the only sound I hear is my heart beating. 

We wait outside the airfield. I’m certain the sound is coming from the airfield. It is a sonic wave kind of signal which shatters what sanity I have left. It goes off any time of day or night, there seems to be no order to it. It started all of a sudden last month. From scouring the internet we think it is some sort of pest control put up to ward away the few animals left who manage to live off the resources the interstate has not done away with. After all, we can see the line of a sacred protected mountain ridge from where we live, the edge of town, where there are junk yards and the gas station the truckers meet at in the morning, smoking cigarettes and drinking weak coffee. We can see the ridge even from here, not so distant, but distant enough to be smeared as a blue haze. 

Recently, by a dear friend, I was shown some other path—a job. I have never taken a job—well, not a real one. Certainly not full time. I have always been for my soul road, and at times, have been completely indifferent to material comforts because I was deep in a novel, or excavating familial treasures through prose, or healing myself after being blindsided by something or other. These things I have always been able to do because I make my own hours. But I am so frayed—the children’s financial needs balloon and balloon and the yurt utterly falls apart and I tend to hate it so much I do not want to fix it. So I consider the job. It is something I have to admit I am capable of doing. There is nothing else sound for me on the horizon except for a goal I have been pursuing in secret—a deeply desired and deeply singular goal—which I have a .01% chance of achieving. There will be nothing but the gaping unknown if I fail, but then again the world seems to be in an unheard of chasm of the unknown, ‘collapsing’ I have heard said, and, as my reality too seems to be collapsing, perhaps my time of relevance is coming. All this is potentially near, yet still feels far from me. While the strange sonic sound drives my moment, drives me to box my ears and close my eyes to this world. Then up pops this job.

At first I feel with my body a hard no and I say so to my friend. But she is persistent. She knows, though I do not tell her all, what I suffer, and what my family lacks because of my choices, my holding out. She says to me she herself would take this job if she were qualified like me. There are so many perks. The salary is good. So good it could propel us out of the yurt in less than a year. But so could my dream. There are perks too. Yet the writing this job would require of me, though easy, is banal, and I would be bound to it for four days a week. Yes—four days a week—what a great work week! Four days! But to someone who is free every day, it is a chain. Then there is the remoteness of it, the computer requirements of it, when I have so tenderly healed myself from insomnia by breathing wild life into my circadian rhythm and spending whatever hours I like out in the sun. And finally, there is my little boy—one year old—who I have not been parted with longer than three hours since he was born, who has never been taught to seek anything but my breast. 

We fail to hear the beeping sound. I am sure it is from the airfield. So is J—or he thinks it may be coming from a private citizen, one of the houses that has no barrier from the interstate, where the people must not register or be numbed out from noise pollution, totally numbed out. We live amongst them; they are also indifferent to light pollution, and when I look at the stars at night, I have to shield my vision, tunnel my vision by precise coordinates and sometimes within the frame of my hand so as to not have house lights in my peripheral. I am always adapting, and hanging on by a thread so I may, despite where I am, keep up the soul work I chose for myself as a young girl—at which I am not only adept, but have literally healed my psyche with, grabbing hold and wresting residue of trauma and old joys from my throat, to shape into something that to me is holy: Literature. My road has always been the furtive path to visibility and I have been slogging through anonymity and poverty for so long, I almost forget that money is not a prerequisite to the writer’s life, which I am truly living at this very moment. I realize my life has such emptiness to it because I want to be able to—any time inspiration strikes me—set to work, set to writing, which I do free of deadlines, free of social compulsions.

The other day I thanked my children at dinner for dealing with the house so well.

“What do you mean?” my older son asked.

“Why, us having no water and having to get it from the shower.”

“Oh that, I don’t care.”

My daughter was off in her own head, taking the tiniest nibbles of her fried rice. So, the children are all right.

As soon as we get back home, we finally hear the sound. It eluded us. It’s almost laughable. We went to the local town hall; the woman there guessed it may be being used rightly by apple farmers to sound-shock frost from trees. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t exist, nor do the trees need it. But I do need my sanity, and even here, between junk yard, apple farm, and highway, I scrape together my peace, and I write my heart out, for seven years now in the yurt. Seven years, here, while others I know go off to see the world, I am always here, nowhere to travel but my psyche. Oh, it would be delicious to leave it, to have our own rooms again, to have alternate heat, pipes which flow, no (or less—!) mice… and to travel somewhere, to see my old friends, or my family far away, it would melt my body with sweet relief. 

But I did not apply and tomorrow we will go out again to hunt for the sound.