The Correspondent
Gilbert’s dying. It became the whole thing. You, Bruce and Fiona, my brother, our friends, my work, the house, our life, all of that was sitting on the sidelines, but I was in the ring wrestling, bloody, half-dead, with Gill’s death. Parenting the other two, trying to help them with their own grief, was like acting. I could say what needed to be said, but I was only thinking of myself in the ring with Gill’s death. I have asked Bruce and Fiona about that period of time. I was surprised to learn they’re both in therapy. I think neither of us was able to shepherd them in those first crucial months, submerged, completely, in the swamp water of despair. We were needing the same thing, you and I, a temple in which to tuck away and disappear from the earth, to mourn at the altar of our desolation, but we had the children, so we could not. Could we have held onto each other? I’ve wondered. We did the best we could and it was not enough. The four of us came away injured, but is there any other way for a person to come through? Oh, Gilbert. I do hope there is an afterlife as I have always believed, a heaven. I hope I will see him and know him there. I believe I’ve been looking forward to death on one hand.
From the archives
·
2000
Pastoralia
This morning is the morning I empty our Human Refuse bags and the trash bags and the bag from the bottom of the sleek metal hole where Janet puts her used feminine items.
For this I get an extra sixty a month. Plus it’s always nice to get out of the cave.
I knock on the door of her Separate Area.
“Who is it?” she asks, playing dumb.
She knows very well who it is. I stick in my arm and wave around a trash bag.
“Go for it,” she says.
She’s in there washing her armpits with a washcloth. The room smells like her, only more so. I add the trash from her wicker basket to my big white bag. I add her bag of used feminine items to my big white bag. I take three bags labeled Caution Human Refuse from the corner and add them to my big pink bag labeled Caution Human Refuse.
I mime to her that I dreamed of a herd that covered the plain like the grass of the earth, they were as numerous as grasshoppers and yet the meat of their humps resembled each a tiny mountain etc. etc., and sharpen my spear and try to look like I’m going into a sort of prehunt trance.
“Are you going?” she shouts. “Are you going now? Is that what you’re saying?”
I nod.
“Christ, so go already,” she says. “Have fun. Bring back some mints.”
She has worked very hard these many months to hollow out a rock in which to hide her mints and her smokes. Mints mints mints. Smokes smokes smokes. No matter how long we’re in here together I will never get the hots for her. She’s fifty and has large feet and sloping shoulders and a pinched little face and chews with her mouth open. Sometimes she puts on big ugly glasses in the cave and does a crossword: very verboten.
Out I go, with the white regular trash bag in one hand and our mutual big pink Human Refuse bag in the other.
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Pastoralia
This morning is the morning I empty our Human Refuse bags and the trash bags and the bag from the bottom of the sleek metal hole where Janet puts her used feminine items.
For this I get an extra sixty a month. Plus it’s always nice to get out of the cave.
I knock on the door of her Separate Area.
“Who is it?” she asks, playing dumb.
She knows very well who it is. I stick in my arm and wave around a trash bag.
“Go for it,” she says.
She’s in there washing her armpits with a washcloth. The room smells like her, only more so. I add the trash from her wicker basket to my big white bag. I add her bag of used feminine items to my big white bag. I take three bags labeled Caution Human Refuse from the corner and add them to my big pink bag labeled Caution Human Refuse.
I mime to her that I dreamed of a herd that covered the plain like the grass of the earth, they were as numerous as grasshoppers and yet the meat of their humps resembled each a tiny mountain etc. etc., and sharpen my spear and try to look like I’m going into a sort of prehunt trance.
“Are you going?” she shouts. “Are you going now? Is that what you’re saying?”
I nod.
“Christ, so go already,” she says. “Have fun. Bring back some mints.”
She has worked very hard these many months to hollow out a rock in which to hide her mints and her smokes. Mints mints mints. Smokes smokes smokes. No matter how long we’re in here together I will never get the hots for her. She’s fifty and has large feet and sloping shoulders and a pinched little face and chews with her mouth open. Sometimes she puts on big ugly glasses in the cave and does a crossword: very verboten.
Out I go, with the white regular trash bag in one hand and our mutual big pink Human Refuse bag in the other.
Read more of this excerpt...
WORDS TO LIVE BY
2005 ·
NON-FICTION
NEW MUSIC