Disaster can strike suddenly and without warning.

Every man joining a ship must immediately learn the alarm signals and

 his specific job in case of emergency.

Manual for Lifeboatmen, Able Seamen, and Qualified Members of Engine Department

United States Coast Guard, 1965

A bucket of piss hangs from the railing outside the door, three steps from where Gunnar sits at his heavy oak library table, unshaven, disheveled. When he needs to piss, he needs to piss, and he doesn't have time to grope along the long hallway to the bathroom. When he does use the toilet, he doesn't always flush, which adds to the sour smell in the house. Or one of them; there are more.  The cats use the house as a litter box now. He doesn't shower and doesn’t want to talk about it. A small, pungent pile of loose tobacco and rolling papers lay close at hand by his radio on the desk where he sits heavily in a thick, squat chair.  The desk, under a clutter of ashtrays, smoking paraphernalia, dirty dishes, and Kleenex wads, occupies a well-lit corner of the small family room, windows front and side. Sunrise prods the sky awake to his left each morning, and light bathes the room through the day until the sun sets behind the fence that runs along the western edge of the yard. Gunnar watches, but he does not see. At 81, he is nearly blind.

His hearing is going, too, and he keeps the radio at a blast, mostly tuned to talk radio. It pounds through the suburban airspace of this little house, a roaring sea of static with an undercurrent of shrill apocalyptic commentators. Their ranting conspiracy talk fills the hours, fills the room, fills Gunnar’s mind like a swirling, toxic fog. He seems to thrive on a sense of churning chaos, inside and out. Treachery and corruption is all around, they say. He says. Everywhere you look: political intrigue and planetary upset, environmental and economic Armageddon. This is Gunnar’s world. He may be old, mostly blind, growing deaf and stiff from age and inertia, but this dark realm is one he sees clearly, navigates intuitively.

Built like a bear, an old, beaten one, he moves ploddingly. Or viewed from a kinder, more heroic perspective, he moves with the deliberate efficiency of the soldier he considers himself to be. And it is true; he is an old soldier. Barely old enough to enlist in Sweden in the 1930s, he eventually embraced the soldier’s life in the Swedish Army, the merchant mariners, the U.S. Army, and eventually the U.S. Border Patrol in New Orleans, chasing drug runners by boat across the Gulf waters. In the drawer where he keeps a supply of half-used lighters, he also keeps a pocket-sized Coast Guard safety manual. The pages have yellowed with age, but Gunnar’s sense of himself as a man of vigilance and valor seems undimmed by time. He is too old now for war, save the ones he wages around himself. In the absence of chaos, he creates his own.

Most of his volleys are oratorical.  By middle age he was adrift in existential discontent, moving from job to job in a perpetual harangue against bosses and others he judged as corrupt or incompetent. He had a salesman’s cocky self-assurance and persuasive pitch. He sold himself on entrepreneurial schemes, investments in self-styled projects that promised to keep him busy and earning without the burden of employment. They rose and fell like the head on a glass of beer. Nothing lasted but his chronic dissatisfaction, his diatribes and his habit of blaming others for his failures.

A lifelong student of literature and current events, he has lost nothing of his commanding style; he fuses fact, conjecture, and paranoia into a righteous armor impenetrable by reason that runs contrary to his. His voice rolls with a Swedish rhythm and flourish. He enunciates each word, each syllable, with stoic deliberation, as in I don’t give a god-dam what any-body says be-cause they are a bunch of god-dam lye-ars. He rants against big business, big government, and big shots, defending the rights of “the little guy” even though he generally dismisses ordinary people as pathetic: hopelessly naive, stupid or dishonest. Railing against it all, he is a big man reduced to a small space, a small life.  His days are defined by small actions: moving from bed to chair, rolling his own cigarettes, smoking, and petting the cats. It is his mind that races across treacherous distances.

Not that he can’t do damage at close range; he can. He is sedentary—thick, yet threatening at the same time. He has “anger issues” and when he’s angry, this man who cannot make himself a cup of coffee can throw a full bookcase through the living room window, and has.  He can bully someone smaller into a corner and wrap those rough, tobacco-stained fingers around a neck, and has. His expression can change from sweet old Swede to roaring ogre in an instant. I know; I’ve seen it.

For half a century, Gunnar has thought the people around him were conspiring against him, and he was wrong. In fact, his wife loved him and the rest of the family accepted him. But now he is right.  His current situation is a trifecta of his worst fears: People are plotting against him. They are out to seize control of his life. And they are set on moving him to a place he doesn’t want to go. The tribe of women, family and community that has supported him for so long has shifted its collective attention to managing him instead of accommodating him.

The reason for this is that the woman at the center of his fortress-like life—his wife—who also has been his fulltime nurse, cook, maid, chief financial support, social buffer, and target of his explosive tirades and everyday derision for most of their five decades together, has gone AWOL. Away from home, from him, hospitalized with a life-threatening infection. The docs say she’s out for eight weeks and it is clear—to her and to everyone else—that when she returns home Gunnar must be gone. The consensus is that if she continues to live with him, it will kill her. He has been a domineering, hostile, manipulative and occasionally violent mate for more than fifty years, while she, a respected professional, has negotiated her way through each day at home, trading whatever was necessary to buy momentary peace.

She won’t do it, can’t do it, anymore. At 81 herself, she has a long history of appeasement to overcome.  But it is a matter of survival for her now.  She has filed for an order of protection from the court, and set the wheels in motion for a divorce. While the paperwork wends its way through formalities, the informal network of friends, neighbors, co-workers, family and caregivers has upheld a default setting when it comes to communication from Gunnar: access denied.

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