Quiet Days in Purgatory
Eventually, I’m just going to get too tired to keep my eyes open and I’ll have to go down stairs and fetch my wife to bed. Maybe it’ll rain tomorrow. The Colonel has called a meeting for tomorrow night, so that should be a few laughs. He claims that he is going to raise a sunken ship in the river by singing. We’ll believe it when we see it, but that’s not the point. I’ll make turkey meatballs and then we’ll watch a little television.
I work at a school, where I have discovered that I am a teacher of Philosophy. I don’t know if they think I know that the students are plastic manikins, but it is so obvious it is embarrassing. There is no speech, no movement, not the slightest breath. The only fluttering paper is that which I accidentally drop. I am required to lecture vigorously to these figures. When the thought of what I am doing reaches back to my life and depresses me, I stop talking. For this I am gently reprimanded by The Committee.
In all, the time at work moved swiftly today. I drew images of the Polychize on the chalk board while I spoke loud, vociferous incoherencies. There were deer in the parking lot when I came out of work. They saw me and ran. It was hot and beautiful. I came home and smoked a stick and sat in my room with three different radios playing three different songs. I found the sweet spot in my rolling chair, just left of the center of the room, where all the notes and all the voices blend into a hybrid with a will to survive.
Tonight, before dinner, we went down to the river and joined the crowd encircling the Colonel. As usual, everybody was subtly ridiculing him. He takes it well. “If only I had arms and hands to hold you. Oh, how I’d hold you,” he always says. Things got a little out of hand at the last meeting, though. The Colonel had promised a fireworks display, which never materialized, and a man in the crowd threw a dog turd, hitting Rasuka in the left cheek. It was horrible because his eyes kept looking down, trying to see where it had landed.
Today, though, the colonel was in high spirits, singing his head off. His expressions had the crowd in stitches, his voice had them begging for mercy. Occasionally, he would stop his song to tell everyone, “Keep your eyes on the river.” Beneath the laughter and comments, I heard a very low voice whisper, “Look now.” I turned to the river and saw an oak branch floating along with a river rat clinging to it. Just then, Rasuka called it quits, and I turned to see that of everyone there, I was probably the only one to have seen the rat and the branch.
As I gathered my wife and my sons together from the crowd, I kept an eye out for the quiet one. I thought I saw him as I lifted my younger son, but when I looked back he was gone. We started home, the kids running ahead. I told my wife about what I had seen on the river.
“I saw it too,” she said. “When you turned to look, so did I.”
“What did you think of it?” I asked her.
“What did you think of it?” she asked. We laughed for a while about that, and then we spoke about planting the garden.
After the sailor boy puppet with the captain’s hat and the red skirt told a segment of the continuing story of Marlu the Manipulator, and the children had dozed off to my singing, my wife and I sat on the couch in the dark.
“Have I always loved you?” she asked.
“It feels that way, doesn’t it,” I said.
“I remember a bigger house and just the shadow of a another man,” she admitted.
“I remember playing in the snow in another place than this,” I said.
“I guess it’s either this or the void,” she said.
I scratched her back till she fell asleep.
The dog and I went to the river and, on the way, we met Bill. He told me he was due to get his first disability check.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I can’t quite remember,” he said. “I got hurt on the job, something fell on me. I’m set for the rest of my life.”
