After a while I realize I’ve been sitting on the bed a long time. Like waking up, whatever I’d been doing on the bed before is gone, like an unremembered dream. If I was thinking, I don’t remember what. And if I wasn’t thinking, what was I doing? Whatever it was has faded away, and in waking, I come back to the world, worried that if I let myself go, I’ll be gone entirely.
Days go by, or seem to, one day turning into another, and after a while — no one says anything — I seem to be living with them. Moving around the house, from kitchen to bedroom to bathroom, as we pass each other, I can feel my inconsequentiality. I’m not an obstacle to anything, but neither am I affecting the world in which they move. More and more I take long walks along the beach, or north of the beach, where the rocks start.
On certain nights Linda goes away to a class, and on one of those nights I find myself sitting on the sofa looking through an album of photographs, of Geoff and Linda on various vacations, and one of the photographs, with a lagoon in the background, freezes me. The two of them are standing in a jungle, looking at the camera, and you can actually see the happiness playing on their faces. I tell Geoff, who’s reading a magazine, that it’s a beautiful picture, thinking the expression of happiness, which lingers with me even when I look away, is something beautiful. I realize they’ve known each other for years, that their bond is strong. “Could I have a copy of this?” I ask him.
As I stare down at their faces full of happiness, full of transient joy, I see in the photograph, not only the happiness, but also the end of that happiness. As I continue staring at the fleeting moment revealed in the shiny piece of paper I can see the fleeting quality of everything, of life and the memory of life, and when I look up at Geoff, sitting in a chair in a room, it’s like looking at a photograph. Man with Crossed Legs. The room and Geoff and even my act of looking are part of a fleeting moment which is over before it begins. I close the book of photos. “Never mind,” I say. “But thanks.”
A few days later, or hours later — I’ve lost track — I’m sitting on the same sofa. Geoff has gone to work so it must be during the day. Linda is stretching her legs on a mat near the wall in the living room. Light is coming in through the front windows and I sit, listening to her breathing, watching her on the blue mat in an exercise outfit, which, I imagine, wicks moisture away from her body.
I’m also looking at the rug on the floor and the shelves with boxes of music on the wall, and I’m pretty sure I’m sitting in a chair in a house in a city watching a person saluting an imaginary sun, moving her body into a variety of shapes. But because I’m not completely sure, and want some surety, I say something to Linda about something, it doesn’t matter what because what I want is her attention. I want her to corroborate the world that seems to be the one I’m in. Because she’s concentrating on something else, something other than the world we share, I stand up and walk to the closet. I find a vacuum cleaner and snap on a carpet attachment. I plug the cord into the wall and begin vacuuming the rug in the room where she’s practicing.
I want to be in her thoughts, to exist in those thoughts, and so, although the rug is not that big, I keep vacuuming. She says something about not being able to concentrate, but I continue vacuuming. At which point she stands up and I think she has the intention of telling me to stop. But then she changes her mind. Some people are blessed with sympathy, and so she goes into the kitchen, finds a bucket of rags, grabs a handful, moistens them in the white sink and then hands me a rag and begins dusting. The windowsills and along the stereo shelves. I get on my hands and knees, and there’s nothing like activity to distract the mind, and thank god for distraction I think as I start scrubbing the floor and the baseboards, trying to get every last bit of dust and sand and hair. We’re both doing it, working together, and the room is not boundless so we finish and move to the bedroom. There’s a lot of dust there. I take the vacuum and she wipes down the woodwork. We make the bed, put away the dirty clothes, and we finish that room. Then the bathroom. The toilet needs scrubbing and the floor needs mopping and that’s what we do. She polishes the mirror and the sink and I’m standing in the tub, using cleanser and sponge, cleaning the tiles and the area between the tiles, scrubbing off the mildew stuck to the porous grout. We work in a kind of unison, and it’s hard to tell who’s cleaning what, our various hands becoming a single pair of hands, scrubbing and rinsing and squeezing the sponge.
And then she steps into the tub. She kneels down and begins scrubbing the same tiles I’ve just polished, and I tell her, “I’ve already cleaned those tiles,” but she keeps working, scraping away the discoloration. And that’s when I realize that I haven’t cleaned anything. I thought I was cleaning, and wanted to be cleaning, but I was just standing there the whole time, slightly off to the side, watching her. I thought I was holding a sponge, but when I look at my hand nothing’s there. I thought I was making some progress. I thought I was feeling connected to the world but instead of connected, I’m disconnected. And in the middle of that disconnection I seem hardly to exist.
I step out of the tub and follow Linda back to the kitchen. She puts the cleaning supplies under the sink. She goes to her rubber mat and begins where she left off with her yoga. She kneels down and then she stands on her head.
I watch her for a minute and I remember, from Alex, in Kentucky, one pose; it’s the only pose I know but it’s my favorite pose. I lie on my back, next to her, my legs stretched out and relaxed, my arms on the rug away from my hips, my eyes closed, my mind empty.
Not empty, but confined to my body, which is sinking into the floor. My eyes are relaxed. My mind is relaxed.
And then I stand up. Slowly. I roll over, then stand up, vertebra by vertebra, as much as I can. Once I’m up I notice that my senses seem to be functioning better. I can see with a little more acuity. I notice a dictionary on the stereo bookshelf. Two dictionaries, a paperback version next to a red hardcover. I pick up the frayed brown paperback, thumbing through, looking at the words and the black-and-white drawings beside the words. I ask Linda, standing on her head against the wall, if I can borrow the book.
She says nothing.
“I mean can I have it?”
I interpret her silence to mean I should take it.
I’m standing next to her, and I want to thank her, but because she’s upside down, I’m standing next to her legs floating in the air. So I reach over — her ankles are showing — I reach over and I kiss her, lightly, on the skin of her ankle. And then I go to my room.
I sit on the bed.
My body is there. I can still feel my body, my butt bones on the mattress. I can feel my feet on the rug. I can feel the book in my hands, my fingers holding the weight of the book. I don’t want to fade away. Fading away is frightening. I have things to do before I fade away.
So I stand up. I put on one of Geoff’s dark blue sports coats, and in my borrowed clothes I leave the house. They live a few blocks from the water and I walk to the edge of the water, holding the dictionary against my wrist. When I watch the waves, although there are surfers riding the waves, all I can see is the water. The boardwalk, at that point along the coast, is just a sidewalk with cyclists and walkers and people on skates. I walk along with them, south toward the lifeguard tower, and keep walking, down past the coffee stand and along the sandy cement, the girls in bathing suits and boys in shorts. Surprisingly, I’m not in a hurry.