Perhaps his dead wife had taken the photos. But why hadn’t he noticed them before? He hadn’t been paying attention. He had lost his memory of these photos. Little by little he had lost meaning. He had lost his wife.
He’d discovered that when life grew dull he could experiment with being his opposite. A teetotaller, he became a heavy drinker. Quiet around women, he became the ultimate charmer. Passive and reticent, he became forceful and brave. He might maintain the transformation only for a few days, sometimes only for a few hours. But each time he managed to retain at least a ghost of the person he’d pretended to be. For certainly these were all people he could have been, given the right circumstances. Chance could make you dull and fearful, or interested and competent. He believed we should have more control than that over our personalities, but so often we did not. Luck of the draw. Sometimes late at night he could hear the faint sound of the world shuffling, reshuffling, riffling the deck.
John had a sister who would forever define the best and worst of the female sex for him. A year younger, she had always been more mature. When they were teenagers she let him watch her get dressed so that “He would know the order that a woman’s clothes went on.” It was another year before he fully understood what she had been talking about.
They drew apart in their middle years. He never forgave her for taking up smoking. She drank too much, dressed immodestly. The last time he saw her was after his wife died and following the end of her third marriage, and it shocked him how much she looked like their mother.
It was then he knew he could never marry again.
Only recently had John realized that people did not fully appreciate the importance of individual moments. A stumble over a stone, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman, and your life was changed forever. And what is that glint in the passing automobile’s bumper—the reflection of your long dead son, his heart stopped by a fall, now singing into the last sharp reflection of the day?
Most of his adult life John had worked in an office. Originally it had been the best he could get right out of college with a good education but no special skills. In the years that followed it was the thing he knew, and when a company had to plug someone into a position his was the plug that fit.
Primarily he moved papers around, office to office, company to client, company to government, and back again. He now has very few memories of that period of his work life.
For paper destroys time. That can be wonderful in a novel, but not so wonderful when you’re trying to recall, and store away, the best part of your day.
There were very few things John felt ashamed of. But all of them had to do with women. Things he’d done when he was much younger, of course. They’d tease him on and then they’d try to turn him off.
No one knew himself less than a young man in his early twenties. Unable to see past his own need. So many shameful incidents, so many explosions of bad behavior: he’d take them back if he could. He spent many a late night worrying over the sins of a younger self.
If his son had lived, he would have told him. He would have replayed every ill-behaved moment. And his boy, he would have had to listen.
John saw the man three times in as many months. A hard face, collar pulled up as high as it would go. Oily eyes. He never knew such eyes were possible, as if the tear ducts issued a yellow oil that glazed the eyes. The first time he saw him the man was watching some small boys play ball at the edge of the park, examining every move as if he were a major league scout. The second time John had brushed against him as he came out of the hardware store. Metallic things jangled under the coat—John checked his body for injury—he could have sworn he felt his skin tear. The third time the man had appeared on a distant corner, bent to pet a cat, and snapped its neck with a blur of motion. John had run to the corner but there was no sign of the man or the cat.
He searched the papers for months for news of missing children and found nothing. He always believed it was the wrong papers, or the wrong time.
John was hardly suicidal, but sometimes in the dentist’s chair he imagined himself succumbing to some medication mishap and discovered he didn’t feel badly about that. He felt such vulnerability leaning back with his mouth open, metal instruments protruding like utensils from a serving bowl. Halfway to death already, or so it seemed: the only thing between him and death now an allergy or a sensitivity or some accidental lethal combination. That’s what death frequently was, anyway, an accidentally lethal combination of moments. You could worry about it all your life or you could accept it, even welcome this universe of accidental possibility.
In fact, he was frequently so relaxed in the dentist’s chair he slept through the most uncomfortable procedures. The best moment was when he first closed his eyes, waiting for the drill.
They try so hard to be heard, John thinks: the ghosts, the ones who have passed from day to night to when and wherever. They need what we all need: contact, a body that will listen. But at least they know true contact is impossible. We still cling to our illusions.
Sometimes looking at the world is like gazing through an oil-smeared lens: their passage dirties the glass, preventing him from seeing anything with absolute clarity.
But that is their mission—that is all they have left since their lives went away. To obscure. To cloud. To hinder our view of the next day.
He’d reached the age when the body chooses to rebel. Arms had shortened themselves, and hands could not hold anything reliably except another hand.
More difficult still was the unusual shape his ears had taken, and the wart he noticed on the side of his nose one day, apparently which appeared overnight.
He supposed it might be a reaction to the longevity of modern man. The body knows it was never meant to last past forty, and does its damnedest to convince the mind.
One moment he is racing to catch the train, a movie, or a plane. The next moment he dodders like a film slipping its sprockets to display the same image again and again: an old man with a surprised look, shouting at his feet to move.
We drown in a sea of the dead, he thinks. Everywhere are the things they have made, touched, hated, loved. The oils from their bodies, the stench of their humanity, the electric charge of their passions, linger—he is sure of it—long after their physical bodies are gone. In the heavy air that chokes the world their vanished lives move.
We cannot avoid them. They brush against us, rub their lost memories into our flesh so often they become a part of us we cannot scrub, medicate, or cut out.
It is impossible, sometimes, to think, because the noise of what they had and what they miss fills our heads.
It is impossible to breathe without breathing them in.
The world, he thinks, is made not so much of atoms and electrons as of moments.
If he let himself be open to it John knew the world to be a work of art. The textures of it, the infinite shadings of color, the shapes that resonated in the oldest part of the brain. To move through the world was to live inside a work of art, down to the individual brushstrokes and pixels. Moments of time were merely dabs of color, spontaneous decisions, which altered the entire portrait.
All one had to do was pick up the brush and add one’s own little bit. A simple line or color fill would do, but so few made the effort.