A Box of Matches

by Nicholson Baker

  “Is the ant still alive?” Phoebe asked one day. She was wearing two aprons over her dress and a pink blanket over her head, surmounted by a fez hat. I said yes, he was still alive. She said she was sorry that the other ants had died. “When we first got them, they were nice little ants.”

  For two days I forgot about Fidel, and then, in the middle of the night, I remembered him. I shined a flashlight on him, sure that I would find that he was no more. He looked dusty. I dripped in some water and a cracker crumb—an earlier crumb had a fine haze of mold on it—and spoke encouragingly to him. And he moved. I was interested by the ends of his legs, which I thought must be wearing away with all that scrambling over sand boulders. He had learned to brace himself against the plastic as he maneuvered an ant body up an incline. Moving ant bodies had become his whole life.

  And finally he did die, as every ant will. I kept his farm, however, the legacy of tunnels and graveyards that he had completely rebuilt after he had become the sole representative of his civilization. For two years it stood on a table in my office. When we moved, I packed it in a box, wrapped carefully in white packers’ paper. But I wasn’t too surprised when I unpacked it and saw that all the tunnels were gone—the ant farm was now just loose sand with some dirt specks in it.

  31

  Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m., boys and girls. I seem to be down to a few matches skidding around in the little red box. I struck one of the remaining ones and it broke. As a result of the breakage, the match head must have been nearer to my nose than it normally is, so that when the first flare flowed out, going sideways as it does before the teardrop shape can form, I received a sudden sharp smell in my nostril that sent my head back, the smell of a new flame. It was as sharp as when some carbon dioxide from a gulp of root beer accidentally backs up into your sinus and your head rocks. I lit the under-fire and then laid the spent and broken match on top of two quarter logs—sometimes a little piece of something on top of the fire seems to work like a fishing lure, drawing the goldfish flame upward through the cracks and around the corners, where the splinters turn black and crumple, glowing.

  At twilight yesterday Henry and I went on a walk in the woods, where there were tracks of rabbit and deer, and the feetmarks of some small birds. When it got too dark, we came back to the barn and dug another tunnel in the plow pile. Because there have been so many thaws and refreezings, the snow in the pile has a granular consistency for several feet, and then finally you find the virginal substance underneath: bluish white and freshly fluffy even after all these weeks. Then a heat-seeking wind came up, and it filched all the heat from under my arms and around my ribs. But when we went in, the duck stood by the back door quacking actively for warm water with food pellets sprinkled in it. I carried her to her duckhouse and got her settled, and draped the blanket over the roof, stuffing a fold of it into the crack between the roof and the sides so that her night would be a little warmer.

  I want to take care of the world. Sometimes I think of a helmet with a set of plastic earflaps that I swivel down over my ears. There are holes on the outside of the earflaps that pick up sounds of distress from far away. It is like listening to the whales groan and squeal—there is usually one cry that is prominent, and, by turning my head from side to side, I use the signals reaching each ear to guide me to where the crime or misery is. I can fly, of course.

  Meanwhile, Jumbo California Navel Oranges are selling two for seventy-nine cents, according to the supermarket circular I just crumpled and stuffed into a fire hole—which doesn’t seem all that cheap. Last night, Claire and I watched a cable-TV biography of James Taylor—what a voice that man has—and we paid the bills, and now there’s the slush pile of torn envelopes and little cross-advertisements that come in with them; the watches and the luggage sets and the insurance plans that add a few dollars a month. I’m burning some of the envelopes that Christmas cards came in—not the cards. Envelopes burn well, because the torn places catch quickly. Claire started paying most of the bills two years ago, after we got one too many of those polite reminders—“All of Us Forget on Occasion”—which would shade into “Your Account Is Seriously Past Due.” Bills are just little wrapped enclosures. If you don’t open them you don’t know whether they’re angry or not. The credit-card companies love me, in truth, because I’m always good for a late fee and a superhigh interest rate, and yet I’m not going to default on them. And yet once I do open the envelopes and I start paying, I enjoy it, and I still pay some of the charge accounts that have work expenses on them. Also I put on the stamps. I suppose common practices will change soon and become electronic, just as now we’re no longer sent our canceled checks but rather little scanned pictures of our checks. But what a pleasure it is to have winnowed out all the glossy enclosures and have gotten things down to the essentials: the payment stub, torn off, and the handwritten check, and the return envelope, and the stamp. Then you straighten up that little stack of paid bills, all in envelopes that are slightly dissimilar sizes, and see the addresses peeping through the windows, and you feel good. Some billers, like the bank that holds the mortgage, don’t believe in sending return envelopes, and we have to supply a new one of our own.

  A succession of days is like a box of new envelopes. Each envelope is flimsy and can be treated as two-dimensional. But when you pull out all the envelopes from the box at once, there is a hard place in the middle—a thick lump—that you wouldn’t expect envelopes to have. The lump is created by the intersection of the four triangles in the middle of the back. Most of the envelope has only two layers of paper, but on the place where you lick the flap there are three: the front, the lower edge, and the gummed edge. And in the middle of the back there is a place, sometimes two places, of further overlap, and it feels as if the envelopes must be holding something quite hard, or sharp, even—but of course they’re empty. You notice it when you are writing thank-yous for wedding presents, or when you are sending out Christmas cards, or if you have bought a new box of envelopes and you see the edges of them through the clear window and you want to compress them, since envelopes are so springily compressible—and as you reach around them and squeeze them you feel the nugget, the something that isn’t in the envelopes but is of the envelopes. I would almost say that there is a hint on the meaning of life there, in that revealed kernel. That’s what they feel like, in fact, these hard places—little popcorn kernels or apple seeds.

  32

  Good morning, it’s 5:15 a.m.—While I was building the fire I noticed a warm glow coming in one of the windows. I thought there must be a light on in some other part of the house, but the angle was wrong. I went to the window and saw that the inside lights of the minivan were on. They looked quite cozy. I didn’t want to have a dead battery two hours from now, so I found my coat in the dark, slipped on a pair of cold boots that were on the porch, and crunched outside.

  It was dark and starry and the wind was up. I was shocked by how cold it was. I haven’t been outside in the middle of winter at four-thirty in the morning—except perhaps to hop into a cab to go to an airport—ever, I don’t think. I opened and then closed the rear door of the car—one inside light turned off right away, and then the dome light in the front did the slow fade-out that automotive engineers believe is an improvement. Good. Just to be sure the battery was all right, I reached in and turned on the ignition: the radio came on, loudly playing Brahms. I withdrew the key and was done with the car. But I stood for a moment to sense the cold’s spaciousness and impersonality. It was remarkable to think that human beings felt that they could endure in this dark, inhospitable place. If I slipped and fell and was unable to move I’d die. And yet the duck, more or less immobile under her shroud, lived through the night just fine, and was ready to burble in the warm water of her eating bowl as soon as I came out. I heard the wind in the denuded trees—there was no upper hissing of leaf wind, just the longer wailing whistles that the old branches make.

  When I turned toward the house, I saw another glow in a l
iving-room window. I crunched through the snow up the little rise and peered into the living room. “Will you look at that,” I said. There was my fire, as orange as could be, looking warm. I half expected to see myself sitting there, in my bathrobe, but the chair was empty.

  Now I’m back inside. I leaned forward just now so that I could turn to the right and take hold of the handle of my coffee mug, and I moved it around towards me in a wide slow curve, and the sight of this movement in the fiery dimness had a beauty to it. Why are things beautiful? I don’t know. That’s a good question. Isn’t it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That’s a good question? Don’t you feel good when that happens? Sometimes when the fire puffs out it gets so black it’s almost frightening. I don’t want to use the last match. Finally a crumple will catch and burn down to fireworms. Then darkness again, and cold. That’s what I like about this living room: when I come down here, it is really cold. The chair is cold to the touch when I sit down on it. When I sit here and breathe in and out with my eyes closed I can think of myself as a spinning tire, rocking back and forth past a low point in the frozen driveway. The tire wants to spin its own grave, melting the ice to its shape, and you have to help it get beyond that wish. You drive as high up on the upslope as you can and then, just when the car is weightless, you clunk the transmission into reverse and use the ride back down into the self-created valley to help you over it, and if you don’t make it the first time, rock again. As you move the shifter back and forth, from reverse to drive to reverse to drive, and you begin to smell that faint whiff of hot rubber, you feel the same sort of wild joy you felt when you first learned how to swing, and learned how to go higher without being pushed. Actually it’s better than swinging on a swing, since with a swing you can never quite go so high that the swing will fly all the way around, but when you’re stuck in the driveway you finally reach the point where you are no longer tethered to a particular harmonic center point, and you churn off on your errand, sometimes at a slight diagonal, as one wheel pushes better than the other.

  33

  Good morning, it’s 4:49 a.m., and this is my last match. After I lit a few corners of paper and cardboard, I let the match fall onto a fold of a Circuit City flyer where I’m sure it will contribute its pittance.

  What’s the best thing I can think of at this very second? Best thing. Let’s think. All right. Okay, one time Claire and I were driving to the beach and Claire pointed out a Yield sign standing by a field. “Mist,” she said. The early sun was heating up the reflective substance on one side of the sign and evaporating the dew or night-rain that was clinging to it. Morning mist rising from the Yield sign against a field: that’s one thing. Here’s another. Claire and I were sitting on the couch. This was seven years ago. I was doing some work, she was reading a paperback and giving our infant son milk from her breast. “I’ve got a new way to turn the page,” she said. I looked over. One of her arms was holding up Henry and so was out of commission. The other was holding the paperback splayed open. When it was time, she put the tip of her tongue on the lower right-hand corner of the right-hand page. The tip held the paper, and by moving her head to the left, she could make the page slide and buckle, whereupon her thumb dove underneath it and was able to send it over to the little finger on the far side. So, Claire turning the pages with her tongue: that’s another thing.

  You know what I think I’ll do? I think I’ll creep back in bed, very carefully so as not to joggle too much, pull the covers over me, relax all my muscles, and go back to sleep for a little while next to her, then get up at a normal time.

  I tossed my apple core into the fire, and then, as an afterthought, I crunched the empty matchbox into a mound of orange bits the size of sugar cubes that had fallen away from a log. It caught right away and burned with a generous yellow flame. In thirty seconds it had curled away into a twist of ash and the fire was orange again. I was done.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by Nicholson Baker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and

  Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  Baker, Nicholson.

  A box of matches / Nicholson Baker

  p. cm.

  1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. New England—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A4325 B69 2003

  813′.54—dc21 2002069704

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-7633-8

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.0

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Copyright