May 20, 2007 | Fiction, General Fiction |
She went up early, three weeks before the solstice. She sat in the green Adirondack chair on the front lawn. She wrestled it forward until it was just three or four yards back from the staircase that led down to the dock. She did this herself even though it was very hard for her. She went out to sit in it after the morning fog had lifted, so that she could look out on the ocean and track with her eyes how it shifted between blues and grays, mingled them and then veered off in one direction or another, towards spangled bright or towards a more solemn sullen uniformity of dull. She may have been in pain sitting there, but the pain had become such a constant companion that she wasn’t always aware of it. Sometimes when it dimmed, she was surprised to notice that she missed it. She knew that she didn’t have that much time left. It wasn’t about measuring it. She just knew it, but didn’t tell anyone. What would be the point of telling them, anyway? This was personal. It was private. It was the last intimacy that she had with herself within herself. When you hurt for a long time, you started to see yourself as nothing more or less than a peculiar illusion. She thought of her rages and her lusts, of the different bodies she had worn, of the bodies that had come forth from hers. Her four children bobbed on the water like buoys. They were no different than the other buoys that marked anchorages in the harbor. She found herself...
May 11, 2007 | Fiction, General Fiction |
Pascal was five that summer, a demiurge of childhood, unconscious of the life and beauty that brimmed over in him and spilled on everyone who came near, causing each one to smile his or her own smile, compound of memory and desire, of impudent hopes and impossible regrets, as if the most delicate issues in the past were still undecided, waiting for the movement that would release them. He had a dimpled smile that came easily and quick deep blue eyes that held no shame.He was rarely still. Nothing seemed to offend him. I was not quite four times his age, young, too, although I felt very old then, as if I carried great weights whose names I did not know on my back and had no hope of putting them down, as I could hardly tell them apart from myself. I have lost so much of what weighed on me and feel the poorer for it, for freedom can impoverish, rob us of definition, even of aspiration. I am sixty-one years old, a solid citizen who still retains an imagination and a feeling that he is subversive even as everything around him subverts him just as it sustains him. In my mind Pascal remains forever five. Suppose he is still alive and forty-five -years old. Inconceivable. Suppose he is dead. Also inconceivable. He lives in my mind and remains five years old. But there is another possibility. Suppose he is alive and a father or even a grandfather and from him or from one who has come from him there has sprung another little boy, another Pascal, not...
Apr 16, 2007 | Fiction, General Fiction |
I had already reached the age when a man is tempted to try to tell himself the story of his life, as if it made sense, as if his life were a story, as if a path with footprints could be traced through the forest of his years. I had made an attempt to turn into a detective, one whose unreliable witness I was myself. I had discovered within myself a principle of uncertainty. The detective’s questions disturbed the witness, so the witness shifted ground. He became someone else, not wholly new, but yet not the same. This change elicited more questions from the detective who could not help himself in seeking clarity. He wanted to know what had happened and how it had happened and why it had happened. This was the form that his greed took. If this detective suspected he was driving clarity away by the very act of seeking it, the suspicion was only a fleeting one that soon leapt the perimeter of consciousness and was gone back into the wilderness, its natural habitat. The call came early in the morning as I was having my first cup of coffee, as I was half reading the newspaper, half excoriating myself for this reading of the newspaper, tantalizing habit of a lifetime. I was thinking for the one thousandth time, or perhaps the ten thousandth time that I had never seen a situation with which I was acquainted in depth reported accurately in the newspaper. Was the newspaper fact or jive, or both in one? “Is this Felix Bonarien to whom I am speaking?” The voice...
