At ten I sat down at the dinette table in the breakfast nook and took TB’s letter from my wallet. On the other side I wrote this note:
Corrine,
I’ve been holding this letter for months now. The most important thing it meant to me was that I didn’t get angry about it. I was just sad that we had drifted so far apart. I don’t know if you care for this man or if his feelings for you make any difference. But I do know that you didn’t trust me with our money and that you couldn’t share your fears or joys with me, that you gave these feelings to a stranger because I left you no other choice. I know that whatever feeling we once had packed up and moved out with Mercury. So I’m going to leave. I’m breaking it off in one quick movement because I know that that’s the only good thing I could do for you.
I spent three days and two nights in Central Park. The weather was temperate, and I slept on a bench. One guy tried to rob me, and I went crazy. I actually picked up a trash can and hit him with it. After that I went to a homeless shelter on the Bowery. My joints were sore, and I realized that my clothes smelled like dust. I had put all my financial papers and important documents into a safe-deposit box at My Bank on Madison. I figured that I could live a life just off the streets for years with what I had. I’d get jobs washing dishes or maybe as a box boy in a local market in Queens. I could read Love in the Time of Cholera and learn to play chess competitively in Washington Square Park. I had been pretty good at chess in high school and later at college.
I dreamed one night that Corrine and I lived in a room. We were on a bed separated by an unbreakable glass wall. We couldn’t hear each other through the thick barrier and so could only communicate through gesture. She pointed with both hands at her eyes and then at her stomach. I didn’t understand. Then she touched her right foot with her right hand and looked beseechingly at me. I hunched my shoulders.
This dream played over and over, like an experimental film on a continuous loop. At one point I realized that the dream wouldn’t stop. I wondered how long I had been asleep. My joints ached. I wanted to wake up but couldn’t.
Finally I was conscious, but I couldn’t open my eyes because they were glued shut by secretions. I tried to lift my hand to open them, but I was too weak, so I concentrated on forcing my eyelids open. After a while they came apart, scraping the sand of sleep across my corneas.
I was in a long hall tenanted by at least a dozen patients on slender hospital beds. A middle-aged Indian woman in a white smock was standing over me.
“What is your name?” she asked. It seemed as if she had asked me that question before.
“Frank Brown.”
“Do you have family?”
I shook my head and the room also shook.
“Health insurance?”
“No.”
“You’re very sick, Mr. Brown,” the doctor said. “You’re suffering from malnutrition and probably walking pneumonia that has given way to full-blown pulmonary disease. Your lungs are a mess, and antibiotics don’t seem to be working.”
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
“They brought you from the shelter four days ago.”
“Am I going to die?” I whispered.
“That’s why we want to know if you’re insured or if there’s someone who can help.”
When I wasn’t moving or blinking too fast, I felt very warm and secure.
“Can I stay here?” I asked.
“For a week,” she said. “After that we have to move you to a state facility.”
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the Indian doctor was gone.
I felt warm and swaddled. In that bed there were no desires, not even much discomfort. There were beds around me, but I didn’t know who was in them. I didn’t have to eat or get up to go to the bathroom. All I had to do was sleep and awaken now and again. Each period of sleep seemed to have a longer arc. It was as if my consciousness was a skipping stone over placid water that built up speed and power as it went. I was completely satisfied knowing that I’d sleep, open my eyes, and sleep again, until finally one day the sleep would go on, leaving me behind.
“Dad?”
I’d heard the word before in my death-sleep. It was a single note but also a word, a class of men... me.
Mercury was sitting in a pine folding chair next to my bed. His butter-brown face was drawn.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
I looked around and noticed that I was no longer in the crowded infirmary. It was a single room — just for me.
“How do you feel?” my son asked.
I took in a long, deep breath, realizing how shallow my breathing had been.
“Good,” I said. “Better. Where’s your mother?”
“I want you to come home, Dad.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“I took a leave to come back and find you. I’ve been going all over the city to hospitals and shelters, the police and city social workers.”
“Where’s your mother?” I asked again.
“She thought, she thought you might not want to see her.”
There was a lot of information in that stuttered sentence. But it didn’t matter. Mercury my son had done for me what I was unable to do for Mercury my father.
“If I live,” I said.
“What, Dad?”
“If I live, I’ll come home.”
Haunted
Iwas sitting at the dining room table surrounded by stacks of books and old newspapers, dirty dishes, bills, and first, second, and third drafts of handwritten letters to editors of various literary reviews. My laptop computer screen was open to a staff-page photograph from the Black Rook Review’s website. The BRR was a small literary quarterly out of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I was looking at the picture of young, milk-soppy Clark Heinemann, holding in my hand his rejection of my one-thousandth story, “Shootout on the Wild Westside.” Mira, my girlfriend of the last sixteen years, was leaving to sleep at her mother’s house in Hoboken because, she said, and I quote, “your continual vituperation is too much for me to bear.”
“Call me when you’re human again, Paul,” she said, before rolling her black-and-pink-polka-dotted roller bag out the door of our fifth-floor walk-up apartment.
I remember it all so clearly: Heinemann’s rejection letter was in my hand, and his smug, slack face was on the screen; I could hear the thump and slide, thump and slide, thump and slide of Mira’s bag as she lowered it step-by-step.
...while the concept is interesting the execution leaves me with more questions than answers. I think you might have greater success sending this story to a genre magazine where the readers have more sympathy for the ambiance and tone...
Heinemann’s words were in my head while his doughy face smirked at me. Mira’s bag’s bump and slide down the stairs was fading when my hand, seemingly of its own volition, crushed the letter. This minor act of anger was exacerbated by a pain in my middle finger. It felt as if a bone had broken. Before I could react, the sharp ache jumped from my hand to my shoulder, and my breath got short. I was convinced that these were psychosomatic manifestations of the rage I felt about Heinemann and his condescending, typewritten, type-signed letter.
Here he used a typewriter on watermarked paper not as a sign of respect but because of his supercilious conceit.
There was no personal intention to that letter; I was sure of this even as I tumbled from the dining room chair to the bare oak floor. My left ankle got tangled in the power cord, and the laptop fell with me. It didn’t break. Lying there sideways on the floor, Clark Heinemann sneered at my diminution, my impotence.