Once, after a week-long drunk, he’d used his own bodily fluids to smear the doodles across his clean white bed sheets.
He began to write a catalog of the ones he had neglected, or found impossible to save, hoping for some new understanding. He wrote captions at the bottoms of the originals, hoping his labels might crystallize and clarify:
Topographies of nowhere.
The worms of remembrance.
The absence of love.
In the masses of doodles he discovered pointillist portraits of children he’d never had, and that made him feel like a traitor to his daughter’s memory.
And here were the feathers from birds that were now extinct or that had never existed.
And here were mazes that would forever frustrate him because they had no solutions.
And here were the wriggling walls and strange vegetation that had grown up around him, completely isolating him from the outside world.
The fire had started in the bedroom. That’s what they had said the other time. It had been piled almost to the ceiling with “drawings,” as someone had called them, although most were no better than hen-scratchings, crudely repeated patterns like those a very young child might make. The drawings had been set on fire, but the rising heat had permitted a few to escape the open window. Several of these were unlike the others, were not crude at all, but were small, obsessive, precisely rendered portraits of a young girl’s face, dozens of them covering the page in a somewhat spiral pattern.
All the neighbors said he had been a nervous man, a smoker. They’d said that the other time as well.
STRANDS
He came to believe that there were knives far sharper than any made by human beings. Manufactured of materials we could not even imagine. And that there were vague, formless surgeons skilled at manipulating those knives, capable of separating nerve from tissue, nerve from nerve, and, deeper still, spreading apart the strands of thought, severing perception from conclusion, scattering the chains of continuity, turning all the moments of a life into short lengths of string, gathered into a box for casual selection and arrangement.
Dream: His brother, Michael, is late again. He keeps calling the apartment, but there is no answer. Suddenly Michael bursts through the door, his hair wild, his shirt unbuttoned—no, torn. Michael is grinning. Fooled you again! he cries. But Michael’s mouth does not move. It remains open and rigid like the bell of a horn. As if frozen in time.
Memory: The main staircase of his parents’ home had always been carpeted in plush, bright red, as far back as he could remember. On that particular day he had paid close attention to that carpet as he climbed the stairs. For some reason he had known how important it was to notice, and record, every detail of the twenty-year-old carpeting: how it pressed neatly into the bottom edge of each riser, flowed softly over the nosing, then stretched thinly across the tread, where the wear was greatest, where the blood-red of the fibers had worn and discolored to a dull rust. From all those steps: his and his brother’s, his drunken parents shuffling each other off to bed. The areas on the edge of the tread were also unevenly colored, from too little vacuuming or too frequent vacuuming with an ill machine. Where the carpet ended on each side the fibers were ragged, untrimmed. The oak edging looked sticky, and probably hadn’t been dusted or wiped in years. He wondered if his mother still had a cleaning lady come in, or if the drinks had become too costly for that.
The door to his brother’s old bedroom was cracked open. About two inches. Maybe three. Maybe he should measure it. The silliness of the thought bothered him, increasing his anxiety. In a rush to escape the next such thought, he pushed open the door.
The mural with Peter Rabbit and friends was still up on the wall. Their mother had never bothered to repaint. But it confused him for a moment, and even seeing Michael on the bed he wondered why his brother wasn’t getting up for school, if maybe he was sick, or pretending to be sick; and then he remembered that Michael was twenty-three, and neither of them had lived in their parents’ house in years.
Peter Rabbit was holding a bright red flower in his right paw. The dripping flower seemed to come closer, as if Peter were going to hand it to him. Maybe Michael was whispering to Peter, telling him what to do. He had a hard time focusing. On the bed, Michael’s head was covered with the melting red flower. Peter had been digging in the flower garden again. The rabbit had completely ruined Michael’s head with the digging and hadn’t even bothered to wash off the evidence: his fur was all spotted brown and red and gray. Mr. McGregor was going to know what had happened for sure.
But Mr. McGregor had already been here, he could see. For Michael was holding Mr. McGregor’s rifle.
And now: He was going to be late for his appointment again. On the bus an elderly woman thought she knew him. She called him “Joe” and told him all about her daughter, whom he used to date, and how she was doing—married, three kids in Chicago. He tried to remember if the story she was telling might be true.
“She was always a good dancer,” he said.
“Oh, the best! The very best! She won awards!”
“I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ginger Rogers,” he said.
“Oh, you were much too young to remember Ginger Rogers.” The old lady looked worried.
“I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ann-Margret,” he said.
The old lady smiled. “She’s as beautiful as ever,” she said. “She hasn’t changed at all. A good marriage will do that for you. Are you married?”
He stared at her, trying to remember if he had ever been close to marriage, because he wanted to say yes, even though he knew it couldn’t be true. But after all these years, how could he not even have come close to marriage? Could he be that different from everyone else in the world? “No,” he finally said. “I’m afraid not.”
The old lady pursed her lips, patted his knee. “Well, you really should consider it, young man. It would do you a world of good.” And then she sat up straight and looked away from him, out the window at all the stores and people they were passing, as if she were through with him, as if she had immediately forgotten he’d ever existed.
For the rest of the bus ride he tried to imagine what he might have been like if his name had been Joe. He tried to imagine himself married to this old lady’s daughter, having this old woman as a mother-in-law. It all seemed perfectly plausible.
He closed his eyes and could see the daughter dancing, kicking her feet high up into the air, twirling, a bright red flower pinned to her breast.
The Therapist: “Sometimes it’s as if I’ve lost track,” he told the therapist, a woman who always wore dark glasses during their sessions. “As if the events in my life have become subtly disordered. It becomes too easy to believe that something that’s past, that’s over, hasn’t occurred yet, or maybe won’t even occur at all. My relationships don’t end—they just go on and on. The time frame seems too irrelevant. Michael tells me things every day. Tomorrow my mother will send me to school for the first time. Next week I’ll meet a woman I last dated over a year ago, but I’ll be meeting her for the first time.”
“We all want to know where we came from and where we’re going,” the therapist said.