[Listen.]
\
Carving out S after S with the wheels of his bicycle––S’s that might have been 8s had they turned over themselves like the one or two thoughts that he could not set aside, our man tried his best not to think and rethink, speeding forward as though this could aid.
We stopped to watch him wind along the road ahead before we pulled away, he and his thoughts snapping at each other like two foaming mouths. His S’s now straightening, not quite rigid, loosely perpendicular to the horizon that takes and shrinks him.
1
From our side of the door we heard his heavy stomp and keychain fumble. We heard him at the door where he stood a standing that we knew to be a swaying. We knew his one-eyed look at the keychain, his automatic selection; we recall even now its sound as it scraped the keyhole. There he was, stumbling in with eyes for nothing.
The tinkle and thump of keys on his desk, the squeak and thud of shoes on the wood, unzipped coat not yet taken off; all these noises were the matter of his own welcome––and he greeted himself further with a cigarette before throwing open a window from which to exhale. He left it burning on the sill and walked to the fridge where he poured out a glass of beer that he drank half down on his way back for another drag. Our man played no music and did not think to.
We watched him stand and sway in the window’s frame, he and his thoughts divorced; neither recalled the other. His shoulder against the sill, our man felt, as he was wont to, the possibility of falling down to the road.
2
We had been dozing on a chair while he smoked and drank, drank and smoked. He made barely a noise except for the sound of his gradually thickening steps back and forth across the apartment floor: window to fridge, fridge to window. We had slept through all of this, keeping breath to the filthy pendulum swing.
So it came as a shock when a little before first light we woke to not find him. The window was open––but his shoes and coat, keys and cigarettes, were gone as well. We breathed in tobacco must and warm beer.
We might have followed him had we known where he would have gone. We closed our eyes and imagined he would return, our thoughts like twisted smoke, slowly dissipating as we imagined that he was safe or at least on his way to being safe again.
3
When morning had come, he had not. Was he sleeping somewhere cold? Had he gone to see a friend? Who would he have thought to visit? And who would have greeted him? The cat was not fed either, we watched it eye its plate with paws stretched out over the desk.
The cat then stood up and leaped onto the chair where it curled itself as though to shrink its hunger. It closed its eyelids and set its chin against its tail.
From the window we saw the sun shine on our man’s bicycle. It was still chained. Had he gone out to reverse everything? Was he still in the night? We felt that our man had exited the day in the way one exits a room.
4
The doorbell sounded and three knocks at the door pulsated through the house, twitching one of the cat’s ears. Another ring of the bell, that time reluctant, but followed by more determined knocks. The cat walked to its dish and licked it. The knocker stepped off, feet thudding in the hall.
We looked out the window at his bicycle once more, the sun having shifted no longer shone on it. We reflected that it must be afternoon, that his absence is more than noted––that this knocker was a sign or an omen.
The cat left its plate once more and lay in the shaft of sunlight that had come through the open window.
5
Some time later his sister came into the house. She closed the window and fed the cat. Crying she cleared the bottles and did what she could to clean; giving up she put the cat in its cage and took it out of the apartment. The door stayed open awhile.
She came back and took a few more things, of which we only noted a book; we were too busy watching her face for a sign to have paid enough attention beyond that. She left again, this time closing the door. The lock clicked twice and we sat there, waiting and thinking; guesses fleeting and hopeless, like drops of water taken from an ocean.
\ x
At night the bookshelf groaned under the weight of its books and notebooks. Its shelves, sagging at their centers, seemed now to tilt forward––or perhaps it was the wall itself that slanted, forcing the shelves forward. A book slipped off one of the higher shelves, its displacement bringing down the entire row with it. Then the shelves slanted more and the bookshelf lurched forward, smashing the chandelier, its books raining down like endless thumps at a typewriter. The wood frame crashed down and the floor absorbed the shock. Dust lifted from the rug and glass – shattered everywhere – caught quiet moonlight in dusty shards.
Along the bare wall above the fallen bookcase a light began to shimmer, at first only a silver-watery slit from top to bottom, but gradually expanding, it filled the wall like an undulating tarp, digital and glistening, silent as it warped the wall, opening it onto an outside that could not in reality have possibly been adjacent to the room.
It was our man, much younger, seated on a bench with a book––the one, perhaps, that fell first from the cascading bookshelves. He was reading intently, the sky gray and wind fluttering his hair. The image evaporated and in its place emerged another: our man walking somewhere at night, beside him a girl; he was holding her hand, or she his. The image scattered and reassembled into another. Then another and another. Continually shifting, the wall told our man’s story; and over a night that lasted days I watched it all, recalling every moment that it showed me of him.
x \
“No speed to attain that can pull it off me. The guilt and the misery of it.”
x1
“Why have I come home? What is there for me here? What is there for me anywhere?”
“I stand at this window and I drink. That is what I do, every night. I wait for light.”
“There is no light.”
x2
“I must apologize. I will go there and apologize.”
x3
“Is this my last thought? My final vision? All water coming to me, coming up to drench me.”
x4
“There was no way to undo it, the guilt, no way but to drown in it.”
END
idiotic investigations 