by Jason Porter
I went upstairs to stare quietly at my sleeping wife. She looked peaceful. She didn’t snore, but I could hear her breathing softly. She looked like a baby animal. She looked ready to drool. The television was still on, carving a glow into the darkness and offering her new products for her dreams. I turned it off and left her.
I took six of every type of pill we had in the medicine cabinet and sat on the toilet with the lid down. I had the pills in my hand: round, flat, oval, white, yellow, blue. Dividing lines drawn down the center for responsible dosage. Before each pill I said aloud, “Are you going to stop yourself from taking this pill?” Every time I answered the question by swallowing a pill.
I wrote a two-line poem on a cube of toilet paper. My pocket was still full of pens I’d stolen from the office. The ink bled and expanded into the absorbent tissue, but it was still legible. Two lines were all I could write. There was no note that could explain. The truth, the real truth, is only reduced by explanations. What I wrote down made sense to me, but only because nothing in the world made sense to me. I went back to the bedroom and put the poem under Brenda’s pillow. She awoke long enough to say “There’s Chinese in the fridge,” and then she fell back asleep.
Downstairs I poured myself a glass of Old Grandma to sip on while I waited it out. I was about to sit down in the chair that had belonged to Brenda’s dead uncle when I remembered the letter. I was cautious walking from the living room to the kitchen for the letter, and then back to the living room again. I didn’t want to shake up the pills in my stomach or get too dizzy. I was careful about my steps.
We had inherited the massive corduroy chair from Brenda’s Uncle Henry. Neither of us wanted it, because it was ugly, but Brenda’s mother seemed offended, so we took it, and then we soon realized that the ugliness was outweighed by the lazy brilliance of the thing. It was one of the few places I could relax. I sat in it with the letter. I sniffed the envelope. It smelled like nothing. Old paper. My name on the front of it was fading. Black ink that now looked brown.
Dear Ray,
Do not panic. Please, do not panic. I am guessing that it has been about seven years since I wrote this. Since you wrote this. I gave this to Brenda and told her to give it to you the next time you started to seem a little off. It seems to be about every seven years that you need to read one of these. Are you beginning to wonder if the earth’s rotation has slowed down? Do you see the faces of your elementary school teachers in the clouds crying down tears on the earth? Perhaps you have started writing to prisoners, or are trying to make the pigeons feel better about themselves. Once you cried when you saw an old house being torn down, and you swore that each plank was a part of you. You felt like your arms were being ripped off and nobody believed you. You are probably going through something like that right now. Slow down. Take a breath. The government can help you. Call this number: 1-888-899-9090. I have to believe people will still be using phones when you read this. You have called the number before. They do something to your skull. It probably doesn’t even hurt anymore. It is really not so bad. You lie back on a bed. They tell you to think about anything you want, while you wait for the drugs to kick in. Ideally something restful. Last time I thought about sex, but I think even that is okay. A giant white helmet-shaped thing attached to a small crane swings your way and covers your head. That’s about when you fade out, or you may just see pink wavy lines while you hear doctors sharpening things and talking about their plans for the weekend. It feels like your head is a stringed instrument and they are twisting the tuning pegs to correct the intonation, except tuning it involves microscopic needles in your brain. And then you rest. They have a television above the bed that you can watch, and it plays encouraging life-affirming programming while you settle down from the electrical charges and the sounds of spinning blades. Some of the programs are pretty good. Then they recommend that you write yourself a letter because often the initial memory of the event quickly fades away, which is probably for the best. But maybe things have changed. Anyway, don’t give up. Ask for a little help. It is out there. You will resist because you don’t want to ask for help. Usually you feel like you are the only one who can tell what’s going on with you. But it’s not like that. It’s the opposite. Take the help. Take the help. Take care of yourself. If you are reading this, the whole world hurts too much and it is more than you can handle. Call the number.
Love,
Raymond
I started to feel the dull deceleration of the Lortab plus Vicodin plus pentobarbital plus Xanax plus Librium plus Benadryl plus melatonin plus vitamin E. The letter seemed familiar. I thought about calling the number, but then I thought about Switzerland. When I graduated from college my mother surprised me and gave me money to travel around Europe. I saw churches and wrote postcards and stared at people on trains. Poor planning had me stopping over for a night in a city next to a river where they made pills for human pains. It was a wide river, but because it was Swiss, it was not wild. Or maybe it was well-behaved because it was fed a cocktail of pharmaceutical waste. I was feeling well-behaved myself, lying back in Uncle Henry’s chair. I was seeing a river of pills. The chair was a rowboat, and I was dipping the oars into capsules and tablets, and hearing the echoes of men and women in lab coats hammering out powders.
I thought again about calling the number. I couldn’t imagine locating the energy to get up and find the telephone. I was a little thirsty. My head ticked slower. It was looking for a finish line. I wondered if Brenda would remarry. It wasn’t nice what I was doing. I wasn’t helping things. I looked to the side of the chair, down at the floor. I could see through the rug, through the floorboards, deep into the core of the earth. A small, hairless man with moon-colored skin was operating furnaces that powered our collective reality. He was shoveling coal into ovens, sweating and smiling. He looked up and waved at me.
I said, Does this matter? Does one person matter? Is it rude to make your wife disengage your dead body from the recliner and take it to the morgue?
And he said, Morgues offer pickup services, and it doesn’t matter all that much when you go. He said, You probably overreacted, but there is nothing about your mind or soul that is indispensable. And besides, I don’t know you that well, but my guess is you would find the future pretty disappointing.
My mouth was chalky. I kept telling myself to go get a glass of water. And then I would wait to see if I got up to get the water, and would find that I was still in the chair. My self wasn’t listening to myself. My self was too busy watching my self’s eyelids failing to resist their growing weight. With every ounce of energy I could gather, I reached for the remote control on the table next to the chair, and I clicked on the TV. I thought this might help me confirm that I was still experiencing the living world. What I found was that everybody on every channel was selling knives.
I closed my eyes. I said, You are only going to close your eyes for a second, but you won’t keep them closed, because maybe you don’t want to slip away.
I saw silver static. I saw diagonal lines descending a staircase. I opened my eyes and I could see back through the living room and on through the kitchen and around the corner into the front hallway. A man was by the front door. He was wearing a sweatshirt with my name on it, but in foreign letters. He was trying to turn the doorknob as quietly as possible so that nobody could hear him slink off.
Do you believe in life after death?
No, unless that is what I am experiencing at the moment. I believe, or at least hope for, complete memory loss after death. I believe in getting drunk after death and sleeping with a lot of dead people who also just died and can’t believe their luck and are temporarily relieved that they no longer have to pay taxes, even though soon enough they will realize they do kind of miss paying taxes and having aches in their bones and a hunger to fill and feeling like some larger force, like the cable company, has power over them.
or B)
A rainstorm ha
d passed through while we were in Schlitzy’s and left behind fifteen minutes of cool. The roads were wet, the dirt was hidden in the moisture, the cars were hushing each other.
I wondered if I could freeze my mind in one moment. Press pause. Blow it up like a photo. Highlight the titillating parts. Capture the kiss and me in it in a big block of ice.
A yellow leaf, curled on the edges, was trapped under a wiper. Pinned down like a driver after a crash. It said to me: Help. Then it said, You have a heart. Use it. Enjoy the blood surging through you. I’m tired of your excuses. I set the windshield wipers in motion, but the leaf wouldn’t budge. The rain had him glued to the glass. The leaf said, Go home. You have a home. You have a lovely wife. You are not a performance artist.
When the traffic is light I like to take the War of 1812 Bridge going back across the bay. Brenda and I had ridden across it on our bicycles once, when that was still legal. I felt a certain loyalty to the structure. The taillights at night arcing over the span were beautiful despite themselves, despite the stupid drivers and their stupid, bloated vehicles.
I thought about Glenda and her project. I thought about her father. His resources. I wondered if he might fund my research or give me my own channel. “Your Fallen Hopes, with your host, Raymond Champs, emotional downgrader to the stars.”
I was in the final stretch of my return commute. A Japanese restaurant had taken over the Italian restaurant that had taken over the natural foods store. The Storage Time on East 423rd was offering a special on packing tape. The high school where Brenda had learned self-defense after work looked wet and forgotten. A junker was sitting in the parking lot with its doors open and adolescent beats pouring out in a plea for attention.
I drove past a Garden Mania and a Waterfall of Toys and turned into our subdivision. The landscape went from commercial sprawl to the repetition of five different home designs in semirandom formations. Brown neo-Tudor, green ranch, white Sears Roebuck. Shingle, wood, aluminum, stucco. Mailbox, sprinkler, old car, rubber trash can.
Brenda had left a note on the kitchen table, waiting for me under the spotlight of our imitation Tiffany chandelier. Nurse Blaatz performed a surgical operation on Nurse Van Cleef when nobody was looking. Your loss. It was awesome. Also, read the fucking letter I left out for you. I gave it to you two days ago. Stop being rude and read it.
I looked around. It was dark. Domestic items united in undefined shadows. The digital clock on the microwave looked extra green. As bad as my job had been, I did not find relief when I realized I would now be spending my days around this kitchen, in this house, choking on reminders of the life I didn’t love.
Our lives capture us. They tie our arms behind our backs in insurance payments and greeting cards. The thought of it hurt my head. That’s what I wanted to scream, in my most captivating scream, to the people in the shopping mall: We live in a world where we have to pay somebody else to think up something to say on our behalf for our own mother’s birthday.
I thought about writing Brenda a note. A confession. I’m leaving you for a woman who thinks conceptually. I trust that within about a week you’ll realize I am doing you a favor. Oh yeah, I more or less lost my job.
Instead I grabbed the letter and took it to the La-Z-Boy we had inherited against our wishes. I kicked up my feet and opened the letter. The paper felt old. My handwriting was better then than it is now. I must be slipping, or I must have cared. It was folded neatly in thirds. It said:
Dear Ray,
I don’t want you to forget this moment. The surge in your heart. The way the air feels in your lungs. The way your feet are alive. Every second of your life feels like putting on new socks over clean feet. Is that a corny thing to say? Maybe it is. That’s the way it feels. The world feels corny in only the best possible way. You are going to get married. You are excited. I want you to remember this. Brenda just left the apartment to go back to hers. You asked her to marry you. You surprised her. You wrote your proposal out of travel Scrabble pieces that you glued to a drawing of your heart. On the heart you drew little scars that were stitched with Brenda’s kisses. I have to say it was a pretty impressive feat to make it clear that the stitches were made of her kisses. And yet it was the only possible interpretation. You nailed it and it floored her. You should quit studying sociology and go to art school or just quit altogether. You really are pretty good. But back to the point, you hid the drawing of your heart in a small tube that you hid in a pie that you served her. It was risky and didn’t go well at first. She said, “Why the fuck is this tube in my pie?” But then she opened it and unrolled it and saw the heart. And it all clicked. And she started to tear up a little. And she was radiant. The most beautiful face. The most delicate eyes, looking at you, wanting to take you in, to make you hers, to take care of you when you are an old, doddering man and she is an old, doddering woman. They were beams of golden light, and they bathed you all over. You had felt so completely vulnerable and exposed. And she adopted you with those eyes, with her smile, with a hug that reached the marrow in your bones. Honestly, up until the proposal, you were beginning to wonder if she was going to leave you for Johnny Saunders. No hard evidence. Just a hunch. And so you laid it all on the line because you love her. Because you are not everybody’s first choice and you are a little round at the hips and sometimes you complain too much and it has taken you a while to figure out how to satisfy her in bed, and you don’t have Johnny Saunders’s looks or knowledge of European history, and yet despite all of that she loves you. You frequently say something slightly stupid and most people would laugh right at you, but Brenda grabs you and kisses you and loves you all the more, and you think to yourself, Thank God for this. It can rain now. It can storm. The snow may come and trap us. The droughts may come. I can lose my legs. I may never eat again. The world may hate me. But I have this love. And so, you are writing all of this because you don’t want to ever forget how it feels. You are going to give it to Brenda and tell her to give it to you if things ever start to feel like they are slipping.
Love,
Raymond
I checked in. She was in bed. Asleep. The television was glowing the room blue. I turned it off and went to brush my teeth.
I sat on the toilet seat. I cried. There was no cause and effect. A boy, afraid, listening to his guts, unsure about his role in all of the wounds, wondering what had hit him, what he had done, if crime was a choice or a force that takes hold of people and makes them injure their own possibilities. Despite the letter, I wanted to die. I felt weak, like evolution was trying to tell me some bad news in the nicest possible way. I felt like Gus when the wind comes, like my missing fourth leg would come in handy right about now. And then I thought about the letter again. What a sweet idiot the author was.
I wrote a two-line poem on a cube of toilet paper. Maybe it wasn’t even a poem—just a thought. It seemed like the truth. I got into bed next to Brenda. She was more beautiful than when I proposed to her. I put the note under her pillow. She stirred a little, told me I smelled like sauerkraut, and fell back asleep. I slept too.
• • •
The closer I get to death,
the more I like flowers.
Acknowledgments
I have a great family—Porters, Nolds, and McGuires, alike—who have always encouraged me to realize my fullest self, regardless of how unorthodox or impractical that self might be.
The Hunter College MFA program saw me through numerous poorly formed half-ideas and provided the conditioning to plod on. In particular, Peter Carey and Colum McCann put me through the necessary calisthenics and were incredibly generous with their time and advice. Additionally, I must thank all of my fellow students for their patience and brilliant observations.
I have the best agent, Emily Forland, who I could also proudly include in the soon to follow list of friends.
I thank Philip Budnick and Matthew Daddona for placing an ill-advised bet, and s
eeing it through with great intelligence and insight.
I was fortunate to have writing residencies at Caldera, in Sisters, Oregon, and with the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Both allowed me invaluable escapes from distraction. Every day since I have wished I could teleport back for the calm productive focus they generously allowed.
I wish I could thank my grandmother Leah Lee, no longer with us in the narrowest sense, but always present in my heart.
For connecting, reading, and advising I thank Corinna Barsan, David Cashion, Eva Talmadge, and Jeffrey Rotter.
For digital hair wrangling, and ensuring the skin tones of a morning news host, I must thank Tami Gargus.
Every time I am at my most misanthropic, one of my extraordinary friends pops up to prove me wrong. For their particular influence in my creative pursuits, I roll out this long and woefully incomplete list: Justin and Eric White, Paul and Sasha Fine, Daniel Davidson, Tricia Keightley, Bernard Jungle, Paul Benney, Brad Mossman, Julia Jarrett, Carrie Bradley, Tom Galbraith, David and Antonia Belt, Damon Chessé, Karen Davidson, Marsha Champlin, Alice Simsar, Johannah Rodgers, Henry Scotch, Nicole Tierney, mis amigos cuencanos, the Merry Corners, the Friends of Thursday Night poker group, and all of the members of the seminal Bay Area rock band Captain Fatass.
Finally, for rooting for me, and putting up with me, and for being so smart and funny, I thank Shelly Gargus.