18
Good morning, it’s 5:14 a.m., and it’s cold, and the only creature stirring is the cat: he’s just had an extended session in his litter box, scraping and scraping. He’s got one of those litter boxes with the roof and the side hole: he climbs in and is able to turn smoothly around, and then he holds still with his head out the hole, slitting his eyes, until he is finished, and then the compulsive digging begins, the scrape of claws on grey plastic.
I woke up this morning and went into the bathroom and pulled down my pajama bottoms and silently peed, shivering, for a long time. I can accumulate a remarkable amount of urine. It’s been almost fifteen years since I took to sitting down on the toilet to pee at night. Someone I worked with was complaining about her husband’s bad aim in the bathroom, and someone else said her husband sat down and always had, and I was struck by this. Just because during the day you stand, does that mean that you must stand during the night as well? Of course not. There’s no shame in sitting down, and here’s what happens if you don’t. In the middle of the night you don’t want to turn on the light, because it hurts your eyes and makes it harder to go back to sleep, so you decide to go in the dark. You think you have a pretty good idea where the toilet bowl is. So you stand there in the dark, straining for cues and luminosities, saying to yourself that it’s a very large bowl anyway and the chances are good that you’ll hit the mark. And yet of course you’re sleepy and you may have a slight nonsexual stiffening and you’re clumsy. So you let some pee down into the darkness. You listen for the sound. Is it the sound of a fluid stream hitting water? That’s good. Then you’re fine. Is it, on the other hand, the sound of a coherent fluid stream hitting porcelain? That may be good or it may not be good, depending on whether you’re hitting the porcelain of the actual inside of the bowl, around the water, or the porcelain on the edge. A doubt arises. Very probably it’s the porcelain near the water. You’ll know that it is near if you make a tiny left or right adjustment and hear the confirming sound of water. And you wonder, Which way do I adjust the aim? It seems like I might be aiming a little too much to the left. So you correct by directing the stream a little to the right, and the sound changes, and now you’re in trouble, because it’s the sound, you’re pretty sure, of pee hitting rim and maybe even floor, so you quick jerk back to what you think is your original position. But it isn’t the original position. You’ve lost your bearings now, you’re wandering in an unknown forest, and you have a suspicion that maybe the stream has split into a V; when that happens, no amount of course correction will help. You clamp off the outflow and turn on the light to take stock. If you can’t see anything on the floor, you’re okay, but if there’s an obvious small pool, then you have to get the undersink sponge going or use bunched-up toilet paper to dab it up, and the bending with the bunched toilet paper sends blood to the head, further waking you up. Now you’re much more awake than you would have been had you turned on the light in the first place. Not all of the pee will be cleaned, either, because it is the middle of the night, and nobody cleans things up that well in the middle of the night. Eventually over some weeks a faint smell will arise. That’s why I recommend sitting.
Also, if you sit your activity is silent; whereas if you stand and you are lucky enough to hit water, the cat wakes up at the noise and may pluck the bed.
Passing me by, passing me by. Life is. Five years ago I planned to write a book for my son called The Young Sponge. I was going to give it to him as a birthday present. It was going to be the adventures of a cellulose kitchen sponge that somehow in the manufacturing is made with a bit of real sea sponge in it, giving it sentient powers. It lives by the sink but it has yearnings for the deep sea; it thirsts for the rocky crannies and the briny tang. Then Nickelodeon came up with a show, and a pretty good one, about a sponge. My idea was instantly dead: my son would think I was merely copying a TV show. Nickelodeon had acted, I had only planned to act.
Speaking of creative torpor, when my half-eaten apple fell off the ashcan just now, it occurred to me that I don’t really know what the Ashcan school of art is. Yesterday evening I felt the fireplace ash. It was cool, finally: deep-red bits can stay alive for many hours. I shoveled some of it into the tin container with a lid that was here when we moved in — it must be the ashcan. The ash was a very light grey, almost white, and very fine — composed mostly, I imagine, of clay, which doesn’t burn when paper burns. Henry, who was watching me, said: “Dad, think of all the stuff we’ve burned, and it all goes down to this much.” It was only the third time I’ve shoveled out the fireplace. The ungraspableness of history, which can seem thrilling or frightening depending on your mood, can assert itself at any moment. I just found another small bedroll of lint in my automatic lint-accumulator and I tossed it into the fire: there was an almost imperceptible flare of differently colored fire — ah! lint fire—and it was gone. That is part of why I like looking at these burning logs: they seem like years of life to me. All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn. Meanwhile the duck is outside in the cold. She piles her excretions high in one corner, according to Claire, and she has a little declivity in the wood chips, where she fluffs up her feathers, but she’s got to be cold out there. She will be so happy when things thaw and she has the mud along the creek to root around in. Yesterday I touched the feathers on the back of her neck: they don’t look as if they would repel water quite as well as they did in the high summer, because she hasn’t been able to swim in water. Yesterday, also, I heard her take off behind me and I turned to see an egg-shaped, cross-eyed form with windmilling arms flying towards me at head height. Often she changes course right at the very end of her flight, and this time she landed on an icy patch; her feet went back like a penguin’s and she scooted a little. But she was unhurt.
I’m still fascinated by the ability of her feet to withstand cold. The cold must go right through that thick layer of skin into her leg bones. What she wants is more blueberries. Claire bought frozen blueberries for her and defrosted a cup of them in the microwave. You can feel strange worries about the nature of consciousness when you try to imagine what a duck is thinking about all night closed up in a doghouse with a bowl of slowly freezing water and some food pellets, with a screen door over the opening to keep out coyotes and a blanket over the screen door. Every so often, she roots a little in the shavings — looking for what? She wants grubs and worms, but there aren’t any now, too cold. Why does she exist? We as a family exist to be nice to the duck, and the duck exists to puzzle us. Who would have known that ducks make desperate sounds, trembly murmuring squeals, when you hold out a handful of pellets for them? Who would have known that she prefers to be fed by hand than to have the food in her bowl? What she likes best is to have you hold out to her a handful of pellets over the warm water. That way when she jabs at them with her beak, some fall into the water, and she can rap away at them under the water, snuffling through her beak-nostrils, and then come back up and get some dry pellets again, up and down.