Stephen Dobyns

I steal your mailbox, leave gum on your sidewalk. I seduce your sister, ignore your wife. I tear one page from each of your books. I convince you that I am your friend. * When people ask about you, I shake my head. When they tell about you, I nod. * Today, I hang myself from a greased flagpole outside your picture window. Yesterday, I stole your curtains.

The day I learned my wife was dying I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had a good life, I’d punch him in the nose. How much life represents a good life? Maybe a hundred years, which would give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo and take the train to Vladivostok, learn German to read Thomas Mann in the original. Even more baseball games, more days at the beach and the baking of more walnut cakes for family birthdays. How much time is enough time? How much is needed for all these unspent kisses, those slow walks along cobbled streets?

Nihilism, but not in a negative sense—such was his thought, what else to call it? Like snow inside a novelty snow globe, vague possibility descended from probability, descended from likelihood and certainty. Now not even air. Those great words discussed in college— truth, beauty, justice, which had come to embarrass him, like teasing bare-breasted girls in postcards sent from Polynesian islands that each year he had found less likely; absolutes faded like old shirts, as still he tried to create from stray thoughts as if out of wood- chips and mud, the old certainties he once loved, the believable lie.

Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or walking the dog, he would recall some incident from his youth—nothing significant—climbing a tree in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's swing, sitting in a parked car with a girl whose face he no longer remembered, his hand on her breast and his body electric; memories to look at with curiosity, the harmless behavior of a stranger, with nothing to regret or elicit particular joy. And although he had no sense of being on a journey, such memories made him realize how far he had traveled, which, in turn, made him ask how he would look back on the person he was now, this person who seemed so substantial. These images, it was like looking at a book of old photographs, recognizing a forehead, the narrow chin, and perhaps recalling the story of an older second cousin, how he had left long ago to try his luck in Argentina or Australia. And he saw that he was becoming like such a person, that the day might arrive when he would look back on his present self as on a distant relative who had drifted off into uncharted lands.

Not having as yet learned how to live— indecision skittering like a dust devil across appetite’s parking lot—the time has come to learn how to die. First I’ll put away my clothes, return my books to their shelves; then I’ll raise the blinds, to see what’s happening on the street and which birds are forming their flocks, since I think it will be fall with the trees nearly bare, except for clusters of leaves clinging to the oaks. Does it matter that I’ve never learned to sleep on my back? Soon I’ll have plenty of time to practice. Like people standing in line waiting for a train, I’ll check my watch against a clock on the wall, touch the ticket tucked in my breast pocket. Don’t accuse me of morbidity. Actuarial tables have quickened their work against me. Oh, it’s no simple thing to practice for death and I’ve yet to reach the subject of goodbyes. Will I have time to speak to the people I love, to press hand or stroke a cheek? Then each might need to make some remark, maybe even an ironic gesture, nothing too somber as could complicate a rational occasion. Better, I think, to slip out across the driveway to where a car is waiting, its motor making the softest hum. As often occurs the cat will escort me part way and I’ll bend to scratch his ears, as he stretches to let me scratch his neck as well. I don’t know what birds will be left, I don’t know if it will be sunny or dark. Pausing, I’ll pat my pockets to see if I’ve got my keys, and then smile at my mistake. No time now for whatever remains undone, no time for regrets or good thoughts, not time perhaps— and this is hard to imagine—even to shut my eyes. Yes, this practicing for death is no simple thing— look at how I open my hand and once or twice flick my wrist so a bit of fluff or loose thread stuck to my fingers can at last float away.

for Peter Parrish Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark, the cord that makes him always dissatisfied, has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes. He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes, but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men that people who hardly know him often mistake for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus. He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank or a library or turning a piece of flat land into a ditch. All day something that refuses to show itself hovers at the corner of his eye, like a name he is trying to remember, like expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress whom he has never met, would never meet again. And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge of a burning field with smoke swirling around it like white curtains shot full of wind and light. When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see what person he should be that evening. He wants to say: All day I have been listening, all day I have felt I stood on the brink of something amazing. But he says nothing, and his family walks around him as if he were a stick leaning against a wall. Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed. He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him. Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress, and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him. Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more, until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.

The mailman handing me a letter, he paid a little. My daughter’s third grade teacher, the electrician putting a light over my back door: they paid as well. The woman at the bank who cashes my check. She paid a part of it. The typist in my office, the janitor sweeping the floor—they paid some too. The movie star paid for it. The nurse, the nun, the saint, they all paid for it— a photograph from Central America, six children lying neatly in a row. One day I was teaching or I sold a book review or I gave a lecture and some of the money came to me and some rolled off into the world, but it was still my money, the result of my labor, each coin still had my name printed across it, and I went on living, passing my days in a box with a tight lid. But elsewhere, skulking through tall grass, a dozen men approached a village. It was hot; the men made no noise. See that one’s cap, see the button on that other man’s shirt, * * * hear the click of the cartridge as it slides into its chamber, see the handkerchief which that man uses to wipe his brow— I paid for that one, that one belongs to me.

Cabbage—the first word put down with his new pen, a trophy pen, like a trophy wife, not cheap, absurd to use a ballpoint pen for a task like this, a challenge, for which he’d also bought a new, but antique, rolltop desk recently restored, with matching chair, also not cheap, and for which he’d renovated the attic room with pine-paneled walls, bookshelves, and a good light for his new office or weekend office, a place planned for many years, even before college, back in high school in fact, a resolve rare in his life, but about which he’d dreamed in free moments at work, and which kept him sane during those tedious years of doing the taxes for strangers, but now at last begun, excitingly begun, as he leaned forward with pen raised to put down on paper the first word of his first novel.