Other people's stories can mollify and soothe, like a few capfuls of bath oil in a hot tub are supposed to do, and how-to and grammar books, along with biographies of philosophers and criminals, generally bring relief and a sense of safety-safety is a reasonable amount of risk-since a philosopher's life includes contemplation and a criminal's is at least not my own. These books facilitate sleep or delay sleeplessness, with its onslaught of nameless hurts, when I listen to steam belch through the pipes and other noises that don't occur during the day. When I'm in the other room assigned to me that is not for sleeping but has a cot on which I never rest, because for rest I can return to the bedroom, which I'd rather do, I can look at the photographs of friends on a wall. I tacked them on a white wall, careful not to pierce their images, including ones of me and my mother, who can't live too much longer, because no one lives forever, and several of my dead father, and friends, dead and alive, and also scenes I relish or postcards that have recently been sent to me. My collection is growing. Often I think about my dead friends and wonder why people who complain about the unfairness of life want to live forever anyway, since most do want to live forever. Many people complain about how hard life is, but no one wants to die, or very few people want to die. My uncle died before his time, my father never recovered from his brother's death, or his son's furious flight, some of my friends died before their time, and I may not recover, because there are some things you don't recover from. The past can't be recovered or changed.
Billy never told me his real name, I never knew it, just the one he gave himself, and I didn't push him, I thought there was time, and his reticence or shyness about his given name, which named his past, was a curiosity but didn't bother me, since I thought one day he'd tell nie. Melvin was his given name, a stranger beat and murdered him, and was never caught, which is not unusual. A stranger to whom my existence is nothing, and who would not listen to me, could end my life, and I wonder if, when the two young women are my age and start to piss frequently, they will remember me and the sound of the toilet flushing in the middle of the night, which must wake them. But one told me it doesn't, that she can sleep through anything, even my machinations, I thought, and I might remember her for that, something I don't exactly believe, or I might remember both of them because they slept in rooms near mine, crept into and out of their bedrooms, one had short hair cropped to her head, the other long, curly hair she brushed from her face like flies, and they didn't make much noise or play their radio late at night, the way I did during this certain, momentous period of my life, when I was sequestered with strangers in a place not unlike the one where I was sent to summer camp when I was too young to know that I wouldn't always be there. The two take fewer baths than I do, they prefer showers, I also like showers, but want the slowness of a bath, and though I never stay in a bath long, the idea of slowness draws me to it, and the wonder of near-total immersion, which I'm advised relaxes the body, as well as the mind, along with the salubrious oils liberally poured into it that also could help my mood and moisturize my skin, restoring the precise oils that a good, hot bath depletes. But I must take care, my heart is a problem, there is often a pressure or a weight on it, a tightness that has no discernible organic cause, my internist tells me, still I'm careful about immersing myself in extremely hot water and let cold water run, to reduce the temperature. Maybe their skin is less dry than mine, not only because they are younger but also because they take showers. Still, bathing is salubrious, a luxurious waste of water, though it is plentiful here, so I don't have to worry about it now.
I won't always he here, and if I consider that, and regularly remind myself that I only have to be in a particular situation for an hour or two, whether I'm unhappy or not, I can manage it. An hour is a short unit of time, unless you are being tortured or are in some other terrible situation, like starving in a refugee camp. I can imagine myself in almost any situation for an hour, except awaiting execution, being slowly suffocated, being chased and hunted down like a fox, or being tortured, and if I am able or allowed to leave or even escape a situation, since almost anything can be managed for an hour, I'm reassured. I've been cold and miserable; I've been lost; deceived; I've been bored silly; drunk; my underpants have been wet from nervous agitation; the skin on my inner thighs has chafed to a fiery red from rubbing against wool; I've been robbed; fainted from shock; and I've been alarmed beyond words or stricken with fear hearing hitter words flare between friends in freakish eruptions of hatred in bizarre locations, since most sites are not right for confrontation, and when I have no right to speak and no involvement, except self-protection, I have become itchy, my skin a plane of heat, as if a match had been struck against it and my entire body set ablaze. But I was able to withstand it, only because I knew it would end. I have, since cast from home like the carrier of a deadly virus, been the object of virulent words and some violent acts. It is when you're a child and dependent and have no sense of time and don't know that things will end-your parents will die, you don't have to stay in school, the kids you hate won't always live near youthat it is sometimes impossible not to cling to old things and places, because what might come and who could be there and take their place could be worse.
The two young women often looked disconsolate, the way they did this morning, and as usual I didn't want to become involved in and acquainted with their deepest fears, familial or romantic problems, and so I avoided them, walking directly into the kitchen to order two eggs over medium from a woman who has worked in the kitchen most of her life and whom time, in whatever dimension it dwells, has not treated well. Her thin skin was wrinkled, having lost its elasticity, and she had probably never had a facial, certainly not with any regularity nor does she apply rich moisturizers to her desert-like skin. I couldn't help but notice also how everyone who ordered breakfast spoke to her beseechingly, their voices pitched higher, the women almost squeaking in deference, the men suddenly sopranos, all awaiting a sign that she was aware of their presence and, more, that she liked them and would feed them munificently, but the head cook, who has been here many years, was often moody, tired, or overwhelmed by her outside life, about which none of us was privy, and avoided their eyes and gestural entreaties for easy affection, sympathy, or love. I wrote down my order and, instead of begging for notice, kept my head low and eyes fixed on a notepad upon which I scrawled 2 Fried Eggs Over Medium in block letters, but with gusto, after finishing, said: Thank you. The cook reminded me of the Polish woman, because she served people, as the Polish woman served nee, for a price, one I could pay, though the cook couldn't or wouldn't have a facial, never having cared much about her skin, never wanting to spend the money, or never having been told she was sensitive and so was her skin. The Polish woman might be insensitive, I've sometimes considered.
After I sat down to wait for my eggs, while the dining room clamored with more near-latecomers, I avoided the eyes of the others at our table, which was near the toaster and convenient, but the man in his T-shirt who always began conversations that annoyed me assaulted us with his longing. He said he couldn't eat his eggs and poked their yolks with disgust, which bothered Violet, a mysterious woman, whose light brown skin suggested biraciality, or a mulatto, as she preferred to call herself, who averted her eyes to ignore his agitations, but whose lips twitched, as she refrained from eating her meal. Violet, I soon named her Contesa, paused when she brought the yellow eggs to her mouth and her mottled gray eyes, which could have been laughing, metamorphosed into titanium, but he went on, the demanding man. He hadn't slept because his dreamwhich he annotated with his arms whirling like a miniature windmill, while he also alluded to Don Quixote, simultaneously, to underscore his relationship to his mother and mother country-had disturbed him, and none of this mattered to nee, yet I listened. He rubbed his beard and forehead repeatedly, so his oily skin shone even when weak sunlight hit it. I had learned, in another breakfast discourse, that he'd had impetigo as a child, which left no trace, except the type that is invisible and most immutable, but maybe his early surroundings were unclean, his mother inattentive when he was an infant, perhaps he lay in his own urine for hours, dependent on others for the care he never received and now seeks in strangers. Yet he tells us his mother doted on him, that she did everything for him, that he was spoiled, which he proclaims proudly, as Violet, or Contesa, smiles, nearly laughing, I think, but this is conjecture. Impetigo is not unusual. It is a staph infection that occurs most often in childhood, when its prognosis is best, since it's worse in adulthood and usually occurs in hot humid climates or during the summer. His mother may have adored him, as he insists daily, and still he caught a staph infection. Impetigo occurs most frequently on the exposed parts of the body, the face, hands, neck, and extremities. There's impetigo of the scalp, too. The lesions rupture and a thin, straw-colored seropurulent discharge appears. That exudate dries to form loosely stratified crusts that accumulate layer upon layer until they are thick and friable. The crusts can be easily removed, though, and what's left is a smooth, red, moist surface that soon collects new discharge or exudate, and this spreads to other parts of the body, through fingers, and by towels, or household utensils. But, in the history of the disease, it is an extremely superficial inflammation. The demanding man had been born in a hot climate, though he no longer lives there, but instead resides in a cold, midwestern city, about which, though he's well dressed and fed, boasting a burgher's belly, and claims to lead the good life, he voices voluminous complaints: its climate, especially, bothers him, raw cold shoots through him like a spear, as he puts it, and also he is so far from his mother. His dependence is interminable, his complaints unassuageable, and I have known many such people.