ONTOLOGY

One must admire your monkish habits: your devotion to a closed loop of domestic stations that lead nowhere and end at the beginning. Your legs still carry you because your body remembers what the soul has abandoned; and the body, unlike the soul, does not require reasons.

The lacquer smudged into the wood floor beside the bed in an accident you no longer remembered the circumstances of but you had once, in the early months, tried to scrape away with a butter knife before stopping midway through in a kind of dismal un-moving horror, a revulsion at your own hands, at the efficiency of how a body can remove totems she left behind.

The remaining smudge was half-removed and half-preserved and, like an argument, interrupted and never resolved - which in this case was better than resolving: you can remember, everyday, that lacquer, her favorite lacquer. 

The closet was the next totem. You opened it and stood inside the frame of it - because it wasn’t luxuriant enough to be walk-in, just frame-in - and breathed. It was lavender and coffee, still. Still! It was fading, but you did the load-bearing mechanics of making sure the air outside and the air inside don’t mingle. Of course, these load-bearing mechanics were keep-sake insurances of making sure you don’t give way in the closet and weep with her fabric stippled to your face. [1]

[1] Which had happened, more than once.

She’d sold most of her clothes in secret to pay for the treatments. The remaining few hung like survivors at a reunion where most are gone. [2]

[2] Like the year-ends of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings, the remaining few with hair barely attached to their scalps. Of women and men alike - all red-eyed - sobriety takes a toll as any other substance.

In the kitchen remains her broken plates. She had broken them on the infirm day of “realizing”, “dawning”, that this wasn’t ordinary - her arms just gave way. You kept them the way you kept everything she left: totally indiscriminate. Everything in the same place as she left them; if you begin forgetting, let there be totems.

The tupperware she left in the fridge. Her last meal, the one she couldn’t finish, still inside, and you opened the fridge and looked at it every morning. No mold and no smell. You did not believe in signs but you didn’t throw it out either, and in it lies the difference: a territory of half-belief half-not so all-consuming that entire religions were founded, and you, a man who read the entire discouraging bibliography of Western Thought™ on the subject of death and its aftermath, could not place yourself with any confidence. The tupperware was simply there and that was that - to adjudicate.

Beyond totems, a coworker had recommended Vietnamese coffee on account of your comments on low energy (his recommendation goes: ‘This will fuck you up. Seriously, for cardiac events only.’ And that’s all you needed, really.) 

Of course: it did nothing. You drank the bitter of it at the counter, standing and not sitting at the table for two. The whole emotional calculus of sitting on the table for two was exhausting and destructive so you opted to just stand. It would’ve made her laugh, this blunt solution. She had a laugh that involved her whole body, a laugh that bent her forward at the waist and put her hand on whatever was nearest - your knee, your stomach, your shoulder, your forearm. And because the laugh was like that, it conscripted you - you joined her to laugh at whatever. Her laugh was the last thing you heard in your head at night. It remained itself, unlike the perfect song which eventually dis-morphs and degrades. And this was either a mercy or a cruelty that you couldn’t decide on. Her whisker-touched smile still lives in your mind endlessly. 

You drove across town to see her. It was muscle memory, this track. Like it were on rails or those toy trains that you had to pull off the track just to keep them from moving in that particular way. Past the elementary school where someone had misspelled CONGRATULASHIONS on a banner that no one had removed.

And this was a fact that you and her talked extensively about. Like the ‘wicked bible’, in which the word 'not' was omitted from the seventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ The printers were fined and most copies were destroyed. She laughed about this extensively, her hand was on your belly so you laughed about it too.

Past the Presbyterian church whose sign read GOD'S LOVE IS UNCONDITIONAL but whose parking lot was gated and locked on weekdays, a contradiction you had pointed out to her once in the passenger seat and she had laughed, that laugh, bending forward, her hand on your knee, and you would give anything, anything, your hands, your degrees, the entire corpus and every footnote you'd ever written about it, for that laugh, for the fact of her diaphragm contracting, for the air that came out of her and hit the dashboard and fogged it for a half-second in January, proof of breath, proof of life.

The cemetery was simple. It had none of the Baroque funerary elements, the weeping angels and obelisks and mausoleums built on the scale of modern-age buildings, that the Europeans enjoy as architectural entitlement. Someone with a worn-down clipboard sketching his children had designated it (it was a simple flat land) for the storage of the dead, and the dead, being dead, had not objected.

In all honesty, it was a fairyland. The grass moved in a single direction, always shimmering. Just the light, the grass and the quiet.

You brushed the night dust off the stone with your palm. You rearranged some flowers the strong wind had shifted.

‘Hinton,’ you said.

The bird - a handsome blue jay - on the branch above you tweeted. It was probably experiencing zero spiritual continuity with your dead wife. It wanted seeds or it wanted a different branch.

‘He got drunk at his own birthday. Classic. John and I set up this surprise for him, collector’s editions of the board games he plays - you know Hinton, the way he is about board games, the obsessive joy - you would’ve said we spoiled him.’

You pulled up a blade of grass. Split it down the center with your thumbnail.

‘I drove him home and he went into one of his drunk rambles - he was like: “you’re the best friend ever, and I’m sorry for being such an unreliable junior. Please forgive me.” It was a whole thing…’ you showed a grin, ‘I’ll talk to him today. He’ll probably hide from me in the breakroom like last time.’

'Anyway.' You brushed the grass off your palms. 'I'm trying. You told me to move on so I'm - I don't know. I'm moving somewhere. Not sure it's somewhere good, probably more like moving around… but I'm moving.'

You touched the top of the gravestone. 'I'll come back Thursday. Same time.'

You stood, took one look at the grassland - the blades still synchronized, leaning east - and walked back to the car.

-

Work.[1]

[1] Where, among other things, you are technically required to sit in a chair that a facilities team selected from a catalog in that has never been comfortable for anyone, and where the same three people microwave the same fish every Thursday, where your manager sends emails at midnight with the subject line 'Quick thought' that are never quick and never just one thought and are torture-like-borrowed-from-Hubei-province. You survive this, and you survive managers.

After work you made the familiar turn away from home opposite your home. Toward a bar with no legible sign, or a sign so rain-damaged it had become a Rorschach test. You saw Reilly's. Hinton swore it was Kelly's. The barkeep, when asked, said:

It didn't matter. 

You parked a short distance away. There was parking closer, by the trees, but you liked to walk. Taste the town air. Let the breeze move through your hair, down your back.

The bell above the door rung, the barkeep nodded, and a few regulars glanced your way, grinning, throttled by their own worries.

You ordered some beer. Grabbed a napkin to fold into disarray and disfigure.

An unfamiliar face on the stool next to you. A girl. Beautiful, but that's not what you noticed first. What you noticed was that she sat down like someone who'd been walking a long time - this tired huff of a person without energy.

'Vodka with Coke Zero,' she said to the barkeep.

Coke Zero?

Not even a real Coke with vodka? She's cutting sugar on a vodka coke. She wants to get drunk but she doesn't want the calories. Or she wants to get drunk and wants to taste nothing while she does it. Or, and this thought arrived without permission: somebody had trained her, at some point, to read everything that entered her body at the molecular level. Just a hunch.

'It's something I developed early on,' she said. Not to you exactly, to the irreverent watchers in the void.

'People give a side eye - or cant help it - when I order it.' She turned now. 'I just like to explain myself.'

'Right.' You took a sip. 'So what brings you here. This is a mid-career panicked people's gathering zone.' You offer the appeal of a bar in layman's terms.

'My career is over.' She picked up her glass when it arrived. Held it but didn't drink, more like staring into it, just a hint off the color of cola. 'I'm arguably deeper into it than you are.' A slight grin from her.

You offered one back. A smaller, more defiant one.

The ambience filled the space between you: it was quiet for a while, someone fed the jukebox, someone else laughed too loud at nothing.

'I like hearing stories,' she said.

'Hm?'

'Tell me a story. I came to this bar for a reason.'

'For stories.' You reply, unmoved.

'Yeah. You 'mid-career panicked people' (air-quotes) have the best ones.'

'What, you want me to tell you about my office life? My daily wars with the printer?'

'Come on.' She took a sip now. Finally. 'You know what I'm talking about. Drink more beer and talk to me.' She set her glass down. 'You people and your privacy. Hmph.'