A. Homes - Things You Should Know

We were airborne, we were flying, Rockets Round the Moon. I focused on the taillights of the ship in front of us, up and down, it went before us, side to side. Looking at it, I knew what would come next, I had a second to prepare. Up and away. Pushing off my knee, Henry stood. He rose up, steadied himself, then raised his arms up and open. His legs pressed against the safety bar. All of his weight was there. I pulled back on the bar hoping it would hold. I pulled back hoping Henry wouldn’t take flight, fall free, roll out over the nose and into the sea. He stood in a trance, face taut, hair blowing, arms extended, scarecrow of the universe. Then his face dissolved into a colorless puddle of flesh. His jaw fell open, raw sewage spilled out and was whipped into the wind behind us. I slid down under the safety bar, onto the floor. I wrapped my arms around his legs, pressed my cheek to his knee, and pulled down. I looked up to see Henry still standing, his face covered with his own chunky blue. From the floor I could smell the noxiousness of its mixture, hot and rich, like some hearty soup a grandmother would serve on a winter night.

When we landed, the ticket man came running over with a bucket I thought was for Henry, but instead he flipped the safety bar back, pulled us out, and dumped a bucketful of sudsy water into the belly of our ship. “You fool,” he yelled at Henry, who was unsteady on his feet, searching his pockets for more ride tickets, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Go back where you belong. Go home.”

I wish I were dead. I have tried to keep it a secret, but it leaks out: “I wish I were dead,” I blurted to the woman who is now my wife, the first morning we woke up together, the sheets still hot, stinking of sex.

“Should I take it personally?” she asked, covering herself.

“No,” I said and began to cry.

“It’s not so easy to die,” she says. And she should know, she’s a woman whose milieu is disaster — a specialist in emergency medicine. All day she is at work, putting the pieces back together and then she comes home to me. She tells me about the man run over by a train, how they carried in each of his legs in separate canvas bags. She tells me about the little boy doused in oil and deep-fried.

“Hi honey, I’m home,” she says.

I hold my breath.

“I know you’re here, your briefcase is in the front hall. Where are you?”

I wait to answer.

“Honey?”

I am sitting at the kitchen table.

“Today’s the day,” I tell her.

“What’s different today?” she asks.

“Nothing. Nothing is different about today — that’s the point. I feel the same today as I did yesterday and the day before. It’s insufferable. Today,” I repeat.

“Not today,” she says.

“Now’s the time,” I say.

“Not the time.”

“The moment has come.”

“The moment has passed.”

Every day I wish I didn’t have to live a minute more, I wish I were someplace else, someplace new, someplace that never existed before. Death is a place without history, it’s not like people have been there and then come back to tell you what a great time they had, that they highly recommend it, the food is wonderful and there’s an incredible hotel right on the water.

“You think death is like Bali,” my wife says.

We have been married for almost two years; she doesn’t believe me anymore. It is as if I’ve cried wolf, screamed wolf, been a wolf, too many times.

“Did you stop at the store?”

I nod. I am in charge of the perishables, the things that must be consumed immediately. Every day on my way home I shop. Before I was married I would buy only one of each thing, a bottle of beer, a can of soup, a single roll of toilet paper — that sounds fine on a Monday when you think there will be no Tuesday, but what about late on Friday night when the corner store is closed?

My wife buys in bulk, she is forever stocking up, she is prepared in perpetuity.

“Did you remember milk?”

“I bought a quart.”

“Not a half gallon?”

“You’re lucky it’s not a pint.”

We are vigilant people, equally determined. The ongoing potential for things to go wrong is our bond — a fascination with crisis, with control. She likes to prevent, to repair, and I to wallow, to roll obsessively in the possibilities like some perverted pig. Our closets are packed with emergency supplies: freeze-dried food, a back-up generator, his and hers cans of Mace.

She opens a beer and flips through a catalog for emergency management specialists. This is how she relaxes—“What about gas masks? What if something happens, what if there’s an event?”

I open a beer, take a breath. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

“You’re stronger than you think.”

I have spent nights laid low near the exhaust pipe of a car, have slept with a plastic bag over my head and silver duct tape around my neck. I have rifled through the kitchen drawers at three A.M. thinking I will have at myself with a carving knife. Once fresh from the shower, I divided myself in half, a clean incision from sternum to pubis. In the bathroom mirror, I watched what was leaking out of me, escaping me, with peculiar pleasure, not unlike the perverse pleasantry of taking a good shit. I arrived at the office dotted with the seeping red of my efforts. “Looks like you got a little on you,” my secretary said, donating her seltzer to blot the spot. “You’re always having these shaving accidents. Maybe you’re cutting it too close.”

All of the above is only a warm-up, a temporizing measure, a palliative remedy, I want something more, the big bang. If I had a gun I would use it, again and again, a million times a day I would shoot myself.

“What do you want to do about dinner?”

“Nothing. I never want to eat again.”

“Not even steak?” my wife asks. “I was thinking I’d make us a nice thick steak. Yesterday you said, ‘How come we never have steak anymore?’ I took one out of the deep freeze this morning.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it.”

“Fine, but I’m having steak. Let me know if you change your mind.”

There is a coldness to her, a chill I find terrifying, an absence of emotion that puts a space between us, a permanent and unbridgeable gap — I am entirely emotion, she is entirely reason.

I will not change my mind. This isn’t something new, something that started late in life. I’ve been this way since I was a child. It is the most awful addiction — the opposite of being a vampire and living off the blood of others, “eripmav”—sucked backward through life, the life cycle run in reverse, beginning in death and ending in…

Short of blowing my brains out, there is no way I can demonstrate the intensity, the extremity of my feeling. Click. Boom. Splat. The pain is searing, excruciating; the roots of my brain are hot with it.

“You can’t imagine the pain I’m in.”

“Take some Tylenol.”

“Do you want me to make a salad?”

I have been married before, did I mention that? It ended badly — I ran into my ex-wife last week on the street and the color drained from both our faces; we’re still weak from memory. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m better,” she said. “Much better. Alone.” She quickly walked away.

There is an enormous amount of tension in being with someone who is dying every day. It’s a perpetual hospice; the grief is too extreme. That’s my specialty, pushing the limits, constantly testing people. No one can pass — that is the point. In the end, they crack, they leave, and I blame them.

I’m chopping lettuce.

“Caesar,” my wife says, and I look up. She hands me a tin of anchovies. “Use the romaine.”