I just have to think that and my cell phone rings. To whom am I talking, I say. To whom do you think you’re talking, you say. I say my father. And so it is.
I have warned you about specificity, my father says. Nothing is possible but that which has happened.
And what is that which has happened?
In this case something of great sadness, my father says. There are limits to what even we can do, he says, and breaks the connection.
Despite my father’s warning, I shower and shave and dress nicely and wait for the evening hour to call on her. Downstairs I nod at my doorman, jog directly across the street, and ask her doorman to announce me. I feel my heart beating. I rise in the elevator. I reach her floor. Her door is open.
Come in, a voice says, and I enter a dimly lighted room. A large Seeing Eye German shepherd stands there. From its leather harness a leash angles up into the gloom. Patient, forbearing, the dog moves toward me one careful step at a time. I know it’s you, the voice says, and the speaker emerges from the darkness, a large old woman holding a walker to which the leash is tied. She looks familiar. Hair bunched like steel wool. A big bony jaw, a thin nose. Blind eyes bulging to see. It is the kind of ancient ugliness that connotes a past beauty. She wears a loose black knit dress with the sleeves pulled up to the elbows. Loops of pearls hang from her neck and clack against her walker. You dare to come back? she says. You dare?
I look past her to a dimly lighted dining room. In the glimmering light of a candle whose flame flares and fizzles like a star in the sky, I can see lying on the table a specifically dead girl, the contours of her body indicated in the tight wrappings of a white shroud. I can’t remember her name, but I know I once loved her. Her closed eyes suggest a mind in intense thought. You’re too late, the old woman says, you’re too late, she says with enormous satisfaction. Her triumph is affirmed by the smell of Chinese food coming from her kitchen. I go there and several mourners sitting around the kitchen table look up from the open white cardboard containers into which they are dipping their chopsticks. For a moment I think I know exactly that which has happened. But then over the heads of the mourners at their Chinese food and through the kitchen window that looks out across a dark side street I see in a lighted window a naked girl dancing.
AND NOW I AM back home and unaccountably sad. At the same time I feel I have been unfairly judged. This was not the kind of specificity for which I long.
You to whom I think I am talking may ask what I do when I’m not running or longing for specificity: I question my station in life. I believe I am retired, but I feel I am too young to have retired. On the other hand, or alternatively, I don’t know of any work that I’m doing that would suggest I’m not retired. As you can imagine, it would make anyone uneasy knowing there are things about himself he does not know.
I am not constantly unhappy, I’m not saying that. But my uneasiness builds until I have to talk to someone. At such times I speed-dial my therapist.
Yes? To whom do you think you’re talking?
Dr. Sternlicht?
You got him.
I’m having that feeling again.
That is to be expected.
It’s like I’m living in exile. I am lonely. I have no one.
That is to be expected.
Why? Why is it to be expected? That’s all you ever say.
No, I say other things. I say you’re in a rut. I say change your lifestyle, expand your horizons. A whole city is at your disposaclass="underline" museums, concerts, the passing parade. I say go out and enjoy yourself. You’ve got all the time in the world.
Until what?
What?
You said I have all the time in the world.
Until what?
Until something happens.
What can happen?
If we knew. But we don’t, he says, and breaks the connection.
THE THOUGHT OF expanding my horizons is attractive, so I am on my way to the Museum of Natural History. And to change my lifestyle, I’ll take the bus. It dawns on me metaphorically that I have never appreciated the bus stop for the ancient invention it is. Carriages pulled up at inns, oxcarts creaked from one village square to another, pirogues made their landings along the rivers of Mongolia. The cartoon logic of the bus stop makes me smile with a love for all mankind. I wait faithfully at this stop and lightly inhale the city’s carcinogenic particulate.
An old woman with a walker is here with her black woman helper, whose expressionless face conceals a great anger. Also, three slim middle-aged men with closely cropped hair and matching sweatsuits. More trusting people arrive at the bus stop, a man in a doorman’s uniform, a priest, a pretty girl at whose mini-skirted backside I steal a glance. Also a pair of small, self-sufficient children, a boy and a girl, each of them holding a violin case. In their jeans and jackets, to say nothing of their mutual commitment to the violin, they might be twins.
I see our bus in the distance. It has been at that same distance for some time now. I see it over the car roofs. Nothing seems to be moving. The way things are going hundreds of us will be waiting at this stop before the bus ever arrives. Waves of dissonant horn blowing break over my ears. All at once I lose my love of mankind. I resume my old lifestyle and take off at a run between the cars because that is the only way I will get to the Natural History Museum.
THE MOMENT I COME through the doors, I hear that characteristic museum murmur. Maybe it is the murmur of visitors long gone because I look around, but I am the only person here. I find I am in the Mongolian Hall. I am tracking through the taiga, which is the name for this wild, snow-filled boreal forest of needle-leaf evergreens, spruce, and pine. I say I’m “tracking through” because I am there — this exhibit is a terrarium that you walk into, and as I move through this lush biome, the earth revolves, and from the frigid boreal forest with its cold stars visible even in dark winter daylight and its skulking hunting lynx hush-hushing through the snow, and its leaping snowshoe rabbit, and its stumbling terrorized blind vole, I find myself rotated to the green steppe where the snow has turned to rain and the rainy wind flattens the nap on the shepherds’ coats and the sturdy shepherds and their sons, quietly indifferent to the weather, walk their yaks and goats and sheep over the low rises of natural pasture. But things are changing still, and gradually the earth flattens, grows warm, and I am in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, where the sun is blinding and the snakes coil themselves in the shade of rocks, and tiny tornadoes of sand sting one’s legs. Here is a Buddhist monk in a saffron robe dancing away from the sand stings. So I am not alone. I follow him as he dances in circles barefoot over the hot sand and spins right out of the Mongolian Hall of the Museum of Natural History and into a waiting bus. It is occupied solely by Buddhist monks in saffron robes. The bus door closes with a hiss as if it could drive off, but of course it can’t, not because it is a Buddhist bus but because it is locked in the unmoving traffic.
I resume my run now, I head downtown. I’m running well, still intent on expanding my horizons. But it suddenly comes over me that I have trudged through the taiga and hiked over the steppe and into the desert, going from cold to hot, from snow to sun, many times before. The fact is I know the Natural History Museum as well as my own hand. And so what new horizon? Not only have I been to the museum more times than I can count, I have never seen anything but the Mongolian Hall and never has it been without that Buddhist monk spinning in the sand.
There seems to be a flow of people going my way, runners running between the cars, walkers moving at a good pace on the sidewalks. Closing in on Times Square, I step into a doorway that has glass cases with black-and-white photos of dancing girls, and I flip open my cell phone.