After lunch, I sometimes take a walk, it's good to get exercise, but I dislike exercise for its own sake, and the fire is still burning. I'm reluctant to throw water on it, because later it might be harder to start another, when the ash is wet, the floor of the fireplace damp, but I'm reluctant to leave it burning, because it might consume the place where I make and unmake things or do nothing, which is mine for a short while and on whose walls I've affixed photographs, to remind me of my friends, as well as places I've never been and places I've been, where I may want to return. Some of my friends are smiling, some not, some will never be anywhere again but in photographs, and their weight burdens me. It is disagreeably stuck in me like undigested food, so I walk closer to their pictures, whose lack of animation might be undone or upset by my movement toward them, but they are always dead. Of a mountain's treacherousness, a bad heart, a brain tumor, a murder, AIDS, cancer, a car crash. On another wall are photographs of friends' well-fed, bright children, who are amply encouraged but who will anyway have problems and may one day turn against their parents, who can't help themselves, have tried their best and probably won't deserve their enmity, though people live with the consequences of their actions. No one can foretell the events that will have weight in a young child's life, which also incites anxious parents to more worry, but then most things in a child's life can't be accounted for, and they will remember almost nothing that happens before the age of three, four, even five. From the time I learned to count and read, when I read or heard a number, I saw a color, and when I heard or read the word for a color, or saw a color, I registered its numerical value and equivalent. Orange four, black ten, white one, red five, purple nine, blue eight, powder blue three, pink three, yellow two or three, depending upon how light, muted, or bold it was. The elements had weight, numerically, and shades and hues of color. Numbers and colors were figures in my imagination that fused into patterns about which I never spoke, though in some way it helped the world make sense, as things added up in my young mind. But the weight of death is heavier, there is no scale for it, and I shove it into a corner, where it lies, an insurmountable lump, threatening to spread its ugliness.
The Polish woman's salon is near where I normally live, an easy walk, and one I know so well I may no longer actually see where I'm going, but at least I'm unaware of exercising, unless I force myself to think about it, but then if I do, I also think about how little I actually exercise and that I'm hastening my end or allowing for a more difficult old age, though I'm reluctant to acknowledge I'm aging, that death's around a corner, while I also know that I'm dying and think about death daily, like a prayer I'm expected to repeat. Not taking exercise may hasten my end, or final rest, though it's not rest, just a nothing and something we can't know, but maybe thinking that is restful. Also I'm lazy, impatient, and dislike pain, though my dentist and a physical therapist have told me I have a high threshold for it, which also doesn't surprise me. I have watched people who are exercising, grimacing and grunting, especially when lifting weights or contorting themselves into peculiar shapes that are hard to achieve and hold, but many enjoy their effort, they may enjoy effort itself, as it makes them feel they're accomplishing a goal and also effort could make them feel alive. Many people don't feel alive.
The Polish woman is a great one for exercise, exuding a heartiness of appetite, which I feel is repulsive and attractive, when I'm lying on the chaise lounge, covered in a soft pink or fuzzy blue blanket of one hundred percent cotton, as she ministers to me in her attentive way, though it is sometimes perfunctory, because she doesn't really care about me or my skin, it is of no genuine concern to her, and she doesn't think about me or it when I am not with her. Her healthy face can look bored or vacant, the emptiness of which is intriguing and unpleasant, though her skin is unlined and, like a rough linen, straddles her broad Slavic cheekbones. She has a light red mole perched close to the corner of her lip, and it is that area of excess on her face to which my eyes often return. She has no facial scars, none I have noticed, while she, sometimes known as an aesthetician, has, I imagine, noticed every imperfection on mine. Once or twice she has given me a massage and seen or felt all or most of the skin on my body, where she perhaps noticed the scar above my knee, which is an inch long and a quarter-inch wide. It's ugly, but it is not on my face, whose placement might have inflected the course of my life, I might not have gone out in company much or been considered in any way a desirable partner, for sex or dinner or even talk, if several deep scars covered my cheek, chin or forehead, if my face had been slashed to ribbons with a razor or knife. If the cat I put to death because it attacked me had clawed my face and not my calf, if the cat had clung to my face with its sharp nails the way it clung to my left leg, I would now have four depressions on my cheek or forehead, which would make me a less suitable partner in many situations, and some sensitive people, such as myself, would have to ignore the imperfections or never engage with a character that scarred. But instead the scars were carved into my calf when so much tissue oozed from my leg that small craters formed, whose depressions could not ever again be replenished, so much tissue was disgorged, and my left calf will never be normal or beautiful again, but forever marked by the action of an insane cat, who will always he remembered for that, as well as for the mystery of its animus toward me and my inability to quench or limit its unrepentant hatred or protect its deformed life, and if it had attacked my face, my life would have been changed.
I like having a place to go toward, a direction consoles, and there are many places around here for escape. I could walk around the grounds and search for elusive deer or shy moles, I could stroll into town and have coffee in a cafe where local residents gather, or go at any time to the library where the odd inquisitive woman might await me, or wander around the local, historic cemetery, with its tombstones, graves or resting places, supposedly a sanctuary for the living, though for me this has never been true, as it is predicated-like some schemes and plots, whose repetitions advance an old story and make it appear inevitable-upon hoary untruths about eternity, since also life and death are repetitious, and if I know where I'm going, to town, to have a coffee or a tryst, to buy socks, and that I have a reason to go there, it doesn't feel like exercise. It's an adventure, even if the goal isn't exciting, but I become excited easily, like my father, when we drove to the Thanksgiving parade or returned to the fierce, gray-green ocean in winter, where he made me exercise, run along the sand to build up my calf muscles, one of which now has four indentations from the claws of my insane cat, but my father wasn't alive then. My everyday, unremarkable shoes are hidden from me, as I'd inadvertently located the spot most unlikely for them, but finally I discover them in the place I told myself I'd remember they'd be but didn't, slip them on and notice my all-cotton socks, which I like, because they were simple to buy. In the place where I grew up, girls and their mothers shopped relentlessly for clothes they didn't need but wanted, and I didn't ever want to join them, but sometimes went along, secretly dying because I was wasting time doing what I disliked, shopping and trying on clothes in too small rooms, where, awkwardly, women and girls undress and saleswomen ask them to come out and show them how the clothes look, or stand in larger rooms surrounded by other women and girls, strangers, who are undressed and then dressed, looking at themselves in mirrors, displaying expressions that betray avarice, despair, glee, and no one says anything except, Try this on, I don't like this, it's too big, small, tight, I like this, how much is it, and it's often better not to say anything at all. People have baker's dozens of yeasty, unspoken wants, they often especially want objects to make up for what they never had, and some ask for them, which makes them vulnerable, and those who never make demands may feel less vulnerable, but they are not, as they are hungry too, and unlikely to be fed, since they are afraid to ask for what they need. Sustained hunger must be worse than the discomfort of undigested food or the phantom pangs of unrequited love everyone suffers, but hardly anyone wants it known they do, since sometimes it's better not to say anything. Some people want to feel hungry, women, especially, who can afford to eat well but who deny themselves, some even want to feel faint with hunger, because they become alive then, eating themselves alive. Spiritual people also want to feel hungry, they renounce and deny the flesh, along with the rest of the material world, and when they fast for a week, they become lightheaded and feel closer to a higher power, which in high and hallucinatory moments they may be.