by Laura Furman
They find themselves under a low dome of branches just big enough for them to lie stretched out, a place where an animal might sleep, perhaps. Improbably, they hear the sound of an ice cream van, far off. No fourth shot.
What do we do now?
We wait, says Sean.
What for?
Till it’s dark.
Daniel looks at his watch. At six his mother will call Sean’s flat, at seven she will ring the police. He rolls onto his back and narrows his eyelids so that the light falling from the canopy becomes a shimmer of overlapping circles in white and yellow and lime green. The smell of dog shit comes and goes. Is this a safe place or a trap? He imagines Robert looking down at the two of them lying there under the brambles. Fish in a barrel. That weird keening noise Donnie made when his fingers snapped.
After twenty minutes the tension begins to ease. Perhaps this was what Robert intended after all, to scare them then go home and sit in front of the TV laughing. Forty minutes. Daniel hasn’t drunk anything since breakfast. He has a headache and he can feel little gluey lumps around the edge of his dry lips. They decide to run for it. They are now certain that Robert is no longer waiting for them but the running will increase the excitement of their escape and recapture a little of their lost dignity.
And this is when they hear the footsteps. A crackle. Then silence. Then another crackle. Someone is moving gingerly through the undergrowth nearby, trying not to be heard. Each heartbeat seems to tighten a screw at the base of Daniel’s skull. Sean picks up the gun and rolls onto his stomach, elbows braced in the dirt. Crackle. Daniel pictures Robert as a native hunter. Arrow in the notch, two fingers curled around the taut bowstring. The steps move to the right. Either he doesn’t know where they are or he is circling them, choosing his direction of approach. Come on, says Sean to himself, turning slowly so that the gun points constantly toward the direction of the noise. Come on.
Daniel wants it to happen quickly. He doesn’t know how much longer he can bear this before jumping up and shouting, Here I am! like Paul used to do during games of hide-and-seek. Then everything goes quiet. No steps. No crackle. Midges scribble the air. The soft roar of the cataract. Sean looks genuinely frightened now.
A stick snaps behind them and they twist onto their backs just as the silhouette springs up and shuts out the dazzle of the sun. Sean fires and the gun is so close to Daniel’s head that he will hear nothing for the next few minutes, just a fizz, like rain on pylon wires.
He sees straightaway that it is not Robert. Then he sees nothing because he is kicked hard in the stomach and the pain consumes him. When he uncurls and opens his eyes he finds himself looking into a face. It is not a human face. It is the face of a roe deer and it is shockingly big. He tries to back away but the brambles imprison him. The deer is running on its side, wheezing and struggling in vain to get to its feet. A smell like the camel house at the zoo. Wet black eyes, the jaws working and working, the stiff little tongue poking in and out. Breath gargles through a patch of bloody fur on its neck. It scrabbles and kicks. He can’t bear to look but can’t make himself turn away. The expression on its face. It looks like someone turned into a deer in a fairy tale. Crying out for help and unable to form the words.
It’s weakening visibly, something dragging it down into the cold black water that lies just under the surface of everything. That desperate hunger for more time, more light. Whenever Daniel hears the phrase fighting for your life this is the picture that will come back to him.
Sean hoists his leg over its body and sits on its chest. He presses the end of the barrel to the side of its head and fires, bang … bang … bang … bang … each shot sending the deer’s body into a brief spasm. The gun is empty. A few seconds of stillness then a final spasm. It stops moving. Oh yes, says Sean, letting out a long sigh, Oh yes, as if he has been dreaming about this moment for a long time.
Fingers of gluey blood start to crawl out from under the head. Daniel wants to cry but something inside him is blocked or broken.
Sean says, We have to get it back.
Back where?
To the flat.
Why?
To cook it.
Daniel has no idea what to say. A part of him still thinks of the deer as human. A part of him thinks that, in some inexplicable way, it is Robert transformed. Already a fly is investigating one of the deer’s eyes.
Sean stands up and stamps the brambles aside, snapping their stems with the heel of his trainers so they don’t spring back. We can skin it.
He tells Daniel to return to the lay-by to fetch the pram they saw beside the rubbish bags. Daniel goes because he needs to get away from Sean and the deer. He walks past the scrapyard. He wants to bump into Robert, hoping that he will be dragged back into the previous adventure, but the curtains are still closed and the house is silent. He removes the loop of green twine and opens the clangy gate. There is a brown Mercedes in the lay-by. The driver watches him from the other side of the windscreen but Daniel cannot make out the man’s face. He turns the pram over. It is an old-fashioned cartoon pram with a concertina hood and leaf-spring suspension. The rusty handle is bent, the navy upholstery is torn and two of the wheels are tireless. He drags it back through the gate, closing it behind him.
It’s a trick of the light, of course. Time is nothing but forks and fractures. You step off the curb a moment later. You light a cigarette for the woman in the red dress. You turn over the exam paper and see all the questions you’ve revised, or none of them. Every moment a bullet dodged, every moment an opportunity missed. A firestorm of ghost lives speeding away into the dark.
Perhaps the difference is this, that he will notice, that he will see things in this way when others don’t, that he will remember an August afternoon when he was ten years old and feel the vertigo you feel walking away unharmed from a car crash. Or not quite unharmed, for he will come to realize that a part of himself now exists in a parallel universe to which he has no access.
When they lift the deer onto the pram it farts and shits itself. It doesn’t smell like the camel house this time. Daniel is certain that it would be easier to drag the body but says nothing, and only when the track flattens out by the scrapyard and they are finally free of the roots and the sun-hardened ruts does the pram finally begin to roll a little.
The man is sitting against the bonnet of his Mercedes, as if he has arranged himself a better view for the second act. He has shoulder-length black hair, a cheap blue suit and a heavy gold bracelet. Sean shuts the gate and reattaches the loop of green twine. The man lights a cigarette. Lads. It’s all he says. The smallest of nods. No smile, no wave. He will recur in Daniel’s dreams for years, sitting at the edge of whatever else is going on. Cigarette, gold bracelet. Lads.
They stand at the side of the carriageway. Hot dust, hot metal. Daniel sees drivers glance at them, glance away then glance back again. Three, two, one. The pram is less stable at speed and less inclined to travel in a straight line and they reach the central reservation accompanied by a whoosh of air brakes and the angry honk of a lorry that comes perilously close to hitting them in the fast lane.
Clumsily, they heave the deer and the pram over the barrier. This takes a good deal of time and the strip of yellow grass is not wide. Police, says Sean, and Daniel turns in time to see the orange stripe of a white Rover slide past, lights and siren coming on as it goes up the hill. It will turn at the roundabout and come down the other carriageway. They have a minute at most.
Now, yells Sean. And the relief Daniel feels when they bump over the curb of the service road and heave the pram up the bank through the line of stunted trees into the little park makes him laugh out loud. The warrens, says Sean, panting, and they keep their momentum up past a gaggle of rubbernecking children on the climbing frame and into the little network of walled paths round the back of the estate. They stop by the peeling red lockups and wait. No siren. No squeal of tires. Daniel’s head pulses. He needs to lie down in the dark.
They pu
sh the pram across the parched quadrangle to Orchard Tower. An elderly lady watches them, transfixed. Polyester floral dress and varicose veins. Sean gives her a jokey salute. Mrs. Daley.
The double doors are easy but it takes some juggling to get the pram and the deer into the lift and they leave a lick of blood across the mirror that covers one of the side walls. Sean puts his finger into it and writes the word MURDER in capital letters on the glass at head height. The chime goes, the lift bumps to a halt and the doors open.
Later when he tells the story to people they won’t understand. Why didn’t he run away? His friend had a loaded gun. He will be repeatedly amazed at how poorly everyone remembers their childhoods, how they project their adult selves back into those bleached-out photographs, those sandals, those tiny chairs. As if choosing, as if deciding, as if saying no were skills like tying your shoelaces or riding a bike. Things happened to you. If you were lucky, you got an education and weren’t abused by the man who ran the five-a-side. If you were very lucky you finally ended up in a place where you could say, I’m going to study accountancy … I’d like to live in the countryside … I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
It happens fast. The door opens before Sean can put his key into the lock. Dylan stands in dirty blue dungarees, phone pressed to one ear. He says, calmly, Cancel that, Mike. I’ll talk to you later, and puts the phone down. He grabs a fistful of Sean’s hair and swings him into the hallway so that he skids along the lino and knocks over the little phone table. He puts his foot on Sean’s chest and yanks at the bag, ripping it open and breaking the strap. He takes out the gun, checks the chamber, shunts it back into place with the heel of his hand and tosses it through the open door of his room onto his bed. Sean sits up and tries to back away but Dylan grabs the collar of his T-shirt and hoists him up so that he is pressed against the wall. Daniel doesn’t move, hoping that if he remains absolutely still he will remain invisible. Dylan punches Sean in the face then lets him drop to the floor. Sean rolls over and curls up and begins to weep. Daniel can see a bloody tooth by the skirting board. Dylan turns and walks toward the front door. He runs his hand slowly across the deer’s flank five or six times, long, gentle strokes as if the animal is a sick child. Bring it in.
He wheels the pram across the living room and out onto the balcony. Dylan gives Daniel a set of keys and sends him downstairs to fetch two sheets from the back of his van. Daniel feels proud that he has been trusted to do this. He carries the sheets with their paint spatters and crackly lumps of dried plaster back upstairs. Dylan folds them and spreads them out on the concrete floor and lays the deer in the center. He takes a Stanley knife from his pocket, flips the animal onto its back and scores a deep cut from its neck to its groin. Gristle rips under the blade. He makes a second cut at ninety degrees, a crucifix across the chest, then yanks hard at one of the corners so that the furred skin rips back a little. It looks like a wet doormat. Daniel is surprised by the lack of blood. Under the skin is a marbled membrane to which it is attached by a thick white pith. Dylan uses the knife to score the pith, pulling and scoring and pulling and scoring so that the skin comes gradually away.
Sean steps onto the balcony pressing a bloody tea towel to the side of his face. Daniel cannot read his expression. Turning, Daniel sees the radio mast and the sandy slab of the car plant. A hawk hangs over the woods. His headache is coming back, or perhaps he has simply begun to notice it again. He wanders inside and makes his way to the kitchen. There is an upturned pint mug on the drying rack. He fills it with cold water from the tap and drinks it without taking the glass from his lips.
He hears the front door open and close and Mrs. Cobb shouting, What the bloody hell is going on?
He goes into the living room and sits on the brown leather sofa and listens to the slippery click of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, waiting for the pain to recede. There are framed school photographs of Sean and Dylan. There is a wall plate from Cornwall, a lighthouse wearing a bow tie of yellow light, three gulls, each made with a single black tick. The faintest smell of dog shit from the sole of his shoe. Sean walks down the corridor carrying a full bucket, the toilet flushes and he comes back the other way with the bucket empty.
He dozes. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. The sound of a saw brings him round. It takes a while to remember where he is, but his headache has gone. So strange to wake and find the day going on in your absence. He walks out onto the balcony. Dylan is cutting the deer up. The legs have been sawn off and halved, hoofs in one pile, thighs in another. Carl from next door has come round and is leaning against the balcony rail smoking a cigarette. I’ll have a word at the chippy. They’ve got a chest freezer out the back. Sean is no longer holding the tea towel against his face. His left eye is half closed by the swelling and his upper lip is torn.
Get rid of that, will you? Dylan points to a yellow plastic bathtub. Lungs, intestines, glossy bulbs of purple Daniel can’t identify.
He and Sean each take a handle. As they are leaving Dylan holds up the severed head and says to Carl, What do you reckon? Over the fireplace? But it’s the bathtub that unsettles Daniel. The way it jiggles and slops with the movement of the lift. MURDER in capital letters. The inside of a human being would look like this.
He says, How are you?
Sean says, Fine.
Neither of them means it. Some kind of connection has been broken, but it feels good, it feels like an adult way of being with another person.
They put the bathtub down and lift the lid of one of the big metal bins. Flies bubble out. That wretched leathery stink. They hoist the tub to chest height. Two teenage girls walk past. Holy shit. A little countdown and they heave the bathtub onto the rim. The contents slither out and hit the bottom with a slapping boom.
Upstairs, the oven is on and Mrs. Cobb has put a bloody haunch onto a baking tray. Carl is helping her peel potatoes with another cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Dylan drinks from a can of Guinness. Come here. Sean walks over and Dylan puts an arm around him. If you ever do anything like that again I’ll fucking kill you. Understand? Even Daniel can hear that he is really saying, I love you. Dylan gives Sean the half-finished can of Guinness and opens another one for himself.
Your mum rang, says Mrs. Cobb. Wondering where you were.
Right. He doesn’t move.
Because it has nothing to do with the gun, does it. The gun is one of those dark stars that bend light. This is the moment. If he asks to stay then everything will be different. But he says nothing. Mrs. Cobb says, Go on. Hop to it, or your mum will worry, and however many times he turns her words over in his mind he will never be able to work out whether she was being kind to his mother or cruel to him. He doesn’t say good-bye. He doesn’t want to risk hearing the lack of interest in their voices. He walks out of the front door, closes it quietly behind him and goes down via the stairs so that he doesn’t have to see the blood.
Forty years later he goes to his mother’s funeral. Afterward, not wanting to seem callous by heading off to a hotel, he sleeps in his old bedroom. It makes him profoundly uncomfortable, and when his father says that he wants things back to normal as soon as possible, he takes the hint with considerable relief and leaves his father to the comfort of his routine, the morning walk, the Daily Mail, pork chops on Wednesdays.
There are roadworks on the way out of town and by chance he finds himself diverted along the stretch of ring road between the flats and the woods. It all comes back so vividly that he nearly brakes for the two boys running across the carriageway pushing the pram. He slows and pulls into the lay-by, grit crunching under the tires. He gets out of the car and stands in that same thumping draft that comes off the lorries. Freakishly the gate is still held shut by a loop of green twine. It scares him a little. He steps through and shuts it behind him.
The scrapyard is still there, as is the Roberts’ house. The curtains are closed. He wonders if they have been closed all these years, Robert Hales and Robert Hales and Robert Hales
, the same person, growing old and dying and being reborn in the stink and the half-light.
That cathedral silence before the first shot. Slabs of dusty sunlight.
He stoops and picks up a jagged lump of broken tarmac. He imagines throwing it through the front window, the glass crazing and falling. The loose rattle of scattering birds. Light flooding in.
A stick cracks directly behind him. He doesn’t turn. It’s the deer. He knows it’s the deer, come again.
He can’t resist. He turns slowly and finds himself looking at an old man wearing Robert’s face. His father? Maybe Robert himself. What year is it?
The man says, Who are you? and for three or four seconds Daniel has absolutely no idea.
Stephen Dixon
Talk
HE HASN’T TALKED TO anyone today. I haven’t talked to anyone today. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to. It’s not that he hasn’t wanted to talk to someone, but he just never had the chance to. He only realized he hasn’t talked to anyone today when he sat down on the bench he’s sitting on now. In front of the church across the street from his house. I like to sit on it after a long or not-so-long walk around my neighborhood. I usually take the same route. Almost always end up on the same bench. One of the benches in front of the entrance to the church. It’s now 6:45. Closer to 6:47. I haven’t talked to anyone today since I woke up more than twelve hours ago, rested in bed awhile, exercised in bed awhile, mostly his legs, and then got out of bed and washed up and so on. Did lots of things. Brushed my teeth, brushed my hair, dressed, took my pill, let the cat out, let the cat in, gave the cat food, changed its water, let the cat out again, made myself breakfast, ate, got the newspaper from outside before I made myself breakfast and ate, same things almost every morning soon after waking up, same breakfast, coffee and hot cereal and toast, maybe blueberry jam and butter on the toast every third or fourth day instead of butter and orange marmalade, same newspaper, different news but some of it the same, same cat, same water bowl for the cat, same kibble in a different bowl for the cat, same plate for the cat’s wet food and same wet food till the cat finishes the can in about three days. Then I shaved, did some exercises with two ten-pound barbells, one for each hand, curls, he thinks they’re called—the exercises—and so on. No one phoned. The classical music radio station was on when I shaved and exercised and after he was done exercising he turned the radio off. Then he sat at his work table in his bedroom. I could use one of the other two bedrooms in the house to work in or the study his wife used to work in, but I prefer this room, the master bedroom they used to call it to distinguish it from the other bedrooms, the room that was once their bedroom but is now only his since his wife died. She didn’t die in that room. She died in one of the other bedrooms. He had a hospital bed set up for her in that room more than a year before she died and she died in that bed. She was unconscious for twelve days in that bed before she died. Do I really want to go into all this again? Just finish it. She was lying on her back in a coma for twelve days in the hospital bed. Or just unconscious for he doesn’t know how many days and then in a coma, when she opened her eyes, or her eyes opened on their own, and her head turned to where he was sitting on the right side of the bed and she died. He closed her eyes with his hand. Her eyes struggled to stay open and then, after he closed them a second and third time, they stayed permanently closed. The day after she died I had the hospital bed removed. He bought a new bed for that room a week or two later so his older daughter could sleep in that room again when she visited him. But I was thinking before about my not talking to anyone today. No opportunity to, as I said. He could have made the opportunity to, I suppose, but he didn’t. I didn’t go out of my way to talk to anyone today, he’s saying. He likes these kinds of conversations to happen naturally. He’ll be in the local food market, for instance—not to bump into people he knows from around the neighborhood or initiate small talk with employees behind the food or checkout counter with shoppers he doesn’t know—but to buy things, mostly food for himself and his cat—and he’ll bump into someone he knows. Hi, hello, how are you? and so on. Maybe with someone whose hand he shakes, back or shoulder he pats, cheek, if it’s a woman, he kisses. Someone who most of the time stops his or her shopping to talk to me, and whom I like to talk to too. Am I being clear? He thinks so. Anyway: that didn’t happen today. It’s happened plenty of times in the almost twenty years he’s lived in the house and been going to that market. But I didn’t go to that market today. No market, and he rarely sees anyone he knows at any other market. He did, after writing in his bedroom for about three hours, go to the Y to work out. I often see someone I know from the Y in the fitness room, or whatever that room with all the resistance machines, he thinks they are, is called. Fitness center. Fitness center. And sometimes he sees two or three people there he only knows from the Y and has a brief conversation with them or just says “Hi” or “Hello” or “How you doing?” to. And he has, in the local market a few times—the one he almost always goes to because it’s so close and the prices aren’t that much higher than the big chains and they get you out fast because they have lots of working checkout counters for a store its size and just about all the checkout clerks know him—bumped into people he knows only from the Y and chatted with them. Though for the most part these chats are shorter than the ones he might have with the same people in the Y, and one or the other of them will usually say something like “Funny to see you here after seeing you so many times in the Y” or “I almost didn’t recognize you out of your gym clothes.” As for the weight room in the Y, which is right next to the fitness center, he has fewer conversations there than he does with people in the fitness center, since there are much fewer people working out in it. They also seem more serious and involved in their workouts. But he’s still had a few conversations there when both he and the other person working out took a minute-or-so break from the weights and were close enough to talk to each other. Like a few days ago. “I always see you with a book. What are you reading now?” this person asked him, or said something like it: a man; very few women work out in the weight room. Someone he’d seen several times before in both rooms but never spoke with or even said hi to but might have smiled or nodded at. He held up the book so the man could see the cover. “Gilgamesh?” the man mispronouncing it the same way he once did till his wife corrected him. “Never heard of it. From the cover, it looks like it could be a fantasy or horror novel.” “In a way it sort of is,” I said. “But it’s a new or relatively new translation of an epic poem, maybe the oldest literary work, or the oldest one found so far. With a long introduction as interesting as the work itself, and with great notes.” “What’s it about?” He gave a brief synopsis of it, based on the introduction, since he was only a third of the way into the poem. And then—“This might give you a laugh”—why he bought it. “The oldest work—a classic—and the only one in my family never to have read it? My older daughter, who graduated college eight years ago, read it when she was nine or ten and took a special humanities course in grade school. And I was in the bookshop last week, the Ivy on Falls Road, looking for something to read. I always have to have something to read—at home; if I take a walk and think I’ll stop to sit and rest. Even here between sets on the sit-down resistance machines for a minute or the stationary bike if it doesn’t have on its TV screen something especially good on the movie channel—and I saw it. In the store, this book, and remembered I’d never read it but for many years wanted to. But I’ve told you more than you probably wanted to hear, and you want to get back to your weights.” “No,” the man said, “it’s interesting. Gilgamesh. I’ll remember,” and we both resumed our workouts. That’s how the conversation went, sort of. I know I went on too long. He often does most days because he gets to talk so little. But today there wasn’t anyone he knew at the Y to say even a word to, which was unusual. Most times, after he slides his key through the bar-code recorder, or whatever that piece of plastic on his key ring is called, and his name and photo appear o
n the monitor and an automated voice says “Access granted,” someone behind the front desk there will look at the monitor and say “Have a good workout, Mr. Seidel,” and he’ll say “Thank you.” But the one person behind the desk—usually there are two people there—was folding clean towels for members with the more expensive plan and more elaborate locker rooms, and didn’t look up. He went into his locker room. Sometimes there’s someone there I know from the Y and we’ll talk a little. But the room was empty when I first got there and then after my workout. Sometimes, though this doesn’t happen much, he might talk with someone in the shower room after his workout, but the one guy showering there today was someone he knows doesn’t want to talk. I’ve seen him in the locker room and shower and at the front desk checking in dozens of times. Never downstairs in the fitness center or weight room. He seems to only come to the Y to swim. And I never saw him communicate with anyone. I don’t even think the people at the front desk say “Have a good day” to him, or if they do, he doesn’t answer them. First thing the guy does when he gets to the locker room is put his athletic bag on a bench and go around the room closing every locker that might be even just slightly open and make sure every bench is aligned with the banks of lockers. Then he’ll walk around the room again and pick up any trash he sees on the floor—tiny pieces of paper, thread, part of a broken shoelace, for instance—and drop it into a trash can there. Then he’ll undress and get into his swimsuit and lock his locker and go to the pool with his towel and in his shower slippers. I said hello to him a few times, but gave up. He looked right past me as if I hadn’t said anything or he hadn’t heard. Today I avoided looking his way once I saw who it was. I feel he doesn’t want to be looked at either. I could have gone to the small food shop at the Y and ordered a sandwich to go—chicken or tuna fish salad on rye toast with tomato and lettuce and once each a powerhouse and grilled chicken sandwich, which weren’t good—and while it was being made by an employee in back, exchanged a few words with the shop’s owner about a number of things. The owner just takes the orders and rings them up and serves the food if anyone’s sitting at one of the two tables there, which I’ve never done. The owner likes to talk. A few days ago it was strawberries. He said he grows them in his garden and they’re very small this year, he doesn’t understand it. I told him my younger daughter put in a number of strawberry plants two years ago, I got nothing but a few tiny ones last year, but this year they’re all over the place and big, “What can I say?” And he once told me, when I asked, how to get the shells off hard-boiled eggs without taking any of the white of the egg with it. “Boil them for thirty to forty minutes. Infallible, and perfect for deviled eggs.” But he didn’t want to order any kind of sandwich today. He still has in the refrigerator, and it’s probably still good but a little soggy, half the chicken salad wrap he got from him yesterday. What were some of the other opportunities to talk today? And by talking, I mean to someone, a human being, not the cat. He talks a lot to his cat. Actually, it’s his younger daughter’s, but she lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, the cat likes to run around outside, so he’s taking care of it for the time being. “Hey, little guy, want something to eat?” Talk like that. “Want to go outside, Rufus?” “Go on, go on,” when he’s half in and half out the door. “I don’t want to catch your tail, and you can come back whenever you want.” “It’s getting dark, Rufus. Want to come inside?” “Come inside, Rufus. Don’t make me have to chase you.” “You here to help me with the weeding?” Because sometimes when I’m weeding outside, he’ll lie down on his stomach beside me and pull a weed out of the ground with his teeth and play with it or try to pull one out of my hand that I just got out of the ground. Also, sometimes when I talk to him it seems he talks back to me with a couple of meows. And when he’s at the front door and I let him in, he always meows in a sound he uses no other time as he scoots in or walks past me, as if saying thanks to me for opening the door. He never meows, though, when I open the door to let him out. When he wants to go out he’ll stand silently facing the door or stand up on his back paws and scratch the door with his front ones till I let him out. If I don’t want him out, he’ll walk quietly away from the door after about two minutes. But no other opportunities to talk to someone today? Can’t think of any. Usually, during his late-afternoon walks, he’ll see at least one person walking his dog and he’ll say more than “Hi” or “Good evening” to him. He’ll ask the breed of the dog, for instance, and if he asked it the last time but forgot it, he’ll say “I forgot what you told me your dog’s breed is” or “your dogs’ breed is,” since several people in the neighborhood have two dogs of the same breed, and one couple has three, and walk them together. I’ve also asked this person or couple what the dog was originally bred for. Not that I’m really interested, but it gives me a chance, if it was a day I hadn’t talked much, to talk more. “Hunting foxes?” “Herding sheep?” “Going after moles or other burrowing animals like that in holes?” He once joked, and regretted it right after, for the guy didn’t seem to find it funny, “Catching Frisbees?” But in his walk today he saw no one he’s talked to or just said hello to before. Saw no one, period. Oh, people in cars, and a jogger, but she came up behind him without his hearing her and was past him before he could even wave. Maybe when he gets home he’ll call his daughters and, if they’re in, speak to them. Although it doesn’t have to be in their homes. With their cell phones, they could be anywhere: walking on the street; having a drink in a bar. He speaks to them almost every night around seven. Seems to be a good time for them. They’re done with work for the day, haven’t started dinner. They call him or he calls them. But that’s the kind of day it’s been. Where he hasn’t as yet said a word to anyone. Not one, and it makes me feel kind of strange or odd. It’s true. It does. Both of those. But enough of that. Maybe, really, it’s better not to dwell on it. If his wife were alive and still relatively healthy, or just not as sick as she was the last three years of her life, he would have spoken to her before he left the house. That would have been nice. “I’m going out for a walk,” he would have said; “like to join me?” If she didn’t or couldn’t because she was still working in her study or something else, then when he got back she might say, as she did a lot, “See anything interesting?” or “Meet anyone on your walk?” Or just “Did you have a good walk?” Or he might volunteer: “I had a good walk. Farther than I usually go. Saw some beautiful and unusual flowers. Our neighbors, especially the church, really take care of their properties. But for the first time in a long time I didn’t see anyone else outside except a fleet-footed jogger, who ran past me before I could even say hi to her. And of course people in the occasional passing car, but they don’t count.” Or if she was too weak to walk and didn’t want to be pushed around the neighborhood in her wheelchair—“People stare; I don’t like it”—he’d say “All right, then, if I take a brief walk by myself? And I will make it quick. I won’t stop to talk to anyone.” “Why should I mind?” she said a number of times. “Get out. You need a break. And talk all you want.” “So you’ll be okay here alone?” and she always said “I told you. I’ll be just fine.” But he shouldn’t think of himself as odd or strange just because he hasn’t talked with anyone today. I’m not odd. He’s not strange. Thirteen hours? That’s not so long. Listen, this is where life has led me, to this point; something. He can’t quite put it in words now. But he’s trying to say what? What am I trying to say? That it’s not his fault he hasn’t spoken to anyone today? No, that’s not what I wanted to say. Forget it. I think if I had someone to speak to other than myself today, I’d be able to say what I want to say understandably. Coherently. Clearly. Some way. But again: enough. He opens Gilgamesh and turns to the page the bookmark’s on. I resume reading what I stopped reading when I was on the exercise bike at the Y. Is that the best way to put it? What if it isn’t? What’s important is that I know what I mean. Or another way could be “He resumes reading at the place he left off when he was on the exercise bike at the Y.” Any real d
ifference? Some. Second’s better. I’m reading when someone says my name. He looks up. It’s my neighbor from up the hill from my house. Karen.