Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

Good morning, it’s 5:36 a.m. I’m finding that a flat slab of junk mail dropped in the mail-slot created by two hot logs can sometimes get an unwilling fire to take the next step. Or try one of those enclosures for lightbulbs — slide that easy flammability into the spot where you wish the fire to move. This morning when I woke up I peed and then, inexplicably, I got back in bed and lay there for a while thinking about driving a speedboat off the watery edge of the world. It seemed to me, as I lay there awake, that the world was indeed flat, and as I reached the edge of it and saw the enormous glossy curve of ocean turn the corner and fall away I sped up. It was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. My boat began falling, and as it fell it turned, but I held on to the steering wheel so as not to become separated from it. I fell towards a region of mists that I thought was the bottom, and I prepared to be dashed to pieces on the rocks, but no, I had fallen off the edge of the flat world, and the world was fairly thick: I was passing through the mists in a region that smelled like a salty shower, where the ocean began to pour past the inner molten earth-sandwich. The steam dried away finally and I tumbled past a cross-section of semi-plastic moltenness, and then, as I kept falling, I blew through the mists again, which cooled my hull, and I rose up past another waterfall that mirrored the one over which I had fallen; and then the bow of my boat, its progress slowing, reached a turning point about twenty feet in the air and I fell down with a slap on the gray, choppy ocean on the other side of the earth. Fighting the waters there that wanted to push me back off, I drove the boat to shore. Everything was more or less normal, and I ate at a Bickford’s and left a generous tip, but I wanted to go home to the “real” side of the earth, the side I was born on, and the phone system on the underside, where I was, didn’t reach through to the other side: so after a night in a motel I drove my boat back out to the edge of the ocean and hurled myself and my boat back out into the void, far enough that, with the stars at my back, I had a good view of the cataract falling off into the lava layers, and then, like an adept skateboarder, I flipped up the stern of my boat at the point of highest rising and slap landed neatly back in our ocean. I was home in a few hours.

That’s what I lay there thinking about. Then I got up and came down here and made the coffee. Sometimes when I imagine driving off the end of the earth — it isn’t a subject I take up every day but it does recur — I consider what it would be like to go out for a little stroll in the direction of the setting sun and then trip on a rock, and, oh, heavens, I’ve fallen off a cliff. And then as I fall I look around — wait, this is not just any cliff, I seem to have fallen off the edge of the flat earth. In my descent I try to keep my wits about me and look downward, where I’m falling, and there I see, coming towards me, a huge burning dome of fusion: the sun. Yes indeed, I’m falling towards the sun, which when it sets goes down here past the edge of the world for the night and rests, keeping the lava bubbly near the middle of things. Fortunately I’ve got my magical sunglasses on, so that when I plunge into the sun, which roars like a locomotive, it isn’t too bad on the eyes, and then I’m squirted out again, and I fall — i.e., rise — past rocks and roots until I’m almost at the edge of the underworld, and there I grab a root and hang on, dangling, and pull myself up so that my chin is over the edge, and I have a brief chance to survey its features. It is a grassy place with some trees and a new housing development going up, each house with a large pseudo-Palladian window over the front door. And then the root gives way and I tumble away back through the set sun: down once again becomes up and I am back on the grassy verge where I began my walk.

Claire and I took a walk yesterday afternoon along the place where the trolley to West Oldfield used to go. When we started, there was still plenty of afternoon light left, and then the slow-roasting orange clouds began, and by the time we reached the little cemetery where you can see through to the lake, the light had an impoverished glow of the sort that induces one’s retinas to give extra mileage to any color because the total wattage of light is so radically reduced. Where the snow had gone away, the tan layer of needles on the ground sang out with a boosted pallor, and a mitten-shaped patch of cream-colored lichen on a gravestone waved at me in the gloom and made me want to have been a person who devoted his life to the study of lichens. I told Claire that I was having lichen-scientist thoughts, wishing I had become a lichen man, and she nodded. She’s heard me say it before.

I’m burning a bunch of little pinecones now that I gathered on the walk. One of the joys of life, I think, is trying to decipher the name on a gravestone as it is transmitted through the dense foliage of blue-green gravestone lichen. Some people clean off the grave-growths with chemicals and wire brushes, a mistake.

Where have I seen that interesting blue-green lichen color recently? Yesterday morning it was — no, day before yesterday — when I opened the hood of our Mazda minivan in order to replenish the tank of windshield-washer fluid. I’d turned on the car to warm it up, and I’d pressed the button that activates the rear-window heater — a stave of long wires elegantly arranged like the plectrum of a hardboiled-egg slicer, buried in the glass, which melts the ice with surprising efficiency — and then I pulled the hood release and heard the hood spring free. I propped it up on its cold rod. The windshield fluid is stored in an L-shaped tank that has a representation of a windshield wiper’s swath molded into it. It was down to the dregs, squirted dry. That’s not safe. When the trucks salt the roads, the white smear of salt solution on the windshield sometimes catches the glare of the risen sun and obscures the road entirely, forcing me to poke my head out the window to see where we’re going. The plastic was cold and inflexible, its edges slightly painful to the fingers. I poured the pink liquid in. The engine, idling, trembled its hoses. When the tank was full, I snapped the lid back on and pulled the hood prop from its oval hole and, lowering it, pushed it into the metal prongs that wait in the gutterish area where the hood’s shape fits. And then, just before I let the hood drop shut, I noticed that the battery had grown some lovely turquoise exudate, electrical lichen, around one of its poles.

It isn’t clear to me why I grew up to be someone who can spell rhinoentomophthoromycosis, and yet whose knowledge of car repair extends only as far as replenishing the windshield-wiper fluid. When I was a teenager, I took off and put back on as much of my ten-speed bicycle as I could, soaking the wheel bearings in gasoline overnight and then packing them back in their tracks with fresh, pale grease. Ah, what a keen pleasure it is to glide ticking down a leafy street with fresh grease on one’s wheel bearings. But I’ve never taken the next step and begun tinkering with cars.

Come to think of it, the bicycle was the beginning of my end-of-the-earth thoughts: I’d be on a trip down a long straight road, and the road would become steeper and steeper until finally it was plunging vertically down and the stars would come out around me, and I’d fall past the strata, and then somewhere along the way a road would form on the side of the cliff and I would land on it and begin bicycling as hard as I could up what became a very steep hill, and when I finally crested the top of the hill I would be in the underworld.