When Sedgwick saw the body on the beach in the morning he resisted believing it was Adelaide, the woman he had been seeing until they had wordlessly drifted apart without, he thought, having made any sort of commitment, save for the unspoken assumption that they’d spend an evening or two together when she was in town, mostly on the weekends, at one of the beach bars along the A1A strip up by Fort Pierce for drinks, slow dances, and sharing their stories over a bowl of peel n’ eat shrimp or maybe the conch fritters which she liked better even though they were greasy and she’d have to take a Zantac later but truly because the lingering smell of shrimp on her fingers kept her from teasing herself with the smell of Sedge on them after he would leave with the sky beginning to lighten over the water in the east through the windows of the condo she rented in the winter months, but before the beachgoers had set up their chairs and umbrellas, save for the brown-skinned men in Panama hats, long sleeve shirts, and their tall fishing rods to catch the blues or whatever was running from the tuna that early in the day and, when Sedge, that day, saw the body, a shudder ran down his spine to behind his knees from the adrenaline or whatever chemical it is that shocks into your veins and your heart and lungs and stomach even before your eyes have adjusted to what you are seeing, like how your brain knows what is coming before the tires screech and the metal crushes you into the exploding airbags and breaks your nose, and he realized then that it was her, with the leathery men and women around her with their tucked-in towels and their heads bent, and she, lying on her stomach with her arms spread out limp and wide and her head turned away from him as if she could not bear to think of him looking at her lying flat on the beach in the black bathing suit she loved and thought she looked stunning in and how he might think then that she’d worn the same bathing suit two days in a row instead of how she washed it each evening and hung it to dry on the railing of the deck of the condo, soaking up the morning sun and the freshness of the sea and, with her hair red and clogged with clumps of brown seaweed, and the drying sand adhering to her back and her thighs in a way that she would feel made her look dissolute and un-ladylike, and as if she wanted him turn and walk back up the beach while the other men and women standing over like mournful Neolithic sarsen Stonehenge pillars created long slow shadows across her body, with one of them pointing toward her as if questioning whether or not to cover her before the police came, and talking in soft funereal tones to spare her from hearing what perhaps only she, if she were alive, would hear, as she always had, as criticism and fault with her, as had her father in the years before he left her mother and herself in the one bedroom apartment in Kissimmee where she had slept on the pullout couch and, even then, at the age of seven, was expected to have washed and dressed herself and made her own breakfast and folded the bed back up into the rank and moldy innards of the couch that had been in the apartment they rented by the month, and hearing, on the first day of every month, the rapping on the door as she picked up the trash and bottles from the kitchen floor and put them in the bin as she had been told to do whenever the landlord came for the rent, peeking in over her shoulder, breathing his rancid breath with his hand on the small of her back in a way that chilled her and made gooseflesh on her arms and she would tell him that he should come back in the evening to see her father who had the money for him, while her father, at that very moment, was laying in his shorts and tee shirt with his arm across her mother, before she dressed and left for work at the nail salon in Orlando six days a week, knowing that the life she had was not the life she wanted nor wanted for her daughter and prayed that when Adelaide was old enough she would leave this tawdry place and its guns and ammo shops and have a life that would bring her a little happiness, a little rest, and a man who would treat her right, like a woman wants to be treated, and which, she told Adelaide, that that life would come to her because she was smart and strong and wily, to which Adelaide would laugh and say that she never wanted to be like Wile E Coyote because he’s the one who always runs off the edge of the cliff or has an anvil falling down on him and maybe he dies or maybe he doesn’t but she didn’t really know because she’d always put her hands over her eyes when she saw that starting to happen and she hoped that it never ever would happen to her, and her mother would grab her up in her soft white arms and hold her as tight as could be and squeeze Adelaide’s breath out of her and say to her, “Adelaide, my baby, that will never happen to you,” and, when Sedge saw her lying there in her black bathing suit in the center of the growing crowd on the early beach with the receding tide, his heart sank and his knees sank, falling to the rough sand, he shielded his eyes in his arms, wanting in desperate hopeful hopelessness for what he had seen to be unseen, undone, and erased from the eternal memory of the universe and feeling, too, that somehow, someway, he had what?…. failed her?…. forsaken?…. her by not caring enough to avert whatever had happened to her, while knowing in the deepest depths of his being that, yes, that was, in truth, what he had done.
Category: Friendship
Silas Cleary, Friday Morning
Silas Cleary awakes slowly. Friday morning. It is grey with wind and rain.
He draws the covers aside and lifts one leg, and then the other, over the side of the bed. He feels the cold floor on the soles of his feet as he walks into the kitchen. His sleep had been fitful, interrupted, and difficult falling back to sleep.
He takes his morning meds from the cupboard and swallows them with a cup of warm coffee from the pot Mirette had made for the two of them before she left for work.
The day is his. Nothing required of him. Only what he wants to do. And what needs doing.
Rain thrums against the roof shingles. After coffee, Silas sits at his desk to write a few emails. He is wearing headphones, listening to a recording of Dion in concertat the Tropicana in Atlantic City in 2004.
A brief intro followed by two, three, and four beats of silence. The next thing you hear is an acapella solo, by a bass-baritone, his lips and breath pushing out heavy, propulsive consonants into the mic: Dun-dun-dun-dun, Dun-dun-dun-dun-dah, and in comes Dion riding above the bass, with his B-flat tenor, asking, I wonder why, I love you like I do. is it because I think you love me to?
The do-wop, the rhythm, the lyrics of teen angst, wonder, and the anticipation of first love. All as real and present for him as in ’58 when he first heard it on the radio in the back seat of his brother’s black 1951 Ford Custom Tudor sedan … Dun-dun-dun- dun- dah...
Last night, as he has done on every-other Thursday night for the last sixteen weeks, Silas went to sleep wearing an infusion pump as he will for two nights and three days. Chemotherapy agents flowing through a port in his chest. The pump emits a low whir and click. In the days after the infusion begins, the fatigue, the neuropathy, the GI symptoms, and low appetite come again.
Silas has cancer. It is treatable the oncologist says. Treatable, but not curable. It was diagnosed five months ago.
An endoscopy had revealed a bleeding gastric ulcer which would be biopsied.
Two days after the endoscopy, the hospitalist came into his room, pulling aside the curtains between the beds. “You have cancer,” he said. He’d been brief, disconnected, barely making eye contact. If he’d said more, Silas could remember none of it. And then when he was done, Silas was left alone, sitting in bed.
It, the diagnosis, was unexpected. A surprise. Coming at him like a sand-spreader truck backing out of a blind alley onto a dark, icy road towards his car at three o’clock in the morning.
And as it is backing out, for an instant, time slows to a slouching crawl; the mind moving at one-quarter speed in the single second before the crash.
In a way, though, it was less of a surprise: the slow motion truck coming toward him was real. For years he’d had heartburn, anemia, fatigue, cramps, taking Tums, and pantoprazole. It all kept getting worse.
And then he’d gone to the ER.
Alone in the hospital bed, surrounded by sadness, he felt the tickle tears that would have come if only someone else had been there by the bedside. But no one was, and the tears did not come.
It didn’t matter that the doctor didn’t stay. The diagnosis had become the new incumbent shape of reality. The frame, the context, the backdrop.
But within that, nothing had changed. The room. The light through the window. The metal chair in the corner. The closet with his coat, shoes and a bag of his belongings. The white board with his last and first name, date, and who the on-duty nurse was. The book he brought, the phone, and a plastic cup of water on the wheeled table. Everything was the same, exactly the same, as moments before, but everything was different.
Later, Silas will feed the dog and then they’ll walk up into the woods behind the horse farm, avoiding the puddles and mud, and taking the path that circles the lake and leads up through the cemetery.
When they come back, he’ll make something for breakfast, pay the bills coming due, and write for a few hours. Maybe a nap before starting dinner. Tomorrow he’ll return to packing up books for the thrift store and the used bookstore, considering which ones to be left on the shelves.
Yesterday had been the last infusion in the first treatment cycle. Eight, three-day infusions, two weeks apart. Sixteen weeks of first line therapy. Whatever line might come next will depend on the results of the PET scan he’ll have in four days.
Don’t know why I love you. I just do.
Silas no longer wonders why. There is no point to wondering why.
Not why his life has taken the turn it has. Nor why he loves Mirette or their dog or cooking, or mowing the lawn, or reading books about slavery and the Third Reich, or why he spends his time writing short stories. This is what he does now, what he wants to do, what he will continue to do.
By next week, the fatigue will have worn itself out, and the mouth sores and tingling fingers will lessen. He will call a friend, and they’ll meet for coffee and talk about the novels they’re reading, Wimbledon, and the state of the world. And they’ll make plans to play tennis one morning, and to go to the little seafood place on Hanover Street in the North End and they’ll order a skillet of the black ink pasta and garlic calamari meatballs with a house salad with oil and vinegar, and maybe also a bottle of Nero d’Avola… if the spirit so moves them.
And come fall, he and Mirette will rake and bag up the oak and maple leaves, and they’ll plant the bulbs they’ve kept in the basement. Maybe they’ll plan a vacation to someplace simple and warm, and with a language they will not have to practice and learn to speak beforehand.
My Dinner with Andra
Andra and I met for dinner at Wo Hop on Mott Street. It serves what she calls the most “authentic New York-style” Chinese food. It is bright, loud and crowded. It smells heavenly. And the waiters rush dishes out as soon as they are prepared.
Because her flight from Europe was delayed, we met there at 9:30 pm, shortly before closing.
We sat at a booth in a corner furthest from the kitchen. She’d slept on the plane intermittently and she was ravenous. She ordered for the two of us.
We spoke for a while about Budapest, her writing, and the course she taught there. She was animated but soon her mood shifted.
She folded her arms in front of her on the table and leaned toward me.
“I am spent,” she said. “I had such great hopes for my year away and much of it was wonderful. But I now feel lost, unmoored, and meaningless to a certain extent and that life, in fact, lacks any inherent meaning.”
“Andra,” I said.
“No, I’m serious. I was there for a year and my classes were going well. I even considered moving there, at least for a few years, but as time went on, I felt the work was dispiriting. I was diligent. I admit, I had high expectations. However, my students were unengaged, uncommitted, at least in the way I had expected them to be: European, whatever that might mean. They were no better by comparison to those I had been teaching here. I began to ask myself, am I making any difference at all in their lives? They certainly were not making any difference in mine.”
“Andra, I know you. You’re a good teacher. Your students speak highly of you.”
“Yes, yes, I know that, but…”
“And this just began in Budapest?
“No. In fact, I had taken the job there because I felt that living here, in this New York bubble, was, with the constant hype, celebrity, needy causes, acquisitiveness, and self-satisfaction, stifling. Don’t you feel that at times?”
“About New York or that I am going through life playing a part of some sort with no meaning?”
“Well, both, but more than that, that life ultimately has no meaning. We fill our days with work and phone calls and dinners out, and futile political conversations without any effect. When, in fact, they are simply diversions from facing that we are alone in the world which cares nothing about us and which itself has no meaning.”
The waiter had brought platters of chow fun, spareribs with ginger and scallion and a shrimp dish I could not identify. I spooned some of each dish onto my plate.
“Andra, I don’t disagree with you at all. The world is, in fact, pointless. But life need not be meaningless or pointless. If you are thinking that because, ultimately, as perhaps you are, we all die, therefore life has no meaning, I disagree with you. If anything, death gives us the opportunity to find meaning in life, in relationships, family, and creativity.”
She was quiet while the waiter filled our glasses with ice water.
“On the flight back,” she said, “I had this terrifyingly real dream that I had somehow contracted a painful and incurable condition, much like when I was younger and had endometriosis which they could do nothing for except remove my uterus which I refused to do, and now I had this disease, equally painful and incurable. I woke up in fear. I may have screamed, because the attendant came over to me and she actually sat down next to me and asked if they should divert the fight for me, and of course I said no, I apologized and passed it off as nothing of concern.”
“That must have been so frightening.”
“Yes, yes, it was, but of course I don’t have such a disease. Not that I know of, but what if I do? It would be all over. How could I go on? Maybe I could. I mean it just shows you how flimsy life can be. Ultimately how meaningless it is. Do you ever feel that way?”
“Yes, I said, “I am constantly aware of the tenuousness of life and, and, how close to death we might be at any moment. Even at this very moment.”
“Doesn’t that terrify you?” she said, “I try not to think about that. I don’t think I could get up in the morning or go to work if I thought like that. But you have not touched the kung pao shrimp, it is truly scrumptious.”
I took a bite of the shrimp.
“And then,” she continued, “just when I was considering lengthening my stay there, to focus on the book I had started, there was this student, an attractive young man from the Pest quarter of the city, who was clearly one of the better of the group, invited me to lunch after the semester ended. We went to the Espresso café near the Montenegro Embassy. He was an earnest young man and quite well dressed. I admit I felt a twinge of what, affection, perhaps. But as the afternoon went on, I was unprepared for what he began talking about.”
“What was that?”
“Well, at one point over our coffee, he said, conversationally, that he was studying acting and that Stanislavski taught that the essence of acting was to constantly ask oneself, ‘Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from, and where am I going?’ And he told me, again quite earnestly, that to truly live we must ask those questions of ourselves. Only then, he said, can we act with honesty, compassion. and empathy. Only then can we live rather than just perform.”
“That is remarkable insight is it not? I mean, for a young man. And, was that not what you yourself had been feeling? Did you see him again?”
“Heavens no,” she said. “Why would he say such things to me? His former teacher. I had no desire to spend the rest of the afternoon at a glorious outdoor café by the Danube or any time or any place, being lectured by him about how I should live.”
“But, Andra, was he not being sincere and caring and relating to you, just as you wanted. Just as we all want?”
She looked at me as if I was talking gibberish.
“I don’t know what we all want, and don’t think you or he know either. I toldhim that what he was suggesting to me was, by implication, impertinent and glaringly inappropriate. I am an educated, aware, and accomplished person. Thoroughly cognizant of my own mortality, and that, as a path to gain authenticity in life that I should engage in some theatrical trick is in any way superior to, say, just waking up each day, having a cup of coffee, breathing in some fresh air and saying, ‘fuck it, let’s see what happens today.”
Her watch beeped. She checked and moved to stand up.
“I am tired now. I am exhausted, and I am going home to sleep. I have come home from a situation which no longer worked for me. And tomorrow I will undoubtedly awaken, say ‘fuck it,’ perhaps out loud, and feel boundlessly better.”
I started to say something when she stood up. She waved me not to, thanked the waiter, gathered up her package of leftovers, and said, “This has been fabulous,” and, pointing to the check, she said to me ,“I have only a few Euros in my pocket. Please be a dear, will you?”
And then she was gone. Her footsteps clacked on the concrete steps up to Mott Street.
A Hole in the Bucket
Somewhere in this story there is a point. I’m not sure yet what it is, though it may be revealed in the task of my telling it.
I’ll begin here in the middle, with when I left the Yankee tour bus in the parking lot at Queechee Gorge and got into the car service I had arranged to have meet me.
I had agreed with the driver on the general directions and the cost, and after a brief and conversation, he looked in his mirror and said, – So, is this on your bucket list?
– Sort of, I said. A very short one. I told him I had some health issues and needed to get away to someplace quiet and less stressful. That was not quite true, but not entirely false, either.
– I hear you, man, he said. Bummer. You doin’ okay, though?
I told him I was and thanked him for asking.
– You bet, he answered.
Two or three weeks ago I first told Liza about I how needed leave the country, to go to Canada.
– Why on earth do you want to do that? Are you in trouble? she said.
– No, it’s not like that. It’s just every day, now, the relentless not knowing what will come next. Tariffs, Medicare, FEMA, deportations, DEI, the stock market, IRAs, firings, threats, trashing the constitution and our lives. I just can’t ignore what’s going on.
– Nor can I, she said. But I don’t think about it all day the way you do. Thinking like that is right where they want you. Making you feel powerless and vulnerable when I know you are neither.
– But I feel that way. I’m frightened and depleted. I don’t want to live like this, not here, not now, and not for four more years.
We talked for days. I won’t go into it all now, but you can easily see how that was going and where it eventually led, given that there I was in a car service heading north with nothing more of a plan than an inchoate need to get away.
Liza is a wise woman, way wiser than I am, and I didn’t listen to her.
I had found a place on Google maps along Halls Stream Road in Vermont, upstream from Beecher’s Falls, where the stream and road bend close to the border with Quebec. The stream there is wide, and seemed likely to be slow, shallow, and hidden beneath trees. A spot where the farmhouses on the Canadian side seemed so close you could hit the bright white side of one with a baseball.
We drove north on I-91, then on two-lane roads over streams that shifted from one side of the road the other. It was all so green. The tension began seeping out of my bones. Granite cliffs with plumes of water plunging through the cracks and tumbling white and hard to the side of the road.
We turned onto more narrow roads with gabled houses on both sides and large front porches and stacks of cord wood under the windows.
My eyes grew heavy, and I dozed though, without the scenery to distract me, I did not rest. Lisa and our argument spun on a loop, snippets morphing into a city street, alone, I didn’t know where I was, or how I could get home and not even knowing where home was. Asking for help from unresponsive passersby.
I was then suddenly startled, as if I’d been shaken awake.
– We’re coming up to three hours now, the driver said. How much further?
Where were we? I had lost track of the miles and the minutes. The houses on both sides had crept closer, encroaching on the rutted road. A fluttering of Trump flags in yards on the Vermont side, Buy Canadian and No US dollars Wanted on the other. The dark and ominous Sharpee lines so thickly drawn at home had been traced this far north. This was neither peaceful nor woodsy and welcoming.
I had envisioned getting out of the car at a quiet, deserted spot, stepping into the stream and walking south with the current. Finding a safe spot to climb onto dry land in Canada. I’d find a small town café with place to sit, blow steam across a hot cup of Tim Hortons and nod to folks in flannel shirts.
I was, instead, thrown off balance, tossed roughly aside by my own foolish self-centeredness. I was ashamed to have ignored Liza, her feelings, discounting her. Leaving her alone where I myself did not want to be. What I had envisioned was a selfish adolescent fantasy. In leaving I had lost what had been the most stable and reassuring place I had ever been. I felt a fool. I had betrayed her. I had betrayed myself. I had chosen to leave only because I could while others could not. To let them deal with whatever would come next. I am not fleeing gang violence or drug cartels or anything near that, as so many others are. Not even close. I’m a privileged opportunist playing political runaway.
– What are we doing here, Bud? the driver said.
He was right. What was I doing here? This was not where I wanted or needed to be, away from Liza, from reality, however grim I felt it to be.
– Oh, I’m sorry, I told him. I lost track of where we were going. Pull over for a moment, please. I don’t feel well. I need to…
– You bet, he said, and he got out of the car, walked away, and lit a cigarette.
Did I know what I needed to do? Yes.
I paid the driver what I owed him and asked him to take me down to Montpelier. To the Amtrak station.
I now have ticket in my pocket for the train that leaves tomorrow morning at 10:25 AM which gets me back home by 6:09 PM. I will call Liza and get a room at a hotel.
It will all work out ok, I am certain, as it likely would have if I had simply listened more and heeded Liza’s advice.
But I will say one more thing that has come to me, two actually: 1) A bucket is no place to carry anything other than water and, 2) A list is not where the life that you want and which makes you most happy should reside.
Slow Dancing
Henderson awoke this morning, as he had on some other mornings lately, with a fog-bound sense of dread.
He opened his eyes, lifted his head to the day for a moment, and then turned away, closing his eyes against the light coming in through the window.
“Lena,” he said, “I just need a few more minutes.”
It had been, in truth, more than just a few mornings.
They came with a vague, unfocused, sense of foreboding.
Lena was, and always had been, an energetic early riser. He had been like that too when he was a bit younger. And even now, on some mornings, if he had a task to do, somewhere he needed to be, or someone he’d promised to help in some way, he had no trouble opening his eyes minutes before the alarm would ring and he’d be up shaving, showering and having a cup of coffee. He’d be alive with energy. Alive with purpose. Alive with relevance. A relevance which was invigorating. An invigoration that he savored, however fleetingly.
The sense of dread was shapeless. Not like as a young boy when he had awoken with terror in the middle of the night. That would wake him suddenly, gripping him with a sense of his disappearing into a vast and endless universe of death and obliteration. Of confronting his own inevitable return to nothingness, unable to calm himself by thinking the feeling would pass, or with rational thoughts of that earlier time of timeless nothingness, before he had been born. Before he had a consciousness. That was of no use. Try as he might to think thoughts of a pleasant ignorant time of non-being, he failed.
No, this dread was a filled with a shifting sense of hopelessness. Of being edged aside. Of being inconsequential. Of being overburdened by a life that traveled too fast and with a no longer discernable purpose. The purpose once being, or so he thought, of making a difference in the world. Of course, that was unrealistic and wholly unrealizable, even in a modest, local, and narrow sense. His mother, he clearly remembered, told him once or, more likely, many times, “Don’t think, Henry,” she’d said, “that you can change the world. Nobody can.” Of course, he’d not believe a word of that then. How else, he thought, was the world ever changed? Not by chance. Certainly not through divine intervention. People were the engines of change in the world. For good and for bad. For good and, more often, horribly for the worse.
“Are you sick?” Lena would say on some of those mornings.
“My stomach doesn’t feel right,” he might say. Or more likely, “No, I’m okay. I’ll be up in a minute.”
That sense of being pushed aside, that sense of not counting, of being irrelevant, was at times exacerbated by his hearing and his dependence on hearing aids. They worked. They worked okay most of the time but not when he was in groups of three or four or five and where there was crosstalk. He would turn his head one way and then back and then in another, hoping to catch the thread of a conversation, any conversation, that he could follow and hold on to. Often, he’d find something else to focus on or he’d just step back. And then that feeling of self-enforced separation would tarnish him. He loved being alone but not under those circumstances.
He’d read a book once many years ago: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. The future, Toffler had written, in 1970, was rushing at us so fast we had too little time to adjust. And not only that. It would continue to accelerate faster and faster as technology and communications built on one another. Soon, where we were and what we were about would become beyond unfamiliar, too disturbingly unrecognizable. Henderson had not felt that then. He was young.
That was it, he realized. He was slowly being rushed at by life at twice or three times faster than he felt comfortable with. His own obsolescence bearing down upon him. There was an expectation that he would adjust; should adjust; as well as his expectation that he would be able to understand the new jargon, or the old words used in new and unclear ways, or how new devices came out before he could figure out the current ones, and how, of course, the new versions quickly became the new currency of belonging, however temporarily. His inability to use a simple phone/camera/email/internet search device had become the marker of his own loss of personal relevance and agency.
No, that too was only symptomatic. It was not the heart of the matter for him. It was deeper, more pervasive. The world around him at times, the world he read about, watched, and heard about, the world others seemed to constantly talk and obsess about, the world of the blurring of right and wrong and truth, of buy-this-now, of scams, of shootings in once-safe places, of widening inequality, of ignoring the common good and do-unto-others, of the worship of GDPs, profits, AI, and all things crypto-meme-celebrity, or of neglecting the earth and all of its inhabitants for some personal gain, and all of that life-diminishing world, was rushing at him like a vast slate-gray tornadic wall.
The world of slow but sure progress, of peace, of comity, of consideration, of righting wrongs, had long filled him with a sense of pleasure. The rightness-sounding Obama “hopie-changie” world Sarah Palin disparaged. A world of hope guiding action. Of patience and planting bulbs in the fall. That world seemed already to be burning, flooding, starving, withering, and dying around him. This was no entertainment or topic of idle conversation. It was deadly serious reality.
The dread he woke with lasted all day on some days. Not all of them, but on those days, he could not read or work. He wanted to curl up in a closet. He only wanted to close his eyes, to make peace with it all in some way. To wake later up with hopefulness. Or not wake up at all.
And then, another day would come, perhaps the next day, when the dread disappears. When he makes a to-do list of his own choosing, crossing off items he’d noted as he’d taken care of them… feeling whole again after planting the mums, baking a pie, reading a book he wanted to read, talking to a trusted friend, or, more often, feeling Lena’s gentle touch and holding her close, dancing slow with her like they’d once done at their wedding.
A Life in the Rearview
David Bellingham nodded to the usher as he passed by and he took a seat in a pew by the open window. It was in the last row on the righthand side as you faced the front of the sanctuary. The back of the pew pressed hard against his spine. He was prone to slouching and straight-backed seats like this one were uncomfortable for him.
He wondered, did people choose seats on one side or another at a funeral as you did at a wedding. More likely as not, one did, he thought. Families and friends being what they were. They were no different at funerals than they were at weddings were they. Maybe, he thought, there was an even greater cause for internecine animus at a funeral.
Nonetheless, he sat where he sat and that was that. Besides, would where he sat make any difference? Make him feel any less like an interloper of sorts? Any more than he was already feeling?
He knew next to no one there, and, of course, that was to be expected. The people he knew or who knew him were dwindling, were they not?
Outside the window, the tops of trees down the hill, across the lake, rustled in the breeze. The sound they might have been making didn’t reach him, though the breeze through the window brushed across his skin. His mind wandered. Drifted.
When they called his name, he touched his hand to his jacket pocket. His notes. An Ativan. A Clif Bar. His water bottle. He got up and walked up the side aisle and negotiated the short flight of stairs to the microphone. He tapped it. God, he thought, must everyone in the world do that?
Hear cleared his throat. “We met,” he began, “in September of ‘57. The year the Dodgers left New York for LA. He was new. It was junior high and everyone that year was new. We all came from different parts of town. But he was from a different town.
“I remember that he looked lost. Maybe not lost, but he had this solitary look about him. The way he looked around. The concavity of his expression. He looked, I think, like I was feeling.
“You have bike?” I asked him. He shook his head. You play basketball? ‘Yeah,’ he said.
“In Phys Ed, we shot baskets at one of the nets on the side of the gym by the bleachers. He would shoot these jump shots from the corner. He’d say, ‘Fall back, baby!’ when he hit one. Those were not high percentage shots but that’s what he liked. We’d go to the outdoor courts after school and shoot around and then we’d play one-on-one.
“And there was this one day. I remember it was cloudy. I don’t know why I remember that but, we were playing, and I thought he was going to take one of those corner jumpers, but he didn’t. He drove straight at me, and I had my hands up, my arms up, my hip into his, and he went to the hoop for a layup. He didn’t stop. Just banged into me and, and I can feel him coming into me at this moment as I stand here, and his shoulder slammed into me, right under my arm, and it snapped his shoulder. He just crumpled. He fell down, and some old guy came over and he yanked on his arm, and I could hear the bone pop back into the socket. I was shaking. Felt sick. He was sweating like crazy, and I thought he was going to faint, but he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay. I’ll take the foul.’
“His mother made us good sandwiches and he had a nice sister. One day after school he told me that Miss Bergman, the English teacher, who he thought had a crush on him, told him he was an iconoclast. I didn’t know what that meant.”
“One year, this was the year before we graduated, we went to see a Chiffons concert in the city together, and after the show he said to me that one of them, the one on the left, the really cute one, was looking at him the whole entire show. I told him I thought she was looking at me. ‘You believe what you want to believe,’ he said.’
“Then the next year, after we graduated, it was May or June, he called me on a pay phone from upstate. He said, ‘Can you pick me up at the AmTrak station?’
“Why?”
“I flunked out,” he said.
“Sure.”
“I was sorry, I told him, but I was really glad to have him home. I didn’t say so. So, we went straight to Roberta’s in the Bronx for pizza and a beer.
“We went to Knicks games. Bradley, Frazier, Monroe and Willis Reed. He was my best man, and I was his. We were both crazy young. Too young and too crazy to know we were too young and too crazy.”
“One year, it was ’69, he called me, ‘Come over and we’ll watch the moon landing together. The four of us did. We sat on the floor in his living room and ate tacos. And afterwards he said, ‘You think that whole thing was for real?’
“Yeah, why?”
“’No reason. Just saying, I guess.’” That was exactly the kind of thing he would say.”
“We used to talk about the kids. Vacations. Work. Where the country was heading. Where the world was heading. We still do. Talk about kids and vacations and the country. Not still, I mean, but you know what I mean. It was always grounded in the here and now. The present. Covid shots. Hearing aids. Knee replacements. Shingles.
“A few years ago, he started talking about how old we were getting. It was like, aches and pains and surgeries. And he’d always say how he could see us one day sitting on a bench on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, wearing hats and overcoats and looking out at the water. Sort of like the Simon and Garfunkel song. And he’d always say that we’d be mumbling things indistinctly in one another’s direction and we’d be nodding our heads like we heard and understood.
“But, you know, we never really talked about the rest of it. The ‘what happens after the mumbling stops’ kind of thing. Other than joking about being euphemistically ‘gone.’ I don’t know what he believed. I mean really. I think we had different ideas, but I’m not so sure about that. I never really asked him, in just those same words.”
He paused speaking.
“Oh, yes, and one last thing that he would say to me, ‘You know, David, I’ve been down so long, it is beginning to look like up to me.” I always thought he made that one up. I was sure of it. Anyway, I liked thinking that. Besides maybe Richard Farina was the one who stole it from him. That’s possible.”
He looked out at all the faces of all. There were mostly smiles all around. People he didn’t know or didn’t recognize. You could see he figured that that was as good a time as any to stop.
So, he walked back down the steps. Back to the pew at the end of the aisle, near the open window and he watched the trees across the lake rustling without saying anything and he could feel the breeze brush against his skin.
The Way Things Work Out
When Bix was young and newly married, before he had a child of his own, when he knew all he needed to know about pretty much everything; most everything that mattered; most everything that mattered to him; he knew a couple who had a young child, an infant. Brown-eyed like her father. Soft black hair. A pinched chin like her mother. He was sure that with a pencil, a piece of paper, a Punnett square, and a few minutes he could suss out all the probabilities of that combination happening. It was just dominants and recessives. Like heads and tails. That was what he knew, what most people knew then; dominants, recessives, and probabilities. Probabilities ruled.
He’d been in college with Vincent, the father of the young child. A philosophy major. The mother had been a teacher where Bix taught high school Bio. So, they were all friends. Not close, but friends. People he knew. Not that well. But none of that really matters. They were just two people he knew who had a child. A girl. Maybe two or three weeks old, maybe six months. He didn’t pay too much attention to other people’s children then.
What he knew then about children was that, if things worked out, most of the time, probably, when you had one, there’d be a few months of listening to their soft breathing in the dark room next door, lifting your head to the sound of a call or a cough, holding your breath until another cough came, or a swallow, a cry, or the rustling of a shoulder finding a new resting place by the side of the crib. And you’d turn your head back to the hollow of your pillow and fall back to sleep while someone else fed it or changed its diaper.
That’s if things worked out.
He and his wife had visited them, the couple, once, on an unusually warm November evening. The child was named Clair. Clair de lune. He could see her rounded face from across the room, resting in the angle of her mother’s arm, partially hidden by a thin flannel cover.
After the child had been put to bed and quieted, they all sat in the living room.
The couple kept the door to the child’s room ajar and would take turns getting up to bring drinks, clear plates or whatever, and stopping to listen at the child’s door in the lighted hallway. They’d then come back and sit on the couch for a few minutes.
After a while, Bix’s wife said, “We should go now and let you two get some sleep while you can.”
“No, no,” said Vincent, his friend, the philosophy major.
“Oh, my goodness, are you sure? I wish you could stay longer,” said the child’s mother, Lindy, or Lorraine, he couldn’t recall which, and she went into their bedroom coming back with their coats.
On the drive home he thought, they fuss so much. Worry too much. He’d said so to his wife. She turned from looking out the window to look at him.
And then he and Mara had children. Twins.
He found himself thinking of Vincent and Lindy. And of himself back then, when he knew so much about so little and so little about so much. How little he knew then of wakeful nights when every sound in the dark comes freighted with ancient, existential, fear, alerted to every nuance of sound, nerves as taut as a mousetrap in a kitchen cupboard, and of gratefulness in the morning after a peaceful, uneventful, night believing, hoping, that things would work out as they had done last night. The way probability says it should work out, the way it should work out in a well-ordered, teleological, universe. The right way.
For Vincent and Lindy, and their little girl, Clair, it did not work out so well.
A few short weeks after Bix and Mara had put on their coats and said good night, and after they drove home thinking about what they would or would not do when they had children, and then about work and other things and other people, they heard the sad news about the child. About how the child had died in bed during the night; one night, not that night, but a different night. Another night of listening to the silence through the child’s open door.
And, somehow, even then, he shoved that into the recycling bin of his thoughts … because things usually work out well, don’t they? But deep down knowing that the improbable is not the impossible. Else, why read horror stories or watch Stephen King films to attest to your own invulnerability?
And then, for Bix, the years of parental basal-metabolic worry came and went; listening to soft breathing and mashing bananas to silky sweet smoothness evolved into cutting grapes in half, and blowing across hot bowls of vegetarian vegetable soup, sitting on edge on the edge of a sandbox in the park, and figuring out how to remove a square piece of cut carrot from deep in a squirming nostril. Saving growth charts and Crayola drawings of Mommy, a calendar of milestones, and progress reports and SAT scores. He heard his own voice say, “Did you do your homework?” “Who’s driving tonight?” “No matter what you have done or what time it is, call me and I’ll be there in five minutes to pick you up,” and “Because I said so.”
And so, having traveled that far, like Bix, you figure things will all work out okay.
Then your kids get married and move away, or just move away, just as you had hoped would happen, knew would happen, feared would happen, and you wait for texts or phone calls. Track them on Find My Friends. And maybe they come back after a rough breakup or needing space to figure out what they really want to do or who they really are. And when they go again you say our door is always open. And even when they call you with biopsy results, you say, because you believe it, as he had come to believe it, that things will work out okay though you know that only sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t. And you suffer when they don’t and fret when they do.
And so, if it all works out, as it did for Bix, one day they do come back, and tell their own kids to sit quietly, and they stand by the door to your bedroom with a tissue in one hand and a glass in the other. And they listen to your breathing, and read to you, and kiss your forehead at midnight, and ask, “Are you warm enough?” “Can I get you water or anything?” And then they will all go to sit in the living room and talk quietly among themselves and wait for you to fall asleep.
The Long Orderly Life of Morrison G. Heffermann
Morrison Heffermann awoke to footsteps scuffing on the wooden stairs up to his bedroom.
Morse?
A familiar voice. His father’s voice? His bed is wet. Shivering in the cold. His father will find him once again soaked in his own pee. Wet sheets wrapped tight round his knees and ankles.
“Morse?”
“Morse?”
The bedroom door is knocked and rattled and banged and pushed open.
“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here.
Morse?”
“It must be a hundred.”
“Morse? Can you get up? Syd, open a window and put the A/C on.”
“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Syd, can you get him up?”
“Don’t turn it on!”
“We have to. Have you had anything to drink today? Get him some water.”
“It’s me, May, Morse. Can you sit up? Let Syd help you up.”
“May?”
“Go get him some water. I’ll help him up.”
“I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?
“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”
“Yes… give me my robe, please.”
“Get him his robe. And turn the AC on for God’s sake.”
“Don’t turn it on. It uses up too much electricity. It’s old and won’t last long.”
“But it’s so damn hot in here. You won’t last as long as it will if you don’t let us turn it on.”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Syd will help you. Let Syd help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”
“Can you get up?”
“Help me. I can’t get my balance. Not under that shoulder.”
“I’ll get you something to eat, okay?”
“Close the door, Syd. Just help me get my damn shorts down so I can sit down and get that pad on.”
“May, call 911. He’s fainting.”
“Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I’m not leaving my house. I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Dammit. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.”
August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties at night.
Morse Heffermann was a Navy man, he joined right out of high school. After Pearl Harbor. Air crewman. Pacific coast patrol bombers.
After the war, he met Margret. In two months’ time they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottningholm, and then by bus to Stockholm. They stayed with her parents a week.
In Boston, they both took whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter.
He started a business and kept it for forty years, working the phone out of his home selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was right to do.
Margret died young and the daughter left home. For fifty-five years he kept the old house.
He paid the bills on time, read books on the war and every book by David McCullough, Goodwin, Tuchman, Caro, and Mantel. He remembered each one. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm running. Saved every nickel, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Never spoke ill of another person. Kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit the lights only when he needed one and shut them off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and heated up Swanson’s dinners in the oven. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.
One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.
You keep to yourself, keep your affairs in order, prepare well, make plans, and stick to them. That’s all you need.
He handwrote his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law, Syd. The one who had married Agatha, his daughter. His only daughter. And then she too died, young and fresh like her mother had.
He had files and note cards for everything. “Do not touch” labels in uniform squared blue ink caps taped to light switches, the radio, bookcases, file cabinets, the stove, and cupboards.
He catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, and a hot coffee in front of him.
After Syd and May got him down in the stair chair, he ate an egg, a cup of coffee, and then fell asleep at the table.
He’d told May that he’d had nothing to eat or drink for days. He’d ridden the stair chair up to his room and lay down a few days ago when it got real hot. How many days, he didn’t know. He had asked her to bring him back up there after he finished eating and told her to call no one else and to shut the door and lock it when she left.
When she could not waken him the next morning, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the County hospital. You can’t make me leave my own house! He refused treatment on the gurney. They moved him from the ER to a room. He took no food. No drink. He accepted only pain medication. Nothing more.
“We can’t let him do that, May!”
“We can. What else are we going to do, Syd? Have them tie him down and shove a PEG tube in his gut, stick an IV drip in his arm, and a Foley up his tiny you know what? We have no right to do that. No one does.”
“We’re his only family, May. We can’t let him die like that?”
“We can, Syd. Because we are the only family he has. It’s his life, not yours or mine. We need to let him live the last days he has the way he has lived every other day in his whole life. Let him be who he is. Please, just let him be.”
Ronald Reagan’s Christmas Cookies
Greg Molson followed the recipe for gingerbread cookies he’d found in his sloppy, falling-apart, copy of The Joy of Cooking, page 662:
Beat softened butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in molasses. Add the dry mixture to the butter mixture in three parts, alternating with the water. On a floured surface, roll the dough to your preferred thickness.
His copy was the one bought years ago for his wife, before they’d gotten married. The one he’d wrapped and carried in his suitcase on their trip to the Sha-wan-ga Lodge Resort and Conference Center, where they stayed for a three-day, four-night honeymoon in the sweltering Catskill Mountains, among waves of shrill families, clouds of mosquitos, a tight circle of faux-log cabins, six varieties of flapjacks and canned fruit cocktail at each meal, and a deep green lake with unseen slimy, slithery, scaled things that rubbed up against his bare legs like a school of subaquatic feral cats.
“Just so you know, Greg,” Marsha said, on the ride home from the Catskills to their new apartment in Yonkers, holding a cigarette tipped toward the open car window, “Just so you’re not surprised, when we get back, I don’t cook.”
When she moved out, leaving him after seven slow years of increasingly insurmountable, unavoidable, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences between them, Joy was the one book Marsha left behind for him on the kitchen counter.
Of course, she ate. Certainly, she ate. She ate with relish and gusto. That was something, in fact, that Molson liked so much about her. She loved food. All food. Italian, French, Chinese, burgers, shrimp scampi, pizza, mac and cheese, chow fun, and noodle kugle. Her mother cooked for her. Her grandmother cooked. Her brother-in-law cooked. Her friends cooked. But, in their overheated Hertz rental with the windows down, heading south on the Taconic Parkway, she told him clearly, emphatically, resolutely, and in no uncertain terms, that she did not, could not, and would not cook.
He was disappointed to hear her say that. He didn’t say so in so many words.
“Oh,” he said.
So, by dint of circumstance and dedication, never having cooked a meal before in his life, he found himself going into markets, filling shopping carts and brown bags with handles with what he needed. He stocked the cupboards, drawers, refrigerator, and breadbox. He learned to cook. He learned to love it. He found rest and refuge in it.
Joy became his bible.
And, so, when Marsha and he went their separate ways, he made, ate, and served to others what made him happy. He worked hard. And he came home each evening to a kitchen of respite and re-charge.
The idea for gingerbread cookies came from the need to bake something Christmassy to give to the people he worked with. They made, boxed, and ribboned packages of miniature pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse, which they handed out with big grins at the holiday party. Gingerbread cookies seemed to be just the right thing.
He mixed, cooled, and rolled the dough. Set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and separated out the gingerbread figures. They lay flat and brown on the parchment paper, looking up at him.
And standing at the counter with his floured fingers, he felt moved somehow at that moment, an irresistible urge to draw a gentle, curved, line of a mouth into each figure. A thin, up-turned, simulacrum of a smile.
He took one step back and looked at them. Their arms and legs outstretched. Their dotted eyes. Their smiling faces.
A slow smile came to his lips. It grew and broadened. And he began to laugh. A big, loud, head-tipped-back, open-mouthed, laugh. A nothing-held-back, totally uninhibited, burst of child-like laughter. He was overtaken, carried away by his own laughter echoing in his empty kitchen.
He felt an expansive release from deep within. His body, weary and sleep-deprived, let loose an anthem of inchoate joy. A feeling so surprising and foreign to him that he could find no word to give it.
He laughed in wonderment and deep awareness. How, almost out of the blue, had a bunch of corny cookie faces which, just a moment before, had been blank, and on which, with the tip of a fork and the curved edge of a spoon, he had drawn a simple smile, had looked up at him and had done this to him?
And so, with intention and only a moment’s pause, he turned the spoon around and he pressed a narrow furrow of a frown into one of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made him laugh, he felt a sadness grip him, and he began to cry.
Tears welled in his eyes and overflowed his cheeks. Crying as he could not ever remember doing in his entire life other than the day his mother had left him at the door of his kindergarten class on the very first day of school and turned away from him leaving him in the doorway in the firm grip of the tall sharp-faced, Mrs. Howell, and closed the door behind her.
He cried without trying to stifle it. Unselfconsciously. Without covering his eyes. Crying. Letting go, he felt, of days, and months, and years of submerged, un-cried sadness.
A sadness, only then at that very moment, so clearly to him that his skin prickled with gooseflesh, that he knew it was not for himself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and every other one of the friends he had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces he’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia.
Men and women, younger than him, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed.
And then he laid all of the cookies, smiling and frowning, in careful rows on the baking sheet and he cried and laughed as he looked from one of them to another and, when he felt ready, he opened the oven door, and wiped his eyes. Grateful, in a way, that he had known each and every one of them.
In the Last Days There Will Come Times of Difficulty (2 Timothy: 1-2)
Morse Sheffield lay alone in his bed in the late heat of August. Shades pulled down against the sun, darkening the room. The air, close and heavy. A thin sheet over him. He is dreaming his unpleasant dreams.
Someone on the stairs. Two of them. His father. Leave the cat alone. Do your homework. His mother. Come take your bath. Morse? Morrison? You hear me? Cold and wet. Dust in the air and in his mouth. Knocking on the door. Go away. I’m not dressed. He’d wet the bed again. His legs would not move. Tangled sheets around his ankles.
“Morse?”
“Morse? Are you here?”
A hand pushes against the door.
“He’s in here,” one of them, a young woman, says.
“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here. Morse? Morse?”
“It must be a hundred in here.”
“Morse? Can you get up? Simon, open that window. Morse?
“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Can you get up?”
“It’s Didi, Sigrid’s daughter, Morse. Can you sit up? Do you need help?”
Didi.
“Do you have any water? Simon, go get him some water. Help him up.”
I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?
“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”
Yes. Can you give me my robe?
“Get him his robe. And turn on the air conditioner.”
“Don’t turn it on. Leave it. I don’t want it on.”
“But it’s so hot in here, you’ll die. Get him some water. Do you want some water?”
I need to go to the bathroom.
“Simon will help you. Morse, Simon will help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”
“It’s Simon, Morse, can you get up? Morse, lean over this way.”
I can’t. Don’t touch that shoulder.
Simon walks with Morse into the bathroom, helps him turn and eases back him down on the toilet seat.
“Are you okay in there?”
Don’t come in. Just help me get my shorts down.
“Ask him if he wants something to eat. Should I call 911?”
Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I will not go. I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Please. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.
For over a week, the heat had been oppressive. Over ninety each day. The nights unbearable.
Sigrid, who came in to clean once a month, is the one who had found him. She knocked on the bedroom door. He told her to leave. To go away. She called the brother. The one with the house by the water. The only family of his she knew. No answer. She called her daughter Didi.
“You have to come to Mr. Sheffield’s house. He’s in his bedroom with the door closed and it’s a hundred and ten up here. He won’t let me go in.
Morse Sheffield had been a Navy man. He joined right out of high school. 1944. An air crewman, flying patrol bombers on the Pacific coast.
He met Margret in college. In ’55 they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the freighter Drottningholm to meet her parents in Stockholm. They married there and, after Oslo, Paris, and London, they made a home back on the east coast, in the town where his grandfather and his grandfather’s father had grown up.
He had no trouble finding work. Enjoyed working, no matter the job. He was gregarious. They liked his attitude.
He and Margret were together. They had a daughter. Life had no end.
Then Margret died and, soon after, Agatha got married and moved away.
He stayed in their small dark house on the corner of a quiet street up the hill from the center of town. His sadness weighed him down.
One winter he’d fallen down the back stairs carrying a bucket of trash out to the garage and he lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw him. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked his neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.
You have no right to take me anywhere. This is my home. Getting old is not a crime. I want to stay in my home. This is my home, and you have no right to take me from it. Living alone is not a crime.
The officer helped him back up the stairs, made a note in his notepad and said, “Mr. Sheffield, you’d better get someone to put a railing up along the stairs there for you.”
Thirty-five more years he lived there. Went working in an office in a nearby town, keeping house, paying the bills on time, reading books on the war, Lincoln, the depression. All the presidents. He kept his Saab running, saved his money, trusted few people, had fewer friends. Year after year. Solitary. Thoughtful. Kind. Carefully generous. Never speaking ill of another. Keeping things in order. Was he happy? It was not a question anyone would think to ask him.
He started his own business and kept it going for a few years, working out of his home, selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death.
He’d say that keeping your affairs in order, preparing and planning, not being a burden, was what mattered. He wrote a will. Leaving the house to his son-in-law. The one who had married Agatha. His only child. His only daughter, who died young and fresh, just like her mother had.
He turned the lights off when he left a room. Wrote reminder notes to himself and thank-you and birthday cards to others. He cooked when he was able and ate what he made, and then later, when he couldn’t manage the pots and pans, heated up the Swanson’s pot pies and frozen dinners in the microwave. He didn’t renew his tickets to the symphony. He had to stop walking to the beach and the market and the bookstore.
He wrote notes with detailed instructions in uniform capital letters and taped them up on everything. “Unplug when not in use” over light switches. “Do not touch” on bookshelves, file cabinets, the stove, cupboards.
He catalogued boxes of 35 mm prints, names, dates, and places on the back. Made notes of thoughts and quotes and left them folded in the books he’d read. David McCullough. Goodwin. Tuchman. Caro. The Bible.
Didi waited at the bottom of the stairs. Simon had helped Morse fit himself into the stairlift. He rode down holding on to the armrests, in his slippers and his robe.
She had opened the back door and the window above the sink. He ate the eggs and sausage and sipped the tea she prepared for him, eating without speaking, and when he’d had enough, he asked Simon to help him go back upstairs.
You’re both kind, he told them. I don’t want you to call anyone, and please shut the door when you leave.
In the evening, Didi returned with a small dinner she prepared. When she could not waken him, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the local hospital. He refused treatment and was moved to a bed near a window in the nursing home nextdoor. He took no food. He accepted only pain medications he could take with a sip of water.
Morse Sheffield passed away in bed in a quiet room near a window. Neither in the bed of his dreams nor in the one or in the manner of his own choosing.
It’s Life. Period. Goodbye
Jake Greenfield brought in the mail. Careful not to let his cats out.
Among the bills and flyers was a green square envelope.
He shut the door firmly and ran his finger under the envelope flap. He removed a note card.
“Dear Jake, My dearest brother Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.” No further details, except that a memorial was planned at Sam’s home in Essex on the coming Sunday afternoon.
It was signed “Rebecca, Sam’s Sister, PS, I would love to hear from you.”
Jake sat on a chair beside the kitchen table. He took a long slow breath. Holding the card in his lap.
“Sam,” he said.
In high school they called Sam “the Russian.” He was not Russian. His last name was Rudski. So, they called him the Russian. His family was Polish. Maybe. Maybe Slovak. Maybe Latvian. Nobody knew or cared. Neither did he.
He was quick to smile. Quick to say, “Do what you guys want, I’m going home,” and the only one who saw no reason not to eat the last slice of pizza.
There were three of them back then. Jake, Bob, and Sam, who hung out together. Played ball together. Driver’s licenses. First legal beers. College.
When Kennedy was shot, they watched the TV together. Then Oswald. Jack Ruby raising his right arm straight out from his shoulder, with the Dallas police and the reporters in black felt fedoras standing around, and he shot Oswald square in the belly with a pistol he’d pulled out of his overcoat pocket. Oswald winced.
They drove down to DC in Sam’s VW and waited in the dark cold wind outside of the Capitol to walk past the quiet coffin and then over to Lafayette Park, to sit on a blanket under the trees on the curb across from the White House. They watched Bobby, Jackie, Caroline, and John John walk behind the casket.
What they were seeing was unfathomable. They were nineteen. It was something never to be forgotten.
Sam was the first among them to fall in love. The girl lived up in White Plains. He sent her flowers and after he paid for them, he called Jake to say, “alea iacta est,” like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The die was cast, he said.
Everything they did or said back then was concrete, momentous, consequential, black and white, final, irrevocable. Neither good nor bad. It just was. They never gave a thought to any time beyond the present. Who they were was who they’d always be. There were no thoughts of the future beyond which shirt you would put on in the morning or which classes you had the next day.
Then there were weddings. First jobs. Children. They each moved away. None of them went to Vietnam. They grew beards and long hair. Bob worked for a big Pharma company. Jake got teaching job. Sam got a job working for Anaconda Copper right out of Fordham.
One day he showed up at Jake’s house. “I quit,” he said. “They are just fucking up Chile, paying people shit wages, mining the crap out of the ground. Capitalist shitheads,” he said. “They don’t give a shit about anything other than screwing people for profits. I can’t do that anymore.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I got a teaching job in Roxbury.”
“Where’s that?”
“Boston,” he said.
“A good job?”
“Boston’s all fucked up. Desegregation. Bussing. Crazy racists attacking school buses. Throwing rocks and bottles at kids. Retrenchment. Poverty. I’ll teach in one of the schools.”
“Oh.” Jake knew nothing about Boston or Roxbury. He was teaching in the Bronx. The South Bronx. High school biology. Things were not good there either.
They all moved around again. Grad schools. New jobs. Not necessarily better jobs but jobs they liked to think were better.
After another move, Jake got a call from Sam. “I moved to Essex. I found your number in the phone book.” They went out for burgers and beer at a place called the Farm or the Barn and talked about work and their new hearing aids.
When Jake got laid off in 2008, he started doing freelance work. Writing. Sam became a psychologist and stopped selling sandwiches and DVDs. They kept in touch.
One afternoon, Sam rode his new Yamaha 500 over to Jake’s. They sat in folding chairs on his back porch. They wore warm jackets and drank hot coffee.
“You look sad,” Sam said.
“Sad? I don’t know. You know I had a heart attack a year ago.”
“You told me.”
“I did?”
“Yeah, and you said you were doing fine.”
“I was. I still am. A lot of stuff going on. I’m okay.”
“Listen, Jake,” said Sam. “I see patients all day long, and they say, ‘yeah, I’m okay,’ and I look at them and I know they’re not. We both know they’re not. I look at them. They look at me. Their eyes. The way they sit all folded up, looking out the window. They start talking and in three minutes tops, I get the whole picture. I’d love to say to them, ‘Look, we can drag this on for a few months or years and neither of us wants to do that. So, give me the word and I can tell you right now exactly what your problem ia and what you can do to change it. Period. Goodbye.’”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying. I know you. You lost your job, and you had a heart thing, and you have a hearing problem. It’s life. You had a lousy marriage and that’s over, and now you have great one. Something’s bothering you but it’s not the job or money or your heart, or your hearing. You think I don’t have shit going on? You think the guy next door doesn’t? Look around. See the trees. You have food in the refrigerator. You have a woman who loves you. I’ll tell you right now, what your problem is. You haven’t told her how you’re feeling. You’re holding it all in. Like your father. Go in there and tell her what’s going on, how you’re feeling, what you’re worried about. And twenty minutes from now, guaranteed, she’s going to grab you and hug you and the sun will come out and light up your sorry-ass face like high noon on the goddamn equator.”
That day on the porch was the last time Jake saw Sam.
The letter surprised him. He never expected, never thought, that one day he’d be sitting in a chair by his kitchen table holding a letter saying, “Dear Jake, My dearest brother, Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.”
Just like that.
“Jake,” he could hear Sam saying, “it’s life. There is no secret. Nothing to figure out. It’s life. Period. Goodbye.”
Umi, Annunziata, and String Theory
Umi and Annunziata. Side by side. No earbuds. No Beats. The Harvard Bridge. Sunny. Warm. Late October afternoon. Cross breezes push ripples upstream.
Umi, I didn’t mean that I don’t really believe in string theory. I do, but…
… But Nuzzi, that’s exactly what you said, like in front of the whole class. I was like totally freaked. I never heard you say anything like that before.
I know. But I think I was just trying to say that it has no physical or philosophical relevance to me or to life, fundamentally. To actual life. Here and now. To you and me or anyone on the planet or in the entire universe.
In Theoretical Physics? Saying you don’t believe in string theory. Space-time. The event horizon. General relativity. The most basic theories of totally everything?
No, Umi. I was just like ‘Ok, so that’s how everything got created and all.’ As if that explains everything like life and all. But I mean it just doesn’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with real life.
What do you mean? Doesn’t it? The origin and expansion of the universe? The elemental seeds of all life?
It’s not that. It’s that it has no relevance to the lives we live. I mean I think of my grandparents and their lives. They got along great living in only three dimensions
Of course, and their life was good or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was terrible. But the world changes and we learn new things, face new problems that need new answers.
I know that. The mathematics. The theories. They’re quantitatively and empirically provable theoretical concepts. But pragmatically and humanistically? They’re real and measurable and you can believe in them but ultimately, they have no relevant meaning, philosophically or practically. They are barren terms with no influence how we live or how we might choose to live. To me, at least, and possibly to you too, if you think about it.
You think I don’t think about things like that? You think I’m a basic geek?
No, yes, Umi, but I don’t mean it like that. I mean take gravity. Nobody knows what it is, but you trip on a crack in the sidewalk and you break your arm. That’s gravity. Human relevance. Pragmatic. Philosophically, too. You make life decisions based upon your understanding of gravity. You teach your children about it. You don’t say, ‘Oh sweetie, stay away from the event time horizon, do you?’
You sound like a narrow nihilist, Nuzzi. I mean thinking that there is nothing that means anything except eating, sleeping, shitting, and fucking. There is no greater good, nothing more than our lonely finite selves in a vast infinite universe.
Umi, I am so not a nihilist. I believe totally in life. Life is the center of all meaning. That is why the end of time personally, is the only meaningful philosophical concept for us. Nothing is even close. What we do as human beings, how we live, how we treat others each day, is inherently, genetically, socially, and culturally imbedded in our biological being. The impermanence of life, finite time, knowing that at some point it all ends. That’s the only relevant event horizon with any pragmatic and philosophical meaning, not what may or may not happen billions of years from now.
Is that where all this is going? Giving more meaning to death than to life? You’re totally contradicting yourself. Life has joy, mystery, adventure, discovery, creativity, doesn’t it? Our brains, our consciousness, evolved because we have the capacity to know that there is more to life and being human than what you are saying. More to finding meaning in life than painting the side of a barn, having babies, and doing the dishes.
I’m not talking about doing the dishes.
Yes you are, Nuzzi. You’re missing what is essential in being human. Sitting at the edge of the sea and looking out and wondering what is beyond the horizon, and the next horizon. Imagining the things that we can’t see, the things only humans can imagine. That’s what being human is.
I feel like I need to choose one or the other.
Nuzzi, it’s not one or the other unless we choose to make it that way. Our brains are big enough for both philosophy and theoretical physics. But I have to say, what problem has philosophy ever solved for us? Name one. What can we learn about life from a philosopher that affects anything of meaning. Has it ever prevented or ended a war or poverty, racism, genocide, misogyny, or… ………….. stop, don’t look at me. Just walk over to the rail and let those two old people with ski poles walk by. Don’t look around, just look out at the crews practicing down there, and, like, maybe point to one and laugh out loud or something.
Umi, are you okay?
I have this weird feeling, like someone has been listening to us, and it’s not like just listening but actually writing what we are saying, like not just writing but like writing dialogue for us, like making us say what we are saying, like right this second when I am saying what I’m saying, and I don’t even know what I’m going to say next and it made me say that I don’t know… It’s like someone is writing a story I’m in and putting words in my mouth. Both of us.
That’s so totally weird. You’re not making this up, are you?
Or maybe it’s like someone with a high-tech AI content-generator app is using like a universal, multilingual, transducer, computer dialog algorithm listening to us, with like a long-distance, uni-directional tele-focus microphone using voice recognition on us to grab our voices on re-synthesis software feeding it back to us make us say this stuff? I don’t even talk like this. Have you ever heard me talk like this before? Either way, I bet they’re going to publish this in some podcast or a short story collection, totally co-opting and commodifying us without our permission, making us like not real people but just made-up words.
Or maybe he’s just writing that too, and making me say that, and isn’t it weird that there are no quote marks around anything we’re saying.
… Nuzzi…what’re you doing? Get down.
HEY, YOU, LISTEN TO ME, WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING … “so cut the crap, you creepy piece of cow caca.”
Notes on the Celebration in Honor of The Essayist on his Ninetieth Birthday
The celebration in honor of a well-known essayist’s ninetieth birthday was held on the Saturday following his birthdate. A Saturday amidst the blistering heat of a northeastern July, an uptick in Covid-19 infections, fires in the west and in Europe, reports of a monkeypox outbreak among gay men, and news of the Pope’s visit to Canada to apologize for the church’s treatment of indigenous children.
Lily, the essayist’s wife, planned the celebration, addressed, stamped, and mailed the invitations, using names she gathered from the essayists address book.
Full vaccination required. No gifts. Regrets only. The invitation said and was signed simply in a firm hand, Lily.
At four, the room had filled with guests. The invitation had said, ‘four ‘til seven.’ Anyone who knew the essayist for any length of time had surely known that he was punctual and expected punctuality. He always made his expectations clear. He was a Marine.
He often told me, “If you’re on time, you’re late.” I took him figuratively though he meant it quite literally. “How does that work?” I’d ask him. “It just does,” he’d say.
No one spoke about the heat, or the pandemic, or the hearings on television, wearing masks, abortion, inflation, gasoline prices, Ukraine, or the media. All of that, they knew, was the essayists bailiwick. They found other things to talk about.
Prosecco in stemware and small hors d’oeuvres were passed on silver trays by young men and women wearing collared white shirts and black pants. The music from the speakers in the dining area set aside for the gathering was loud and conversation became difficult. Names were hard to hear.
“Guernsey?” I repeated, not really believing that could be the woman’s last name.
“No, it’s Gert Seavey,” she said.
I nodded.
I sat in a seat beside Lily. The essayist sat next to her at the head of the table. His three sons were there, sitting at another table. He looked over at them often.
After the dinner plates were removed, Lily stood and nodded to her three boys. The first one, the oldest, the one who had come in late, was the first to stand and speak.
““I just flew in from Paris, and the plane was late.”
“We all can see that,” said his father.
“I’m happy to be here, Dad,” said his son. “I have only one word to say to all of you that epitomizes my father best. Forgiveness.” Then he sat down. There was applause.
“Thank you,” said his father, so softly that only those of us closest to him could hear.
The second son spoke anecdotally, and then the essayist’s granddaughter raised her hand. “I love you, Boppa,” she said, “you are the smartest, funniest, and greatest man ever in the world.”
Her grandfather bowed his head. “Thank you,” he said to her.
Lily looked to the third son. He shook his head and didn’t get up, and so she walked to the end of the room, where it was the quietest. She asked the waiter to stop pouring wine.
She stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, and, because the curtains had not been drawn, she appeared briefly in silhouette surrounded in a halo of white light and seemed like a dark apparition in a dream or an afterimage following the sudden appearance of the Madonna.
She asked for quiet in a voice as soft as a dove and she turned to her husband, whose smile we all could see. From a pocket in her light-colored flowered dress, she read from notes she had written. She recounted how they had met and all of her husband’s many accomplishments in life and then she asked the essayist to come forward, and she kissed him on the cheek as they passed and returned to her seat at the table.
“That’s my first wife,” he said. “I always say that.”
The room quieted.
“You all know I have a tendency to be somewhat long-winded.”
“Nooohhh, Dad,” his sons said in unison.
“Please put your phones down and pay attention,” he said to us all.
He spoke without notes.
“There’s a line from Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, with an “E”, it goes something like ‘we can’t turn back the days that have gone. We can’t turn life back to when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire–a brain, a heart, a spirit.’”
“I dreamt last night that there are two paths forward for humans on earth. This earth, where we were born, where we live, and where we will die. The two paths are not mutually exclusive. And neither path is one that does our species credit.
“The vast majority of us are on a path we have no control over. Nine-nine percent of us, are on a path headed back in time to life at its most basic. Sweating in toil, planting the crops that will grow in the narrowing bit of land suitable for them, hunting what animals survive, and gathering the little water we need to live.
“Our disregard for water will be our undoing. Drought and flood and fires have already begun. You see it all around you. While corporations and governments husband our most essential natural resource for whatever profit they can make and power they can wield. We are watching the demise of most of what is human existence. We have set a rapidly degenerative system in motion by our lack of regard for the needs of society. One another. We have lost our social conscience.
“We had long survived as a species because we evolved as social animals. We need one another. But what we have done in the last two hundred years, as a result of our self-centered greed and avarice and our disregard for one another, has set us on a downward spiral which will consume us. Through starvation, drowning, unbearable temperature extremes, and the wars that will erupt and eliminate the rest of us, along with almost every other living species.
“We have brought this upon ourselves because we have not paid attention. We saw what was happening and we said that was somebody else’s problem and we kept on making plastic and burning oil and coal. How brutally ironic is it, is it not, that the lives of past plants and animals that inhabited this earth for millions of years before us, their very carbon souls, are what we are burning, and which will bury us and crush us under intense heat and unimaginable pressure back into carbon chains again, and that is all that will be left of us.
“It did not have to be this way. We have willfully disregarded the wisdom of the past generations who lived in concert with the land and the water and who were swept away by our greed and our guns and the rape of our natural resources. We laughed at their ignorant simplicity. Their traditions. We failed to learn from them and their respect for the mysterious power of nature.
“On the second, more narrow path, some few will survive. They will be the ones who had the privilege and resources unavailable to the rest. They may survive in small enclaves into a temporary future, perhaps using advanced AI computing and multidimensional printers to engineer some semblance of artificial nutrition and a livable environment.
But, surely, around them both, the earth and nature will heal itself, perhaps creating a natural re-arrangement of our DNA with the DNA and RNA from which we all came, and life on earth will go on. The Anthropocene epoch will end and surely, with it, other species will fill the gap.
“As Wolfe once said, you can’t go home again, and we cannot. Not when you have burned your home to embers and released the fumes into the atmosphere to smother you.
“So, pay attention. Love your family. Love one another. Love the life you have while you have it. Heal the earth in any way you can. Return to the simple life on the earth that created us in any way you can. Honor it. Eschew the false and artificial and disingenuous.
“That’s all there is and that’s all I have to say. Thank you for coming.”
And then the cake was plated and served. Coffee was poured. The essayist sat beside his wife and drank a glass of milk and then we said our goodbyes and went to our cars and drove back to our homes.
The Catfish Review 