Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

On the north side of the vacant lot was a garage, and in the garage lived a man named Henry. Henry had been living there for years. He collected bottles and cans and returned them for their deposits. He didn’t bother anyone much, and nobody bothered much with him.

Oh no, thought the woman. I can’t take a sock away from Henry. He needs it more than I do.

But sure enough, her foot walked her right up to Henry’s garage. It wanted to go inside, but she walked it right on by. She pretended to look in the window of the hardware store on the other side of the vacant lot. It contained brooms and dusty tools. Her foot pawed the ground to go back.

As she stood there struggling, Henry came out of the garage. He smelled like a lube job, and he was wearing her sock on his left hand like a mitten, his thumb stuck through the hole in the heel.

He said something to her, but the woman wasn’t listening. Her foot was trying very hard to leap up into Henry’s hand, and the woman was resisting with all her might. As you can see, she was not the sort of person who casually thrust her feet into other people’s hands.

Henry brushed by her then, and she never did catch what he was saying. Perhaps he was just muttering, who knows? He muttered a lot, Henry.

Certainly he was muttering later when she caught up with him and gave him a pair of gloves. He took them and muttered his thanks, and then he asked her if she could spare him a dollar for trolley fare. The woman, her left foot chattering against the pavement, said she’d give him two if he’d give her the grey sock. He grabbed the bills, flung the sock in her direction, and hobbled off quickly, his left hand clutching pathetically at the air.

The woman is very careful of her socks now, and always counts them before she leaves the laundromat, but she is a woman who lives with the knowledge that her body can be ruled by her foot, and how she can be happy knowing that I’m damned if I can figure out.

That’s all there is to this story, and there’s no use in complaining if you don’t like it, because this is the way it’s got to be told.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

This story was written from start to finish in a single day, after an emotional experience with some wet socks, and owes a debt to Gary Snyder’s ethnographic essay “He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village.”

It’s pretty straightforward, and it sprung full-blown into my head, just as it is told. I typed it up, changed a couple of words, and printed it out. I wish all my stories worked this way.

The life leaked out of the old man. He lay in bed for more than a month, in hospital and nursing home, in worlds of pain. He fought first for control of his death, then for control of his life once more. Toward the end he gave up his desire for control, as much as he was able. He still issued every visitor a list of tasks, but he knew he had no control over whether those tasks got done.

So, painstakingly, he combed the thatch of the past. He returned to the old mysteries and puzzles, and reflected at length on the lives and motivations of people long dead. He constructed theories to explain the petty cruelties of childhood bullies. He made plans to purchase a small house, to reclaim his land in Guatemala, to publish essays, fiction, fragments of prose. He ate bananas and rye bread and institutional meals, and put his teeth in when visitors stopped by. He resolved not to worry about things he couldn’t fix, and struggled to keep that resolution.

Then the muscles of his heart, exhausted after three billion beats and weakened by pneumonia, diabetes, and the stress of a choleric temperament, paused just for a moment, and could not resume. A nurse called for help and, with a team of aides, brought him back. He squeezed her hand, his heart failed again, and they let him go. The tenuous flow of electrochemical impulses that made up his nervous system slowed and ceased, and the order that he had imposed on the universe started to disintegrate, releasing heat.

His body cooled. A mortician came and removed it. A nurse’s aide gathered his belongings together, threw out a few unimportant scraps of paper, put the rest in a plastic bag. The bed was remade: someone was waiting for it.

Friends came to visit, and found him gone. The news traveled, a spasm of regret at the disappearance of a keen mind, a brilliant wit, a generous friend. Kindnesses postponed would not be realized. Harsh words, whatever the source or reason, could not be unsaid.

He died with a book newly released, an essay in the current issue of a popular journal, a story to appear shortly in a well-known magazine. He left a respectable amount of work and a stack of unpublished manuscripts made more marketable by the fact of his death. For days after he died, his friends continued to receive his cards and letters.

After the passage of several weeks, his daughter, sorry about her father’s death but not pleased at having to shoulder the responsibility, came from out of state to pack up his papers and books and to dispose, somehow, of the rest of his belongings. She unlocked the door and let herself into the silent, stale-smelling apartment.

The old man’s spirit was still strong; he had always put its stamp on everything of consequence in his possession.

An umbrella with the handle carved into the shape of a goose’s head leaned against the wall inside the door. A tag hung from the neck. It read, in her father’s handwriting: “The kind gift of Arthur Detweiler, whom I met in the public library reading room on a rainy March afternoon.”

She looked around the cramped two-room apartment. There were slippery piles of manuscripts and writing supplies. Heaps of clothes, towels, dirty dishes. A scattering of loose cds across the top of his desk. Stacks of books, books, books.

She had never been there before. Her father had moved, not long before his death, to this last remote way station in a lifetime of wandering. Too new to the old man to be called his home, the small flat was clearly in disarray. Some belongings were in cardboard boxes, still unpacked from his last move or the one before that.

She had a fleeting thought that perhaps someone had broken in, to rifle her father’s few belongings, and had put them in the boxes to take them away. At his previous place, a kid with a knife had come in and demanded forty bucks from his wallet. It made her angry, the idea of somebody coming in and rooting through her father’s stuff, while he lay dying in the hospital. But then, she thought, it doesn’t matter. He took no money with him, and he surely didn’t leave much behind. What he had had of value was his mind and his persistence and his writing skills, and those, actually, he had taken with him.

The cleanup seemed daunting, too much for her to deal with all at once. Maybe she’d make herself a cup of tea first. If there was tea.

In the kitchen, scraps of paper were taped on surfaces, stuck into openings, poked into canisters. A torn piece of lined yellow paper, taped to the front of the refrigerator, read, “This big refrigerator! What for? I’m an old man, I don’t cook.”

You didn’t cook when you were younger, either, thought the daughter. A hotdog when she came for lunch, Chinese if she stayed for dinner. When she was a teenager, trying to create a normal life for this wayward parent, she had tried cooking meals for him when she came to visit, but he wasn’t patient with her mistakes.

On the stove, a piece of paper was stuck on the front of the clock, obscuring the face: “Ignore this clock. The clocks on stoves are always wrong.”

Squares of paper were taped all over the stove:

“Mornings, I make myself a pot of coffee, if my stomach permits.”