In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page A

all alone, watching the lake.
    Later still, he woke up in bed. A soft pinkish light played against the curtains.
    For a few seconds he studied the effects of dawn, the pale ripplings and gleamings. He'd been having a curious nightmare. Electric eels. Boiling red water.
    John Wade reached out for Kathy, who wasn't there, then hugged his pillow and returned to the bottoms.

9. Hypothesis
    Maybe it was something simple.
    Maybe Kathy woke up scared that night. Maybe she panicked, just walked away.
    Just conjecture—maybe this, maybe that—but conjecture is all we have.
    So something simple:
    He was yelling bad things in the dark, and she must've heard him, and maybe later she smelled the steam and wet soil. Almost certainly, she would've slipped out of bed. She would've moved down the hallway to the living room and stopped there and watched him empty the teakettle on a geranium and a philodendron and a small young spider plant. "Kill Jesus," he was saying, which would've caused her to back away.
    The rest must have been automatic. She would've turned and moved to the kitchen door and stepped out into the night.
    Why? she thought.
    Kill Jesus. That brutal voice. It wasn't his.
    And then for a long while she stood in the windy dark outside the cottage, afraid to move, afraid not to. She was
barefoot. She had on a pair of underpants and a flannel nightgown, nothing else.
    A good man. So
why?
    Clutching herself, leaning forward against the cold, Kathy watched him pad into the kitchen, refill the teakettle, put it on the stove to boil. His movements seemed stiff and mechanical. Like a sleepwalker, she thought, and it occurred to her that she should step back inside and shake him awake. Her own husband. And she loved him. Which was the essential truth, all that time together, all the years, and there was nothing to be afraid about.
    Except it wasn't right.
He
wasn't right. Filtered through the screen door, his face looked worn and bruised, the skin deeply lined as if a knife had been taken to it. He'd lost weight and hair. His shoulders had the stooped curvature of an old man's. After a moment he lay down near the stove, sunburnt and naked, conversing with the kitchen ceiling. Not the man she'd known, or thought she'd known. She had loved him extravagantly—the kind of love she'd always wanted—but more and more it was like living with a stranger. Too many mysteries. Too much walled-up history. And now the fury in his face. Even through the screen, she could make out a new darkness in his eyes.
    "Well, sure," he was saying. "Shitfuck Jesus."
    Then he said, "
You.
"
    He chuckled at this.
    He jerked sideways and clawed at his face with both hands, deep, raking the skin, digging in hard with his fingernails, then laughed again and muttered something indistinct.
    A bit later he said, "Beautiful."
    Again, Kathy felt a little gust of panic. She turned and looked up the narrow dirt road. The Rasmussen cottage was
barely a mile away, a twenty-minute walk. Find a doctor, maybe; something to settle him down. Then she shook her head. Better just to wait and see.
    What she mostly felt now was a kind of pity. Everything important to him had turned to wreckage. His career, his reputation, his self-esteem. More than anyone she'd ever known, John needed the conspicuous display of human love—absolute, unconditional love. Love without limit. Like a hunger, she thought. Some vast emptiness seemed to drive him on, a craving for warmth and reassurance. Politics was just a love thermometer. The polls quantified it, the elections made it official.
    Except nothing ever satisfied him. Certainly not public office. And not their marriage, either.
    For a time Kathy stood gazing at the night sky. It surprised her to see a nearly full moon, a stack of fast-moving clouds passing northward. She tried to inventory the events unfolding in her stomach. Not only pity. Frustration. The fatigue of defeat. The whole election seemed to have occurred in