After a night of bar hopping and late-night driving through anonymous housing developments, John parked on a side street to walk and puke and clear his head. After an hour of this he discovered he could not find his car. He wandered the dark streets searching, but after a time he became more fascinated by the subtle differences among the houses in the development, how each family created its individual look. A different porch light fixture, a differently colored door, lawn furniture in front of one, bright curtains in a window. “We’re all the same here, but different,” they seemed to declare. He never found his car, opting to take the bus home instead. He never returned to retrieve it.
A woman John was dating disappeared one night never to be seen again. Her family and friends were frantic—he helped with the search. Now and again he would return to where she had last been seen—a gray street with glass- and steel-fronted shops. Like an operating theater. A mail carrier, said to have been the last to see her, stated she had stood in front of an empty display window for an unusually long time. When John came here he thought of surgery, that she had been surgically removed.
He supposed the conventional wisdom was that one’s birth was the first event of a lifetime, the beginning of the story. But now John wasn’t so sure. What about the courtship, the circumstances of his parents’ first meeting, their attitudes and expectations? There was also the fact that he had not learned the details of his own birth—the blood, fractures, extended trauma—until he was in his thirties. So did that trauma affect him more before or after he learned the facts of it? There was also his conviction that, for some, birth marked the beginning of possibility, but for others, it marked the end.
A man in a crisp white suit followed John as he made his way from his house to the grocery store. On his way back he noticed the man in the white suit again, waiting on a bench, then following him again. John picked up the pace, and so did the man. John began to run, the man began to run. John dropped several apples out of his bag. The man picked them up and began eating them. John tripped over a curb and went sprawling, the man did several somersaults and a cartwheel. John picked himself up. The man bowed, smiled, and went on his way.
“Why?” John called.
But the man had become interested in someone else. John followed the man following this someone else. He had no idea what he was doing, but it filled the rest of his day.
The quality of John’s work had fallen off sharply in recent months. “I may have to let you go,” his boss told him.
“I’ll do better. I can do this,” John declared.
“No third chances,” the boss said.
“Of course not,” John replied. “I wouldn’t expect it.”
John stared at the papers on his desk. They made no sense to him. Why was he doing this? He got up and left the office, walked down the street, watched birds flying overhead. He watched people walking, some of them laughing, some of them holding hands. Why can’t I get paid for doing this? he asked.
He stayed away for two days. Of course they fired him. He checked the want ads every day, finally answering one.
The ad was for his old job. His interview went very well. His former boss said he thought John had initiative, not like that last fellow.
John got his old job back. He had a lot to do—the fellow who had formerly held this position had gotten woefully behind.
It always amazed John, the power and influence of popular song. The aesthetic qualities of the tunes were seemingly irrelevant—even the stupidest composition might remain in your ear and force the rhythm for the day. Many songs seemed to acquire an added life in commercials and movies, often years after their initial release. Despite a certain tendency toward anarchy, he secretly hoped the government kept a close eye on these composers of our daily soundtracks. A musician with a dark motivation could conceivably do harm, guiding the unaware listener through a spectrum of emotional changes in a relatively short period of time. For his part, he would make himself more aware of his semi-conscious foot tappings and hummings, and put a stop to them now.
When John separated from people he often wrote them a brief letter a week, until they moved or he grew tired of the occasional response. The fact that he lied in his letters may have been a factor. His lies consisted of narrations of events he was afraid might happen or hoped might turn out a different way.
Billie,
My mother is dead. I’m not sure how, but I’ll manage to get through this. Love, John.
An ungenerous observer might have said he secretly hated his mother as he killed her off frequently, in a variety of ways.
Jack,
The house burned down, and with it all my accumulations. More later, John.
John had long believed that if you wanted to get a feel for the consciousness of a place, the air of ideas, hopes, fears and traumas that gathered there, you need only read a few months’ worth of its daily newspaper, especially the small stories, the crimes, the domestic incidents. “Wife kills husband and dog” “Local funeral home defaced” “Methodist minister and three women missing.” A newspaper was like the diary of a city, the city revealing itself almost unawares. For a time he tried rewriting his own life in terms of local news headlines: “Man breaks up with wife, again” “Man changes jobs for the sixth time in a year” “Man prowls grocery store aisles seeking company.” The attempt quickly grew depressing. He felt like a criminal reading the newspaper for word of his own crimes, following the trail that must inevitably lead to his incarceration.
John once spent a slow weekend taking close-up photographs of the things of his life, then the following weekend distant shots of his house, his neighborhood, a long shot of his town from the hill on the outskirts. He papered the walls of his bedroom with the photos and felt no compulsion to leave that room for more than the few moments required to raid the refrigerator. Eventually he tore the photographs down, sold the house, and moved to a new town where he again began accumulating photographs.
Like many people, John supposed, he did not have a particularly discriminating sense of smell. Aromas blended like the ingredients of a porridge, so that he could not distinguish a lover from a dead dog, sugar from decay. This seemed a terrible disadvantage. He’d had a dream in college he was about to kiss his girlfriend—had thought her perfume to be unusually strong that evening—when he found himself kissing her dead lips, crying not in deep emotion but from the smell. The odor of fear, the secret smells of the body, the smell of the air before some great disturbance, all having meaning if you simply knew how to parse them.
Sometimes in his anxiety he would smell his own body seeking signs of illness, but it appeared to smell no better or no worse than any other.
Sometimes the air grew stale from the perfume of too many people, desperately trying too many things, seeking to put together a bouquet, succeeding only in stinking.
John was always surprised at how difficult it was to know his own mind about things. But how could he, when each part of him, each object in his everyday life, had its own point of view? What the stomach wants is not always what the intellect wants, and truly, the left hand does not always tell the right hand what it is doing. The eyes might dream of blues and yet it is reds and pinks that the fingertips crave. Your life story was a completely different narration depending on which piece of you was listened to. The healthy ones, he thought, were those who quickly achieved some sort of coordinated consensus. The unhealthy ones were constantly at war with themselves, and unable to choose a restaurant for dinner. The brain might be Catholic, the feet agnostic, the fingers Republican, and the ears Democrat. And, perhaps, that was the way it was supposed to be—listen to your voices, for they contain the world.