Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

Ruth died. Jack went to the funeral, sat at the back and didn’t talk much to anyone. Kay asked what did levayah mean and Deb shushed. “It means to accompany, ” Simon answered, showing her the bright white face of his phone.

Deb woke up earlier and earlier, at six or five-thirty. In the hall she turned the knob to Simon’s room, and if the door was locked she knew he was home. When she washed his hoodies they smelled thickly of spearmint gum, skunk, and burnt leaves.

Nubs of paper towel began showing up in the carpet, wherever Travolta left a mess. Kay filled out an entry form online and eleven weeks later received a forty-eight by seventy-two-inch poster for a television show on the CW, which by that time had been canceled.

—

It took everyone too long to realize Simon was failing school. “Aren’t your grades slipping?” Deb asked over his report card. “When were my grades ever good?”

Toward the end of his senior year, Jack and Deb agreed to send Simon to a wilderness retreat in Virginia for troubled teens. “We can’t take him if he’s an addict,” the program director said in their overlit Manhattan outpost.

“We think it’s just pot smoking,” Deb answered.

“Still, anything more serious, we’re not equipped for that kind of thing. If you want, there’s a place in Utah—”

Jack said, “Who said addict? It’s just the pot. It’s fine.”

For seven weeks Simon and eight other boys built campfires and ate dehydrated packs of Yankee Noodle Dandy and were called only by their Nature Names, which they were made to choose their first night there. Simon was Wind.

—

Night drained the bruisy skies. The world blinked and the streetlamps came on. Travolta died, in the bathroom, a few feet from her litter box.

—

New year new year new year. The ball thrown in the air comes down faster. The numbers grew too big, unhinged from anything that sounded like time or what kept it. Nineteen ninety-eight was a year. 2015, 2020, those were eyesights. Calendars and the Times became props from a space opera. Everyone was always putting the date wrong in the upper right-hand corners of things.

Jack had very few, basically zero, New York openings after Stanley gave up the gallery. His art got smaller, actually smaller, with no more room in his Queens apartment, which did not now seem so big, and no room for it either in the world, which had grown enormously. A school in Arizona invited him to teach, and Jack left New York for good. Or forever, anyway.

—

Doors to new drugstores whooshed open for anybody just passing. No one knew anyone with an address book but still companies somewhere kept making them. Kay was voted Nicest Girl in the yearbook, but all she’d really ever been was Most Quiet. Simon went out of his way to walk on cobblestones because he’d heard they were good for feet, though he forgot it was Jack who’d told him. He crossed the street, hair growing, nails growing, wisdom teeth two months from cresting.

Deb kept teaching at the college, studio and then dance criticism, and started dating another ex-dancer, a physical therapist called Eli, also divorced. She went to the earliest classes at Steps, fastening her hair the way she used to. She leaned close to the locker room mirror to tweeze the short grays that antennaed around her head.

Kay went to a university in California, and when she came back her name was Katherine.

Simon stayed Simon, at a college in the city.

—

On his faculty ID card, Jack wasn’t smiling. It was a webcam, and he hadn’t even known they were taking it — no flash, no birdie. In the photograph, his face, half under hologram, came out swollen on one side like he’d just had oral surgery. Or squirrelly, which is what he said to the girl who took it, meaning that he looked to be storing nuts for winter.

On Craigslist, fewer people responded to rentals without photos. Simon got a deal on a brownstone apartment in Crown Heights, where each morning sparrows hopped their cotton-ball bodies along the fire escape and would not shut up.

Deb moved into Eli’s Tribeca loft. Because of the market or for other reasons, she didn’t sell the apartment uptown.

In Palo Alto, Katherine got a job at a start-up in a technology research park, which in everyone’s head looked like Six Flags.

—

They used pens made from recycled water bottles, or they didn’t use pens.

Every screen responded to human touch.

A mole on Deb’s face turned out to be cancer, but only stage one. A little plastic surgery and the scar hardly showed. At the gym, she sat in the sauna, with the warped wooden door that snapped shut behind her, feeling surrounded by dock on all sides.

How does anyone get over anything in places where the weather doesn’t change? If you live someplace where the seasons are all the same, how do you get over any one or thing.

When her kids came to visit she wanted to make them so many dinners. I never washed a vegetable until I fed the two of you.

—

After a few years, people expressed surprise to learn Jack had ever lived in the city. The lope in his speech revived, a timbre he got not so much from Houston as from growing up around his mother. He looked like a carpenter or a woodsman, in flannel and quilted vests. He’d always dressed that way, but only here did it take the form of function over style. The irony being that in New York he had done the hard labor of a carpenter, a metalworker, even a glassblower from time to time, and here his art grew ever finer and more precise, though now he had more studio space than he could fill.

He whittled figures out of chalk, colors mint and lavender and Pepto pink, sidewalk chalk sold by the bucket at a dollar store in town.

—

The nice thing about the university health clinic was you could make appointments online without talking to anyone.

—

Katherine sent Deb an invitation to one of her company’s sites, where users set up virtual houses and decorated virtual rooms with JPEGs of furniture they could never afford in real life. Deb made an account, then did nothing with it. She got their newsletters, though, from Your Virtual Decorator, announcing the week’s most popular chaise longue. They bugled into her inbox at five in the morning, when she was usually already awake. She’d clicked the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page. She didn’t know how to make them stop.

—

You could also cancel appointments online, at the university health clinic. Under “Reason for Cancellation,” there was an option for “Illness,” but not “Fear.”

A few days after his sixty-sixth birthday, the associate dean who was also his girlfriend brought Jack a bouquet of silver balloons he could see his face in. They sank from the ceiling and stayed at eye level, hovering in the hall. In the morning, he held them out the window, set them free.

—

Balloons in bare branches look like foil lungs.

All the weight lost made him look better before it made him look worse.

He seemed to spend a lot of time in the rec room, looking at his hands.

The school updated all its access passes, so you didn’t have to swipe but just hold the card to the thing, and everyone had to take new pictures. On his second ID card, he was smiling but rained on, a little deranged.

—

Jack found, before he died, among his stack of accordion folders, a portfolio of sketches he didn’t recognize. Two of Katherine, around age ten, and a few innocuous still lifes — a cracked egg with the yolk pooling out of it — from the drawing and painting class Simon had failed in high school.

A deep ache in his bones began to wake him in the night. Blood began showing up in his stool.

You ok?