“I’m not quitting.”
“What’s the matter, then? Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Okay, but are you?”
“I’m not sick and I’m not quitting,” Bob promised. And he wasn’t quitting, but he couldn’t face Chip knowing she was Connie, and had made the decision to avoid the center until she had gone. Perhaps it was a failure of mettle, some fundamental human test he was not rugged enough to master; and yet the task was so outsize to what he felt he was capable of that he experienced not a twinge of remorse at his turning away from it. Bob didn’t believe that Connie would understand who he was — that his presence would bring her comfort; and so to sit with her now would introduce nothing on her side but a significant pain on his, and he decided he’d had quite enough of it, and that was that. Maria told Bob it was his right as a free citizen to engage in mysteriousnesses but that she hoped he would soon get over whatever it was that was distracting him and return to the fold.
“You’ll save me my seat, then?” Bob asked.
“Well, yes, I will. Just be good and let us know when you want it back.”
And so came the period where Bob had no access to the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, and his days were dreary and lusterless. He disliked being separated from his friends, and the news of Connie brought on a pervasive sorrow which, while neither acute nor dangerous, slowed the clock by half and drained the world of its sounds and colors. He had for some years been experiencing the slow dimming of his capacities, but it was during this time away from the center that the dimming achieved prominence. He was forgetting things, he was burning things on the stove top, and he did occasionally become unsure about where he was going and why. His body, also, was uncooperative; he felt weaker in his limbs, he was falling asleep without knowing he was tired, then waking up confused and unrefreshed. He had increasingly been relying on the rope to climb the stairs to his room, pulling himself up hand over hand in the style of the mountaineer. One evening he fell asleep on the couch in the living room and didn’t wake up until four o’clock in the morning. He lay in the darkness for a time, looking, breathing. He stood and crossed the room and started hauling himself up the steps; when he reached the top step, the brass eyelet came away from the wall. There was a sickening instant where he hung in the air, teetering, rope in hand, then gravity seized him and threw him down the stairs like a stone into a pit. When he came to he was lying flat on his back and the pain in his midbody region made his mind pulse white, and his heart felt brutalized with its thuds and poundings. In a while the pain was lessened and replaced by a numbness and he found he could think of other things besides his discomfort. He thought, I believe I’ve broken my hip, and he had broken it. He thought, How am I going to be helped? A gauziness came over him, and now he felt bouncy and glad, and he giggled, but this hurt, so he stopped. He was becoming sleepy, and then very sleepy, and he was afraid of this sleep because he thought it could be sneaky death masquerading as an innocent tiredness. But there was no fighting it, and he dropped into slumber and did not die. He awoke at half-past nine in the morning to the sound of someone knocking on the door. “Come in,” he called. A young man wearing a safety vest entered, speaking as he stepped deeper into the house, “Hello? Hello?”
“Here I am.”
The young man hurried over and knelt beside Bob. “Sir, are you okay?” he said.
“I’m not, no. How are you?” Bob suggested the young man call him an ambulance and the young man took out his cell phone and did this, explaining the situation to the emergency operator so far as he understood it. “I don’t know what happened but I can tell you he’s definitely injured.”
“I fell down the stairs,” Bob said, pointing.
“He fell down the stairs,” the young man said. He asked Bob for his name and address and Bob told him these things and the young man relayed them to the operator. Now he was listening; soon he told Bob, “They want to know about your pain, Mr. Comet.”
“What about it?”
“How is it?”
“It’s coming in and out, but when it’s in, it’s large.”
The young man said, “I think he’s in a lot of pain.”
Bob still was clutching the rope that had come away from the wall. The young man noticed this and became shy. Lowering his voice, he told the operator, “Yeah, he’s holding a rope in his hand?” He left the room for the kitchen, speaking softly into his phone; Bob tried to hear what the young man was saying but couldn’t make out the words. He noticed the ceiling above the stairwell was cracking and he told himself to remember to address this later. In a while, the young man returned. “Five minutes, they say.”
Bob said, “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Glad to be of service.”
Bob said, “You don’t have to stay, if you’ve got work to do.”
“What’s five minutes?”
“I’m not suicidal,” Bob told the young man.
“Me neither,” the young man replied. He pulled up a chair and they waited together. Bob asked him what the purpose of his visit had been and the young man said, “I sell windows. Or I try to sell them. Actually, I don’t sell very many at all. When you sign up with this company, management names past employees, all-stars who’ve brought in such-and-such an amount through commission. But none of these famous past employees are still with the company, and I’m starting to think they didn’t exist in the first place.”
“Are the windows nice windows?”
“Between you and me? They’re defects. Shipment-damaged, mostly, or else banged-up display models. We buy them cheap and sell them cheap — which is how we get our foot in the door. It’s our installation of the windows where we make our profit. Or where the company does.”
Bob forgot he was injured and shifted his body. This occasioned a pain like an icicle in his stomach; he squinted hard and produced a low growling noise at the base of his throat and the young man asked, “Are you all right?” Bob shook his head: no. “Pain,” he said. When the pain passed, he told the young man, “I’d like to hear your patter.”
“You don’t want to hear that,” said the young man, smiling.
“It could be good for passing time,” Bob said.
“Okay, then. Only we don’t do patter anymore. Now it’s all about engagement.”
“What’s that mean?”
“In the old days, no offense, to sell was to utilize the monologue. But now, people want an active experience. The updated version is to ask questions that, coincidentally, lead the potential client where we want them.”
“Where’s that?”
“Where they’re talking themselves into buying our product.” The young man paused. “You really want me to do my thing for you? It’s a little gross. Phony-friendly, you know what I mean?”
Bob said, “I’m ready,” and the young man reconfigured himself into the shape of a salesman. He sat up straight, and his face became earnest, his voice jumped an octave: “Mr. Comet, you have a beautiful house. May I ask you how long you’ve been living here?”
“All my life, actually. It was my mother’s house before it was mine.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s wonderful. What a thing that is!” He was surveying the house interior, nodding, impressed. “And you know what? I can see at a glance that this is a well made house. Well made but also well cared for — which is critical. Because there’s a responsibility which comes along with owning a house like this, am I right? With a house like this, you’re not just the owner, you’re the custodian, would you agree with me on that, Mr. Comet?”