The Wall

One night from the other side of a motel wall made of nothing but sawdust and pink stuff, I listened as a man cried to someone on the telephone that all he wanted to do before he died was to come home. “I want to come home!” That night a man cried until I was ankle-deep in sleep, and then up to my neck, wading like a swimmer or like a suicide through the waves of him crying and into the deep as icebergs cracked into halves, as jellyfish, like thoughts, were passed secretly between people. And the seaweed, like the sinuous soft green hair of certain beauty queens, washed up by the sea. Except that we were in Utah, and one of us was weeping while the other one was sleeping, with nothing but a thin, dry wall between us.