Dale worked at a sawmill that was slowly dying, which is to say it was still open but open in the way that a mouth is open when someone is breathing their last.

The mill was in western Virginia, in a county that the maps called McDowell but the people who lived there called Nowhere, which was not technically correct but was close enough. Dale lived in a trailer park off Route 18, the kind of place where the spaces between trailers were filled with gravel and the gravel was filled with cigarette butts and the butts were filled with rain.

He was twenty-four and had dropped out of community college two years earlier because his mother said the tuition was too much and he said he didn't see the point and neither of them was entirely lying.

The job at the mill paid twelve dollars an hour, which was more than his father had made at the mill before his back gave out, and less than his uncle made driving a truck for a company that didn't have a name, just a phone number written on the side of the vehicle in letters that had faded to grey.

The valley was behind the mill, up a road that was more dirt than pavement and ended at a gate that was more rust than metal. Dale had driven past it a hundred times without thinking much about it. Valleys were common in this part of the state. Some of them had coal in them. Some had gas. Some had nothing, which was the most common condition of all.

But something about this valley was different. Dale noticed it in the way the air smelled—sweet, in a way that didn't belong to wildflowers or pine or anything that grew naturally in these mountains. It was a manufactured sweetness, the kind that came from something being processed, dried, prepared for something.

He asked Hank about it. Hank was fifty-eight, had been working at the mill since he was eighteen, and had the kind of face that looked like it had been carved from the same rock the mountains were made of—hard, weathered, and not particularly interested in conversation.

They were sitting in the break room, drinking coffee from paper cups, watching the rain hit the corrugated metal roof.

"Up in the hollow?" Hank said.

"Yeah. What's up there?"

Hank took a long pull from his coffee and set the cup down carefully, as if placing it required concentration. "Nothing. Just land."

"People don't just leave land empty in these mountains. Someone's using it."

Hank looked at him for a moment, then looked away. "You know what they grow down there?"

Dale waited.

"Pain," Hank said. "That's what they grow. Pain. And they sell it back to us."

Dale didn't understand immediately. Then he did, and the understanding sat in his stomach like a stone.

He didn't report it. He thought about reporting it—stood at his kitchen sink one evening with the phone in his hand and the number for the state police on a piece of paper next to the sink—and then he put the phone down and went to the refrigerator and got a beer.

The reason was simple and complicated all at once. His mother took pills. Oxycodone, prescribed by a doctor who visited the county twice a month from a town two hours away. The pills cost forty dollars each without insurance, and her insurance had lapsed six months earlier when she worked fewer hours because her asthma was worse. The pills helped. Without them, she couldn't sleep. Without sleep, she couldn't function. Without functioning, she couldn't work. Without working, she couldn't buy the pills.

It was a loop, and the valley was part of it.

Dale thought about this loop a lot, sitting in his truck in the trailer park parking lot, watching the rain or the sun or whatever the weather was doing, trying to decide whether the loop was something he should break or something he should accept.

He accepted it. Not enthusiastically. Not with any sense of moral justification. He accepted it the way you accept the weather or the price of gas or the fact that your knees hurt when it rains.

He started driving past the valley more often. Not to investigate—just to drive past it, to look at the gate, to notice whether there were cars or trucks or any sign of activity. Some days there were. A pickup or two, usually in the early morning or late evening, times when visibility was poor and questions were easier to avoid.

One morning, he saw a truck he recognized—his foreman's truck, the man named Billy who had a cousin down in the hollow and used to mention it casually in conversation, the way you mention a relative who lives far away, which is code for something that is not actually about family.

Dale said nothing. He went to work, cut lumber for eight hours, went home, and watched television.

A man died in the valley in October. Dale heard about it from another trailer park resident, a woman named Darlene who heard it from her brother who knew a guy who was there when it happened.

"He was operating a grinder," Darlene's brother's friend said. "Machine jammed. He reached in. Got caught. They couldn't get him out in time. Blood loss."

"Did somebody call 911?" Dale asked. He was not sure why he asked. It was not his business.

"Nah. They handled it."

"Handled how?"

Darlene shrugged. "However they handle things. That's how."

Dale drove past the valley the next day. The gate was closed, which it usually was. There were no trucks. There was no activity. There was only the wind moving through the trees and the smell—still there, sweet and wrong and persistent as a thought you can't shake.

He drove home.

November came and went. The mill reduced hours—three days a week instead of four—which meant three days of pay instead of four, which meant his mother's pills became a mathematical problem he couldn't solve. He stopped buying them for a week. She didn't sleep. She didn't eat. She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and whispered things that sounded like prayers and sounded like curses and sounded like the same thing said twice.

He bought the pills. From whom, he did not ask. They appeared at a small gas station in a town forty miles away, handed across the counter by a man who did not look at Dale's face and did not ask for ID. Forty dollars each. He paid.

He drove past the valley once in November. The smell was stronger in the cold air, sharper, more insistent. He rolled down his window and let it fill the cab of his truck and thought about how strange it was that something that caused pain could also smell so sweet.

December came. The mill announced indefinite furlough. "Temporary," the manager said, using a word that in the vocabulary of western Virginia meant permanent wearing a mask.

Dale packed his things in a weekend. His mother said she would follow when she could. She probably wouldn't. The house she lived in was small and cold and she was older and her asthma was worse. Leaving was not a practical option.

Dale left alone. He drove east, out of the mountains, out of the county, out of the state, and did not look back. He ended up in Charleston, found a job stocking shelves at a grocery store, rented a small apartment that smelled like the person who had lived there before him, which was nobody he could identify but was definitely somebody he didn't want to be.

He got a phone. He got a routine. He got a life that was not happy but was not unhappy, which in his experience was the normal human condition and not something to be complained about or celebrated, just lived.

Sometimes he heard things about the hollow. The news mentioned it occasionally—opioid crisis, Appalachian epidemic, counties with the highest overdose rates. He changed the channel. Not because it made him uncomfortable, though it did. But because changing the channel was what he did. It was a habit, like rolling down his window to let the smell fill his truck, or thinking about his mother and wondering if she had enough pills.

One evening, six months after he left Charleston, he was at a bar with a coworker named Ray, and the television above the bar was showing a news segment about the opioid crisis in rural America. Dale reached for the remote and changed it.

Ray looked at him. "You don't like the news?"

"I'm fine with whatever's on."

Ray nodded and went back to his beer. Dale sat and drank his and thought about the valley and the sweet smell and the man who had died in a grinder and the way nobody had called 911.

His phone rang. It was his mother.

He answered. "Hi, Mom."

"How are you, baby?"

"I'm good, Mom. Really."

"Are you eating?"

"Yes, Mom. I'm eating."

"Are you sleeping?"

"Yes, Mom. I'm sleeping."

"Good. That's good."

They talked for five minutes about nothing. Then Dale said, "I gotta go, Mom. I'm busy."

"Okay, baby. Take care of yourself."

"I will. You too."

He hung up and sat in his apartment, looking out the window at the city lights, grey and distant and reflected in the glass so that they looked like they were on his side of the window, in his space, part of his world.

He said, to no one and to everyone: "I'm fine. Really."

It was a lie. It was also, in some small and unmeasurable way, the truth.

--- OTMES-v2.T3.M1.N2.K1.270.006 TI: 55.0 (T3 殉情级) | M1_悲剧: 5.0 | N2_被动 | K1_感性 | θ: 270° (存在主义型)