Break It Down

by Lydia Davis

  The next time the moon was full, I was back in the city, and I saw it out the window of a new apartment. I thought to myself that a month had passed since he and I were together, and that it had passed very slowly. After that, every time the moon was full, shining on the leafy, tall trees in the back yards here, and on the flat tar roofs, and then on the bare trees and snowy ground in the winter, I would think to myself that another month had passed, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. I liked counting the months that way.

  He and I always seemed to be counting the time as it passed and waiting for it to pass so that the day would come when we would be together again. That was one reason he said he couldn’t go on with it. And maybe he’s right, it isn’t too late, we will change over to a friendship, and he will talk to me now and then long distance, mostly about his work or my work, and give me good advice or a plan of action when I need one, then call himself something like my “éminence grise.”

  When I stopped making my phone calls, I was too dizzy to go to sleep, because of the wine, so I turned on the television and watched some police dramas, some old situation comedies, and finally a show about unusual people across the country. I turned the set off at five in the morning when the sky was light, and I fell asleep right away.

  It’s true that by the time the night was over I wasn’t worrying anymore about what was wrong with me. At that hour of the morning I can usually get myself out to the end of something like a long dock with water all around where I’m not touched by such worries. But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I’m not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that.

  Sketches for a Life of Wassilly

  1

  Wassilly was a man of many parts, changeable, fickle, at times ambitious, at times stuporous, at times meditative, at times impatient. Not a man of habit, though he wished to be, tried to cultivate habits, was overjoyed when he found something that truly, for a time, seemed necessary to him and that had possibilities of becoming a habit.

  For a while, he sat in his wing chair every evening after supper and found it pleasant. He once thoroughly enjoyed smoking a pipe of fragrant tobacco and thinking over what had happened to him during the day. But the next evening he suffered from wind and could not sit still; the pipe, also, kept going out; the lights for some reason flickered and dimmed constantly, and after a while he gave up the pretense of leisurely contemplation.

  Some months later, he decided that a stroll after dinner was also a popular thing to do and might easily become a habit. For many days he went out of his house at a fixed hour and walked through the neighboring streets, successfully evoking in himself a mood of calm speculation, gazing at the swallows as they flew over the river and at the red sun-soaked housefronts and deducing various ill-founded scientific principles from what he saw; or he let his thoughts dwell on the people that walked by him in the street. But this did not become a habit either: he realized with great disappointment that once he had exhausted all the possible routes within an hour’s stroll of his house he became frankly bored with walking, and that instead of benefiting his constitution, it upset his stomach enough so that he had to treat himself with some pills upon returning home. The strolls stopped altogether when his sister came unexpectedly to visit him, and did not resume when she left.

  Wassilly was ambitious to learn, and yet sometimes for days on end he could not bring himself to study, but would sneak off into a corner, as if to avoid his own anxious gaze, and spend a long time bent over a crossword puzzle. This made him irritable and dull. He tried to throw the puzzles into a more favorable light by including them in his scheme for self-improvement. During three days, he tested himself against his watch: he did most of a puzzle in twenty minutes on one day, all of it in twenty minutes on the next, and then almost none of it in twenty minutes on the third. On that day he changed the rules and decided he would try to finish the puzzle every day, no matter how long it took. He clearly saw the time coming in which he would be master of the game. To this end he started keeping a notebook in which he wrote down all the more obscure words which appeared regularly in the puzzles and which he otherwise forgot as soon as he learned them, such as “stoa: Greek porch.” In this way he persuaded himself that he was learning something even from the puzzles, and for a few wonderful hours he saw the conjunction of his baser inclinations and his higher ambitions.

  His inconsistency. His inability to finish anything. His sudden terrifying feelings that nothing he did mattered. His realizations that what went on in the outside world had more substance than anything in his life.

  Sometimes Wassilly had an inkling that he suffered from a deeper boredom than he could completely picture to himself. At these times, he would brood about the yearly allowance his father gave him: perhaps it was the most unfortunate thing that had ever happened to him; it might ruin what was left of his life. Yet one of the only things Wassilly could be sure of in himself was the recurring hope that things would not turn out as badly as they seemed to be.

  His effect on the world was potentially astonishing.

  2

  Wassilly’s few real successes left him unmoved. Or rather, he could not bear to look at an article he had published and would allow his copies of the magazine to become covered with coffee stains and bent at the edges. He could not feel that his printed name was really his, or that the words on the page had really come from his own pen. His sister confirmed this feeling by remaining utterly silent about what he sent to her and also by treating him in exactly the same way she always had—as an agreeable but ineffectual person—when he felt his accomplishments should have made her see him in a new light. As some sort of retaliation, he occasionally wrote her long, deeply serious, and carefully phrased letters criticizing her personal life. These she would only mention months later and in an offhand way.

  Not only did his published name and works seem to belong to someone else, but he derived little joy from anything he wrote. Once he had done it, it was out of his hands: it lay in a no-man’s-land. It was neutral. It did not speak to him. He wanted to be proud of himself, but felt only guilty—that he had not done more, or better. He envied people who set out to write a book, wrote it, and were pleased with it, and when it was published read it through again with fresh pleasure and turned easily to their next project. He felt only a frightening emptiness ahead of him, a vacancy where there should have been plans, and all his work grew out of impulses.

  3

  Wassilly was so extremely self-conscious that at times even the soft eyes of his dog made him blush with embarrassment when he tried to attract her attention by some stupid action. Talking to friends on the telephone he would put fantastic interpretations on what they said and respond with clumsy remarks which left them bewildered and nervous.

  In strange company he spoke too softly to be heard, afraid that his remarks would be misunderstood. His confidence was further weakened by the fact that people looked puzzled every time he spoke, since they were trying to hear what he was saying, or did not even notice that he had spoken.

  Sometimes he was not certain whether or not he should say goodbye to a stranger. He compromised by whispering and looking off to one side.

  He did not know exactly when to thank his hostess after attending a dinner or a weekend party. In his uncertainty, he would thank her over and over again. It was as though he did not believe his words carried any weight and hoped to achieve through the effect of accumulation what one speech alone could not accomplish.

  Wassilly was puzzled by the fact that these social responses did not come naturally to him, as they evidently did to others. He tried to learn them by watching other people closely, and was to some extent successful. But why was it such a di
fficult game? Sometimes he felt like a wolf-child who had only recently joined humanity.

  4

  Wassilly kept falling in love. Even with the dullest and plainest women, since he was so isolated, out there in the country, that his loneliness soon overcame his initial disgust; when he awoke from his madness he would feel disgusted again and embarrassed.

  Wassilly had difficult relations with the girl at the grocery. He felt insulted by her cold manner. At home, he sometimes worked himself into a rage against her and made cutting remarks to her out loud. Then he would become ashamed of himself and try to adopt a more enlightened attitude, realizing that she was only an unattractive girl in a small town working in a grocery, someone with no hopes, no ideals, no future. This would restore his sense of proportion. Then he would remember a certain day the previous spring. At the shooting match on a hill above the town she had flaunted herself in a white hat and had not acknowledged his presence by so much as a nod, though all around him people were in the highest of spirits. As if this was not enough, he had taken a shot at the target on the next hilltop and the gun had recoiled and hurt him badly in the shoulder. Everyone had laughed. But after all, he said to himself, they were experienced hunters and he was only a fat intellectual.

  5

  There were days when nothing went well, in spite of his good intentions. He would mislay everything he needed for work—pen, notebook, cigarettes—then after settling down would be called away to the telephone or would run out of ink, would resume work and become suddenly hungry, would be delayed by an accident in the kitchen and sit down again too distracted to think.

  Even after an hour of good work, the day might be lost: he would feel that a fruitful afternoon was opening up for him, and on the strength of that feeling would take a break, stretching his legs in the garden. He would look up at the sky, his attention would be caught by an unfamiliar bird, and he would take up his bird book and follow the bird over the wild acres outside his garden, plunging through the underbrush, scratching his face, and gathering burrs on his socks. Returning home, he would be too hot and tired to work, and with a sense of guilt would lie down to rest, reading something light.

  6

  Wassilly sometimes suspected that he worked on his articles only because he enjoyed writing with a fountain pen and black ink. He could not, for example, write anything good with a ballpoint pen. And his work did not go well if he worked with blue ink. When he and his sister played gin rummy together, he enjoyed keeping score—yet if all they had at hand was a pencil, he allowed his sister to keep score.

  He liked to use his pen for other things as well: he made lists on scraps of white paper which he saved in a little pile. One list showed what he must remember to do when he visited the city again (Walk in the poorer neighborhoods, Take pictures of certain streets), another what he must do before he left the country (Visit the lake, Take a daylong walk). On another scrap of paper he had written out a tentative schedule for the perfect day, with times set aside for physical exercise, work, serious reading, and correspondence. Then there was a scheme he was outlining for a set of camping equipment which would include a writing table and a cookstove and weigh less than forty pounds. And there were more lists—for example, insoluble problems he was encountering in his study of languages, with suggestions for where to find the answers (and on the list of what he must do in the city he would then add: Visit the library).

  But far from helping to organize his life, the lists became very confusing to him. Working on a list, he would send himself into a certain room to check a book title or the date and forget why he had gone there, distracted by the sight of another unfinished project. He received from himself a number of unrelated instructions which he could not remember, and spent entire mornings uselessly rushing from room to room. There was a strange gap between volition and action: sitting at his desk, before his work but not working, he dreamt of perfection in many things, and this exhilarated him. But when he took one step toward that perfection, he faltered in the face of its demands. There were mornings when he woke under a weight of discouragement so heavy that he could not get out of bed but lay there all day watching the sunlight move across the floor and up the wall.

  7

  Wassilly’s conception of himself: Wassilly had been an exceptionally healthy, agile, and physically fearless boy—and so he continued to think of himself. Even when he fell prey to a variety of ailments that followed one after another with hardly a pause for several years, he persisted in regarding each ailment as unusual—even interesting—in a man of his good health. He would not admit that he was becoming frail, until one day his sister dropped in to see him where he lay suffering from a painful sinus attack, and in her blunt way said that she had never known anyone to get sick so often.

  He took up yoga for a time after that, and did a shoulder stand every morning, since according to his book this would “drain one’s sinuses and at the same time redistribute one’s weight.” (There his housekeeper would find him, staring up at a fold of his stomach, his chin pressed into his thyroid.)

  He resolved to eat more wisely, taking his protein mainly from yogurt.

  Vitamin D, said another book he consulted, was the most difficult vitamin to obtain naturally, and was formed on the oil of the skin by the sun’s rays in the hours from ten to two in the months from May to September in Western countries (in the Northern Hemisphere). Accordingly, on the morning of May first, Wassilly exposed most of his skin to the feeble sun, lying for half an hour shivering in his back yard before he could not stand it any longer and gave up. Later, in the summer, he decided to combine the shoulder stand and the sunbath. He went out at noon and pointed his toes at the sky, but becoming dizzy he immediately lost all interest and for a time abandoned both yoga and sunbathing.

  The key to everything, he decided, was to relax.

  8

  Wassilly, suddenly enlightened, saw that there was a terrible discrepancy between his conception of himself and the reality. He admired himself and at times felt slightly superior to others, not because of what he really was and what he had really done with himself, but rather because of what he could do, what he would soon do, what he would accomplish in the years ahead, what he would one day become and remain, and for the courage of his spirit. Sometimes he dreamt of obstacles which he would overcome with glory: fatal illness, permanent blindness, a flood or fire where lives could be saved, a long march as a refugee through mountainous country, a dramatic opportunity to defend his principles. But since under these circumstances it would actually be easier—not more difficult—to perform honorably, it followed that the tedium of his present situation was the most difficult obstacle of all.

  One important thing was not to forget what he hoped to achieve in life. Another important thing was not to confuse a romantic picture of himself—as a doctor in Africa, for example—with a real possibility. And he tried not to lose sight of the fact that he was an adult in an adult world, with responsibilities. This was not easy: he would find himself sitting in the sun cutting out paper stars for a Christmas tree at the very moment other men were working to support large families or representing their countries in foreign places. When in moments of difficult truth-seeking he saw this incongruity, he felt sick that he should be saddled with himself, as though he were his own unwanted guest.

  9

  Wassilly’s immobility: In midwinter, Wassilly’s brother died. His father asked him to go to the apartment and sort through his brother’s things. Wassilly’s brother had lived alone in the city. Wassilly had never visited him there, because for some years his brother had not wanted to see him.

  The door of the apartment had many locks and Wassilly did not know which were closed and which open, so it took him some time to get inside. Once inside, he was taken aback by the squalor and nakedness of the apartment: it looked like the home of a very poor man. There was nothing on the walls or floors. The furniture was shabby, and there was very little of it.

  Wassilly
walked through the rooms. Signs of his brother were everywhere. In the bathroom, a web of black fingermarks surrounded the light switch. There was a ring in the tub, and a crust of dirt in the basin and the toilet. In the kitchen glass bottles and jars were crowded into one corner. Sheaths and roots of garlic buds covered the table like a light snow. It was as though his brother would be coming back at any moment.

  Wassilly walked into the living room, where the only furniture was a desk, a cupboard, a few chairs, and the unmade bed from which his brother had been taken to the hospital. On the floor under the window, piles of papers and notebooks collapsed out into the room. Wassilly poked through them and found nothing. He pulled a folding wooden chair out into the middle of the room and sat down. He looked out the window at the brick walls of the apartment buildings which abutted this one, enclosing a courtyard and a spindly locust tree.

  Wassilly tried to think about his brother—the stooped, thick figure, the slow speech, the hesitations. But again and again his mind wandered. The room was dark, even though the sun shone on the buildings nearby. A neighbor banged something against the wall behind the kitchen stove and immediately afterwards a door slammed in the hallway. Wassilly began to doze off, his chin on his overcoat lapel.