Sometimes in the morning I remember thinking: it is the sorrow of leaving a place you’re not done loving yet. In the afternoon the satisfaction of the mophead’s gray overlapping circles across the floor as you advanced down a corridor of distress. On your way to the corner store after work the simple pleasure of barking at the businessman in the flannel suit and brown fedora humming as he passed you on the street, all smug in himself: Behind him the prissy woman with the fascinator like a small scarlet bird tangled up in her hair, staring down at the sidewalk, frantic to avoid your eyes.
Sister Superior Nightmare. I remember the uncomplicated happiness of watching them recoil, wondering what it was like walking around in such tight skins. When has a weatherman ever gotten a single thing right? being the real question behind all the others, it strikes me now.
Answer me that, and everything else will fall into place. You recollect nothing, by the way, of the day your mother died. That, and those seconds of weightlessness for a job well done, the mophead circling beneath you across the linoleum floor.
Or the dead face some people get when they don’t like living anymore. The unqualified wellbeing housed in the hospital kitchen as you extracted each plate from the four-wheeled wagon, scraped off the refuse, and loaded it into the dishwasher. When Whillie’s hand touched mine I forgot.
The way he would look at me with loving hopelessness. I remember Harry of the long neck and vegetal ears adding up my purchases at the register at the corner store on the days I don’t eat for free, didn’t eat for free, in the hospital refectory: one can Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup, one bottle Coca-Cola (cold), three Tootsie Rolls. He gave you your change, saying: Windows broke out.
Since when did this city become such a stupid idea? Scooping up your paper bag, you replying: You can see me? I mean how do you know your real name is the one everyone decides to throw at you and sometimes it is a sky full of clouds lit by flames, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. 65 degrees, from 3:00 to 6:00 a.m. 39, and sometimes pudgy long-haired bearded hippie art student David Berglund singing under his breath outside your door on his way to the common bathroom from the apartment he shares with his rumpled wife Betsy and her green tree-frog spectacles.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
