I
I came here when I decided I was tired. I no longer wanted to cook, clean, shop, wash myself or deal with other people. I wanted to bask in the luxury of stillness and wait for death to come.
II
Several times a day I am visited by a woman with a face like a thumb who variously changes my bedpan, plies me with baby food, and washes me with a sponge. We never speak and I generally dread her visits.
III
The only other person I see is a bespectacled man who visits me occasionally. He is some sort of counselor. He is trying to redeem his life by assisting people with their deaths, and it seems to me that he succeeds at neither. He is a failure and that is why I like him. His name is Abernathy.
IV
Abernathy is autumnal. He is greying around the temples. He has a blasted look in his eyes. He doesn’t glow. He is about the age I was when I realized everything was over.
V
I tried to explain this to Abernathy once. Half my life ago I was paused in a car at an intersection in a prosperous American suburb, waiting for the light to change. I saw a man in an enormous vehicle roll by among all of the other enormous vehicles rolling by. He had a long black cigar in his mouth. The cigar looked virginal; I could tell that this man held in his mind an image of being cigar smoker more intently than he was actually smoking a cigar. Through him yawned the vast gleaming emptiness of a sunlit desert, the same vast gleaming emptiness that yawns through everything in the American suburbs.
VI
This man thought that he was free. He didn’t see himself as a product, sold with all his other fellow consumers to advertisers by broadcasters and publishers who didn’t give a damn about him beyond where he steered his eyeballs. Even after he rolled out of sight, I couldn’t shake from my mind the image of this ghost with a symbolic cigar jutting out of its face steering an enormous vehicle in pursuit of other empty symbols.
VII
It was then that I saw all of the masks that comprised my negotiations with the world scattered in a rubble at my feet. I no longer believed my own bluff. I didn’t evaporate in that instant, as would have been merciful, nor did my heart explode in my chest. Instead I felt struck to my core by a blow that winded me of my buoyancy. I persisted under this heaviness, still wielding bluffs I didn’t believe in, until several months ago when I came here, where I am ridding myself of the final bluff of being alive.
VIII
When I told this to Abernathy he smiled dimly and coughed once like shooting himself in the foot. “Yes,” he said, appraising his shoe, “I know what you mean about not believing your own bluff. I’ll see you next time.” He closed the door behind him. The nurse with a face like a thumb does too. The door only opens when they come in or go out.
IX
Abernathy is a decent sort, but he has everything upside down. He thinks the world is bad because people in power are bad, when it is power that tends to bring out the worst in people. "The problem," he once told me, "is that people keep asking 'What should we do?' It's a luxury to ask 'What should we do?' People in poor countries don't ask what to do—they rally themselves against their oppressors." I told him that Americans don't know what to do because of their luxuries; if they weren't so materially contented they'd be brimming with revolt and revenge—until their struggles yielded nothing sustaining and they became tired, too tired to try anything new, and they found themselves lapsing and waiting and bursting into occasional fits of violence that in the end only fortified their torpor. Abernathy understands poverty as love and blood and righteousness in a noble struggle for a new world order no longer ruled by the most brutal and greedy of our fine fellow men. He doesn't see the leaders of a successful revolution as the same men freed from their cages.
X
A big part of my crisis was my realizing that I wasn't one of these men. In my prime, at whose height I was poised when I struck by the apparition of my fellow man as a product reifying itself with the continuous acquisition of other products, I fancied myself as I kind of minor devil. I was fond of my wickedness. I was cunning and I had carved a neat little niche for myself in the fold of the world I'd inherited. According to my internal economy, I was maximizing my opportunities. I was a salesman who rolled from product to product with the tides of the times and was very good at what I did. People seemed to like me and, because I liked myself, I liked them. My wife was good-looking and we got along well, and together we'd made a daughter to whom I admittedly had trouble relating, but I made sure she was well provided for, and figured that the rest was up to her and her mother.
XI
I was loose and carefree, to the point of seeming sloppy to myself now, but even then I comported myself within the stricture of certain disciplines which fortified a necessary degree of self-righteousness. I may have flirted openly with women when I was away from my wife, but I never came close to having a full-blown affair. Such an enterprise requires real willfulness, and even then I knew there were limits to my wickedness. What I liked was staring into the swirling mirror that was the world of women to me. To be smiled at with knowing eyes was enough to assure me of whatever I believed myself to be, and that was enough for me, because as I soon realized, I was I creature nourished on fantasies that had no correspondence with reality, with what finally was.
XII
After I cracked I became quiet. I knew at last I was alone. Part of me considered abandoning what had been a lie of a life—to leave my wife, quit my job, and live like something other than the jolly-go-happy slob I had been until then. But I didn't. I wasn't wicked enough. Instead I plodded through my plotted course, a hollow man, a pair of eyes whose intensities where absolutely elsewhere. A dozen practiced gestures got me through the day. To others I was an echo of what I once was, and I deployed all of my cunning to keep that echo alive, which, knowing what I knew, was a torture that almost permanently mangled me. I am amazed that I don’t have cancer.
XIII
For the first time I saw how lonely my wife was, that she related to our camaraderie sadly, as a slender solace from her loneliness. In photographs of the two of us I saw our separateness: I self-satisfied, beaming broadly, almost lizardly, aloft on a gust of pleasure that was almost wholly my own; my wife serious, stern, sadly smiling, clinging to vapors that allegedly held us together. I was tempted to strand her in her loneliness then, to set her adrift in her separateness, but I couldn’t—seeing her so sad was unbearable, and after standing still and staring at her so surgically for months I suddenly seized her in an embrace with all the love I could summon shuddering through me, and she held me with all of her might, squeezing me so fiercely that she passed something quivering from her core into mine. I never pitied her again. We didn’t deign to pal around like in the dim days of yore, but we lived in quiet closeness until she died five years ago.
XIV
I cannot say the same for my daughter. She clearly hated me, and any attempt I made to narrow the gulf between us only exaggerated how impossibly apart we were. I hadn’t taken any real interest in her life until then, when she was a college freshman, and my clumsy overtures to try only insulted her. She quickly distanced herself from my wife and I after graduating, attaining, eventually, some managerial rank as a chemist for a dermatological medications corporation, married late, had a son. They live on the other end of the continent. She attended her mother’s funeral alone.
I came here when I decided I was tired. I no longer wanted to cook, clean, shop, wash myself or deal with other people. I wanted to bask in the luxury of stillness and wait for death to come.
II
Several times a day I am visited by a woman with a face like a thumb who variously changes my bedpan, plies me with baby food, and washes me with a sponge. We never speak and I generally dread her visits.
III
The only other person I see is a bespectacled man who visits me occasionally. He is some sort of counselor. He is trying to redeem his life by assisting people with their deaths, and it seems to me that he succeeds at neither. He is a failure and that is why I like him. His name is Abernathy.
IV
Abernathy is autumnal. He is greying around the temples. He has a blasted look in his eyes. He doesn’t glow. He is about the age I was when I realized everything was over.
V
I tried to explain this to Abernathy once. Half my life ago I was paused in a car at an intersection in a prosperous American suburb, waiting for the light to change. I saw a man in an enormous vehicle roll by among all of the other enormous vehicles rolling by. He had a long black cigar in his mouth. The cigar looked virginal; I could tell that this man held in his mind an image of being cigar smoker more intently than he was actually smoking a cigar. Through him yawned the vast gleaming emptiness of a sunlit desert, the same vast gleaming emptiness that yawns through everything in the American suburbs.
VI
This man thought that he was free. He didn’t see himself as a product, sold with all his other fellow consumers to advertisers by broadcasters and publishers who didn’t give a damn about him beyond where he steered his eyeballs. Even after he rolled out of sight, I couldn’t shake from my mind the image of this ghost with a symbolic cigar jutting out of its face steering an enormous vehicle in pursuit of other empty symbols.
VII
It was then that I saw all of the masks that comprised my negotiations with the world scattered in a rubble at my feet. I no longer believed my own bluff. I didn’t evaporate in that instant, as would have been merciful, nor did my heart explode in my chest. Instead I felt struck to my core by a blow that winded me of my buoyancy. I persisted under this heaviness, still wielding bluffs I didn’t believe in, until several months ago when I came here, where I am ridding myself of the final bluff of being alive.
VIII
When I told this to Abernathy he smiled dimly and coughed once like shooting himself in the foot. “Yes,” he said, appraising his shoe, “I know what you mean about not believing your own bluff. I’ll see you next time.” He closed the door behind him. The nurse with a face like a thumb does too. The door only opens when they come in or go out.
IX
Abernathy is a decent sort, but he has everything upside down. He thinks the world is bad because people in power are bad, when it is power that tends to bring out the worst in people. "The problem," he once told me, "is that people keep asking 'What should we do?' It's a luxury to ask 'What should we do?' People in poor countries don't ask what to do—they rally themselves against their oppressors." I told him that Americans don't know what to do because of their luxuries; if they weren't so materially contented they'd be brimming with revolt and revenge—until their struggles yielded nothing sustaining and they became tired, too tired to try anything new, and they found themselves lapsing and waiting and bursting into occasional fits of violence that in the end only fortified their torpor. Abernathy understands poverty as love and blood and righteousness in a noble struggle for a new world order no longer ruled by the most brutal and greedy of our fine fellow men. He doesn't see the leaders of a successful revolution as the same men freed from their cages.
X
A big part of my crisis was my realizing that I wasn't one of these men. In my prime, at whose height I was poised when I struck by the apparition of my fellow man as a product reifying itself with the continuous acquisition of other products, I fancied myself as I kind of minor devil. I was fond of my wickedness. I was cunning and I had carved a neat little niche for myself in the fold of the world I'd inherited. According to my internal economy, I was maximizing my opportunities. I was a salesman who rolled from product to product with the tides of the times and was very good at what I did. People seemed to like me and, because I liked myself, I liked them. My wife was good-looking and we got along well, and together we'd made a daughter to whom I admittedly had trouble relating, but I made sure she was well provided for, and figured that the rest was up to her and her mother.
XI
I was loose and carefree, to the point of seeming sloppy to myself now, but even then I comported myself within the stricture of certain disciplines which fortified a necessary degree of self-righteousness. I may have flirted openly with women when I was away from my wife, but I never came close to having a full-blown affair. Such an enterprise requires real willfulness, and even then I knew there were limits to my wickedness. What I liked was staring into the swirling mirror that was the world of women to me. To be smiled at with knowing eyes was enough to assure me of whatever I believed myself to be, and that was enough for me, because as I soon realized, I was I creature nourished on fantasies that had no correspondence with reality, with what finally was.
XII
After I cracked I became quiet. I knew at last I was alone. Part of me considered abandoning what had been a lie of a life—to leave my wife, quit my job, and live like something other than the jolly-go-happy slob I had been until then. But I didn't. I wasn't wicked enough. Instead I plodded through my plotted course, a hollow man, a pair of eyes whose intensities where absolutely elsewhere. A dozen practiced gestures got me through the day. To others I was an echo of what I once was, and I deployed all of my cunning to keep that echo alive, which, knowing what I knew, was a torture that almost permanently mangled me. I am amazed that I don’t have cancer.
XIII
For the first time I saw how lonely my wife was, that she related to our camaraderie sadly, as a slender solace from her loneliness. In photographs of the two of us I saw our separateness: I self-satisfied, beaming broadly, almost lizardly, aloft on a gust of pleasure that was almost wholly my own; my wife serious, stern, sadly smiling, clinging to vapors that allegedly held us together. I was tempted to strand her in her loneliness then, to set her adrift in her separateness, but I couldn’t—seeing her so sad was unbearable, and after standing still and staring at her so surgically for months I suddenly seized her in an embrace with all the love I could summon shuddering through me, and she held me with all of her might, squeezing me so fiercely that she passed something quivering from her core into mine. I never pitied her again. We didn’t deign to pal around like in the dim days of yore, but we lived in quiet closeness until she died five years ago.
XIV
I cannot say the same for my daughter. She clearly hated me, and any attempt I made to narrow the gulf between us only exaggerated how impossibly apart we were. I hadn’t taken any real interest in her life until then, when she was a college freshman, and my clumsy overtures to try only insulted her. She quickly distanced herself from my wife and I after graduating, attaining, eventually, some managerial rank as a chemist for a dermatological medications corporation, married late, had a son. They live on the other end of the continent. She attended her mother’s funeral alone.
XV
I came here to lie and to wait. To stare at my life unflinchingly and to live according to what I saw. To endure without distraction whatever visited me, be it physical indignity, obliterating sickness, loathsome shame, mortal fear, abysmal loneliness, Abernathy, or the nurse with a face like a thumb. I don’t keep track of days or hours, but I get a sense of their passing from the visits of the nurse and Abernathy. He seems to come weekly. Once I was particularly eager to see him, the time felt ripe for his arrival, but he didn’t come. I spent endless days and nights stranded on the edge of my ephemera, adrift in a horrible twilight flickering before a darkness so swallowing that when she came in to bathe me one day I spoke to the nurse for the first time. I asked her with a gasp where was Abernathy. “He’s been on vacation,” she told me, her face the clay of benignity. “You’ll see him tomorrow.”
Never have I felt so grateful.
.
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