Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

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You know those things that look like various breeds of dogs, and you get them in the backs of guys’ cars, where it sits on the back dash and the head bobs up and down? What the hell are those things called?

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Things would get quiet. Then, after a while, things would get quiet.

I GETthat letter they send every year from the hospital, asking me to send them money.

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She kept holding up the little cards with buttons on them. “What do you think of these ones?” she would say. She would hold the little card with the buttons in front of my face and wait for me to say something.

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It is my belief that you can never have too much playground equipment. At the community center, near where we live, there is a playground for the kids who go to the day care over there. It says, Day Care Only , on a sign on the fence that surrounds the playground. I like taking Sammy over to that playground after dinner, when there are no kids left over there from the day care. I lift Sammy up over the fence and set him down in the playground. We watch the sun go down behind the community center. Then we hurry home. When the dark starts overtaking the sky, we feel a kind of fear. This is in the autumn. The air is cold. From the driveway, we can see Tutti in the kitchen, washing the dishes.

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I got all my money out of the bank. I rode the bus. I called some of my friends, but they said, no, give it to me loose.

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Coco once bought a little electric thing that was supposed to shave off those fabric balls you get on your clothes after you have washed them a lot of times. She lent it to me one time, and I brought it home, thinking about all the clothes I was going to save with this thing.

I THOUGHTI was alone. But then I hear this banging out in the hall and I say to myself, “I wonder who that is.” I open the door and look out. Gerome is out there. I turn on some lights. I go into the kitchen to make some coffee.

The light is on in the managers’ office, but I figure it’s Gerome who has turned it on, for whatever reason. Then I see Lina, one of the managers, working at her desk.

“You’re in early,” I say.

“I think I set my watch wrong.”

I think Lina is probably lying. I don’t think her watch is wrong. I think Lina is probably the same as my mother.

My mother used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and sit at the kitchen table paying bills. She wrote in her checkbook in this perfect handwriting she has. Sometimes she would get up and turn on the light over the kitchen sink, because she couldn’t get her solar calculator to work.

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I wouldn’t die. I’d go out and buy something frozen. Or I’d eat something raw. Or go to a restaurant. I have money. I don’t need anybody to cook for me.

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I unplug the coffeemaker and take it with me into the laundry room. I have the cream. I have a spoon. I hope nobody ever wakes up.

IF OURlife together were a book, this would be page 3504, the best page of the book, with the air breathing insect wings, conning the sun like radar blips, low-volume hum of life about to explode onto page 105, when out of the sky swoops the tail end of time, a nail driven down into the front porch, sweeping Foufou up by the scruff of the neck, our twenty-year-old cat carried off, out past page 252, past About the Author , right out the back of the book.

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I go up the ramp and there are some windows with some scraggly trees looking in from outside and the sky is gray and the wall on the far side of the courtyard is a lighter shade of gray, only there are some dark streaks of grayer gray where the wall is wet from it being so wet and drizzly out there. Always having been here, I’m not sure where I might have been.

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What I am is an object on the sidewalk with some wind on it.

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When I was a kid, if you would have asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you I wanted to be one of those guys who gets reports coming in over their desk every day. How I imagined it was, I had this office, with a big window behind my desk, and I was way up on the hundredth floor, and guys would come into my office and drop files onto my desk. I would leaf through the files, and then more guys with files would come into my office and dump these files onto my desk, and nobody would ever say anything to me. I would go home at night and tell my wife and kid about all the reports I had coming in over my desk.

One time I was having lunch with my wife, only she wasn’t my wife yet. We had known each other, say, eight years. Or maybe six. I can’t remember. The point is, I got down on my knees, and I think maybe the TV was going.

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There are two sounds. Coming home. Leaving home. That’s all there is.

As SOONas we get into bed and get the covers pulled up over us, Tutti gets her Milk Makes Sense calendar from the bedside table and starts circling numbers on it. I sit there and watch her for a while, trying to figure out what she’s doing. She does this every night. I get my head over toward her and push it up under her arm and rest my head on one of her breasts. I put my hand on her other breast.

“Get lost,” she says. She gets her hand on my forehead and starts to push. I just stay there, pushing back with my head, and after a while she gives up.

She has a pen in one hand and she’s tapping the days of the month off with the end of this pen. She has the eighteenth circled in dark, black marker. She counts forward and back from the eighteenth. Finally she throws the calendar and the pen onto the bedside table and says, “Forget it.” She rolls over on her side, her back toward me, and goes to sleep.

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Dad took me out into the driveway and hoisted me up onto his shoulders and I felt the wind. Dad said it was windier up where I was, that my head was closer to the epicenter of the wind. He asked me for a weather forecast.

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Listen, how much more of this do you think I can take?

I WASsitting in the kitchen, staring out the window, waiting for Sammy to wake up from his afternoon nap, and I started thinking he was dead up there. I starting thinking, What if he’s up there now and he’s dead?

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I go back downstairs, down the hall with the meeting room doors, and I start sticking my key into the knobs on all the meeting room doors, pulling open the doors and leaving them open. Then I go through the staff entrance, past the desks with papers and books on them, past the shelves with books on them, and I go over to where Paul is standing and I hand him a piece of paper.

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I have been told it is necessary to waste time. I have begun to believe this is true. When I was nineteen, I got angry when people wasted my time. I don’t know who figured all this stuff out. I want to meet him. Sit down under a tree and talk to him. Figure him out. And then kill him. I imagine he is already dead, though.

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When he was a baby, and we lived in the apartment, Sammy used to go to the cupboard and drop Tupperware lids down the space where the cupboard met the wall. We didn’t realize he was doing this until the day we moved out. I tried to reach down into the space and get the Tupperware lids out of there, but there was no way of getting them out without ripping out the cupboards, and we had to be out of the apartment by noon.

NOVEMBER 21. The third floor is open and the second closed. While second is closed, some things, not yet fully detailed, will be moved to third.