So I sat looking out at the dim world, eating wheat bread and drinking cold water, hoping to come up with a first chapter, where the dead body is discovered. I wrote fourteen pages. Then Claire and I began to notice a puzzlingly sweetish smell in our apartment. It got worse. We told the building manager that we suspected that a raccoon had died on the roof. The manager walked the roof and found nothing. Then came the hideous black flies, the biggest I’d ever seen. The woman next door stuffed a towel in the crack under her door to block the stench. We thought maybe the solid-waste plant down the road had had a mishap. But it turned out that the man below us had died. I thought, I don’t want to write a murder mystery with a plot like a machine; I don’t want a corpse lying there pushing a little imaginary world into gear.
The Postmortem Handbook, my grandfather’s small but steady seller, was translated into Spanish. He believed that what the world needed, above all, was more autopsies. He told us this at Christmas and he told us this at Thanksgiving; he told us this while sitting on a deck chair cruising up the Rhine. Better diagnoses, handier surgeons, wiser doctors, happier patients, all would result from more autopsies. In his will he ordered that an autopsy be performed on his body, as indeed it was. But once he said to me: “Fluorescent light is bad for the eyes. Pick a life that gets you outdoors.” I work all day in fluorescent light; it isn’t so bad. But maybe that’s why I crave this fire, which is hissing nicely after I stuffed in more of yesterday’s cardboard box.
My grandfather was a determined walker, and he sang Purcell songs rather breathlessly while he walked—“I’ll Sail upon the Dog-star” and “I Attempt from Love’s Sickness to Fly-hi-hi-high in Vain.” Later he grew vague and didn’t sing anymore, and he began advocating compulsory world disarmament and walking up to smokers in restaurants saying, “Do you enjoy killing yourself?” He continued to practice the piano, however — he played a certain Chopin E-minor prelude over and over in the basement. When my grandmother broke her back and was in bed wondering whether to call the ambulance, my grandfather retreated downstairs to perform Chopin’s E-minor prelude several times. As the rest of his mind closed up shop, the musical node carried on.
Once when I was fourteen I arrived at my grandparents’ house after twelve hours on a bus. We sat down to dinner. I politely asked my grandfather how his medical work was coming along. “I’m considering whether I should embark on a new research program,” he said. “It seems to me that an effective cure for the facial lesions of adolescence would be a contribution to humanity. I notice for instance that you have a number of acne pustules there on your forehead, and on your nose, and I wonder whether you think this disease might yield a fruitful program of research.” I said, “Well, yes.” Then came the dear, nervous laugh from my grandmother.
13
Good morning, it’s 5:36 a.m. I’m finding that a flat slab of junk mail dropped in the mail-slot created by two hot logs can sometimes get an unwilling fire to take the next step. Or try one of those enclosures for lightbulbs — slide that easy flammability into the spot where you wish the fire to move. This morning when I woke up I peed and then, inexplicably, I got back in bed and lay there for a while thinking about driving a speedboat off the watery edge of the world. It seemed to me, as I lay there awake, that the world was indeed flat, and as I reached the edge of it and saw the enormous glossy curve of ocean turn the corner and fall away I sped up. It was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. My boat began falling, and as it fell it turned, but I held on to the steering wheel so as not to become separated from it. I fell towards a region of mists that I thought was the bottom, and I prepared to be dashed to pieces on the rocks, but no, I had fallen off the edge of the flat world, and the world was fairly thick: I was passing through the mists in a region that smelled like a salty shower, where the ocean began to pour past the inner molten earth-sandwich. The steam dried away finally and I tumbled past a cross-section of semi-plastic moltenness, and then, as I kept falling, I blew through the mists again, which cooled my hull, and I rose up past another waterfall that mirrored the one over which I had fallen; and then the bow of my boat, its progress slowing, reached a turning point about twenty feet in the air and I fell down with a slap on the gray, choppy ocean on the other side of the earth. Fighting the waters there that wanted to push me back off, I drove the boat to shore. Everything was more or less normal, and I ate at a Bickford’s and left a generous tip, but I wanted to go home to the “real” side of the earth, the side I was born on, and the phone system on the underside, where I was, didn’t reach through to the other side: so after a night in a motel I drove my boat back out to the edge of the ocean and hurled myself and my boat back out into the void, far enough that, with the stars at my back, I had a good view of the cataract falling off into the lava layers, and then, like an adept skateboarder, I flipped up the stern of my boat at the point of highest rising and slap landed neatly back in our ocean. I was home in a few hours.
That’s what I lay there thinking about. Then I got up and came down here and made the coffee. Sometimes when I imagine driving off the end of the earth — it isn’t a subject I take up every day but it does recur — I consider what it would be like to go out for a little stroll in the direction of the setting sun and then trip on a rock, and, oh, heavens, I’ve fallen off a cliff. And then as I fall I look around — wait, this is not just any cliff, I seem to have fallen off the edge of the flat earth. In my descent I try to keep my wits about me and look downward, where I’m falling, and there I see, coming towards me, a huge burning dome of fusion: the sun. Yes indeed, I’m falling towards the sun, which when it sets goes down here past the edge of the world for the night and rests, keeping the lava bubbly near the middle of things. Fortunately I’ve got my magical sunglasses on, so that when I plunge into the sun, which roars like a locomotive, it isn’t too bad on the eyes, and then I’m squirted out again, and I fall — i.e., rise — past rocks and roots until I’m almost at the edge of the underworld, and there I grab a root and hang on, dangling, and pull myself up so that my chin is over the edge, and I have a brief chance to survey its features. It is a grassy place with some trees and a new housing development going up, each house with a large pseudo-Palladian window over the front door. And then the root gives way and I tumble away back through the set sun: down once again becomes up and I am back on the grassy verge where I began my walk.
Claire and I took a walk yesterday afternoon along the place where the trolley to West Oldfield used to go. When we started, there was still plenty of afternoon light left, and then the slow-roasting orange clouds began, and by the time we reached the little cemetery where you can see through to the lake, the light had an impoverished glow of the sort that induces one’s retinas to give extra mileage to any color because the total wattage of light is so radically reduced. Where the snow had gone away, the tan layer of needles on the ground sang out with a boosted pallor, and a mitten-shaped patch of cream-colored lichen on a gravestone waved at me in the gloom and made me want to have been a person who devoted his life to the study of lichens. I told Claire that I was having lichen-scientist thoughts, wishing I had become a lichen man, and she nodded. She’s heard me say it before.