Deep-Holes, by Alice Munroe

Chapter 4

He did write, three years later. His letter was mailed in Needles, California, but he told them not to bother trying to trace him there—he was only passing through. Like Blanche, he said, and Alex said, “Who the hell is Blanche?”

“Just a joke,” Sally said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Kent did not say where he had been or whether he was working or had formed any connections. He did not apologize for leaving his parents without any information for so long, or ask how they were, or how his brother and sister were. Instead, he wrote pages about his own life. Not the practical side of his life but what he believed he should be doing—what he was doing—with it.

“It seems so ridiculous to me,” he said, “that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean, like the suit of clothes of an engineer or doctor or geologist, and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can’t ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself may seem over-blown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness—”

“He’s on drugs,” Alex said. “You can tell a mile off. His brain’s rotted with drugs.”

In the middle of the night he said, “Sex.”

Sally was lying beside him, wide awake.

“What about sex?”

“It’s what makes you do what he’s talking about—become a something-or-other so that you can earn a living. So that you can pay for your steady sex and the consequences. That’s not a consideration for him.”

Sally said, “My, how romantic.”

“Getting down to basics is never very romantic. He’s not normal is all I’m trying to say.”

Further on in the letter—or the rampage, as Alex called it—Kent said that he had been luckier than most people, in having had what he called his “near-death experience,” which had given him perhaps an extra awareness, and he would be forever grateful to his father, who had lifted him back into the world, and to his mother, who had lovingly received him there.

He wrote, “Perhaps in those moments I was reborn.”

Alex groaned.

“No. I won’t say it.”

“Don’t,” Sally said. “You don’t mean it.”

“I don’t know whether I do or not.”

That letter, signed with love, was the last they heard from him.

Chapter 5