earn your lodging. To keep things fair and square, so that you won’t owe me. At five, I summarize the late-breaking news to you over tea. I wait for an opening, a crack in the hard glaze of your silence. You wait for me to finish, wash out the cups, dry them, and return them to the cupboard. You fold the dish towel. You remind me of someone who walks backwards, sweeping away his footsteps. You go up to your room and close the door. Yesterday I stood and listened. What did I think I would hear? The scratching of a pen? But there was nothing. At seven you emerge to watch the news. At eight I eat dinner. At nine-thirty, I go to sleep. Much later, perhaps close to two or three in the morning, you leave the house to walk. In the dark, in the hills, in the woods. I no longer wake with a hunger that drives me out of bed to gorge myself before the open refrigerator. That appetite, which your mother called biblical, abandoned me long ago. Now I wake for other reasons. Weak bladder. Mysterious pains. Potential heart attacks. Clots. And always I find your bed empty and neatly made. I return to bed and when I get up in the morning, no matter how early, I find your shoes lined up by the door and your long gray form bent over the table. And I cough so that we can begin again.
Listen, Dov. Because I’m only going to say this once: We’re running out of time, you and I. No matter how miserable your life may be, there is still more time left for you. You can do what you wish with it. You can waste it wandering the forest, following a trail of turds left by a burrowing animal. But not I. I’m rapidly approaching my end. I will not come back in the form of migrating birds, or pollen dust, or some ugly, debased creature befitting my sins. All that I am, all that I was, will harden over into ancient geology. And you will be left alone with it. Alone with what I was, with what we were, and alone with your pain that will no longer stand any chance of being allayed. So think carefully. Think long and hard. Because if you came here to be confirmed in what you have always believed about me, you’re bound to succeed. I’ll even help you, my boy. I’ll be the prick you always took me to be. It’s true that it comes easily to me. Who knows, perhaps it will even excuse you from regret. But make no mistake: While I’m buried in a hole void of all feeling, you will live on in an afterlife of pain.
But you know all of this, don’t you? I sense that it’s why you came. Before I die there are things you want to say to me. Let’s have it out. Don’t hold back. What’s stopping you? Pity? I see it in your eyes: While I fly up in my mechanical chair I can see your shock at my diminishment. The monster of your childhood defeated by something as mundane as a flight of stairs. And yet, I only need to open my mouth in order to send your pity scurrying back under the rock it came out from. Just a few well-chosen words to remind you that despite appearances I am still the same arrogant, obtuse asshole I’ve always been.
Listen. I have a proposal for you. Hear me out and then you can accept or reject it as you choose. What would you say to a temporary truce, for as long as it takes for you to say your piece and me to say mine? For us to listen to each other as we have never listened, to hear one another out without becoming defensive and lashing out, to put, for a moment, a moratorium on bitterness and bile? To see what it’s like to occupy the other’s position? Perhaps you will say it is too late for us, that the moment for compassion is long past. And you might be right, but we have nothing more to lose. Death is waiting just around the corner for me. If we leave things like this it’s not I who will pay the price. I will be nothing. I won’t hear or see or think or feel. Maybe you think I’m belaboring the obvious, but