BRIAN

His first few weeks back in central Oregon he spent much of his time changing bandages, applying salve to the wound that continually dried out and cracked and sent a trickle of blood into his eye so that his vision went red, and then with a blink, clear.

Every day he would crawl into the Jeep he had bought thirdhand in high school and drive around, needing the speed, the distance between him and the rest of the world. He kept the windows down and let the air bully its way into the cab, down his throat, hot and dry and flavored with the familiar taste of sage and juniper. The world tasted the same but looked different, the plateaus and buttes stacked up like slabs of meat, the ponderosas scabbed over with bark the color of dried blood. The bandage that patched his skull would flutter against the wind and one time tore off entirely, sucked out the window, into the day, where a clump of rabbitbrush caught it and june bugs and fire ants and bluebottle flies drank of the red wetness collected in it.

During this time it was difficult to shop for groceries and order a burger and get mail from the mailbox and even speak to people—about weather, politics, the price of gas—those things that seemed so irrelevant. Being ordinary was difficult, almost startling. He felt as he used to, as a teenager, after a long day of skiing Mount Bachelor, when sprawled out on the couch or lying in bed, his thighs would seize up, his knees would bend, imagining the rise and fall of snow-groomed trails. His body couldn’t realize that it had slowed down, that the white huddled shapes of trees weren’t rushing past.

This was why he drove and stomped his foot against the accelerator: to maintain his speed. And then his father died and slowed everything down again.

He found his father in the driveway, in the truck, the engine still running. He had backed up into a juniper tree and remained there long enough for the tailpipe to scorch the bark. His body slumped against the door. Slowly Brian approached the truck. Through the window he could see first his hair, the color of cigarette ash, and then below it, the emptiness of his face, and knew him to be dead. His mouth was open and his tongue hung from it. His left eye was a tiny red planet. A rope of blood ran from his nose. An aneurysm, the doctor said.

His father had put the truck in reverse and turned around in his seat to eye the long curve of the driveway and a vessel at the base of his brain burst. Just like that. Something he had done a thousand times before—the safest thing in the world—had killed him. It was like getting lung cancer from pouring cereal or choking to death when checking e-mail: it didn’t make sense or seem fair. Especially considering what Brian had walked away from, dented and spoiled, but alive. At the funeral many people said his father was with God, which meant God was death. Afterward he did not cry. He only felt profoundly lonely and staggered around the house, peering into rooms, trying their doorknobs to see if they were locked.