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18.

But he didn’t leave again.

The day after he returned, he took the television set out to the backyard and set it on the mangled stump where we split our logs. Then he went to the shed and came back out with a pickaxe. Before I had time to process what was about to happen, he heaved the axe into the front of the television. Again, and again, and again, he slammed the pickaxe, glass splintering into tiny pieces, metallic shards spraying in every direction, sweat flying off his brow. We would be picking bits of television out of the weeds for years to come, I thought.

I watched him through the window, the knot in my throat making it hard to swallow. I wondered if the modem would be next to go; and then the telephone; and then the toilet; until we were back where we started thirteen years earlier, with just four walls and a woodstove. I saw all the gains of my childhood being clawed back; and I wondered where this all would end.

Who was I kidding? I already knew where it would end. With me trapped in this cabin forever. It was becoming clearer and clearer that my father had no intention of us ever going anywhere again. And maybe, just a few months ago, that might not have seemed so awful; but now it felt like doom. I needed to break out of my jail, but how? Steal his truck? He kept the keys locked in the study. Try to hike out, in the dead of winter? I’d end up dead of hypothermia before I made it to civilization. It made more sense to wait until our next trip to Bozeman, and then slip away when he wasn’t paying attention. Maybe Heidi would even let me live with her for a while.

My father threw the television carcass into the trash pile at the bottom of the hill and when he came back inside I was still standing by the window, pale and shaky. He washed his hands in the sink, carefully flicking bits of glass out of his beard, a bright gleam in his eye.

“Don’t look so alarmed, squirrel. It was time to get rid of that thing. No good was coming of it. And if I’m not publishing Libertaire anymore, there’s not such a need to be up on the latest news. Anyway, there’s the newspaper if we really need to know what’s going on out there.”

—

Without the television, without the clattering of my father’s typewriter, our evenings grew quiet. It was as if the manifesto had been a purge, scraping years of pent-up thoughts out into one towering document, and now my father was lighter, almost giddy. Instead of locking himself away in his study, doing God knows what, he now sat with me in the evenings, rereading books from his shelf—Fourier and Chernyshevsky and Bowles—while I sketched with my new pastels, sulky and angry. Sometimes he would even whistle little tuneless songs that didn’t seem to have beginnings or endings.

His pleasure, I was starting to realize, was usually tied to someone else’s displeasure; nothing made him happier than imagining that he’d really taught those fools a lesson .

“Would you stop that?” I barked at him one night.

“Stop what?”

“Whistling.”

He looked puzzled. “I was whistling?”

“It’s annoying, Dad.” I looked at him suspiciously. “Why are you so cheerful, anyway?”

“Oh nothing. I was just remembering.” He was gazing across the couch at me, where I sat slumped in the corner with my sketchbook, doodling pointless shapes in my notebook, pushing so hard on the pastels that they left slicks of colors on the page. “The time when I rescued you from the bear.”

“The time what ?” He had my attention now.

“You don’t remember? No, you wouldn’t. You were probably, oh, six? We’d been here for only a year or two, still figuring everything out. I was out back working on the septic system and you were playing nearby—pressing wildflowers I think—and at some point I looked up and realized that you’d vanished. Probably chasing a butterfly or something along those lines. You knew you weren’t supposed to go into the woods on your own, but you were stubborn when you got a notion in your head.” He laughed. “Guess you inherited that from me. Anyway. I drop everything and start combing the woods for you, calling your name, and there’s nothing. Just nothing. Absolute silence, which was the most terrifying thing of all, because you know how sound echoes out here.

“I’m running frantically through the woods, getting more and more panicked. What if you got hurt and we’re so far from the hospital? And I’m kicking myself for moving out here. Telling myself that if I find you, I’ll move us to someplace safer, a house that has a fence around it. Finally, I walk into a glade—that one with the sideways cedar tree and all the bracken ferns—and there you are, sitting cross-legged in the dirt with your back to me. And just ten feet beyond that, staring straight at you, is this mangy-looking black bear. His snout moving back and forth as he takes a big whiff of you, trying to figure out if you’re going to be his lunch.

“And you—you are just as calm as can be, looking straight back at him. My heart is going crazy and I come up right behind you and make myself huge, the way you’re supposed to, and start yelling at him to go away. The bear stares at me for a while and finally turns and ambles off. And that’s when I look down and realize that you’re crying. Not because you’re scared but because you’re upset. With me. And I see that in your hand you are holding out some beef jerky. You were trying to feed the goddamn bear.”

“?‘He was a nice bear,’ you insisted. ‘He wanted me to bring him home.’?”

My father started to laugh now, an unlikely giggle, his chest rising and falling as he struggled to catch his breath. “My bold daughter wanted to adopt a bear. God, I was so amazed by you. I remember that was the moment when I finally knew for sure I’d done the right thing, bringing you out here. I had nothing to worry about as long as I kept you close; and while there were so many things I had to teach you, I saw that you could also teach me, about how to be fearless. As fearless and open and pure as a child, the most beautiful thing in the world.”

I stared at him, tearing through my brain for this memory—my father as a giant, coming to my rescue?—but came up empty-handed. He reached out and gripped my toe in its threadbare sock. “She’s still in there, that unpolluted little girl, even as you grow into a woman. And every day that I wake up and see her in your face, I am proud of what I’ve done. What we’ve done.”

I shifted my toe out of his hand and watched the smile slide right off his face.

“Maybe you should have just let the bear eat me,” I said. And I stood up and walked away to my room and closed the door behind me—knowing that I’d wounded him in the place where it would do the most damage, and hating myself for how good that felt.

—

The remains of December passed like this, and then January. Winter blew in with a fury, dumping a snowy blanket on our cabin, trapping us there until the plows came, driving us into the numbing dullness of hibernation. We spent the days huddled up by the stove, eating cans of SpaghettiOs and Quaker Oats from the endless boxes in our storeroom, drinking plain hot water because my father had forgotten to stock up on tea. The tedium of our short days was broken up only by the occasional spotting of a coyote in the garden, or the drama of a dead chicken. I’d gone through thirteen long, brutal winters in that cabin, but this one seemed to drag more than any of the ones that had come before. For the first time, I was acutely aware of everything else I was missing.

We hadn’t been to Bozeman since late November; and with no Libertaire to take to the bookstore—and the roads unplowed—it seemed that our visits to town were over for the foreseeable future. So there would be no slipping away during a visit to town, no chance of moving in with Heidi. Anyway, our friendship seemed to have dried up; she never called anymore. Maybe it was just the chaos of the holidays, and then her starting classes at Gallatin High, but I suspected the real reason for our growing distance was that she just didn’t have a use for me anymore. Jocelyn had filled the space that I once occupied, and there was no way I could compete with a friend that was actually part of her day-to-day life. One that wasn’t a weird, socially na?ve recluse with a pedantic, paranoid father.

I knew she was halfway along the path to forgetting my existence forever; and I couldn’t really blame her.

I’d never felt so trapped in my life.

—

My father’s good mood came to its inevitable end at the end of January, six weeks after I uploaded The Luddite Manifesto to the internet. The sun had finally emerged after five straight days of snow, and my father had sent me out to the henhouse to check on the chickens and see if there were any eggs to be had. When I returned, my pockets empty, I found my father sitting in front of the laptop. He’d connected to the internet without my help and had made his way to the Luddite Manifesto website. He was staring at the home page with a frown on his face.

“I think this thing is broken,” he said, stabbing at the screen. “Are you sure you coded it correctly?”

I followed his finger and realized that he was pointing at the hit counter. You are visitor 0012. Don’t forget to sign our guest book!

No one had signed the guest book.

“It’s working. See? Eleven more people have visited since the last time.” I wasn’t sure why I felt so defensive. “Oh, wait, ten, because it’s counting us for a second time.”

“ Ten people? Can we even tell who they are? Or if they read the whole manifesto?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t really know.”

“Christ.” He shoved the laptop away with a slap of his palm. “I should have just left a copy in the men’s room at the bus station, more people would have read it there.”

“I’m sure more people will visit the site,” I objected. “They just have to find it. It’s only been up for six weeks. That’s no time at all.”

“How do people usually find websites? There’s a directory, somewhere?”

We stared at each other, realizing we’d both neglected to consider this critical piece of the puzzle. I shrugged. “Yahoo, maybe? But I don’t know how you get listed on that. I mostly find websites by following links. So, someone needs to link to you.”

I could see my father suddenly realizing that his hermit-like existence had its drawbacks. No friends meant no connections. No connections meant you were essentially invisible, even online.

“You could send a letter to your Libertaire subscribers? Let them know about it? What about those guys you write to a lot? Malcolm? Benjamin?” He nodded in agreement, but his eyes were far away. I realized—and surely he did, too—that if his Libertaire readers were true believers, it wasn’t going to be likely that they were also internet early adopters. He’d wanted a broader audience than that; it was the whole point of going online.

“Not a single comment.” He shook his head. “Christ, it’s worse out there than I thought.”

“Just give it time, Dad. Someone who sees how brilliant it is will find it eventually. Word will spread. Even if it’s just a small audience, that’s something, right?” I knew, even as I said this, that it was the absolute worst thing I could have uttered. It sounded patronizing. It sounded like I didn’t trust his genius. The tone in my voice made him look sharply up at me, and the expression on his face was that of a wounded lion: proud and dangerous and unpredictable.

I should have known to be scared.