I am having a real day of it. Silences stretch like spider-webs between the hours, imperceptibly growing in the corners. I get up from my bed thinking I am headed somewhere, but by the time I get half way across the room I seem to have forgotten where I’m going, so I stand there with my bare feet on the cold floor, reading up the spines of coffee table books, thinking  how do these things happen? The light outside the windows is soapy with the early morning and I can hear the trucks – big trucks, eighteen-wheelers – on the street, tossing their weight over the potholes. A pile of clothes sits bunched on a suitcase where I never unpacked; I think about laundry. In the kitchen the teakettle is cold on the stove. A head of garlic has sprouted a brilliant green arm, like an alien trying to reach up to the pots. I kick a shoe in the hallway and it tumbles to where the garbage sits waiting to be taken out. I feel a kind of sympathy for the shoe. The quiet by the door is thick as fog.

Things edge like this into full blossomed morning, when the sun climbs out from behind the cement of the city and my apartment starts to chirp. The radio announcer is talking about crosswords. The tea kettle hums a quirky Italian harmony, imported and re-gifted to me by my parents, who seem to think that Italy’s the only country worth a dime. My best friend on the phone is talking about love; she’s in it or she’s out of it – I’ve lost track – but I like the sound of her voice on the line, like a song I’ve heard before and missed. I think about the wires, telescopic, stretched along a highway for miles, over the heads of truckers pulling into rest-stops for gossip and Mona’s coffee: the sounds of humanity in motion. “Hello?” she says, and I think “I’m still here” but say only “uh-uh,” as if not wanting to assert too much too soon.

And then I am alone again, the quiet, soft and pliable, like wax on a hot day. The sun collects in puddles on the floor, catching the yellow edges of my plant, which I have forgotten to water. I go into the kitchen, stare into the fridge, open the freezer, close it.  I stare into the fridge again. I close the door. An empty feeling grows inside my stomach. I go back to my desk, where the computer’s screen is blinking cheerfully, and for a second I can see myself turned inside out, bones and guts and organs out in the open for anyone to see, perfectly clean and presentable, like an anatomy doll. The image is so vivid I look down at my shirt, and, mentally, I fold myself back up. I wonder if I am losing it. I wonder who could tell me.

Close third person.  Tone: journalistic.  Mood: dread/loss.

The trains came in like giant caterpillars and exploded, their guts spilling out through their pores onto the platform and scuttling away until the body was left hollow and lifeless, all skeleton and no flesh.  Jonah was one of the last to leave.  He watched the train’s crew emerge from their cubbies, disoriented like post coma patients in a hospital.  He heaved his bag onto his shoulder and exited out into the cement damp of the platform, gulping the November air like a drowning man, letting it fill his lungs until he felt bloated with breathing.  He did not know where he was, exactly.  He had found a phone number scribbled on a torn off scrap tucked into the back of his address book, and had caught a train thinking that maybe he would call the number when he got there.  Now he wasn’t so sure about his plan.  What if nobody picked up?  What if the person who picked up didn’t know who he was?

He walked into the departure hall and paused by the ticket teller’s window.  None of the other passengers had stayed around, so the hall was empty except for the few homeless who seemed to be unaware of each other, or of him.  The teller behind the barred window was deep into a book.  A tiny bit of spittle had collected at the edge of his mouth and his tongue idly glided across his lips trying to find it.  He clung to the edge of the book with his hands as though it might blow away in a sudden gust of wind.

“Excuse me” someone said, in Czech, and Jonah felt a flutter at his neck.  He spun around, too quickly, in time to see an old man tumble into one of the marble benches behind him.  His skin was taught and thin like paper.  Jonah didn’t know any Czech, but he reached over to try and grasp the old man by the elbow to help get him back on his feet.  The old man shrugged him off.  He wrestled his body to its feet, and walked past Jonah.  His flannel shirt gathered in folds between his shoulder-blades.

During his years in the Soviet army is when Leo first came face to face with fate. He’d entered the army when he was barely twenty on a drunken whim. A few months of training with his buddies had landed them in Berlin, and landed him in the deserts of Uzbekistan on a mission nobody could name. Leo had never been one to question things. He watched the expanse of sand reach around the edges of the earth and thought that maybe this was the essence of all things, that perhaps his other existence had been just a mirage, a kind of elaborate fata morgana. It was at that moment that fate had appeared to him.

“She’s a hawkish old hag,” he told Sarge, his commanding officer, a goat of a man who had a passion for gardening and a habit of swiping small objects and stashing them under his mattress for a rainy day. “She’s got heels and pearl necklaces and a sports car and servants running everywhere. She’s a kind of spoiled savage, I think.”

“She came to you, did she?” Sarge asked, staring into his oatmeal with the concentration of a pilot trying to land Sputnik.

“Yes. I guess. I mean, I know she wasn’t really there, not like a real woman or anything, but you know. I think it was some sort of a sign.” Sarge nodded, but it wasn’t clear if it was in agreement, or just to keep the conversation going.  In either case, it stopped, Leo having gotten momentarily lost in the cacophony of his own thoughts.

At the end of every meal Sarge filled his water glass from the communal pitcher and headed into the barracks. At first Leo thought this was to honor the stringent hydration requirements, but one of the other boys explained that a few months ago Sarge had requisitioned some army dirt on the pretense of “location revitalization” and had deployed a vegetable garden underneath his bunk. The tomatoes were starting to swell on the vines that had crawled up into the mattress springs, and the officers’ quarters were beginning to take on the distinct odor of an omelet fresh off the frying pan.

The first few weeks on base, months before his encounter with fate, Leo had spent his nights awake, the heat searing into his eyeballs, and listened to the guttural snore of one private Schulman, whose heft had almost kept him out of the service entirely, and who currently slept on the floor for want of a cot that could reasonably hold his weight. Leo would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the white sliver of a moon cutting through a crack in the wooden slats. He imagined that beyond the sand, beyond the scorpions and snakes, beyond the moisture-free air that rose in clouds off the dunes, there was a world he had not seen. He could not grasp these thoughts, entirely, and so tried his best to keep them out of his head. By day he took sips from his neighbor’s smuggled stash of Fanta and read, cover to cover, the stack of Vonnegut novels that he had found hidden underneath his mattress. He had never been a reader, but found that the words, even those he didn’t understand, were a descent way to keep things from getting too complicated. When he got to thinking about things, which was not very often, or when loneliness gnawed at the edges of his waking, he’d find Sarge – who would inevitably be sweeping his hut or shaking out his sheets – plant himself in the doorway and ask, without hesitation or explanation: “Any orders this morning, boss?” Sarge would always oblige with an order, whether out of a perverse sense of duty or just to get Leo out of his hair, neither man would ever quite know. And so it went: Leo would sweep the latrines, refold the linens, count the dinner trays, and hand out the mail, and forget all his troubles in the doing.

So it went, that is, until fate sauntered into Leo’s life like an overfed maitre d’ at an initiation ball and planted her wide rear end too close to his bunk. He woke up mornings to the gurgling in Private Shulman’s throat, and pictured her, wide thighed and narrow eyed, watching him from somewhere just beyond the haze.  He suddenly felt small like an ant, like someone could step on him and sweep him up with the dust they were constantly purging from the barracks.  The magnitude of this feeling was so far greater than any he had known, that he felt, for short and terrifying moments, like everything around him was collapsing into dust.

NOTES

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

One afternoon he was in the dining area wiping down the dinner trays when he heard the scrape of a wooden chair on the cement floor behind him.  The whole encampment had been put on severe water rations due to a helicopter malfunction earlier in the week, and the sand had settled, so that everything made the same grating sound as the grit between one’s teeth.  When Leo turned to see what was happening, he found Sarge reclined in a wooden dining chair, picking dirt from underneath his fingernails with a hunting knife.  He was out of uniform – a pair of khaki shorts, a yellowing wife-beater, and no shoes.  The wife beater was too small and chest hair, scraggly and white, protruded from around the edges.  Sarge’s right foot was pulsing as if he had a nervous tick.

“Boy,” Sarge said without looking up.  After some moments of silence he rested the hunting knife carefully on the thigh of his non-dangling leg.  Leo did not know if Sarge had meant “boy” as an interjection, or a direct address, but suddenly he felt like he wanted to get closer.  He picked up a chair from a nearby table and pulled it over to where Sarge sat.  They sat next to each other, facing the stack of uncleaned trays, as though they might have been at a movie theater, or on a train, or watching the Kirov Ballet – a young man in an army uniform and old man in khaki shorts balancing a hunting knife on his thigh.

Leo suddenly found that he didn’t want to be alone.  It’s not that he was needy, but the silence started to get to him, to feel grotesque like an amusement park deserted for the off-season.  No matter how vehemently one told oneself that the kids were warm at home, occupied in more weather appropriate activities, one could not shake the feeling that something ghastly was taking place.

Private Culder became known as Ansel Adams because he always had a picture in the breast pocket of his uniform, of this little girl with pig-tails and bows tied around them, and a crooked little smile, wearing a dress with lace on the sleeves.  He held it sometimes during meals, cradling it between his ring and index finger and trying to read it, as though it were his ticket to somewhere far away.  Leo sat with him at lunch, neither of them talking, and Private Culder looking at that picture smiling somewhere deep inside so that his face had that soft look about it, like the stars of old black and white movies.

On the fourth night after Leo’s departure the moon was so bright that it kept the entire base awake.  Private Shullman, having gotten weary of sleeping on the floor, had tried to sneak onto Leo’s bunk, but the aluminum legs had buckled underneath his weight and he had broken his left wrist trying to catch his double-wide torso at it tumbled to the floor.  Sarge, before he finally fell asleep, pulled out the Vonegut book that he had swiped from Leo during one of their lunches and leafed through it to see if there was anything in it worth his time.  He found a Fanta label tucked into the pages, towards the back, and held it up to the flickering fluorescent.  It glowed an orange that he had not seen in years.  He placed it carefully into the “miscellaneous” box he kept beneath his bed.  He was thinking about his good fortune as he drifted off to sleep, the Vonnegut slipping from his hand and through the crack between his mattress and the bed-frame.  That is where, some years later, a young soldier by the name of Gibbs would find it and toss it out wih the rest of the trash.

One afternoon Private Schulman returned to the men’s quarters after his afternoon, post-lunch stroll, to find Leo crouched on top of his cot, fully dressed, shoes and all.

It happened on a particularly cloudless afternoon. The air hung above the sand so motionless and clear that Leo had the distinct feeling of being under observation, an experimental outpost only coincidentally stationed on earth. Leo had eaten his lunch in relative proximity to Sarge, and had headed out towards the watchtower, a structure that reminded one, more than anything, of a ruined playground fixture. There had been no need to build it to stand at any serious height – given the incontrovertible flatness of things – so it perched unceremoniously on a pile of discarded pipe and planks, gathered together like a bird’s nest9 around an egg. Leo climbed the tangle of debris and ducked into the low entrance to the observation deck. It was hotter than usual and he was starting to sweat.

He had sat there for about 20 minutes and was starting to doze off when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a movement out beyond his enclosure. He lifted his head to look at it, but the desert was clear and silent.

“Hey!” he yelled out into the open desert. “Hey, wait a minute, lady!” Leo scrambled to his feet and dove for the opening that let him out into the tangle of pipe and then the open desert.

The feeling – which I think is peculiarly 25 – of standing on a precipice. The feeling that if you, for a second, stop grasping for a foothold, the ground will fall away from beneath your feet and you will be left adrift in a terrible, lonely emptiness.

Dog: We had bought The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of Skeate, and it sat like an ironic reminder on the lower shelf of the coffee table, its cover half chewed off with a puppy’s zeal.

Sock: Her husband had left for the weekend.† In the bedroom he left behind a tossed off pair of jeans and a single sock trailing across the floor, like a lost soldier in a war zone. She walked into the room and thought that this must be what psychologists talked about when they talked about the remnants of the recently deceased that drove the living to suicidal despair. It was the kind of detritus of life that makes one feel that another human being was just there, just breathing, just making a mess. The neatnicks would not get the same level of sympathy when they died, she thought, startled, wondering if she should pick up he clothes or leave them.

Books: Sometimes, particularly around the summers when his nephews would drop in for a weekend or a week, he would start to worry that his apartment had become a collection of his lifetime of failures.† To be sure, there were chic vases and tomes of Proust and Faulkner on his bookshelves, which he thought were just the thing to make young boys harbor a secret respect for their elders.† But then there were the books he’d bought when he turned 40 and would wake up, middle of the night, terrified of his own middling existence.† There were his divorce books, his spiritual meditation books, his books on aging, on hair-loss and tooth-whitening, and one recent addition called “The Perfect Resting Place: How to Select a Nursing Home Before Your Loved Ones Have To”.† He had picked each of them in earnest, and read them, for the most part, with some interest.† But as he waited for the doorbell to ring with two twenty-something boys on the other side of the door, everything in his apartment seemed a terrifically misguided attempt at a kind of self-assuring comfort that one could only pity in its aftermath.† He sat in his chair and fretted.

Bike: She’d insisted that we take his bike, spray-paint it white, and lock it up on the corner of Main street and Damascus. We did not have the heart to tell her that that was something one did for a loved one killed while riding a bike. We took the bike out back, and the walked it quietly to the center of town and chained it to a lamppost.† When we came back the following morning we found a crushed coke can and a gum-wrapper in the basket that he had neatly affixed to the handlebars.

Rooms: There were times when the silence was so grating, so overwhelmingly present, that it would seem to swallow all hope, like a chill that sneaks up on the crocuses in April.† But there were also times when her solitude was soft and pliable.† It enveloped her wholly in its murmur – the radiator hiss, cars in the street, the neighbors taking the trashcans to the curb – and she let herself explore it, walking from one room to another, wondering at first if this was a mistake – if the chill would return as suddenly as it left – and growing gradually more comfortable, letting an inner monologue fill the empty spaces in her mind.

plucking a thought – just for fun

When Jeb arrived at the house it was late, and although he was loathe to admit this to himself, the chill and dark that permeated the empty rooms unnerved him.† Walking up he’d noticed that someone had spelled out the street name on the door with brass lettering, lest the house forget what street it belonged to. Now he stood in the hallway and wondered at how the occasional edges of light cut eerily through the darkness, creating a sharp, spooky effect of things being broken. Richard had written out instructions for Jeb on a [Calvin Klein] shirt label that he’d pulled out of the wastebasket, but having checked his pockets Jeb concluded that he had already misplaced it. He thought it might be in the car, but the only parking he could find was nearly a mile up the road, and the evening was quickly settling into a drizzle.

third person, close, quirky tone, mood – loss

As she sat there and looked out over her garden she had to admit to herself that she had a serious weed problem.† She’d tried everything – bought a weed-waker, stocked bottles of weed-be-gone in her makeshift shed, had even looked at ordering weed-kiling breeds of locusts online, but nothing seemed to solve her problem.† She eventually had to admit that it was her old age that was the real problem – that for a fifty-eight year old to be on her hands and knees pulling at the suckers was not an option, and so they continued to grow.† She sat at her bedroom window and watched them.† If one looked really closely, she’d say to her husband when he was there, one could actually see them expanding their dominions over her carefully sanctioned spaces.† Her husband would grunt, or say nothing at all.

The garden was not a particularly complicated affair – no rose-bushes to prune, no japanese maples to fret over.† She liked the earthier things, like squash and zucchini, which would swell with their heavy fruit in late spring, and bloom green the rest of the season until the frost turned everything a death-inspired shade of rot.† At least the weeds were green, she eventually admitted to her friend, Martha, not without a note of defeat.† Her husband had left for the weekend, leaving behind a tossed off pair of jeans that he’d worn on his fishing trip, and a single sock trailing across the floor, like a lost soldier in a war zone.† She walked into their room and thought that this must be what psychologists talked about when they talked about the remnants of the recently deceased that drove the living to suicidal despair.† It was the kind of detritus of life that makes one feel that another human being was just there, just breathing, just making a mess.†† The neatnicks would not get the same level of sympathy when they died, she’d thought, staring at her own bedroom, wondering if she should pick up he clothes or leave them.† She decided to leave them, in part out of respect for the slob her husband had always been, and in larger part because her recent back pain had made it impossibly painful to bend at the waist.