It came to John how randomly, and all-too-infrequently, silences occurred in his life. When he made himself too busy with the striving of the now, others’ silences seemed like that awkwardness that happens when the tape runs out or the conversation dries up. But now and again when he remembered that it pays to listen to oneself, he heard himself breathing in the silence, and the unsteady emotion that was that breathing, and the anticipation of new beginnings, and the anxiety that there would be no new beginnings, ever again.
During one such silence he realized he loved the woman who became his wife. During another he decided to change careers. All at random, all unplanned. Some days he waits for the silence, and yet another opportunity to breathe.
John had discovered One Hundred Twenty-five ways of hiding himself from others. Thirty-eight of these involved various ways of holding his nose. If he felt he had to say something critical to someone he adjusted his glasses. If he had to ask for something he scratched either his left or right eyebrow, depending on how badly he wanted it. If he said hello to someone he had to manage, somehow, to touch one eye. If he had to say goodbye it was both eyes, accompanied by a little dance of the feet. If someone he knew died he’d scratch away at a certain point on his neck all day until it was torn and bloodied. If he lost his hands, he realized, he would be quite unable to venture out in the world. Sometimes when he didn’t know what to do he simply closed his eyes. People could not tell, but there were tears beneath the lids. Sometimes a woman would hold both his hands, and he would close his eyes, and blink, blink again, open his eyes and blush. He liked it most when they grabbed his hands by surprise, when he least expected it. It was a thrill like no other, an ecstasy he could barely tolerate.
John had long resented the influence the news had on day-to-day life. His father had had the right idea—he never watched it on television, but listened to it on the radio, or read newspapers. Of course, if it was something that had gone on for days, and everybody talked about it, he might check in with it a few minutes one night just to see what was going on. That’s how the old man knew about World War II.
John knew all too well how learning the daily news could ruin a day or week, a lifetime, change the way you looked at the world and how you saw yourself in it, what you strived to be. Better to let the decline of civilization happen without you, better to let destruction occur without warning, better to let unhappiness be a surprise and not what happens to everybody, every day.
People lie about the strangest things. What they did last evening, the importance of their jobs, even what they had for lunch that day. So much of their own memory, in fact, has been filled with self-manufactured moments.
It is not because I want to deceive people, John thought, having caught himself in the fourth deception of the day, but because this isn’t the life I wish to live.
In the long night before his next day he lunges recklessly in pursuit of the events that will define him: things that never happened, but should have.
John wondered when food had become such a toy, a miniature landscape for dolls, a diorama concerning the landscapes of other countries. Meals at the best restaurants felt more like museum exhibits. Anyone who could afford a lunch might travel to a place where he was guaranteed misunderstanding. A fork, a knife, a spoon was a ticket out of the head and into a dream.
If he could have afforded it every day, he might have eaten the world. As it was he had a taste enough to staunch a craving through sleep and into another day.
John went through long periods unable to speak to anyone but his wife and son and a few co-workers. This was not unfriendliness. It was simply his way of reducing the burden of complications in the world. He had discovered other people to be infinitely distracting. They walked around in their clouds of moments, wearing their lives on their sleeves, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they were happy, if they had some tragic secret or unfulfilled dream, if they made their families feel good about themselves, or if they were a drag on the progress of western civilization.
And if he got too close or stared too long, he risked having their moments mingle with his own, and the messiness, the tears and the regrets and the recriminations, would be much too much to bear.
You think it’s going to be perfect. Both of you do. You laugh at the same things, appreciate the same movies, agree on the same two or three political issues you’re aware of. For the first time in your lives, everything fits.
That time of close fitting is woefully short, John thinks, but most things are. We are not made to fit, for any length of time, but those brief moments are precious to us. They give us good mileage.
John always loved his wife, even when things seemed to have been bad for years: for a moment taken there, an hour here, scattered minutes pulled out of time and held close when the lights dim.
John’s wife had had one affair that he knew of. He understood that it had been going on for some time, but he never let that knowledge reach him. Finally one evening he drank enough to drive down to her office. He saw nothing, yet knew everything.
He didn’t even know she owned the kinds of underwear she gathered together, cursing. He didn’t know she drank, and the smell of whisky on her was almost too much to bear. Her boss was unflappable, offering up a sheepish grin while pumping his arms daring John’s no-doubt feeble attack.
John did not attack, of course, and he and his wife never spoke of it again, not even when a month after the event she was quietly fired. The embarrassment made her bitter.
John’s own shame became a worm that spread itself through nerve and muscle until he could barely speak of anything, or move his arms above his shoulders, or recognize more than the most basic of colors other than the hues illustrating that one defeating moment.
One of the things John remembers most about parenting is weekend trips to the emergency room. Illnesses and mishaps occurred almost invariably on weekends, and there quickly grew an atmosphere of desperation about it. His son panicked so he and his wife panicked as well.
He saw his neighbors visit the emergency room with their young daughter regularly for months.
Then one day they returned without her. The couple was quiet and had few friends in the area, so he never found out what really happened during those crucial moments of their last trip. Eventually they had another child: dark-haired, beautiful, and they never let her out of their sight.
Every year or so there would be reports of a rabid dog on the edge of town. No one could specify the location or witnesses. A friend of a friend (for enemies keep their peace). Children were said to have been killed. No surprise there, John thought—children are always said to have been killed.