her next fix is where it was,” he said. “They’re all like that. They hate the tricks they turn, don’t kid yourself, Ben. Hey, you don’t look so good suddenly. Think you can make it back up that hill?”
“My doctors want me to exercise,” I told him. “They want me to drop dead.” As I shuffled my way up the curved asphalt, past the fruit trees with their rotting dropped fruit, the lilacs turning purple leaf by leaf, the sassafras shaped like an upside-down bowl, and the cedar with its frost of tiny berries, I decided that the stir of my penis at the mention of Deirdre’s name had likely been just a leak of warm urine I had happened to notice. I resolved to work harder on my Kegel exercises.
Rain for three days, one of those fall nor’easters that knock the leaves from the trees and paste them to the wet earth, Still, the hickory outside my upstairs window has scarcely turned, but for patches of yellow. Agitated squirrels tousle it, clambering out on its downward-drooping twigs, and then scamper thunderously across the roof above my head.
The gutter at one end was plugged, and the overflow built up a puddle behind the pachysandra that was draining into a basement window. In a burst of vitality that alarmed Gloria, I put on my old foul-weather sailing gear and in the driving rain set up the extension ladder and climbed its slick rungs and, not daring to look down into the steep triangular space beneath my feet, cleared away a plug of twigs and leaves with my hands. There was primitive satisfaction in seeing a vortex appear and the level of water standing in the old wooden gutter go slowly down, obedient to the patient, omnipresent laws of physics. Childhood games: getting the elements back on track. Man as hydraulic traffic cop. Down on the ground I tried with the point of a pick to gouge a runnel through the pachysandra to drain the puddle into the driveway, but gravity was against me. If gravity be against us, what can be for us? I liked being out in the rain, because it made my soaked paper diaper feel natural, a piece of saturated nature.
Inside the house, arranging everything in the laundry room to dry, I was aware of the heat from the radiators, as touched and grateful as if a faithful servant had thought to set out for me a tray of tea and warm scones. The house and its appurtenances of wiring and piping pursue an independent life, like a motherly, stationary megatrinket.
Gloria professed alarm at my exertions but in fact I felt invigorated, my face tingling. It was only in the evening, as I tried to read in bed a popular book about cosmology, that a terrific fatigue hit me—that degree of unforswearable weariness that brushes even the certainty of death aside in its haste to close our eyes.
Alive, I’m alive, I sometimes think now, listening to the rain in the gutters, feeling the extension of my limbs beneath the soft sheets. What bliss life is, imagined from the standpoint of a stone or of a cubic yard of black water in the icy ocean depths. Even there, apparently, conglomerated molecules manage to light a tiny candle of consciousness. The universe hates death, can it be? If God be for us, who can be against us? Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the … Alive. A pitiable but delicious reprieve from timelessness. I think of all the sons of bitches like Gary Gray and Firman Frothingham who would just as soon see me dead and the pleasure of spiting my enemies warms my cooling heart.
The sky this dawn was a pink blotting paper, set above a sea whose blue presented the same misty, fibrous texture. In the foreground the golden trees looked sullen and darker now, curdled and rust-ridden, after the storm. As the leaves thin, the sky lowers again upon our awareness. Making my slow way down the damp asphalt, where flowing water has left drifts and eskers of pine needles, acorns, hickory nuts, dead twigs, and gravel from the edges, I seem to see, in broken arcs beyond the scudding, thinning rain clouds, the heavenly circle, the torus. Has it, in spite of the public indifference that attended its departure, returned, or is it a trick merely of refracted sunlight in a high mist of crystals—a white rainbow?
According