It had a sun porch over on one side of it — that's what we had, that's what the place we had had! — oh so forever sunny in the sun porch so long as you were never in it without the little man.
Hey, so long as you were never in it without these two ones of your two fingers right up to this crease between them right here.
The place had a sun porch on it and the floor of the sun porch had all of these different-colored field stones on it and the name of the kind of the rug on it, it was named, I'm telling you, a scatter rug, everybody everywhere was always calling it the scatter rug on the floor of the sun porch in the sun porch of where we lived and believe you me when I tell you there were these tied socks and things it was made of, there were like these stockings knotted among the things this thing was actually knotted of, washrags, washrags, pajama legs, nighties, all of it all torn up and all probably all knotted up or probably all tied up but with like these cords of this cut-off crap of it all around all the whole edge of it, and filthy? I'm telling you, it was so filthy and so sickening, but didn't I, Gordon, didn't I get down there and make him be there — him?
These fingers here.
Standing capeless on incomparable feet.
Oh, play, indomitable child, play!
Till they call and call please.
But who hears please?
Nobody hears please — nor needs to.
Hear instead elsewhere, hear instead anywhere — hear instead turn, my beloved, turn!
But the little man never once did.
THIS SIDE OF THE ANIMAL, OR, BRICOLAGE
ALL DAY LONG THE MAN READ to them from the storybooks they had. They seemed to like to hear him read to them, but it was not possible for the man to tell if this was truly so. Perhaps they merely put up with the man, his thin white hair hanging in meager clots from his thin glittery skull. Perhaps he had beguiled the children into their feeling sorry for him, or feeling sad for him, or feeling afraid to be unquiet in his company.
The man was so tired.
It hurt his legs when there was one of them, or two, who would take to his wasted lap for a while. But didn't all the parts of the man hurt, no matter if his lap were filled or not with any child anymore?
How on earth had he got this weak, this old?
It had never been his plan. His plan had been to be strong, and to come to the last of his life with the power of his youth. Not one jot of himself would time ever wrest from his fisted hands. But time had, hadn't it?
It was a trick.
It had to have happened when his attention had been situated elsewhere. But where? Certainly not on the children who had conducted into his life these numberless offspring of theirs. There were so many of them — grandchildren, everywhere grandchildren — whereas it required no numbering for the man to reckon there was hardly even one of him and that not at all long from now would there be a sign of even that?
He was alone, had always been alone, and would die — perhaps this very night — as solitary as he had forever in his memory been.
The man had no complaints, not a one.
Yet what could have made him so horribly weary just this very instant?
Fatigue must have hurtled down at him from somewhere overhead and now, at the end of the day, it felt to the man as if exhaustion, breathless itself, lay gasping as it hung from his neck, snatching at the frail struts of the crazed skeleton as the man struggled to free himself from this last cruel assailant.
But why bother?
After all, was the man not preparing for sleep?
They had made up some sort of contraption for him in the main room. It had rather surprised him to turn away from the kisses goodnight and discover behind himself the site where he had sat from sun-up wearing himself out enunciating for the children — for the grandchildren — transformed into what would be his bed. When had this happened? How could it have? Hadn't he been occupying the very place, reading and reading to half of creation since the very stroke of day?
Everyone seemed so capable nowadays.
By what means had this occurred? Was there any precedent in their lives for this? Where was the example in managing matters that had guided these children of his in their accomplishment of such infernal displays of competence, competence — skill and grace? It had not been their mother, surely. Long gone in her dishevelment somewhere to the dreadful margins, hadn't the woman made a proper mess of things, starting with — let gentility select our diction — her exercise, first and last, of, shame, shame, bed-making?
Wait a bit.
He had packed his sleeping pills — but exactly where? The little overnight bag he had fitted them into, what had the children — or the grandchildren, damn every squirming living one of them! — done with it?
Ah, there.
Or here.
Yes, yes.
Just where it ought to be — at the foot — or is it the head? — of this exasperating business that must have once been a couch before the new ingenuity on the march in the world decided to interfere with it and make it serve two ends.
Well, it wasn't out in the open enough, was it? How come people don't appreciate the courtesy of leaving things where you cannot miss them! Why does it have to be his fault if everything's not where fair play would indicate it be?
He sucked and sucked and accumulated saliva in his mouth and swallowed it waterless — bitter pill, so terrible for such a tiny palliative indeed.
His fingers — were the bones breaking?
Not just canny and capable, but thoughtful, actually incomparably thoughtful, once you gave it some thought and actually really thought about it, this family of his, even if none of them knew somebody's overnight bag belonged where a person did not have to spend half his life in a wild hunt for it. Such a fund of solicitude, whatever source it had, it could never be alleged any spoor of it could be tied to him. No, it was not that the man did not wish to be generous with himself when called upon to do so. It was rather that the man noticed not all that much of what was available to notice, so that such a call, made however close to the man's ear, might go unattended even when the caller shrieked. But what little the man did attend would grip his attention with a violence that was unrelenting and even eerie. Oh, no, never think the man was not all too excruciatingly aware of what he deigned to be aware of — torn spines of storybooks irksome in their haphazard stacks, toys luridly expressed in polyurethane deep-banked for the night up against the baseboards, frame after frame of family snapshots gaping in disorderly array from every level of tabletop, everywhere the walls flapping with sheets of crayoned and penciled foolscap, none of it had the man elected to ignore — given the chance, he would have discarded the lot, and with gusto! — not least the photograph of the children's mother — was this person a grandmother, in fact? — that now came plunging into view at the far side of the man's pillow and, with it, the career of the marriage, a contending whose vehemence never flagged and whose object was the vector of the slant — upwards versus downwards, downwards versus upwards — of the Venetian blinds distributed throughout the dwelling in receipt of the — up to that point — happy couple.
If the woman aimed the slats one way, the man would restore their alignment to the prior disposition. Where the woman had visited would have the arrangement of its window treatment, however maddening the task to effect the detail, reversed upon the man's replacing the woman there.
Oh, it was endless, endless.
Until it ended.
And what had it all had to do with — what?
Neither the man nor the woman might ever have said — unless it had been the use to be made of sunlight if sunlight were in the moment given — or, at all events, by those who paid attention to change, been promised.