I’ve sat on this one for a bit and just want to get it out there, so I apologize for any typos or inconsistencies. I get these earworms on a daily basis, one or two lines of a song playing over and over in my head. For two solid days a couple weeks ago I had the Grateful Dead’s ‘“Dire Wolf” lodged in my head. Imagine walking around and all you are hearing is “Don’t murder me. I beg of you, don’t murder me. Please, don’t murder me.” It gets morbid. So, I thought I would write the earworm out of my head.
"Ms. Hunter, I'm Officer Garcia. I understand you are concerned about your ex-husband because you haven't heard from him in... how long?"
"I guess about six weeks."
"And that's unusual?"
"I mean, not exactly. It isn't unusual for me to not hear from him, but for our son. He usually talks to his father every week or every other week. So, after this past week, after not hearing from his father, Brandon tried reaching him a number of times. It isn't like Alex to not pick up for Brandon or at least not return his calls."
"And is there any other reason to be concerned for Alex? Anything he may have said or done when you saw him last?"
The Dire Wolf is back. I've asked that I could just take a few minutes to write this down before going with him. I thought it was generous of him to allow it.
You arrive at these points in your life sometimes that are not crossroads but just the opposite. You desperately want to believe there is some other path than the one before you, but there isn't. It's checkmate.
The times when you get caught in one lie after another until you are out of lies and just need to swallow the consequences. The time when you did or said something horrible that you just could never take back again. The time when you put your name to some big expense and later regretted it.
In life there are no take-backs. We have no magical way of undoing those regrets. When I was writing we called this event-sourced data. Every event in the system was recorded, even if there were some mistake. You could not delete the mistake; you could only add a compensating event. If someone sent a credit card application that was declined because they entered their address incorrectly, we did not remove the incorrect application and replace it with a new one. We kept the original and recorded an “Address Updated” event. It allows the data analysts to look at how many times an application was denied because the ZIP was incorrect, for example.
There was always some compensating event that could undo a mistake in a database. Unlike computers, we humans do not always have those same options. Sure we can try something to compensate, but our memories are long and are not wiped so easily as hard drives.
I knew that I was not all alone in this place. If you had asked me about how I felt being in such a remote place, I would have said that I had my demons to keep me company. I knew that it was not just those demons that had followed me out here, though.
One night not too long after I had been out here, I was feeling alone and lonely again. No matter how introverted one may be, it does not prepare them for a week straight of talking to nothing but the walls. No wonder those ladies get all those cats. Instead of my normal dinner, I took out a bottle of bourbon I had been saving for a "special occasion". I admit that I was not feeling particularly special, just especially lonely. A little ice would have been nice, but of course there was none to be had, so I just put in a splash of water.
I sat down with my dinner and opened a book, The Man Who Fell to Earth. The booze had just begun to warm me and I had already lost myself in Walter Tevis’s words when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to a strange man in a drab green parka, making him look something like a park ranger.
“Can I help you?”
The man gave me a wide grin full of teeth. “I believe you can, Alexander.”
I waited for him to continue. I had not yet recognized him.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?"
I was not sure why I would invite in a strange man, but he did look thirsty.
"You aren't some sort of vampire, are you?"
In answer, he stepped across the threshold of the door beside me and gave me another grin of but went no further into the room.
"Please, have a seat. I just poured myself a whiskey. Can I get you one?"
The man had a seat on the bar stool and accepted my offer of a drink but with no water. Though I hadn't put on any food for myself, I thought it would be rude of me not to offer something to my guest. He declined.
"I figured as much. I don't suppose I need to ask why you are here either." I had realized what he was when I saw how comfortable he made himself in this place he had never been.
He smiled as he picked up the deck of cards that I had sitting on my makeshift table and began to shuffle them.
"Why are you here, though Alexander?"
I, at first, was surprised he did not know, but then, I was not completely sure why I was there either.
"I was looking for some sort of purpose, some reason to even get out of bed. My work, writing software to help put people in debt; that was no reason. I read Frankl and then thought that maybe my purpose was to write something. I guess you could say that I chose writing as my purpose. I truly think the purpose the Good Lord set out for me was to ease people’s suffering, and the only way I thought I could do that was through writing."
"You pick the game."
Most men in my situation would have chosen poker, but I figured poker is not such a great game when there is only two of you playing for all the stakes. It's the reason I saw so many pots get chopped 50-50 when it was just the last two players in a hold-em tournament. I figured gin would be more interesting. I perhaps also thought that I would have a better chance to win, though I should have known better.
“I read Thoreau and thought I needed to be alone to write. You know, writing is a solitary pursuit.”
“I don’t know. I can’t say that I have ever really written anything,” the man answered.
“For me it is. A solitary pursuit.
“But then I still couldn’t write. Not for having nothing to write about. It wasn’t writer’s block; it was simple lack of motivation.
“Looking back on all the suffering I caused in the past, I knew I wasn’t a good enough writer to make for all of it. Perhaps that’s the real reason I came out here to isolation, to get away from the suffering I caused and to not cause any more.”
He asked me if I knew that he would come for me. Of course I knew he would at some point.
“Tonight I have only come to play a game though. Yet I think you know the stakes.”
I did.
“Then let us cut for the deal.”
I cut a card from the deck and left it face down. He did as well, and we turned over our cards together. I turned over the Queen of Spades. He turned over the King of Hearts and then handed the deck to me.
“You know, it wasn’t just purpose I was after. I wanted passion. I wanted support. I wanted connection.” I think it was with those words that I began to have hope in this game of gin.
The man looked over with his big, bright eyes like he was ready to devour me. I thought then that he looked wolfish. I do not know if that was how other men saw him.
“I would hope you want those things, Alexander. It proves you are human and have a soul. I give you credit. Most people do not seek out real purpose. For most, passion and connection is all they seek.”
And perhaps the pursuit of passion and connection should have been enough for me. I came to realize that too late in life. Things were already too much in motion. I told The Wolf so.
“We still have a game to play,” he responded.
The first hand brought on more hope when I went out with only four points to his thirteen. I won the second hand too. On the third hand he had gin. When he knocked early in the fourth hand, I had to unload what points I could. My fate was sealed with that hand. The game was over when he went gin again on the seventh hand.
My visitor finished his drink in one long swallow and another wide grin grew across his face.
“I don’t suppose it would do me any good to beg?” I asked.
He only said, “I will give you tonight and be back tomorrow for my payment.”
“My one regret is for my son,” I told him. “I wish I would have tried harder for him, fought for him. I hope he knows that.”
“You have one more night to write,” he reminded me as he stepped out the door into the cold.
“Brandon, I have news. It’s good and bad. We found your father’s land and there is a little cabin out there. We also found a journal indicating he was there in the past week. Do you know if your father knew a man he called The Wolf?”
“I don’t think so. When he was drinking he called booze The Wolf, and later he just generally referred to his mental issues as The Wolf. Maybe it’s just his…”
“Inner demons?”
“Something like that. But no, I can’t think of any man he called The Wolf. You know of the affair, though, right?”
“Your mother mentioned it, and we’re investigating that, though both she and her husband have a pretty good alibi, if that’s what you are thinking.”
“I want to thank you all for coming today. Today we are here to put the memories of my father to rest but not to bury them. My wish, and I hope yours too, is that wherever he might be, that he is at peace.
“My father made mistakes. He had his demons. I think those mistakes broke his spirit. The fact is that even though they broke him, I was able to learn from them, and they did more for me than his successes. His imperfections did not mean he was a failure.
“His final wish was that he could have stayed for my mother and I. He did not run from us but was taken away, whether by those inner demons or something else he called The Wolf. However, I know that that wolf or those demons could not take one thing from us, and that is our memories of him. May they rest in peace.”