I wouldn’t die. I’d go out and buy something frozen. Or I’d eat something raw. Or go to a restaurant. I have money. I don’t need anybody to cook for me.
~
I unplug the coffeemaker and take it with me into the laundry room. I have the cream. I have a spoon. I hope nobody ever wakes up.
35
IF OUR life together were a book, this would be page 3504, the best page of the book, with the air breathing insect wings, conning the sun like radar blips, low-volume hum of life about to explode onto page 105, when out of the sky swoops the tail end of time, a nail driven down into the front porch, sweeping Foufou up by the scruff of the neck, our twenty-year-old cat carried off, out past page 252, past About the Author, right out the back of the book.
~
I go up the ramp and there are some windows with some scraggly trees looking in from outside and the sky is gray and the wall on the far side of the courtyard is a lighter shade of gray, only there are some dark streaks of grayer gray where the wall is wet from it being so wet and drizzly out there. Always having been here, I’m not sure where I might have been.
~
What I am is an object on the sidewalk with some wind on it.
~
When I was a kid, if you would have asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you I wanted to be one of those guys who gets reports coming in over their desk every day. How I imagined it was, I had this office, with a big window behind my desk, and I was way up on the hundredth floor, and guys would come into my office and drop files onto my desk. I would leaf through the files, and then more guys with files would come into my office and dump these files onto my desk, and nobody would ever say anything to me. I would go home at night and tell my wife and kid about all the reports I had coming in over my desk.
One time I was having lunch with my wife, only she wasn’t my wife yet. We had known each other, say, eight years. Or maybe six. I can’t remember. The point is, I got down on my knees, and I think maybe the TV was going.
~
There are two sounds. Coming home. Leaving home. That’s all there is.
36
As SOON as we get into bed and get the covers pulled up over us, Tutti gets her Milk Makes Sense calendar from the bedside table and starts circling numbers on it. I sit there and watch her for a while, trying to figure out what she’s doing. She does this every night. I get my head over toward her and push it up under her arm and rest my head on one of her breasts. I put my hand on her other breast.
“Get lost,” she says. She gets her hand on my forehead and starts to push. I just stay there, pushing back with my head, and after a while she gives up.
She has a pen in one hand and she’s tapping the days of the month off with the end of this pen. She has the eighteenth circled in dark, black marker. She counts forward and back from the eighteenth. Finally she throws the calendar and the pen onto the bedside table and says, “Forget it.” She rolls over on her side, her back toward me, and goes to sleep.
~
Dad took me out into the driveway and hoisted me up onto his shoulders and I felt the wind. Dad said it was windier up where I was, that my head was closer to the epicenter of the wind. He asked me for a weather forecast.
~
Listen, how much more of this do you think I can take?
37
I WAS sitting in the kitchen, staring out the window, waiting for Sammy to wake up from his afternoon nap, and I started thinking he was dead up there. I starting thinking, What if he’s up there now and he’s dead?
~
I go back downstairs, down the hall with the meeting room doors, and I start sticking my key into the knobs on all the meeting room doors, pulling open the doors and leaving them open. Then I go through the staff entrance, past the desks with papers and books on them, past the shelves with books on them, and I go over to where Paul is standing and I hand him a piece of paper.
~
I have been told it is necessary to waste time. I have begun to believe this is true. When I was nineteen, I got angry when people wasted my time. I don’t know who figured all this stuff out. I want to meet him. Sit down under a tree and talk to him. Figure him out. And then kill him. I imagine he is already dead, though.
~
When he was a baby, and we lived in the apartment, Sammy used to go to the cupboard and drop Tupperware lids down the space where the cupboard met the wall. We didn’t realize he was doing this until the day we moved out. I tried to reach down into the space and get the Tupperware lids out of there, but there was no way of getting them out without ripping out the cupboards, and we had to be out of the apartment by noon.
38
NOVEMBER 21. The third floor is open and the second closed. While second is closed, some things, not yet fully detailed, will be moved to third.
39
THERE IS a store over at the mall near my work where I sometimes go in the afternoon, on my lunch hour, to buy something for Sammy. I bring it home and give it to him after work. Tutti always says, “How much did you pay for that?” I always say, “Three dollars.”
~
My father used to play this game where he’d put us in jail. Jail was the bed in my grandpa’s bedroom. My grandpa was dead by then, but we still called it Grandpa’s bedroom, even though Grandma called it the spare room.
~
I don’t think there is an end to the depth of the soul. Sammy stood outside the video store and cried until Tutti picked him up and put him in the stroller. We were on holidays. Sammy got back out of the stroller. The wind was blowing in the grass.
~
Later, when I went back in his room, and I looked at him lying in his bed, with his blanket under his nose, lying there so peacefully, with his little eyelids closed over his eyes, I felt like I should apologize to him for something.
40
THE SUN was shining. No, wait a minute, the sun wasn’t shining. It was sort of shining. It was hazy. There were clouds. The sun was peaking out. No. That’s not right. The sun was an orange ball. Hold it, hold the orange ball. It was night.
The moon cast a pale shadow — no, that’s been done. The moon was a hole — no, that’s wrong, the moon was not a hole, the moon was bleak, there was something bleak about the moon, about everything. The earth was a prisoner. No, wait! I know. The earth wasn’t a prisoner. She was a hostage. No, she was free, the earth was as free as …
Wait.
There was snow. The snow was like…what? Not marshmallows, definitely not marshmallows. More like a whole lot of toilet paper. That’s it, toilet paper. Exactly. The snow was exactly like a whole lot of toilet paper.
It was New Year’s Eve. No it wasn’t. It wasn’t New Year’s Eve at all. It was summer. There were birds. No, wait, forget the birds. No, no, I know, there were birds, but they were asleep. So there were birds, but there were no bird noises. Wait! I know! All the birds are dead. There are no birds. There were never any birds. Forget the birds.
This is not a story about relationships. There are no men and women in this story. Okay, hold it. Of course there are men and women, all stories have men and women, but in this story the men and women never meet. They live on opposite sides of town. All the women live on the north side…No, wait! All the men live on the north side. Yeah, that’s it — all the men live on the north side of town, and all the women live on the south side.