When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,52
the words are out of my mouth the skeleton has morphed into a guy named Stew, who I once slighted in a drug deal.
Stew and the Frenchwoman will be happy to see me go, and there are hundreds more in line behind them, some I can name, and others I’d managed to hurt and insult without a formal introduction. I hadn’t thought of these people in years, but that’s the skeleton’s cleverness. He gets into my head when I’m asleep and picks through the muck at the bottom of my skull. “Why me?” I ask. “Hugh is lying in the very same bed. How come you don’t go after him?”
And the skeleton says, “You are going to die.”
“But I’m the one who found your finger.”
“You are going to die.”
I say to Hugh, “Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier with the baby?”
For the first few weeks, I heard the voice only when I was in the bedroom. Then it spread and took over the entire apartment. I’d be sitting in my office, gossiping on the telephone, and the skeleton would cut in, sounding like an international operator. “You are going to die.”
I stretched out in the bathtub, soaking in fragrant oils, while outside my window beggars were gathered like kittens upon the heating grates.
“You are going to die.”
In the kitchen I threw away a perfectly good egg. In the closet I put on a sweater some half-blind child was paid ten sesame seeds to make. In the living room I took out my notebook and added a bust of Satan to the list of gifts I’d like to receive.
“You are going to die. You are going to die. You are going to die.”
“Do you think you could alter that just a little?” I asked.
But he wouldn’t.
Having been dead for three hundred years, there’s a lot the skeleton doesn’t understand: TV, for instance. “See,” I told him, “you just push this button, and entertainment comes into your home.” He seemed impressed, and so I took it a step further. “I invented it myself, to bring comfort to the old and sick.”
“You are going to die.”
He had the same reaction to the vacuum cleaner, even after I used the nozzle attachment to dust his skull. “You are going to die.”
And that’s when I broke down. “I’ll do anything you like,” I said. “I’ll make amends to the people I’ve hurt, I’ll bathe in rainwater, you name it, just please say something, anything, else.”
The skeleton hesitated a moment. “You are going to be dead . . . some day,” he told me.
And I put away the vacuum cleaner, thinking, Well, that’s a start.
All the Beauty You Will Ever Need
In Paris they warn you before cutting off the water, but out in Normandy you’re just supposed to know. You’re also supposed to be prepared, and it’s this last part that gets me every time. Still, though, I manage to get by. A saucepan of chicken broth will do for shaving, and in a pinch I can always find something to pour into the toilet tank: orange juice, milk, a lesser champagne. If I really get hard up, I suppose I could hike through the woods and bathe in the river, though it’s never quite come to that.
Most often, our water is shut off because of some reconstruction project, either in our village or in the next one over. A hole is dug, a pipe is replaced, and within a few hours things are back to normal. The mystery is that it’s so perfectly timed to my schedule. This is to say that the tap dries up at the exact moment I roll out of bed, which is usually between 10:00 and 10:30. For me this is early, but for Hugh and most of our neighbors it’s something closer to midday. What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone’s guess. I only know that they’re incredibly self-righteous about it and talk about the dawn as if it’s a personal reward, bestowed on account of their great virtue.
The last time our water was cut, it was early summer. I got up at my regular hour and saw that Hugh was off somewhere, doing whatever it is he does. This left me alone to solve the coffee problem — a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight. Once, in a half sleep, I made it with Perrier, which sounds plausible