A Box of Matches

by Nicholson Baker

  Filling the carafe with water is not so difficult as measuring the coffee, because the sink is directly under the window, and I can sense the weight of the water; but when I pour the water into the top of the coffeemaker sometimes some streams out and down the sides and onto the counter. But who cares? It’s just water. It’ll be dry by the time there is light.

  Then, back in this living room, I position the chair and make sure my computer is plugged in, since its battery no longer holds a charge. I bought it for $250 from a used-computer store several weeks ago: once it was the sleekest and most desirable of black laptops, now it is practically junk. Someone, not me, has worn away the stippling on the space bar under the resting place of the right thumb, and the upright of the T is gone; I’ve changed the screen colors so that they display dark blue letters against a black background, almost illegible even in the dark, and when I’m ready to start typing I tip the screen towards me, so that it nearly grazes the tops of my prancing fingers. I’ve always liked the phrase touch-typing: I type by touch, staring at, or at least looking steadily at, the fire.

  When I lit the fire this morning, a pompadour styling of flame came forward from underneath and swooped back around a half-detached piece of bark. Right now there is one flame near the front that has a purple underpainting but a strong opacity of yellows and oranges and whites: it is flapping like one of those pennants that used to be strung around used-car lots. You don’t see those so much anymore: multicolored vinyl triangular flags on cords that hopeful sales managers hung from pole to pole to offer a sense of carnival.

  5

  Good morning, it’s 4:20 a.m.—You know, I used to have trouble sleeping, but now I have much less trouble because I’m getting up at four in the morning. Before five, anyway. I’m so sleepy that I sleep well. For some years I relied on suicidal thoughts to help me go to sleep. By day I’m not a particularly morbid person, but at night I would lie in bed imagining that I was hammering a knitting needle into my ear, or swan-diving off a ledge into a black void at the bottom of which were a dozen sharp, slippery stalagmites. Wearing a helmet and pilot’s gear, I would miniaturize myself, and wait for a giant screwdriver to unscrew the hatch at the nose of a bullet. I would be lowered into the control room of the bullet, whereupon the hatch would be screwed tight over me. At a certain moment, I would flick a switch and the gun would fire, throwing me back in my seat. I would shoot out the muzzle and over the sleeping city, following a path towards my own house; I would crash through the window and plunge toward my own head, and when the bullet dove into my brain I would fall asleep.

  Now I lie in bed and think a few random things about soil erosion or painting a long yellow strip on the side of a black ship, and because I’ve gotten up so early, I just fall asleep. The soporific suicidalism peaked several years ago, when we were staying for a few months in San Diego, so that I could “encourage” a group of doctors who were supposed to be revising their textbook. My brain was alive with the nightcrawlerly unfinishedness of the project, and there were four palm trees that I could see from the window of the room that I was using as a temporary office. The palms were beautiful trees in their way, especially as part of a quartet, but there is an intrinsic scrawniness to the palm, which grows like a flaring match, with a little fizzle of green at the top. It is doing only what is absolutely necessary to do to be a tree; and it has big, coarse leaves—intemperate leaves—and the bark shows its years on the outside, so that the tree has no secrets: it doesn’t have to die and be cut down before you can date its birth. I would look up at those four trees as I worked, and then at night I would imagine digging my own grave, because it just seemed that it would be so much easier to die than to get those three contentious doctors to contribute their material for the new and heavily revised edition of Spinal Cord Trauma. Claire and the children would be fully provided for as long as I was able to craft a way of dying that didn’t seem like suicide. But eventually the new edition was written, and then it was copyedited and indexed and published and distributed, and now medical-school students are buying it and underlining things in it, and all is as it should be.

  At around four-thirty, sometimes later, the freight-train whistle goes off. At seven I have to get dressed and drop my daughter Phoebe off at school and drive to work. I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty. A hundred years ago, a trolley line and two passenger trains came through this town; Rudyard Kipling reportedly stayed here for a week on his way inland to his house in Vermont, where he wrote the Just So Stories. “How the Leopard Got His Spots” is a good one. My mother read it to my brother and me, and it changed the way I thought about shadows. There were several places in our yard that offered Kipling’s kind of jigsawed shade. The euonymus tree that grew near the edge of our property worked best. Euonymus bark has beautiful fins, and under this low tree I could sit and watch the sunlight break into pieces.

  I like deciduous trees, frankly, especially trees with lichen growing on them. I like living in the east, I like old brass boxes with scratches, I like the way fireplaces look when they’ve held thousands of fires. The fireplace that I’m sitting in front of was built, supposedly, in 1780. How many fires has it held? Two hundred a year times two hundred years: forty thousand fires? I like to burn wood. I’ve only discovered this recently. Last year, Claire gave me an ax for my birthday, and I began using it to chop up the scrap wood that the contractors piled up where they were reconstructing our slumped barn. If you bring the ax down really hard, right in the middle of a six-inch board, the board will break in two longways, and the grain of the breakage will sometimes detour nicely around a knothole. Then you can chop across the grain. Apple boughs are very hard to chop, even the old gray ones that have lost their bark. You slam away at them for five minutes and then suddenly, if you hit them just right, they leap up at you and whack you in the face. Contractor’s scraps burn with many little explosions and whistling sighs.

  When we had burned through most of the scraps, I called up a wood man and ordered a cord. A cord is a unit of measure that means “a goodly amount.” The wood man used a large pincering hook to snag the quartered logs off his truck. He drove off with a pale blue check in his hand, leaving us with a heap of logs. This heap Claire and I, over the next week, built into a long, neat edifice against the barn. You crisscross the logs: three one way, and then three over those going the other way, and you put each crisscrossing pile next to the other, and you have to choose the logs so that the pile will remain stable and not topple; and you surmount the whole architecture with a roof made of stray pieces of bark. It takes on an air of permanency, like a stone wall—so finished seeming that you hesitate before pulling from it the first few logs for burning.

  The woodpile quickly became an object of fascination for the duck. She roots in between the logs and bangs at the bark with her beak until some breaks off, to see if there are bugs underneath. Now that everything is frozen, there is much less for her to eat there, but once in the fall I lifted a bottom log for her and she found an ant colony and several worms which she consumed with much lusty beak smacking. She is a dirty eater. She snuffles in mud and grass and then goes over to the plastic wading pool that we set up for her and drinks from it, and streams of dirt flow from her beak as she scoops up the water. When she has found a patch of wet earth or weeds that particularly pleases, she makes a whimpering sound of happiness, as a piglet would at the udder. I had no idea that ducks were capable of such noises. In coloration she resembles a tabby cat.

  The other day I pried up a log from the stiff ground and turned it over so that Greta (that’s the duck’s name) could have a once-over on it before I brought it inside. It’s not just th
at I want to give her a treat; it’s also that I don’t want to be bringing termites or strange larvae into the house. She rooted all over the exposed underside, as if she were Teletyping a wire-service story on it. Finally she located, hidden in a crevice, a brown thing that excited her. She was able to pry it out: it was a frozen slug. Its slime had grown ice crystals, giving it a kind of fur. I couldn’t tell if it was hibernating or dead. The duck tumbled it around in her beak and tossed it into the water (whose icy edges she’d broken earlier), and eventually much of it went down her gullet. She bobs her head to work things down into the lower part of her neck, and I suppose her gizzard goes to work on them there.

  6

  Good morning, it’s 6:08 a.m.—late. When I got up and stood on the landing at the top of the stairs I could see three light effects. One was the white spreadsheet of the moonlight on the floor, and one was more moonlight barred with long banister shadows on the floor downstairs, and one was the hint of pale yellow and blue of dawn arriving beyond the trees. Or maybe it was the glow of the convenience store in the next town. I got up late because I stayed up late working on that thief of time, a website. Nothing so completely sucks an evening away as fiddling with the layout of a website. By the time I was in bed reading “The Men That Don’t Fit In” by Robert Service, Claire was asleep in her blue fleece bathrobe and it was eleven o’clock.

  But now I’m up and little flames are growing like sedums from the cracks in today’s log wall, and I still have a little while before I have to drive Phoebe to school. Every morning the coffee makes me blow my nose, and then I toss the nose-wad into the fire, and it’s gone. The fire is like a cheerful dog that waits by the table as you feed it life-scraps.

  Our bedroom was still quite dark when I got up. I felt for my glasses on the bedside table in that tender way one uses for glasses, as if one’s fingers are antennae, so as not to get smears on them. The smear of a fingerprint makes it impossible to concentrate on anything; it’s much worse than the round blur in your vision made by a speck of dust. The glasses made a little clacking sound as I sat up and put them on—oh yeah, baby. The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.

  My hand seemed to know just where my glasses would be, and this reminded me of something that I noticed about five years ago in a hotel bathroom. I wish I’d taken photographs of all the hotel rooms I’ve been in. Some of them stay in my head for a while, and some disappear immediately—those many shades of pinky beige. I remember well two of the hotel rooms that Claire and I stayed in on our honeymoon—one a fancy one, and one in an unprosperous little town. There was a bathroom behind an accordion wall in that one.

  Claire has just come in to say good-morning. She said that she could tell that I hadn’t been up for too long today because of the newer smell of the coffee. She has a good sense of smell. In college there were coed bathrooms; one time she knew that it was I who had surreptitiously peed in the shower stall. Right now she’s unhappy that the last American manufacturer of a certain kind of wooden spoon has gone out of business. She saw a woman on the news saying, “This was my life. My grandmother made spoons, my mother made spoons, and now it’s finished.” Claire likes old people—not just relations, but old people in general. She’s become friends with the catty woman down the street, and she is used to the smell of oxygen from oxygen tanks. I’m glad she likes old people because it means that when I get old she will be less likely to be disgusted with me.

  I’ve known Claire for—let me figure it out—twenty-three of my forty-four years. More than half my life I’ve loved her. Think of that. We met on the stairs of a dormitory; I was carrying my bicycle down and she and her roommate were walking upstairs carrying bags of new textbooks. We lived on Third North, the third floor on the north side, a hall of extremely young boys and girls (so they seem to me now) who, because we all shared a large bathroom, quickly became chummy. Claire and her roommate gave cocktail parties every Tuesday at 4:30, using the floor’s ironing board as a bar. I walked out in the snow with them to buy the liquor: I was twenty-one, and Pennsylvania had one of those tiresome laws.

  When Claire was a little drunk, she would rock slowly to reggae and her lips would get cold. Her mouth, however, was warm and her teeth sharp. I cultivated a rakishly nutty air: I discovered a fine prewar toilet on the curb and carried it into my room, propping the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary inside. But Claire had a thing for a very handsome sandy-haired boy named William. Many had crushes on William because he was gentle and aloof and had an appealing way of clearing his throat before he spoke. Rumor had it that his penis was unusually attractive, but I never saw it. William’s father was a famous surgeon, and one day William borrowed some thread and showed us how to tie the knots that famous surgeons use on wounds. He never drank. When, maliciously, I tried to slip a little gin in his tonic, he sipped and handed the glass back to me with a reproachful look. I still feel guilty.

  Claire had a thing for gentle William, as I say—and then one evening, after one of the ironing-board cocktail parties, she asked me out on a date with her to walk to the cash machine. I said that a walk to the cash machine would be very nice. In those days she wore a thrift-store cashmere coat and soft Italian sweaters and, though her mother pleaded with her, no bra. And her lips were soft, too—much softer and somehow more intelligent than others I’d kissed, and though I hadn’t kissed that many lips I’d kissed some.

  I went with her to the dentist when she had her wisdom teeth out. Afterward she slept curled for a long time, a small beautiful person; there on her desk in a glass of water were the two enormous teeth. They were like the femurs of brontosauri. How those giant teeth could have fit into her head I don’t know.

  So this morning when I reached for my glasses, I remembered noticing in a hotel how my hand had gotten better at knowing just where the soap was in an alien shower. My lower mind would hold in its memory a three-dimensional plan of the shower that included the possible perches for the soap: the ledge, the indented built-in soap tray, the near corner, the far corner. I would wash my face, then put the soap down somewhere without thinking about it, then shampoo; and then, still blind from the shampoo, I’d want to wash my lower-down areas, and even though I’d been turning around and around in the shower, I was able to use the north star of the angle of the shower-flow to orient myself, so that without looking I could bend and find the bar of soap under my fingers, often without any groping.

  7

  Good morning, it’s 4:19 a.m., and I can’t get over how bright the moon is here. We’ve lived in Oldfield for over three years now and the brightness of the moon and stars is one of the most amazing things about the place. Even when there’s a big chunk taken out of it, as there is now, the moon’s light is powerful enough that you can sense, looking out the window, what direction it’s coming from. When you look anglingly up, there’s this thing high in the sky that you almost have to squint at. The small, high-up moons seem to be the brightest ones.

  I fell asleep a little after ten reading a software manual, and now I’m up and waiting for the train whistle. The fire today is made partly of half-charred loggage from yesterday, but mostly from thin apple branches that I sawed up when I got home from work. I tried the ax first and had a heck of a time. But a handsaw will slide right through with wondrous ease, sprinkling handfuls of sawdust out of either side of the cut, like—like I can’t think what—like a sower sowing seeds, perhaps. Anyway the fire took to burning so readily that I’ve had to move my chair back a little so that my legs aren’t in pain through the flannel.

  The thing that is so great about sitting here in the early morning is that it doesn’t matter what I did all yesterday: my mind only connects with fire-thoughts. I have an apple to eat if I want to eat it—picked in the fall and refrigerated in a state of semi-permanent crispness.

  The whole dropping-of-the-leaves thing and the coming of
winter is one of those gradual processes that becomes harder to believe each year it happens. All those leaves were up there firmly attached to the trees, and they’re gone. Now, incredibly, there are no leaves on the trees. And not only that, but it’s becoming impossible to conceive that there ever would have been leaves on the trees. It’s like death, which is also becoming harder and harder for me to understand. How could someone you know and remember so well be dead? My grandmother, for instance. I can’t believe that she is dead. I don’t mean that I believe in a hereafterly world, I don’t. But it does seem puzzling to me that she is now not living.

  This year there was a particular moment of leaf-falling that I hadn’t encountered before. I went outside at sunrise to feed the duck—this was sometime in October. There was ice in her water when she jumped in: hard pieces of something that she thought might be good to eat but weren’t particularly when she tumbled and smacked them around with her beak. While I was waiting for my daughter Phoebe to come out, I began scraping off the thin ice layer on the windshield using my AAA card, and then I heard a leafy rustling a few hundred yards away. I looked in the direction of the sound, expecting to see a coon cat or a fox. What I saw, instead, was a middle-sized, yellow-leafed sugar maple tree. It was behaving oddly: all of its leaves were dropping off at the same time. It wasn’t the wind—there was no wind. I stood there for a while, watching the tree denude itself at this unusual pace, and I came up with a theory to explain the simultaneity of the unleaving The tree was not as tall as some of the other trees—that’s the first thing. And it was the first night-freeze of the year. So we can imagine all the twigs of the tree coated with the same thin but tenacious coat of ice that I was encountering on the windshield. Now the sun had risen enough to clear the dense hummock of forest across the creek, and thus sunlight was striking and warming the leaves on this particular tree for the first time since they’d frozen. The night-ice had sheathed the skin, holding the leaf in place, but the freeze had also caused the final rupture in the parenchymatous cells that attached the leaf-stem to its twig: as soon as the ice melted, the leaf fell. I had some confirmation of my theory when I noticed that the leaves on the sunward side of the tree were mainly the ones that were falling.