I and the i-not-i
Michael thériault
I have known of him three times, this other, says memory. I have never met him. Memory says he might inhabit the holes of memory. My thought is brambled. Memory’s holes are many. Where else might he live, that I do not know? How do I find him to ask him to find the son, if the son is not just rumor of news or news of rumor?
These things I puzzle here under my blankout, starless gray-wool sky of most of my day, woven firmament as on this park bench I sit bent over my walker now unwalking; these things, and more.
I first knew of the I-not-I through report of others. Once in my long roaming for work, crossing Kansas in my pickup, between a worksite done and another imminent, the miles I had desired punished desire. Their simplicity in the night, tick of lane markers, cones of headlights, became unrelenting, then unbearable. Escape from them commanded sleep. I obeyed while still driving. My pickup rolled from the pavement, and over, and over. I have an only dreamlike recall of tumbling.
How am I here? from a hospital bed I asked a nurse. Why do I hurt?
She recounted: Other drivers saw and stopped. They reported that the driver freed himself from the pickup now on its side and told them he was fine, though he toppled in trying to stand. Phone call from a farm nearby brought the Kansas Highway Patrol, the KHP an ambulance. The pickup’s driver answered questions. He produced a wallet and from it a driver’s license.
Mine.
The driver joked with the paramedics in the long drive to the nearest hospital.
You don’t remember? the nurse said. You were talking afterward.
Wasn’t me, I said.
The man who crawled from the pickup and tried to stand, who conversed with the KHP and made an ambulance laugh, was I but not I. He was the I-not-I.
The roaming was as a lineman stringing new transmission and distribution lines and replacing those dropped by disaster. Plentiful work. Before it I did start college in Santa Fe and did well. At sophomore year’s end I was awarded enough scholarship money to return in the fall without working all summer, if I lived cheap. Weekends during the school year, I had made a reputation with wealthy owners of grand adobes by digging postholes in the hard red soil and setting unpeeled juniper fence posts, stacking native stone dry into terrace walls, chipping and sanding vigas stupidly plastered over by earlier owners. There was more such work for the start of summer. I'd sleep in the mountains above town, in an ancient kapok-stuffed sleeping bag from a dumpster dive, under blue tarp for rain, sheet of plastic as groundcloth. I'd sneak into the college bathrooms to wash. Then, in a few weeks, I’d put out my thumb by the road out of town.
Stiff torqued knob now.
And ask it to take me west to L.A. up to Canada across to New Brunswick back south and west to Santa Fe.
This was the plan.
I described it to Helena, who was a year behind me there, between dances at an end-of-school-year party. The notion of sleeping weeks in the open horrified her. She would apartment-sit in town that summer. She offered me her floor. She insisted.
I wasn’t many nights on her floor.
She had hair in long, light-brown waves, with depths of darker brown, twisted and hung over left shoulder to her waist by day, by night splayed extravagantly on her pillow. Her heavy eyelids and small crooked smile together colored her pleasures with irony. I liked this and asked that we leave the lamp on. For this I believed the nights unserious.
I had decided to spend my last night before the trip atop Atalaya, the Watchtower, the high peak nearest Santa Fe. Packed, I took what I expected to be my last shower for a while, red dust from work swirling toward the drain. I dressed and went to her kitchen to thank her for her bed.
Tears streaked her face. No smile, crooked or not.
I didn’t think myself worth tears. We had, I thought, an arrangement, nothing more. She didn’t ask me to stay.
Atalaya rewarded my departure. Rain had struck in the afternoon, it often did, the Sangre de Cristos seemed to manufacture it. From a hollow in a ridgetop rock, I drank a cold tea of rainwater and fallen spruce needles. As night fell the storm had passed south beyond the near hard lights of the state prison and was lit from below by the farther glow of Albuquerque. The storm had its own lights. I saw some lightning between ground and clouds, but more often contained within clouds.
Clouds like enormous lightbulbs, at that distance with no audible thunder.
I unrolled kapok bag on plastic on damp ground and sat hours on them to watch the storm until it passed the Sandias or played itself out.
I was sober, serious, no gods in my brain’s burning bush, but the sky spoke that night to me, this I, myself, of beauty, grand movement, power to bind men, power to serve them, all from electricity, the manipulation of which had been mastered, so could be taught.
It spoke nothing about a woman sleeping alone first time in weeks, far below.
Nor did dawn as I descended Atalaya and walked to Santa Fe’s southern edge. My thumb took me from there. I didn’t count the rides. Through scales in the road atlas in my pack, I totaled more than nine thousand miles by summer’s end. Bald eagles on the Olympic Seacoast, in the Canadian Rockies streams blue gray with glacial flour, night scent of dew on prairie hay, day scent of flowers hanging from Montréal lampposts, patter of rain on the stone fortifications of Québec. And touch and scent together, of a freckled big-cheeked blond after a shared joint in a Missouri campground, of a bone-thin brunette in her van outside Trinidad, Colorado; I wanted more of these, and more of the road.
The electric, the road, I had no notion yet of how to assemble a life from these.
So I landed back in Santa Fe and school. Helena was there. The arrangement done, I had only Hello for her.
I came by her and her friends in a corridor just before she left partway through that semester. Their talking went dead. Hello, I said. Their stares went sharper. The school had high attrition. Nothing unusual in her leaving.
My turn came.
Come spring, I learned how I could entwine the road and the electric. My cousin wrote from Portland about a linemen’s apprenticeship. The apprenticeship complete, you could stay working for Portland General Electric or be a vagabond lineman.
I left college and we joined the apprenticeship together. I excelled in it. Once journeyman, I journeyed. Unmarried, unbound, boomer following booms, roughneck living rough, I chased the jagged lightning of the road, happy in the chase.
In time, it brought me to Kansas and the first knowledge of the I-not-I.
The second came in a jail cell, through a sheriff’s deputy.
I knew some already of the preceding night. I can’t stand television. It seemed bleaker still in motels. I read, but sometimes my skin said Stop ignoring me. It was usually in bars I found women to answer this. A quick exterior pass was generally enough to keep me from bars that were buckets of blood. Even those that weren’t sometimes found my presence problematic. A local ending a bad day might not want to take it out on locals, who will be around afterward to remember. Or he might be bored with fighting them or get sat back down if he tries. New guy is a godsend.
The bar had seemed nice, actually. I recall two attractive women sitting together. Stool by one was empty. I bought them drinks, we clinked glasses.
Then, jail cell.
By the deputy’s account a bottle applied to the back of my head had taken me down.
Wasn’t me who stood back up. I learned that the I-not-I is more ferocious than I’ve ever known myself to be. He sent the bottle-breaker to the hospital.
I of course disavowed any knowledge of him, but enough facts being in, they’d already decided to release me, and somehow my pickup still parked outside the bar was untouched, which said maybe the bottle-breaker had it coming, by general consensus.
I’ve heard that in some traumas the brain, physically shocked, misfires and over time recovers, and there you are.
But.
Who can tell how a brain, lump of gray crinkles, makes an I, even this I? And how an I whom I don’t remember, an I whom I’ve never met, who by accounts speaks from my mouth and fights with my fists, and so must share my gray lump, can also originate from it? The I-not-I in fact seems a visitor, because calendars, timesheets, interactions, and just the duration of each day I witness personally say that this body is typically mine – although I can’t vouch for nights.
Does the I-not-I have a separate existence? Does he visit elsewhere?
I so need this to be so.
Third report I had of the I-not-I came about two weeks after I first heard of the son, from Flaco.
Flaco had been in my college class, year before Helena. I stopped one night in Las Cruces, New Mexico, between jobsites. The motel had a bar, and I wanted a beer. He came in and looked around, not for me but for two men and a woman at a table just past me, and on his way to them he and I did double takes. I stood and hugged him. He said stick around, I’ll come back and buy you a drink. Half an hour with the three and he shook their hands, off they went, and he took the stool beside mine.
He was teaching at New Mexico State. The three were there for a conference. He asked what I was doing. I told him. He said he wished he could do something similar. He’d just suffered through a divorce, and it was awful being in the same town, let alone the same university. The road seemed good. But the two kids kept him where he was. And how was my son? He would be, what, eighteen, nineteen? Maybe off to college himself.
Son?
Was it just a rumor?! he said. Made so much sense everyone thought it was true.
Make it make sense for me, I said.
He did. Helena had told her friends at the college she had a health situation, she wouldn’t say what, and had to leave school.
The friends knew of our weeks together. Multiplying health situation by weeks together gave them the product: Pregnant. This accounted for the sharp stares they had for me that last time I saw her. From somewhere, Flaco couldn’t say where, came the detail: Son. The product and detail traveled everywhere but missed me, who everyone thought must know.
When in fall I didn’t return, and word was I was off to learn a trade, the new product was: Son of a bitch went to her and did right.
Would have, if I’d known, I told Flaco.
Hard now to say if there was something to know or not, he said.
I need to know, I told him. And: The detail Son makes Pregnant more believable.
I had no means to try to find out just then. I’d spent down my money before the new job. I had no computer, couldn’t use one yet anyway. My phone was just a phone; my life didn’t need it to be smart. Something cheap was fine. I decided to finish out the job to money up, find a library with public computers, and have someone show me how to use one. Then I’d search.
If I hadn’t done right years back, I’d do it now.
I never finished the job. It almost finished me. I do recall we were replacing storm-wrecked lines. I was up a pole. The lines were de-energized. They had been for two weeks.
Then I was in a hospital bed. My hands were bandages. Again, no recall of how I got there. I had a good guess, given the nature of the work. I was trying to push the nurse-call button with bandages when a nurse came eventually and confirmed the guess. We argued about my seeing my hands, me for, her against. Next day, a doctor came. He exposed them to debride dead meat.
I saw chunks already missing. I saw bone.
My lawyers and the company in the suit that followed had different explanations. Some feedlot company that had hooked up a big generator illegally to the system we were working and fired it up to run machinery that day got pulled into the suit. We settled before the court date with nothing definitive decided.
But I did know what my crew said when they visited me in the hospital, and that I would not otherwise recall: Briefly, my body seemed to attempt flight. The hands released the work, the arms spread like wings.
The attempt failed. The body fell. My harness did its job, so not far.
Someone dangling from the pole screamed, then said Christ.
That someone said, Jesus, I can smell myself cook.
That someone did not joke with the paramedics in the ambulance but asked, Will my hands ever be good again? and must not have got an answer, because he kept asking, he did, the I-not-I, in this, at least his third habitation of this body.
I would answer him, if he came to me: Not really, never again.
Not the brain, either.
My niece cares for me now. Cooked as my hands are, they hardly hold the walker, the little that I walk. House is mine, bought with the settlement, which pays also for her care of me. Her affection for me is her own. How I deserve it I can’t imagine. By days I am out of the house and bent under this wool and its gray sun.
The I-not-I must sometimes be close to me, that he steps in, when I step out. Does he hear my thought?
I am the wreckage of myself, unpresentable to a son to whom I’m unknown. Would I know even if he is real or not? Either way, he is at least an obligation I feel, but maybe also a joy I might have known. Now I have left myself scattered through miles and days, and what remains is a life that will spin out within this blankout, maybe shortly. The son who might or might not be and the I-not-I, who speaks through my lips when I do not possess them, have in some sense the same reality, a reality I feel but to which I have no door. They are thus for each other. My hope is in them. If the I-not-I is, he who has shared my body may feel the love I would give to a son and carry it through another body, to speak it through other lips. If my son is, he may hold a hollow in himself for a father he has never known, and so a father who might come in any form.
My thought is: Come to me, oh come, o I-not-I, and then go out and find the son and give him my love, for no one can say it is unreal, and without it we may be lost, downfallen from brief flight, all of us.
These things I puzzle here under my blankout, starless gray-wool sky of most of my day, woven firmament as on this park bench I sit bent over my walker now unwalking; these things, and more.
I first knew of the I-not-I through report of others. Once in my long roaming for work, crossing Kansas in my pickup, between a worksite done and another imminent, the miles I had desired punished desire. Their simplicity in the night, tick of lane markers, cones of headlights, became unrelenting, then unbearable. Escape from them commanded sleep. I obeyed while still driving. My pickup rolled from the pavement, and over, and over. I have an only dreamlike recall of tumbling.
How am I here? from a hospital bed I asked a nurse. Why do I hurt?
She recounted: Other drivers saw and stopped. They reported that the driver freed himself from the pickup now on its side and told them he was fine, though he toppled in trying to stand. Phone call from a farm nearby brought the Kansas Highway Patrol, the KHP an ambulance. The pickup’s driver answered questions. He produced a wallet and from it a driver’s license.
Mine.
The driver joked with the paramedics in the long drive to the nearest hospital.
You don’t remember? the nurse said. You were talking afterward.
Wasn’t me, I said.
The man who crawled from the pickup and tried to stand, who conversed with the KHP and made an ambulance laugh, was I but not I. He was the I-not-I.
The roaming was as a lineman stringing new transmission and distribution lines and replacing those dropped by disaster. Plentiful work. Before it I did start college in Santa Fe and did well. At sophomore year’s end I was awarded enough scholarship money to return in the fall without working all summer, if I lived cheap. Weekends during the school year, I had made a reputation with wealthy owners of grand adobes by digging postholes in the hard red soil and setting unpeeled juniper fence posts, stacking native stone dry into terrace walls, chipping and sanding vigas stupidly plastered over by earlier owners. There was more such work for the start of summer. I'd sleep in the mountains above town, in an ancient kapok-stuffed sleeping bag from a dumpster dive, under blue tarp for rain, sheet of plastic as groundcloth. I'd sneak into the college bathrooms to wash. Then, in a few weeks, I’d put out my thumb by the road out of town.
Stiff torqued knob now.
And ask it to take me west to L.A. up to Canada across to New Brunswick back south and west to Santa Fe.
This was the plan.
I described it to Helena, who was a year behind me there, between dances at an end-of-school-year party. The notion of sleeping weeks in the open horrified her. She would apartment-sit in town that summer. She offered me her floor. She insisted.
I wasn’t many nights on her floor.
She had hair in long, light-brown waves, with depths of darker brown, twisted and hung over left shoulder to her waist by day, by night splayed extravagantly on her pillow. Her heavy eyelids and small crooked smile together colored her pleasures with irony. I liked this and asked that we leave the lamp on. For this I believed the nights unserious.
I had decided to spend my last night before the trip atop Atalaya, the Watchtower, the high peak nearest Santa Fe. Packed, I took what I expected to be my last shower for a while, red dust from work swirling toward the drain. I dressed and went to her kitchen to thank her for her bed.
Tears streaked her face. No smile, crooked or not.
I didn’t think myself worth tears. We had, I thought, an arrangement, nothing more. She didn’t ask me to stay.
Atalaya rewarded my departure. Rain had struck in the afternoon, it often did, the Sangre de Cristos seemed to manufacture it. From a hollow in a ridgetop rock, I drank a cold tea of rainwater and fallen spruce needles. As night fell the storm had passed south beyond the near hard lights of the state prison and was lit from below by the farther glow of Albuquerque. The storm had its own lights. I saw some lightning between ground and clouds, but more often contained within clouds.
Clouds like enormous lightbulbs, at that distance with no audible thunder.
I unrolled kapok bag on plastic on damp ground and sat hours on them to watch the storm until it passed the Sandias or played itself out.
I was sober, serious, no gods in my brain’s burning bush, but the sky spoke that night to me, this I, myself, of beauty, grand movement, power to bind men, power to serve them, all from electricity, the manipulation of which had been mastered, so could be taught.
It spoke nothing about a woman sleeping alone first time in weeks, far below.
Nor did dawn as I descended Atalaya and walked to Santa Fe’s southern edge. My thumb took me from there. I didn’t count the rides. Through scales in the road atlas in my pack, I totaled more than nine thousand miles by summer’s end. Bald eagles on the Olympic Seacoast, in the Canadian Rockies streams blue gray with glacial flour, night scent of dew on prairie hay, day scent of flowers hanging from Montréal lampposts, patter of rain on the stone fortifications of Québec. And touch and scent together, of a freckled big-cheeked blond after a shared joint in a Missouri campground, of a bone-thin brunette in her van outside Trinidad, Colorado; I wanted more of these, and more of the road.
The electric, the road, I had no notion yet of how to assemble a life from these.
So I landed back in Santa Fe and school. Helena was there. The arrangement done, I had only Hello for her.
I came by her and her friends in a corridor just before she left partway through that semester. Their talking went dead. Hello, I said. Their stares went sharper. The school had high attrition. Nothing unusual in her leaving.
My turn came.
Come spring, I learned how I could entwine the road and the electric. My cousin wrote from Portland about a linemen’s apprenticeship. The apprenticeship complete, you could stay working for Portland General Electric or be a vagabond lineman.
I left college and we joined the apprenticeship together. I excelled in it. Once journeyman, I journeyed. Unmarried, unbound, boomer following booms, roughneck living rough, I chased the jagged lightning of the road, happy in the chase.
In time, it brought me to Kansas and the first knowledge of the I-not-I.
The second came in a jail cell, through a sheriff’s deputy.
I knew some already of the preceding night. I can’t stand television. It seemed bleaker still in motels. I read, but sometimes my skin said Stop ignoring me. It was usually in bars I found women to answer this. A quick exterior pass was generally enough to keep me from bars that were buckets of blood. Even those that weren’t sometimes found my presence problematic. A local ending a bad day might not want to take it out on locals, who will be around afterward to remember. Or he might be bored with fighting them or get sat back down if he tries. New guy is a godsend.
The bar had seemed nice, actually. I recall two attractive women sitting together. Stool by one was empty. I bought them drinks, we clinked glasses.
Then, jail cell.
By the deputy’s account a bottle applied to the back of my head had taken me down.
Wasn’t me who stood back up. I learned that the I-not-I is more ferocious than I’ve ever known myself to be. He sent the bottle-breaker to the hospital.
I of course disavowed any knowledge of him, but enough facts being in, they’d already decided to release me, and somehow my pickup still parked outside the bar was untouched, which said maybe the bottle-breaker had it coming, by general consensus.
I’ve heard that in some traumas the brain, physically shocked, misfires and over time recovers, and there you are.
But.
Who can tell how a brain, lump of gray crinkles, makes an I, even this I? And how an I whom I don’t remember, an I whom I’ve never met, who by accounts speaks from my mouth and fights with my fists, and so must share my gray lump, can also originate from it? The I-not-I in fact seems a visitor, because calendars, timesheets, interactions, and just the duration of each day I witness personally say that this body is typically mine – although I can’t vouch for nights.
Does the I-not-I have a separate existence? Does he visit elsewhere?
I so need this to be so.
Third report I had of the I-not-I came about two weeks after I first heard of the son, from Flaco.
Flaco had been in my college class, year before Helena. I stopped one night in Las Cruces, New Mexico, between jobsites. The motel had a bar, and I wanted a beer. He came in and looked around, not for me but for two men and a woman at a table just past me, and on his way to them he and I did double takes. I stood and hugged him. He said stick around, I’ll come back and buy you a drink. Half an hour with the three and he shook their hands, off they went, and he took the stool beside mine.
He was teaching at New Mexico State. The three were there for a conference. He asked what I was doing. I told him. He said he wished he could do something similar. He’d just suffered through a divorce, and it was awful being in the same town, let alone the same university. The road seemed good. But the two kids kept him where he was. And how was my son? He would be, what, eighteen, nineteen? Maybe off to college himself.
Son?
Was it just a rumor?! he said. Made so much sense everyone thought it was true.
Make it make sense for me, I said.
He did. Helena had told her friends at the college she had a health situation, she wouldn’t say what, and had to leave school.
The friends knew of our weeks together. Multiplying health situation by weeks together gave them the product: Pregnant. This accounted for the sharp stares they had for me that last time I saw her. From somewhere, Flaco couldn’t say where, came the detail: Son. The product and detail traveled everywhere but missed me, who everyone thought must know.
When in fall I didn’t return, and word was I was off to learn a trade, the new product was: Son of a bitch went to her and did right.
Would have, if I’d known, I told Flaco.
Hard now to say if there was something to know or not, he said.
I need to know, I told him. And: The detail Son makes Pregnant more believable.
I had no means to try to find out just then. I’d spent down my money before the new job. I had no computer, couldn’t use one yet anyway. My phone was just a phone; my life didn’t need it to be smart. Something cheap was fine. I decided to finish out the job to money up, find a library with public computers, and have someone show me how to use one. Then I’d search.
If I hadn’t done right years back, I’d do it now.
I never finished the job. It almost finished me. I do recall we were replacing storm-wrecked lines. I was up a pole. The lines were de-energized. They had been for two weeks.
Then I was in a hospital bed. My hands were bandages. Again, no recall of how I got there. I had a good guess, given the nature of the work. I was trying to push the nurse-call button with bandages when a nurse came eventually and confirmed the guess. We argued about my seeing my hands, me for, her against. Next day, a doctor came. He exposed them to debride dead meat.
I saw chunks already missing. I saw bone.
My lawyers and the company in the suit that followed had different explanations. Some feedlot company that had hooked up a big generator illegally to the system we were working and fired it up to run machinery that day got pulled into the suit. We settled before the court date with nothing definitive decided.
But I did know what my crew said when they visited me in the hospital, and that I would not otherwise recall: Briefly, my body seemed to attempt flight. The hands released the work, the arms spread like wings.
The attempt failed. The body fell. My harness did its job, so not far.
Someone dangling from the pole screamed, then said Christ.
That someone said, Jesus, I can smell myself cook.
That someone did not joke with the paramedics in the ambulance but asked, Will my hands ever be good again? and must not have got an answer, because he kept asking, he did, the I-not-I, in this, at least his third habitation of this body.
I would answer him, if he came to me: Not really, never again.
Not the brain, either.
My niece cares for me now. Cooked as my hands are, they hardly hold the walker, the little that I walk. House is mine, bought with the settlement, which pays also for her care of me. Her affection for me is her own. How I deserve it I can’t imagine. By days I am out of the house and bent under this wool and its gray sun.
The I-not-I must sometimes be close to me, that he steps in, when I step out. Does he hear my thought?
I am the wreckage of myself, unpresentable to a son to whom I’m unknown. Would I know even if he is real or not? Either way, he is at least an obligation I feel, but maybe also a joy I might have known. Now I have left myself scattered through miles and days, and what remains is a life that will spin out within this blankout, maybe shortly. The son who might or might not be and the I-not-I, who speaks through my lips when I do not possess them, have in some sense the same reality, a reality I feel but to which I have no door. They are thus for each other. My hope is in them. If the I-not-I is, he who has shared my body may feel the love I would give to a son and carry it through another body, to speak it through other lips. If my son is, he may hold a hollow in himself for a father he has never known, and so a father who might come in any form.
My thought is: Come to me, oh come, o I-not-I, and then go out and find the son and give him my love, for no one can say it is unreal, and without it we may be lost, downfallen from brief flight, all of us.
Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, half a dozen stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by numerous publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and New World Writing. His story “An Invitation to the Gulls” was shortlisted lately for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.